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

  Curtis squints at the sun.

  “He would make a good horror movie, wouldn’t he?” he says. “Just by himself.”

  Curtis and I laugh. We’re the loudest thing in the street.

  “His Nationalist Movement,” Curtis says, “seemed to be just him.”

  “So he didn’t seem to have any friends?” I ask.

  “Didn’t know of any, other than his neighbor right across the street. Wendell. It was just Wendell who was his friend. Wendell’s wife didn’t want anything to do with him. And his son Bobby hated him.”

  “Wendell doesn’t live there anymore?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Do you know where I could find Bobby?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Did you hear what the killer said,” I say, “why he killed Richard?”

  “He had various reasons,” says Curtis, “and the last thing he said was, ‘I did it because he made a pass at me.’”

  “More than a pass. He claimed he dropped his pants.”

  “I guess he thought he could have a good defense if he said that.”

  “Richard didn’t seem like that kind of character to you?”

  “Not to me,” Curtis says. “And I’m gay.”

  I ask Curtis if the people around here know he’s gay.

  “They just don’t know,” he says. “It never comes up, and I see no reason to tell them. I didn’t tell my family till I was in my forties. The worst response was my mother. ‘Thank goodness your father is dead.’ You don’t really like to hear that kind of response.”

  Curtis laughs and laughs.

  I tell Curtis people think Vincent will get a tough sentence because Rankin County is so tough on law and order.

  “In their own way,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  Curtis doesn’t buy Rankin County’s good clean Christian routine. He’s not talking about racism—it’s a place of phonies and hucksters, turning up to church on Sunday and bootlegging Monday. That’s its roots, Curtis says. That’s its origin story.

  I ask him if he’ll agree to a snap, for the photo section of the book.

  “Sure. My ex may see it,” he says, hope in his eyes.

  “When did you break up with him?”

  “He broke up with me.”

  “Yeah, but when, how many years ago, though?”

  “I was in my thirties,” he says. “We had met in Saudi Arabia. I was with the military. He was from Scotland. It was long-distance, and he met some German. His mother was not happy. She was an old ‘Brits against the Germans’ type.”

  “She might have been just not happy with him being gay, maybe,” I say.

  “No,” he says, a little wounded. “She didn’t like the guy because he was German. She knew me. She liked me.”

  He tells me he’ll go fetch a photo of his ex.

  “Hey, could I use your bathroom?” I ask.

  “You picked the wrong place.”

  “Why is it the wrong place?”

  “I have absolutely no money. The water’s cut off, electricity, phone, gas. I don’t have a bathroom to offer you.”

  He tells me to go see Mrs. Ruby Yates, second from the end of the street. She’ll have some Richard stories. And a bathroom. I walk off with a strange feeling tingling through me. I realize Curtis isn’t the only one growing old, alone in his grandparents’ old place. There’s also that guy back in Melbourne.

  Mrs. Ruby Yates

  Mrs. Ruby Yates is just a nose. A streak of sun lights it up. The rest of her stands in the shadows of her half-opened door.

  “I don’t know anything I could tell you about him. I mean, everybody on the street knew him, but that was it. He sort of stayed to himself,” says the nose.

  I ask Mrs. Yates if there is anything she knew about Richard.

  “He did not have a neatly kept yard,” the nose confides. “He would let the grass get pretty high before he would get out and cut it. But he would always cut his own grass.” She clearly wants me to understand something here. “So the black boy doing yard work at his other house—why was he hired? When I heard that, I said, well, that just don’t make sense. Because Richard would always let the grass get high, but he’d always get out and cut it himself.”

  She tells me I should speak to Tommy Strickland. He has the maroon car parked in front of the green house.

  I don’t ask if I can use her bathroom.

  Tommy Strickland

  The five kittens sunbaking in Tommy Strickland’s front yard are either adorable or feral, I can’t figure out which. There’s also a wind chime that won’t tingle because the spiders have strangled it with spiderwebs.

  Tommy’s black-and-gray beard sort of matches the web-covered wind chime.

  “I need to go to the store in a minute,” Tommy says, shooing a cat from the bonnet of his maroon car. “But yeah, I mean, you know, he was a peculiar person. It’s hard to explain.”

  Fifty-two years ago, Tommy was pushed up and down Sunset Terrace in a stroller. And he’s still here, with his own family in the house behind the kittens. Tommy knew Richard. “He was a super nice guy. And to be honest, too, he tried to do recruiting with young men.”

  “Oh really?” I say, fishing for whether this was recruiting for the Nationalists or recruiting for sex.

  “He knew all the kids in the neighborhood. And once we reached a certain age, fourteen or fifteen, he would start tryin’ to pump the racist stuff into us, you know?”

  Hovering a meter from Tommy is a tanned man without a shirt. All of him droops except his big, taut, spherical belly. It’s really quite impressive and hard not to ogle. I ask the owner of the belly who he is.

  His cheeks turn pink and bashful, like my Dictaphone is a bit Hollywood and he’s not sure he deserves the attention.

  “Hee-hee, all right,” he says, “I’m his nephew.”

  “My nephew, James Drew,” says Tommy.

