by Safran, John
I live in a trailer. I have got a barn behind my trailer. That’s just a barn for my cows. I’ve got four Jerseys. Three Jersey cows and a Jersey bull. That’s where I keep my puppies, under there. I have ten bluetick coonhounds. I have two puppies I am not counting in that number. I’ve got six Great Pyrenees.
One route to my home is the road where my mother’s mother lived. There is squalor there that you won’t see anywhere. There is nothing that looks any worse in Haiti.
I’ve been coming down here to this farm ever since I was about seven or eight years old, when my grandparents first bought this property and built the house. My mother lives next to me, in the two-story house that I speak of. Her home is a very nice home.
I had a pretty regular childhood. They integrated the schools when I was about in the fifth grade. My recollection when I was a kid in school, the classrooms, the hallways, they were quiet places. A school is a place where you go and study and it’s supposed to be quiet. Slowly after integration everything seems to be very loud. And I think that is a function of Africans just being basically, you know . . . their natural tendencies come out—they are loud people.
My father was killed in a car wreck when I was eleven.
I talked about Madison Avenue before. After I finished school that was the job I sought and obtained. I was working for IBM, the computer company, in the capacity of a systems engineer, which is somewhat of a technical sales job.
Anytime you would open your mouth in New York they would look at you kind of funny. They would say, “Where are you from?” and draw attention to it. Some did it in a friendly, nice way, and others were rather malicious in their views of Mississippians.
Aged nineteen, I went to Paris for one year. I was studying French at the Sorbonne. Mitterrand had just been elected, and I recall running through the streets of Paris going from one bonfire to another, because they didn’t like the policies he enacted as president. They turned over those little French cars and set them on fire. But we don’t have that kind of activist group here in Mississippi.
You ask about my wife. I have spoken about all of this on the radio in a very open way. There is nothing that I don’t talk about. My lack of a woman. My ex-wife. My mother. My ex-friends, who have abandoned me because of my political views.
My wife was a beautiful Swedish-German woman that I met when I was working for IBM in New York. And being a young, insensitive husband, I screwed that relationship up. That was my fault.
We were married a year.
Did I have an affair? No, no. Really, a lot of it had to do with us moving multiple times with IBM and her ending up in Atlanta, unhappy, and me being insensitive to her unhappiness. Those young brides, there’s a make-or-break point in there where you have to treat them right. And if you don’t act right, you can lose your girl. And I didn’t act right, so I lost my girl.
I have run for Congress three times. I was ignored by the media. But I did capture people’s attention with the large trailer I pulled around. Had the Confederate battle flag on it. This was when I was arrested for pointing my finger at that black cop. She said I pointed a loaded .357 at her, when in point of fact all I did is point my finger at her.
I did not have a good showing at the polling booth.
I didn’t move here into this trailer until 1996, when my grandfather got so old he couldn’t see well enough to go to the doctor and I had to come home and start shuttling him and my grandmother, really, basically, taking care of them. And that turned out to be a fifteen-year, sixteen-year job.
My grandparents have both now died. The death of my grandfather is a rather recent event. And now I have to go out and get a real job. I existed off of their pensions. I was able to stay here and care for them. They didn’t have to go to a nursing home. That was really my job in large part, even though I have engaged in organic farming here and I have done Internet radio.
I am working now on finding another girl. I have put in a concerted effort—I have joined dating sites and I am diligently pursuing an attractive female as we speak. But honestly there are two things holding me back. Number one, I have very high taste in regard to women. Number two, I have a lot of baggage in regard to all this public speaking. Most pretty girls, most people in general, I don’t think necessarily want to be associated with somebody who is so out there and so vocal on such a controversial subject as race.
I soon will be fifty-two years old.
Jim Makes a Call
Jim begins dialing a number, live on air.
