Confederates in the Attic (18 page)

By law, juveniles couldn’t be housed with adults in Tennessee prisons. But Robertson County, at whose border the shooting occurred, lacked a juvenile facility. So Morrow found himself in solitary confinement at the county jail, an overcrowded pen under court order to improve its wretched facilities. The jail was a squat box the color of slightly-off salmon, with a rooftop exercise yard wrapped in chain link and razor wire. As I walked across the parking lot, inmates began rattling their rooftop cage and shouting.

“Yo, snow! What’s your name?”

“Hey sugar, come up and get some sweet stuff.”

“You coming to see Freddie?”

“They gonna fry that little dude?”

“Shut the fuck up!” a guard shouted, escorting me inside to a converted cell that served as the prison’s library. Then he brought in Freddie Morrow. Wearing orange prison pants and a white T-shirt, he stood a lanky five feet ten and flashed me a chip-toothed grin. His head was shaved but he had a wispy teenager’s goatee, which he fingered self-consciously. He looked even younger than his actual age of seventeen.

We sat knee to knee in the cramped cell and made desultory small talk about basketball. I’d heard from Freddie’s family that he’d become a passionate reader in prison and I asked him what books he’d most enjoyed. Morrow perked up. He’d just finished
Native Son
and said he identified with Richard Wright’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas.

When I asked why, he launched into the long, tangled tale of his own troubled upbringing in Chicago. The story unspooled in a rush of urban images: a struggling single-parent home (his father died in a car crash soon after Freddie’s birth), rough schools, drugged-out parties, gang skirmishes, pregnant girlfriends, curfew violations and
juvenile court hearings. Eventually, Freddie’s mother sent him to live with in-laws in Guthrie, hoping the small-town atmosphere might calm him down.

At first it did. He began dating a girl and attended church with his relatives. The Kentucky quiet agreed with him. “I thought I was in heaven,” he said. But things started to unravel soon after he entered Todd Central. Freddie’s baggy pants and earring and inner-city slang aroused suspicion and fear among white students and teachers. Black classmates caused problems for Freddie, too.

“Being in gangs, that’s the main thing they want, they want to be bad,” he said. “They came and asked me about gang colors, stealing cars, crazy stuff.”

Before long, Freddie fell into his old ways, playing the part of street-savvy tough that both blacks and whites seemed to expect of him. He showed off the star-shaped tattoo marking him as a member of the Gangster Disciples, a notorious Chicago gang. He talked back to teachers and brawled with classmates. The way Freddie told it, these fights always followed the same pattern. Someone would provoke him, he’d walk away, then a taunt or internal prompt would lead to a fight. He kept repeating an odd, fatalistic phrase: “Go on ahead.” As in, “He picked up a bottle and broke it and was talking about putting it in my back, and I was like, ‘Go on ahead, just go on ahead.’”

At the start of his second year at Todd Central, Freddie fell in with a rough crowd in Clarksville, a mid-sized city ten minutes from Guthrie. He bought a Czech semiautomatic for $50 at an abandoned baseball diamond in Guthrie, and purchased bullets at Wal-Mart. Then one night he fired off a few rounds in the chill Kentucky air. “It felt good,” he said, “like all my worries was through.” He stuffed the gun under his mattress and didn’t take it out again until the Martin Luther King birthday weekend.

Just before Christmas, Freddie got into a fight after being taunted during a school assembly. Freddie was suspended, then told by school officials that he’d missed so much class time that he’d flunk for the second year running. It was during this suspension that he shot Michael Westerman. Freddie’s lawyer had barred us from discussing details of the killing. So I asked Freddie the question that
had gnawed at me ever since I’d arrived in Guthrie. He was a newcomer in Todd County and didn’t know Michael Westerman. Yet the sight of Michael’s flag had apparently sparked so much rage that one teenager now lay in a Guthrie grave and Freddie sat here in solitary confinement, facing the possibility of life imprisonment (as a juvenile, he could not receive the death penalty). What exactly did the rebel flag mean to him?

Freddie shrugged and looked at me impassively. “I thought it was just the
Dukes of Hazzard
sign,” he said.
The Dukes of Hazzard
was a popular TV show that featured a car decorated with a rebel flag. Growing up in Chicago, that’s all Freddie had known about the Confederate banner.

