by Safran, John
(There’s another photo of me from around that time sucking on a chocolate malt, on holiday in rural Victoria, Australia. Pinned to my denim hat is a tin badge—the Confederate flag. Did that come before or after the T-shirt? I’m also wearing a blue Michael Jackson sweater my mum knitted, causing a fashion/race faux pas.)
Because it’s sleeveless and large, I keep wearing the shirt as I grow. It becomes a type of Linus blanket and a conversation point: Can you believe I’ve had this since I was eleven? I can’t remember what I thought of the T-shirt when I was obsessed with rap, from the age of fourteen to the end of high school. I don’t recall the rappers on my cassettes addressing the flag controversy. Public Enemy, Run-DMC, LL Cool J, they’re all New Yorkers. Maybe worrying about the flag was just a Southern thing.
What was I thinking when I wore it to university? University was nonstop dress-ups and dabbling with beats and punks and yippies and anarchists. I briefly pinned a yellow Holocaust star to my jacket, too.
I do recall Malcolm the hippie at the ad agency, my first grown-up job, aged nineteen. (Yes, I’m still wearing the T-shirt eight years later.) I’m a copywriter, writing brochures for car dealers. In the office next to mine is a small-framed vegan who insists there is no connection between his small frame and his veganism. One night we spray-painted Free East Timor on the bridge reaching over a freeway. He heard the foreign minister would be driving past in the morning.
We usually riled each other with sarcasm, but when he saw me in the office in the T-shirt he waited till I was alone and approached. He said gently, like I was an innocent Dukes of Hazzard fan, “Black people see that like a swastika.”
What was I thinking? I’m pretty sure it was about dancing with white liberal taboos. There weren’t many (or any?) black people around me then. I’m pretty sure I didn’t want to upset black people.
And then there was this weird moment. I’m out at a restaurant. Pretty swish, a birthday dinner, for one of the girls at the ad agency. Across the table is one of her friends—a black girl. If the Scientology auditor forced me to cough up more detail, I’d say I think her family had come from South Africa. She keeps eyeing my shirt and comes over after cake.
“Love your T-shirt,” the black girl says. She’s serious. She then brings up the politician considered by many the most racist in Australia. “I mean, I don’t agree with everything Pauline Hanson says, but she’s right. You can’t just have nonstop immigration.”
What an unpredictable response to my barely thought-out provocation.
Was Richard Barrett doing a version of the same thing? An outsider, coming down to Mississippi, mucking around with things he didn’t fully understand, for some obscure reason of his own? Until he ended up way out of his depth?
Just before leaving for Mississippi, I did a massive cleanout of my study. I found a clipping I’d torn out of an Australian newspaper in 2001: SOUTH’S FLAG RISES AGAIN IN MISSISSIPPI. The article says Mississippians had just voted to keep the Confederate symbol on their state flag, the last US state still hanging on to it. Above the headline is a photo of three people flapping giant state flags. They’re standing on the side of the road—in Rankin County.
I feel I’ve been tied to a piece of elastic my whole life that’s finally pulled me to Mississippi.
3.
THE MURDER
The Murder House
Today I’m going to go to the house where Richard Barrett was murdered. There are tingles dancing up my arms as I drive. Is that because I’m worried someone has moved in? Or just the general death vibe of the house?
I stop and fill up at the Texaco Outpost in Pearl even though there’s more than enough gas in the tank. It’s a chance to calm myself. I catch myself pressing on the pump and releasing it in sync with my deep breaths. A kind of makeshift yoga exercise.
Richard lived in Pearl, but so deep in rural Mississippi, it’s “unincorporated Pearl,” basically out of town. On a practical level that means when you’re knifed and left to burn inside your home, the Rankin County sheriff’s department comes to poke at your corpse, not the Pearl police.
Ten minutes from the Texaco, the only store I’ve passed in unincorporated Pearl, the Stepford Wife tells me to slow down.
I’m dead on the corner of Highway 469 and Richard Barrett’s road. The sign on the church on the corner says THE WEATHER NEVER CHANGES IN HELL. The trees don’t block the sky in this part of Pearl. Instead, the sky is wide open and golden plains roll out everywhere.
