by Tony Horwitz
“He loved Jeff Foxworthy jokes more than anything,” said Hannah’s sister, Sarah. She quoted a few of Michael’s favorites. “You might be a redneck if your family tree doesn’t fork.” Or: “You might be a redneck if you refer to fifth grade as ‘my senior year.’” Just before he died, Michael bought a decal for his truck windshield that said “Redneck Ride.”
The family said Michael first met Hannah on a bus to night vocational classes, where he’d studied welding and she nursing. Michael later used his welding skills to attach a flag pole to the diamondback toolbox in the bed of his pickup. Then, a few months before he died, he got a tattoo on his arm of the cartoon character Tasmanian Devil clutching a Confederate battle flag.
“It was a school symbol, that’s all,” Billy Laster said. “I don’t think he knowed the history of it.”
Sarah thought there was more to it than that. “The flag was a symbol of him,” she said. “He was a rebel, a daredevil, outspoken. He’d do anything.”
MICHAEL’S AUNT, BRENDA ARMS, gave Michael’s devotion to the flag a very different spin. A retired nurse and the self-appointed historian of the Westerman family, Brenda had given Michael his first rebel flag as a child. “Michael was raised with that flag, just like my own son,” she said. “It’s just part of our life.”
We sat in her kitchen drinking coffee from mugs decorated with the rebel flag. Brenda said Michael displayed the banner on his bedroom wall as a boy, then moved it from his bicycle to a three-wheeler he raced through the fields, then to his car, and finally to his truck. “It was his first flag,” she said, weeping softly. “He treasured it just the way I do the doll I’ve been carrying around since I was a little girl.”
Since her nephew’s death, Brenda had become the point-person for a parade of Southern groups seeking to contact the Westermans. First came members of a nearby chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. They volunteered to set up a bank fund for Michael’s widow and children, and deposited several thousand dollars to kick off the effort. They also helped Michael’s parents catch up on bills. Soon, solicitations for the “Westerman Twins Fund” began appearing in the Sons’ national magazine. “His death causes us to reflect upon the continued sacrifices made in the name of heritage and honor,” read a message accompanying the ad.
Southern heritage groups now planned a major memorial in Todd County for Confederate Flag Day in early March. Organizers had asked Brenda to read a short biography of her nephew. She handed me a flyer for the Flag Day event. It was headed: “In Honor of a Fallen Confederate Patriot.”
AFTER TWO WEEKS in Guthrie, I took the motelkeeper Maria Eskridge’s advice and decamped to the Holiday Inn in nearby Clarksville, Tennessee, where I could relax at night watching a basketball game on the bar’s cable TV. One evening, the bartender asked what brought me to the area. When I told him, he said, “Oh yeah, Westerman. He used to wash dishes here. Tight jeans. Shitkickers. The hundred-pound belt buckle. Your basic total redneck.”
He called over two waitresses, who offered an even less flattering picture of the Fallen Confederate Patriot. “How would I describe Mike? Goofy and obnoxious, kind of ignorant,” said a twenty-two-year-old named Lydia. “He’d do a few dishes, then sit reading comic books and annoying anybody who walked by. He took things to extremes.”
One night Michael had argued with a waitress, then picked her up and carried her around the kitchen. The waitress screamed “Put me down!” and struggled to get free, but Michael wouldn’t let her go. When a black cook intervened, Michael shouted “nigger” and other slurs. “Mike had a racial hang-up,” Lydia said. “He thought the races shouldn’t mix.” Soon after the incident—the third for which he’d been reprimanded—Michael was fired.
The waitress Westerman harassed that night had since taken another job. She wasn’t surprised by the news that Westerman had been killed while flying his rebel flag. “I hate to walk on a dead man’s grave, but the best word to describe him is bully,” she said. “Everyone around him needed to know he was bigger than them.” She paused. “I’m prejudiced too, I guess. But I know when to keep my mouth shut. He was the kind who never did.”
A FEW WEEKS LATER, I finally saw Michael’s truck, which Hannah drove in one of the half-dozen memorials held in her husband’s honor in the weeks following his death. This particular wake was organized by motorcycle clubs in Kentucky and called, with conscious irony, “Freedom Ride ’95.”
