Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  Now they knew. Freddie’s words fit the picture of events I’d begun to form during my weeks in Todd County. What happened on that lonely road outside Guthrie wasn’t the portentous clash that outsiders—from the Southern League to the NAACP to journalists like me—imagined it to be. It seemed instead a tragic collision of insecure teenaged egos: one prone to taunts and loutishness, the other to violence and showing off. In a way, Michael Westerman and Freddie Morrow had a lot in common.

  Freddie had grown morose during our three-hour chat. He talked of his frequent nightmares about the shooting, and began to cry. “No matter what I do—ever since I turned myself in I’ve been saying ‘sorry,’ but that just ain’t gonna do.” One night, he’d torn up a bed sheet and decided to hang himself. But a prison guard and former preacher pulled him back from the brink. The guard had since persuaded Freddie to study the Bible and think about the future. Freddie said he now planned to take up drawing again, a hobby he’d enjoyed as a child. He also fantasized about his release from jail, which he spoke of as though it was imminent.

  “My main plan for when I get out is to be back in touch with my family, go to church every Sunday,” he said. He wanted to stay in Guthrie—nothing fancy, just settle down with his girl and get a job at an appliance factory where several of his relatives worked. “I was thinking when I turn eighteen I can get on at State Stove with my cousin Jeff,” he said.

  INSTEAD, FREDDIE CELEBRATED his eighteenth birthday by moving out of solitary and becoming “rock man,” prison slang for toilet cleaner. His mother could no longer pay the private lawyer she’d hired, so a public defender took over the case. Meanwhile, back in Todd County, the atmosphere had calmed since the Flag Day rally. The county’s school board quietly shelved plans to change Todd Central’s rebel mascot, allowing Frances Chapman and her followers to declare victory and abandon their school boycott. Guthrie hired its first black cop. And when town officials learned that a new tattoo parlor in Guthrie acted as a front for the Klan, they quickly used building-code violations to shut the place down.

  I went one peaceful afternoon to see the crowning of a new Miss Confederacy at the Jeff Davis monument. A succession of young belles sashayed past the crowd: twirling parasols, flicking fans, and smiling as best they could in their oxygen-depriving corsets. The winner, a tenth-grader named Rebecca, cinched the contest with her crowd-pleasing answer to the question, “What was the proper role of a Southern lady as a wife and mother?”

  “As a wife, she supported and respected her husband and believed in the Cause,” Rebecca said. “As a mother, she looked after her children and spent a lot of time with them.”

  Heritage groups kept a low profile at the Miss Confederacy contest, sensing perhaps that locals were weary of rallies and anxious to restore some normality to their lives. But outside the county, the mythical status of Kentucky’s teenaged martyr continued to grow, culminating in Michael’s induction into the pantheon of Confederate heroes at Franklin, Tennessee, one of the foremost shrines to Southern sacrifice. It was at Franklin one afternoon in the autumn of 1864 that the South suffered over 6,000 casualties in a frontal assault even braver and bloodier than Pickett’s Charge.

  A Sons of Confederate Veterans’ museum at Franklin now featured a Westerman exhibit, including the rebel banner that had draped Michael’s coffin, a photograph of the teenager, and a retelling of his death that carried overtones of a nineteenth-century regimental history: The “Confederate Martyr” had “succumbed to his wound” after being “accosted by a carload of black youths who made racist remarks concerning the flag.”

  The exhibit occupied pride of place in the museum’s foyer, right beside a portrait of Pat Cleburne, the most renowned of six Southern generals killed at Franklin. Cleburne had two horses shot from under him before leading his men forward on foot, waving his cap and shouting, “If we are to die, let us die like men!” He was found the next day, shot through the heart and stripped of his boots, saber and watch. Cleburne’s death site lay only a hundred yards from the museum, beneath the parking lot of a Pizza Hut.

