God'll Cut You Down (6 page)

I ask him what he knows of Richard’s life before he came to Mississippi. Joe says he knows nothing—it never came up.

“Hey, Joe.” Jim laughs. “Let me tell you the prank he pulled on Barrett. He came down here and got a saliva sample from Barrett and he went and contended he found out that Barrett had African ancestors.”

“Oh yeah,” says Joe. “I know who I’m talking to now. He came to Barrett’s Spirit of America. Yeah, that was a bad day. I don’t even want to talk to him. He’s crazy.”

“Well, he’s back here in Mississippi, Joe,” Jim says, quite delighted.

“Were you there, Joe?” I ask.

“I was there,” Joe says darkly. “I remember all the lies you come up with. You were buddy-buddying up to us, then turned on us like a goddamn snake.”

“But Joe,” says Jim, “Mr. Safran and I have had a very congenial conversation thus far. And one thing that he was critical of Barrett was in Barrett’s misleading. So maybe Mr. Safran felt justified. Mr. Safran pointed the finger and, Joe, I think he’s kind of right about this. Barrett would tell white Mississippians, ‘Y’all come to this event, it’s for the Spirit of America,’ when in fact it was something totally different.”

“But Jim, you just wasn’t there,” Joe splutters. “He got up and said Richard was half-black!”

Jim laughs.

“Well, one difference, Mr. Safran,” Jim says, “between me and Joe is Joe contends that he never suspected Barrett of being bad.”

“Well, I’m not saying that he is a good guy,” Joe says. “I am saying that I never seen anything about him being queer. I don’t believe anyone can come out and prove he’s queer. And I was ’round him all the time.”

“Did you always notice he was around young boys?” Jim asks.

“Yeah, I did. That didn’t look good,” concedes Joe. “I heard on the radio—but you have to understand this was a black radio station—that he was running around with dresses on in his neighborhood. But I know three people who lived in the neighborhood and they never saw it.”

“But Joe, wouldn’t you admit that in terms of being a regular Southern guy, Barrett was the opposite? He didn’t come across as one of us.”

“No, he didn’t,” admits Joe. “I talked to his sister.” (I reach for my ballpoint again.) “And his sister said the reason he came down here, he wasn’t getting no attention in the North. So he came down here where he could get some attention. From the news media and all. That was what Richard liked.”

“Joe, you said you knew his sister?” I say, excited.

“I didn’t know her,” Joe says. “I didn’t even know he had a sister till he died. I spoke to her over the phone. I never even met her. She did say that Richard had a girlfriend for ten years. And I didn’t know Richard had a girlfriend. That’s what looked bad.”

I ask Joe how he contacted the sister.

“Well, she really contacted me,” Joe says. She did that through the executor of Richard’s will. Joe doesn’t have this man’s name or number at hand, but he might be able to find them.

“Let me get off the phone, because I am at work right now,” says Joe.

“Good-bye, Joe,” says Jim. “We got to go and eat some catfish here one of these days.”

Joe hangs up.

“Promise you won’t hang up when I say this,” I say to Jim. “But because you didn’t get back to my Facebook message, because you didn’t reply to that, and because I had come here and I wanted to interview you and I didn’t have your phone number, yesterday, I drove to your farm.”

“Well, that’s no problem,” he says. “You see my coonhounds? Did you see the bee yard?”

“I saw the dogs but not the bees. So have you got that costume that you wear so you don’t get stung by the bees?”

“I do. You are welcome to come down here. We will go collect eggs and I will show you my birds and you could see my pack of dogs and my bee yard.”

“Oh, I’d love that,” I say, sealing the playdate.

“I’m ready to get out of here. I am getting hungry. I got to get in my push-ups and sit-ups.”

Jim finishes his glass of orange juice.

“This is Jim Giles, and you’re listening to
Radio Free Mississippi
.”

Jim pulls up Rammstein, and I shut my laptop.

I’m pumped about the sister lead. My favorite bits in the true crime books are when you find out all about the baddies as little kids. And in my months Googling Richard, I’d seen no mention of any family member. I put this note alongside the boy with a bomb. And what I saw at the Spirit of America Day. These pieces form a strange picture. Richard seems both a buffoon and a danger, someone running his own agenda for his own curious, confidential ends.

I look out the window of my room.

