TOMB
OF THE UNKNOWN
RACIST
ALSO BY BLANCHE MCCRARY BOYD
Terminal Velocity
The Revolution of Little Girls
The Redneck Way of Knowledge
Mourning the Death of Magic
Nerves
TOMB
OF THE UNKNOWN
RACIST
A NOVEL
BLANCHE McCRARY BOYD
COUNTERPOINT
Berkeley, California
Tomb of the Unknown Racist
Copyright © 2018 by Blanche McCrary Boyd
First hardcover edition: 2018
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Boyd, Blanche M., 1945– author.
Title: Tomb of the unknown racist : a novel / Blanche McCrary Boyd.
Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017052537 | ISBN 9781640090675 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: White supremacy movements—United States—Fiction. | United States—Race relations—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Family secrets—Fiction. | Domestic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3552.O8775 T66 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052537
Jacket designed by Nicole Caputo
Book designed by Jordan Koluch
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Leslie, James, and Julia, who gave me a new life
CONTENTS
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part II
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part III
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
TOMB
OF THE UNKNOWN
RACIST
FACTS
1. The Silent Brotherhood, also called the Order, was a white supremacist terrorist organization reportedly destroyed by the FBI after a shootout and fire in 1984.
2. Robert Mathews, cofounder and leader of the Silent Brotherhood, was the only person actually killed in that confrontation. Other members were arrested.
3. Alan Berg was a Jewish radio shock jock in Denver who was assassinated by the Silent Brotherhood on June 18, 1984.
4. The Turner Diaries (1978) is an apocalyptic novel recounting a future white takeover of the world by a group called the Order. It predicts the extermination of all nonwhites, Jews, and homosexuals. William Luther Pierce, a white supremacist leader and theorist, wrote The Turner Diaries and its “prequel,” Hunter, under the pen name Andrew Macdonald. More than half a million copies of The Turner Diaries have been sold since its publication; it is highly valued by many white extremists, and some consider it a kind of revolutionary blueprint.
5. Timothy McVeigh, the ex-soldier who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, had pages of The Turner Diaries in his car when he was arrested. These pages provided basic instructions for building a fertilizer bomb similar to the one McVeigh used.
6. A month after the Oklahoma City bombing, authorities discovered an unidentified leg in the rubble of the Murrah Building. The existence of this leg was not disclosed for at least another month, and it was later identified in variously contradictory ways.
7. A white supremacist compound continues to exist at Elohim City, Oklahoma. Timothy McVeigh phoned this compound several weeks prior to the bombing, asking to speak to a man named Andreas “Andy” Strassmeir, reportedly a German national with significant expertise in explosives; he and McVeigh had met at least once before. After the bombing, Strassmeir left the United States without being interviewed.
8. Kenneth Trentadue, a man who his lawyer brother believes was arrested because he looked like the sketches of John Doe #2, was said by authorities to have hanged himself in his jail cell. (John Doe #2 was the unknown man alleged to have accompanied McVeigh when he rented the Ryder truck used in the bombing.) An independent examination of Kenneth Trentadue’s body revealed more than forty wounds and bruises as well as a cut throat; suicide seems an unlikely explanation.
9. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were over one hundred armed militias in the United States by the year 2000. There are now over five hundred.
PART I
The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard.
—CLAUDIA RANKINE, Citizen: An American Lyric
1
One spring evening in the year 1999 my mother and I were watching Wheel of Fortune, our matching rocker recliners locked into their forward positions so we could reach our fast-food burgers and fries, when a news bulletin interrupted the show: two young children had been kidnapped from a Native American reservation in New Mexico. The announcement was brief but Wheel of Fortune switched straight to commercial, and Momma had already guessed the puzzle: Surrender to win. Dark, shiny smudges marked her hamburger bun since she had painted blue eye shadow on her lips that morning. On the days I took care of her, I let her do whatever she wanted.
Later that evening, after I had arranged her in the great canopied bed with the white George Washington spread (she was wearing a cotton nightgown embossed with an image of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) she whispered, “It was the s and the double r combination that gave it away.”
“So how did you know the first word wasn’t serrated?” Serrated had been my own guess.
Her dark eyes gleamed up at me, deep in their orbits. “Don’t be silly, honey. That word only has two r’s, and there aren’t enough letters.” She called me “honey” whenever she couldn’t remembe
r my name.