  THE TRIAL OF Michael Westerman’s assailants was held in Springfield, Tennessee, forty-five minutes south of Guthrie, in a brick Victorian courthouse with glass globes dispensing gum for a penny and clouds of cigarette smoke hanging in the air. The Westerman family sat behind the prosecution bench, wearing pictures of Michael pinned to their breasts. Friends and neighbors clustered behind, as did several SCV members and a publisher of Southern books who spent each break peddling copies of “Facts the Historians Leave Out,” a Confederate apologia from the 1920s. Two local Klansmen also sat in, sans robes and literature.

  Across the gallery gathered a smaller group of blacks, mostly the defendants’ families. Conspicuous among them was Freddie’s mother, Cynthia Batie, who had come from Chicago by Greyhound. Afflicted with a crippling nerve ailment, she rode into the courtroom in a motorized cart.

  There was no jury. The pool of potential jurors had proved overwhelmingly white and pro-prosecution, so the defense lawyers chose to try the case in front of a judge instead. In opening arguments, the defense likened the car chase and shooting to a schoolyard brawl that spilled tragically out of control. Freddie had fired wildly, intending only to scare the truck’s passengers. In the defense view, this amounted to manslaughter rather than felony murder, which carried a mandatory life sentence.

  The lawyers also attempted what Freddie’s attorney called “the cockroach defense.” If you lack strong evidence that might exonerate your client, he told me, “you shit all over what the other side’s got.” As a result, much of the trial focused on holes in the police investigation. No ballistics tests were ever performed on Michael’s gun to see if it had been fired. Police failed to do gunshot-residue tests on the black teenagers’ car and didn’t inspect the damage to Michael’s truck until 116 days after the crime (better tests might have shed light on whether Freddie fired wildly or intended to hit the truck).

  Questions also arose about Michael’s medical care. Emergency-room doctors had accidentally severed one of his phrenic nerves, which control the diaphragm. And in a bizarre twist, the coroner who signed Michael’s autopsy report was unavailable for questioning. He’d fled Tennessee amid allegations of incompetence and necrophilia; colleagues said he fondled corpses’ breasts and conducted anogenital exams that were “inappropriate and degrading to the deceased.”

  These and other questions, as well as the recently concluded O.J. Simpson trial, raised hopes among the defendants’ families that the prosecution case would collapse due to flawed or tainted evidence. But the defense team—a public defender, two court-appointed lawyers, and a black attorney working on the case pro bono—didn’t have the sort of resources available to the O.J. “Dream Team.” And the defendants had made incriminating statements to police, before any of them had lawyers and before they knew that Michael’s wound was fatal.

  The state also had two potent witnesses in Hannah Westerman and Tony Andrews, a passenger in the black teenagers’ car who had agreed to testify against his friends in exchange for two years’ probation. Hannah took the stand clutching a picture of Michael and told about the premature birth of her twins (named Michael and Michaela), the couple’s first night out, and Michael’s fateful stop for gas in Guthrie. She said neither Michael nor she did anything to provoke the black teenagers at Janie’s Market. Asked why Michael displayed the flag, Hannah repeated what she’d told me: “It matched his truck and made it look sharp.”

  Tony Andrews corroborated Hannah’s story, calmly fingering Damien Darden as the driver and instigator of the car chase, and Freddie Morrow as the willing triggerman. But he testified that he’d seen someone in Michael’s truck reach out and shake the flag at Janie’s, just as Damien was having second thoughts about a brawl. Tony said this action, combined with one of the passengers hearing someone shout “Nigger,” reignited the teenagers’ desire to fight.

  When Tony was done, the judge called a break and the f
amilies drifted out of the gallery, silent and stunned. Tony had fragged his friends, but he’d also blown a hole in Hannah’s story—and Michael’s reputation—by suggesting that racist gestures and remarks were made at Janie’s. As Freddie’s mother steered her motorized cart out of the chamber, she ran into Michael’s family standing just on the other side of the door. Hannah, arms crossed, fixed Cynthia Batie with a flinty-eyed scowl.

  “What’s your problem?” Batie snapped.

  “Bitch,” Hannah said.

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard me, bitch.”

