Confederates in the Attic (15 page)

Aryan Nation and other white supremacist groups had also turned up in Guthrie. “I know from Aryans,” Eskridge said, fingering one of the groups flyers. She reached inside her desk and pulled out a German newspaper clip from the 1950s. It showed a shirtless man with a shaved head, harnessed to a road grader. Eskridge translated the headline: “The Galley Slaves of Our Times.” The man in the picture was her father, imprisoned at Dachau during World War II for speaking against the Nazis. “That’s what an Aryan nation looks like,” she said, studying the photograph.

Eskridge had one other thing to show me. She led me across the motel’s forecourt to a fence enclosing picnic tables, beach umbrellas and a rectangle of patchy grass. “That used to be our swimming pool,” she said. Guthrie had no public parks or pools, so locals paid two dollars to swim at the motel. Then, two summers ago, several black kids paid their money and jumped in. “It was like we sent an electrical charge through the water,” she said. “As soon as the blacks got in, all the whites got out.” Whites demanded that Eskridge tell the blacks to leave. Her response: kiss my grits.

When whites kept complaining, Eskridge and her husband filled the pool with pond dirt rather than let it become the scene of racial strife. A dogwood and weeping willow now sprouted in the deep end.

“Enjoy your stay in Guthrie,” she said, handing me a room key and retreating inside with her schnauzer.

I
STAYED TWO WEEKS
at the Holiday Motel, enduring its lumpy beds and stained carpet and threadbare covers, which forced me to deploy my ripped jacket as an extra blanket. Each morning, I breakfasted on a Styrofoam cup of watery coffee and a scratch-off lotto ticket from the convenience store across the road. I visited Robert Penn Warren’s childhood home, a Victorian bungalow at the corner of Third and Cherry, now a well-kept but forgotten shrine open only a few hours each week. I went to church on Wednesday night and heard a two-hour sermon titled: “If you were arrested and charged
with being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” Most other nights, I drank at Billy’s, where the same two songs—“If Hell Had a Jukebox” and “I Like My Women a Little on the Trashy Side”—played over and over again as the barmaid wailed along. I decided that if hell had a backwater, it would look a little like Guthrie, Kentucky.

But what Guthrie lacked in atmosphere it made up for in intrigue. The mystery began with the circumstances surrounding Michael Westerman’s death. Westerman and his wife, Hannah, had been high school sweethearts, about to enjoy their first night out since the birth of their twins five weeks before. They planned to buy Hannah a denim dress before going to dinner in Nashville, an hour south of Guthrie. En route, at about four o’clock, Michael stopped for gas at a convenience store called Janie’s Market, on Guthrie’s main street.

Westerman’s truck caught the eye of four black teenagers who were parked in a car nearby. The pickup was hard to miss: a big red Chevy 4×4 with a jacked-up chassis, a rebel-flag license plate, and a large rebel flag flapping from a pole in the truck’s bed. The car’s driver, Damien Darden, thought he’d seen the flag-waving truck before, cruising through Guthrie’s black neighborhood.

“Let’s go whip that dude,” he told his friends, speeding off to recruit others for the brawl. Because the Westermans’ truck had dark tinted windows, Darden and his friends couldn’t see that the pair inside were former neighbors and classmates.

Michael Westerman pumped gas and bought watermelon bubble gum, then sat chatting in the cab with Hannah. The two weren’t in any hurry. They’d left the twins with Michael’s parents and had the whole evening to themselves. Hannah told police that Michael had teased her and joked about “getting some” later that night.

Damien Darden returned to Janie’s Market trailed by two other cars, and pulled alongside the pickup. Several of the black teenagers later testified that a white hand reached out the truck’s sliding back window and shook the rebel flag. One of them said he heard someone in the truck shout “Niggers!” Hannah denied that she or Michael had said or done anything.

Michael pulled out of Janie’s and drove south into Tennessee. Hannah glanced back and saw the three cars from Janie’s trailing
behind. “Kick it!” she said, and Michael floored the accelerator, hurtling down the two-lane highway.

At about the same moment, in the backseat of Darden’s car, a seventeen-year-old named Freddie Morrow told his friends he had a gun. “No you don’t,” the others taunted. Freddie reached inside his belt and brandished a cheap .32 pistol. Damien Darden sped up, gaining ground on the flag-bearing truck.

A few miles south of Guthrie, near a forlorn railroad siding, Freddie fired wildly out the window. Then the gun jammed. Damien accelerated and pulled into the oncoming lane. He and Michael now raced side by side, going eighty-five. Michael shoved Hannah to the floor. Freddie unjammed his gun, stuck his hand out the window and fired again.

