“I would like to get my hands on it,” Chief Stewart admitted when questioned by reporters.
Had he been so inclined, he could have easily found a copy at the Redneck Shop. A month or so before the Pelion rally, a Laurens resident was presented with the booklet and a membership application to the Klan by none other than John Howard. When reached by a local reporter for comment, Howard explained that the booklet had merely been left at the shop “by the International Keystone Knights”—an odd way of denying culpability, since he was a high-ranking member of the same organization—then grew flustered, claimed he was being harassed, and hung up the phone.
It was exactly the kind of thing Rev. Kennedy had worried about. Far from being a simple southern pride store, the Redneck Shop had become a Klan crossroads, a meeting place for high-level members to strategize and hold sway over young and impressionable recruits. The shop’s proximity to the courthouse, and the fact that it was housed in a historic building, added yet another layer of legitimacy.
By summer, the Keystone Knights had finished renovating the old screening room at the back of the theater. A giant mural of a hooded Klansman on horseback was painted on the back wall. A stage had been erected, on top of which stood a lectern, the lightbulb-studded cross from Plantation Concrete, and an array of flags.
“That’s where they had the podium and stuff set up,” Stacy explained.
Not that the children were permitted to spend much time there. Various Klan factions—in addition to Howard’s Keystone Klan—had been granted permission to hold their klavern meetings in the projection room, but Howard didn’t want Judy or her kids near the action. During the day, he told them to enter and exit through the rear of the building, and when Howard locked up the shop for the night, he insisted that the family stay down in the basement, so as not to trigger the security alarms.
Within a matter of days, the situation had become untenable. At Judy’s urging, Burden again asked Howard for financial help. It seemed like a fairly reasonable request; Burden had worked for John for seven years, hardly asking for anything. Again, however, Howard turned him down. More than that, he suggested that Judy wasn’t worth the effort. “He could see she was becoming an influence on me,” Burden says. “So he more or less wanted to get her away from me.” Howard started to make accusations—that Judy wasn’t good for Mike, that she didn’t really care about him. For perhaps the first time in his life, Burden put Howard in check. “You need to back off and leave me the hell alone,” he told him. “This is my family, not yours.”
Burden didn’t think the fight was all that consequential. He and Howard had bickered before, without incident. It wasn’t until several days later that he realized this fight had been different.
* * *
—
A week after the rally in Pelion, Judy was no more settled into her new, if ostensibly temporary, home. In the damp of the basement, the temperature soared past 100 degrees. The dust made it difficult to breathe. She had to get out.
“It was the Fourth of July,” she said, “and I couldn’t take my kids on vacation like a normal family would do.” Instead, she bought supplies for a simple picnic lunch—sandwich meat, chips, drinks. “I said, ‘We’ll go down to the river, just to let ’em get out and have a…you know, a break from that place.’ ”
The Enoree River flows southeastward for eighty-five miles across the upper piedmont, joining up with the Broad River just south of Clinton. It’s a popular canoeing destination in the late spring and early fall, when the rains cause the river to swell, but in summer months, the Enoree shrinks to something more like a creek, hemmed in by floodplain forests and hardwood bluffs. It is totally isolated—peaceful, quiet.
Judy, Mike, and the kids spent the afternoon lolling along the shoreline a few miles outside town. “The kids played, we ate lunch,” Judy said. It was evening by the time they drove back to town and Mike pulled the family’s truck into the parking lot on the west side of the shop. He left Judy behind to rouse the kids—half asleep, faces flushed from a day in the sun—trudged down the little embankment at the rear of the shop, walked up the ramp, and reached for the door. It wouldn’t budge.
“What do you mean, ‘locked out’?” Judy asked, incredulous.
Mike explained about the fight, about how he’d gotten up the nerve to ask for some help, about how John had rebuffed him. Judy had clearly been right about John; now, as some kind of retaliation, they’d been locked out of the only home they could afford. The speed with which it all came crashing down was perhaps the only truly surprising part. The realization of how dire the situation was, however, was slower to come.
“Keep in mind,” he said later, “everything we own is in there. All we’ve got is what we’ve got on our back and what we got in the pickup truck.”
That was putting it mildly. They had no money. The rest of Judy’s groceries—purchased with food stamps—were locked inside, too. They had nowhere to sleep until this mess got sorted out, save for the truck. Judy was livid.
“Choose,” she said. “Right here, right now.”
Burden stared at her blankly.
“I’m done. You choose this,” she said, gesturing to the shop, “or me and my kids. I’m not putting my kids through this no more. I’m out of here. I’m gone.”
Burden looked back at the shop. For the last five years, his entire life, his entire identity, had revolved around that building. He had considered it a sort of retirement plan, a safety net. It was his only real asset in the world. But suddenly it represented something entirely different: a lie. Everything John had ever told him about the Klan—the boasts about protecting women and children, the stories about the charitable donations and the sense of fraternity and family—all of it rang hollow now that he’d been turned out.
