“I’ll say this. I’ve never had a bored day sober. And I was bored a lot when I was using.”
“I can’t imagine what an amped-up version of you would be like.”
“One of my old friends says I’m completely the same but completely different.”
“What is this thing going on with you and Chief Blake?”
She saw me react. “Nothing. None of your beeswax.”
“There are rumors. You must know that.”
“I do know that.”
“Aren’t you a lesbian?”
“Listen to me, Claudia Friedman. I am not your journalistic subject. I am your source. No profiles of me—swear it on your, I don’t know, swear it on your sobriety.”
She stopped eating and emptied the rest of my pitcher of Coke into her own glass. “That’s hard,” she said, “because you’re so quotable. But of course, yes, I’ll do what you ask. I give you my word. And if I ask questions that are out of bounds, let me know the way you just did. I’m pretty curious, but I won’t pry.” She held up three fingers as if she were saying the Girl Scout Promise. “On my sobriety, which I hope is not fragile, and on my life, which I know is not fragile, or it would already be over.”
I tried to gauge her truthfulness. “Okay,” I said.
It was almost eight o’clock, and dusk had settled in. “I didn’t plan this correctly, damn it. I wanted to ride you up and down the front beach road so you could see what I mean about Folly Beach washing away. After the 1938 hurricane tore up the coast, there was this interesting class effect. The houses left after the storm were more modest. And it’s not a beach you can walk along anymore, because they’ve put all these breakwaters out there to try to stop the erosion. It’s treacherous. There are riptides. Deep holes in the water you don’t expect. So, if you’re going to find a serial killer in Charleston, he’s probably hiding at Folly Beach. Lots of drugs out here, and active alcoholics.”
As if on cue, a tall man with a thick beard staggered toward the door. At our table he paused, leaned too close to my face, and said, “I know who you are.”
After he left, we sat still for several seconds. “So, Claudia, I’m thinking we’d best get ourselves away from this place.”
Outside I held a small canister of pepper spray ready in my hand, but the man no longer seemed to be around, and Nadine appeared unharmed. I tried not to show how rattled I was.
The Tuesday night meeting on Folly Beach was chaired by a woman named Rose. The job of chairing any AA meeting generally rotates every couple of months among its members, but the meeting at Folly had been run by Rose for almost two years because nobody wanted her to step down. It was hard to identify what was so compelling about Rose. She was middle-aged, white, late forties or early fifties, hair dyed brown, gray roots showing. She wore makeup and dressed inexpensively, and she always wore straw pumps with little flowers on the tops. She painted her toenails red, but her fingernails she kept groomed and natural. When she called the meeting to order and read the Preamble, people listened as if they’d never heard it before.
There were only about twenty people in the room, all white, most of them beach derelicts. “Any newcomers?” No one raised a hand. “Anyone returning after further research?” Two hands went up, both belonging to women in such rough shape I couldn’t guess their ages. “Welcome back. Are there any visitors?” Claudia raised her hand. “My name is Claudia, and I’m an alcoholic and drug addict visiting from New Mexico.”
“Welcome,” the group mumbled, more or less in unison.
Rose’s topic this night was “The Gift of Sobriety.” She talked about how difficult it had been to put a week together when she first came in, how many times she’d had to raise her hand to say she was returning. “I’d get two, three days. Once I got a whole month. But I just kept coming back. Then I don’t know what happened. One day I stayed. It took me a long time to surrender.” I knew she was indirectly addressing the women returning. “We all come in here thinking we’re different. We think this program works for other people, but it won’t work for us. Anyway, that’s what I thought, that y’all are nice folks and all that, but this can’t work for me, I’m too far gone. And, of course, I had my secrets. I’ll tell you the rough ones in private sometime, if you think it might help you. But here are a couple: I was a prostitute for three years. I broke into a drugstore and stole drugs with my boyfriend, and I got sentenced to a treatment center instead of jail for testifying against him. But you know what happened as soon as I was released from treatment? I got drunk and jumped off the Cooper River Bridge. Broke both legs, but didn’t die.”
