Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  But arriving late on a Saturday night, I knew little about the place, except what a gas-station attendant told me. The Kentucky side of Guthrie was dry, she said. If I wanted a beer, there were two bars in Tennessee, just across the state line at the southern edge of town. “There’s Billy’s, which is kinda country-and-western,” she said, “and Redbone’s. That’s a biker bar. Real bad news.”

  The music at Redbone’s blared too loudly for conversation. So I sipped my Budweiser and studied the walls. Amidst the usual biker-bar decor—pictures of half-naked women splayed across motorcycles, a pistol mounted beside the words “We Don’t Bother Calling 911”—I noticed a curious anthology of hand-scrawled verse. The poems mingled biker and Confederate themes, evoking nihilistic scenes of the ruined South as viewed from the back of a Harley.

  It was 1865, homes burnt to the ground,

  Everything lost, I took my stand.

  Riding through the fog,

  Rebel flag in hand,

  Fighting for my freedom,

  Fighting for my land.

  Beneath the poetry appeared a cryptic insignia: “F.T.W” Between songs on the jukebox, I turned to a man on the next stool and asked what F.T.W stood for.

  “Who’s asking?” he replied. “F-B-I?”

  This provoked howls from the bar. “I’m a writer, not a cop,” I said, inanely flashing a spiral pad with “Reporter’s Notebook” stenciled on the cover.

  The man looked at me dubiously, but muttered, “F.T.W Fuck the World.”

  Another man, bulging from a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt, lurched over and bellowed, “Write this in your damned notebook. We got a few people standing up for white rights. The rest are pussies who let niggers trample all over them. Like those boys who shot Westerman did t’other day.” He reeled for a moment. “You’ve got your KKK and your BBB—that’s Badass Black Brothers. Two sides of the same coin. If they want war, come on. Let’s get it on.”

  He sat down with a thud and gazed blankly at a TV behind the bar. Male ice skaters in tights glided across the screen. As I scribbled down his words, I sensed someone looming behind me. Then a hot, beery breath whispered in my ear: “That shorthand or chicken scratches?”

  I looked up to face a leather-clad giant with bloodshot eyes and long, straggly hair. “Shorthand,” I lied, hoping he couldn’t decipher my notes about swastikas and lynchings. He bent down, tore a few pages from my notebook, and stuck the wadded paper in his mouth. “You know,” he said, chewing loudly, “I shit out a turd this morning that was bigger than you.”

  Unsure as to the appropriate response, I glanced around the bar for support. The other drinkers had vanished into a cloud of cigarette smoke by the pool table. Only Redbone remained, eyeing us warily from behind the bar. “The question is,” my inquisitor resumed, “should I beat the shit out of you right here and now, or let it slide this time?”

  The veins in his neck began throbbing. One of his hands curled into a fist. I weighed whether to take off my glasses, so shards wouldn’t lodge in the back of my head, or keep them on in the faint hope that spectacles might cause the giant to let it slide this time. A snatch of poetry swam on the wall behind his head.

  Like the Rebels of Old,

  Still Bursting With Pride,

  Don’t Take no Shit,

  On Harleys We Ride.

  I eased slowly off my stool, nodded toward the door and said, “Maybe I should just—”

  The man grabbed my coat and ripped it cleanly from armpit to wrist. Redbone lunged across the bar and seized the man’s arm, shouting “Cool it!” I ducked under the giant and dove through the door, sprawling on the gravel outside. Then I sprinted toward the lights of town. Slowing to a jog, I reached the Kentucky line and a sign that read:

  WELCOME TO GUTHRIE

  BIRTHPLACE OF ROBERT PENN WARREN

  FIRST POET LAUREATE OF THE UNITED STATES.

  DURING ROBERT PENN WARREN’S childhood at the start of the century, Guthrie was a raw railroad town ringed by fields of dark-leaf tobacco known as “the Black Patch.” Warren, who lived in Guthrie until he was fifteen, later described his hometown as “very un-Southern,” a new community that lacked “a sense of belonging in any particular place or having any particular history.” Eighty years later, Guthrie exhaled the depleted air of a thousand other towns across the back-country South, bypassed by the interstate and drained of vitality by decades of migration to the city. Guthrie’s main street wound past a Piggly Wiggly, a pool hall, The American Cafe (“country cookin’ makes you good lookin’”), a hog-feed elevator, a garment factory, and convenience stores crowded with people scratching lottery tickets (locals drank on the Tennessee side of town but could gamble only in Kentucky).

