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

  The journalist describes James Rankin shackled in a courtroom and his mother trying to pass him a Bible. The photograph with the article isn’t of them, though; it’s of Richard Barrett.

  Two years earlier, in her home in Pennsylvania, James Rankin’s mother was flitting around the Internet when she stumbled onto the Nationalist Movement website. She began to chat with Richard online, and then on the phone. Richard told her he would help out her and her son. Soon she packed up her life and squeezed it in a car and drove to Mississippi. James and his mother moved into Richard’s crummy little house in Pearl.

  Richard tells the journalist he tried his best to assist, but he could tell after several weeks it wasn’t going to work. He kicked them out of his home and canceled James’s Nationalist Movement membership. There seem to be missing pieces to the story. Who invites a seventeen-year-old boy and his mother to come halfway across the country and move in?

  The article tells me James and his mother’s old address—3175 US Highway 80—but cruelly does not attach a town name. There are “3175 US Highway 80s” dotted all over Mississippi, from Jackson to Pelahatchie. For two days my knuckles rap on doors across the state, until a man in one of the 3175s tells me he remembers the incident. But James didn’t live at his house, he lived across the road.

  Across the road, a kind-faced old man opens the door. I hand him my business card.

  “I’m writing a book about Richard Barrett,” I say.

  “All right!” he wheezes. “I don’t even want . . . You’ve mentioned the wrong name there. So, get your ass off my place!”

  “Okay, sorry,” I say, and back away. As I slide in my car I look back toward his doorway. The old man’s face has turned red. He’s ripped up my business card and is throwing it to the sky like confetti.

  But I reddened the old man’s face for no reason. A Rankin County bail bondsman, who offered to help me out, found James Rankin. He’s boxed in a federal prison in Pennsylvania.

  So now I’m sitting out on the balcony at my apartment, in the sun, scratching my whiskers with my non-cell-phone hand. A couple of black residents strolling to the pool are ruining my chance to paint the apartments as a quasi-gated white community.

  “Did you hear about Richard being killed?” I ask James Rankin.

  “Yes, I was in Z block in prison here in Lewisburg and it said that he got stabbed—it was in the USA Today. And, like, a week later, I got stabbed!” James laughs in an ain’t life funny way.

  “Oh my God! Why did you get stabbed?”

  “I just went in the wrong cage and I got stabbed by two people forty-five times and that was it.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Why did they stab you?”

  “Don’t know, no idea. I thought that was funny that . . . what a coincidence, you know? He died and I almost died!” James chuckles again at the serendipity of their mutual stabbings.

  James has to squeeze his six-foot-four body into his cell. “It is really small. It’s as small as they get—the smallest I’ve ever seen. You can’t really even, like, pace. They got two beds and they got a hot pipe that heats up for winter. They got a window that you open with a stick.”

  Although two beds are squashed into the cell, James is alone, locked down for twenty-three hours a day. He passes his time reading German philosopher Oswald Spengler.

  James tells me his dad darted out of his life early, leaving him and his mum alone.

  “I have a sister named Lulu,” James says. “She’s in Peru prison right now on a cocaine conspiracy.”

  Richard offered James an internship at the Nationalist Movement.

  “What did the internship involve?” I ask.

  “I was mowing his lawn,” James says. And James would also follow Richard about his Nationalist Movement headquarters as Richard dictated notes for the week’s telephone lecture. “You could call 601-FREE-TIP,” James says, “and he’d give this little dictum about what he believed and what was in the news.”

  Richard would lecture James about the history of his Nationalist Movement while James mowed the lawn.

  I tell James, “He said that he had a bad experience in the war fighting, ’cause he felt the black soldiers weren’t as loyal as the white soldiers.”

  “He mentioned that one time he stayed back for something,” James says, “and the whole platoon got murdered. Had he not been off that day, he would have been killed also. He felt bad that he wasn’t there getting murdered with them, more than Woo-hoo, I won! He was more like, I wish, or I’m saddened that I wasn’t there with them. And he said that in such a subtle way that you know he didn’t say it to get an effect, like he had a heart of bravery. That was not, like, a key part of his talks or anything.”

  “And do you know where he went off to when his . . . Where was he when his platoon was getting killed?”

  “I can’t even remember,” James says.

  That sounds like Richard. When the shit’s going down, he’s snuck off somewhere. If the story’s even true in the first place.

  One afternoon, Richard summoned James to the backyard of his crummy little house and introduced James to a man in a khaki uniform. “He was about thirty or something. I think he was in the Ku Klux Klan more than anything.”

  James does not want to name him. The two became close, “hunting and doing all that stuff—outdoor shit,” which included blowing things up. But the man turned informant for the law enforcement agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Or perhaps he was an informant the whole time. According to James, the man set him up. The man told the ATF James had manufactured some grenade bodies he hadn’t in fact manufactured. In the ATF’s version, after this tip-off, they had a female undercover agent buy a briefcase bomb from James Rankin, which she said was to kill her ex-husband. According to the report, “Rankin assured her that the bomb would kill him. If the bomb for some reason did not work, Rankin said he would give her the next one free.” After Rankin was arrested, explosives experts confirmed the bomb would indeed have worked.

