God'll Cut You Down (33 page)

The woman touches her red fingernail to one of the names on the page: André de Gruy. He was the lawyer who represented Daniel Earl Cox in 1995.

He works not far from here, she says.

The sixth floor of the Robert E. Lee Building holds the Office of Capital Defense Counsel, the people who’ll take care of you if you’re broke and the district attorney wants to execute you. Sitting at a wooden table in the corner is André de Gruy, with blue eyes and a Roman nose, gobbling on a chicken sub sandwich.

Yes, he remembers Daniel Earl Cox. Yes, he’s dead. No, he doesn’t keep copies of affidavits from 1995. No, he says indignantly, he was not the man who tipped off Mike Scott about the incident. He says he’s unclear about client-lawyer confidentiality when the client is dead, so he
can’t say more. He kicks me down the street to the Office of State Public Defender.

The Office of State Public Defender will take care of you if you’re broke and the district attorney
doesn’t
want to execute you. It looks like a bed-and-breakfast from the outside, or perhaps a nice, tucked-away Italian restaurant.

The bald public defender, William LaBarre, sits in a big office that’s a crack den of manila folders. They tower in piles all over his desk and floor.

I darted out of Mike Scott’s office four hours ago, and in some circular serendipity he happens to be in this building, walking past William’s door, as I begin to tell William my story. I had dropped Mike’s name to William not a minute ago. Am I a wizard?

“Hey, Mike,” shouts William, “you know this guy?”

“I do,” says Mike. “I did not send John over here, by the way.”

“He was asking me about Daniel Cox,” William says. “I don’t know if he’s dead.”

I tell William and Mike he is dead.

“I had a copy but I can’t find it,” says Mike.

William scans the crack den. “I had a copy of it, too.”

William remembers this particular document because soon after Richard Barrett was killed, André de Gruy foraged around his office for it so he could tip off Mike Scott about the incident.

William swats his hand on the far end of his desk like he’s killing a fly.

“Here it is,” says William.

William and Mike shrug back and forth about whether I’m allowed to have it. Usually, probably not, but the fact Daniel is dead may make things different.

William blows out his cheeks and slides the affidavit across the desk.

The Affidavit

In the Circuit Court of Hinds County, Mississippi

First Judicial District

State of Mississippi

VS No. 96-1-64 DANIEL COX, DEFENDANT

STATEMENT OF DEFENDANT

I am Daniel Earl Cox, the defendant in the above numbered case. I have been charged by way of indictment with the offense of grand larceny. I am giving this statement on my own free will and everything contained herein is true and correct to the best of my knowledge.

Sometime in June 1995 I was at a gas station in south Jackson, where I met a man who gave me some money for gas for my motorcycle. We discussed some work the man had for me clearing land. He told me where he lived, and I went to his house the next day.

The man invited me in his house, where he had a lot of photography equipment set up. The man started talking about taking photos of me. I felt he wanted me to pose nude for photos. I became very uncomfortable and let him know. As I started to leave, he became angry. He followed me out of the house and was yelling at me. I have not seen the man since that day, nor did I take anything from his house. The first I heard about his accusations were at the time of my arrest.

This is all I know about the accusations made against me.

A lot of photography equipment set up.
But Jesus! Why did it have to say “I felt”?
I felt he wanted me to pose nude for photos.
Why couldn’t it just be
He 100 percent, unambiguously, no question, asked me to pose nude and got angry when I refused?
But that’s not how this story works. It’s not how most things work.

Is it possible the difficulty I had in finding the document says as much about Richard as the document itself? I’ve never been sure about the high-power connections Richard claimed to have. But could those
connections have erased details off the police computer and emptied files from law enforcement filing cabinets?

I slide the affidavit into my folder, under the photo of Vincent McGee, topless in the hallway, with his eyes gently shut.

I’m running out of time in Mississippi, but not places to burrow for a smoking gun. Why, for instance, was Richard booted out of the Southern Hills Baptist Church in the 1990s? I suppose a book set in Mississippi was always going to end up in church at some point.

“Lord, we come to you with our families and friends who need you to intervene medically for them to live!” the pastor cries, thumping the altar. “Agnes is back in the hospital. She usually tells us everything to pray for. We pray for her knee operation, and hopefully she’ll be able to go home the next day!”