I decide that when I do the movie of the book I’ll have a scene where
there’s a mix-up. People spy Jim in the distance on his farm in his beekeeper suit and think it’s a Klan uniform.

Something’s occurred to me. My footage is probably the last film of Richard alive.

There is no component of this bed that doesn’t squeak. The frame squeaks, the mattress squeaks, and the sheets squeak. To get to the bed that squeaks I must cross the carpet, which squeaks. And to step foot on the carpet that squeaks I must open the door, which squeaks. Like a lyrebird mimicking its environment, my asthma wheeze, which I swear used to be more of a whistle, has become a squeak. I shuffle to the kitchenette and begin preparing my third bowl of cornflakes for the day.

The silver laptop’s talking again, this time with the rasp of an older black man, Earnest McBride on
The Empowerment Hour
.

Earnest is also contributing editor of the
Jackson Advocate
—“The Voice of Black Mississippians since 1938.” The paper comes out weekly and has a smaller print run than Jackson’s mainstream
Clarion-Ledger
. I’d called Earnest from Melbourne. He said to get in touch when I arrived and he would sort out contacts for me.

“As you know,” Earnest rasps, “we at the
Jackson Advocate
were instrumental in getting involved in freeing a young man who had been, for no reason at all, locked away in seclusion, in isolation. Locked away from his family and all incommunicado for five days. And he was being charged as an accessory to the murder of Richard Barrett. But this young man just happened to be the common-law brother-in-law of the main suspect, Vincent McGee.”

I swallow two Tylenol, squeeze my head in the kitchenette sink, and wrap my lips around the spout.

“May I add a footnote on the character of Richard Barrett,” Earnest continues. “Lot of people—even black people, some of the black leadership—are coming out after his death and saying, ‘Oh, Barrett really wasn’t a real racist, that was just a public facade.’ What they don’t understand is that Barrett was sincere—probably one of the sickest psychopathic racists that would have come into this state. He was born in New York, grew up in New Jersey. He had beaten a woman within an inch of her life!”

I jerk my mouth from the spout, ripping my gum, grab for my notepad, and scribble
beat a woman
.

“And that was one of the reasons why he was compelled to leave New Jersey. Richard came here in ’66. The political power brokers at the time, they embraced Barrett. They sent Barrett out to every white high school in the state of Mississippi to spread his poison. They gave him entry. They gave him letters of introduction to the high school principals. So Barrett was able to take his message of white supremacy and take it to these children. And these children are grown-ups now, forty, fifty years old. The age of Haley Barbour, today’s governor. He probably heard him back then.”

I tickle my suddenly numb gum with my tongue and keep scribbling. This Richard doesn’t sound like the goofy outsider Jim Giles described.

“This man was sick! And some suggested there was some type of a homosexual overture in his approach to McGee. I kind of doubt it. But that would be a part of the whole schematic, a part of the sickness. They hate people so much, but at the same time they want to despoil them, they want to rape them, they want to bring them down to the basest level they possibly can. I just wanted to make it clear that I have no doubt whatsoever about Richard Barrett being a sincere racist. I interviewed him two or three times. And there was no . . . none of this,
Oh, he’s just faking it, in real life, one-on-one, he’s a nice guy and all
. No, that’s not true.”

I spit into the kitchenette sink. My saliva is swirled with red like a peppermint candy. So Jim Giles thinks Richard wasn’t a racist but was gay, and Earnest McBride thinks he wasn’t gay but was a racist. I wonder which one he was to Vincent McGee.

I call Earnest. He tells me to drive over on Saturday morning. There’s a Civil War reenactment happening an hour out of Jackson that he wants to cover. And he has no car and he needs a lift.

Last night a Jackson pothole burst my tire, and my mood. A warning shot to my kneecap.
Get out of here, boy.

This morning, I cruise through a Jackson historic area called the Farish Street Entertainment District. It looks like a million dollars in the moonlight. But in sunlight it’s a slum. Shop fronts with the guts knocked out. Facades collapsing. The “Entertainment” refers to things that happened long ago. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong played in the now-shut-down Crystal Palace Ballroom. Robert Johnson recorded blues tracks at the no-longer-there Speir Phonograph Company. Trumpet Records, closed. Ace Records, closed. Two small eateries are still here. Above one is the tiny office in which civil rights activist Medgar Evers typed a letter on a sheet of cream paper before driving home to a waiting Klansman. For a state obsessed with its history, they don’t seem to look after it too well.

