God'll Cut You Down : The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, Amurder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi (9780698170537)

by Safran, John

“Okay, so I understand nationalism,” I say. “So, it’s not racism?”

  Richard looks offended by the vulgar term.

  “Well, it’s not so much a matter of what it’s not. Let’s talk about what it is. Nationalism is blood-based. Where you have a feeling for your own self, your own people, your own children, your own family, your own countrymen. It’s really what makes the world tick.”

  “But so many young people today are a mixture of things,” I say. “Like, they’ll have one Lebanese grandparent. So if you’re an American with one Lebanese grandparent—”

  “You don’t have that,” Richard interrupts.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Not really.”

  I find it odd I have to argue the point that mixed-race people exist.

  “Go to New York,” I say.

  “Sure, New York.” Richard chuckles. “You know what Senator Goldwater from Arizona said? He’d like to cut it off and let it float into the Atlantic.” Richard chuckles again. “I was born in New York.”

  Next to the WHITES ONLY sign is a flag that looks incredibly like a swastika. “That’s from South Africa,” Richard says. “Eugène Terre’Blanche’s party.” And next to the flag is a plaque: FAG-FREE ZONE.

  “So you’re not allowed to be gay in the Nationalist Movement?”

  “Well, of course not,” Richard replies.

  Leaving the study, I ask, “Why all the law books?”

  Richard tells me he’s a lawyer. (Of course. Some of the hairsplitting begins to make sense.) Richard says the law is his weapon. He says he grinds his enemies to dust with legal action. When a county in Georgia tried to charge Richard for the extra police it put on to cover a protest he planned, he dragged the county through court after court, all the way to the US Supreme Court, until he won. He lawyered a black family out of a home in Jackson, Mississippi. Something about “blockbusting” maybe? I don’t really follow.

  We’re in the Nationalist Movement’s lounge area. The first thing I notice is a rifle, propped up in the corner like a mop.

  “What kind of gun is that?” I ask.

  “A Chinese gun,” Richard replies, plucking it up by the barrel, a little clunkily, I reckon.

  “A Chinese gun! In a white supre—” I hit the brakes on my mouth. “Shouldn’t you have an American one?”

  “Someone gave this to us.” He’s not quite pointing the muzzle to his face, but he’s not many degrees off, either. “I do have American ones,” he mutters. “In fact, they’re all around here. And in fact, did you notice the ax handle?” He perks up, pointing to an ax handle mounted on the wall. “The ax handle was given to me by Lester Maddox, who in Georgia was the one who took up the ax handle to keep the Negroes out of his restaurant. And he was elected governor of the state because of it.”

  I’m pretty excited that not only is he saying Negroes, he’s pronouncing it Nigroes, like an old Southern plantation owner.

  Next to that is a black-and-white photo, where (Christ, this is an embarrassing example of my postmodern education) he’s dressed like the Illinois Nazis in The Blues Brothers.

  “The Nazis in The Blues Brothers, they dress like that,” I say.

  “I don’t know.” He chuckles. “I’m trying to dress like that because it’s reminiscent of the skinheads that we know from England. We have many here, and it has, you know, a certain appeal.”

  Richard passes me the latest issue of his newsletter.

  The front-page headline: INTEGRATED LICENSE PLATE DITCHED. Below that is a picture of the special-edition license plate. The design is a brown boy’s face and a white girl’s face drawn in crayon by a child.

  “Yes,” Richard tells me, “we had actually a license plate that had a Negro and a white. And we lobbied against it and we had it taken out. And thank goodness we did.”

  “But it’s just a license plate, isn’t it?”

  “Well, that’s something contrary to what the American people stand for. People can do it, but don’t put an official seal of the state on it.”

  People can “do it”? People can “do” what? I scrutinize the crayon drawing.

  “But . . . what . . . Is that meant to be a boyfriend and a girlfriend, do you think?”

  “Yes, it’s just not done, it’s not proper, it’s not part of our heritage. People find it offensive. If you had two homosexuals there, kissing each other, we’d find that offensive. People can do it, but you don’t flaunt it, you don’t give the stamp of approval.”