He didn’t have to choose. The choice was made for him.
They spent the night in Burden’s truck, Stacy and Brian stretched out in the bed, Judy curled against Mike’s chest in the front seat. But Mike didn’t sleep. He seethed.
“I was like, ‘This is bullshit,’ ” he said. Two young Klansmen were sitting in a jail in Clarendon County at that very moment. Their leader, Horace King, had cut them loose, claiming that he didn’t even really know them. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what Howard would have done had Burden gone through with any of his plots against Rev. Kennedy.
He realized there was only one way to get back at Howard.
“People in Laurens tried everything in the world to shut that business down,” he said. “They couldn’t do it, because I’d had the business license prior to the actual store being revealed. I mean, everybody knew what it was. But until the city seen it, they couldn’t do anything about it.”
More than anyone else save John Howard, Burden also knew the shortcuts they had taken to secure that license—hiding issues with the wiring, camouflaging parts of the building that weren’t up to code. By dawn, he’d made his decision. “That’s when I done the ‘I’ll show you.’ ”
Shortly after eight on Monday morning, Mike Burden marched through the front door of City Hall and surrendered the Redneck Shop’s business license.
seven
“THIS NEW BEGINNING, AIN’T IT?”
For Reverend Kennedy, the morning of Monday, July 8, had begun like any other. The pastor let himself in through the church’s side door, the smells of his aunt Alberta’s cooking already wafting from the Soup Kitchen to the sanctuary—collards, okra, onions frying in butter.
In the office, he found his assistant, Frances, fielding phone calls and arranging stacks of real estate paperwork atop his desk. New Beginning was preparing to purchase twenty-eight acres off the Highway 127 bypass, where Kennedy would fulfill his longtime dream of building a community center—a multicultural center, as he’d taken to calling it. The finished complex was to have a daycare center and a senior cit
izens’ program, a storage room for the donated clothes now piled high in the empty front office of his church, a mess hall to house the Soup Kitchen, a library, an after-school tutoring program, a health clinic, and acres of athletic fields. It was a wildly ambitious project—perhaps too ambitious. The only thing not settled was the question of money. To that end, Kennedy was launching a letter-writing program and putting out a call to sign up as many volunteer laborers as possible. He planned to reach out to state and local politicians, too—even Governor Beasley himself. If the governor wanted to insist that race relations in South Carolina were good, Kennedy figured, let him put his money where his mouth is.
Every few minutes throughout the course of that morning, Frances popped in to announce the arrival of yet another parishioner awaiting an audience with the reverend. A factory was threatening to close its doors and ship its jobs to Mexico. A jailer on medical leave had received a subpar evaluation after her testimony in a court case led to a dismissal of the charges. By late morning, a line of folks snaked along the hallway and straight out the door. Amid the chaos, Frances handed Kennedy the phone—a parishioner was calling from the local police department. “Somebody had a situation with the law,” Kennedy remembers. “So I had gone over to talk to the chief about something.”
Kennedy’s trip to the police station turned out to be a quick errand; it was still shy of noon by the time he set out across the parking lot toward his vehicle. By then, the temperature had soared to ninety degrees. The air above the asphalt was hazy with heat, and Kennedy could feel his dress shirt turning wet at the back. He was pulling his keys from his pocket, lost in thought, when he heard someone call out to him.
“Could you help me out?”
The man, slouched against the hood of a pickup truck, was rail-thin. Dirt was caked on the knees of his jeans. Rev. Kennedy counted at least three visible tattoos—most notably, on the man’s right biceps, a figure on horseback waving a scythe in front of a billowing Confederate flag. Though they had never met before, Kennedy recognized Michael Burden immediately. “I knew he was part of the shop,” he said later. “I knew he was a Klansman.”
Kennedy’s eyes swept past Burden to the truck and the little family assembled inside it. “I looked at them and I thought, ‘Lord have mercy.’ ”
He could see two little faces peeking out from below the truck’s camper shell, both flushed red from the heat, hair wet and glistening at the temples. The girl, who looked to be about ten, had a mop of dirty-blond ringlets and a sheepishness about her, all hunched shoulders and downcast eyes. The boy was older, with dark brown hair and the wispy beginnings of a mustache shadowing his upper lip. On the far side of the truck, loitering near the open passenger door, was a petite woman, hair dyed a brassy blond, styled in a kind of teased-out bouffant straight out of the 1980s. She had on a loose-fitting crop top and athletic shorts. She was so skinny. They were all so skinny. Kennedy wondered how long they’d been living in that truck—and why no one else seemed to be helping them.
“Have those children eaten today?” Kennedy said.
“No, sir.” Burden bowed his head. “I know you may not like me, but my wife and these young’uns…”
The reverend silenced him with a flick of the wrist. “We can talk about our differences later,” he said. He took a few steps toward his car, turned, and waved. “Well? Y’all follow me.”
