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

  “Yes, sir.”

  For the first time, Justin McGee, in his virgin-white singlet and shorts, butts in.

  “He didn’t want people to think he was gay. That’s what I think.”

  “Sure,” I say. “Because even if he was involuntarily attacked, maybe people in the community would think he was gay?”

  “’Cause they had it all on the Internet,” Justin says. “They thought it was a relationship that went bad or something.”

  “Do you think that it could have been that, Justin?”

  “That’s what I think.”

  “You think it was a relationship that went bad?” I blurt excitedly.

  “Nuh-uh!” says Tina.

  “No,” Justin corrects me, “I think that’s probably why he changed his story.”

  “Okay, sorry,” I say. Christ. Do I really want that badly to add gangs or sex to race? Still, to clarify: “Do you think there’s any chance he was in some relationship with Richard? You know, Richard paid him for sexual favors or anything like that?”

  “No, sir!” says Tina. Passion courses through Tina’s voice on this particular topic, like nothing else we’ve discussed—not the prison visits, not the gangs, not even the death penalty.

  Justin smirks.

  “Fair enough,” I say. “And also—because of the violence of that crime—he wasn’t violent when he was growing up, or anything like that?”

  Tina shakes a no.

  “So were you quite surprised when you heard that he stabbed someone? He stabbed him, like, thirty times.”

  Shock bolts through her face.

  “Thirty times?” she says.

  “I’ve heard between sixteen and thirty times,” I say.

  Tina can’t hose down her shock. She seems to have forgotten I asked a question. I feel bad about having said it so bluntly. But I’m puzzled. Haven’t the police spoken with her? Hasn’t she read any reports about the murder her son’s accused of? Hasn’t anyone told her what happened? The best thing I can do is move on.

  “I’m trying to get a picture in my head of who he is,” I say. Vincent never replied to my Facebook message, but I want to get a sense of him for the murder in my mind. “I’ve never met him. When did he leave school?”

  “He left school,” Tina says, “he got the tenth grade.”

  “When he was young, did he have interests? Like, was he into sports or music, or anything like that, or guns?”

  “Basketball and stuff like that . . . sports.”

  “Did he follow a particular team or did he like any particular player?”

  Tina shrugs.

  “And what about, like, movies? Did he like a particular sort of movies or particular actors?”

  “He liked regular movies.”

  “And what about music?”

  “He liked regular music.”

  “Did he spend lots of time in other places, like a bit of an explorer, an adventurer, so even when he was young, he would kind of go off and just do his own thing for days?”

  “He was a homebody.”

  “So what did he do at home all that time?”

  “Watch TV.”

  “What were his favorite TV shows?”

  “Regular TV.”

  Tina’s shut me out, maybe still dealing with the stabs. I ask a couple more aimless questions, and then realize I’m done. Who can complain about a mother wanting to think the best of her son? I crack my neck and thank Tina and the silhouettes of Alfred and Justin.

  Tina says I can come back and ask more questions anytime I want. Despite everything, I think she even means it.

  The Clobbering Sun

  The sun clobbers me on the short walk from the side door of the house to the car. It’s pushed its heat into the concrete, too, so I’m hit from above and below, through my soles.

  I burn my palm on the car door, opening up and sliding in.

  I realize sitting in a dark room with this sun sealed off is probably the most sensible thing to do on a day like today.

  I’m kind of irked that Tina came more to life defending her son against the charge of homosexuality than anything else that came up. My entry point to understanding this murder has been race, Race, RACE!

  But is this really a homophobic crime? Bad news for the Race Trekkie if it is.

  If Vincent killed a white supremacist, fighting racism, he can be the hero in that story. If Vincent killed a gay man for hitting on him, that doesn’t work anymore. I wanted the narrative to be me and the brave McGee family against “the system.” I wanted to be hanging with the black activist lawyers, but they’ve cut me off. Worse, I got on smashingly with Jim, the white supremacist.

  This story isn’t working out like it should.

  4.

  WHAT WAS RICHARD BARRETT THINKING?

  #1 WAS RICHARD A RACIST?

  Hey Joe

  I pluck a scrap of paper from my wallet. Smudged across it is the phone number of Joe McNamee—the friend of Richard’s who I offended with my antics at the Spirit of America Day and who Jim conferenced in during our radio interview.

  If I want to know whether Mississippi’s most famous white supremacist was a real white supremacist, or an FBI agent, or gay, or Klan, or violent, or just unlucky, I need to talk to his family and friends. Joe McNamee would be both rolled into one: an old friend who has spoken with Richard’s sister.

  My brain has been scratching around for days, trying to figure out a hustle. How can I get Joe to talk?

  I punch in his number.

  “Murble murble murble,” twangs a Southern man through the phone static.

  “Hello? Joe?” I say. “It’s John Safran. We spoke on the phone the other morning!”

  “I don’t need to speak to you,” he coldly twangs.

  “The reason I want to talk is because I’m writing about Richard Barrett and people have only been saying bad things about him and I need someone to say something good,” says the salivating rodent. The reverse psychology hustle was my best bet.

