God'll Cut You Down (10 page)

Five years ago he assaulted a couple of law enforcement officers. For this, he served one year in prison. Not long after he was released he was arrested again for grand larceny. So, both a history of violence and a history of robbery. Vincent was meant to serve five years for the grand larceny.

However.

For whatever reason—Michael doesn’t know—Vincent was released early. And within two months of his early release, Vincent was shadowing over Richard Barrett in his kitchen with a knife.

I decide we’ve become chatty enough for me to ask the big question.

“Even if Vincent did steal from Richard and that was his motive, don’t you, as the district attorney, have discretion to
not
seek the death penalty? Why did you go for the death penalty?”

The big leather chair rocks very fast. His face and eyes soften, like the thought of snuffing out a man’s life weighs heavily on him.

“You know,” Michael says, “what we did is we indicted with the death penalty to keep that option open.”

I’m wrong about our chattiness. Michael won’t say any more on the matter. The conversation is clearly finished.

“Just one final question. Tina McGee said—that’s Vincent’s mother—said she’s not allowed to visit him in prison. Is that true?”

Michael’s eyes and lips squeeze into confusion again.

“The family should have access to him. I would be surprised if the family would not be allowed to see him while he is here in jail.”

Halfway down the corridor to the elevator, I can still hear the pacy squeak-squeak-squeak of Michael Guest’s big leather chair.

A local lawyer called Mark is waiting for a client outside the entrance of the courthouse. His white hands grip a leather satchel.

“All my family is originally from Mississippi,” he tells me. Nevertheless, and not consciously, he refers to Mississippians as
they
, not
we
. He and his parents lived in New York for long stretches, so he’s an insider and an outsider.

I tell him I just chatted with Michael Guest and his squeaky chair.

“The district attorney is elected every four years,” he tells me. “He doesn’t want to lose a case this high-profile. There are a certain number of folks out there who are still ardent segregationists. They were supportive of Richard Barrett. If he allows Mr. McGee to be acquitted at trial, he will lose those people’s votes.”

Mark thinks Michael Guest will try to pry a guilty plea from Vincent.

“Honestly, I don’t think Mr. Guest wants to go to trial. And the reason he doesn’t want to go to trial is that there is that very slim, but possible, group of folks that would be on the jury pool that upon hearing of Mr. Barrett’s solicitation for sex would be so offended, they’d say, ‘He got what he deserved.’ There is a possibility that Mr. McGee could be acquitted.”

I notice that Mark doesn’t think there’s a chance that a Rankin County jury would be sympathetic to a black man. He just thinks that there’s a chance that they’d hate gay people even more.

Mark knows of both Precious Martin and Chokwe Lumumba.

“Precious tends to be a more even-keeled-type person. Chokwe tends to want to cast everything in racial terms. He has a reputation for viewing every black defendant as innocent and every white victim as guilty of racism and therefore deserving of whatever happened to them. In this particular case he is absolutely correct. Mr. Barrett actually was a racist. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.”

Still, while Chokwe’s routine kills in black Jackson, it could fizzle here in Rankin County, says Mark.

“What’s Vincent’s Hail Mary pass,” I ask, “that gets him minimal jail or no jail?”

“I think the best that Vincent can hope for is to find other individuals
that have had the same experience that he did with Mr. Barrett. That they were propositioned and/or threatened by Mr. Barrett with physical harm if they had not engaged in some sexual relations with him. If he can find somebody to corroborate his version of that story, that is the type of thing that could possibly destroy the prosecution’s case.”

Richard Barrett was running his fingers down my producer’s back within hours. Jim Giles and even the DA think Richard was leading a double life.

I’m thinking there must be someone in Mississippi with a story.

Except for a French news photographer checking out the legs of high-school girls, everyone at the Martin Luther King Day parade is black. I’ve been threading through the crowd for an hour—not even one knot of white Mississippi liberals, and nothing like those white kids in dreadlocks who would rock up to an Aboriginal march in Australia.

Navy-blue black men toot golden tubas. Army-green black kids rat-a-tat drums.