It was a three-minute drive from the Laurens police station to the redbrick church, a straight shot down East Main. Burden pulled his truck into a space out front and reluctantly followed Kennedy in through the church’s side door.
“This my sister Pam,” Kennedy said to the Burdens, gesturing to a pretty middle-aged woman standing in the hallway outside his office. “And this Frances.” To Pam and Frances he said, “These folks are here from the Redneck Shop.”
Judy looked at Pam and Frances, well dressed and conservative, and then down at her own clothes, suddenly self-conscious. “I was in a pair of shorts, flip-flops, and a top about up to here,” she says. “Mike had a T-shirt and jeans on. And they kinda looked at us like, ‘Are you serious?’ ”
Before anyone was forced to make small talk, Kennedy came back with a small wad of cash and a set of instructions: “We’ll find you somewhere to stay tonight. Go get you a change of clothes, toiletries, whatever you need. Toothbrush, soap. Don’t be ashamed about getting it. Just get what you need. Get yourselves freshened up and meet me at Ryan’s. You know where Ryan’s is at? I’ll meet you there.”
As the Burdens made their way out the side door of the church, one of Kennedy’s parishioners—a deacon—passed them on the stairs.
“Was that…?” the man said, doing a double take.
“Mm-hmm,” Kennedy said to the deacon, fishing some more money out of his pocket. “Listen, go find the cheapest—somewhere decent, now—but go find the cheapest motel you can and set them up for a week.”
“What? A whole week? You sure you wanna—”
“They been living in a truck with those kids, okay? They human beings. I don’t care what you think about ’em, but we have to feed them.
“Besides,” Kennedy said with a wink, “this New Beginning, ain’t it?”
Everyone in the congregation knew well the story of the church’s founding. Back in 1984, a young Reverend Kennedy had just resigned his post at a rural church in Abbeville County, and a fair portion of the congregation came with him. They met in schools, restaurants, living rooms, anywhere they could be together, and Kennedy spent weeks casting about for a name. One day he was ministering to one of his parishioners, an older gentleman, a wounded Vietnam veteran struggling with addiction issues. (Black and Hispanic soldiers, fighting a deeply unpopular war with no guarantee of their rights at home, were two to three times more likely to suffer from battle-related PTSD than white veterans.) “He told me, ‘We did some things over there that nobody…I don’t know if I can ever be forgiven.’ ” Kennedy talked with the man about his sacrifice and what it meant to find forgiveness through Christ. At last the veteran said, “If you telling me that God can give me a fresh start, a new beginning in life—then that oughta be the church name. I think the church should be called New Beginning.”
And so it was.
Kennedy knew his decision to help one of the chief architects behind the Redneck Shop would raise eyebrows. The reverend was no miracle worker, and he didn’t yet know how the situation would play out—whether his generosity might truly spark a change, or if Mike Burden would, in effect, take the money and run. But he didn’t second-guess himself, either. “I was raised to love your enemies, and to pray for those who despitefully use you,” he said later. “And lemme tell you something: God see ya. And his judgment is serious. All of this will come to play on Judgment Day. That’s my belief. That’s my faith.”
* * *
—
Ryan's, the budget steakhouse and buffet chain, had opened a location across from the church that April, to considerable fanfare, and quickly became Rev. Kennedy’s favorite restaurant—though Burden already knew that from the weeks he’d spent stalking the reverend. The whole congregation would meet there after protests and planning sessions. Kennedy himself stopped in as often as two or three times a week. Catfish, cornbread, mac and cheese, five separate Mega Bar buffets, and a bakery, all you could eat for little more than six dollars.
“Can we bless this food right quick?” Kennedy said after the odd dinner party sat down with their plates.
Mike half bowed his head, one eye trained on the reverend.
Blessing completed, Kennedy lifted his fork. “So, tell me what happened.”
Mike was slow to talk at first, but gradually he began to describe the argument he had had with John Howard, the seven years he had spent working for the man without a steady paycheck, the way he and his family had been unceremoniously tossed out on the street. And he talked about Judy
, how she had been right about the Klan and about John. Given the chance to do it all over again, Mike said, he would make the same choice—to leave—but now he was right back where he’d started all those years ago. No job, no home. Every so often the reverend asked a question about Mike’s goals, his plans for the future, what he hoped to accomplish—questions Mike was in no way prepared to answer that night. But to Mike and Judy’s surprise, the reverend didn’t seem remotely interested in discussing the Redneck Shop or the inner workings of the Klan. “He just wanted to talk to us as people,” Judy said. “He wanted to know what he could do to help, to get us lifted back up.”
At that question, Mike pushed his food around the plate. “To be honest, I would like for me and my family to move away from this town.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“Money.”
Kennedy could understand that. His thoughts drifted briefly to the multicultural center, where construction would soon stall for lack of funding.
“That shop,” Mike continued, “it ain’t caused nothing but problems. And I’m gonna find a way to pay you back for your kindness today. I’ll paint the church, or…whatever needs done. I’m good with my hands.”
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