  “I don’t need to talk to you,” Joe says, and hangs up.

  The knot in my neck tightens. Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Richard’s sister is the closest I can get to Richard. And Joe is the only way to her.

  More Than One Way to Skin a KKKat

  A big gray cube throws a big gray shadow over the colorful cars parked alongside it. This is the William F. Winter Archives and History Building in downtown Jackson.

  Military records from the Civil War are bound in crimson. Newsletters from the Daughters of the American Revolution are bound in blue. Microfiche film is spooled up in cold white drawers.

  The old man behind the pick-up desk flicks a speck of white lint from his tie. He pushes two fat manila folders across to me. He widens his eyes and pokes out his lower lip when he reads the label on the folder: RICHARD BARRETT.

  “You know him?” he says quietly.

  “No, no,” I say.

  I feel he’s hankering for gossip.

  “Did you?” I say.

  He darts his eyes around.

  “He used to come in here all the time,” he says.

  “Oh, really?”

  I feel his gossip is like a kitten. Best to let it come to you in its own good time rather than leaping at it and scaring it away.

  “Him and a fat man,” he says. “I’m talking about the 1970s. He’d go obsessively through the press with pictures of young athletes. The school newspapers and such.”

  “No way,” I squeak in my softest library voice.

  “Young male athletes,” he says.

  “No way.”

  “He was polite on the surface, but he was abnormal.”

  “Abnormal?”

  “He would look through all these pictures. And he and the fat redneck would say, ‘He should get a s
cholarship. Let’s give him a scholarship.’ But it was a scholarship with strings attached.”

  “What do you mean, strings attached?”

  “You’d have to be with his way of thinking.”

  “What do you mean, he’d look obsessively at these pictures?”

  “He was just strange.”

  The kitten has run away, and the more I ask, the vaguer he gets. Still—I’m excited by this sighting of an unguarded Richard.

  I schlep the two fat folders to the photocopy machine.

  There’s Richard’s FBI file, released under the Freedom of Information Act after his death, with some names blackened out. An old-fashioned typewriter bashed out the early pages—they go back to Richard’s arrival in Mississippi. The FBI was hardly liberal. They would infiltrate black groups, but white supremacist groups were also seen as antigovernment and spied on.

  There’s Richard’s local law enforcement file. In the 1960s the men in uniform weren’t necessarily anti-Klan. In fact, the men in uniform sometimes flung their police caps off at night and pulled on white hoods. Still, they kept an eye on Richard.

  There’s Richard’s Sovereignty Commission file. The commission was a Mississippi spy agency petulantly set up in the 1950s. The United States Supreme Court had just ruled segregation illegal. Mississippi’s most powerful politicians told the people of their state to ignore the ruling. In this moment, they pulled together the Sovereignty Commission to keep tabs on black civil rights agitators. When an odd New Yorker drifted into town, they expanded their objectives. They’d kept tabs on black civil rights agitators and Richard Barrett.

  I feed ten dollar bills into the photocopy machine.

  The Photocopies

  My motel room looks more crack den than motel room. Three plastic bags blurt garbage in the kitchenette, and the rest of the floor is covered by the spy agencies’ files, arranged in little stacks, squeezed between tangled shirts and underpants.

  I flip through the first impressions of the New Yorker who drifted into Mississippi in 1966.

  Federal Bureau of Investigation

  United States Department of Justice

  Jackson, Mississippi

  June 1, 1967

  RICHARD ANTHONY BARRETT

  RACIAL MATTERS—KLAN

  A confidential source advised on October 27, 1966, that Richard Barrett, a white male, age 23, in the past few months, went to Natchez, Mississippi, and contacted .......... The purpose of the contact was for Barrett to ascertain if ......... knew the names of a couple of men in each county in Mississippi whom Barrett could contact in an effort to have them join some type of hate-group he was trying to form. ......... told Barrett he could not assist him in his request.

  Assistant Chief of the Mississippi Police Department advised he had received information that Barrett had two large flags hanging in his room which he claimed were given him by Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Barrett has received mail from “Voice of the People,” address unknown, condemning Negro servicemen in Viet Nam.

  An article in the Natchez Democrat newspaper indicates that Richard Barrett recently returned from Viet Nam where he was wounded twice in action and received the Purple Heart twice.

  Barrett was interviewed by Special Agents of the FBI, at which time he advised he is a “racist” and gives talks frequently concerning segregation and talks concerning Viet Nam. He says he believes in segregation and feels that segregation should some day be the law of the land, and it is his objective to organize an organization with this objective in mind.

  Barrett continued that he is not a member of the Ku Klux Klan or any other organization and would not identify any of his associates nor state whether he was or was not acquainted with any members of the Ku Klux Klan. Barrett refused to discuss in detail any of his activities insomuch as he felt the FBI was becoming a national police agency similar to the Gestapo.

  Because I’m a Moron

  Because I’m a moron, something that should have sprung into my mind a while ago has just sprung into my mind now.

  The FBI are not the only ones who saw Richard in full swing.

  There is also me. And I have the footage.

