Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love

by Thomas A. Tarrants

  Kathy and I left Jackson and headed east toward Meridian. During the two-hour drive, we discussed our plan further. The bomb was set to detonate at 2:00 a.m. It consisted of twenty-nine sticks of dynamite and a separate, battery-powered timing device. It would do massive damage. By the time it exploded, we would be well on our way to Mobile. Kathy would spend the night with friends there before we continued on to Miami. I reassured her, “It will be a simple operation.”

  We reached the Meridian area at about eleven o’clock, stopping at a pay phone near a hamburger stand on the highway. I was all business now. “I’ll call Raymond and be back in just a minute,” I informed Kathy as I stepped out of the car.

  I was now much more alert, and nervous tension was growing. Off in the darkness, a dog barked. The chirps of crickets and squeaks of tree frogs cascaded through the tall trees. The light from the phone booth dimmed my night vision, blinding me to all but the most overt surveillance that might be nearby. But that didn’t matter; this wouldn’t take long.

  The restaurant was closed, the night was dark, and the air hung heavy with humidity.

  I dropped my dime in the slot and dialed Raymond’s number. He was expecting the call. We spoke only a few words, in code, signaling a meeting at a prearranged rendezvous point—a truck stop near Meridian.

  “Is Bill there?” I asked.

  “You’ve got the wrong number,” he replied.

  That was it. We assumed the presence of FBI wiretaps on our telephones. Therefore, we routinely employed countermeasures, such as the use of codes, veiled references, voice disguises, and especially short calls. This one had taken less than a minute.

  I returned to the big Buick. It had bench seats and a powerful engine that made it fast—fast enough to outrun many police cruisers. Kathy and I drove in alert silence to the designated meeting place, a truck stop closer to town, where we waited in the parking lot.

  Within a few minutes Raymond drove up. He came over to our car and got in the backseat, expecting to see me and another Klansman. Surprised at the presence of a woman, he demanded, “What’s she doing here?”

  “Don’t worry,” I replied. “She’s been on missions like this before. She can do anything you can do and more.”

  After we talked for a few minutes, Raymond returned to his car. Kathy and I followed him to the nearby Holiday Inn, which had a late-night bar. Raymond parked his car and then got in the Buick with us to check out the Davidson house.

  Meyer Davidson lived in an affluent, but not ostentatious, neighborhood. His house was a comfortable, ranch-style brick structure with a double carport, standing on a spacious, tree-shaded corner lot. Kathy, Raymond, and I circled his block twice and drove through the surrounding neighborhood, looking for anything that might indicate surveillance or the presence of a stakeout. Except for an occasional streetlight, the streets were quiet and dark—optimum conditions. I hadn’t seen any problems and had no reason to expect any. I was nevertheless feeling tense and uneasy.

  I knew that if anything went wrong, it could be disastrous. Because of the recent bombings and church burnings, tensions were high in Meridian. The police were in a heightened state of alert and under intense pressure from Chief Roy Gunn, a strong, domineering man with a temper, who was given to emotional outbursts and could be ruthless in achieving his goals. He was on a personal campaign to stop Klan violence in his city, no matter what it took, and he expected his officers to do whatever was necessary, legal or otherwise.

  We drove back to the Holiday Inn and dropped off Raymond. It was now midnight. When the bomb exploded, he would have been in the bar for two hours with plenty of witnesses. We continued out to a secluded, wooded area several miles north of Meridian. There I retrieved the bomb from the trunk of the car.

  With no witnesses other than the stars and the deepening darkness, in the dim glow of the trunk light, I connected the electrical detonator to the dynamite and set the timer for 2:00 a.m. I got back in the car and gently placed the bomb on the front seat between Kathy and me. I looked at her and asked, “Are you ready?”

  Kathy looked down at the bomb, then replied with an almost imperceptible hesitation, “Yes.”

  We headed back into Meridian. As we turned south onto Davidson’s street, we saw his house ever so softly cast in the pale-yellow light of the lone streetlamp. It was a scene of tranquility that would soon be shattered.