After moving to Guthrie, he gradually began to sense whites’ attachment to the flag and blacks’ hostility toward what they considered a symbol of slavery. “They was telling me about how they had a war for it back in the days and all this,” Freddie said. That was all he knew of the Civil War. To him, the banner was simply something whites knew that blacks hated. He suspected whites brandished the flag as a sort of schoolyard taunt, “just doing it out of spite, to see what we would do.”

Now they knew. Freddie’s words fit the picture of events I’d begun to form during my weeks in Todd County. What happened on that lonely road outside Guthrie wasn’t the portentous clash that outsiders—from the Southern League to the NAACP to journalists like me—imagined it to be. It seemed instead a tragic collision of insecure teenaged egos: one prone to taunts and loutishness, the other to violence and showing off. In a way, Michael Westerman and Freddie Morrow had a lot in common.

Freddie had grown morose during our three-hour chat. He talked of his frequent nightmares about the shooting, and began to cry. “No matter what I do—ever since I turned myself in I’ve been saying ‘sorry,’ but that just ain’t gonna do.” One night, he’d torn up a bed sheet and decided to hang himself. But a prison guard and former preacher pulled him back from the brink. The guard had since persuaded Freddie to study the Bible and think about the future. Freddie said he now planned to take up drawing again, a hobby he’d enjoyed
as a child. He also fantasized about his release from jail, which he spoke of as though it was imminent.

“My main plan for when I get out is to be back in touch with my family, go to church every Sunday,” he said. He wanted to stay in Guthrie—nothing fancy, just settle down with his girl and get a job at an appliance factory where several of his relatives worked. “I was thinking when I turn eighteen I can get on at State Stove with my cousin Jeff,” he said.

I
NSTEAD
, F
REDDIE CELEBRATED
his eighteenth birthday by moving out of solitary and becoming “rock man,” prison slang for toilet cleaner. His mother could no longer pay the private lawyer she’d hired, so a public defender took over the case. Meanwhile, back in Todd County, the atmosphere had calmed since the Flag Day rally. The county’s school board quietly shelved plans to change Todd Central’s rebel mascot, allowing Frances Chapman and her followers to declare victory and abandon their school boycott. Guthrie hired its first black cop. And when town officials learned that a new tattoo parlor in Guthrie acted as a front for the Klan, they quickly used building-code violations to shut the place down.

I went one peaceful afternoon to see the crowning of a new Miss Confederacy at the Jeff Davis monument. A succession of young belles sashayed past the crowd: twirling parasols, flicking fans, and smiling as best they could in their oxygen-depriving corsets. The winner, a tenth-grader named Rebecca, cinched the contest with her crowd-pleasing answer to the question, “What was the proper role of a Southern lady as a wife and mother?”

“As a wife, she supported and respected her husband and believed in the Cause,” Rebecca said. “As a mother, she looked after her children and spent a lot of time with them.”

Heritage groups kept a low profile at the Miss Confederacy contest, sensing perhaps that locals were weary of rallies and anxious to restore some normality to their lives. But outside the county, the mythical status of Kentucky’s teenaged martyr continued to grow, culminating in Michael’s induction into the pantheon of Confederate
heroes at Franklin, Tennessee, one of the foremost shrines to Southern sacrifice. It was at Franklin one afternoon in the autumn of 1864 that the South suffered over 6,000 casualties in a frontal assault even braver and bloodier than Pickett’s Charge.

A Sons of Confederate Veterans’ museum at Franklin now featured a Westerman exhibit, including the rebel banner that had draped Michael’s coffin, a photograph of the teenager, and a retelling of his death that carried overtones of a nineteenth-century regimental history: The “Confederate Martyr” had “succumbed to his wound” after being “accosted by a carload of black youths who made racist remarks concerning the flag.”

The exhibit occupied pride of place in the museum’s foyer, right beside a portrait of Pat Cleburne, the most renowned of six Southern generals killed at Franklin. Cleburne had two horses shot from under him before leading his men forward on foot, waving his cap and shouting, “If we are to die, let us die like men!” He was found the next day, shot through the heart and stripped of his boots, saber and watch. Cleburne’s death site lay only a hundred yards from the museum, beneath the parking lot of a Pizza Hut.

