God'll Cut You Down : The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, Amurder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi (9780698170537)

by Safran, John

  For the theft, coupled with the assault, Vincent was sentenced to five years’ jail.

  “I said, ‘I knew it had to be a white girl somewhere,’” Vallena tells me, “‘because they just do that.’”

  Vallena left the McGees’ house for her car. Soon her friend came from the house, pulling Tina’s sister behind her.

  “And the sister said, ‘I don’t know if you needed to know this or not, but Vincent’s first cousin is married to a white lady.’ And she said that two weeks ago, before the incident with Richard Barrett, that the Klans went to their house and cut three dogs’ heads off, okay, and threw them upon the porch and spray-painted KKK on the house.”

  I squint my eyes and my temples hurt. I run back in my head what she just said. I’m finding it hard to take it all in in one go.

  “So after that I pretty much had what I was looking for,” Vallena tells me. “A motive. A motive for Richard to do bodily harm to the defendant. Because that’s the history of the Klans. That’s what they do. They burn crosses in the yard to try to scare you off. And if that doesn’t work, the next thing you know you end up hanging in a tree and you committed suicide. But if you look at the background, the young black male that committed suicide had some kind of run-in with the white female, and it never fails. So that was the information that I needed to get back to Chokwe. It was just like Emmett Till.”

  The murder of Emmett Till isn’t scorched in Earnest’s psyche alone.

  “So,” I say, “you think it’s possible that Richard, through his Klan connections, knew Vincent’s cousin was married to a white woman, and they knew that Vincent himself had dated a white girl? And that’s why he attacked Vincent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think Richard just physically attacked Vincent, or also sexually attacked him—tried to rape him?”

  “That, I don’t know. It might be rape, because they always try to take the manhood of the black man. They either cut his penis off or they try to turn him into a girl.”

  “Lots of people are saying, though, that Richard might have been a repressed gay person and that’s why—”

  “I don’t think so,” Vallena interrupts. “I don’t think he was gay, because if I’m not mistaken, I think the Klans have some kind of issue with gay people.”

  “But, you know, people can be secret about it. But in this case . . .”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So this was like a war, when you try to sexually humiliate your enemy?”

  “That’s what I am thinking. Like I said before, when I heard about it in Dallas, the first thing I thought about: Did he have a white girlfriend? And most of the time, if you find out they were humiliated by a Klan, there is a white female in the background somewhere.”

  On the way home I try to work out the questions the trial’s got to pick through. Did Richard attack Vincent, or did Vincent attack Richard? Was Richard killed because of something Richard did, or something Vincent did? Did Richard make a pass at Vincent, and if he did, was it because he was attracted to him or wanted to humiliate him? Or is the sex angle really about a white girl, not a white man?

  Everyone seems to think it was about more than just a robbery, except the prosecution, who want to keep the death penalty on the table. For Michael Guest, race is a third version of events, after the sexual advance and the robbery. But for everyone else, it’s the first.

  Precious, the Otter

  I’d read in Melbourne that Vincent’s lawyer was named Precious Martin. Precious must be a woman, I thought, because in the film Precious she was a she. But a niggle tickled my brain: Precious may be a man’s name, too. The first three pictures on Google Images were of a man named Precious, a woman named Precious, and an otter named Precious.

  So, since then, Precious Martin has been an otter in my head. Striding around its law firm in a waistcoat with a fob watch tucked in its pocket. He’s remained an otter even after I found out he was a he.

  But Precious won’t return my thrice-weekly phone calls, even though I’ve got footage to offer and am a potential witness to Richard’s behavior. He sees the phone memo John Safran called, screws up the memo in his little paws, adjusts the spectacles on his snout, and continues on to the tearoom. For a while I thought it was because I was white, but Earnest has tried a couple more times, too, and can’t get anywhere.

  Who cares, Precious? Chokwe’s right, you don’t need to talk to me. Avoid me all you want. I’ll be waiting for you, to see whether you’ve done your homework. I’ll see you in court.

  In the meantime, like Vallena, I’m conducting my own investigation. I’ve heard enough secondhand stories to be ready for something firsthand.

  The House of McGee

  I knuckle the front door of the redbrick home, three doors up from the Murder House.

  The heavens have thrown a fierce sun across the land this morning.

  I knock again.

  A 1980s boxy van, a Vandura 2600 Starcraft, is embarrassing itself on the front lawn.

  I knock again.

  I’ve told Tina I’m coming.

  “Hello?” I say. “It’s John.”

  “Who’s that?” says the house.

  “John Safran.”

  “What?”

  The voice is not from behind the door. I peek right. A black hand, then arm, is forcing itself through a taut red curtain, as if the curtain is giving birth to the limb. The hand is clenching a can of Budweiser.

  “Side door!” says the hand.

  I go around the side and through the door there. Inside, my pupils dilate furiously, desperate for light. Black people are moving through a near-black room.

  Thick material blocks every window. The only light source is a small TV, beaming blue.

