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

  I want to find someone who remembers little Richard Barrett skulking into gay bars late at night. Proof that the white supremacist was homosexual!

  A nervous bald man in a lime-green T-shirt walks toward the door as I’m walking toward the door.

  “You know what sort of bar this is?” he asks gingerly.

  “Yes.”

  “Because some tourists come in and whoa!”

  A video bowling machine is pushed in a corner. Chandeliers hang from the low ceiling of the dimly lit room. Behind the bar sits an old woman with a hump.

  The crowd is thin—two women and three men.

  The old woman with the hump tells me she runs JC’s. Yes, she answers, she knew Richard Barrett.

  “Oh, really!” I say excitedly. But alas (for me), she didn’t know him from his skulking into JC’s late at night.

  “My ex-husband was a police officer, and Richard was always down at the station stirring up trouble. He’d be telling them he’d been appointed by the Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon to lead a march down the Jackson streets where the blacks were.”

  “And he wasn’t appointed?”

  “No, he wasn’t. And there was no march.”

  I droop. I don’t need another story about Richard the exaggerating racist. I came to find the smoking gun about his secret gay life so that Vincent has a defense against the lethal injection, and I can show that white supremacists are self-hating frauds.

  She says that Richard wasn’t wrong about everything, though. Mississippi was better before desegregation.

  She writes down a name on a square piece of paper: Eddie Sandifer. He is a gay civil rights activist, she says. Eddie knew Richard.

  I chat with the other folk in the bar. One man tells me that his gay friends won’t come to JC’s unless he drives, because someone takes photographs of the license plates in the parking lot and posts them on the Internet. Nevertheless, he agrees with Men Like That, that homosexuality here is overlooked “with a pervasive, deflective pretense of ignorance.”

  “My dad was in charge of the Mississippi softball team,” he says. “And the best softball players were lesbians. My mother and father would say, ‘Isn’t it nice how Shelly and Mary can share expenses?’”

  A lot of the people at JC’s knew Richard from the news, but no one ever saw him in a gay bar. Most of the conversations start with me asking about homosexuality and them seamlessly easing into complaining about black crime and asking me if the Aboriginals “you have” are as bad as the blacks here.

  Mississippi. Where even the homosexuals are rednecks.

  Eddie Sandifer

  I pull in to a crumbling plaza in Jackson. A dozen flat-roofed businesses, some with 1950s typefaces on their signs, form a horseshoe around the parking lot. DIABETIC FOOT CLINIC, KIRK R. SMITHHART OPTOMETRY, and so on. The plaque screwed to the wall of my destination reads MY BROTHER’S KEEPER. DENOUNCERS OF HEALTH DISPARITIES.

  Piled on the reception desk, My Brother’s Keeper business cards are stamped in the corner with NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF PEOPLE WITH AIDS and TAKE THE TEST. TAKE CONTROL. PROTECT YOUR FUTURE. Good Lord. This is an HIV/AIDS clinic!

  In an otherwise empty community room, a sick old man sits proud as a mafia don at the end of a long table. Standing next to him, where the don would have one of his men, Eddie Sandifer has a walking frame.

  “I was born in Louisiana,” Eddie tells me in a husky voice. “My father was there pastoring a church at the time. He was a Baptist minister.”

  Spread out before him are clippings from his life in plastic sheet protectors. Eddie points to a photo. Three men are at a wedding altar with 1980s haircuts.

  “That’s one of my weddings I performed in ’83. I used to perform before preachers would do it, and I was performing the weddings in Mississippi. Not legal, but weddings. They’re both dead now. They died of AIDS.”

  “Oh, right,” I say. “When I came in here, ’cause I didn’t know what kind of place this was, when I saw it was an AIDS place I thought maybe you had AIDS.”

  Christ, Safran.

  “Oh, no,” Eddie says. “No, I haven’t. I get tested all the time. I’ve never had any venereal disease, period. The clinic, they gave us space here.”

