God'll Cut You Down (25 page)

What if this is the way that power asserts itself over the helpless in Mississippi?

What if Tina is a better mother than I first thought?

Lord it’s hard to work out what’s going on. Although I feel like I’m plodding in a concentric circle toward
something
. If I keep plodding, I’ll eventually get to the center, won’t I?

The skin on my left wrist hurts. It hurts because I’m biting it. I’m biting it because I’m seething and I hate myself. For five minutes I thought my Dictaphone, with the lapel microphone sticky-taped to my cell phone, was recording.

My eyes just caught the counter flashing
00:00:00:00
. My finger torpedoes to the red record button.

Vincent McGee is the man I haven’t been recording for five minutes. He’s sealed in his little cell. I’m hunched over my coffee table.

Two Walmart Green Dot cards—one for a hundred and fifty dollars and one for fifty—sit on the table before me. He asked for the numbers right away. I said, “Hello,” and he said, “You got the numbers?” My fingernail scratched the silver panels on the cards—like on instant lottery cards—and I read them out.

“Sorry, I didn’t get that,” I say, the Dictaphone recording now, and my teeth released from biting my flesh. “So they wouldn’t let you use the phone to get home, so then the fight escalated from there?”

I’m asking Vincent about the fight with the policemen, the incident that rolled him out of juvenile detention into the adult prison system.

“Right,” Vincent says, his voice tiny and crackly, traveling through his cell phone, across the Mississippi sky, and into my ear. Even tiny and crackly, his words echo off his prison cell walls. “’Cause I was in court and the judge released me. So I was trying to call somebody to come pick me up, but they wouldn’t give me access to a phone.”

“It says in the report,” I tell him, “it’s because your mother didn’t come to pick you up and that’s why you got angry.”

“No!” Vincent says. “That wasn’t the case—they didn’t want me to leave.”

“Oh yeah, I understand,” I say. “They wanted to punish you for being in the Vice Lords gang?”

“Say what?”

“They wanted to keep you incarcerated for being in the Vice Lords.”

“Something like that, you know what I’m sayin’?” he says. “They didn’t like what I was. They didn’t respect me. They thought they had more authority on me and all types of stuff like this.”

Not quite the same lie as to Daisy, then, but certainly close.

“I heard,” I say, “that sometimes the officers in juvenile detention centers, they tease and pick on the prisoners until they get angry and upset.”

“Right,” says Vincent. “They do that all the time here. That’s what caused most of the fights, you hear? You see, I was behind my door. They had to open my cell in order for the confrontation to take place, you see?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I found that strange. Because they were saying you were being angry, but even if that was the case, you were already locked up, so there was no need for them to open up the door.”

“Correct,” he says.

I ask Vincent how old he was when he first met Richard Barrett.

“I think I was around about fifteen, sixteen.”

“And what happened? Where did you meet him?”

“Me and my little brother, we were walking up the street. He called us to his yard and he was telling us about a job, you know what I’m sayin’? Paint his deck. So that’s how it went.”

“And what happened with that job? Did both you and your brother do it, or only you?”

“Just me,” he says. “You know what I’m sayin’, I went and did it. But I ain’t finished it because he tried to pay me in slave wages, you hear?”

The vernacular “slave wages” sounds more heated when muttered in Mississippi.

“He tried to give me a dollar for painting the whole building, you hear? I did the front part, and then I told him, ‘I don’t think I’m being paid fair. It’s too hard.’ So I was like, ‘No, I’m through.’ But he took me to the house to pay me for what I did, and he gave me a dollar.”

He did that to other people. I’ve spoken to other workmen who he ripped off. And they were all very angry at him. One young man (white) I tracked down had started legal action against him and was still
seething years later. “Is that the only time you worked with him? Or did you work with him a few times?”

“A few times. I worked with him when I was twenty-two.”

That was the time Richard ended up with a knife in his neck.

“Why did you work with him again,” I say, “when you knew he hadn’t paid you money last time?”