  At the end of the strip, next to the Tinytown Baptist Church, I found a rundown place called the Holiday Motel. The motel’s neon sign flickered WE ARE REASONABLE, which sounded comforting after the conversation I’d just had at Redbone’s Saloon. A large woman in a baggy housedress sat smoking behind the reception desk.

  “I’d like a single room for the night,” I said.

  “Why is that?” She had a German accent and stroked a schnauzer in her lap. A German flag and pictures of the Bavarian Alps adorned the wall behind her.

  “Why do you ask?”

  She shrugged. “Your car plates are out of state. Your coat is torn. You look pale. There is a Holiday Inn over in Clarksville, much nicer than this.”

  I told her I wanted to stay in Guthrie to learn about Michael Westerman’s shooting. Then I mentioned my visit to Redbone’s.

  “You crazy?” she exclaimed. “When that bar closes, that’s when I turn on my No Vacancy sign. They stupid to begin with, but once they start drinking and doing drugs, they have no brains left.”

  As I filled out a registration form, a police scanner crackled behind the desk. “I’m nosey,” the woman said, twiddling the dial and looking through the motel’s picture window. “Not much ever happens here, until they shoot that Westerman boy.” She chuckled. “You know, I think there’s some pride. Guthrie had its first drive-by.”

  I sat up most of the night with Maria Eskridge, sipping peppermint schnapps and sifting the trove of newspaper articles and gossip she’d collected on the Westerman killing—and on everything else in Guthrie. The daughter of a Munich brewmaster, Eskridge had married an American soldier and moved to his native Kentucky. While he worked a small farm, she ran the motel, which she freely conceded was a fleapit. “Holiday Motel—it is a sort of joke,” she said. “Who takes a holiday in Guthrie?” But she loved to gossip, and the motel gave her ample chance for that. She herself had become part of local lore, a strange blend of Bavaria and Kentucky who spouted things like “kiss my grits” with a guttural accent. “People here call me the crazy Kraut of Tinytown,” she said.

  But after thirty years in Guthrie, Eskridge still felt like a stranger, never more so than in the days since Michael Westerman’s death. She told me about the crude, scrap-lumber crosses that burned in the night, and about Michael Westerman’s funeral procession; rebel flags flapped from the 120-car caravan trailing the hearse to Guthrie’s all-white graveyard. Now, well-dressed strangers had begun appearing in town, distributing literature that proclaimed Michael Westerman a Confederate martyr, the first man to die for the rebel flag in 130 years.

  Aryan Nation and other white supremacist groups had also turned up in Guthrie. “I know from Aryans,” Eskridge said, fingering one of the groups flyers. She reached inside her desk and pulled out a German newspaper clip from the 1950s. It showed a shirtless man with a shaved head, harnessed to a road grader. Eskridge translated the headline: “The Galley Slaves of Our Times.” The man in the picture was her father, imprisoned at Dachau during World War II for speaking against the Nazis. “That’s what an Aryan nation looks like,” she said, studying the photograph.

  Eskridge had one other thing to show me. She led me across the motel’s forecourt to a fence enclosing picnic tables, beach umbrellas and a recta
ngle of patchy grass. “That used to be our swimming pool,” she said. Guthrie had no public parks or pools, so locals paid two dollars to swim at the motel. Then, two summers ago, several black kids paid their money and jumped in. “It was like we sent an electrical charge through the water,” she said. “As soon as the blacks got in, all the whites got out.” Whites demanded that Eskridge tell the blacks to leave. Her response: kiss my grits.

  When whites kept complaining, Eskridge and her husband filled the pool with pond dirt rather than let it become the scene of racial strife. A dogwood and weeping willow now sprouted in the deep end.

  “Enjoy your stay in Guthrie,” she said, handing me a room key and retreating inside with her schnauzer.