I’m squashed between the pastor’s wife and a man so sour, he’s twitching. Ten minutes ago joy stretched his smile and sparkled in his eyes, before I spoke these words:
I’m writing about Richard Barrett
. The man, Milton, said we could talk later in the back room.

Later, five church members squish around the table in the small back room. Three look like their anger may escalate into spasms. The pastor and his wife, however, are more recent additions to the church and have never met Richard Barrett.

Milton says this all started when Richard had bumbled into church one Sunday morning, walked down the apricot carpet, and asked the previous pastor, Pastor Farris, if he could join.

“I taught him many Sundays at my Sunday School class,” snaps another man at the table, Doug. “I had a great conflict with him over the fact that not only did he despise blacks, he despised Jews. My Savior, in the flesh, was born as a Jew!”

Whispers blew back to Pastor Farris and the congregation. Richard
had been on the radio, blurting that he and the church were fighting the same fight for segregation.

“This is a place of worship and service to the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords!” cries Doug. He waves his arms about and probably would wave more, but his elbow would smash the walls in this small room. “Well, Richard Barrett, when he came here, the main purpose in coming was because he felt that our ideas coincided with his ideas. And they only did in part.”

Pastor Farris called Richard to the church. He told Richard to stop yapping to the media that the church backed his views. Richard did not stop yapping. Pastor Farris summoned Richard again. This time for a meeting with the whole congregation. And despite agreeing not to bring the press, Richard marched up the stony road toward the church with news crews fluttering about.

Pastor Farris screamed, “Hold up!” He told the newspeople they’d have to wait at the tip of the church’s driveway. Richard marched into the church.

“We gave him a chance to speak,” Milton says. “We did it by bylaws of the church constitution. And a great majority of the church voted against him, you know, to get him excommunicated.”

Richard would not leave the church.

“Remember the night?” Milton asks the table. “He got so mad. He went to the piano.” Richard pounded away at “God Bless America,” over and over, refusing to stop, sweat flying from his face.

Even after that he didn’t let things rest, bashing on the door of Pastor Farris’s private home, threatening to bash Pastor Farris.

There’s a dimension to this story that is being flicked to me in crumbs, and it’s taking my brain a while to roll it together.

Did Doug say before that Richard Barrett, when he came here, the main purpose in coming was because he felt that their ideas coincided with his ideas
and they only did in part
? Which part?

Doug leans forward, agitated and defensive, and explains.

“Now, we inherited a school system called the Council school system.
It was given to us because the people who established it, basically, so far as school, so far as gatherings in the church and all that, they were basically for the white race.”

“The Council” is short for “the White Citizens’ Council.” After the US Supreme Court told government schools they must integrate in 1954, pro-white groups set up “segregation academies.” Because they were private institutions, they weren’t bound by the court ruling. Southern Hills Baptist Church took over several of these academies, although it ran them as separate entities. The church was overseeing these academies when Richard bumbled in and asked to join the congregation in the early 1990s.

Doug flaps his finger and his cheeks pink up.

“But the reason this church voted to accept that school system,” he cries, “was simply because we saw it as a means of extending the name of God in those young people. Not necessarily to teach racism, but to expand and extend the kingdom of God in their hearts.”

Thirty-five segregation academies survive in Mississippi today. That’s the figure from a Columbia University report. Richard didn’t spin a globe, poke his finger out, and randomly hit Southern Hills Baptist Church. He chose this church because it ran segregation academies.

When Richard blurted to the media that he and the church were fighting the same fight, he was kind of right.

James Rankin said that Richard was never more thrilled than when he discovered something was legal.
His whole leverage that he took pride in, was the legalities and all that.

Did some Mississippians not like Richard because he drew attention to things—ugly, lawful things—they would prefer remain discreet?

REAL TALK

T
he Peach Street Café does not sit in a street lined with peach trees; it sits in a megastore parking lot. Each time the door opens, the scent of exhaust fumes dances down the aisle and up my nostrils.

“I’m eighteen years old and in college now,” Chywanna tells me over the phone. “I’m studying dental hygiene.”