  I slowed to a stop about fifty feet from the drive leading to Davidson’s residence. It was almost 1:00 a.m. As near as we could tell, the entire neighborhood was asleep. The house was set back about forty feet from the street. On our left, directly across the street, was a five-foot embankment with trees and shrubbery that partially obscured a neighboring house from view. The embankment would shield that house from a large part of the bomb’s blast.

  Ever so quietly, I opened the car door and stepped out in the dimly lit street. The humid night air once again enveloped me. Kathy remained in the car. I tucked a pistol into the waistband of my trousers, then lifted the bomb from the front seat and cradled it. I gently closed the car door behind me. Any sound it made was drowned out by the cacophony of chirping crickets.

  Full of tension, I walked silently around the front of my car and up the concrete driveway. I was almost there.

  Then a gunshot pierced the night. And a man shouted.

  More gunshots boomed. The bullets made whizzing pops as they passed me.

  They seemed to come from every direction.

  And they were all aimed at me.

  I dropped the bomb, which should have exploded instantly but didn’t. As I spun around and ran back to the car, the pistol in my waistband spun out and fell to the ground, unfired.

  I had to reach the car.

  I had to get away.

  My mind began to race: Did Davidson see us? Where are all the shots coming from? We had to get away before police sealed off the area.

  As I reached the front of the Buick, a hot, massive blast tore through my upper right leg. It was buckshot. The force of the impact stunned me. I grabbed the hood of the car to keep from collapsing. I didn’t see the shooter, but he couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away.

  I was hit. I sensed pain that my amped-up mind didn’t fully register. But I did fully register the continuing bangs and booms of gunfire. Bullets and buckshot were flying everywhere around me. Inexplicably, although I was completely exposed to the barrage, I was not hit again.

  Once more I strained forward, on a wounded and wobbly right leg, lurching toward the driver’s door. Kathy leaned over from the passenger side to open it and pull me in.

  Hot lead now tore through the heavy metal of the big Buick. The concealed shooters were pumping round after round of rifle and shotgun fire into the car.

  I started the engine, dropped the car into gear, floored the accelerator, and sped away through the hail of gunfire. I could feel the warm blood flowing out of my leg and onto the front seat.

  As I sped down the street, I heard Kathy say in a soft voice, “Tommy, I’ve been hit.” I took a quick glance over at her. In the yellow glow of a passing streetlight, I saw a bullet hole at the base of her neck.

  “I’ve been hit, too, Kathy, but we’re going to make it. Don’t worry. There’s a doctor in Jackson who can help us.”

  When she didn’t reply, I looked over again and saw her body slumped over on the seat.

  I was careening south down Twenty-Ninth Street, toward the highway to Jackson. It looked as though we might get away. I experienced a bright moment of hope that both Kathy and I could find medical help and survive this night’s disaster.

  Seemingly out of nowhere, a police car zoomed up behind us. Its driver practically fastened his vehicle onto our rear bumper. I would later learn that it was a brand-new Ford Police Interceptor with a more powerful engine than the Buick’s. I glanced up in my rearview mirror and saw an officer hanging out the passenger window, aiming a shotgun.

  Boom! Boom!

  The rear win
dshield shattered. I swerved to throw off the shooter’s aim until he had to reload. I made a hard right at the next intersection, then another. But in that kind of turning chase, the Buick was no match for the lighter and nimbler Ford. The police car stayed right on my bumper, pumping round after round into the car. Once again, inexplicably, I was not hit.

  In a last desperate effort, I turned again, this time to the left, putting the shooter on the outside of the turn. But I had taken the turn too fast and skidded to the right and off the paved street. With the big engine screaming, we smashed up and over the curb, coming to a rest half in the street and half in the yard of a corner house. The police cruiser was so close behind that it couldn’t stop, and it crashed into the rear of the Buick.

  For a moment there was silence. The smell of hot brakes and smoking motor oil and burned rubber wafted through the hot, muggy air.