  I STAYED TWO WEEKS at the Holiday Motel, enduring its lumpy beds and stained carpet and threadbare covers, which forced me to deploy my ripped jacket as an extra blanket. Each morning, I breakfasted on a Styrofoam cup of watery coffee and a scratch-off lotto ticket from the convenience store across the road. I visited Robert Penn Warren’s childhood home, a Victorian bungalow at the corner of Third and Cherry, now a well-kept but forgotten shrine open only a few hours each week. I went to church on Wednesday night and heard a two-hour sermon titled: “If you were arrested and charged with being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” Most other nights, I drank at Billy’s, where the same two songs—“If Hell Had a Jukebox” and “I Like My Women a Little on the Trashy Side”—played over and over again as the barmaid wailed along. I decided that if hell had a backwater, it would look a little like Guthrie, Kentucky.

  But what Guthrie lacked in atmosphere it made up for in intrigue. The mystery began with the circumstances surrounding Michael Westerman’s death. Westerman and his wife, Hannah, had been high school sweethearts, about to enjoy their first night out since the birth of their twins five weeks before. They planned to buy Hannah a denim dress before going to dinner in Nashville, an hour south of Guthrie. En route, at about four o’clock, Michael stopped for gas at a convenience store called Janie’s Market, on Guthrie’s main street.

  Westerman’s truck caught the eye of four black teenagers who were parked in a car nearby. The pickup was hard to miss: a big red Chevy 4×4 with a jacked-up chassis, a rebel-flag license plate, and a large rebel flag flapping from a pole in the truck’s bed. The car’s driver, Damien Darden, thought he’d seen the flag-waving truck before, cruising through Guthrie’s black neighborhood.

  “Let’s go whip that dude,” he told his friends, speeding off to recruit others for the brawl. Because the Westermans’ truck had dark tinted windows, Darden and his friends couldn’t see that the pair inside were former neighbors and classmates.

  Michael Westerman pumped gas and bought watermelon bubble gum, then sat chatting in the cab with Hannah. The two weren’t in any hurry. They’d left the twins with Michael’s parents and had the whole evening to themselves. Hannah told police that Michael had teased her and joked about “getting some” later that night.

  Damien Darden returned to Janie’s Market trailed by two other cars, and pulled alongside the pickup. Several of the black teenagers later testified that a white hand reached out the truck’s sliding back window and shook the rebel flag. One of them said he heard someone in the truck shout “Niggers!” Hannah denied that she or Michael had said or done anything.

  Michael pulled out of Janie’s and drove south into Tennessee. Hannah glanced back and saw the three cars from Janie’s trailing behind. “Kick it!” she said, and Michael floored the accelerator, hurtling down the two-lane highway.

  At about the same moment, in the backseat of Darden’s car, a seventeen-year-old named Freddie Morrow told his friends he had a gun. “No you don’t,” the others taunted. Freddie reached inside his belt and brandished a cheap .32 pistol. Damien Darden sped up, gaining ground on the flag-bearing truck.

  A few miles south of Guthrie, near a forlorn railroad siding, Freddie fired wildly out the window. Then the gun jammed. Damien accelerated and pulled into the oncoming lane. He and Michael now raced side by side, going eighty-five. Michael shoved Hannah to the floor. Freddie unjammed his gun, stuck his hand out the window and fired again.

  Hannah didn’t hear the blast but she saw her husband clutch his side and moan, “Oh my God, they shot me.” As the truck slowed, she somehow scrambled over Michael into the driver’s seat. Damien’s car had stopped in the road just ahead; another car from Janie’s pulled up behind the pickup. Hannah thought the cars were trying to box her in. So she swerved off the road, did a U-turn, and sped back toward Kentucky as Freddie fired again.

  By the time Hannah reached a hospital emergency room, Michael was in shock. A bullet had passed through his heart. Surgeons closed the wound and rushed him by ambulance to Nashville, where he died the next day. When police searched the Westermans’ truck, they found a single bullet hole in the door, Michael’s loaded .380 automatic on the floor, and his black cowboy hat with a big wad of watermelon bubble gum stuck to the brim.

  The episode bristled with question marks. Who was Michael Westerman and what did he mean by flying the flag in a largely black town on Martin Luther King’s birthday weekend? Why had this so provoked Damien and his friends that they chased down and killed a white man in broad daylight? And why had violent rage over the rebel flag erupted here of all places, in Warren’s “un-Southern” hometown, in a state that never joined the Confederacy?

