Making Rent in Bed-Stuy

by Brandon Harris

  “Are you okay?” I asked her once we got back in the van. She said she was fine. I was the only black person in her party but I feared she may have been traumatized the most; our host had not just cast her as an object of desire but had openly speculated about many uses for her sexual organs in front of all of us. The others filed out and climbed back in the van, and without much talk, we pulled away from the sanctuary for self-obsessed idolatry that had become Paul’s oddly poignant life’s work, a chilling testament to a man who, like Paul, went on to his reward while sitting down.

  Sometime around eleven o’clock on the night of July 15, Paul Bernard MacLeod, aged seventy-one and Caucasian, and Dwight David Taylor, aged twenty-eight and black, found themselves on opposite sides of Paul’s front door. Dwight had been seen on Paul’s porch earlier in the evening, agitated and chain-smoking, by a man who lived across the street, a local restaurant owner named Tyler Clancy.

  A distraught Paul told local law enforcement that Dwight, whom he knew and who had been in his employ from time to time, tried to force his way into the “museum,” possibly over money he thought he was owed. A glass pane near the base of a door leading to the foyer had been kicked in, seemingly from the outside. An altercation ensued. Ostensibly fearing for his life, Paul shot Dwight in the right side of the chest, killing him. Less than twenty-four hours later the case was considered closed. The mayor and acting police chief, Kelvin Buck, a sharply dressed, smooth-talking African-American politician and ex-member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, believed that Paul MacLeod had acted in self-defense. That was the official line.

  Some members of the community, even before the local police had made their announcement, were not satisfied that justice had been done. The afternoon following the shooting, when Paul had secluded himself inside Graceland Too, various people drove by the property and yelled accusations from their cars. Dwight’s mother, Gloria, told Channel 3 news that no one had been in touch with her from the police department about what had happened and why. “All we want is justice for our son,” she said.

  Dwight was a diminutive man, much smaller than Paul, with an angular brown face, close-cropped hair, and an easy smile. He went by “David” with his closest intimates. Unable to maintain steady employment, he was known to approach people at their homes and ask for work doing anything that could possibly need doing. He was often seen painting Mr. MacLeod’s home, which in recent years had been several different colors. Dwight was by all accounts a gifted musician; he both sang and played guitar for the fifty or so parishioners at the Tabernacle of Prayer.

  Like his parents, Dwight was desperately poor. The local homeless shelter, a former twelve-room motel in the run-down northern end of town, turned him down because of outsized demand for the few rooms available. But he and his parents were known to use the shelter’s food services from time to time. His parents lived in poverty on Valley Street, also in the impoverished northern end of town. Dwight had hoped to bring his father to the church to play music with him on Sunday, July 20, five days after he died.

  Less than seventy-two hours after the shooting, Marshall County district attorney Ben Creekmore confirmed that the investigation into the death of Dwight David Taylor was ongoing and that the results were to be presented to a grand jury on October 1. That grand jury, the proceedings of which remain sealed, didn’t result in an indictment.

  It isn’t common, one imagines, for unarmed young black men, regardless of how desperate they are, to break into the homes of heavily armed white men in a place long riven by the ghosts of human ownership and the hundred-year state-sponsored terror campaign that followed in its wake. What was Dwight Taylor really doing there that night?

  I arrived, with a photographer named Levin, in Holly Springs for a second time early on the afternoon of August 10, a few weeks after the shooting, to figure out what happened to Paul, and to Dwight, for Harper’s Magazine. I had a lot riding on the story, as it was the most lucrative piece of journalism I had ever been assigned. Given that I still qualified for food stamps, I was hoping it would, for at least a little while, elevate me out of the chic poverty I had known since my adjunct teaching checks stopped coming in during summer break. My things were in storage and I had spent much of the summer shuttling back and forth to and from the Bronx, where I was subletting a cheap and tiny studio while I figured out what I could afford and where. I had run out of money that summer again, subsisting on the dollar menu at McDonald’s for weeks at a time in July once my food stamps expired. A lucrative story in an important magazine seemed like a lifeline.