Chywanna is weaving down a corridor to class as we speak. Students bustling in the background is a nice alternative to the primal screams from prisoners in the East Mississippi prison for the criminally insane.

You know I got a new girlfriend, her name’s Chywanna?
Vincent told me on the road trip. They have since broken up, he updated me yesterday. It’s not always easy for me to keep up. Chywanna is different from China, the girl he pimped out, my notes confirm.

“I was in, what, fifth grade,” Chywanna says. “It was fifth or sixth grade when I was seeing Vincent around and I kind of had a little crush on him ’cause he’s cute, you know?” She giggles. “I mean, there was a lot of girls that had a crush on Vincent ’cause he was cute.”

Chywanna tells me she wasn’t aware she and Vincent were dating last week. They’ve only dated for one stretch of time: over a year ago, for a month and a half.

“And why did you break up?”

“Well, it’s just that my parents didn’t really agree with me talking to him, ’cause they really wanted me to be with somebody who was in school and trying to do something with their life.”

“And did he have tattoos on his face when you knew him?”

“Yes. He had, I think, six or five maybe. Yeah, my parents didn’t approve of that, either.”

“He doesn’t like being rejected, but he seems to do things that will make people reject him. Like, you know, getting tattoos on his face, for example.”

“Yeah. He really . . . I mean, the tattoos on his face really say that he really didn’t wanna do anything with his life. I don’t really like the fact that he had tattoos on his face, but he was a nice person toward me.”

One evening Chywanna told him it was over and watched him amble away down the street, slowly shrinking from a man to a speck in the distance. Two weeks rolled on before she saw him again. This time he shuffled into her family’s living room, through the television, in his yellow prison jumpsuit.

“Had you seen that side of him before?” I ask. “Like, him being angry enough to kill someone?”

“No, not at all,” she says. “He didn’t act that way toward me at all, so it was really shocking.”

“What about his mother?” I ask. “Did you like his mother, Tina?”

“Yeah, she was pretty nice. She was really nice, but I mean, he, he would disrespect her a lot, though. Like, you’re supposed to talk to your mom in a respectful way, but he didn’t. It’s almost like he was a controlling husband over his mom, instead of his mother’s son.”

Chywanna clucks, then blows a little huff.

“I feel like, if I would never have broken up with him, I feel like I could’ve at least stopped him from killing the man. You know how somebody makes you mad and you call your friend and you’re like, ‘Man, guess what happened to me today? This man tried to do this and this. I think I’m going to do this to the man for doing that to me, you know?’
So I thought maybe he would tell me about it, and I would be, ‘You know, I don’t think that’s a good idea.’”

Chywanna says he called her on the morning after he’d lit the house on fire but before the police pointed a gun in his face and cuffed him.

“He told me that he wanted to see me, but I couldn’t because I was at school, on my way to class. I was like, ‘I can’t.’”

“Yeah, it was probably lucky you couldn’t catch up with him, because everyone who he rang up that morning and who met him ended up being dragged to the police station.”

“Really?”

“Don’t tell him I told you this, but I think you’re very lucky to get away from him.”

“Everybody says that.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I can’t help thinking about Daisy and China. “He’s a very nice . . . On one hand he’s very . . . I’m just telling you this, you know, just in case . . . Not that, you know, you don’t know how to take care of yourself, but I’ve been talking to him a bit and he’s definitely a bit volatile and prone to breaking into violence and stuff. So, yeah, you should be careful. But he’s going to be in jail probably for decades, so you should be okay.”

“Yeah. And he . . . he calls me all the time and he’s talking about he wants to marry me and stuff like that, but I don’t want to tell him that I have moved on—but I have.”

I think of how a normal family life stopped Chywanna from being drawn into the madness.

Because she was off to school, she couldn’t catch up.

“Mike Scott found another man,” I tell Vincent, straightening the affidavit on my coffee table. “Another man complained Richard Barrett sexually harassed him.”

I slurp a mouthful of black coffee.

“For real?” Vincent says, surprised.

I tell him for real.

“Damn, yeah? I don’t know nothin’ about it, right? Like I said, the motherfucker ain’t did me no kind of way like that, you hear?”

I squint at the topless photo of Vincent next to the affidavit.