T
HE TRIAL OF
Michael Westerman’s assailants was held in Springfield, Tennessee, forty-five minutes south of Guthrie, in a brick Victorian courthouse with glass globes dispensing gum for a penny and clouds of cigarette smoke hanging in the air. The Westerman family sat behind the prosecution bench, wearing pictures of Michael pinned to their breasts. Friends and neighbors clustered behind, as did several SCV members and a publisher of Southern books who spent each break peddling copies of “Facts the Historians Leave Out,” a Confederate apologia from the 1920s. Two local Klansmen also sat in, sans robes and literature.

Across the gallery gathered a smaller group of blacks, mostly the defendants’ families. Conspicuous among them was Freddie’s mother, Cynthia Batie, who had come from Chicago by Greyhound. Afflicted with a crippling nerve ailment, she rode into the courtroom in a motorized cart.

There was no jury. The pool of potential jurors had proved overwhelmingly
white and pro-prosecution, so the defense lawyers chose to try the case in front of a judge instead. In opening arguments, the defense likened the car chase and shooting to a schoolyard brawl that spilled tragically out of control. Freddie had fired wildly, intending only to scare the truck’s passengers. In the defense view, this amounted to manslaughter rather than felony murder, which carried a mandatory life sentence.

The lawyers also attempted what Freddie’s attorney called “the cockroach defense.” If you lack strong evidence that might exonerate your client, he told me, “you shit all over what the other side’s got.” As a result, much of the trial focused on holes in the police investigation. No ballistics tests were ever performed on Michael’s gun to see if it had been fired. Police failed to do gunshot-residue tests on the black teenagers’ car and didn’t inspect the damage to Michael’s truck until 116 days after the crime (better tests might have shed light on whether Freddie fired wildly or intended to hit the truck).

Questions also arose about Michael’s medical care. Emergency-room doctors had accidentally severed one of his phrenic nerves, which control the diaphragm. And in a bizarre twist, the coroner who signed Michael’s autopsy report was unavailable for questioning. He’d fled Tennessee amid allegations of incompetence and necrophilia; colleagues said he fondled corpses’ breasts and conducted anogenital exams that were “inappropriate and degrading to the deceased.”

These and other questions, as well as the recently concluded O.J. Simpson trial, raised hopes among the defendants’ families that the prosecution case would collapse due to flawed or tainted evidence. But the defense team—a public defender, two court-appointed lawyers, and a black attorney working on the case pro bono—didn’t have the sort of resources available to the O.J. “Dream Team.” And the defendants had made incriminating statements to police, before any of them had lawyers and before they knew that Michael’s wound was fatal.

The state also had two potent witnesses in Hannah Westerman and Tony Andrews, a passenger in the black teenagers’ car who had agreed to testify against his friends in exchange for two years’
probation. Hannah took the stand clutching a picture of Michael and told about the premature birth of her twins (named Michael and Michaela), the couple’s first night out, and Michael’s fateful stop for gas in Guthrie. She said neither Michael nor she did anything to provoke the black teenagers at Janie’s Market. Asked why Michael displayed the flag, Hannah repeated what she’d told me: “It matched his truck and made it look sharp.”

Tony Andrews corroborated Hannah’s story, calmly fingering Damien Darden as the driver and instigator of the car chase, and Freddie Morrow as the willing triggerman. But he testified that he’d seen someone in Michael’s truck reach out and shake the flag at Janie’s, just as Damien was having second thoughts about a brawl. Tony said this action, combined with one of the passengers hearing someone shout “Nigger,” reignited the teenagers’ desire to fight.

When Tony was done, the judge called a break and the families drifted out of the gallery, silent and stunned. Tony had fragged his friends, but he’d also blown a hole in Hannah’s story—and Michael’s reputation—by suggesting that racist gestures and remarks were made at Janie’s. As Freddie’s mother steered her motorized cart out of the chamber, she ran into Michael’s family standing just on the other side of the door. Hannah, arms crossed, fixed Cynthia Batie with a flinty-eyed scowl.

“What’s your problem?” Batie snapped.

“Bitch,” Hannah said.

“What did you say?”

“You heard me, bitch.”

Hannah’s family pulled her away as Batie yelled, “The truth is going to come out! Then we’ll see who the bitch is!” The two camps huddled at opposite ends of the hall, chain-smoking and venting their rage. Batie groused that Hannah and her family were bigoted rednecks. To Michael’s mother, Freddie’s crippled mother was a “motor-mouth with a motor,” an uppity city black just like her son. Watching the scene, it was hard not to see a depressing adult mirror of the anger and racial stereotyping that had afflicted their sons.