Cindi showed up a short time afterward. She’s a small woman, not much taller than five foot four, and was dressed in an oversized pink T-shirt, shorts with a plaid design, and a ball cap that read “Chattanooga.” We greeted each other gingerly after she climbed up the porch steps. Shannon asked if she felt like talking. Mosquitoes were swarming, actively biting us all. “Let me go get something,” she said. Then she asked to go sit in the garage. “I’m from the dust,” she said after we had sat down to talk, referring to the homes she grew up in without floors in nearby Ashland, about forty-five miles south.
Cindi confirmed that she was still in touch with her family there and had been in Ashland when her husband had been killed. They were at least temporarily estranged, although she wouldn’t discuss the details. None of their problems dampened her feelings of loss. “I miss my husband. Whatever he done, I miss him,” she said to us with an earnestness that belied much pain. “What brought me here was Dwight. That’s my best friend, my lover, my husband. Me and him had a connection that didn’t no one else have in Holly Springs.”
Cindi had come here to be with him in 2009, only a month after she had met him, after many late-night phone conversations. She thought she’d just come for the weekend, but she never went back. She referred to herself and Dwight as the “Bonnie and Clyde of Holly Springs” without irony. They’d coordinate their clothing in order to seem more like a unit. Her Christianity assures her that he’s now watching over her and that he has no worries. “Every day that we wake up, we got problems. Good, bad, problems,” she said, smiling, as if to reiterate that she was almost happy for him not to have to struggle so much anymore. “The average person wouldn’t want to live how we live for seven days. You’d want to kill yourself.”
Dwight and Cindi met Paul in 2011. He was having trouble digging a ditch on his property as they passed by on a hot day. They offered to help him. Cindi spoke about him with great affection. Her grief wasn’t limited to Dwight. “People never knew our struggle. That’s how we ended up meeting Paul. Paul has pictures of us on top of his roof all over his house. We took care of Paul when Paul got sick,” she said. Paul had fallen off a ladder and broken one of his legs shortly before they met him. It wouldn’t stop swelling and got to the point where he could scarcely get around. “Maybe God put us in that man’s life for a reason, me and Dwight. We stayed down in Senatobia Hospital a week with that man.”
Paul had wanted to shoot the doctors after they had discussed amputating his leg. Fortunately, he improved enough to keep it. “Me, Paul, and Dwight, we was like this,” she said, squeezing her fists together. “He was a funny guy, but he was crazy, too, but he was a good person, Paul,” Cindi claimed, trying futilely to hold back tears. “I lost two people. We developed a friendship that nobody knew about, for real.”
They had painted the house blue, they had painted the house gray. “We painted that house from roof to bottom,” she remembered with fondness. “We just happened to come into his life when he wanted it moody blue.” When Paul would be in pain and hardly able to give the tours, they would help him out. They provided security when an especially rowdy group would visit late at night. He often would pay them only in Coca-Cola and Budweiser. For a time, they didn’t mind. “He was cheap, but he would help us,” she said.
Paul and Dwight had fallen out two years before. Cindi wasn’t forthcoming about what had compelled Dwight to go to Paul’s that night. I asked her if she thought Paul was capable of shooting someone. She said she never had a doubt he was. He would tell everyone who entered the home that he was carrying weapons. She said he was worse when he was drunk. Cindi suggested that Paul could go through a case of beer before noon. Shannon, who was sitting with us while Wallace played with their child nearby, asked Cindi why she thought Paul had shot Dwight.
“Let me tell you somethin’: Paul opened the door for Dwight because he knows him,” she began. “For real. It was a reason that Dwight went there, that only I know, but I won’t say right now. I just want you to know about Dwight and Paul. My best friend and his associate. Paul would never have done that. No, Paul’s not the bad guy. And David’s not the bad guy either. Whatever happened God intended to happen. He never would have hurt him, no sir.” Her voice began to rise a few octaves as her hands trembled. “We stayed at this man’s house. Only a few people got to see the upstairs. We got to see what downstairs and the upstairs was like. We had it all. Literally.”