  Seeing it in the light of day for the first time, the city of a little under eight thousand had whatever one thinks of when the term “southern charm” is issued. A center for cotton production before the war, it was later home to thirteen Confederate generals, and then played uneasy host to General Grant’s command as the Union army invaded. It’s home to one of the oldest historically black colleges, Rust, founded in 1866 to educate newly freed slaves. Today, the 70-percent-black population lives integrated with whites on the more genteel southern side of town. Blacks hold the mayoralty and two alderman seats in the city government. On the northern end of town, not far from Rust College, exists a level of poverty and disinvestment that has become forgotten America’s calling card, especially in communities of color.

  That area was once home to the highway interchange that had been moved south with a rerouted Interstate 78. Cars feed off the three-lane highway there into a seemingly always busy Walmart. Houses that have stood since Jefferson Davis’s time line a street that leads from the highway into the town’s handsome square. I vaguely recognized it from a movie: Holly Springs is the setting of Robert Altman’s 1999 comedy Cookie’s Fortune. Like many of the other homes from that era in Holly Springs, Strawberry Plains, a mansion used in the Altman film, was spared by Sherman’s March. The town legend is that the mansions were too beautiful for the approaching Union army to burn down. Or that someone had a mistress.

  You couldn’t miss it, Graceland Too, perched on a corner not far from the square, where East Gholson Avenue, mainly a collection of one-story ranches, dead-ends into South Randolph Street. The front porch and surrounding area was covered with hundreds of unopened cans of Coca-Cola, the beverage Paul claimed to drink twenty-four times a day—they’d been left there by well-wishers in memoriam. The Confederate flag I had seen on the edge of the property months before had been removed.

  Immediately after we’d parked across the street and stared out at the house for a bit, a van pulled up behind us and parked. In it were Amy Hoyt, the volunteer for the film festival who had first brought me there, and Amy Nicholson, the auburn-haired documentarian from New York who had previously been there with me as well. She was back to film the proceedings of the ensuing week; Paul’s funeral was scheduled for the following Tuesday morning. A day of events at the home and a nearby community center, all culminating in a midnight vigil and screening outside the house, were also scheduled.

  We were given access to the premises that Sunday by Philip Knecht, a local lawyer who was managing Paul’s estate. A stout man in his early thirties, he was dressed as if to parody the image of a genteel country lawyer from yesteryear; his pale, balding pate glistened in the heat.

  We walked around for a bit, taking photos, listening to Knecht recite various aspects of Paul’s legend, as we dug through Paul’s belongings. In a closet we found a pink shotgun and several other weapons. The police had taken only the weapon Paul used to kill Dwight, and his ammunition. Out behind the house, Paul kept a makeshift electric chair he’d claimed was from Jailhouse Rock, as well as a couple of limousines, including a pink one he said had belonged to Presley but which he had actually acquired from a local used-car dealer. I encountered a large and active hornets’ nest. A wheelbarrow filled with basketballs, painted black and wrapped in barbed wire, sat not far from it. Near the pink stretch limousine, I found storage bin after storage bin of empty spray cans in half a dozen
different colors. It hadn’t always been pink.

  Paul slept on a rectangular storage box in the “shrine room” of his museum, above which hung a portrait of his idol. A bank of six or so TVs stretched along the far wall. On these televisions Paul, who owned the largest collection of TV Guide I will surely ever come across, recorded any mention of Elvis Presley on network television he could find for many years, just a few feet away from where he slept.

  In the “portrait room” Amy Hoyt discovered letters from Paul’s mother, Helen, who shared a birthday with Elvis Presley. She had sent them from Paul’s ancestral home in Michigan and later from a retirement center in Arizona more than twenty years before. In the letters, some of which were written in a script that is nearly impossible to read, she often asked about him and his son, Elvis Albert. Were they okay? In another letter to her son she suggested, quite oddly, that she was as beautiful and alluring as a clearly much younger woman in an attached photograph.