  Two crayon children smile up at me from the license plate.

  It’s one thirty a.m. Richard starts his rounds of the headquarters, flicking off each room light and desk lamp.

  “Okay, we’re done here, yes?” Richard asks me.

  “Yes, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say.

  He flicks the final switch.

  Fade to black.

  Fade up. It’s morning.

  I’m walking through the parking lot of a motel. The sun is trying hard to perk things up, but it can only do so much for the Budget Inn parking lot. My voiceover announces, “This is the place where Richard will be hosting his whites-only sports awards, the Spirit of America Day banquet.”

  I push open the glass door and cross the lobby. I lean into the camera and mumble a very quiet aside. “I have to get a saliva sample from Richard Barrett for the DNA test. He’s in the Diplomat Ballroom apparently.”

  I push open the door to the Diplomat Ballroom. Red, white, and blue stings my eyes, the colors crisp, bright, and everywhere. It’s like walking off a gray street into a candy shop. Balloons and bunting run from wall to wall. A Confederate flag hangs behind a raised stage.

  Six helpers, including two black children, mope about. Should the black kids be here? The black kids are with a white man and a helium tank, inflating balloons. A white kid runs about, placing a small Confederate flag in the center of each round dinner table.

  Up a ladder, a body is lost in a bundle of thirty-odd balloons. Two legs poke out.

  “Hello, Richard!” I shout up.

  “Wuh, herlow!” he shouts down, muffled by the balloons.

  Months earlier, the researcher and I had been slumping in a TV production office in Melbourne, trying to figure out a way to thieve saliva from a white supremacist. Coffee cup? Toothbrush? Chewing tobacco? When Richard told the researcher I’d be arriving just as he was preparing his banquet—hanging streamers, blowing up balloons—I thought, God really wants me to do this.

  I wag two uninflated balloons.

  “Can we bother you for your time for ten seconds?” I say. “The camera guy is saying it’ll be a good shot if you and me are blowing up balloons together.”

  Richard and I purse our lips to our floppy balloons, the raised stage behind us. The American football beefcake painted on the big Spirit of America Day crest looks down on us as we huff, huff, huff.

  Richard ties a knot in his red balloon.

  “How’s that?” he asks.

  I pluck the red balloon from his hands.

  “Thank you very much,” I say.

  I creep out of the Diplomat Ballroom.

  Fade down. Fade up.

  The hinges squeak on the door of the motel lobby bathroom as it swats shut behind me. I crouch on the floor, the urinals lined up behind me, and paw through my backpack.

  “This is the Family Tree DNA kit,” I whisper to the camera, ripping open the vacuum-sealed package. I hold up the plastic scraper in my left hand and the vial in my right.

  Three stabs with the scraper bursts the balloon. The boom bounces wall to wall. I scrape Richard’s saliva off the shreds of red balloon.

  I snap the head of the scraper into the vial and twist on the lid.

  I dart out of the motel lobby bathroom.

  Fade to black. Fade up.

  A small man in a blue
suit stands at the end of a silver corridor.

  “Mr. Greenspan?” I ask, rolling forward, my arm outstretched, ready for a shaking.

  “I am,” says Mr. Greenspan, and we shake and shake and shake. Mr. Bennett Greenspan is the CEO of Family Tree DNA.

  “Well, here’s me and my friend’s samples.” I hand over a package of two vials.

  “Good,” he says. “We’ll get them processed for you and hope you’ll find the results interesting.”

  Fade to black. 6 Hours Later snaps up on the screen. Fade up.

  In an office, bald little Mr. Greenspan is pecking at his laptop. I’m parked next to his desk in a swivel chair.

  “I was brought up,” I explain to him, “to marry a Jew, because I’m a Jew, and I just thought, I just want a 100 percent guarantee that I am a Jew so I’m not wasting my time.”

  Mr. Greenspan ignores my shtick and rotates his laptop so I can see the screen.