Cindi, increasingly emotional, assured us that no break-in had taken place, that the story the police were telling was surely inaccurate. Shannon suggested that maybe Paul didn’t recognize him and that’s what caused the shooting. Cindi shook her head. I asked if he’d simply gone to Paul’s house to talk. She didn’t respond to either question.
“It killed Paul. Reality set in that he killed his friend, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He had nicknames for both of us. He called me C. C. Rider,” she said, the tears finally escaping down her face. “There is more to this story than people will ever know.”
Paul MacLeod wanted to be buried in a gold suit. It didn’t happen. He never got life insurance and died with a $17,000 lien on his home that he had taken out just months prior, so his remains ended up in an urn, one decorated with the visage of Elvis Presley. It will be placed in a donated burial plot in Hillcrest Cemetery, not far from his home. A planned monument at Hillcrest will read, “Here Lies the World’s Greatest Elvis Fan.”
Only about sixty turned up for his funeral on August 12, three weeks after his death, at Christ Episcopal Church. His two daughters were in attendance but his son, Elvis Albert Presley MacLeod, who had tended to the museum with his father for many years, was not. Brenda, the oldest of the children, had visited Paul once at the museum, neglecting to tell him she was his daughter until toward the end of the tour. After that first visit, her husband refused to come in with her; he’d wait in the car while she visited her father.
Rev. Bruce D. McMillan, who had been Paul’s preacher for many years, presided over the service. Annie Moffitt, Paul’s purple-haired black friend, sang showstopping versions of “Amazing Grace” and “Walking Around Heaven” for the attendees, including more than a few people, young and old, in newly printed Graceland Too T-shirts. Mayor Buck was there too, dapper as he’d been described. The entire thing lasted less than an hour.
It was Elvis Presley week in nearby Memphis. Every August, in the run-up to the anniversary of Presley’s death on August 16, the town plays host to parades and conventions, to impersonator contests and singalongs. The goings-on in Holly Springs proved far more telling, however. A spectacle of simultaneous remembrance and denial was in store for all of us. It was in the air. Half a country away, in that very same week, Ferguson, Missouri, had become a police state because an unarmed black man had been struck down by an armed white one; here it was just an opportunity for commerce.
If paying off his outstanding debts meant luring some of those who had converged on Memphis to take a posthumous tour of his home or buy a Graceland Too shot glass, so be it. One can’t say the man wouldn’t have wanted it this way, wouldn’t have indulged in the crassness and opportunism that would inevitably come with his passing. T-shirts and plastic cups were sold at a tent outside Paul’s home, dilapidated male and female mannequins displaying the pastel blue and pink T-shirts while various “lifetime members” of the museum gave tours of the space.
I passed Cindi, wearing a black-and-gold Drew Brees #9 T-shirt, a few blocks from the house. She was distraught and claimed she’d been drinking. She had been walking around the neighborhood, working up the courage to go over to Graceland Too while all those strangers were there, touring the place where her husband and her friend had died. Eventually she was given a tour by one of the “lifetime members.” She broke down about halfway through.
Jeffrey Joe Jensen, a well-heeled documentary filmmaker who had been making a film about Paul, and a scholar from nearby Oxford who had commissioned Paul to write about his Elvis fandom, traded w
ar stories and hawked their work nearby. Both of them spoke to visitors in the dusty museum and at a larger public memorial held at the town’s multipurpose center that evening. After that memorial the crowd grew younger, with the college students that often made up Paul’s customer base showing up as the light died over the town. Alcohol flowed freely; later that night, a fistfight broke out between two women.
As this younger set took over the street near Paul’s, lining up to get one last look at his property before its uncertain future was sorted out, Elvis Presley songs blared from a PA set up in the middle of the street. Tyler Clancy, the owner of a BBQ joint and café in nearby Red Banks who lives across the street from Graceland Too, set up a stand in his front yard where he sold “The Paul MacLeod”: a deep-fried version of the peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich that was Elvis’s favorite. A screening was held just after midnight of various short films people had made about Paul over the years. And then the place thinned out. Paul MacLeod had gotten a hero’s send-off, no question about it.