Marching bands and marching girls and marching bands. Endless. Each regiment has the same shtick: Go along for a bit with tradition, then break it on down with the band going hip-hop and the girls doing booty shakes.

Everyone’s pretty joyless considering it’s a parade. No winks and secret smiles. Few seem to be into it on its intended level, and Mississippi doesn’t do meta, so no one’s enjoying it because it’s kooky.

I, however, am loving it.

Freemasons! A silver sedan slides past, marked
33° MOST WORSHIPFUL GRAND
MASTER. KING HIRAM GR
AND LODGE
. The silhouette of the Grand Master waves from behind the tinted glass.

Obscure Freemason spin-offs! A black sedan follows, marked
GRAND MATR
ON—ELECTA GRAND CHAP
TER. ORDER OF THE EAS
TERN STAR.
Perched on the head of the old Grand Matron is a fascinator that looks like a large exotic bird about to eat her.

Can it get any better? Yes, it can.

Shriners! A purple tractor creeps by, steered by a man in a blazer with a fez atop his head. The tractor is pulling a purple car marked
IRON CAME
L JERUSALEM SHRINE #1.
In the car, the Grand Poobah nods his fez-topped head.

I’m impressed, but, standing beside me, Earnest is not. Who are these black idiots appropriating the ancient rites of white secret societies? He’s also not sold on the beauty pageant winners rolling past on SUVs. They’re not independent competitions, he says. Rich fathers just make up some pageant name and award their daughters the trophies.

Earnest is in a foul mood for another reason, too. He arrived at the
Jackson Advocate
office this morning to find a small team furiously pulling out one page from each of the four thousand copies of this week’s paper. An obituary had been printed with a photo of the wrong woman. A living woman, as it happens. Earnest’s Vicksburg article, culminating in him sticking it to Jefferson Davis, was printed on the back of the obituary. The long piece covered his passions: It celebrated the black soldiers at Milliken’s Bend, attacked present-day black Mississippians for not understanding the past, and had a go at the curator of the Vicksburg museum. Now no one in Jackson will read it.

“The owner is so scared of any legal action,” Earnest hisses.

He had smuggled out one copy of the banned
Jackson Advocate
. It was obviously tense enough at the office that when passing it to me he added, “When you come back to the
Advocate
, you can’t bring it with you.”

A man in a porkpie hat and long winter coat skids through the crowd.

“Chokwe!” shouts Earnest, suddenly perked up. “Chokwe!”

Chokwe connects the
Chokwe!
with Earnest. His body, face, and silver mustache droop.

This has been a recurring theme among black Mississippians. Earnest spots you and you droop. It happened a couple of times in Vicksburg (once with a barman, once with a jazz-activist), and a few times here in
Jackson, once with Earnest’s own sister. I think it’s because he’s got his theme and he sticks to it. I don’t mind that, because I’ve got mine, too.

Chokwe has been dodging my phone calls. He droops further when Earnest tells him I’m
that guy
.

“I’m only
co
-counsel!” Chokwe says. “Precious has not spoken to me!”

Precious and Chokwe work at different law firms. Chokwe says he has only agreed to help on the case with the proviso that Precious handle the bulk of it. He hasn’t had time to look into the case himself. He’s been focused on the Scott sisters.

I tell Chokwe that Precious isn’t returning my calls, either. His eyes say,
So?
It’s feeling awkward. So I don’t ask why it is—seeing as Vincent’s death penalty trial is starting in less than a month—that he and Precious haven’t worked out who’s doing what. I don’t ask what defense they’ve got worked out, because they clearly don’t have any defense worked out, beyond their usual routine.

The vein in Chokwe’s temple is purpling deeper the longer he’s trapped with us and my nonquestions. As a circuit breaker, he tells me he’ll hook me up with a woman from the Vincent McGee Defense Fund.

Chokwe fastens his porkpie hat and slinks away into the crowd.