  On a Sunday morning, I went looking for clues in the Todd County seat of Elkton. Located at the county’s main crossroads, ten minutes north of Guthrie, Elkton was home to the high school that both the Westermans and their assailants attended. It was also here that Michael had sometimes cruised with his rebel flag, circling the courthouse square and crawling past an adjoining stretch of fast-food joints. In a dry county with no mall or movie theater (or even a stoplight), looping between the Dairy Mart and the Dairy Queen provided what little action was available. Teenagers called this 1950s-style ritual “flipping the dip.”

  When I arrived, the dip was flipping with rebel-flag-toting trucks. There were also two cars with holes crudely drilled in their rooftops and flagpoles poking out, like mutant hair follicles. One member of this ersatz color guard wore a rebel kepi and carried a loaded .22 pistol in his lap. He told me he’d only begun flying the flag since Michael’s death. “One goes down, two fill his space,” he said. Then, flag hoisted high, he shouted “These colors don’t run!” and sped off toward the Dairy Queen.

  Nearby, a dozen people in jungle fatigues and combat boots stood at strategic points around the square, handing out flyers to the after-church traffic. I approached the troop’s leader, a bearded man with a walkie-talkie, and asked what was up. “Literature roadblock,” he said, handing me several flyers. The first was headlined: “The only Reason You are White! Today is Because Your Ancestors Practiced & Believed in Segregation YESTERDAY!” The second commanded: “I WANT YOU FOR THE ALMIGHTY KU KLUX KLAN!”

  The literature was signed “Yours for White Victory, Ron Edwards, Grand Dragon for Christ, Race & Nation.” This was the same bearded man who stood before me, barking un-dragonlike orders into his walkie-talkie. “Cross the street only on the crosswalks, and stay on the goddam sidewalks!” he commanded his underlings. Then to me: “I don’t want us breaking any laws.”

  Ron Edwards was a water-blaster by trade and ruler over “the Realm of Kentucky.” Two subalterns shared the corner with him: an Exalted Cyclops named Jim, and a Klaliff named Velma. Velma wore furry earmuffs, snug booties and green mittens with her military fatigues. “Jelly doughnut?” she asked, proffering a cardboard box.

  Passing cars honked and gave the thumbs up. Several motorists swapped church pamphlets—“What Must I Do To Be Saved?”—for the Klan’s exclamatory literature: “Justice For Our People NOW!” Then a burly pedestrian in a farm cap stopped to grouse, “I’ve had enough of niggers telling us what to do.”

  Jim and Velma quickly escorted the man to a rusted Buick, which served a
s the Klan’s recruiting office. I tagged along and climbed into the backseat with Velma while Jim sat up front, delivering the Klan’s sales pitch. “You move up quickly,” Jim said. “Any day now I’m going to be promoted to Great Giant.”

  “My son just joined,” Velma added, “and he’s a Grand Titan already!”

  The burly man seemed impressed. Jim went on: “You can get started today for just twenty-five dollars and two photos, and if your wife wants to join, too, the price is the same.” He paused. “That’s sort of a special we’ve got going this month.”

  While Jim kept pitching God, Race and Nation, Velma showed me snapshots of her grandchildren. She talked about her crafts shop, the macramé she’d made for Christmas, and an upcoming cross-burning she hoped to attend. Before going, Velma had to pass an exam that would qualify her for full citizenship in the Realm. “It’s like a driver’s test where they try and foul you up,” she said. “I need to know the whole book of knowledge. Like if someone asks, ‘Why do we hate Jews?’ I didn’t know before, but I found out. It was Jews that put Christ on the cross.”

  If she passed the exam—and avoided Klan infractions, such as committing a felony or sleeping with a black man—Velma would don a satin hood and robe for the cross-burning, which marked her full “naturalization” into the Klan. I asked why she and the others weren’t wearing their hoods and robes today.

  “It’s a good look,” she said. “But we’ve had a lot of events lately. The cleaning bills will kill you.”

  THE KLAN HANDED OUT 750 flyers and signed up ten new acolytes before melting back into the Kentucky hills, leaving Elkton Sunday-quiet. The only place open on the square was a luncheonette called the Town Grill. A petition lay on the counter: “We the undersigned believe the rebel mascot should stay at Todd County schools. We are the South, let us wave our pride.” The waitress explained that Todd County Central High School called its sports teams “the Rebels” and took as its logo two flag-waving Confederates. But just before Michael Westerman’s shooting, a committee of prominent citizens had quietly recommended that the school drop the rebel motif to ease racial tension.