  Hannah’s family pulled her away as Batie yelled, “The truth is going to come out! Then we’ll see who the bitch is!” The two camps huddled at opposite ends of the hall, chain-smoking and venting their rage. Batie groused that Hannah and her family were bigoted rednecks. To Michael’s mother, Freddie’s crippled mother was a “motor-mouth with a motor,” an uppity city black just like her son. Watching the scene, it was hard not to see a depressing adult mirror of the anger and racial stereotyping that had afflicted their sons.

  On the trial’s third day, Freddie took the stand. He showed none of the emotion or remorse he’d displayed during our prison chat. Instead he seemed numb with anxiety and dully mumbled “Yessir” or “I don’t know” as the prosecution asked one incriminating question after another. In the gallery, the county’s chief deputy leaned over and whispered to the man beside him, “He started in a ditch about six inches deep with a shovel. Now he’s in with a backhoe digging himself as deep a grave as he can.”

  Ironically, it was left to the prosecution to point out the provocative role played by the rebel flag. The defense feared that dwelling on the flag, or on racial strife in Todd County, might bolster the state’s claim that the crime was premeditated, and also incriminate the defendants on the charge of violating Michael’s civil rights.

  But in closing arguments, a defense attorney quoted Hannah’s testimony about the flag making the truck look sharp, rather than expressing any political belief. In his view, this undermined the charge of civil rights intimidation. “Aesthetics are not protected by the Constitution,” he dryly observed.

  This prompted an emotional reply from one of the prosecutors, an owlish man who rushed to the podium carrying several tomes. The key issue, he said, wasn’t the intent of the person displaying the flag, but “stereotypical assumptions” made by those who saw it.

  “If a person feels it is symbolic of keeping African-Americans back, then it’s easy to believe that the people displaying it are bigots.” Whites in the audience began to shift uncomfortably. “They’d get mad,” the prosecutor went on, “they might want to drag them out and beat them up. A stereotypical assumption was made in this case, and that’s why it happened.”

  Then he opened William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and quoted Nazi laws proscribing Jews, which he said offered further illustration of how “stereotypical assumptions” led to violence. He opened another book, Carl Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln. “I’ll probably offend some people,” he said. Then he read part of the Gettysburg Address, lingering on the phrase, “All men are created equal.”

  The prosecutor cited Lincoln to buttress his central point: whites had the same right to fly the rebel flag as blacks had to wear X caps. Still, it was strange to hear the Confederate Antichrist invoked in a Tennessee courtroom filled with family and friends of a man killed because of his rebel flag.

  As the judge deliberated, the families stood at opposite ends of the courthouse, holding hands and praying. When the judge returned after a ninety-minute recess, the chamber filled with undercover police. There had been anonymous death threats against the judge, and police also feared a post-verdict brawl between the families.

  Fingering a Styrofoam coffee cup, the judge spent several minutes staring at a legal pad. Then he read the charges against Freddie, finding him guilty of felony murder, attempted aggravated kidnapping, and civil-rights intimidation. “The court imposes sentence of imprisonment for life,” he said. Damien Darden received the same. The third defendant, a fifteen-year-old who had apparently just been along for the ride, was found not guilty on all counts.

  Freddie’s head slumped on his chest. Damien stared blankly ahead. Behind them, relatives burst into tears, as did the women in the Westerman family. Except for Hannah. Striding out of the courtroom, she paused before a TV camera and declared, “They got what they deserved—well, they deserved to die.” But she seemed satisfied by her day in court. “It’s about time,” she said, “someone who’s white got to stand up and say, ‘Our civil rights were violated.’”

  A FEW HOURS LATER, at Billy’s Bar in Guthrie, I watched Hannah again on the six o’clock news. The barmaid raised a beer bottle in salute and everyone at the bar cheered—before turning on the jukebox again. Down the street, at Janie’s Market, trucks pulled into the gas pumps with rebel flags flying from their beds. Banners also appeared in windows along the main street. But after a few days, this white triumphalism stopped. Most locals recognized the severity of the verdict: justice had been served, tribal blood money paid.

  At the cemetery, I found two teenaged girls smoking beside Michael’s grave. They said Todd Central High School was calm now, but a chilly distance separated blacks and whites. “No one wants to talk—we go our separate ways,” one girl said. She flicked ash on the ground. “It’s probably for the best.”