  “Looking at your results,” he says, “it’s very clear that you have a . . . what we call an Ashkenazi background. And so what that means is, you descend on your mother’s side from Eastern European Jewish stock.”

  “What about my dad’s side?” I ask.

  “Your dad’s side, well . . .” He spools down the screen. “So you are J1. In that respect, your DNA is commonly found among Jews all over the Middle East. So on your mom’s side you’re Jewish and your dad’s side you’re Jewish.”

  From spit in a jar, he can tell I’m an Ashkenazi Jew.

  “Well, can we look at my friend’s DNA?” I say.

  Mr. Greenspan types in a code and a new page pops up.

  “The father’s side is European,” he says. “There’s no question about that.”

  Mr. Greenspan spools down the page.

  “On your friend’s mother’s mother’s mother’s side, your friend has African ancestry.”

  I swivel a little happy swivel.

  “And so on your friend’s mother’s mother’s mother’s side, he descends from an African.”

  “My friend is really, really, really white,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says. “That tells us that this event, this black marriage to a Caucasian, happened a long time ago.”

  “Wow. I cannot tell you how white this person is. And how white this person thinks they are.”

  “I cannot tell you how African they are, if they’ll scratch the surface a little bit.”

  Fade to black. Fade up. Nighttime.

  I’m pulling at the lapels of my best suit, stepping through the parking lot of the Budget Inn. Car headlights blind me, but I march on.

  Richard Barrett is held together in a sharp suit, too. His fingers wriggle up and down a Casio keyboard in the corner of the Diplomat Ballroom. The ballroom is even more colored in than this morning. Confederate battle flags are planted across the stage.

  Six white athletes march in to Richard’s “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

  The athletes’ families are seated at round tables across the room. A candle has joined the Confederate battle flag in the center of each. The mayor and other special guests look down from a long dining table on the stage.

  The Nationalist Movement’s second-in-command, a potbellied man called Vince Thornton, bends down until his lips nearly touch the microphone on the podium.

  “Please join me in welcoming Richard Barrett,” he announces.

  A local beauty queen’s tiara twinkles as Richard passes behind her on his way to the microphone.

  “Thank you, Vince. American youth, because you are special, you deserve a special day,” Richard reads from his cards. “Ever since the days when youngsters were pressured toward long hair, loose living, and drugs, the Spirit of America Day has showcased clean-cut, clean-living youth who are patriotic to the core.”

  Richard tells us what makes Mississippi Mississippi. He gushes over the mayor, the beauty queen, and a local country singer in attendance.

  “At this time,” he continues, “we’d like to thank Australian television, which is here covering the banquet and the Spirit of America Day. And John, if you’ll come up? He wanted to say a few words of appreciation. John, we’d be honored to have you.”

  I walk from the back of the ballroom, straightening the Windsor knot in my tie. The stage lighting burns my eyes, and the crowd turns to shadows. I lean down to the microphone.

  “Um, well, thank you to the people of Mississippi and, um, congratulations to all the, er, participants in the Spirit of America Day awards.”

  I suck in a little air. I turn my head to Richard and then turn back to the crowd.

  “Now, this is a bit awkward. But, er, earlier when I interviewed you, Richard, I procured a saliva sample. And I took it to a DNA testing plant. And the results are in, as they say. And there’s no real easy way to put this, but you have African DNA.”

  Perhaps three confused giggles arise from an otherwise silent ballroom.

  “You’re part African,” I continue. “But don’t worry, you’re not, you’re not, it’s not like you’re black black. It’s more you’re white and a bit black. Like Barack Obama. But it doesn’t really matter because we’re, like, all mixed up. All of us. Like, if we went back far enough, I probably wouldn’t even be Jewish. Anyway, thank you, everybody, and enjoy the Spirit of America Day banquet.”

  I turn my head to Richard. He is pulling a smile so wide and so fake, I can see his decaying gums.

  “Ha, ha,” mumbles Richard with a clap, “very good.”

  It is a tribute to the politeness of Mississippians that I receive a light applause.