“Someone also sent Mike Scott a photograph of you. In the mirror it looks like Richard Barrett is taking the photo of you.”

“No! Hell no!” Vincent laughs, then shouts, “Hell no! That’s bullshit! The only motherfucker who takes photos of me is me!”

“There’s someone’s arm.” I laugh, too. “He definitely looks white.” I roll my finger down Vincent’s arm. “I didn’t know you had a Satan’s star on your shoulder.”

“Man, listen, I got a whole lot of tattoos you don’t know about. That ain’t no satanic star, though. I ain’t no satanist, you hear?” he says. “You tryin’ to make me out to be a devil worshipper?”

“No, no, no.”

Vincent tells me he’s still trying to get me a visitation. I tell him I’m leaving in exactly a week.

“Now tell me,” he says, “what all you and Chywanna talked about me? You weren’t talkin’ that sideways shit. You didn’t bring up that bullshit that he tried to make sexual advances?”

“It was in the newspapers,” I say, weaseling out of the question. “People know about it. They don’t know if it’s true, but they’ve heard about it.”

A primal “AAAARGGHHH” ricochets off the walls in Meridian’s East Mississippi Correctional Facility.

“Hold up!” Vincent says to me. “Hold up!”

Vincent pushes his face to the bars to suss the source of the
AAAARGGHHH
.

“Someone’s started a fire or some dumb shit,” Vincent tells me.

“Is everybody mentally unstable in Meridian?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Vincent says. “I ain’t got no mental problems, though.”

I laugh. “Well, you know, you do seem to have a propensity for violence.”

“Man,” he says, exasperated, “everybody’s violent, goddamn it.”

“But most people don’t do all the violent stuff you do. I’m just being honest with you.”

“I’m sayin’ everybody is violenter than me in prison. I’m the only person that seems like I’m sane. Everybody else is crazy.”

“Do you remember being really young and not being violent?”

“I used to, like, find dogs and shit, you hear? We’d take those bitches and hang them in trees.”

I put down my coffee. Have I misheard or misunderstood? My arms don’t think so. They’ve prickled up with goose bumps.

“You hung dogs in trees?”

Vincent names a relative. It’s a name I haven’t heard before.

“He started payin’ me to catch them. He used to pay me to go catch everybody else’s dogs in the neighborhood, you hear? And shit, I’d bring them back to him, he’d take ’em bitches and tie a rope around their necks and hang ’em bitches from a tree, you know?”

Vincent watched his relative tape shut the mouths of the dogs. Vincent stood back from the tree. His relative drifted to his car, parked nearby, and creaked opened the door. Pit bull puppies scuttled out of the backseat.

His relative was training the pits for fighting.

He led the puppies to the tree. The neighborhood dogs flapped on the branches, wailing through the tape. The pit bulls tore up the dogs.

The pit bulls would eventually calm down, and his relative would herd them back to the car. Vincent would gaze at the carcasses swinging from the tree. It wouldn’t take long for the flies to arrive.

“How old were you?” I ask.

“I was about eight,” Vincent says with a slurred, pained giggle. “He’s the one who put me on to this shit.”

“That’s a pretty horrific thing for you to have to see.”

“That’s what I used to do. I used to fight any motherfuckin’ thing that would fight—cats, dogs, chicken. Oh man! I used to fight motherfuckin’ little black ants with the little pincer on their mouths!”

Vincent giggles a woozy giggle.

“But when did you move on to people?”

“Why you tryin’a make it seem like I’m so violent, man, when I’m so friendly, I’m so nice and pleasant?”

Vincent’s serious. I chuckle.

“I mean, I think there are two sides to you,” I say. “I think you’re nice, but you’re also violent. I’m just trying to understand what happened in your life that made you end up being able to stab people.”

“I’m gonna tell you what happened, right? I finally realized either you were doin’ it to them or they were gonna do it to you, you know what I’m sayin’? In this world, nigga, you gotta be . . . It’s a dog-eat-dog world, you hear? Only the strong survive—that’s my motto. Only the strong survive, and the weak die.”

Vincent says that aged ten he would shoot dice with his adult cousins. They’d jump him if he won and he’d have to fight to keep his winnings.

“So, you know what I’m sayin’? I’ve been fighting for my life. All my life, man.”

