God'll Cut You Down (4 page)

Tonight I go one step further. I slap my wallet onto the dining room table. I slide out my credit card. I bash in the numbers and hit confirm.

•   •   •

H
ow can I
not
get on a plane to Mississippi? I’m a Race Trekkie. I
met
the dead white supremacist. Why would God and/or Fate have arranged that if not for me to now get on that plane? I know that man at the book publisher sneered when I told him my idea.
John, a book is a little more difficult than a comedy TV show.
I know I have no book deal. But the trial’s not going to wait for me. There’s not going to be a
second
white supremacist who I hung out with murdered. This is my sweet spot, right? As well as race and money and sex and death, this thing with Richard Barrett is about small towns, tribalism, and old ways. I’m going to escape my ghetto, thank God, for a new one across the
sea.

MISSISSIPPI

I
t’s winter in Mississippi and drizzling. My feet squelch on my untied shoelaces as I jerk my luggage across the parking lot at Jackson–Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport.

Mississippi doesn’t waste any time. That
Jackson
is President Andrew Jackson, pro-slavery campaigner and master to three hundred slaves. That
Medgar Wiley Evers
was a black activist who collapsed and died outside his house in 1963 after a Klansman had shot him in the back. You land straight in a race war.

And Mississippi wants to get something else out in the open, too. Tennessee Williams is looking down at me like I’m a piece of dirt. John Grisham wants to stab me. William Faulkner sneers.

YES, WE CAN READ,
says the headline on the welcome billboard.
A FEW OF
US CAN EVEN WRITE.

Way to try to psych me out, Mississippi. Why not just put up a sign:
John, a book is a little more difficult than a comedy TV show
? All up, a dozen Mississippi writers scorn me from the billboard, glowing in the night, as I steer out of the airport.

One Mississippi stereotype collapses as I drive into downtown Jackson. Jackson is the state capital, but from the little I can see, the Mississippi with white plantation mansions is somewhere else. I pull in to the motel, a hunk of concrete in a parking lot of concrete in a city of concrete.

In the entrance, a black man in black is pacing with a thumping stick. I try to remember if motels usually have guards with thumping sticks out front.

The man attending the front desk has a neck that flops over his collar. He looks at me as if an elf has just turned up on his doorstep. Overseas folk, I gather, don’t really stop by downtown Jackson. Or is that white folk? A gold Freemason ring, of all things, twinkles on his fat black finger as he signs me in.

I’ll be the first person to stay in room twenty-two, he tells me. The motel fresh opened just two weeks ago.

Glue fumes follow me through the lobby, up the elevator, down the hall, into my room, and into the shower. Those twenty hours of planes. Mr. Sandman has not only sprinkled sand in my eyes, but grouted over my nostrils and under my fingernails. I scratch the asthma tickle in my chest.

I’m not going for the sympathy vote, but I can tell you I don’t really know what I’m doing. For weeks I’ve been reading true crime book after book after book for hints. I’ve got a month before the trial starts. You can’t just rock up on the day of the trial and expect to be able to work out what’s going on. That’s what I learned from
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
: Arrive early and befriend the local yahoos. That’s how you paint a picture of the town, understand the context. Start getting an idea of what really happened.

What have I got? I’ve got the names of the killer’s lawyers from the news reports: Chokwe Lumumba and Precious Martin. And what names they are. I don’t even know whether Precious is a man or a woman. And Chokwe? I’ve also got the number of a black journalist, Earnest McBride. And there’s this white separatist podcaster, Jim Giles.

Out of the shower, I pace, one towel as a kilt, one towel as a cape. I wiggle my toes. The carpet feels like mini golf Astroturf. Everything here, from the bed headboard to the venetian blinds, is both brand-spanking-new and about to fall apart, like counterfeit Nikes at the market. You know, I saw on an Internet message board that John Berendt fudged the start of
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
.

John Berendt barely knew the killer Jim Williams; he had never met him at the time of the murder, and the entire first chapter of the book in which Williams’s violent lover comes in and throws a fit is made up (or at least is told in first person with Berendt as the observer when in fact he wasn’t there).

The pedants are even after Truman Capote.
Truman said he went to the house on Tuesday! It was Wednesday!