  “Us” is the Southern AIDS Commission, which supports people with HIV/AIDS. Eddie is the only full-time staff member of the Jackson branch.

  In the 1960s, Eddie did a lot of demonstrating and protesting for gay rights. “Now, Richard Barrett gave me some problems.”

  “What did he say?”

  “The things preachers always say. That it’s a sin and against the morals of the society. He was always calling my office and bugging me. Or calling people to call me. But he just liked seeing my boyfriend at the time. And other lovers. He tried to recruit them to do things for his group. I have an idea that eventually he was planning on trying to get in their pants. It didn’t happen. But I think that was it.”

  Another encounter, in the 1980s, sticks in Eddie’s mind.

  “One time when we were on a gay pride rally in the park in Jackson . . . some of his loons came in, carrying their hate signs against gays, into the park. And Richard came from the back way, by the church, and walked down and made them leave. They were his kids from his group and he told them to leave.”

  “Why do you think he dispersed them?”

  Eddie looks at me and blows out a huff.

  “I have no idea.”

  • • •

  Back in the 1950s, Eddie helped run secret gay parties in a white antebellum home in Jackson.

  “It was bought and put together from one of the homes that was being torn down, with big columns, pillars out front going from the bottom, two floors high, that sort of thing.”

  “And were those parties often?”

  “June and December. Twice a year at least. And that’s when people would come from Memphis to party and stuff. They couldn’t do it up there back in the fifties. You had to bring your own liquor. Liquor wasn’t legal here at the time. You had to get it from bootleggers.”

  “What was the music?”

  “Oh hell, I don’t remember!” Eddie raises his voice. “See, you’re going back longer than half my life.”

  “Was it jazz or rock ’n’ roll?”

  “There was no rock ’n’ roll. It was dance, where you could hug up to each other and dance. Ballroom, two-step, fox-trot, that sort of thing.”

  I tell Eddie that when I went to JC’s bar, the gays slagged off the blacks just like the straights might. There wasn’t some sense of solidarity in oppression.

  “Back in the fifties,” Eddie says, “a lot of homosexuals were racists. The black guys that I invited to the parties, they always came in white jackets in case there was a raid. They’d look like they were working. But they wound up in bed with the racist white men. The racism ended there.”

  I tell Eddie about a security guard I talked to at the State Capitol, who pulled a mischievous grin when I told him about rumors of Richard’s secret life. “He was talking about gays who are members of Congress,” I tell Eddie. “He says they really push it. Like, they don’t really have to be that secretive about it. They just can’t actually say it. They can’t go, Oh, listen, I’m gay. But they can turn up to political functions with another man, their date, and then don’t say it’s their date.”

  “When I was active and on the streets—available—I was the one that got called to go to bed with them,” Eddie says.

  “What do you mean, active on the streets?”

  “I was available. I could keep secrets.”

  “Oh, really? So you were with members of the legislature?”

  “I’ve been with them, yeah.”

  Eddie says they had to be discreet, but not that discreet. They never had to drive out of town to have flings. Just book a room at the luxurious local hote
l.

  “We got a room at the King Edward Hotel,” Eddie says, “called the Robert E. Lee.”

  Richard’s phrase in Race Relations about homosexuality comes back to me: “People can do it, but you don’t flaunt it.”

  The Knife

  I pull a knife from the kitchen shelf and slice.

  I fold open the flaps on the cardboard box and pull out The Commission. In the early 1980s, Richard self-published his manifesto—not available at all good bookstores. I found it online, at a secondhand bookshop in Georgia, while I was looking around unsuccessfully for Vince Thornton’s address.

  The fat and heavy hardback is uncomfortable to hold lying back in bed. I roll over. What’s this going to tell me about what Richard was thinking?

  A quick flick reveals much of the book to be Richard pounding his fist, about culture, the law, and race: “The Negro features a hypertrophy of the organs of excretion, a more developed venous system, larger teeth, a thicker cranium, and less voluminous brain as compared with the White race.” And so on. But it begins not with Negro craniums and Confederate flags. Richard first talks about his childhood.