The funeral home is still running. (It’s the very one where Medgar Evers found himself that night.) The Alamo Theatre used to host Nat King Cole and now hosts community theater. The black letters running across the front read
MIMIC: A STAGE PLAY IN HONOR O
F DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
SURVIVORS.

I blump over potholes and pull up outside the
Jackson Advocate
, a squat cement box with no apparent windows. As I walk to the red front door, the air tastes like gasoline and stings the little cuts on my fingers.

Earnest is pacing up and down, his ear to the phone, his free arm flapping. He is tall and aging, maybe in his sixties. His pale blue suit pops against the yellowing front pages that wallpaper the office. As he’s talking, I take in some of the headlines:
PRISON
AUTHORITIES DENY IN
MATE FACING AMPUTATI
ON IS REALLY SICK; EN
VIRONMENTAL RACISM: D
EATH FROM EVERY DIRE
CTION!; FINDING UNCLE
TOMS TODAY.

“Two p.m. Central Standard Time today!” Earnest brays into the phone. “Mr. Jefferson is accepting presidency of the Confederacy! Ha-ha!”

What does that mean? While Earnest’s mouth is on the call, his fluttering hand carries on a second conversation with me.

Get the car ready,
say his fingers, mimicking twisting keys in the ignition.

Staple those sheets on the desk,
says his palm, splatting down in thin air.

He waves a phone memo at me:
Malinda Adams, NBC Nightly News.

“Yes, Malinda!” Earnest chuckles into the phone. “I just wanted to let you know so you won’t be left out, behind a curve, when you hear that the Civil War has broken out! Ha-ha! Bye-bye.”

“What’s happening?” I ask, confused.

Earnest tells me this year is the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War.

“The first year of the five-year war. The good people of the South and the Confederacy are only going to celebrate four years. They’re going to celebrate their four years of glory, which were not really glorious at all. But they’re going to ignore the fifth year because that’s the year that they got their butts kicked, mostly.”

“Who’s Mr. Jefferson?” I ask.

“Jefferson Davis! He’s the president of the Confederacy! Abraham Lincoln’s enemy.”

White Mississippians are holding a reenactment of Jefferson Davis
accepting the presidency on the steps of a courthouse in Vicksburg. Earnest wonders whether today Jefferson Davis will read out
all
of the Mississippi declaration of secession or dodge around the awkward bit that endorses slavery. If he does read it out, Earnest wants to challenge him. If he doesn’t read it out, Earnest wants to attack him for whitewashing history.

“They’re pretending history,” Earnest says, “and so we’re going to go over and I’m going to play the role of a faithful reporter in 1861. I’m going to assume the persona of someone who is on the scene, a freeborn black man. I just want to let him know that we have every right to fight and kill anybody who proposes to keep African people in slavery.”

“But who’s going to play Jefferson Davis today?”

“I don’t know. It’s reality,” Earnest says.

Earnest tucks too many
Jackson Advocate
s under his arm and carries a whole cardboard box of them toward the door as I follow, bewildered.

“You know, John, we might just be dreaming that we are in the twenty-first century, but in reality, we’re in the nineteenth century, we’re facing this crisis. You know how people fantasize when they have a crisis? They want to get out of it. We’re caught up in a crisis!”

“We’re in the nineteenth century?” I ask, floundering, as Earnest’s white leather shoe pushes open the door.

“What did Kant say? Reality is perception.”

Soon, I’m wiggling the car through the historic district.

“Hi, Chokwe!” Earnest shouts into his phone. “I have John, who’s come all the way over from Australia looking into the Richard Barrett case. Would you call me back?”

I feel better that Earnest gets the answering machine, too. Chokwe and Precious teamed up to pinch the Vincent McGee case from the white public defender. They (and Earnest) think there is a race aspect to the case that will be ignored if left in white hands. They think the whites will explain the crime as a garden-variety fight over money rather than a white supremacist attacking a black man and the black man having to
defend himself. “Hello, Tina!” Earnest shouts as I curl onto the highway to Vicksburg. “I’ll put you on. An investigative reporter from Melbourne, Australia!”