Burden

by Courtney Hargrave

  Kennedy shook his head. “There’s something else you can do for me.”

  Burden felt himself tense up involuntarily. Accepting a free meal for his stepchildren and working off that debt through manual labor was one thing. The suggestion of some larger commitment was another thing entirely. “It was like, how far do I trust?” he says.

  But the issue of trust was Kennedy’s point exactly. “I think you should speak to the congregation,” Kennedy said. “Tell ’em what you told me, that you’re done with the Klan. You go up there and show ’em who you are, and they’ll…accept you more.”

  “He said it would be like a peace offering,” Burden recalled. “Because at the time, I think his congregation—they felt a lot like me. They had trust issues, too.”

  After dinner, Mike and Judy climbed back in the truck and headed west. In the cab, Stacy and Brian were already half asleep. The light from the dashboard cast a glow on Mike’s face.

  “How does it feel?” Judy asked.

  “What?”

  “That the man you was gonna try to kill is helping us.”

  Mike was quiet for a long time. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I can’t figure out what’s in it for him.”

  * * *

  —

  Two nights later, Rev. Kennedy looked out at a sea of faces from the carpeted riser of his modest pulpit. “This is a very special night,” he said. “Tonight, our little town becomes a town to be imitated. We’re not saying our problems are over. Our fight continues. But we are proud of what’s happened this week.”

  Burden’s public apology, which had been billed in the local papers as a “unity service,” had brought out a sizable crowd. Every pew was full, with church members and a number of city and county officials. All ten members of the choir were assembled to Kennedy’s left, seated on two parallel rows of brown metal folding chairs. And in the front row, dressed in jeans and muddy sneakers, was Mike Burden, his knee bouncing uncontrollably.

  He was perhaps right to be nervous. On the surface, the congregation at New Beginning was warm and welcoming, if a little tentative. Behind the scenes, however, there had been plenty of chatter: You know he a Klansman. We oughta run him outta here. Some members had worked up the courage to confront their pastor directly: Why in God’s name would he help the very people who had caused the congregation so much pain? What exactly was he trying to prove, anyway?

  “I told them I’m not taking up for the Klan,” Kennedy said. “I’m taking up for God’s creation. I don’t care how evil they are—you have to be careful not to become like them. That’s the difference between the Klan’s ideology and the teachings of the Bible.”

  Whatever doubts his parishioners harbored about the young Klansman or the gamble their pastor was taking, Kennedy was not dissuaded. He figured his flock would come around. He realized, too, that at most his congregants had only read about the events of the previous few days, heard the story secondhand. Actually being there, and seeing the humiliation on Burden’s face, was different.

  Not long after the Burdens had climbed into their truck and driven to Kennedy’s church, the Laurens police chief, Robin Morse, had attempted to broker a meeting between Mike and John so that the Burdens might retrieve their belongings without the need for a court order. Mike was informed that he could return to the shop on Tuesday morning and pick up his things with the safety of a police escort. Later that evening, however, as the Burdens were sitting down to dinner with the reverend, Howard reneged on the deal.

  They had arrived at the Redneck Shop to find everything they owned piled in a heap at the back of the store—their clothes covered in mud and reeking of urine; cardboard boxes scattered over the lawn, the bottoms soaked with dew and disintegrating. Their larger possessions, they would later discover, had been trucked out to a storage facility in Woodruff, thirty minutes away. The rest was just gone. “I had a jewelry box,” Judy said later, “and my mom and my grandma had given me certain little pieces. It wasn’t really worth a lot, but…it got gone. Stolen. Stuff you cannot replace.” Mike and Judy had to pick through their possessions under the watchful eye of the press, fielding questions from reporters who were anxious to know about the details of the argument, the future of the shop, and what exactly a black preacher was doing helping a Klansman.

  “Need has no respect of race or ideology,” Kennedy told the reporters gathered behind the shop. “One thing we do at New Beginning is we help anyone in need.”

  Back at the church, the reverend beckoned his new parishioner to the pulpit. Burden slid out of his seat and paced to the front. He looked at rows and rows of black faces, some smiling, some scowling, little kids yawning and swinging their feet, old men in their double-breasted blazers, and a large portion of the reverend’s family lining the first pew. And he looked at Judy. She smiled and gave him a little nod.

  “I want to apologize for opening the Redneck Shop,” he began. He told the crowd about his reasons for joining the Klan, about why he’d chosen to leave, and the remorse he felt for the “heartache” the shop had caused. He admitted that a disagreement with John Howard had spurred his decision to relinquish the license, but vowed to do whatever he could to ensure that the shop stayed closed. He heaped praise on his wife, who he explained had been instrumental in helping him see the error of his ways, and thanked Reverend Kennedy, the only person who had been willing to step in and save his family from homelessness. Then, sensing that the congregation might be suspicious or unwilling to believe that he’d had a change of heart, he made a plea: “I risked my home. I’ve risked my family’s reputation. I’ve risked my family’s life. Now I’m asking you to trust me. Y’all have to trust me, because I have to trust you.”

