Confederates in the Attic (19 page)

On the trial’s third day, Freddie took the stand. He showed none of the emotion or remorse he’d displayed during our prison chat. Instead he seemed numb with anxiety and dully mumbled “Yessir” or
“I don’t know” as the prosecution asked one incriminating question after another. In the gallery, the county’s chief deputy leaned over and whispered to the man beside him, “He started in a ditch about six inches deep with a shovel. Now he’s in with a backhoe digging himself as deep a grave as he can.”

Ironically, it was left to the prosecution to point out the provocative role played by the rebel flag. The defense feared that dwelling on the flag, or on racial strife in Todd County, might bolster the state’s claim that the crime was premeditated, and also incriminate the defendants on the charge of violating Michael’s civil rights.

But in closing arguments, a defense attorney quoted Hannah’s testimony about the flag making the truck look sharp, rather than expressing any political belief. In his view, this undermined the charge of civil rights intimidation. “Aesthetics are not protected by the Constitution,” he dryly observed.

This prompted an emotional reply from one of the prosecutors, an owlish man who rushed to the podium carrying several tomes. The key issue, he said, wasn’t the intent of the person displaying the flag, but “stereotypical assumptions” made by those who saw it.

“If a person feels it is symbolic of keeping African-Americans back, then it’s easy to believe that the people displaying it are bigots.” Whites in the audience began to shift uncomfortably. “They’d get mad,” the prosecutor went on, “they might want to drag them out and beat them up. A stereotypical assumption was made in this case, and that’s why it happened.”

Then he opened William L. Shirer’s
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
and quoted Nazi laws proscribing Jews, which he said offered further illustration of how “stereotypical assumptions” led to violence. He opened another book, Carl Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln. “I’ll probably offend some people,” he said. Then he read part of the Gettysburg Address, lingering on the phrase, “All men are created equal.”

The prosecutor cited Lincoln to buttress his central point: whites had the same right to fly the rebel flag as blacks had to wear X caps. Still, it was strange to hear the Confederate Antichrist invoked in a Tennessee courtroom filled with family and friends of a man killed because of his rebel flag.

As the judge deliberated, the families stood at opposite ends of the courthouse, holding hands and praying. When the judge returned after a ninety-minute recess, the chamber filled with undercover police. There had been anonymous death threats against the judge, and police also feared a post-verdict brawl between the families.

Fingering a Styrofoam coffee cup, the judge spent several minutes staring at a legal pad. Then he read the charges against Freddie, finding him guilty of felony murder, attempted aggravated kidnapping, and civil-rights intimidation. “The court imposes sentence of imprisonment for life,” he said. Damien Darden received the same. The third defendant, a fifteen-year-old who had apparently just been along for the ride, was found not guilty on all counts.

Freddie’s head slumped on his chest. Damien stared blankly ahead. Behind them, relatives burst into tears, as did the women in the Westerman family. Except for Hannah. Striding out of the courtroom, she paused before a TV camera and declared, “They got what they deserved—well, they deserved to die.” But she seemed satisfied by her day in court. “It’s about time,” she said, “someone who’s white got to stand up and say, ‘Our civil rights were violated.’”

A
FEW HOURS LATER
, at Billy’s Bar in Guthrie, I watched Hannah again on the six o’clock news. The barmaid raised a beer bottle in salute and everyone at the bar cheered—before turning on the jukebox again. Down the street, at Janie’s Market, trucks pulled into the gas pumps with rebel flags flying from their beds. Banners also appeared in windows along the main street. But after a few days, this white triumphalism stopped. Most locals recognized the severity of the verdict: justice had been served, tribal blood money paid.

At the cemetery, I found two teenaged girls smoking beside Michael’s grave. They said Todd Central High School was calm now, but a chilly distance separated blacks and whites. “No one wants to talk—we go our separate ways,” one girl said. She flicked ash on the ground. “It’s probably for the best.”

The black teenagers I spoke to felt much the same. A growing number had decided to escape Todd County by joining the army at
the earliest chance. Many of their parents now felt awkward and unwanted around local merchants and shopped in nearby Clarksville instead. Some blacks avoided going out after dark.

On the Sunday after the trial, I went to a service at Guthrie’s black Baptist church attended by members of the defendants’ families. Several relatives got up to thank the community for their support. “God will deliver his verdict, but in his own good time,” Freddie’s aunt said. “We look at the little pictures, He takes the big view.” Another woman wailed, “I don’t want to go to hell, Lord. It’s hell here.” Then the pastor set the trial in the broad context of black suffering. “We have been o-pressed and depressed for over two hundred years,” he said. “Ain’t nothing change but the years.”

After the service, Freddie’s mother invited me to her in-laws’ house, a small bungalow across from the church. Showing me a picture of Freddie at age two, hugging a Teddy bear, she pondered how her youngest child could have ended up in prison for murder. Perhaps, she said, it was her fault, for losing her job when Freddie was a young teenager; after that, she’d had to move to a rough area of Chicago she described as New Jack City. It was there that her son first got into trouble.

Or maybe adolescent hormones were to blame. “Boys got this thing, showing your manhood, that you’re bad,” she said. “It’s a man thing.” But she was also angry that racism and the rebel flag hadn’t really been aired at the trial. “The flag and ‘nigger’-calling—you can deny that it hurts you, but it builds up,” she said. “You keeping putting it on people, it’s going to blow up.”

She reached in her purse for a card from prison. The front showed a calm winter landscape with farms and horses. Inside, Freddie had scribbled a poem.