  James is forty-nine and left Sunset Terrace moons ago. He returned just four days ago to crash on his uncle’s couch.

  “Did it seem like Richard was a predator when you were growing up?” I ask Tommy.

  “Nah, nah, nah,” he says, “not when he approached me. He would just be talkin’ racist stuff, just to see how you would be back to him; you know, he would play off that. And if you said, ‘Yeah, I hate fuckin’ niggers,’ oh, well, he’d be, ‘Okay then, well here, take this pamphlet.’ He always had his literature with him.”

  James Drew cools his desk-globe belly with a beer bottle. A tender red blotch of skin glows below the bottle. James catches me staring at the blotch.

  “Yeah, my stepdaddy stabbed me,” James Drew says.

  I’m not sure what to say to that, but perhaps the reference to knives emboldens me to ask, “Did you know Richard?”

  “I was younger, but I remember who he was,” James says. “He’d been in jail, too.”

  “What?” I yip.

  “He’d been to jail, too,” James says.

  “He’d been in jail? What for?” I say.

  “Sexual predator.”

  “Really?” I ask, confused. In my long nights spooling through gossip about Richard on the Internet, I read that Richard was a Jew, a pedophile, and an FBI agent. But nothing about jail. And for being a predator? Is this just gossip he’s heard? “How do you know?”

  “I was in jail,” James says. “When he was there.”

  “You were in jail with him? What year?”

  He turns to Tommy. “When did I go to treatment? ’05? ’06?”

  “Yeah,” says Tommy.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “The day, it were really hush-hush. The only way I knew him was ’cause I seen him here in Sunset Terrace when I was young. In the jail he recognized who I was. And he talked to me. He got
out within the hour. I mean, he had good lawyers and all that. Got him out of jail and nobody there talked about it.”

  “I’ve never been to prison before,” I say. “Are you all in the same area or in different cells?”

  “I was in a holding cell. Where they book you. They don’t separate you when you first come in.”

  “And what did you say when you spoke to him?” I ask.

  “I just said, ‘How you doin’?’ He mentioned he was in some deep crap.” James laughs. “He said that they had got him because one of the boys in the neighborhood said something to the parents. About his advance to him. And I said, ‘Well, did you?’ And of course he denied it. He said, ‘I been set up. I have a lot of enemies.’”

  James was released fourteen days later. He flicked through the papers. Richard was supposed to be a big deal. His arrest should have been a big deal. But nothing in the papers.

  James was friends with a turnkey at Rankin County Jail. The turnkey is the guard who opens and shuts the doors. Next time he caught up with her, he brought up Richard. Orders came down from the top to let him out, she told him.

  “What does ‘orders came down from the top’ mean?” I ask James. “The jailer? The sheriff? The DA?”

  “Something like that would have to come from the governor,” says James.

  James doesn’t know if it was a white kid or a black kid who made the complaint against Richard.

  “And you never talked to him afterward?”

  “No, never seen him again.”

  “And why were you in jail?” I ask.

  James says he lost his mind. He had found himself darting through a forest at night, in Terry, Mississippi, following three days gorging on drugs. He smashed on a woman’s back door, not knowing where he was. The woman telephoned his mother and stepfather, who drove out to the woods and picked up James, then forty-two years old. That night his stepfather slapped him about the ears and called him a fuckup, so James beat him until his head bruised purple. The stepfather telephoned Rankin County police.

  James says he accidentally snapped an officer’s wrist in the arrest, so they walloped him behind the police car before driving him to Rankin County Jail.

  I’m not sure what to make of James’s story about Richard now that I know this one.

  “I knew a lot of Klan people when I was growin’ up. I never become one because I guess kind of I never fed into the hatred part of it. But a black guy’s sayin’ that he was a predator toward him—that’s BS to me. If you knew how much Richard hated blacks, you’d know it made no sense.”

  But inside (finally, a bathroom!), Tommy Strickland’s wife has another idea. We talk in the shaggy living room, where there are several more cats and a daughter.

  “If he was a child molester,” Mrs. Strickland says, handing me an iced tea, “and if he did target black kids, to me, that’s just—I’m real analytical—that’s the ultimate insult to you. I’m gonna rape you and I’m going to hurt you.”

  “So he hates blacks so much, he’s going to rape one?” I ask. That was Vallena Greer’s angle, too. (Two women, I note.)

  “That’s the ultimate—to be raped, man or woman—it’s the ultimate degradation. I’m more powerful than you.”

  I drift for three more hours through Sunset Terrace, ping-ponging from home to home. The cement burns through to my feet. I have to wipe the sweat from my face before each bell-ring so I don’t look like a sexual deviant/drug addict when the door opens up. As I talk with people, something sneaks into my brain. The Internet commenters, the black and white podcasters, all bluster about Richard’s misshapen sexuality. Yet here I stand in Richard’s actual world. And none of the young boys in this world—Curtis Rumfelt, Tommy Strickland, James Drew, and others—think Richard was hitting on them, nor that he was a sexual predator in general. They mostly thought him odd or creepy, but not in that particular way.