“Well, if it’s meant to be a straight book,” Jim says, “and you are looking for somebody who actually knew Barrett, I have a friend in particular, to this day, who sings Richard Barrett’s praises. And I don’t understand him and I am a little, to be honest with you, worried about him. His name is Joe McNamee. One second, Mr. Safran.”
Jim gets through to Joe.
“Joe. I am on air now,” Jim tells him. “I have got this writer from Australia, and he is writing a book, so he says, about Richard Barrett. And he is Jewish. He is not a friend of . . . He is not a, you know . . . He is not one of us, Joe, is all I can tell you! But he comes across as real nice and he has got a reputation for playing pranks on people. What would you have to say to a Jewish book writer on Richard Barrett, who is in Mississippi right now?”
“Well, I got nothing about . . . I got nothing against Jews,” says Joe, “other than what they are doing to us over here. Me and Richard was long-running buddies. Richard was really my attorney.”
“Why did you need an attorney?” I ask.
“Trying to have my voice, my opinion,” Joe says. “And now’days they claim you can’t say nothing.”
Joe says he struck trouble fighting to keep the Confederate flag at Ole Miss football games.
I ask him what he knows of Richard’s life before he came to Mississippi. Joe says he knows nothing—it never came up.
“Hey, Joe.” Jim laughs. “Let me tell you the prank he pulled on Barrett. He came down here and got a saliva sample from Barrett and he went and contended he found out that Barrett had African ancestors.”
“Oh yeah,” says Joe. “I know who I’m talking to now. He came to Barrett’s Spirit of America. Yeah, that was a bad day. I don’t even want to talk to him. He’s crazy.”
“Well, he’s back here in Mississippi, Joe,” Jim says, quite delighted.
“Were you there, Joe?” I ask.
“I was there,” Joe says darkly. “I remember all the lies you come up with. You were buddy-buddying up to us, then turned on us like a goddamn snake.”
“But Joe,” says Jim, “Mr. Safran and I have had a very congenial conversation thus far. And one thing that he was critical of Barrett was in Barrett’s misleading. So maybe Mr. Safran felt justified. Mr. Safran pointed the finger and, Joe, I think he’s kind of right about this. Barrett would tell white Mississippians, ‘Y’all come to this event, it’s for the Spirit of America,’ when in fact it was something totally different.”
“But Jim, you just wasn’t there,” Joe splutters. “He got up and said Richard was half-black!”
Jim laughs.
“Well, one difference, Mr. Safran,” Jim says, “between me and Joe is Joe contends that he never suspected Barrett of being bad.”
“Well, I’m not saying that he is a good guy,” Joe says. “I am saying that I never seen anything about him being queer. I don’t believe anyone can come out and prove he’s queer. And I was ’round him all the time.”
“Did you always notice he was around young boys?” Jim asks.
“Yeah, I did. That didn’t look good,” concedes Joe. “I heard on the radio—but you have to understand this was a black radio station—that he was running around with dresses on in his neighborhood. But I know three people who lived in the neighborhood and they never saw it.”
“But Joe, wouldn’t you admit that in terms of
being a regular Southern guy, Barrett was the opposite? He didn’t come across as one of us.”
“No, he didn’t,” admits Joe. “I talked to his sister.” (I reach for my ballpoint again.) “And his sister said the reason he came down here, he wasn’t getting no attention in the North. So he came down here where he could get some attention. From the news media and all. That was what Richard liked.”
“Joe, you said you knew his sister?” I say, excited.
“I didn’t know her,” Joe says. “I didn’t even know he had a sister till he died. I spoke to her over the phone. I never even met her. She did say that Richard had a girlfriend for ten years. And I didn’t know Richard had a girlfriend. That’s what looked bad.”
I ask Joe how he contacted the sister.
“Well, she really contacted me,” Joe says. She did that through the executor of Richard’s will. Joe doesn’t have this man’s name or number at hand, but he might be able to find them.
“Let me get off the phone, because I am at work right now,” says Joe.
“Good-bye, Joe,” says Jim. “We got to go and eat some catfish here one of these days.”