The thing I like best about Rose’s story—jumping off the bridge comes in second—is when she talks about having the opportunity, before her mother died, to take her to Magnolia Gardens in her wheelchair, steering her through the paths of flowers. I disliked the swaths of garish azaleas that flushed the Charleston landscape every spring. Each property seemed to have azaleas, clashing pinks and yellows and reds and oranges, and I found them as alarming as giant white magnolia blossoms. But Rose spoke about taking her mother to the Gardens when it was in full bloom, and how lovely it was with all the brilliant colors. She called the colors brilliant, and spoke about what it meant to share something like this with her mother, who had suffered so much over Rose’s debacles. Rose’s eyes filled with tears when she talked about the gift of being allowed to do this simple thing for her mother.
Soon after I heard Rose tell this story, I took my mother to Magnolia Gardens, and she loved it. She said it was so much better than the time I dragged her through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.
6
The next morning, I held my press conference at the foot of the City Market, in the same place where, according to Avery, Joe Magnus and Royce set off a bomb while they were still teenagers. When I was a child, locals always referred to this two-block open-air building running down the center of Market Street as the Old Slave Mart, but as Charleston was transformed from a lovely old city preserved like a jar of figs into a tourist attraction displaying the scalding virtues of preservation, the slave market, we were now assured, had really been the Old City Market, and the actual Slave Mart had been over on Chalmers Street. No human beings had ever been sold in this space, only blameless vegetables and fruits and quilts and jams and baskets made by pleasant old darkies wearing Aunt Jemima scarves. During the preservation movement, the first block of the City Market was rehabilitated into boutique shops, and the second block, the one Avery had pointed at, was stuffed now with vendors selling tourist wares. Silver sand dollars on little silver chains were favorites, as were the sweet grass baskets woven by “basket ladies,” canny black women who had begun to understand the value of their craft, brought to this country, like Gullah, from West Africa. The baskets were expensive, and though the women still sat on corners weaving them, the older ones teaching the younger to make the intricate patterns, they no longer kowtowed, ingratiated themselves, or bargained. These baskets were what I usually gave Yankees for presents, and next time I went to New Mexico I intended to bring one to Ed Blake.
By 10:00 A.M., the corner of East Bay and Market Street became congested with reporters and cameras. The midmorning cars moved by slowly, their occupants straining to see what was happening. I borrowed a wooden crate from a vendor, an elderly black man with professionally friendly eyes, and stood atop it, passing out my flyers with these basic lines:
BLACK GRANDDAUGHTER OF FAMOUS WHITE RACIST TO BE BURIED BESIDE HIM
Lucia Burns Godchild, the four-year-old granddaughter of deceased white supremacist Royce Burns, will be buried beside him Wednesday at 1 P.M. at Carolina Memorial Gardens in North Charleston. Ruby Burns Redstone, mother of Lucia and daughter of Royce Burns, is being held without bond in Albuquerque, New Mexico, charged with the murders of her daughter and her son. River, aged two, was buried last week in a private ceremony on New Mexico’s Nogalu Reservation.
Ruby Redstone’s mother was a Vietnamese im
migrant with whom Royce Burns cohabited but failed to marry before disowning her and their child several years before his death.
The identity of Lucia Burns Godchild’s father remains unknown.
All who are concerned about the continuing presence of racism in our society are welcome to come honor the burial of this innocent child.
Calling hours will be at J. Henry Beecher’s tomorrow, from 3–6.
I read the flyer loud, which quieted everyone. Then I spoke more informally. “You may wonder why this announcement is being made at this particular location. I learned recently that back in 1969, my brother Royce Burns and his friend Joe Magnus, a terrorist who remains un-captured to this day, tried to set off a bomb on this very corner. They were protesting a strike by a group of black female hospital workers who wanted to unionize and win pay equal to the white workers. My brother and Joe Magnus’s attempt to set off a bomb here was so incompetent and ineffective it didn’t even make significant news.”