Hannah didn’t hear the blast but she saw her husband clutch his side and moan, “Oh my God, they shot me.” As the truck slowed, she somehow scrambled over Michael into the driver’s seat. Damien’s car had stopped in the road just ahead; another car from Janie’s pulled up behind the pickup. Hannah thought the cars were trying to box her in. So she swerved off the road, did a U-turn, and sped back toward Kentucky as Freddie fired again.

By the time Hannah reached a hospital emergency room, Michael was in shock. A bullet had passed through his heart. Surgeons closed the wound and rushed him by ambulance to Nashville, where he died the next day. When police searched the Westermans’ truck, they found a single bullet hole in the door, Michael’s loaded .380 automatic on the floor, and his black cowboy hat with a big wad of watermelon bubble gum stuck to the brim.

The episode bristled with question marks. Who was Michael Westerman and what did he mean by flying the flag in a largely black town on Martin Luther King’s birthday weekend? Why had this so provoked Damien and his friends that they chased down and killed a white man in broad daylight? And why had violent rage over the rebel flag erupted here of all places, in Warren’s “un-Southern” hometown, in a state that never joined the Confederacy?

On a Sunday morning, I went looking for clues in the Todd County seat of Elkton. Located at the county’s main crossroads, ten
minutes north of Guthrie, Elkton was home to the high school that both the Westermans and their assailants attended. It was also here that Michael had sometimes cruised with his rebel flag, circling the courthouse square and crawling past an adjoining stretch of fast-food joints. In a dry county with no mall or movie theater (or even a stoplight), looping between the Dairy Mart and the Dairy Queen provided what little action was available. Teenagers called this 1950s-style ritual “flipping the dip.”

When I arrived, the dip was flipping with rebel-flag-toting trucks. There were also two cars with holes crudely drilled in their rooftops and flagpoles poking out, like mutant hair follicles. One member of this ersatz color guard wore a rebel kepi and carried a loaded .22 pistol in his lap. He told me he’d only begun flying the flag since Michael’s death. “One goes down, two fill his space,” he said. Then, flag hoisted high, he shouted “These colors don’t run!” and sped off toward the Dairy Queen.

Nearby, a dozen people in jungle fatigues and combat boots stood at strategic points around the square, handing out flyers to the after-church traffic. I approached the troop’s leader, a bearded man with a walkie-talkie, and asked what was up. “Literature roadblock,” he said, handing me several flyers. The first was headlined: “The only Reason You are White! Today is Because Your Ancestors Practiced & Believed in Segregation YESTERDAY!” The second commanded: “I WANT YOU FOR THE ALMIGHTY KU KLUX KLAN!”

The literature was signed “Yours for White Victory, Ron Edwards, Grand Dragon for Christ, Race & Nation.” This was the same bearded man who stood before me, barking un-dragonlike orders into his walkie-talkie. “Cross the street only on the crosswalks, and stay on the goddam sidewalks!” he commanded his underlings. Then to me: “I don’t want us breaking any laws.”

Ron Edwards was a water-blaster by trade and ruler over “the Realm of Kentucky.” Two subalterns shared the corner with him: an Exalted Cyclops named Jim, and a Klaliff named Velma. Velma wore furry earmuffs, snug booties and green mittens with her military fatigues. “Jelly doughnut?” she asked, proffering a cardboard box.

Passing cars honked and gave the thumbs up. Several motorists swapped church pamphlets—“What Must I Do To Be Saved?”—for
the Klan’s exclamatory literature: “Justice For Our People NOW!” Then a burly pedestrian in a farm cap stopped to grouse, “I’ve had enough of niggers telling us what to do.”

Jim and Velma quickly escorted the man to a rusted Buick, which served as the Klan’s recruiting office. I tagged along and climbed into the backseat with Velma while Jim sat up front, delivering the Klan’s sales pitch. “You move up quickly,” Jim said. “Any day now I’m going to be promoted to Great Giant.”

“My son just joined,” Velma added, “and he’s a Grand Titan already!”

The burly man seemed impressed. Jim went on: “You can get started today for just twenty-five dollars and two photos, and if your wife wants to join, too, the price is the same.” He paused. “That’s sort of a special we’ve got going this month.”