And all those true crime books were written before the Internet. These days, you can’t get away with anything. Everyone has a Twitter account. Just hours after I was crucified (literally, by the way) in a tiny village in the Philippines for
Race Relations
, an Australian journalist had tracked down a local online to see if my version of events matched what he saw. I unpack my Flip video camera and my Zoom Dictaphone. I’ll get everything on tape, so none of my frenemies can trip me up later.

My eyes fall on the bedside table, as yet untouched by a guest’s hands.

My God! I skip over and creak open the drawer. Can it be true? Will I be the first to open a brand-new Gideon Bible?

The spine indeed squeaks a most pleasing never-been-opened squeak. I flick the pristine white pages to John 8:44.

You belong to your father, the devil.

Ever since the Grand Dragon quoted that to me, it’s been my fave! Because
You
is the Jews and John is my name.

My neck already aches, and I’ve only been lying here two minutes. My lungs clench up. I huff and huff. A green leech crawls from my mouth into my Delta Air Lines serviette.

I puff my Ventolin puffer five times, rub my neck, and fall asleep.

The sharp winter sun rises. Outside my window, down the road, four black convicts plod and mope. I know they are convicts because
CONVICT
is printed on the back of their green-and-white-striped shirts.
They’re stroking a fresh coat of white paint on a fire hydrant. A black bus with tinted windows, marked
SHERIFF
, trails the men by a hundred meters or so.

I flick on the coffee machine in the kitchenette.

“If it pleases the court, this is Jim Giles, and you’re listening to
Radio Free Mississippi
,” says my laptop on the kitchenette bench. Jim pulls up his theme song, “Amerika” by Rammstein.

Jim Giles is a white separatist who lives in Pearl, in Rankin County. More specifically, he lives in a trailer on his mother’s farm. Each weekday morning he hunches over a microphone in that trailer and broadcasts
Radio Free Mississippi
live over the Internet. This one isn’t live, though. I’m working my way through his old podcasts, from the weeks after Richard’s death.

“I had a Rankin County deputy sheriff call me from a crime scene,” Jim says, “Richard Barrett’s crime scene where he had been killed, and he was trying to figure out did I do it! He actually lived fairly close to me, Barrett did, I still don’t know where exactly.”

Jim Giles takes a sip of something in his trailer; I take a sip of coffee in the kitchenette.

“Who was Richard Barrett?” Jim asks. “Richard Barrett was an asset. Not to white people. He was an asset to the FBI and to the fucking media. He was a sick puppy, and I’m suggesting sexual perversion on his part. He was a little man. He was a lawyer. He was a scrawny man and he had a look in his face that was one of distortion, of perversion. He would call me on the telephone incessantly.”

You should know, white separatists are always kvetching about one another. In fact, most white supremacists hate: (1) white liberals, (2) white conservatives, and (3) other white supremacists, making it unclear which whites they have in mind when proclaiming their love of the white race. It’s not uncommon for them to accuse one another of working for the FBI, although already I’m hoping it’s true in Richard’s case.

“Richard Barrett, the most famous European supremacist Mississippi
has ever known.” That’s a big claim. Bigger than the Mississippi Burning Klansmen? Maybe he’s being sarcastic. “He is dead now, though, boys, if y’all didn’t know that! An African killed him, and I’d say that’s an appropriate end to his life. His demise was rooted in his conduct as a man. He was somewhere he did not belong. He was from . . . He wasn’t originally from the South. He was a Yankee from up in New Jersey, who came down here like those Freedom Riders.”

The Freedom Riders were civil rights activists in the 1960s. Odd comparison, but perhaps it’s a white supremacist insult. Barrett was an outsider, coming down to meddle in things that weren’t his birthright to meddle in.

“I have read brand-new Freedom Riders will be marching on Mississippi this month. Well, let me tell you, folks, this might be called the hospitality state, but I’m not offering you any hospitality. I hope an African kills you dead. And your demise will be rooted very appropriately where Richard Barrett’s demise was rooted. Come on down! I’m praying one of the Africans kills you dead as Abraham Lincoln.”

I’ve made Jim first on my list of people to pursue. He sounds emotional with nothing to lose. They’re the people who blurt out the truth. Back in Melbourne, I flicked a Facebook message to Jim. He never responded. But his home address is online. Jim had claimed in an interview he’s such a good fighter, he can beat up 95 percent of people in the street. So an antiracist activist posted a smart-aleck poll on a message board.

POLL: Can you beat up Jim Giles?

a. Yes

b. No

c. Maybe

Jim Giles responded to the poll.