Arriving at the procession’s gathering point beside a Cracker Barrel restaurant, I found a sea of Harleys, bomber jackets, and T-shirts as loud as the bikes: “Drunk and Ready to Fuck,” “Shit Happens,” “Helmet Laws Suck.” Someone shouted “Pulling out!” and the iron horses charged down through the hills of southern Kentucky, rebel flags flapping in the wind. As I trailed the mile-long cavalcade, it struck me that I might be witnessing the largest assemblage of rebel flags since Appomattox.
The bikers growled down Guthrie’s main street to a vacant lot beside a grain elevator. Several bikers erected a makeshift stage and auctioned leather jackets and other items, with the proceeds donated to the Westerman family. Parked beside the stage was Westerman’s truck, with the rebel flag flying from a pole in back. Well-wishers filed solemnly by, poking their pinkies in the small bullet hole in the door and peering at Michael’s cowboy hat, perched on the dashboard with the watermelon bubble-gum still stuck to the brim.
Hannah, a tall, hefty woman with permed strawberry-blond hair, stood impassively beside the cab. I asked her why she thought Michael had displayed the flag. Was it Southern pride?
“He wasn’t into all the Confederate history and that,” she said, echoing her father. “He didn’t, like, dig into it.”
“School spirit?”
She smiled. “Michael was glad just to graduate from the place.” She said a few of Michael’s friends had started flying the flag from their pickups about the time he bought his truck. He decided to do the same.
“Why?”
Hannah shrugged. “He’d do anything to make his truck look sharp. The truck’s red. The flag’s red. They match.”
BY THE TIME of the Confederate Flag Day rally, six weeks after the shooting, Michael Westerman’s biography had undergone a rewrite. Now, according to official lore, Michael and Hannah first met during a school outing to Fort Donelson, a Confederate redoubt where one of Michael’s forebears served. The Sons of Confederate Veterans also claimed that Michael was an avid student of his family’s rebel genealogy and had planned to join their group. A Kentucky camp inducted him posthumously and helped refurbish his grave. Chiseled on the new granite headstone was Michael’s pickup and flag. Planted beside it was an iron cross identical to those marking the graves of actual rebel veterans, with C.S.A. on one side and 1861-1865 on the other, beside the Confederate motto, Deo Vindice. With God As Our Defender.
Michael’s new Confederate profile appeared to comfort his relatives, giving a larger meaning to what had seemed a senseless death, and drawing the family into a world beyond the provincial confines of Todd County. Michael’s parents, who had previously kept their grieving private, now began granting newspaper and TV interviews defending their son’s display of the flag. An SCV member connected to the Nashville music scene arranged tickets and backstage passes for the family to see Lynyrd Skynyrd, Confederate Railroad and other shows. Contributions to the Westerman Twins Fund poured in from sympathizers across the South, as did letters and poems. The Klan also sent its condolences, even offering the family help in writing thank-you notes.
But no one wanted the Klan to distract attention from the Flag Day memorial. The KKK more or less obliged, staging another “literature roadblock”—in robes and hoods this time—but donning street clothes before joining others at the cemetery. Aryan Nation also politely called Michael’s aunt Brenda ahead of time and agreed to leave its literature at home. The few skinheads who showed up kept a respectful distance from a 200-car convoy that wound down Guthrie’s main street, across the railroad tracks and past a corrugated
-cardboard plant that adjoined the cemetery.
At the grave site, Confederate reenactors unfurled a rebel flag embroidered with the words “Michael Westerman Martyr” and fired their muskets in salute. Women dressed as Confederate mourners wept. The service concluded with the playing of “Dixie” and a eulogy by an SCV “commander” from Mississippi. Michael Westerman, he declared, had joined “the Confederate dead under the same honorable circumstances” as rebels who fell in battle. “He was simply one more casualty in a long line of Confederate dead of over one hundred thirty years of continuous hostility towards us and our people.”