  Was it okay for us to be here, rummaging through a dead man’s belongings, through a space that had recently seen so much tragedy and dread? “My position has always been, as the attorney for the estate and the attorney for the house, and the person with the keys, I want as many people in here as possible recording, filming, getting his name out, because I am first and foremost Paul’s attorney,” Knecht said to us. He had issued a press release three weeks previously stating, “Graceland Too, in partnership with the City of Holly Springs, is excited to announce a Memorial and Celebration of the Life of Paul MacLeod on Tuesday, August 12, 2014, during Elvis Presley week.” It went on to state that tours of the premises led by “family, friends and lifetime Graceland Too members” would be given that day for five dollars each, even to other lifetime members accustomed to paying nothing, in order to raise money for Paul’s “funeral and burial expenses, as well as the expenses and costs of his estate.” No mention was made of whether the “expenses and costs of his estate” included fees to Knecht.

  But this was still, in many ways, a crime scene. Philip Knecht, despite having a law practice that was only a few blocks away from Graceland Too, first talked to Paul at length the day after he shot Dwight. They spoke at the behest of the local pharmacist and town alderman-at-large, Tim Liddy, who implored Paul to get legal representation. Paul was mainly interested in giving Liddy and Knecht yet another tour of his Elvis museum even as Knecht suggested he could be charged with murder. “In a way, I got the last tour Paul ever gave of Graceland Too,” Knecht reflected in his nearby office later that day.

  Knecht knew Dwight as well, better than he knew Paul. “He would come by and offer to wash my truck. I usually didn’t let him,” said Knecht. “I’d let him do a little something and give him some money. Most of the time I would go to the store and buy him food. A lot of people did that around town. They were basically drifters, he and his wife, Cindi.” Knecht, who has a gallows sense of humor and a nervous laugh, had known Cindi longer than he had Dwight. He was friendly with her for the most part but was upset about rumors he claimed she had been spreading. “She’s been saying some things to other people that were racially insensitive, trying to make it a race issue.”

  He claimed to have helped both Dwight and Cindi out with legal issues they’d had, pro bono. They were both sent to jail for six months in 2013, almost simultaneously, Dwight for grand larceny after he allegedly stole a grill and Cindi for reneging on back child-support payments from a previous apparently violent marriage. They both faced fines they ultimately couldn’t pay. “His family isn’t acknowledging this but a lot of people knew Dwight, a lot of people had interactions with him. In the last two weeks of his life, they weren’t very good interactions.” Knecht alleged that Cindi had filed charges against her husband, whom she had married only months before, claiming he had been abusive toward her. She left him and returned to her family in nearby Ashland. Dwight had told Knecht he was desperate, given that he could go to jail for a long stint with the potential new charges. A silver chain and an iPhone charger were stolen out of Knecht’s truck a few days later. The last time Knecht saw Dwight, he says that Dwight admitted to stealing them.

  Paul had also previously filed charges against Dwight, who had apparently tried to break in before and, according to the former Holly Springs tourism chief Susan Williams, had beaten Paul up and stolen his car. Allegedly this was becoming a pattern for Dwight; Tom Stewart, who owns a catering company and a restaurant named Southern Eatery on the square, told me a few days later that Dwight, whom he “fed for a year and a half,” had tried to break into his home the night after Stewart had refused to deliver five meals to a local motel where Dwight and some of his friends were holed up. When I asked him what Dwight was like, Stewart, a pink-faced, heavyset man in his forties, paused and looked around his restaurant. It was full of black patrons. He clearly did not want to offend anyone who might be listening. “He was not atypical of Holly Springs.” He paused again, taking another look around. “He may hit you up for money, he may say, ‘You got some work?’”

  I suggested Dwight was underemployed. “Severely. Severely undereducated, had some substance problems, fairly moody guy.”