  Richard was born on February 18, 1943, into a family squeezed into a small apartment, a block from Broadway. Irish Catholic families filled up this wedge of New York City.

  Richard would peek out his second-floor window and take in the crowd. Still quite young, he sensed something new was rumbling through his city.

  A massive influx of the foreign-born suddenly disrupted school, as it rent the neighborhood apart. Uneasiness became tension, which became fear, as vandalism and crime erupted everywhere. The newcomers could not speak English. I detected a haughtiness, a slovenliness, which irritated my classmates and teachers, too. In no time at all, one could hear Yiddish more than English spoken in many public places. Little corner stores became kosher. Kidnappings and murders were mentioned in hushed whispers, chilling us all to the bone. It was as though a curtain had rung down and the entire scene had been transformed to another act, to a whole new cast, to an unrecognizable scene. The school across the street was burned to the ground, leaving me with such a feeling of sickness and sadness that I could not bear to look on the ruins. A Jewish hall was erected in its place.

  Jim Giles also said he was distressed by the noise of black kids at school. Jews, Puerto Ricans, and Negroes roll in and white families split town. The Barretts flee to New Jersey, a suburb called East Orange.

  How clean and fresh was this new air. Houses were one- and two-family types, close together, with small, well-cropped lawns and lots of trees. Here were largely Anglo-Saxon working people of English descent, some Irish, and a few traces of very old Dutchmen. There was singing and stickball and sleigh rides.

  But Richard’s father drinks too much and angers too quickly. Once an assistant to the American military attaché in Moscow, he now sells machine parts. Richard, however, still respects him, understanding that this “downgrade” twists him to this state.

  My father was a stern disciplinarian, a devout believer that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. He often read to me on his knee and we spelled and recited together. My sister, Geraldine, was born when I was four.

  I scribble Geraldine on my yellow notepad and read on. Richard’s childhood in the fat book doesn’t match the story he tells elsewhere. Richard typed up a pamphlet when he first came to Mississippi: “Richard Barrett. Soldier for the People.” He writes of himself in the third person:

  Before joining the Army, Barrett did farm work and painted signs to put himself through Rutgers College in New Jersey. He had no family to help him. His mother and father left him when he was young, and his grandfather helped raise him until he died.

  His mother and father don’t abandon him in The Commission, nor does his grandfather raise him. But “left him” feels like more than just something made up for effect. So does “helped raise him.” Is Richard really saying no one really raised him? “Until he died,” rather than until the job was finished. Is Richard saying that whatever the reality, as far as he was concerned, he was abandoned? Such a person might well hate crowds and noise and want to live in the woods. He might well not have family or friends and keep his secrets impossible to find.

  Sunset Terrace

  When Richard moved from New Jersey in the late 1960s, he found himself in Sunset Terrace, Jackson, where he stayed until he moved to the Murder House. I ramble into the same street over forty years later, in search of anything he might have left there.

  The street is a horseshoe cut into the woods. I can tell some people aren’t home by the cobwebs spun on the door handles. Although sometimes you can’t see the door handles because the grass has swelled so thick and high. Some doors bear the sign THIS PROPERTY HAS BEEN DEEMED VACANT AND SECURED PER THE INSTRUCTIONS OF YOUR LOAN SERVICER. Pinned-up bedsheets are as common as curtains. But like elsewhere in Mississippi, it’s every man for himself, so these dilapidated houses are shuffled in with respectable ones and big flashy ones. So it’s hard to know what kind of place it is. Except in one respect: When Richard fled from here to the Murder House in the mid-1990s, he made it a media event (well, he got a Jerry Mitchell article in the Clarion-Ledger): “After fighting against integrated neighborhoods in Jackson for three decades, white supremacist Richard Barrett is leaving because his own neighborhood has become multiracial.”