  James Rankin was sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary. Richard claimed to have no idea what they’d been up to.

  “Do you think Richard actually did know you were involved in bomb-making?” I ask.

  “I think . . . I think he did know,” James says. After all, Richard had made the introductions.

  James doesn’t remember being booted out of the Nationalist Movement.

  “It’s possible he said that for legal purposes,” James says. “He was always about the book and the law and that’s it. Everything was . . . That was his whole leverage that he took pride in, was the legalities and all that. It was . . . like, it would put a smile on his face if he found out that something was legal. That was his whole thing—was legal, legal, legal, the law, and that was it.”

  “But he introduced you to somebody who taught you how to make explosives. It sounds like maybe he didn’t mind if other people did things not by the book.”

  “Correct, yeah,” says James. “I think you’re right about that.”

  I ease into the awkward main game. Did Richard sleaze on James? Why did Richard invite a then seventeen-year-old stranger and his mother to move in? And why did he kick them out soon after?

  “The guy who killed Richard,” I tell James, “said Richard made sexual advances on him.”

  “Wow!” James says. “That’s weird. That’s really strange.”

  “Does that add up in your head based on your experiences?”

  “No, not at all,” he says. “That’s wild. I mean . . . it doesn’t sound right at all.”

  James says Richard didn’t even stay in the same house as him and his mum. Richard put James and his mother up in his home in Pearl and he stayed in a house in Jackson.

  Even without the sexual aspect, the
re’s a lot that’s familiar here. Another young man without a father, lost in the world, doing yard work for Richard, ending up in jail. But in this story, the young man is white.

  Accessory

  I phone the number Vincent last called me from. I haven’t been cleared to visit him or received the letter for Mike Scott yet, either.

  “You want to talk to Vincent McGee, huh?” says a man without a murble.

  His cousin, Michael Dent, has picked up. Vincent’s stepfather, Alfred, drove Vincent to Michael’s house the night of the killing. Michael was arrested as an accessory along with Alfred, Tina, and Michael’s mother, Vicky. Michael is the only other one who ended up locked in prison.

  “Do you want me to tell you all the story, man?” Michael says.

  “Yeah,” I say, “I don’t mind.”

  “Tell you the story for real?”

  “Yep.”

  “No, man,” Michael says suddenly, backing away. “I’m gonna let you and Vincent get on that shit.”

  Vincent snaps the phone off Michael.

  “Yeah, what’s up, man?” murbles Vincent. “Got the numbers?”

  “Yeah, I got the Green Dot numbers,” I say. “But I need the Mike Scott letter.”

  He swears he’ll pop the letter in the Monday post, but he needs the numbers now.

  I cough up the numbers.

  “You just spoke to Michael Dent, too, yeah?” says Vincent.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say. “So it seems like you’re friends again?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, you hear? But listen, if anyone calls you and asks you for anything, don’t give it to them.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say, “sure.”

  Six Hours Later

  Vincent is murbling down the crackly line. He’s almost inaudible. The fridge hum is louder than Vincent. I walk to the kitchen and unplug the fridge. I can hear him a little better now. Something about a fight.

  “So, how many inmates did you get in a fight with?” I say.

  “I guess twenty murblestatic Michael,” he says.

  “Wow, so your cousin Michael was also in the fight?”

  “No! I said me and him were murble. Murble Meridian murble crumbly ensane.”

  “Crumbly?” I say.

  “CRI-MAN-LEE,” he spits.

  Syllable by syllable, spit by spit, Vincent tells the story. He roused a fight with twenty inmates. After the brawl, he was pulled into a van and driven to another prison, the East Mississippi Correctional Facility in Meridian. This is a prison for the criminally insane.

  He needs three hundred dollars on Green Dot cards to buy another phone. He’s speaking from another prisoner’s, and he needs his own if I want to talk. He’ll ring tomorrow night for the Green Dot numbers.

  “A’right?” he asks.

  “Sure.”

  Vincent Calls the Next Night

  “How long do you have on the phone now?” I ask Vincent. “Can you talk now?”

  “Murble,” says Vincent.

  “Okay, cool. So tell us why—I’m taping this—tell us why you got let go from the other prison and moved into this prison?”

  “I got caught with a cell phone, then I busted six windows out, then got into a fight with another inmate, all this type of shit. You hear?”

  “Sure.”

  “But look,” he says, “I need those numbers real quick. I gotta go. I got some business.”

  I walk under the fluorescent light in the kitchen and read him the numbers.

  “A’right.”

  “So when will you be able to ring me back for a proper interview?”

  “I gotta get somebody to give me a cell phone, you know what I’m sayin’? Check this out, how much is this one?”

  “That’s two hundred and fifty.”

  “What’s the other one?”

  “The other one is fifty. Before you go, tell me, why did you plead guilty when it was going to be sixty-five years?”