  At the end of Burden’s speech, Rev. Kennedy got up again to lead the congregation in prayer. The choir sang a few gospel songs, and the service came to a close. Some folks were still wary. Others were eager to speak to the Burdens one-on-one, to hear more about Mike’s sudden conversion.

  “See, I knew Judy,” Clarence Simpson said. “I used to manage a rent-to-own—that’s how I got to know Judy and Carl, doing business with them. Nice, sweet people. The children? Very nice. People you would really want to do business with…If the reverend showed love and mercy, so to speak, why shouldn’t I?”

  As the crowd milled about in the sanctuary, Kennedy pulled Mike aside and explained that one of his deacons had a few rental properties, and that one might be available. “Would you be interested?”

  Burden shook the reverend’s hand. “I’ll take anything.”

  * * *

  —

  “Now, this particular street here—this is a black community, right?”

  Clarence is driving his Cadillac SUV roughly ten miles an hour through a modest neighborhood situated a little ways north of the courthouse square—incidentally, the neighborhood where he grew up. “But, see, white folks used to live here, too,” he says. “This is Washington Street, but back then it was known as Stumptown.”

  There are, or at some point were, thousands of unofficial “stumptowns” spread across the country—many of them poor African American communities, most of them named for the tree stumps that remained after land was cleared for new development. Laurens’s version was settled after the turn of the twentieth century, and grew further still after the Second World War, when the need for modern housing exploded. (By 1940, 70 percent of the homes in Laurens County still had no running water; three-quarters had no bathtub.) Like all neighborhoods in Laurens, Stumptown was segregated, but it had long been a place where many poorer residents—black and white—could find a place to call their own.

  “Everybody owned their own home here at one time,” Clarence is saying, “but they all died out. These are all just empty now.” Floating past the car windows, in slow motion, are rickety bungalows and little one-room frame houses with weatherboard siding; the buildings sag
and lean and sigh with age. Switchgrass has grown up and over and through the cement steps of one home’s porch, busting them apart. The plastic rain gutter on another has cracked and sheared off from the roofline. There are small signs of life—a pole-mounted satellite dish here, an overflowing recycling bin there—but Stumptown for the most part is eerily quiet. Clarence slows to a stop just shy of a rural intersection and lets the car idle.

  “See that yellow pole there?” he says. On the far side of the intersection is a bright yellow sheath of plastic encasing a tension cable at the base of a telephone pole. Beyond it, Washington Street slopes downhill for a hundred yards or so before dead-ending at a gravel railway embankment. “That’s where the white people lived, back down there. Black folks lived on this street, white people there. But you better believe the white people that stayed down there, they were poorer than us black folks. They hated us, too. They really hated us.”

  Off to the right is a plot of land, overgrown and unkempt, hemmed in by a chain-link fence. Somewhere beyond is the former home of one particularly cantankerous white neighbor. “He would come up in his car and try to run over the black kids that’d be in the yard. I mean, this is how bad the hatred was.”

  Clarence turns his car around and drives the other way down Washington, deeper into the black part of town. To the east lies a dense swath of pines. To the west, visible from the crest of the hill, are the golden arches of a McDonald’s and, farther afield, the smokestacks of Laurens Cotton. At the bottom of the hill, Clarence pulls to a stop in front of the corner lot and gestures to a single-wide trailer, tucked into the hillside and propped up by a cinder-block foundation.

  “This was my first home. This is where my wife and I lived when we got married in 1970.”

  The trailer has eggshell-colored steel siding and a corrugated metal awning balanced awkwardly atop wrought-iron columns. Four mismatched windows dot the façade, all different shapes and sizes.

  By the time of Burden’s falling-out with Howard, Clarence and his wife had long since moved “to the country,” a simple ranch home amid the vast tracts of farmland west of Laurens—but they kept their first marital home as a rental property. By chance, a tenant had vacated just before Burden’s apology to the church, which is how the former Klansman and his family came to reside in a black neighborhood. Stumptown would be their home for the next eleven months.

  Moving in didn’t take long, as most of the couple’s possessions were still locked up in storage. It wasn’t until then, however, that Reverend Kennedy realized just how much Burden had relied on the Klan, and specifically on John Howard. “He would buy Mike shoes,” Kennedy said. “Buy him a shirt, buy him a pair of pants, but never give him money. I asked, why? Because if he had his own money, he wouldn’t be dependent.”

  Mike had gone in search of work and even talked his way into a few handyman gigs—painting a house, tiling a bathroom—but it wasn’t enough. Though he had renounced the Klan, the press coverage had associated his name, permanently, with the face of white supremacy. “Everybody that you used to go to see and talk to more or less ignored you,” he said. “Door got shut in your face real fast. And then you got people out there that are supposedly in support of the church, in support of getting rid of the Redneck Shop. But when it came down to actually doin something, and makin it possible so I could get in and get a job, they done the same thing. ’Cause they didn’t want no conflict.”

  There weren’t many jobs to be had, anyway. Between December 1995 and July 1996, the unemployment rate in Laurens County jumped to 7.6 percent. Roughly a thousand jobs had evaporated within the span of eight months.