  Richard’s old home stands here today, the weatherboard painted yellow, the lawn freshly shorn. A Welcome heart hangs from the front door.

  I knock just below the heart. No one answers.

  The black kids across the street tell me a light-skinned guy lives there now.

  “Light-skinned, like white?” I ask.

  “No, light-skinned black.”

  The black kids have never heard of Richard. They throw up names of old people who might remember him: Mrs. Yates. Mr. Strickland.

  I plod up the street, trying to figure where to knock first. The heat is socking me out and glistening my face. My glasses slip off my nose. Now and then a dog, which I don’t trust has had his shots, pelts out and yaps, the only sound besides my breathing. As the horseshoe curves around I see a big old white house in the distance. Pine trees have sneezed brown pins all over the roof.

  Standing on the front lawn, with his top off and his hands behind his back, is a white man. He’s watching me.

  “Hello!” I say.

  “Creepy old man . . .” he says.

  “I’m not a creepy old man.”

  “I’m the creepy old man,” he clarifies. He gives a warm, self-deprecating laugh. It should be noted this is the first incidence of self-deprecation I’ve come across in Mississippi.

  The Ballad of the Creepy Old Man

  “I’m Curtis Rumfelt. Rum and then felt,” he says as I scribble his name on my yellow notepad. “I’ve been here so long, I’m older than a lot of people in the street now,” he says. “I used to be the youngest kid in the neighborhood. Ha-ha!”

  The youngest kid now has gray hair, gray eyebrows, and gray chest fluff. His laugh is the laugh of a hurt man, chuckling at his own supposed flaws before a bully gets in.

  “Really?” I say. “You’ve been here that long?”

  “Our family built this after World War II.” He points his big nose at his big white house, keeping his hands behind his back. “It was my grandparents’ house. My father’s family.”

  Curtis’s grandfather was a drifter, so his family moved a lot. When they arrived here in Jackson, two of the kids died—Curtis doesn’t know what they died of, something that people don’t die of these days. His grandfather was ready to move again, but his grandmother told him, “I buried two children here in Jackson, I’m not leaving.” His grandfather was still a drifter, so he left. She kept all the kids in the big white house.

  “I took after him, though!” he says. “Ha-ha-ha-ha! I’m the drinker and the alcoholic in the family
, just like he was. But I always ended up back here. He ended up anywhere where he just happened to end up being.”

  I now point my own crooked nose across the street.

  “Were you aware Richard Barrett lived there?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I first met him when he introduced himself to the people in the neighborhood.” Richard would have been in his midtwenties. “And I was just a young kid back then. I was reading and the next thing I knew he was at my bedroom door introducing himself.”

  “He’d come into the house?” I gasp.

  “He was talking to my parents in the living room and then he wandered over,” Curtis says. “Have you ever seen the movie Andy Warhol’s Blood for Dracula?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Okay, well, you’ll have to watch it, because then you’ll know exactly what he looked like. He was very pale. He was in a dark suit and he had slicked-down black hair. And he was very creepy, even then.”

  “Did it seem weird or something? Like, Why are you at my bedroom door?”

  “No. I just looked up, my eyes got bigger, and I thought, Hello. He just introduced himself and he turned around and walked back out.”

  “Did Richard cause any trouble on the street?”

  “I don’t recall any trouble. Only a few people that I know of actually had ever been over to his house.”

  Sweat drips off my nose onto my yellow notepad, smudging the ink.

  “I don’t know if this is true,” Curtis says, “but they said he had his mother’s . . . all his mother’s china, he had the dining room table all set up. He had the table all set up like he was expecting guests over, but nobody ever came. Like a state-visit type of thing. It’s all laid out, napkins and everything and the wineglasses and all the plates in the right place for a dinner. Usually you don’t keep china patterns out like that because they get dusty, so if they were all ready he must have cleaned them every day. It’s all I can figure, because I know this area. You have a window open for more than five seconds, you have to go back dusting everything.”