She leaned across the table in the diner she owned. Her gorgeous eyes were flaming.
“Ain’t nobody gonna talk about my Daddy.” She tapped the table with her long, polished fingernail. “I’ll kick their tail and drag them around the town square.”
From beyond two graves emerges two different stories. One is told by modern, forensic science and the other by a daughter who can no longer defend the father she worshipped.
Whichever version you choose to believe, both are pure Southern gothic storytelling.
I feel an obligation to tell the story that Dwana Pusser told me almost 20 years ago. She was talking about her father’s death when, suddenly, she pivoted into a rage about gossip in the small town of Adamsville, Tennessee.
“I hear tell that some people say my Daddy killed Mama. Well, they won’t say it to my face. I guarantee you that.”
The sheriff of McNairy County, Tennessee, in 1967 was an enormous hulk of a man named Buford Pusser. On the morning of August 12th, he received an early morning call to check on some normal county rowdiness. McNairy, which sets across the state line from Corinth, Mississippi, was well known for a murderous, moonshining evil bunch called the State Line Mob.
Their unlikely leader was a rotund, red-headed woman named Louise Hathcock, who owned a honky tonk that straddled the state line. This made it hard for the authorities to bring law and order to that part of the rural South. If Louise had an illegal card game going on and the Tennessee law was coming for her, they simply moved the card game to the other end of the long building which set on the Mississippi side of the line. Mississippi law encountered the same problem in reverse.
In 1966, Sheriff Pusser killed Louise Hathcock when, in a drunken state, she pulled a gun on him one morning.
In the movie that made him famous – Walking Tall – Pusser asked his wife, Pauline, if she’d like to ride along with him on that early morning call, then stop for breakfast. As they drove along New Hope Road, the pair encountered an ambush. Pauline was killed and half of Sheriff Pusser’s face was blown away. Pusser always claimed that the State Line Mob had committed the ambush. Their unhappiness with him stemmed from several reasons, the least of which was Hathcock’s death.
Sam and Clara McCuller, friends I met through my sister, lived in that area and invited me up for a long-ago weekend. For two days, they showed me every spot that had anything to do with Buford Pusser: the courthouse basement where his office had been, the brick ranch house where he and Pauline lived (which was now a museum), the country road where the ambush took place, and the spot where Pusser himself died several years later.
Importantly, they introduced me to Dwana Pusser Garrison, the Pussers’ only child. Over lunch in the busy diner, she talked. For two hours, her pretty face, surrounded by thick, blonde, perfectly Southern big hair, ran through a range of emotions as she told her story. Sometimes, she cried.
I hadn’t been in town too long before I came to understand that some people believed Buford to be a hero, some thought he was a crook, and most sat somewhere in the middle. In mid-century days, it wasn’t unusual for rural Southern sheriffs to keep law and order while secretly taking hush money, particularly from moonshiners.
Her fury suddenly snapped to sorrow, her eyes filling with tears. “I know how much he loved her.”
She reached for a napkin to dab her eyes. “He died in my arms, tryin’ to tell me that he loved me.”
The Pusser family story is long in its telling. Pauline was murdered, Sheriff Pusser died under questionable circumstances, and Dwana, after years of heartbreak, was found dead on her kitchen floor only a few years ago.
Next week, I’ll share Dwana’s story.
Ronda Rich is the best-selling author of the Stella Bankwell mysteries. Visit www.rondarich. com to sign up for her free newsletter.