  Without John Howard’s patronage or any kind of income, Mike and Judy came to rely on the reverend. “He would call us up and say, ‘We just had a big donation of clothes. Come up here and see if anything fits.’ Or ‘Do y’all want to come to the church and eat with the Soup Kitchen?’ ” When the power bill arrived and the Burdens couldn’t pay it, they resorted to candles and a camping stove—that is, until Rev. Kennedy had the utilities turned back on in his name. At one point, Burden was forced to sell his truck, and the family started relying on church members for transportation.

  Going out in public became increasingly difficult. One day, Stacy came home from school crying because some of her classmates had called her a “nigger-lover.” At Walmart, Judy and the kids were spat on by a grown woman who was upset they’d turned their backs on the Klan. “It got to where we didn’t even want to go to no stores,” Judy said, recalling that she felt most comfortable when Kennedy was with them. People were less likely to treat you poorly if a pastor was around. The day Mike relinquished the license to the Redneck Shop, Judy had told reporters that she had “never been prouder of a person than I am of my husband.” She had not anticipated the isolation or the blowback she would receive from so many people in the community. As for Burden, he would later tell a reporter from The State, “I think I’m learning what hate feels like.”

  * * *

  —

  John Howard was in a bind. The very steps he had taken to secure his business—chief among them applying for a license in his former protégé’s name—were now the very things keeping him from it. Shortly before noon on Tuesday, the day after Kennedy took Burden in, Howard marched into City Hall and asked to speak with the city administrator, Gene Madden.

  “I wasn’t here,” Madden later explained to the Greenville News, “but he requested a transfer of the business license.” The city of Laurens, however, had an ordinance that prohibited the transfer of such a license from one party to the next. Instead, Howard was informed, he would have to reapply and go through the process all over again. Upon hearing this, Howard grew angry and swore to the clerk—to anyone who would listen, really—that they would all be hearing from him again, this time through his lawyer.

  The scene kicked off a fevered round of speculation in the press: What would Howard do next? And when would he do it? Calls to the Howard residence either went unanswered or, more frequently, ended with the Redneck Shop’s proprietor abruptly slamming down the telephone. Madden, meanwhile, made it clear that if Howard moved to reopen the shop, the license wouldn’t be granted without input from the City Council. Behind the scenes, city officials had been weighing the grotesqueries of the shop against the demands of the First Amendment, a topic with which they were all now very familiar. After various Klan factions sued for, and won, their right to rally in towns across the Upstate, no one was taking the decision about the future of the Redneck Shop lightly. They also knew plenty about Suzanne Coe. The defamation suit against Councilman McDaniel had stalled briefly due to a clerical error, but the councilman, despite having claimed that he wouldn’t “spend 15 cents” to defend the suit, had resorted to hiring a lawyer.

  “They should be extremely careful,” Coe warned reporters, speaking about the City Council. “[Howard] is going to apply for a new license. If they do not issue a new license, they had better have one extremely good reason that isn’t just the fact this is the Redneck Shop.”

  The “extremely good reason” city officials were banking on was a potential loophole within the city ordinance, which stated that a license could be denied “when the application is incomplete, contains a misrepresentation, false or misleading statement, evasion or suppression of material fact, or when the activity for which a license is sought is unlawful or constitutes a public nuisance.” The problem, of course, was that the ordinance didn’t specify what “public nuisance” meant.

  “A nuisance,” Coe said, “would be something like a club that is so noisy, people can’t sleep around it….The Redneck Shop is objectionable to a whole lot of people, and that is completely valid. But just because it’s objectionable doesn’t mean you can ban it.”

  The days until the next City Council meeting ticked by, with nary a word from John Howard. Finally, on Tuesday, July 16, six of the council’s seven membe
rs gathered in the council chambers, a small wood-paneled room on the second floor of City Hall. Shortly after the proceedings were called to order, Gene Madden rose to address the room. “We must balance the applicant’s First Amendment rights against the council’s duty to protect its citizens against private interests [that run] counter to the public good. I recommend that the request, when it comes, be denied.”

  The council retired for a thirty-minute executive session—a closed-door, off-the-record meeting—to receive input from Thomas Thompson, the city attorney. Upon their return, Marian Miller, the council’s sole African American woman, made a motion to accept Madden’s recommendation. Councilman James Robertson seconded that motion. The remaining members quickly followed suit, launching what was in essence a preemptive strike.

  The following day, the editors of the Laurens County Advertiser praised the council’s decision: “We believe the city is on firm ground in denying the application….[Closing the shop] was more than just the moral thing to do.”

  “This time,” Madden said, “we feel like we stood for something.”

  * * *

  —

  Nobody at New Beginning expected the Burdens to become full-fledged members of the church. Kennedy had helped plenty of people in this way before, but his good deeds in the community rarely resulted in a larger crowd on Sunday mornings or more money in the collection plate. As the weeks slipped by, however, Judy’s relationship to the church grew stronger. To her, Kennedy’s arrival in the parking lot outside the police station that morning had been nothing less than divine intervention. “I mean, I always believed in God. My savior Jesus Christ,” she said. “But as far as me going to church? No. Not before this. But I believe He sent Reverend Kennedy there to help me, I really do…And I really enjoyed going to Reverend Kennedy’s church. I felt the spirit.”