  Sitting across Knecht’s desk, I suggested that rumors had been circling that Paul owed Dwight money, and that that night Paul had called Dwight to come over to his house and get his back wages, only to kill him in cold blood when he arrived. “Paul didn’t own a phone, he couldn’t have called anyone,” Knecht said in rebuke to that assertion. He suggested Cindi and possibly Dwight’s parents, whom he had never met, were behind the rumors. “She has been saying some things to other people that are racially insensitive,” he repeated. He admitted that in Holly Springs, Mississippi, it would be easy to make this case a “racial issue,” claiming that U.S. attorney Ben Beaverbrook was bringing the case to a grand jury for purely political reasons informed by the racial dynamics of the town. “I think it’s political, it’s the DAs washing their hands of it, it’s political and racial,” he said.

  Isn’t everything, I thought.

  Shannon McNally resides in an unassumingly gorgeous white frame antebellum house, finished in 1857, that sits high on a hill overlooking a tucked-away corner of Van Dorn Avenue, about a half mile from the town square. “I can only afford this house because it’s in Holly Springs, Mississippi. I’m a musician. You can barter here, you can make things happen,” she explained shortly after we arrived. She was wearing a black dress, her dark tresses tied back, green eyes a bit sallow. She pulled her legs back beneath her on the porch swing she sat on mournfully as she spoke. Shannon and her husband had lived in New Orleans before being pushed out by Hurricane Katrina. Now they’d been joined by her parents, native New Yorkers both; her father is an ex–police detective from the Bronx who, along with Shannon’s mother, retired to the area when Shannon and her husband, Wallace, settled there.

  “This was Wallace’s vision,” she said gently, in a voice that suggested a mild dissatisfaction with the arrangement. She had adopted the cadences and southern lilt of those around her and there was something slightly put upon about the way she spoke. I’m sure she’d done a lot of adapting; Shannon had been a busker in Paris before finding her way to a major-label record deal with Capitol in the late ’90s, back when such a thing still meant something, before the music industry’s business model fell apart. Dwight’s wife, Cindi, had left, spooked by the possibility of our presence, but she would return, Shannon informed us. “No one’s actually talked to her yet. For multiple reasons. She’s a little skittish.”

  Here we were, three Yankees in what Shannon referred to as a “quintessential small southern town,” not quite sure what to make of one another. She talked at length about how difficult everything had been for Dwight and Cindi. They had been homeless off and on, struggling with substances. They could both be found on too many nights at the clubs in the alley, a small lane just off the town square that was known as a haven for public boozing and dope for the town’s less well-off.

 
Shannon took an active interest in helping the newlyweds. She had met the couple, as many in the community had, when they knocked on the door asking for work. Over time Shannon began to see them almost every day. “They went everywhere together. They were clearly very in love. I would generally give them whatever work I could actually afford. Everyone else around here took advantage of them.”

  She suggested that the Taylors were often exploited, given cheap to nonexistent wages by people who would have them wash a car or clean a house. No one did this more than Paul MacLeod. “Paul had him paint that entire house with spray cans and then wouldn’t pay him. Dig a ditch and give him fifteen bucks because you’re a junkie and I don’t want you to spend it on that. Man just worked eight hours or ten hours, whatever he did, who are you to say what he spends his money on?” Shannon said, “It’s a tough little town.”

  Shannon didn’t always have work to give them and would offer food instead. During the winter, she’d give them socks, hats, and coats. Eventually Shannon tried to give them things to do that were enriching. She’d invite them to do yoga or some leisurely gardening. Dwight’s interest in music mingled with her own; Shannon knew that he sang at church. Eventually Shannon began to try to figure out how to get them into some housing, onto food stamps and Medicaid. A month before he died, Dwight had finally gotten a social security card and hoped he’d be able to get on disability. But they never seemed to be able to get through “the incredible labyrinth of endemic poverty,” as Shannon put it. Dwight frequently claimed he couldn’t get food stamps because he didn’t have an address and he couldn’t get an address because he couldn’t find enough work to afford one.