  The black teenagers I spoke to felt much the same. A growing number had decided to escape Todd County by joining the army at the earliest chance. Many of their parents now felt awkward and unwanted around local merchants and shopped in nearby Clarksville instead. Some blacks avoided going out after dark.

  On the Sunday after the trial, I went to a service at Guthrie’s black Baptist church attended by members of the defendants’ families. Several relatives got up to thank the community for their support. “God will deliver his verdict, but in his own good time,” Freddie’s aunt said. “We look at the little pictures, He takes the big view.” Another woman wailed, “I don’t want to go to hell, Lord. It’s hell here.” Then the pastor set the trial in the broad context of black suffering. “We have been o-pressed and depressed for over two hundred years,” he said. “Ain’t nothing change but the years.”

  After the service, Freddie’s mother invited me to her in-laws’ house, a small bungalow across from the church. Showing me a picture of Freddie at age two, hugging a Teddy bear, she pondered how her youngest child could have ended up in prison for murder. Perhaps, she said, it was her fault, for losing her job when Freddie was a young teenager; after that, she’d had to move to a rough area of Chicago she described as New Jack City. It was there that her son first got into trouble.

  Or maybe adolescent hormones were to blame. “Boys got this thing, showing your manhood, that you’re bad,” she said. “It’s a man thing.” But she was also angry that racism and the rebel flag hadn’t really been aired at the trial. “The flag and ‘nigger’-calling—you can deny that it hurts you, but it builds up,” she said. “You keeping putting it on people, it’s going to blow up.”

  She reached in her purse for a card from prison. The front showed a calm winter landscape with farms and horses. Inside, Freddie had scribbled a poem.

  I’m hitchhiking to heaven. I’ll get there someday.

  Others have made it now. I’m on my way.

  I’m here on life’s highway. My thumb up high!

  I can see the sinners laugh as they go by.

  And there comes an Angel. Riding on a cloud.

  That’s my ride to Glory. I’m Homeward Bound.

  The card was signed, “Peace and much love Mama. I love you.” Freddie also asked her to pass on a message to his siblings and their kids. “Much love from little bro and uncle on lock down.”

  Cynthia Batie began weeping and put the card back in her purse. “My baby,” she cried.

  Ten minutes up the road, at the Westermans’ house in flat
farmland north of Guthrie, fourteen rebel flags were on display. One flew at half-mast, the others draped across porch furniture. Inside, Hannah sat with her in-laws watching Oprah as her twin children frolicked on the floor. One toddler wore a rebel-flag shirt: “American by Birth, Rebel by the Grace of God.” The den was also cluttered with Confederate paraphernalia, most of it gifts from well-wishers across the South.

  Michael’s mother, JoAnn, joined us. A wiry woman of forty, she said she now took tranquilizers and had entered counseling with her husband to deal with their son’s death. Returning to work at the garment factory had also been tough. “Blacks I consider myself close to, deep down inside there’s something in between us now,” she said. “We leave that void there and don’t discuss it.”

  Michael’s father, David, offered to show me a home video. Images of Michael rolled across the TV screen: as a baby, as a seventh-grader on the football team, at home making a science-fair telegraph with his father, at the senior prom with Hannah, and finally, cradling his newborn twins. David Westerman began to cry. A modest, soft-spoken man, he was, like Freddie’s mother, still trying to make sense of what had happened to his son.

  “Look at this,” he said, opening an album of family history he’d been given by his sister, Brenda Arms. David ran his finger along a list of rebel ancestors: one captured, another shot dead at Gettysburg, and a private “killed in action, 24th May, 1862.” His age was listed as nineteen.

  “Just like Michael,” David said. He wiped his eyes. “They say that war ended a long time ago. But around here it’s like it’s still going on.”

  6

  Virginia

  A FARB OF THE HEART

  Who knows but again the old flags, ragged and torn, snapping in the wind, may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day? And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise, and all will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well, and there will be talking and laughter and cheers, and all will say: Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?