“I really don’t know myself, you hear? I really don’t understand, but, you know, one day he came to my yard. He sounded like he needed some help, so I was gonna go give him some help, you hear? He tried to pull the same stunt on me again, you hear? I wasn’t gonna have it—God knows, I had grew up.”

To Vincent, growing up was stabbing a man. This was his lesson learned.

“And so, how did the fight break out in his house?”

“But look, we’re moving fast right now, you hear? That’s another topic for another day, you hear?”

“Sure, no, I understand.”

“Yo. You’re gonna write exactly what I’m saying and don’t twist my words.”

Vincent says if I twist his words, it could mess up his future chances in the courtroom.

“One charge they gave me—I got manslaughter, arson, burglary—the burglary charge, they had no evidence. I just went along with it for the plea so I could get the time that I got. I got to go to the court and try to get the time back.”

That burglary charge was twenty-five years. Why would you go along with another twenty-five years?

“Send a letter with the questions on it, you know what I’m sayin’? I’ll take my time to think my thoughts.”

“Sure,” I say. “You’re still at MDOC in Pearl?”

“Yes,” he says. “I need those Green Dot numbers one more time.”

I pluck the cards off the coffee table and hold them under the lamp next to the couch and read out the numbers.

“A’right.”

I tell him I also need a letter so I can talk to his lawyer, Mike Scott. We haggle and hit on a hundred and fifty Green Dot.

I’d be lying if I said paying Vincent was weighing heavily on my conscience. I suspect he’s using his Green Dot money for little luxuries like cigarettes. I can’t help but think,
So what?
I used cash to hustle my way into the crucifixion ceremony in the Philippines in
Race Relations
. And the sperm bank in Palestine. Maybe I’ve just been greasing palms for too long.

When I first got to Mississippi, Jim Giles mentioned that one of Richard Barrett’s young men had been involved with a bomb crime.

It’s taken me a while, but I’ve found him.

The headline in the old newspaper reads:
MAN HELD ON WEAPONS
COUNT: 19-YEAR-OLD ALLEG
EDLY SOLD SUITCASE B
OMB TO UNDERCOVER AG
ENT FOR $130.

The journalist describes James Rankin shackled in a courtroom and his mother trying to pass him a Bible. The photograph with the article isn’t of them, though; it’s of Richard Barrett.

Two years earlier, in her home in Pennsylvania, James Rankin’s mother was flitting around the Internet when she stumbled onto the Nationalist Movement website. She began to chat with Richard online, and then on the phone. Richard told her he would help out her and her son. Soon she packed up her life and squeezed it in a car and drove to Mississippi. James and his mother moved into Richard’s crummy little house in Pearl.

Richard tells the journalist he tried his best to assist, but he could tell after several weeks it wasn’t going to work. He kicked them out of his home and canceled James’s Nationalist Movement membership. There
seem to be missing pieces to the story. Who invites a seventeen-year-old boy and his mother to come halfway across the country and move in?

The article tells me James and his mother’s old address—3175 US Highway 80—but cruelly does not attach a town name. There are “3175 US Highway 80s” dotted all over Mississippi, from Jackson to Pelahatchie. For two days my knuckles rap on doors across the state, until a man in one of the 3175s tells me he remembers the incident. But James didn’t live at his house, he lived across the road.

Across the road, a kind-faced old man opens the door. I hand him my business card.

“I’m writing a book about Richard Barrett,” I say.

“All right!” he wheezes. “I don’t even want . . . You’ve mentioned the wrong name there. So, get your ass off my place!”

“Okay, sorry,” I say, and back away. As I slide in my car I look back toward his doorway. The old man’s face has turned red. He’s ripped up my business card and is throwing it to the sky like confetti.

But I reddened the old man’s face for no reason. A Rankin County bail bondsman, who offered to help me out, found James Rankin. He’s boxed in a federal prison in Pennsylvania.

So now I’m sitting out on the balcony at my apartment, in the sun, scratching my whiskers with my non-cell-phone hand. A couple of black residents strolling to the pool are ruining my chance to paint the apartments as a quasi-gated white community.

“Did you hear about Richard being killed?” I ask James Rankin.