“What I can’t get Cindi to tell me is, why did he shoot him? I don’t know,” Shannon McNally said to us a few days later. She was in between blues sets at a fancy wine bar in Oxford and was having a rough day. Her mother had discovered just that morning that her stomach cancer, previously thought to be in remission, was back. Shannon also admitted that she was soon to get divorced. We shared some whiskeys.
Hill country blues was born here, on the guitars of Mississippi Fred McDowell, R. L. Burnside, and Junior Kimbrough. Gary, Burnside’s son, is working on an album with Shannon. He was her sole accompaniment that night; her husband, who normally served as her drummer, was nowhere to be found. They went without a rhythm section.
“David was bipolar. He had some kind of bleeding ulcer or stomach cancer, he had something going on in his gut, I don’t know what, but it was untreated and it was bad,” she continued. “He was suicidal. He was ready to die.” Cindi had gone home, leaving him for a couple of weeks because the stress level, exacerbated by their poverty, had gotten out of control. Shannon confirmed Knecht’s assertion that Cindi had filed domestic violence charges against him. Given his previous record, he was facing a longer prison stint than he had ever known. According to Shannon, Cindi immediately regretted doing that, knowing it would simply trigger his frequently unhinged emotions. “He really didn’t want to go back to jail.”
While Cindi was at her parents’ place, Shannon had fed him every day and eventually started putting him up. He stayed with her for the three days and nights before the shooting. “I’d spent, like, a hundred dollars just keeping him above water,” she recalled. Dwight felt indebted to her. He would do whatever he could to help Shannon around the house. Dwight had spent most of the day the shooting took place at her home. “He was in physical pain, but he was also in mental pain,” Shannon remembered. She tried to get him to seek medical help, but he rebuffed her.
When he came around that Tuesday night, ostensibly after being on Paul’s porch earlier in the evening, Shannon’s daughter and her daughter’s friend were at the house. Shannon could tell something was amiss. She thought to ask if he’d like to go inside to sleep, but couldn’t. Dwight was agitated. “There was a lot going on with him and his energy. I knew if I brought him in my house and anything went wrong . . .” she said, trailing off.
She offered to get him a room at the Holly Inn, the $45-a-night motel on the increasingly destitute northern end of town. Shannon asked if Dwight wanted to go to the emergency room, but he seemed more concerned with the forty dollars he owed someone he had been staying with off and on. The person had held on to his belongings and wouldn’t give him his personal items back until he paid them. She gave him twenty dollars. “I just didn’t have that much cash on me,” she remembered. “We sat there for an hour and a half. He wasn’t hungry. He was in pain. I said, ‘David, I need one more day. I’ll get you squared away in the morning.’”
The place was filling up behind us. Some folks nearby asked if she was going back on. Our time together was coming to a close. “I trust you, Ms. Shanno,” she remembers him saying. He was worried about going back to jail, looking at five years because of the domestic violence charge if it went through. Given what thin ice he was on legally, “anyone could send him back to jail for anything,” Shannon suggested. She knew she couldn’t help him fast enough. “I knew he was dying. I knew he was dying that night.”
In Mississippi, the black poor don’t have the institutions of resilience that they do in Bed-Stuy. When the going got tough, there was no city-run, understaffed but reliably open Health and Human Services building full of stern-looking black female civil servants doing God’s work. The homeless shelter is a derelict motel. It’s really all about who you know. McNally was truly, by the end, all these people had.
When Shannon saw a text from Tim Liddy the next morning, she already knew. Shannon had warned Dwight away from suicide; she feared he might try to provoke a police officer or jump off a nearby bridge. She told him that if he wanted her to take him to the emergency room, to call. Before he left, Dwight said to her, “It’s going to be big, Ms. Shannon.” And then he was gone.