I paused and Claudia Friedman shouted her planted question: “What happened to Joe Magnus?”
“You’ll have to ask the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms about that. He’s probably working for them now.”
“Is your brother really dead?”
“I doubt it.”
In answering other questions, I pointed out that my brother and Magnus had tried to bomb this street corner many years before Royce wrote his novel The Burning Chest, and, yes, it was a book I once thought very highly of, and, yes, it did seem as if Royce Burns had been two separate people, not a schizophrenic but a good man who had an evil one waiting inside him.
My anger blindsided me, or else I wouldn’t have said what I did next. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the image of Lucia’s small body being professionally made up by an undertaker only a few miles away, this child who had learned to crawl backward before she learned to crawl forward and who had tried to protect herself by holding three pacifiers. Lucia was dead, and so was River, the snuggler who smelled like running water. Or maybe it was because Ruby was my niece and my doppelgänger and a damaged young woman and she had suffered horribly because of my brother and then had committed an unforgiveable act of her own. Or maybe I was still trying to come to grips with the fact that her children had been left to die inside a refrigerator.
The evening news and the paper the next morning reported some of what I had said: “I challenge the Ku Klux Klan, the Silent Brotherhood, the Aryan Army, the Posse Comitatus, the CSA, the Confederate sentimentalists, and any other of you racist cowards out there to try to stop me from burying Lucia Burns Godchild next to this man you revere, Royce Burns. Do you think I don’t know that y’all visit my brother’s grave like it is some sort of holy place? That you recite Confederate doggerel out there the same way you do at Magnolia Cemetery during your pompous, silly reenactments? I know about the midnight pilgrimages to my brother’s grave where you hold hands and sing ‘Dixie.’ ‘Heritage, Not Hate,’ my ass. Royce Burns was a terrorist who believed that white people were the only human beings.”
I went doggedly on, trying to explain the links between Royce and The Turner Diaries and Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, until I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a short, boxy woman leaning over Nadine, who lay stretched out on Market Street with her top down. This woman was dressed as ambiguously as I was, but she looked tougher than I will ever manage, either because I don’t have the right genes or didn’t have the right childhood.
“Hey!” I jumped off my soapbox and pushed through the spectators, but the woman was gone by the time I reached my car. I thought she might be one of Joe Magnus’s sisters. There had been two of them, but there was no way to recognize them except by family resemblance.
Nadine assured me she was fine.
It would be several weeks before I would find out that my brother had not been a committed member of the Silent Brotherhood and that it was his fury over their assassination of Alan Berg that led to his presence at the fire on Whidbey Island. When the members of the Silent Brotherhood retreated to their temporary safe house—as federal agents pursued them—they found my brother waiting to argue race theory with Robert Mathews. Royce was trapped in the shoot-out because he intended to make it clear to Mathews once and for all that the Jews were crucial to the survival of the white race. He thought Mathews, a Christian fundamentalist, might be persuaded by a new argument Royce had concocted: the Jews were the original tribe of Judah, and the Europeans were actually the lost tribes of Israel. Mathews, however, remained implacably convinced about the Zionist conspiracy described in the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He might well have agreed that it was crucial to argue about Jews while other members of the Brotherhood were slipping quietly into the woods to avoid a fight they knew they could not win. Whidbey Island was a large area, but choosing a safe house on an island that required a ferry ride and then paying for it with counterfeit money did not seem entirely smart in retrospect. I like to imagine that Mathews and Royce were still shouting at each other when flares lit the sky and the FBI loudspeakers demanded immediate surrender of all occupants.
Estelle called me during her lunch break, furious about my news conference. “You are using this child as a pawn, Ellen.”
“Oh, my God, Estelle, you’re mad at me for this? You can’t be mad at me.”
