It is not easy to love a place so much and at the same time realize that it is haunted by a past and present that is violent and incredibly racist. Sometimes the violence and the racism come together as they did a few years ago with the murder of James Byrd, Jr., a 49-year old African American living in Jasper, Texas. Jasper is a few miles past Kountze , Texas , and Kountz is, arguably, the central town of the Big Thicket. Kountze is where an editor named Archer Fullingham and his Kountze News worked for years with Senator Ralph Yarborough and others to carve the "string of pearls"—87,000 acres of the remaining thicket that had once spread from northern Florida to Texas —into the Big Thicket National Preserve. I was in the Thicket hiking and camping just a week and a half ago.

You see, that's the land that, when I think back on my past, to the years and people who formed what I am, that's the land that is home. It's the land that produced me and that produced James Byrd and that also produced three men who could look at James Byrd and not see a man, three men who could only see a thing that they called a “nigger.” Three men who beat up James Byrd and tied him to the back bumper of their truck and dragged him for miles...dragged him until parts of his body broke off the main trunk...dragged him until his head separated from his body and lay beside the road.

Jasper, Texas, just north of Kountze, Texas, which is only 30 miles from Beaumont, is nestled among tall pine trees and is a beautiful little town. Its people say, “We're not like that. We're not like Vidor, Texas, which is an even shorter distance east of Beaumont and where William Samples first integrated public housing only a few years ago and was later gunned down in Beaumont, Texas, my home town...not by white men, but by African Americans.

All of that land, filled with rivers and creeks, with snakes and wild cats, with alligators and wild hogs and even wilder dogs, all of that land is beautiful and is often dangerous. If you walk through it and are not careful, you can be bitten by snakes, attacked by dogs and hogs. If you swim in Village Creek or the Big Sandy or the Neches River , the waterways that keep the thicket alive, you can drown from the numerous snags and whirlpools that appear. But the most dangerous thing about the Big Thicket, as with other wild areas, is the people.

Lawrence Russell Brewer, Shawn Allen Berry and John William King all grew up in the Big Thicket. They gave James Byrd a ride in their pickup. They tied him to the bumper after beating him and they dragged him down a road until long after he was already dead. What James Byrd did to cause these three “men” to kill him was to exist and to live in Jasper, Texas .

I love the Big Thicket. I go hiking in the area whenever I can. Earlier in that year of the murder, I walked down the sundew trail, near the Turkey Creek Unit of the Big Thicket National Preserve, and I saw wild orchids growing. As I walked through that savannah area of the thicket, I saw pitcher plants and sundews, two of the wild carnivorous plants that thrive in the thicket. They use their colorful appearance and sweet odor to attract small insects and, then, when the insects make the mistake of walking on the petals of the sundew or moving inside the open bowl of the pitcher plant, they are lost. They cannot get out of the pitcher plant with its spines pointing down to the liquid at the bottom of its horn-like bowl to dissolve them and provide nutrients for the flower. The sundew closes its petals over them. And they die. But the plants are dispassionate in their killing. They stand and wait for the small insects to land on them.

There was nothing dispassionate about the three killers of James Byrd. They picked him up as he walked along the road and offered him a ride. And they killed him. They enjoyed killing him. Sport. Don't imagine that the people who used to hang African American men, women and children, set fire to crosses in their yards, attack them if they tried to vote, kept them down, down, down, ever acted dispassionately. Racism is always passionate.

I do not think I will be able to hike in the Big Thicket for some time without thinking about James Byrd and about Lawrence Russell Brewer, Shawn Allen Berry and John William King. King's father said, "It hurts me deeply to know that a boy I raised and considered to be the most loved boy I knew could take a life." I doubt that his son thought he was taking a “human” life. Racism and hatred do not work that way. When I walk in the thicket again, as I will, and see carnivorous plants growing among beautiful wild orchids, I will think of these people and other people I grew up with when the South was still legally Jim Crow and when no one would have protested the sport of killing men who happened to have a different skin color.

That things are improving cannot be doubted. Thirty years ago, we would not have heard the cries of a whole community in denial. Instead, we would have heard bitter jokes and Lawrence Russell Brewer, Shawn Allen Berry and John William King would be treated in some places as if they were heroes. For this murder, they were charged and convicted. That's an improvement, though not one that will help James Byrd, Jr. I do not sum up the recent schoolyard murders in various locations in the country, the murder of a black man in the Big Thicket, the constant violence and hatred we are faced with on an almost daily basis as the collapse of civilization, but I do come close to despair at these things.

The first time I hiked deep into the thicket after the murder, I picked an orchid. I carried the flower to Village Creek and threw it into the slick brown water in memory of James Byrd and as a token that things are getting better in the aggregate, though that is of little consequence to him or to his family.