Her hair was encased in a pair of white nylon underpants to preserve its shape. I had removed all of her makeup, including the lipstick on one eyelid. Either she had stopped with one eye because she sensed something was wrong or she simply got distracted.
Leaning back against her wedge of puffy pillows, she stared past me through the balcony’s closed glass doors toward the lights of the Cooper River Bridge, glittering in the distance. Still fully clothed, I kicked off my hiking boots and settled on top of the covers on the other side of her bed so we could watch the eleven o’clock news together.
The kidnapping in New Mexico was the lead story. A brief video revealed a teary young woman identified as Ruby Redstone emerging through the doors of a hospital emergency room. She wore an ankle-length mauve skirt and a white blouse splashed with dried blood, almost like a matching decoration. Her straight black hair was pulled back, and a lemon-size patch of scalp above her forehead had been shaved and bandaged. She leaned intensely toward the camera. “I beg of you, whoever you are, let my children go unharmed!” She was riveting, although my view may have been altered by recognition. Despite her auburn skin, Asiatic eyes, and different last name, I knew immediately who she was.
“Momma,” I whispered, “that’s our Ruby, all grown up.”
She reached over and patted my hand. “Don’t be upset, honey. Don’t you worry.” In my mother’s lovely present, distress was rarely permitted.
“I’m not upset,” I lied. I hadn’t seen my brother, Royce, since his daughter was a baby, but this young woman had the curve of my shoulders, her mouth resembled mine, and her hands were bewilderingly familiar. I was too stunned by our physical similarities—and her sudden reemergence in our lives—to respond.
In the early 1980s, Royce had vanished into the white supremacist underworld, sought by the FBI as a possible member of a terrorist organization called the Silent Brotherhood, or the Order. Unsuccessful in apprehending him, the FBI could not find his Vietnamese lover and their six-year-old child either, although it was assumed that Santane and Ruby were hiding from Royce, not with him. When the private detective I’d hired did not locate them either, I let the situation drop, because why would Santane have trusted me? The child, though … I had fretted a great deal about the child.
The one time I visited them, Royce and Santane and their baby were living peacefully in a cabin in Mendocino, California. In that phase of his life, my brother was presenting as a gentle faux Buddhist nurturing his budding family while he wrote his novel, The Burning Chest, using pencils on lined paper. In the evenings, their cabin was lighted with oil lamps because Royce eschewed electricity. Before I departed, he took me outside to confide, his face tight with emotion, that he had named their daughter after the old black woman who had cared for us as children. But not long after his novel was published to high critical praise, Royce suddenly abandoned Santane and Ruby and plunged headlong into the maw of white extremism. It was as if another man had been coiled inside him and sprang forth, full-blown and monstrous.
Because of his novel’s critical success, Royce’s conversion invited attention. In an underground newsletter, he began writing what he deemed “position papers.” A canny writer at the Village Voice discovered them and produced a front-page piece titled “The Disintegration of Royce Burns” chronicling the rise of white extremist groups, especially the Silent Brotherhood, and my brother’s possible connection. The Brotherhood had successfully counterfeited twenty-dollar bills, robbed a Brink’s truck of several million dollars, and assassinated Alan Berg, a Denver radio host who had mocked and baited them. Berg, being Jewish, had been deemed a significant part of ZOG, the Zionist conspiracy they believed was secretly controlling the world. Berg was shot in his driveway while peacefully unloading his groceries.
I doubted this purported connection between my brother and the Silent Brotherhood because through his position papers I knew of their “theoretical disagreements.” In “Position 4,” Royce insisted that Hitler’s crucial mistake was, in fact, his anti-Semitism and that Jews were an essential element of the coming white revolution. Royce, therefore, would have viewed the killing of Alan Berg as a disastrous mistake.
In 1984, the FBI successfully trapped half a dozen members of the Silent Brotherhood, including its leader, in a “safe house” on Whidbey Island in Washington State. A shoot-out took place, during which an incendiary grenade set the house ablaze. The group’s founder and leader, Robert Mathews, chose to remain inside while the house burned to the ground. Most other members surrendered or were captured, and the FBI proclaimed the Silent Brotherhood effectively disabled. Then, in 1986, a full two years after the shoot-out, the FBI notified us that the remains of another body had been detected in the Brotherhood fire. My brother’s identification, we were told with what might have been a whiff of pride, involved one of the earliest uses of DNA for such a purpose.