Joe hangs up.
“Promise you won’t hang up when I say this,” I say to Jim. “But because you didn’t get back to my Facebook message, because you didn’t reply to that, and because I had come here and I wanted to interview you and I didn’t have your phone number, yesterday, I drove to your farm.”
“Well, that’s no problem,” he says. “You see my coonhounds? Did you see the bee yard?”
“I saw the dogs but not the bees. So have you got that costume that you wear so you don’t get stung by the bees?”
“I do. You are welcome to come down here. We will go collect eggs and I will show you my birds and you could see my pack of dogs and my bee yard.”
“Oh, I’d love that,” I say, sealing the playdate.
“I’m ready to get out of here. I am getting hungry. I got to get in my push-ups and sit-ups.”
Jim finishes his glass of orange juice.
“This is Jim Giles, and you’re listening to Radio Free Mississippi.”
Jim pulls up Rammstein, and I shut my laptop.
I’m pumped about the sister lead. My favorite bits in the true crime books are when you find out all about the baddies as little kids. And in my months Googling Richard, I’d seen no mention of any family member. I put this note alongside the boy with a bomb. And what I saw at the Spirit of America Day. These pieces form a strange picture. Richard seems both a buffoon and a danger, someone running his own agenda for his own curious, confidential ends.
I look out the window of my room.
I decide that when I do the movie of the book I’ll have a scene where there’s a mix-up. People spy Jim in the distance on his farm in his beekeeper suit and think it’s a Klan uniform.
The Footage
Something’s occurred to me. My footage is probably the last film of Richard alive.
The Voice of Black Mississippi
There is no component of this bed that doesn’t squeak. The frame squeaks, the mattress squeaks, and the sheets squeak. To get to the bed that squeaks I must cross the carpet, which squeaks. And to step foot on the carpet that squeaks I must open the door, which squeaks. Like a lyrebird mimicking its environment, my asthma wheeze, which I swear used to be more of a whistle, has become a squeak. I shuffle to the kitchenette and begin preparing my third bowl of cornflakes for the day.
The silver laptop’s talking again, this time with the rasp of an older black man, Earnest McBride on The Empowerment Hour.
Earnest is also contributing editor of the Jackson Advocate—“The Voice of Black Mississippians since 1938.” The paper comes out weekly and has a smaller print run than Jackson’s mainstream Clarion-Ledger. I’d called Earnest from Melbourne. He said to get in touch when I arrived and he would sort out contacts for me.
“As you know,” Earnest rasps, “we at the Jackson Advocate were instrumental in getting involved in freeing a young man who had been, for no reason at all, locked away in seclusion, in isolation. Locked away from his family and all incommunicado for five days. And he was being charged as an accessory to the murder of Richard Barrett. But this young man just happened to be the common-law brother-in-law of the main suspect, Vincent McGee.”
I swallow two Tylenol, squeeze my head in the kitchenette sink, and wrap my lips around the spout.
“May I add a footnote on the character of Richard Barrett,” Earnest continues. “Lot of people—even black people, some of the black leadership—are coming out after his death and saying, ‘Oh, Barrett really wasn’t a real racist, that was just a public facade.’ What they don’t understand is that Barrett was sincere—probably one of the sickest psychopathic racists that would have come into this state. He was born in New York, grew up in New Jersey. He had beaten a woman within an inch of her life!”
I jerk my mouth from the spout, ripping my gum, grab for my notepad, and scribble beat a woman.
“And that was one of the reasons why he was compelled to leave New Jersey. Richard came here in ’66. The political power brokers at the time, they embraced Barrett. They sent Barrett out to every white high school in the state of Mississippi to spread his poison. They gave him entry. They gave him letters of introduction to the high school principals. So Barrett was able to take his message of white supremacy and take it to these children. And these children are grown-ups now, forty, fifty years old. The age of Haley Barbour, today’s governor. He probably heard him back then.”