A clang echoes down the corridor in the East Mississippi prison.

“Hold up,” says Vincent, “hold up.”

Cicadas scream outside my apartment, and the sky is turning purple.

A minute later Vincent whispers in my ear.

“Hey, listen,” he says, “talk down low ’cause there’s lots of police around here, you hear?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“But I’m gonna need you to do somethin’ for me, you hear? I need some G-Dot cards, you hear? I got some big business coming through,
you hear? Gonna need twenty-five hundred. And get it in single one-hundreds, you hear?”

“I can’t give you twenty-five hundred dollars. I don’t have much money left,” I say. “You’re going to have to figure out another plan.”

“No,” he says. “
You
the plan.”

I laugh. “You’re going to need another plan.”

“Uh-uh,” he says. “No. Uh-uh.”

“No, uh-uh,” I mimic back.

“Say, John Safran?” he says.

“Yes?”

“I can get you killed from right behind this door, man. Real talk.”

“You can get me killed from behind your door?”

“Real talk,” he says. “I can get your motherfuckin’ ass killed from behind this door, if you playin’. I’ve got niggers right now, on my honor, that can come up to your motherfuckin’ house and put your brains outside the curb.”

“Pardon?”

My “pardon” is me buying time to sort this out in my head, while fear rushes through me.

“I said, by a motherfuckin’ player, I can get you killed in your motherfuckin’ house tonight. I got the address on the letter: 5201 Lakeland Boulevard, Flowood. Apartment F58. Motherfucker’s brains be in the street.”

“That’s rather scary, you know?” I say. “It’s pretty scary to hear that. I don’t understand when you say things like that whether you’re being serious or you’re being funny.”

“No, I ain’t laughing. I’m serious. Serious as a motherfuckin’ heart attack or a stroke.”

“Jesus!” I say, then, “Mmmmm,” not sure where to take this next.

“Listen, this is real nigga shit,” he says. “I’m gonna need you to send some flowers to somebody, too, you hear? I gotta get her address tomorrow and call you back.”

Vincent hangs up, ending the strangest turn of conversation I’ve ever had in my life.

The purple sky turns black, and I fall asleep to cicada screams.

My eyes snap open at two in the morning. I’m sure I can hear a key rattling in the keyhole. I roll my shoulders back and breathe. Everything soft is loud—the refrigerator hum, the tap drip, the breeze on the window.

“I’m leaning toward not sending them flowers to no bitch,” Vincent tells me. As usual he’s called me. He still holds control as to when we talk. “I ask myself, what has the bitch done for me, you hear?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I understand.”

I’m stretched out on a lounge chair under the gazebo by the pool.

My non-cell-phone hand is thumbing through Ann Rule’s
The Stranger Beside Me: The Shocking Inside Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy
. I’m hunting down the chunk about Ted witnessing animal cruelty as a child.

Here we go: Ted Bundy watched his grandfather kick family dogs till they cried and swing neighborhood cats by their tails.

“I’m thinking,” says the man who watched the dogs sway from the tree in Jackson, “I think it should go to my mom or my grandma.”

I plonked this thought in Vincent’s mind at the start of this call. That perhaps he would like me to drop flowers to his mother and grandma as well as this mystery girl.

I, of course, have my reason for plonking this in his mind. It would allow me to circumvent the unspoken Tina ban and knock on her door.
Vincent asked me to deliver these flowers.
And Vincent will have to cough up an address for his grandmother, too. Who knows what detail she’ll add to the story of Vincent McGee?

“Hey, wait a minute,” Vincent says, “actually I might send some to that bitch. At the same time, I don’t really know.”

“What’s the longest,” I ask, “you’ve ever gone out with a girl?”

“Couple of months, like, three months, some shit like that.”

“That’s not very long.”

“At the same time, it’s like—this is what I’m saying. I always been in jail, man. I go to jail so much, that’s how my relationships end, you know what I mean? No bitch never break up with me while I’m on the street. But when I’m back in the penitentiary and shit, we break then, you see? That’s why I say I gotta murblestatic them all over, see the little girl, the honey, before I try to send them some flowers and shit. I don’t know murblestatic but she murblestatic gave them back, you hear?”