  But I wasn’t done yet.

  More reacting than thinking, I grabbed my submachine gun from under the front seat and jumped out of the car. The cop in the passenger seat of the police car had jumped out of his door, brandishing a shotgun, but I had been faster. I fired a sustained burst, spraying the stream of bullets between the two cops. The cruiser’s windshield was destroyed. At least three rounds struck the first cop in the chest, and he went down. The driver, his partner, dove beneath the dashboard, and my burst missed him entirely.

  My ammunition magazine was empty, and the spares were in the car, so I dropped the empty submachine to the pavement. Suddenly, the driver stood up and fired a shotgun blast, striking me in the upper left leg and abdomen. But instead of firing again and killing me, the officer stepped back into his car.

  Somehow, I managed to stagger away. I made my way to the backyard of an adjacent house, where some shrubbery partially concealed me. I tried to scale the chain-link fence, but it was topped with a strand of electrified wire. It delivered a surprisingly powerful electric shock that knocked me to the ground. Stunned, I tried to get up. I couldn’t. My strength was gone. All I could do was lie in the shrubbery where I fell and hope I was hidden enough that the cops wouldn’t find me.

  A sensation of creeping numbness inched over me—as if I were in a rowboat drifting slowly into a foggy night. Somewhere out in the fog I could hear sirens. They seemed to be coming in from every direction. People shouting. Dogs barking. Police officers fanning out with their big, powerful flashlights.

  A beam fell on me.

  “Here he is, in the bushes,” said a voice from behind the flashlight.

  Four armed men approached me with great caution, holding their lights on me each step of the way. I lay very still, with my eyes closed, lest some movement cause one of them to shoot. I heard footsteps stop a few feet away. Then the lights went out.

  A moment of silence, then Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Four deafening shotgun blasts in rapid succession. Two loads of buckshot ripped into my right arm just below the elbow, nearly tearing it off. The other two hit the ground a mere inch or two short, kicking up dirt on my chest. I knew my right arm was shattered. And I was surprised I wasn’t dead.

  There was another pause in the fighting, but unlike earlier, this time I was quite done.

  A flashlight beam shone directly in my face. I squinted against its piercing brilliance. A voice from beyond the beam asked, “Is he dead?”

  A strong hand fastened around my wrist and began dragging me out of the bushes. A voice swore, “No, the son of a bitch is still alive.” The orders from Police Chief Roy Gunn had been “drop them,” no survivors. For the fourth time that night, I was at death’s door.

  Just then, another man came running up. It was an ambulance driver. Had he arrived a few seconds later, the officer with the pistol would have already fired the kill shot. But with a witness—a civilian witness—he couldn’t risk pulling the trigger.

  The police officers all shouldered or holstered their weapons. Without another word, they put me on a stretcher and carried me to a waiting ambulance, where Kathy had already been carried. They placed my stretcher next to hers, an FBI agent climbed in, and they slammed the door closed. The ambulance driver exchanged a few brief words with the attendant, turned on the siren, and began the race to Meridian’s Matty Hersee Hospital.

  Hovering over me, the attendant saw how dire my situation was. I could feel the blood seeping out of my wounds. I tried to speak, but no sound came out.

  “The girl is dead,” he said.

  I closed my eyes. Bloody and battered, I was slipping deeper into the fog.

  I remember hearing the siren. But that was all. I couldn’t think or feel emotion.

  When we reached Matty Hersee Hospital, I opened my eyes, but just barely. Everything was blurry. I could dimly make out police cars and people waiting for me at the emergency entrance. It seemed as if police were everywhere.

  As soon as the ambulance team wheeled me into the emergency room, nurses and doctors cut away my blood-soaked clothes. I lay naked while they swabbed me and inserted probes into the bullet holes to determine the extent of my injuries.

  Standing right behind the doctors, uniformed police and FBI agents looked on. I was captured and helpless while my enemies gazed down on me with contempt. It was like a scene from my worst nightmare.

  I don’t know how long I lay there, but my mind began to drift. I couldn’t recall how I had come to be there.