“Yes, I was in Z block in prison here in Lewisburg and it said that he got stabbed—it was in the
USA Today
. And, like, a week later, I got stabbed!” James laughs in an
ain’t life funny
way.

“Oh my God! Why did you get stabbed?”

“I just went in the wrong cage and I got stabbed by two people forty-five times and that was it.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Why did they stab you?”

“Don’t know, no idea. I thought that was funny that . . . what a coincidence, you know? He died and I almost died!” James chuckles again at the serendipity of their mutual stabbings.

James has to squeeze his six-foot-four body into his cell. “It is really small. It’s as small as they get—the smallest I’ve ever seen. You can’t really even, like, pace. They got two beds and they got a hot pipe that heats up for winter. They got a window that you open with a stick.”

Although two beds are squashed into the cell, James is alone, locked down for twenty-three hours a day. He passes his time reading German philosopher Oswald Spengler.

James tells me his dad darted out of his life early, leaving him and his mum alone.

“I have a sister named Lulu,” James says. “She’s in Peru prison right now on a cocaine conspiracy.”

Richard offered James an internship at the Nationalist Movement.

“What did the internship involve?” I ask.

“I was mowing his lawn,” James says. And James would also follow Richard about his Nationalist Movement headquarters as Richard dictated notes for the week’s telephone lecture. “You could call 601-FREE-TIP,” James says, “and he’d give this little dictum about what he believed and what was in the news.”

Richard would lecture James about the history of his Nationalist Movement while James mowed the lawn.

I tell James, “He said that he had a bad experience in the war fighting, ’cause he felt the black soldiers weren’t as loyal as the white soldiers.”

“He mentioned that one time he stayed back for something,” James says, “and the whole platoon got murdered. Had he not been off that day, he would have been killed also. He felt bad that he wasn’t there getting murdered with them, more than
Woo-hoo, I won!
He was more like,
I wish
, or
I’m saddened that I wasn’t there with them
. And he said that in such a subtle way that you know he didn’t say it to get an effect, like he had a heart of bravery. That was not, like, a key part of his talks or anything.”

“And do you know where he went off to when his . . . Where was he when his platoon was getting killed?”

“I can’t even remember,” James says.

That sounds like Richard. When the shit’s going down, he’s snuck off somewhere. If the story’s even true in the first place.

One afternoon, Richard summoned James to the backyard of his crummy little house and introduced James to a man in a khaki uniform. “He was about thirty or something. I think he was in the Ku Klux Klan more than anything.”

James does not want to name him. The two became close, “hunting and doing all that stuff—outdoor shit,” which included blowing things up. But the man turned informant for the law enforcement agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Or perhaps he was an informant the whole time. According to James, the man set him up. The man told the ATF James had manufactured some grenade bodies he hadn’t in fact manufactured. In the ATF’s version, after this tip-off, they had a female undercover agent buy a briefcase bomb from James Rankin, which she said was to kill her ex-husband. According to the report, “Rankin assured her that the bomb would kill him. If the bomb for some reason did not work, Rankin said he would give her the next one free.” After Rankin was arrested, explosives experts confirmed the bomb would indeed have worked.

James Rankin was sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary. Richard claimed to have no idea what they’d been up to.

“Do you think Richard actually did know you were involved in bomb-making?” I ask.

“I think . . . I think he did know,” James says. After all, Richard had made the introductions.

James doesn’t remember being booted out of the Nationalist Movement.

“It’s possible he said that for legal purposes,” James says. “He was always about the book and the law and that’s it. Everything was . . . That was his whole leverage that he took pride in, was the legalities and all that. It was . . . like, it would put a smile on his face if he found out that
something was legal. That was his whole thing—was legal, legal, legal, the law, and that was it.”

“But he introduced you to somebody who taught you how to make explosives. It sounds like maybe he didn’t mind if other people did things
not
by the book.”

“Correct, yeah,” says James. “I think you’re right about that.”

I ease into the awkward main game. Did Richard sleaze on James? Why did Richard invite a then seventeen-year-old stranger and his mother to move in? And why did he kick them out soon after?