David Crews said he heard one of his favorite quotes in the early morning hours at a First Monday Trade Day in Ripley.
Crews, a U.S. marshal at the time, was working with a colleague to track down a double-murderer and cocaine trafficker who was on Texas’ 10 most wanted list. They started tracking him in Corinth, into Tennessee, then Alabama and back into Mississippi, where they followed him to a Ripley.
At about 6 a.m. one day, Crews said, they found the suspect at a small restaurant on the market grounds. They waited for a few customers to clear out for safety concerns, and moved in to make the arrest. Crews said the suspect, at 6 feet, 5 inches tall, was an imposing figure, but he and his deputy restrained the suspect, removed a gun from his boot and took him into custody.
“My whole goal in life now was to get the guy safely back to our federal lockup in Oxford, Mississippi,” Crews said. “We got his gun out, got him handcuffed and we’re hustling him out of there as this little old lady, her voice kind of quaking, starts making a bee-line for me.
“She says ‘Sir! Sir!’ and I’m trying to get out of there before she catches up with me,” Crews continued. “Finally she does catch up with me and says, ‘Sir, I just want you to know that was one of the most dramatic breakfasts I’ve ever eaten.'”
Crews’ anecdote before the Columbus Rotary Club was just an example of the many quotes in his book, the “Mississippi Book of Quotes.” The book, published in October, is a collection of more than 2,000 quotes from Mississippians or about Mississippi, including everything from quotes to famous Mississippians such as William Faulkner and Fannie Lou Hammer, to a Saturday Night Live line describing the state legislature as “30 hissing possums in a sack.”
Crews, now a clerk with the U.S. Northern District Court in Oxford, said he collected the quotes over 25 to 30 years. He writes down any quotes that stand out to him, whether they’re lyrics to a song or simply lines from overheard conversations. He said he’s done that since high school.
Crews’ talk Tuesday featured more anecdotes, from being caught stealing apples from a tree near William Faulkner’s writer-in-residence home at the University of Virginia, to delivering copies of the New York Times to Eudora Welty in Jackson.
He said his early connection to those two famous Mississippi writers helped give him the foundation to write the book.
“‘One place understood helps us understand all places better,'” Crews said, quoting Welty. “Mississippi is worth struggling to understand — and sometimes it is a struggle. Without a doubt, this collection helps us understand Mississippi from the perspective of our best writers, musicians, playwrights, artists storytellers and others.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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