  “I’m gonna tell you the truth why I pled guilty,” he says. “One simple thing—that when I called my people, they weren’t ready to give me the help that I need, you know what I’m sayin’? I had all of those white officers at the county jail that were jumping on me and they were playing with my food, putting stuff in my food. So I was like, you know what I’m sayin’, so I was thinking I had to leave Rankin County Jail or they were gonna kill me, or they were gonna fuck me up by feeding me other shit.”

  Somehow, almost uncannily, the story’s already echoing the Reyeses’ story—let down by his family, taunted by the petty power of the authorities.

  “Why did you think they were trying to kill you in Rankin County Jail?”

  “You see, every day we were fighting. The officers, they were making racist comments to me, you know what I’m sayin’? They cuff my legs and my arms and leave me like that for hours, and I’m being attacked and shit like that. So I had to get myself out of that situation quickly. So you know what I’m sayin’, they were taking my canteen and they were taking me downstairs in maximum isolation. And when I ordered my canteen, they won’t bring it to me. Shit, I had to do what I had to do, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Why did you think it was going to be safer in MDOC?” I say. “Wouldn’t another prison also be dangerous for you?”

  “Listen, I gotta go. A dude’s coming for the phone.”

  Vincent tells me he’ll call tomorrow.

  The Next Day

  When I speak to Vincent the next day, I ask him why he split with Precious Martin.

  “I really don’t feel like talking that shit to no tape right now, you know what I’m sayin’? You might burn a hole in my shit. I don’t know what’s gonna happen—you might take my voice and make it say something else.” That’s what Jim Giles was suspicious I’d do, too. “What day of the week is it?” He doesn’t know the day of the week?

  “It’s Sunday night.”

  “I’m gonna need three hundred dollars from you, you hear? Fo’ Friday.”

  “What’s happening Friday?”

  “I got something I need to do, you know what I’m sayin’? To help me in here, you hear?”

  “I can’t just give you three hundred dollars. I’m going to need to interview you, you know? I’ve already given you six hundred dollars.”

  “That ain’t shit. I ain’t trying to sound, you know what I’m sayin’, ungrateful, but that ain’t nothing.”

  “Yeah, well, you haven’t given me much, either. Everything I want to talk about, you say, ‘That’s for another day.’ You haven’t gotten me visitation, you haven’t sent me the Mike Scott letter.”

  “I’m saying, at the same time, you ain’t in my situation. I can’t just walk out and do what I wanna do. I got some kind of business tied up here, you know what I’m sayin’? I’m trying to get in, you hear? So I’m gonna need a hundred and twenty dollars. You know what I’m sayin’?”

  We haggle. Instead of him flicking me a scrap here and there, I get to the heart of what I want. If he tells me what happened the night he killed Richard plus sends me the Mike Scott letter, I’ll give him fifteen hundred dollars.

  A man bellows “VINCENT!” in the East Mississippi prison for the criminally insane. Vincent says he has to go. He says he’ll call back soon.

  Do No Harm

  Janet Malcolm wrote a book about a true crime book and its author, Joe McGinniss. Joe buddied up to the killer. Told him he thought he was innocent, that his book would argue he should be a free man. So the killer opened up to him. The book came out. It did not argue anything of the sort. Rather, it painted the killer as a guilty, narcissistic monster. The killer sued Joe for breaking their agreement. Five out of six jurors sided with the killer. They found a man jailed for murdering his wife and children a more sympathetic character than the deceptive true crime writer.

 
Janet Malcolm, in her book, slowly tortures Joe McGinniss for his deception. Janet says most writers do harm.

  I’ve imagined Janet reading everything I write.

  The Second Man in the Will

  Vincent Thornton, Richard’s Nationalist Movement sidekick, was bequeathed Richard’s earthly possessions. Third in line was the government of Iran. Which for a while made me forget about the second man in the will: John Moore.

  But tonight as I gobbled a catfish at a Jackson bar, my greasy fingers flicked through old Spirit of America Day booklets. Beneath a tiny photo in one booklet was the name John Moore. The man wore a business suit, a gold medallion pinned to his lapel.

  I skidded to the apartment, leaving half my catfish in the basket, creaked open my silver laptop, and started to snoop.

  It turns out searching for a John Moore in Mississippi is like searching for a Mohammad in Tehran. But with the photo in the booklet, I whittle down the John Moores to one: a Republican politician. He sits in the Mississippi House of Representatives. He represents District 60, which takes in Rankin County.

  I pluck Richard’s will from my folder. Unlike the government of Iran, John Moore has signed off on it, as executor.

  Mississippians tell me Richard was an impotent outsider, that modern Mississippians rejected him and his views. So why is the most powerful politician in Rankin County in Richard’s last will and testament?

  John Moore

  In the marble-and-stained-glass Mississippi State Capitol, the original 1903 golden elevator cranks me to the third floor. This is where the state legislature sits when it sits. It’s not sitting today. John Moore told me to meet him here. He’s the first Mississippian I’ve lured in under vague pretenses. I told everyone else I want to talk about Richard Barrett. I told John Moore I want to talk about Mississippi “and stuff.”

  One hundred and twenty-two leather chairs, big as thrones, circle the House of Representatives. All are empty bar two, taken by the Johns Moore and Safran.