Pollution and sunshine compete in front of Chokwe Lumumba’s law firm. A skeleton of a dog hobbles past, following a black woman sweating diabetes. Opposite the law firm, a vast concrete plain is sprinkled with debris. And in the center is what looks like a soldier’s watchtower in war-torn Beirut. Then my brain cracks the puzzle. The “watchtower” is actually an elevator shaft. It’s the only thing left of whatever was there.

This is where Chokwe comes to work every day.

Inside, Vallena Greer grips her handbag in Chokwe’s boardroom.

“Is that sound or pictures, too?” she asks, pointing at my Flip camera.

“Video, just so when I’m transcribing . . .”

She pulls a comb from her handbag and combs her already neat gray hair.

Vallena is the founder of the Vincent McGee Defense Fund.

“Are you and your parents originally from Mississippi?” I ask.

Vallena slowly strokes her hair a few more times and puts the comb away.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, originally from Mississippi.”

Jim told me his white story, Earnest told me his black one. Vallena tells me how things get tangled when you’re both in Mississippi.

I was born in Sunflower County in 1946. My father was half-white. He was whiter than I am, with straight hair. And we got away with stuff that regular black people wouldn’t.

I remember once my sister and I were walking in the street, downtown shopping, and there was a group, it was about eight white folks. And usually black folks had to step off the sidewalk and let them pass. We didn’t know. So we just walked straight through, and one of them—I think the male in the group—bumped my sister. He wouldn’t move. They were facing each other and neither of them would move. So when he bumped her, she elbowed him. And he called her—what did he call her?—“You goddamn whore.” And she said, “You po’ red dog.” This was unheard-of for a black person to say to a white person.

So we went about our business. We were coming back down the street. There was this black man sitting at a booth, he was a shoe shine. He said, “Did one of you girls just hit a white man?” I said, “Yeah, she did.” And he said, “Go home, because he just went to a store and bought a knife.” And my sister said, “Is that all he got? A knife?” She was a lot like my father.

So we went home. When we got there, there were these police cars
there at the house, so we walked in and Dad said, “Don’t say a word, go in the house.” So we went in the house, and the next thing we knew the police were flying out, because my dad just pointed his finger and stood up to them. So that’s how my dad protected us. A full black person could never do that.

When I got married, I was twenty-two years old, and my husband was from Carthage, Mississippi. The Klan was real bad there. I didn’t know it, because I never been to that part of the state. This was in probably 1970. And I think they were trying to integrate, they had integrated, but the white folks had not accepted it.

I didn’t know anything about
back door
: The whites go to the front door and the blacks go to the back door. Because most of the places Dad took us to were black-only places. So we didn’t never experience that. So when I got married and moved to Carthage, there was this little hamburger stand. They had a window in the front and had a window in the back. And in the back was just mud, you know, just nasty. And in the front it was nice and clean.

So, my husband pulled out in the front parking area. I just got out and went to the front window and ordered my food. And so I noticed the lady was slinging the food, and slinging real mad. I thought,
She must have had a hard day, a bad day, or something.

So, when it was time, she lifted the window, and she pointed. She said, “Your food is ready.” She said, “You need to pick it up in the back.” So, okay. “Look,” I said. “No, I am not getting my shoes dirty, no, ma’am. Why can’t I get it here? No, I want my food here.”

So she gave it to me out the front window. So I said, “What is your problem?” I didn’t know.

My brother-in-law was about thirteen years old and he was with us. So he was so excited. He went back and told his father, “Vallena went to the front window and was served at the front window!” He said, “When I go back, I am going—I am going to the front window!”

So anyway, he went back, he went to the front window and he came back crying. He said, “They threw ice all over me.”

My mother was full black. She used to participate in all the civil rights demonstrations. She participated because she told us her mother—my grandmother—was killed by Klans.

My grandmother had a Bible. The Bible had black pictures in it, and the Klans were destroying all the Bibles that had a black picture in it. And my grandmother was hiding the Bible. Before she hid the Bible, she took the Bible to church to show it to the black pastor and she said, “This is the true Bible.”

The pastor went back and told the Klans.

Yeah, he was black. But you had what we call Uncle Toms. They want the white man to like him. So, he told the white man that she had the Bible and they came to get it.