  The Race Relations story showed my first night in Mississippi (the Nationalist Movement headquarters) and my second night (the prank at the banquet). There was a whole day in between. On this day the film crew and I had to pretend we were shooting a serious documentary, to build Richard’s trust, so he’d allow me to speak at the podium at the Spirit of America Day banquet. All this footage was immediately dumped on the cutting room floor. I’ve never watched it back.

  I grab my laptop from the kitchenette counter. I serve myself cornflakes in a teacup, the only remaining clean dish.

  I click on a file of this lost footage. Tiny John Safran pops up on the screen. Tiny John is rambling through a park.

  The Race Relations Cutting Room Floor Footage

  In the background, a lone council worker with a leaf blower strapped to his back drifts through a park in downtown Jackson. In the foreground, I’m squinting at the camera, and wind is huffing into my lapel microphone.

  “It’s not the giant skinhead rally I was expecting,” I hiss to the camera.

  This morning, in this park, Richard Barrett will be declaring open the Spirit of America Day. There will be a day of activity culminating in the evening banquet, where I hope to zing Richard with my African DNA speech. For my prank to work to optimum effect, I need a big and dangerous crowd here. Preferably skinheads. Richard does pitch himself as the father of the American skinhead movement.

  Cameraman Germain spots Richard’s black pickup truck parked on the street. Richard is pulling a cardboard box from the trunk. I nick on down to help.

  Richard lugs the box and I schlep the flagpole, thrown over my shoulder like a cartoon hobo. The Mississippi state flag is three thick stripes and one awkward corner where the Confederate symbol sits. I cheekily unfurl the flag as I walk, so Germain can capture the Confederate bit. So things look a bit dangerous. A swastika would be better, but this is what I have to work with.

  “What kind of people will be coming?” I ask. “Young people? Old people?”

  “All sorts!” Richard says. “Vince should be down there.”

  “Lynch?” I ask.

  “No, Vince.”

  That’s how much I want a race war for my TV show. I’m hearing lynch for Vince.

  Vince is Vince Thornton, his Nationalist Movement second-in-command.

  “I was on the Negro radio station this morning,” Richard says, plodding and squinting, “talking about the Spirit of America Day. He actually ended up agreeing with me.”

  Negro almost makes up for the lack of swastikas.

  “I said, ‘I’m coming down to the park with a Japanese camera. But I’d like to have one made in America.’ The Negro said, ‘I agree with that.’ He said, ‘That’s what Obama wants to do.’ I said, ‘Well, I called for it first, so Obama’s stealing it from me!’ And he laughed. And I said, ‘Also we’d like to have Americanism, where America means something. Pride.’ And he agreed.”

  “You’re sounding all about togetherness. You’re sounding very antiracist.”

  “That’s your words. Ours is about nationality. One nation. Pauline Hanson–style.”

  The KKK Grand Dragon in John Safran vs God also name-dropped Pauline Hanson, telling me how great she was. It’s weird how in Australia she became a Dancing with the Stars contestant, pitched to the audience as the lovable eccentric, while being racially inflammatory enough to be revered by US white supremacists.

  We reach the park’s amphitheater. Cement arches around a small wooden stage.

  “And then, on the Negro radio station, he said the Black Caucus is not happy with the Spirit of America Day. I said, ‘When they have a Black Caucus meeting, they have Patti LaBelle. If I insisted on th
em putting on Loretta Lynn, they’d say no!’”

  “So,” I clarify, “if they can have a blacks-only event with black singers, why can’t you have a whites-only event?”

  “Well,” he says, “we prefer to say red, white, and blue.”

  Tiny John Safran in the park looks annoyed at Richard’s response.

  Giant John in the motel room hits pause on his computer. He’s annoyed, too. He’s sure he’s heard this routine of Richard’s some other time. Giant John takes another sip of cornflakes tea and spools through the footage. There it is. The scene of the prank. The ballroom. Richard is setting things up for the Spirit of America Day. Tiny John is about to lure Richard into blowing up a balloon for a saliva sample.

  “We’re honoring our country and our young people,” Richard tells me when I ask what the point of all this is.

  “Is it all athletes?” I ask.

  “Mm-hmm,” he says.

  “But,” I say, “I thought it was just white athletes?”

  “Well, we say red, white, and blue.”

  “So you’re bringing people together?”

  “No,” Richard says definitively.

  One more Nationalist, with tarantulas for eyebrows, stands nearby.

  “Hello,” I say to the man. “I’m John Safran.”

  “Well, hello,” he twangs. “I’m Joe McNamee.”

  Giant John in the motel room nearly spits out a mouth of cornflakes tea. That’s the guy.

  “I hear some people have been complaining about this event,” Tiny John says.

  “They are. ’Cause it’s all-white. That’s what we’re about,” Joe says, as pleasantly as giving me directions to the post office.

  And it makes me realize that Richard makes my skin crawl not so much because he’s a white supremacist, but because he’s a lawyer.

  He gets no Purple Hearts for bravery in what he says. He knows just what to say to plant ticking bombs while covering his own arse.