The convoy wound across Todd County to the Jefferson Davis memorial, where members of the Westerman family briefly shared details about Michael’s life. Brenda Arms said, “Michael’s personal reason for flying the Confederate flag was to show the pride he felt in his ancestors who fought and died for the flag, as well as to show his Southern heritage.” His father, David, a ruggedly handsome man, said Michael died because of his “beliefs and his constitutional rights.”
Then a succession of speakers from across the South turned the memorial into an overtly political rally. An official with the Atlanta-based Heritage Preservation Association ripped into “the goose-stepping stormtroopers of the political correctness movement,” announcing that “the NAACP, Queer Nation and others have been fomenting hatred against the honorable culture of the South.” Jared Taylor, editor of a right-wing newsletter, cited statistics about black-on-white crime. “Any given black person,” he shouted, “is about seventeen times more likely to kill a white person than the other way around.” He listed brutal black-on-white murders, rhetorically asking the crowd each time, “Are we to remain silent?”
“No!” the crowd replied, with a few shouting, “It’s time for revenge!”
Michael Hill, an Alabama history professor, cast Michael’s death against a much broader canvas. Head of the newly formed Southern League, Hill called for secession from “a corrupt Yankee nation” and proclaimed: “The South represents the only remaining stumbling block to the imposition of an American police state.” This state, he added, would plunge America into a “New World Order” marked by a “Godless” and “mongrelized” multiculturalism.
Hill also linked Michael’s murder to FBI action against David Koresh’s band of Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and white separatist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. The message of all these incidents: “It is open season on anyone who has the audacity to question the dictates of an all-powerful federal government or the illicit rights bestowed on a compliant and deadly underclass that now fulfills a role similar to that of Hitler’s brown-shirted street thugs in the 1930s.”
Jefferson Davis, for one, might have been startled by these remarks. A plaque on the monument, a few feet behind the speakers, quoted from Davis’s last public speech, to a group of young Southerners shortly before his death: “The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes and its aspirations; before you lies the future. Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, and to take your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished—a reunited country.”
But the Flag Day speeches weren’t really about the South, and Michael Westerman had metamorphosed once again, from a fallen Confederate patriot to a front-line soldier in a contemporary war, one that pitted decent God-fearing folk against what Michael Hill called “an out-of-control government and its lawless underclass.”
This apocalyptic spin on a small-town tragedy appeared to confuse and alarm many Todd Countians, including Michael’s aunt Brenda. When I visited her a few days after the rally, she opened a trunk stuffed with literature that had begun turning up in her mail. “Some of this stuff is a little wild,” she said, handing me neo-Nazi newspapers, white supremacist screeds, and paranoid militia-style tracts. “South-Hating Liberals Are to Blame for This!” read the headline of one story on Michael’s death. Another, in a newspaper called Confederate Underground, described Michael’s assailants as “menacing black gangsters” and alleged that the cross-burnings following his death were a ploy by civil rights agitators to attract sympathy. A publication called “WAR: White Aryan Resistance” warned of a coming racial Armageddon.
Brenda closed the trunk and slipped a video of the Flag Day rally into her VCR. Midway through the tape, as the fiery speeches played again, Brenda began weeping. “I feel like my grandchildren will see another civil war,” she said. “Between black and white, not North and South. People just can’t seem to get along.”
WHILE DEMONSTRATIONS CONTINUED in southern Kentucky, the prosecution of Michael Westerman’s assailants wound through the Tennessee courts. Though the defendants were minors—one just fifteen—prosecutors won a motion to try them as adults on a stiff list of charges: first-degree murder, civil-rights intimidation (a reference to Michael’s right to display the flag) and aggravated attempted kidnapping (stemming from Hannah’s allegation that the teenagers tried to box her in with their cars). All except the triggerman, Freddie Morrow, were released on bail.
By law, juveniles couldn’t be housed with adults in Tennessee prisons. But Robertson County, at whose border the shooting occurred, lacked a juvenile facility. So Morrow found himself in solitary confinement at the county jail, an overcrowded pen under court order to improve its wretched facilities. The jail was a squat box the color of slightly-off salmon, with a rooftop exercise yard wrapped in chain link and razor wire. As I walked across the parking lot, inmates began rattling their rooftop cage and shouting.
“Yo, snow! What’s your name?”