The box containing Royce’s remains troubled me, of course—it’s hard to believe in anyone’s death without visual proof—but we buried what they sent us in a child-size coffin. Our mother, still cogent and witty at that point, had remarked, through her grief, “Well, I do remember him best when he was small.” When I replied, “I guess he’ll always be my little brother,” she even tried to smile.
The next morning Momma and I watched the news on the TV in her condo’s kitchen while she ate Cheerios with sliced bananas and milk, a ritual she had been clinging to since my childhood. National media were quickly assembling some details of Ruby Redstone’s background, mainly the fact that her father had been the novelist-turned-terrorist, my own brother, Royce Burns.
According to news reports, Ruby Redstone’s husband, a full-blooded Nogalu Native named Lightman Redstone, had come home from work the previous evening to find his wife unconscious and bound with silver duct tape, a strip of skull exposed from a freely bleeding wound, a hammer on the floor beside her. Their children were nowhere to be found. The car, with the child seats inside, remained in the gravel driveway.
The account that Ruby stumbled through with him and then with local and federal authorities was so outlandish it seemed convincing. White supremacists, she said, had come to her home looking for her lost father. They already knew about her mixed blood and had mocked her, but they were infuriated by the sight of the children—River, two, and Lucia, four—whose lineage, they said, had been entirely destroyed. Their leader was a tall, clean-shaven, narrowly built man who said her children were “the worst kind of mongrels, abominations, and sins against God.” Ruby described how she had begged them not to take River and Lucia, who were innocent, but their leader had shouted, “No one is innocent in the land of Nod!” No, she did not know what the land of Nod was, but she thought the attack must involve some kind of blackmail plot against her father. She had never for one minute believed that her father was dead.
Even after I knew much more about what actually happened, I could not comprehend why Ruby would have wanted to bring my brother out of hiding. He was a dangerous, hate-filled man who had abandoned her. But, despite her dazzling lies, she soon dragged me out of the serene light of my mother’s dementia and into the glare of dreadful public events, the kind I had so carefully learned to avoid.
2
I was standing in the guest bedroom packing a few clothes for my flight to New Mexico when my friend Estelle arrived on her lunch hour. Estelle wore her white nurse’s uniform with her identification tags; she did not take off her dark glasses. Yes, of course she would manage my mother’s care for me for a few days, and no, she would not answer the condo’s phone unless I was calling, and yes, she would give similar orders to the other caretakers. “But, Ellen, why on earth are you rushing out there like this?”
“Tell the guards at the gatehouse that no one but the sitters can come in. Absolutely no reporters. Do your best to keep Momma inside.”
She leaned against the doorjamb, removed her sunglasses, and watched me as I threw clothes into Momma’s purple-flowered suitca
se. “Well, I know you’re upset if you’re going anywhere carrying that bag.”
I stopped what I was doing and tried to stare her down. “Estelle, goddamn it, she’s my niece, and she looks like me. She’s like some kind of weird doppelgänger.”
Her gaze softened. “Well, she’s twenty-four years old and half Vietnamese. But, yes, she does look a lot like you. I was startled by it.”
I sat down on the bed, this one draped in an embossed Martha Washington spread, and Estelle sat down beside me, taking my favorite safari shirt out of my hands. I liked this shirt best because it had eight pockets instead of six. “Estelle, how can I possibly leave my brother’s daughter in this situation? No matter who he was, or what he did …”
Estelle and I, both prodigal daughters who had returned to live in Charleston after being away for decades, had first met in Alcoholics Anonymous in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although we were familiar with each other’s recovery stories, we had always remained reticent on the subject of race: Estelle was African American and I was white. She knew my dead brother had been a prominent white supremacist and reportedly a terrorist, and I knew that her great-aunts had been among the heroic women who led the black women’s hospital workers’ strike that had paralyzed Charleston in the 1960s. But these events had occurred decades ago, and recovery in AA is personal, not political.
Estelle folded my shirt as if she were soothing it. “Why don’t you take another day or two to think this through? Let the situation settle out a bit.”
“I’ll stay sober and go to meetings, Estelle, but here’s the truth: I should have dealt with my brother’s fucking disasters a long time ago. What could the AA slogan ‘live and let live’ possibly mean in a circumstance like this?”
After a silence, Estelle said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t go near this situation until I knew a lot more.”
“But I should have tried a lot harder to find his daughter when they disappeared.”
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