  My eyes slowly adjust. The arm of a green velvet armchair glows through the dark, then the whole chair. Then the people. A boy in a white singlet and shorts leaves up a hallway. I’m left with Sherrie McGee, Vincent’s sister. One hand is clenching a Budweiser, the other is clenching a Bible.

  “Mama!” screams Sherrie McGee.

  She scuttles up the hallway, leaving the Bible open on a coffee table. I poke my nose close.

  “And they journeyed, and the terror of God was upon the cities that were all around them.”

  Tina McGee

  Tina McGee, mother of Vincent and Sherrie, sits down in the green velvet armchair.

  I jot down Tina McGee, my handwriting tangled like wire, the best penmanship I can offer in the dark. By the way, why are we in the dark?

  Jersey Shore smolders in the corner, casting a little blue on Tina McGee. She offers me frightened eyes.

  “Is it okay if I tape this?”

  “Yes, sir,” she says softly.

  “It’s not for broadcast, just so I can transcribe it later.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  You never really get used to a black person calling you sir, I think to myself.

  “So, I guess my first question is, what happened with the crime? What actually happened? Between Vincent and Richard?”

  “My son was incarcerated, and he got out and Richard was riding his bicycle up and down the road and he seen my son out in the yard and he stopped right here.” Tina points through the wall to the front yard. “And Richard asked him did he want to work for him and my son say yeah, and he went to work for him.”

  “So, just a pedal bicycle?” Vallena had said a truck, and I wonder whether the difference makes any difference.

  “Yes, sir,” she says. Maybe the truck came later. “And he had brought him home afterward. And that night he come pick him back up and took him down there to his home to get on his computer. And Vincent had told me that he made sexual advances toward him. And pulled a knife on him and stuff like that.”

  “So did Richard pull a knife on him or did he pull a knife on Rich
ard?”

  “Richard pulled the one on him.”

  “Wow.”

  Richard in his crummy little house menacing Vincent with a knife. That scene didn’t appear in the district attorney’s version. Or in Vallena Greer’s. I stop worrying about small differences in the stories now that there’s a big one. The Richard I met boasted unconvincingly about “stomping” an anarchist and looked down the wrong end of a gun—can I imagine him actually pulling a knife on anyone? But Richard had been in Vietnam, and Earnest said he’d beaten up a woman, so perhaps I can.

  “So after that,” Tina says, “I don’t really know. But that’s what my son told me, that he pulled it on him. So what happened in the house I really don’t know, but he had to defend himself.”

  “Were you here when Vincent came back?”

  “He came in crying, and said that a man was trying to—like I told you—molest him, and he pulled a knife on him. And I don’t know what happened down in that house because I wasn’t there.”

  “Did he have any blood on him?”

  “I didn’t see any blood.”

  “Did he tell you the nature of the sexual advances?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Had he been working for Richard a long time?”

  “No, sir. He worked with him one other time when he was younger, as I recall. Something like five years ago.”

  Five years ago Vincent was sixteen, seventeen. There is a three-year jail stint between the two times he worked for Richard.

  The door at the end of the hall opens and shuts, exploding light into the room like a camera flash. Tina’s face lights up, and I’m startled by how young she looks.

  “Have you gone to see him since he’s been in jail?” I ask Tina, who has quickly returned to being a shadow.

  “They haven’t let me see him. He been writing letters; they will not let his letters come through.”

  “Really? Because when I talked to the district attorney he said you would be able to see him if you wanted to.”

  “No, sir,” she says, warming up to anger. “I called—what’s his name?—Eddie Thompson. I think he’s the captain. And he said I had to get a special visit. And he said he would give me one sometime this month. He said he had a lot he was doing right now, but I have called trying to get a visit and they would not let me have one.”

  “So, Alfred Lewis—”

  “That’s me,” says the darkness.

  Lord! How long has he been there? I twist to the voice of Alfred, Vincent’s stepfather. My eyes focus to a silhouette of a slouched man on a couch.

  “Hello? Hello,” I say. “You were here when Vincent came in on the night?”

  “I was lying on the floor, watching the Cavaliers. Yeah, the Cavaliers and the Mavericks was playing.”

  “So what did you tell Vincent?”

  “No!” he snaps. “The Spurs and the Mavericks was playing for the play-off.”

  “Okay. What did Vincent say? Was he crying?”

  “Yeah, he were crying a bit. And holding his stomach like that.”

  I can’t see the “like that” in the darkness.

  I know Alfred led the investigators to Vincent’s hideout. I realize this topic—betrayal—could be a raw nerve.

  “Because you knew Vincent was in trouble, were you scared to tell the police where he was? Or were you, like, We’ve got to tell the truth?”

  “They asked me. I told them where Vincent was. They needed direction where he was, you know?”

  Obviously not a raw nerve. It occurs to me that Vincent’s cousin’s still in jail as an accessory, but Alfred, who drove Vincent away, is not.

  “Were you close with Vincent?”