In Reply To: POLL: Can you beat up Jim Giles?

I live at 6 Oakland Lane, Pearl, Mississippi 39208.

If any of you bitches want to fight me, meet there.

•   •   •

I
t’s still cement in all directions in downtown Jackson. In the daytime, even the sky is cement. Walking through the motel parking lot, I pull my jacket sleeves over my hands—the air cuts that cold. But when the sun elbows its way through the clouds now and then, it laser-beams my eyes.

The Stepford Wife inside the GPS says it’s forty-five minutes to Jim Giles’s. I want to know more about why he hated Richard so much. Does he really think that he was a sexually perverted FBI agent who was killed in some horrible misunderstanding? And I want to know what
he’s
like, the white supreme in the trailer.

The Stepford Wife directs me past vast abandoned concrete lots in Jackson, where things once were but I don’t know what. In one, the mangled metal innards of a building twist to the heavens. I can’t tell if the building was never fully built or never fully torn down. I’m then directed through a designated “historic district.” It tricks the eye. First glance, you see gorgeous, old-world white cottages, the charming heart of the American South. Second glance, you see they’ve been gutted, vandalized, stripped for firewood. Several sit there collapsed in on themselves.

By the way, where is everyone? Those extras in your life, lurking the streets, just aren’t here.

My flavorless red rental weaves onto I-55. Walmarts, Taco Bells, and Red Roof Inns build and build till logos stumble over one another in the blur out my side window. Half a Hank Williams CD later, that thins out and giant golden-tip oak trees take over. Not just lining the road but running thick and deep. Suddenly America has gone and Mississippi has appeared. I’ve crossed from Jackson into Rankin County, where Pearl is.

A silver castle sparkles in the distance. It rolls closer. Golden sunshine pings off the tips of the barbed wire of the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility. Is Vincent locked up in there? How many jails are there in Mississippi?

Opposite the prison is a sign saying
MORE SWEA
T IN TRAINING, LESS B
LOOD ON THE STREET
, with
Sweat
dripping sweat and
Blood
dripping blood. It’s the sign for the police academy.

I need to talk with the police, too, before the trial, get the lowdown.

As I push on, the grass bordering the road collapses into marshland. These could even be “backwoods.” I curve off the highway.

The trees reach over the road to touch one another, blocking out the sun, and now I bolt through green for miles and miles, until a parked fire engine throws a whoosh of red at my windshield. The trees become older and the trunks become thicker, the closer I get to Jim’s. I don’t think it’s just my imagination. Moss has climbed all over the drooping branches; the trees look like they’re dripping green fur.

I slow from a bolt to a crawl to a stop.

Jim Giles’s street is a dirt path off the road. Gently, I poke up the path toward a bend.

I hear before I see.

A wave of wounded howls bursts from beyond the bend and rolls toward my car.

Mississippi’s coming to get me.

Ten huge gray dogs yowl and leap in one tangled bundle behind barbed wire. This one airborne, then that one airborne, then that one, then that one, then that, like they are being juggled. Their teeth make it higher than the barbed wire, but the rest of them remains below. The farm is tucked away behind the bend, hidden from the main road and the world.

I step from the car. The sound of my door slamming behind me is
drowned out by the dogs. Their howls shatter through the air and through the ground, through my body and eardrums. My bearings are toppled, leaving me blinking, disoriented.

First thing. Triggering the hound alarm has tipped me past the point of no return. Any fear I have about Jim and his fighting must be folded away in my pocket for later.

Okay, the vehicle gate in front of me is shut. Okay, it’s a small farm. Okay, barbed wire holds in the farm on the three sides I can see. Okay, I’ll walk the perimeter to see whether there’s a walk-in gate.

I affect a confident stride.

“Jim? Jim! Hello? Hello?”

I’m reverse-psychology snooping.
If he’s shouting he can’t be snooping,
I hope Jim is thinking from wherever he is.

“Jim? Jim!”

The half of the farm closest to my car is green and open. A white trailer squats in the corner. I assume that’s the trailer where Jim flicks on a microphone and rants
Radio Free Mississippi
. Is Jim in there? If he is, doesn’t look like he’s coming out.

The other half of Giles Farm is tightly packed with oak trees, the ground coated with rusty leaves. I squint, and deep behind the black trees, I make out the blur of a two-story wooden house. Is Jim Giles in there, staring at me from the second-story window?