I tickle my suddenly numb gum with my tongue and keep scribbling. This Richard doesn’t sound like the goofy outsider Jim Giles described.
“This man was sick! And some suggested there was some type of a homosexual overture in his approach to McGee. I kind of doubt it. But that would be a part of the whole schematic, a part of the sickness. They hate people so much, but at the same time they want to despoil them, they want to rape them, they want to bring them down to the basest level they possibly can. I just wanted to make it clear that I have no doubt whatsoever about Richard Barrett being a sincere racist. I interviewed him two or three times. And there was no . . . none of this, Oh, he’s just faking it, in real life, one-on-one, he’s a nice guy and all. No, that’s not true.”
I spit into the kitchenette sink. My saliva is swirled with red like a peppermint candy. So Jim Giles thinks Richard wasn’t a racist but was gay, and Earnest McBride thinks he wasn’t gay but was a racist. I wonder which one he was to Vincent McGee.
I call Earnest. He tells me to drive over on Saturday morning. There’s a Civil War reenactment happening an hour out of Jackson that he wants to cover. And he has no car and he needs a lift.
Saturday Morning
Last night a Jackson pothole burst my tire, and my mood. A warning shot to my kneecap. Get out of here, boy.
This morning, I cruise through a Jackson historic area called the Farish Street Entertainment District. It looks like a million dollars in the moonlight. But in sunlight it’s a slum. Shop fronts with the guts knocked out. Facades collapsing. The “Entertainment” refers to things that happened long ago. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong played in the now-shut-down Crystal Palace Ballroom. Robert Johnson recorded blues tracks at the no-longer-there Speir Phonograph Company. Trumpet Records, closed. Ace Records, closed. Two small eateries are still here. Above one is the tiny office in which civil rights activist Medgar Evers typed a letter on a sheet of cream paper before driving home to a waiting Klansman. For a state obsessed with its history, they don’t seem to look after it too well.
The funeral home is still running. (It’s the very one where Medgar Evers found himself that night.) The Alamo Theatre used to host Nat King Cole and now hosts community theater. The black letters running across the front read MIMIC: A STAGE PLAY IN HONOR OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SURVIVORS.
I blump o
ver potholes and pull up outside the Jackson Advocate, a squat cement box with no apparent windows. As I walk to the red front door, the air tastes like gasoline and stings the little cuts on my fingers.
What Did Kant Say?
Earnest is pacing up and down, his ear to the phone, his free arm flapping. He is tall and aging, maybe in his sixties. His pale blue suit pops against the yellowing front pages that wallpaper the office. As he’s talking, I take in some of the headlines: PRISON AUTHORITIES DENY INMATE FACING AMPUTATION IS REALLY SICK; ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM: DEATH FROM EVERY DIRECTION!; FINDING UNCLE TOMS TODAY.
“Two p.m. Central Standard Time today!” Earnest brays into the phone. “Mr. Jefferson is accepting presidency of the Confederacy! Ha-ha!”
What does that mean? While Earnest’s mouth is on the call, his fluttering hand carries on a second conversation with me.
Get the car ready, say his fingers, mimicking twisting keys in the ignition.
Staple those sheets on the desk, says his palm, splatting down in thin air.
He waves a phone memo at me: Malinda Adams, NBC Nightly News.
“Yes, Malinda!” Earnest chuckles into the phone. “I just wanted to let you know so you won’t be left out, behind a curve, when you hear that the Civil War has broken out! Ha-ha! Bye-bye.”
“What’s happening?” I ask, confused.
Earnest tells me this year is the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War.
“The first year of the five-year war. The good people of the South and the Confederacy are only going to celebrate four years. They’re going to celebrate their four years of glory, which were not really glorious at all. But they’re going to ignore the fifth year because that’s the year that they got their butts kicked, mostly.”
“Who’s Mr. Jefferson?” I ask.
“Jefferson Davis! He’s the president of the Confederacy! Abraham Lincoln’s enemy.”