  I dart out of the ballroom and loosen my Windsor knot as I head down to the motel lobby. An asthma whistle pushes up my lungs and out my throat. I pull off my jacket as I exit to the parking lot. A gust of wind hits the sweat on my back and I feel good.

  Fade to black. End of segment.

  The Magician’s Trick

  Okay. Here’s the magician’s trick: We’re all from Africa.

  A thorough DNA test of anyone will reveal African roots. As this is the case—and as DNA testing without permission is a murky legal/ethical area—after I scraped saliva from Richard’s balloon, I did a switcheroo with a sample from a consenting person.

  So I’m P. T. Barnum. Can we move on?

  The Next Morning

  My baseball cap is pulled down like Matt Damon trying not to be noticed. The four-man film crew and I slouch low in a booth in a Mississippi diner confusingly called Texas.

  Will Richard send his footballers out to get us? We only have to make it to the afternoon, when our plane leaves.

  The director, Craig, chews a fried calamari ring the size of a doughnut. Cameraman Germain scratches his face until it’s as red as his stubble and eyes. Production assistant Richie is on the phone haggling down the cost of a prosthetic nose. In two days I’ll be going undercover as a black man in Chicago.

  The producer, Jonathan, plucks the last “pretzel chicken tender” from the basket. It seems to push his Adam’s apple to one side as it goes down his throat. After he’s recovered, he says that when we were packing up at the Nationalist Movement headquarters two nights ago, Richard Barrett put his hand on his back and left it there too long.

  We agree that Mississippi’s most prominent white supremacist gave off a bit of a gay vibe.

  Richie slides his phone in his pocket and says the prosthetic nose will be waiting with the concierge at the hotel in Chicago. I pull out my phone and e-mail my ABC boss back in Australia.

  On Tues, Mar 3, at 11:09 a.m., John Safran wrote:

  Hi Debbie! Well, I did the speech. And I wasn’t murdered. I don’t have too much of a read on how it went because I was at the podium with lights in my eyes and Richard Barrett was standing behind me. But Craig and Germain said it was awkward. We got a great interview with the black House of Rep politicia
n, Robert Johnson, who’s opposing Richard Barrett’s Spirit of America Day banquet, so that really sells to the Aussie audience that Richard is a “someone,” and a dangerous someone, without me having to say much. I also went to Barrett’s office and he gave me skinhead pamphlets and showed me his gun. My read is there’s close to zero chance Barrett’s going to pursue legal action or the like. Time to turn black! X

  I press send, smudging catfish grease all over the screen.

  One Day Later

  Richard Barrett visits a post office somewhere in Mississippi. He sends a registered letter to the Chief Operating Officer of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

  You and your agents acted in the utmost bad faith . . . they claimed that theirs was a legitimate news operation . . . they used the permission to disrupt the ceremonies, insult the guests, slander the state . . . the releases were obtained by fraud and misrepresentation . . .

  Richard demands the ABC drop the footage or face his legal wrath.

  Four Months Later

  Chris Lilley, in various sexes and ethnicities, pulls faces at me from the walls of the Melbourne television production office.

  I am sucking on a mint ball from the goldfish bowl of mint balls in the middle of the table. Through the bowl I see the distended face of producer Jonathan. He presses the red button on the speakerphone. The ABC has instructed us to seek advice from US lawyers. The network is happy to defend us against defamation. That’s a civil action and all part of the rough-and-tumble of this type of television. However, Richard is alleging fraud, and possibly therefore trespass, which are criminal offenses.

  The US lawyers tell us Richard has a case. One he might well eventually lose, but a case nonetheless. They also tell me what Richard told me back in his Nationalist Movement office, something I’d chosen not to think about. Richard-the-lawyer had hauled a county in Georgia through the US Supreme Court, lawyered a black family out of their home, and snuffed out two crayon kids on a Mississippi license plate. The US lawyers also mention Richard Barrett v. Oldsmobile Division General Motors Corporation and Richard Barrett v. Some Guy Who Came to Repair His Xerox Machine.