  “We were close,” Alfred says. “Real nice. In the room, lifting weights in the morning time. We’d mostly stay in the house watching TV.”

  “Did Vincent look at you as a father?”

  “Yeah, he had good respect.”

  “What about Vincent’s real father, who was he?”

  “JD,” says Tina, a little reluctant about where this is all going.

  Tina tells me she was on and off with JD for eight or nine years, but he left when she was pregnant with Vincent, her only child by him.

  Up the hallway, the door opens again, shooting a blade of milky light into the room. I make out a wooden cabinet, with just one china teapot, behind Tina. The door shuts and the cabinet disappears.

  “He was in jail twice before,” I say. “Why was Vincent in jail twice before?”

  “People told stories on him, say he did something he didn’t do. I didn’t have money to get a lawyer, and they just really railroaded him for something that he didn’t do, that they didn’t prove, they just gave him time for it.”

  “The first time would be something to do with the police, like threatening the police?”

  “No, sir. Two police had jumped on him and they said he jumped on the two police.”

  “Sure, and the second time had something to do with stealing some property or whatever?”

  “Mexican money,” she says. “He was going with a girl and he had spent the night with her. She was a white girl, and the mother had some Mexican money that was stolen. And they say he did it, but he was not the only one in the house, and they did not get any Mexican money off of him.”

  “Vallena said that for that particular crime, they wanted to get him because they were very angry because he was going out with a white girl.”

  “Yes, sir. I think her uncle or her brother was in the police force, and they was mad because he was dating a white girl. And I reckon that’s why they laid that on him, the Mexican money. He wasn’t going to Mexico. What would he need with Mexican money?”

  “What was her name, the girlfriend?”

  “Daisy.”

  “Daisy. And what’s her surname?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was Daisy his first girlfriend?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You doubt it.” I realize I’m beginning to sound like a lawyer, and Tina is the reluctant witness. “And was that his only white girlfriend?”

  “I can’t really say.”

  Tina’s eyes drift over to Jersey Shore.

  “It’s said Vincent said to the police he didn’t know Richard was a famous white supremacist.”

  “No one did.”

  “So you’d never heard of it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How long had you been living next to him?”

  “I don’t know when he moved down there, but I been here eight years.”

  No wonder Jim Giles believes Richard was a police agent. He was either the world’s most tolerant white separatist, or he had something else going on.

  Once again the door at the end of the hall opens and shuts, nuking the room with light, then snapping it back to black.

  I feel footsteps vibrating the floorboards. The steps are coming down the hall. The steps are getting closer. The virgin-white singlet and shorts float back into the room like a ghost and fall into the couch next to Alfred. It’s Justin McGee, Vincent’s younger brother.

  “Another thing people said about Vincent,” I say, meaning that I read this on an Internet message board, “was the tattoos on his face showed he was in a gang called the Vice Lords.”

  “He wasn’t in no gang, no, sir, no,” Tina says. “Not in no gang. He never did no gang stuff. He weren’t in no gang.” Tina touches the bone under her eye. “He had teardrops for his brother that passed when he was, like, a month old, and a butterfly on his face. I don’t see that’s no gang thing.”

  “His brother died?” I ask.

  “Yeah, that’s why he got the teardrops he had on his face.”

  “How did his brother die?”

  “Crib death.”

  “A cr
ib death? So that’s, like, a gang thing?”

  “No, that’s a baby death. Crib death.”

  My face heats up. I realize I processed crib as Crips, the black street gang. Nice one, Safran, you dickhead.

  “My child was not in no gang.” It seems very important to her that I understand this.

  I peek at my notepad for more questions, but I can’t see my notepad. I guess I could ask why we’re sitting in the dark.

  “What do you know of Vincent’s lawyers?” I improvise. “Precious and Chokwe. Have you spoken to them?”

  “Yes, sir. Chokwe, he want to get a continuance on the trial because he said he already got something on when the trial is s’posed to start.”

  “Have either Chokwe or Precious said what they are going to argue in court?”

  “No, sir, I haven’t heard anything about that.”

  “Because Chokwe and also Vallena, they are saying there is, like, a racial component to this. Do you think Richard took the knife to Vincent because he didn’t like black people?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is it just that Richard was very messed up in the head, so even though he didn’t like black people, and he wanted to hurt Vincent, he was also sexually attracted to him?”

  “Yeah.”

  I think this might be called leading the witness. I change direction.

  “Is it scary knowing that one of the possible consequences is he gets the death penalty?”

  “Yes, sir,” she says flatly.

  “Did you know that because Vincent changed his story it made it more damaging for him?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t know that.”

  I tell her what I was told. When it was a sex attack it was murder, and jail at most. When Vincent changed it to a fight over money, it became capital murder and the death penalty. I ask her why she thinks Vincent changed his story.

  “Scared, that’s all I can say.”

  “He was scared?”

  “That’s all I can say.”

  Because that really is all Tina says, I end up leading again. “You mean the police tried to make him change his story?”