While Jim kept pitching God, Race and Nation, Velma showed me snapshots of her grandchildren. She talked about her crafts shop, the macramé she’d made for Christmas, and an upcoming cross-burning she hoped to attend. Before going, Velma had to pass an exam that would qualify her for full citizenship in the Realm. “It’s like a driver’s test where they try and foul you up,” she said. “I need to know the whole book of knowledge. Like if someone asks, ‘Why do we hate Jews?’ I didn’t know before, but I found out. It was Jews that put Christ on the cross.”

If she passed the exam—and avoided Klan infractions, such as committing a felony or sleeping with a black man—Velma would don a satin hood and robe for the cross-burning, which marked her full “naturalization” into the Klan. I asked why she and the others weren’t wearing their hoods and robes today.

“It’s a good look,” she said. “But we’ve had a lot of events lately. The cleaning bills will kill you.”

T
HE
K
LAN HANDED OUT
750 flyers and signed up ten new acolytes before melting back into the Kentucky hills, leaving Elkton Sunday-quiet. The only place open on the square was a luncheonette called the Town Grill. A petition lay on the counter: “We the undersigned believe the rebel mascot should stay at Todd County schools.
We are the South, let us wave our pride.” The waitress explained that Todd County Central High School called its sports teams “the Rebels” and took as its logo two flag-waving Confederates. But just before Michael Westerman’s shooting, a committee of prominent citizens had quietly recommended that the school drop the rebel motif to ease racial tension.

To the waitress and many other whites, this assault on the rebel mascot by local elites, meeting behind closed doors, mirrored the assault on Westerman and his flag by angry young blacks. “They’re fixin’ to strip white people—whites that ain’t rich—of what little they got,” the waitress said.

The petition drive was led by a retired nurse named Frances Chapman. I called her from the grill to ask to come chat. En route, I stopped at Todd Central, a low-slung brick school with bright hallways and new computer labs. It looked like any other public high school, except for a vast mural in the foyer of the notorious mascot: two cartoonish Confederates clutching battle flags and blowing bugles emitting the words “Go, Rebels, Go.”

I was surprised that these flabby caricatures had provoked such a storm. They seemed to mock rather than exalt the Confederacy. But Frances Chapman didn’t see it that way. “The fat men, oooh, I think they’re wonderful!” she exclaimed. “They make me feel so proud.”

Chapman was a tiny woman with oversized glasses and an electric-green pants suit. Her words were equally arresting. As soon as I sat down, she showed me a newspaper story quoting her recent comments on a local radio show. “Slavery was not all that bad,” she’d declared. “A lot of people were quite happy to be living on large plantations.”

Chapman smiled sweetly. “Blacks just need to get over slavery,” she said, as though talking of the flu. “You can’t live in the past.”

I gently observed that she herself might be accused of living in the past by defending the rebel flag. “Oh no, that’s about now,” she said. “Blacks don’t really have anything against the flag. They just don’t want us to have it. They want the best jobs, the biggest money. Now they want this. If we lose the mascot, it’ll just be a matter of time before we lose everything.” Her voice quivered with rage. “Don’t put
us
where
they
used to be.”

It was the same bitterness I’d heard from Bud Sharpe, the pro-flag demonstrator in Columbia. For both Sharpe and Chapman, the rebel banner represented a finger in the dike, the last brake against a noisome tide of minority rights that was fast eroding the status of whites. “The pity of it is,” Chapman went on, “blacks have a great legacy. They had Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, George Washington Carver. They first learned dancing and singing—we learned that from them.”

Chapman had learned something else from blacks: the idiom and tactics of civil rights. She and her supporters had launched a school boycott, with scores of white families pulling their kids out of Todd Central and threatening to withhold county taxes unless the rebel mascot was retained. They also planned a sit-in at the next school board meeting. Chapman had printed a special T-shirt for the protest, adorned with the Confederate flag and the words:
SHOW RESPECT—
You’re in Rebel Country.

Seeing me to the door, Chapman raised her small fist above her head. “We shall overcome,” she said.

T
HE NEXT DAY
at Elkton’s library, I learned a strange thing. Todd County wasn’t rebel country, at least not historically. According to the volumes of local history I perused, most Todd Countians supported the Union in the Civil War. Like much of the upper South, the county split along geographic lines. Whites from the county’s fertile plantations bordering Tennessee tended to side with the South. But the more numerous yeoman farmers in Todd County’s hilly north (where slaves were few) supported the Union. Kentucky also stayed in the Union, though the first Confederate Congress optimistically allotted a star for Kentucky on the Confederacy’s flag in hopes the state might secede.