Soon after, Paul MacLeod was gone too. The broad majority of his collection was auctioned off for $65,000 to an anonymous buyer in Atlanta. The house sits empty now, painted over white so as not to be an eyesore, with nothing likely left in its future than condemnation. Paul’s friendship with Dwight and Cindi had transcended class and age, and had scaled the walls of race, in a town riven by the ghosts of the violence that had long reinforced those very walls. But the endearing poverty that gripped both men, and their alienation from the more well-adjusted around them, proved to bring them together and rip them apart. In a way, both of them died of broken hearts.
5920 Rhode Island Avenue
I was driving to my mother’s home in the central Cincinnati neighborhood of Bond Hill one summer night a couple of years ago. I had the windows of her bright orange Volkswagen Beetle down, and had stopped on Bond Hill’s main drag, Reading Road, where the pockmarks of shuttered storefronts and crumbling housing are evident from every vantage point. On many a night, seemingly aimless, unemployed Negro boys sit and carp near a Richie’s Chicken restaurant, across the street from a long-closed Nation of Islam diner. Although I grew up a few neighborhoods away in slightly leafier and more integrated Kennedy Heights I can remember when the neighborhood wasn’t quite like this, before the streets became so hopelessly violent and economically unsalvageable that my father, who’d lived in the heart of the same neighborhood with his most recent wife, decided to get the fuck out. “I’m tired of niggers,” he’d said, his processed hair straightened just so, the green eyes we share darting away from each other’s. It must be tiring to be tired of yourself.
While stopped at the intersection, I glimpsed out of my eye a tall Negro dressed in a white tank top, his skin high yellow like my own, crossing the street in what seemed like a beeline toward my car. He was coming from a corner where much wasteful bravado and boisterous ennui take place, and I felt it immediately, that familiar sensation, the need to secure my body against potential predators. I was driving an orange car with plastic orange flowers on the dash, the same car I had been driving when held up at gunpoint not far from that corner two summers before.
The man sauntered behind my car, and I locked the door. Hearing this, the electronic click of the door locks snapping into place, he looked back at me and our eyes met as I swiveled my head to watch him. We didn’t stop looking at each other the whole time he crossed to the other side of the street. The light turned green, and he said, “I ain’t trying to roll up on you, bruh.”
“It’s all good,” I replied, but really, it wasn’t. Fear might be the predominant mode of contemporary American life, but that doesn’t make it good for you. For the past fifty years or so, Bond Hill has become predominantly African American, and for the last twenty-five or so has been moribund and blighted, as have many Negro communities in
Cincinnati. This is a direct result of redlining, blockbusting, and deindustrialization, of racist federal policy and cynical opportunism on the part of white developers—of America not having a clue how to treat its black citizens fairly.
My best friend’s father, an intellectual property lawyer, grew up in Bond Hill in the ’50s. His family fled with the rest of them, likely told of the coming Negro hordes and the imperative to save themselves from declining property values by huckster slumlords. When I met and befriended his son at Seven Hills School, along with a few coloreds who were nigger-rich like us, his family lived in the tony district of Hyde Park. Bond Hill is now only 7 percent white and just as segregated as it was a half century ago, when blacks first started to seek refuge and opportunity there.
My foot hit the gas, and the encounter ended. As I drove home, back to the rings of suburban simulacra on the outskirts of the neighborhood just a mile away—a suburbia my mother helped build with other Negroes—I couldn’t shake the anger and shame. Why should I have to be afraid of my fellow yellow brother, or any brother for that matter, in the fucking first place? My mother, in her desire to protect me, had spent a great portion of her life instructing me to fear the very officers of the law who were supposed to ensure our safety, all while locking her doors and windows, employing an alarm system, and owning several guns, all in fear of the type of niggers (yes, the very word we use) Negroes fear most. At the “Villages at Daybreak,” not far from a golf course and a decaying sports arena that hosted the NBA during the Kennedy administration, my mother is trapped in a cycle of fear that white folks of her station in life mostly don’t know.
Making Rent in Bed-Stuy Page 18