  James Drew’s Arrest

  In the Rankin County circuit clerk’s office, I slide over a sheet of paper with the name James Drew neatly written on it.

  The clerk punches his name into her computer. She says not only is there no arrest record, there’s no James Drew in the system at all.

  I’m stumped. Why would James make the story up? Or is he confusing Rankin County Jail with some other holding cell? Pearl, Richland, and Flowood are all towns in Rankin County with police stations and no doubt holding cells.

  I call Mark, the attorney I met outside the district attorney’s office. I’ve been calling him whenever I hit a wall. He tells me that around the corner from the circuit clerk’s office is the justice clerk’s office. If James Drew’s case never made it to court, the record of his arrest might be tucked away there.

  I duck around the corner.

  The clerk here is serving a woman who looks so much like my mother that my head sloshes with disorientation. The woman has big, watery blue eyes. The clerk is sorting out with her when she is going to surrender herself to prison.

  My frightened mother drifts out of the office.

  The clerk punches in James Drew’s name. Soon a printer starts bleating in the corner. She snatches the printout and pushes it over the counter.

  James Drew looks up at me, miserable. A cloud of cotton wool is taped to his head. He holds up a board with his name and prisoner number. James was incarcerated in Rankin County Jail when he told me he was.

  I tell the clerk I’d like to look up another name: Richard Barrett. He would have been pulled into jail the same night as James Drew.

  The clerk punches in Richard Barrett. I breathe in and out.

  The printer in the corner of the room does not bleat.

  There is no arrest record for Richard Barrett, she says. There’s no Richard Barrett in the system at all.

  Richard disappears again.

  Sherrie McGee

  And it’s not just Richard who’s disappeared.

  I told the McGees when I visited that I was hunting for Richard’s book, The Commission. Today, Vincent’s sister Sherrie called me out of the blue and asked if I’d found it. She wanted to read about the strange man her brother had killed.

  So there I was for a second time on the couch at the McGees’, lending Sherrie my copy. Sherrie started talking about Vincent.

  “You don’t know nothing!” Tina shouted at Sherrie from another room. “You come in here!”

  Sherrie left the living room. A muffled screaming match pounded through the wall, and Sherrie returned.

  “She thinks it’s not good if we talk,” Sherrie said. “It’ll get Vincent in more trouble. I think talking can only be good. Vincent can’t get in any more trouble, and people should know it was self-defense.”

  Tina hollered again.

  “Call me later,” Sherrie said.

  I sat in the diner area of the Texaco Outpost in Pearl nursing a chicken drumstick and rang Sherrie an hour later.

  “Can I speak to Sherrie?”

  “Not here,” said Tina.

  “Do you know—”

  “She left. She doesn’t live here.”

  “Do you have a new number?”

  “No, she just got up and left.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  “No.”

  Tina Again

  I watch again my Flip camera interview with Tina McGee. Her scared eyes. My nosy questions. Her Yes, sirs. It’s wincey on the page. But it wasn’t like that in person. She liked me. She said I could come back.

  The Black Bar

  Earnest McBride has taken me to a bar by the Mississippi River in Vicksburg. I’ve driven Earnest to Vicksburg several times when he wanted to see his girlfriend.

  “I’m not going to lie, I hate this guy,” he says, referring to the owner. “He clears two million a year at this bar, but he’d have to spend five hundred thousand dollars on alimony all over Ameri
ca.”

  “Is that why you hate him?”

  “No,” Earnest says. “My mother and brother—he’s a minister, he doesn’t have a church at the moment, so he’s sleeping at my house—they were big in the civil rights movement. And he says my brother made out of town with money collected for the movement. He is a damn liar.”

  Earnest sips his drink and delivers the unfortunate news that Tina McGee has cooled on me. She thinks I’m out to make her look bad. She’s warned her circle of family and friends not to speak to me. Has she warned Vincent? Earnest says he’ll write a profile on me for the Jackson Advocate to make me look respectable to the black community. That might help turn Tina around, he says.

  Earnest has really been on my side ever since he saw me on YouTube in blackface for one of my documentaries. One night I picked up the phone. “Ha! Ha! Ha! You, you, you!” he screamed for ages.

  Right after pranking Richard, I had gone on an intentionally clumsy mission to experience life as a black man in America, with convincing prosthetics. I sermonized at a black church and did black speed dating. Now, when we stop for gas and Earnest sees friends, he tells them about my black man adventure and quotes lines from the sermon.

  This vodka is stinging my gums.

  “I rang the Edgar Ray Killen prison,” I tell Earnest. “But they just said they don’t allow the media anywhere. Is that always true?”

  The prisons in other states have paperwork you can fill out, so they can then turn you down. Not in Mississippi. There’s not even a process by which you can be rejected. Really, I’m thinking about Vincent and how I’ll get to him.

  “They don’t allow it,” Earnest tells me. “Under the Constitution, the prisoners have a right to be interviewed. To express themselves. One of the Scott sisters was able to do a full hour radio interview from inside the prison. Since that time they just shut it off. In fact, they took away all the cell phones. Prisoners had cell phones they were buying from the guards—contraband.”