The card was signed, “Peace and much love Mama. I love you.” Freddie also asked her to pass on a message to his siblings and their kids. “Much love from little bro and uncle on lock down.”

Cynthia Batie began weeping and put the card back in her purse. “My baby,” she cried.

Ten minutes up the road, at the Westermans’ house in flat farmland north of Guthrie, fourteen rebel flags were on display. One flew at half-mast, the others draped across porch furniture. Inside, Hannah sat with her in-laws watching
Oprah
as her twin children frolicked on the floor. One toddler wore a rebel-flag shirt: “American by Birth, Rebel by the Grace of God.” The den was also cluttered with Confederate paraphernalia, most of it gifts from well-wishers across the South.

Michael’s mother, JoAnn, joined us. A wiry woman of forty, she said she now took tranquilizers and had entered counseling with her husband to deal with their son’s death. Returning to work at the garment factory had also been tough. “Blacks I consider myself close to, deep down inside there’s something in between us now,” she said. “We leave that void there and don’t discuss it.”

Michael’s father, David, offered to show me a home video. Images of Michael rolled across the TV screen: as a baby, as a seventh-grader on the football team, at home making a science-fair telegraph with his father, at the senior prom with Hannah, and finally, cradling his newborn twins. David Westerman began to cry. A modest, soft-spoken man, he was, like Freddie’s mother, still trying to make sense of what had happened to his son.

“Look at this,” he said, opening an album of family history he’d been given by his sister, Brenda Arms. David ran his finger along a list of rebel ancestors: one captured, another shot dead at Gettysburg, and a private “killed in action, 24th May, 1862.” His age was listed as nineteen.

“Just like Michael,” David said. He wiped his eyes. “They say that war ended a long time ago. But around here it’s like it’s still going on.”

I
returned home to Virginia badly in need of a furlough. My Southern journey had taken a long and dispiriting detour in Todd County. Apart from brief visits to Fort Sumter and a few other sites, I’d hardly set foot on the historic landscape of the Civil War I’d originally planned to explore.

Salvation arrived soon after my return in a telephone call from Robert Lee Hodge, the hardcore reenactor I’d met bloating on the road months before. He said the first major event of the campaign season was coming up: the Battle of the Wilderness. Eight thousand reenactors were expected to attend, plus twice that number of spectators. “It’ll be a total Farbfest,” Rob predicted.

Hardcores were ambivalent about battle reenactments. After all, it was hard to be truly “authentic” when the most authentic moment of
any battle couldn’t be reproduced, though Rob did the best he could with his bloating. Hardcores also felt that crowds of spectators interfered with an authentic experience of combat. But Rob and several other Guardsmen planned to go anyway, to scout fresh talent and see what changes the long winter layoff had brought to the hobby.

I was curious to go, too. Since spooning with the Southern Guard, I’d been doing some research. Before, I’d assumed that reenacting was a marginal part of Civil War memory, a weekend hobby for gun-toting good ol’ boys—with the emphasis on boys. My reading suggested something altogether different. Reenacting had become the most popular vehicle of Civil War remembrance. There were now over 40,000 reenactors nationwide; one survey named reenacting the fastest-growing hobby in America.

Also, while battles remained the core event, reenacting now encompassed all the nonmilitary aspects of the Civil War, mirroring a similar trend in scholarship on the conflict. Soldiers were joined by growing ranks of “civilian” reenactors who played the part of nurses, surgeons, laundresses, preachers, journalists—even embalmers. A generation ago, a young person with a keen interest in the War would likely have joined a Civil War “roundtable,” one of the hundreds of scholarly clubs nationwide. In the 1990s, the same person was more likely to join a reenacting unit, perhaps with his wife and kids.

Not that women needed men to get involved. On the Internet, I found multiple chat groups for reenactors; on one, the topic of the day was “Top Ten Civil War Studs,” a discussion among women about “gents who would most belong on the cover of a romance novel.” The designated “Dishes” included P. G. T. Beauregard (“Continental charm in Creole packaging”) and Robert E. Lee (“a geron-tophile’s dream with sugar daddy possibilities”). The “Dud” list featured Braxton Bragg (“less style than a Nehru jacket”) and William Tecumseh Sherman (“sinister expression”).

Reenacting had also bred a vast cottage industry of tailors, weavers, and other “sutlers,” a Civil War term for merchants who provisioned the armies. For advice, reenactors could turn to a dozen publications, ranging from the oxymoronic
Civil War News
to the
Camp Chase Gazette
, a monthly crammed with how-to articles titled “Bundling Paper Cartridges for Field Use” and personal ads such as, “DWF ISO S/DWM between 45-55. Must be in good shape and ready for some hard campaigning. No TBGs need apply.” Translation: divorced white female in search of single or divorced white male in trim condition—not one of those tubby bearded guys (TBGs), or what Rob would call a “fat flaming farb.” There was even a
Consumer Reports
-style quarterly called
The Watchdog
, which rated the historic accuracy and quality of the various products on offer to the Civil War shopper.

Standards hadn’t always been so high. When reenacting first became popular during the Civil War centennial in the 1960s, many soldiers wore work shirts from Sears and fired BB guns. But in the three decades since, the hobby had matured and so had the quality of soldiers’ “impressions.” Even so, reenactors differed on just how far they should go in seeking “authenticity.” Hardcores were a small minority within the reenacting community and regarded by many as elitists. Mainstream reenactors also feared that the hardcore faith, taken to its fundamentalist extreme, would turn the hobby into a performance art that no one would want to watch—much less participate in.