“You hold a press conference and challenge the Klan and the entire gallery of right-wing nuts out there, and now you think you’re going to have public calling hours at Beecher’s? What on earth has happened to you?”
“It’s a bad idea?”
“It’s a stupid, dangerous idea. It’s a racist idea.”
“Racist? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Lucia wasn’t a symbol, and you, of all people, must know that. She was just a little girl.”
“But that’s what I’m trying to do, make her real. I thought you would understand. I’m trying to do what Emmett Till’s mother did by exposing her son’s body to public scrutiny.”
“Have you lost your mind? Emmett Till’s mother was black and he was her son, and what she did was revolutionary. You are a white woman riding in on a white horse like you think you’re some kind of hero. You didn’t even know this child, Ellen. This is not about Lucia, this is about you and your brother. This is about your ego and his.”
“Wow,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
In her wordlessness, the sound of her exhalation, I heard her anger lessening.
“I sure hope you’re not right, Estelle. Don’t you think white people have to stand up and fight against this kind of racial hatred?”
“I don’t know how to evaluate this particular situation, but I do know you’re being reckless and sound paranoid. BATF? You’re now making public accusations against BATF?”
“Don’t you think Lucia has been a pawn ever since she was born?”
“That’s your excuse? No, Ellen, she was a little girl, and what you have done has created a contaminated, dangerous mess.”
“I thought burying her quietly would be contaminated.”
In her long pause, I felt our uncertainty about each other growing.
“Estelle, disapproval from you feels just awful.”
She still didn’t answer.
“I hope we’re going be okay with each other.”
“So,” she finally said, “did your little Times reporter get here?”
“Yes,” I said, no longer holding my breath. “She and Momma sat through Wheel of Fortune together shouting answers at the television. Momma thinks Claudia is a relative. You’ll like her. She’s young, but she’s one of us. She’s only got about six months.”
“Was that thing you said about people singing ‘Dixie’ at your brother’s grave out there in the dark true?”
“I only know for certain that it was still happening a few years ago, mostly around the time they do that ‘Confederate Ghost Walk.’ You know about this? A bunch of sentimentalists in Confeder
ate uniforms walking through Magnolia Cemetery at night? They sell tickets and do these little skits, trying to reimagine the Rebels buried there. Once they actually walked the crew of the Hunley through the gates of St. Peter. They made what they thought the pearly gates might look like and recited drivel. It’s been infuriating me for years.”
“You’ve got big trouble coming, girl, and I’m staying out of it. And you’d best stay out of bed with that reporter you’re crushing on.”
“Oh, please. I have a few boundaries left.”
“Right. I know all about your boundaries.”
“Nice bluff. You don’t know shit about my boundaries.”
“Ellen?”
“Okay, I won’t, I promise.”
7
Claudia and I had intended to go to the 7:30 A.M. meeting downtown, but in the morning we found Nadine ravaged. I never locked Nadine because her doors couldn’t be unlocked without a call to AAA, but I did raise the top and cover her every night, and Dockside was surrounded by an eight-foot wall. Also, she was parked within sight of the guardhouse.
Her beige canvas cover lay on the ground and her white top and leather seats had been slashed. She smelled strongly of urine.
“It must have been a crowd,” Claudia said, writing in her notebook. “How could they have gotten in here? The guard checked my pass when I came in.”
“Good question. And how do we know it wasn’t somebody who lives in the building? Some of those blue-haired United Daughters of the Confederacy?”
“Well, if it was those ladies, wouldn’t they have brought their kitty litter along? Then they could have put cat shit in here too.”
Over her shoulder I could see an elderly black guard meandering toward us. “Oh, oh, oh,” he said, rubbing his smooth hands together. “How did this happen? Oh, my stars.”
“This is my friend Claudia, Mr. Saunders. We seem to be having a little trouble, and I’m afraid we’re going to have to involve the police. Could you please call them for me?”
Tomb of the Unknown Racist Page 13