God'll Cut You Down (39 page)

“Well, you’ve kind of screwed it up a bit by being in prison, haven’t you?”

“Man, I told you, I ain’t gonna be locked up long, you know what I’m sayin’? I’m talking about I got a plan to get up out of here, man.”

“Which ocean do you want to go to?”

“I’m gonna go to the Atlantic Ocean,” Vincent says. “Where that located at?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure you can get there. There’s lots of good oceans in Australia if you manage to smuggle your way to Australia.”

“I can smuggle myself to Australia?” he says hopefully.

“Yeah,” I say, in the moment, half believing he can.

•   •   •

F
rom my window seat I can see Jackson shrinking below me. I crack my neck.

I pull
The Commission
from my backpack, turn on my reading light, and continue where I left off.

So many wild stories. Richard is fighting with his father. Richard tells him he killed a wildcat and his dad doesn’t believe him. He’s angry at Richard for lying. Richard returns to the woods and drags the wildcat back home. His father still doesn’t believe him.
“How do I know, Richard, someone else didn’t kill the cat? Things are not always what they appear to be.”

Then on page 282, Richard writes—although he didn’t know it at the time—an obituary to himself and his half-made-up-in-his-head white nationalist way of life:

Swallows return to Capistrano, elephants to their burial ground, and salmon to their birthplace. Englishmen go down to the sea in ships. Without the flock, the herd, the community, or the nation, the species withers, falls prey to its enemy, and dies
out.

EPILOGUE #1

EPILOGUE #2

EPILOGUE #3

April Fools’ Day 2014, an e-mail pops into my inbox that I assume is a joke. It says that Vincent, not three years into his sentence, has been released from prison.
This offender will not be under constant correctional supervision. If you have any concerns about your immediate safety, contact your local law enforcement agency
. I soon learn it is not a joke. That day, Vincent, like Richard, had found himself facing a man with a knife. The man, a fellow prisoner, stabbed him through the eye. One month later I’m on the phone to Vincent’s stepfather, Alfred Lewis. He tells me the last time he saw Vincent he was breathing through a machine, not moving, his head wrapped like a mummy. Doctors had removed the eye. Alfred tells me authorities won’t keep the family updated on his condition. At time of publication Vincent has been moved back into prison, into the hospital unit of Mississippi State Penitentiary.

May 2013, Chokwe Lumumba is elected mayor of Jackson. February 2014, Chokwe is found dead. A Mississippi councilman says he was assassinated:
So
many of us feel, throughout the city of Jackson, that the mayor was murdered
. National black leader Louis Farrakhan eulogizes:
You who know Mississippi . . . a black man being mayor and trying to do right by all the people is not a mayor that those people want
. The more conventional explanation is sixty-six-year-old Chokwe suffered heart failure.

May 2014, Precious Martin dies in an accident when his four-wheeler ATV hits a curve and flips.

Was I a naive fan when I reenacted Billy Idol’s photoshoot or did I already sense I was playing with fire? By the time I met Richard Barrett, in the last US state to fly the Confederate flag, I was an unambiguous Race Trekkie. As was Richard, in his own way. He showed off his bona fides in pamphlets like this one, grinning with Klansman Edgar Ray Killen, the subject of
Mississippi Burning
.

The coonhounds of white separatist Jim Giles seemed to be able to sniff out that I wasn’t of pure Aryan stock, despite my blending in with a baby-blue sweater. Below, journalist Earnest McBride. He had the leads, but I had the car. What a match.

Snooping around the Murder House. (Are you even allowed to snoop around the Murder House? “Easier to get forgiveness than permission” is something I learned early in my snooping career.)

Poking my nose where it arguably didn’t belong didn’t always get results. No smoking gun (or literal one) in the garbage behind Richard’s Nationalist Movement headquarters. But in a drawer in a trailer in a forest there were photos of him in his army days and as a child with his sister. A
sister
! Could I find her?