“Hey sugar, come up and get some sweet stuff.”
“You coming to see Freddie?”
“They gonna fry that little dude?”
“Shut the fuck up!” a guard shouted, escorting me inside to a converted cell that served as the prison’s library. Then he brought in Freddie Morrow. Wearing orange prison pants and a white T-shirt, he stood a lanky five feet ten and flashed me a chip-toothed grin. His head was shaved but he had a wispy teenager’s goatee, which he fingered self-consciously. He looked even younger than his actual age of seventeen.
We sat knee to knee in the cramped cell and made desultory small talk about basketball. I’d heard from Freddie’s family that he’d become a passionate reader in prison and I asked him what books he’d most enjoyed. Morrow perked up. He’d just finished Native Son and said he identified with Richard Wright’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas.
When I asked why, he launched into the long, tangled tale of his own troubled upbringing in Chicago. The story unspooled in a rush of urban images: a struggling single-parent home (his father died in a car crash soon after Freddie’s birth), rough schools, drugged-out parties, gang skirmishes, pregnant girlfriends, curfew violations and juvenile court hearings. Eventually, Freddie’s mother sent him to live with in-laws in Guthrie, hoping the small-town atmosphere might calm him down.
At first it did. He began dating a girl and attended church with his relatives. The Kentucky quiet agreed with him. “I thought I was in heaven,” he said. But things started to unravel soon after he entered Todd Central. Freddie’s baggy pants and earring and inner-city slang aroused suspicion and fear among white students and teachers. Black classmates caused problems for Freddie, too.
“Being in gangs, that’s the main thing they want, they want to be bad,” he said. “They came and asked me about gang colors, stealing cars, crazy stuff.”
Before long, Freddie fell into his old ways, playing the part of street-savvy tough that both blacks and whites seemed to expect of him. He showed off the star-shaped tattoo marking him as a member of the Gangster Disciples, a notorious Chicago gang. He talked back to teachers and brawled with classmates. The way Freddie told it, these fights always followed the same pattern. Someone would provoke him, he’d walk away, then a taunt or internal prompt would lead to a fight. He kept repeating an odd, fatalistic phrase: “Go on ahead.” As in, “He picked up a bottle and
broke it and was talking about putting it in my back, and I was like, ‘Go on ahead, just go on ahead.’”
At the start of his second year at Todd Central, Freddie fell in with a rough crowd in Clarksville, a mid-sized city ten minutes from Guthrie. He bought a Czech semiautomatic for $50 at an abandoned baseball diamond in Guthrie, and purchased bullets at Wal-Mart. Then one night he fired off a few rounds in the chill Kentucky air. “It felt good,” he said, “like all my worries was through.” He stuffed the gun under his mattress and didn’t take it out again until the Martin Luther King birthday weekend.
Just before Christmas, Freddie got into a fight after being taunted during a school assembly. Freddie was suspended, then told by school officials that he’d missed so much class time that he’d flunk for the second year running. It was during this suspension that he shot Michael Westerman. Freddie’s lawyer had barred us from discussing details of the killing. So I asked Freddie the question that had gnawed at me ever since I’d arrived in Guthrie. He was a newcomer in Todd County and didn’t know Michael Westerman. Yet the sight of Michael’s flag had apparently sparked so much rage that one teenager now lay in a Guthrie grave and Freddie sat here in solitary confinement, facing the possibility of life imprisonment (as a juvenile, he could not receive the death penalty). What exactly did the rebel flag mean to him?
Freddie shrugged and looked at me impassively. “I thought it was just the Dukes of Hazzard sign,” he said. The Dukes of Hazzard was a popular TV show that featured a car decorated with a rebel flag. Growing up in Chicago, that’s all Freddie had known about the Confederate banner.
After moving to Guthrie, he gradually began to sense whites’ attachment to the flag and blacks’ hostility toward what they considered a symbol of slavery. “They was telling me about how they had a war for it back in the days and all this,” Freddie said. That was all he knew of the Civil War. To him, the banner was simply something whites knew that blacks hated. He suspected whites brandished the flag as a sort of schoolyard taunt, “just doing it out of spite, to see what we would do.”