  My mouth was as dry as a sunbaked salt flat.

  “We can’t give you anything right now,” said a nurse.

  At last the nurse placed a few small shavings of ice on my tongue. The relief was incredible.

  Meanwhile a swarm of ER nurses buzzed about, prepping me for a surgery that no one expected me to survive. For some reason they were holding off on administering the merciful anesthetic that would render me oblivious to my condition.

  Suddenly the nurses were gone, and what seemed like a squad of federal agents circled the metal examination table. “You’re not going to make it,” one said. “Why don’t you make a confession and get all your crimes off your conscience before you die?”

  The emergency room doctor had taken one look at my wounds and estimated I had perhaps forty-five minutes to live. These agents wanted me to deal a death blow to the Klan by linking the bombing to KKK imperial wizard Sam Bowers and revealing the identities of my accomplices. But faithful to the Cause and the Ku Klux Klan’s code of secrecy, I told them nothing—not that I could have said a lot, even if I had wanted to. I could barely speak. Then, just as suddenly as they came, they disappeared.

  The Matty Hersee operating room was a dingy, old-fashioned place where a single klieg light overhead shone directly into my eyes. It smelled like Lysol and rubbing alcohol. A masked nurse fiddled with the IV drip in my arm and said, “Start counting backwards from one hundred.”

  “Ninety-nine, ninety-eight . . .”

  And then I was blissfully, blessedly unconscious.

  2

  AN UNDESERVED MERCY

  The surgery to save my life began at about 2:30 Sunday morning and continued for several hours. During that time, my life hung by a thread. Somehow the surgical team had stanched the bleeding and mitigated the worst of the gunshot damage. But the damage to my body was extensive. There was the open question of how and whether to repair it.

  I remained sedated for a long time afterward. Slowly, imperceptibly, I began to wake up. I first heard the nurses moving about, monitoring my vital signs and checking the circulation in my wounded right arm. I opened my eyes just a little. I struggled to focus. The first thing I noticed was that, like the operating room, this room was old and dingy. The next thing I noticed was an IV needle lodged in my left arm. It hurt. A lot.

  Sometime later, a uniformed police officer escorted my mother, father, and girlfriend into the room. It was an extremely emotional reunion. They had made the long drive from Mobile, Alabama, where they lived. My mom was crying. So was my girlfriend. My dad looked like he was carrying the weight of the whole world
on his shoulders, and his eyes welled with tears. The three of them stood around my bed, each trying to touch me someplace I hadn’t been wounded.

  Over and over, they assured me of their love. They promised to stand by me no matter what. They promised to get me the best possible medical treatment. The near-certain prospect of my going to prison was never uttered. It felt so good to see them—to feel their love, their touch—even if only for a minute or two. I’ve never needed human love as much as I did right then.

  Overcome with emotion, I summoned the strength to speak. “Mama, Daddy, I’m sorry . . . to do this . . . to you . . . but I had . . . to fight . . . for the Cause.” Then I sank back into unconsciousness, leaving them to face what I had become and done—and to face all of the publicity, which had spread like wildfire across America and beyond by television, radio, and newspapers.

  When I woke up, they were gone. A nurse came in to check on me. Heavily armed law enforcement officers stood guard outside the door of my room. After watching them for a while, I got the distinct feeling they cared little whether I lived or died. Surely some preferred the latter.

  The shotgun blasts that ended the gunfight the night before had mangled my right arm. The emergency surgical team had cleaned out the gaping wound, removing bone fragments and splinters. A four-inch section of my ulna bone just below the elbow had been completely blown away. The surgeons had initially considered amputating my arm. However, there was a slight chance of saving it with the help of an exceptionally skilled orthopedic surgeon.

  Fortunately for me at that time, Meridian, Mississippi, was home to one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the United States. Dr. Leslie Rush, the man who headed Rush Foundation Hospital in Meridian, was a pioneer in the design and manufacture of the first generation of stainless-steel pins and screws for traumatic bone repair.