I curve in and slowly, slowly roll down Richard’s road. One foot ever so gently presses the brakes, the other ever so gently accelerates. Brake, acceleration, brake, acceleration. I realize I’m tippy-toeing.
Each house sits deep in a golden field, far from the road.
I roll by a white mansion that could be owned by a Colombian drug lord. Then a gap of gold. Next along, a soot-covered mobile home, one God’s breath from collapsing. A gap of gold. A cheery little cottage that looks like a gingerbread home. A gap of gold.
A rat hole with dead refrigerators piled in the driveway.
A gap of gold.
Then the Murder House.
The road is too narrow to park on the side.
Mississippi chuckles. If you want to poke around the Murder House, you’re going to have to park in the Murder House driveway!
My hands roll right. I creep over into the driveway, waiting for someone to appear from somewhere to stop me.
I pull my Flip video camera from my pocket and push the red button. “This is it. This is, um, Richard Barrett’s house. Where he was murdered.”
The dashboard, like an arsehole, makes a bing bing bing as I open the door. It’s the loudest sound in the street.
The crummy little house squats deep in the field. “Crummy little” is how the investigators described it in a newspaper article. It’s not much larger than the double garage beside it. Redbrick with a red roof, and a white line of gutter. Same with the garage, and the two together look weird, like a couple out in matching tracksuits. The house is not new enough or old enough to mean anything.
Judging by this and Jim Giles’s trailer, white supremacy doesn’t make you rich. But Richard was a lawyer—doesn’t that make you rich?
I teeter toward the house, past police tape lying shriveled in the grass like shed snakeskins. I press the red button on the Flip again.
“Looks like there’s still that, um, that red ribbon that the police put out: Fire Line. Do Not Cross.”
There’s no “next door” on either side of the house. A golden plain to the left, woods to the right.
My nose is touching the Murder House. Iron bars run down the windows, and I push my face between them. A lush old armchair sits alone in a room, framed by clean white walls. Nothing else.
I head to the white front door. I knock.
The armchair doesn’t get up and answer.
I glide around the side of the house. The crunch of dead grass is the only sound on offer. Even the wind has shut up. I squeeze my ear against the electricity meter and hear a whirl. Rumors of this house’s death have been exaggerated (by me).
A bit spooked that the house is still alive, I skip around the back.
“Broken glass,” I whisper to the Flip.
I crunch over the glass to the window whence it came and squeeze my face between the bars.
The lush old armchair sits with its back to me—the house is so small, the armchair can be not far from the front window and not too far from the back window at the same time. I press my face harder to the bars and dart my eyes left. I catch sight of bottles of cleaning agents in a kitchen framed by clean white walls.
I plod on, over glass and grass. Tipped against the rear of the garage are six white tubes. They’re the size of me, plus half of me more. I knock my knuckle on one, and metal clangs.
“I don’t know what these are
,” I tell the Flip.
What am I meant to be doing now, anyway? Looking for clues? Clues to what? The murder? What does “finding clues to the murder” even mean? A gun in the water tank? A bloodstain? They’ve got the killer already! Clues to who Richard was, I guess. And what might have happened here the night he died. Things that won’t make it to court. Things that tell me what it might have been like.
I’ve full-circled the house and now I’m back out front. A twinkle from some tall dead grass out in front of the Murder House catches my eye. I walk over to the twinkle and pull the Flip from my pocket again.
“Holy moly. This is the bed.”
A metal skeleton, rusted and blackened, lies stretched and twisted in the tall grass.
Vincent McGee stabbed Richard and then tried to burn everything. Did he drag Richard’s bed outside to set him on fire? No—more likely the firemen pulled it out. Why? Was Richard on the bed? I don’t know.
I’m in full snoop mode now. Snooping is scary, but fun. I once broke into Disneyland for a TV show, climbing a back fence.
My fingers are now pulling me somewhere else, to the mailbox. They unhook the latch and crawl in. The box is stuffed with drugstore catalogs. And one envelope: a power bill addressed to Vince Thornton. He was Richard’s sidekick at the Spirit of America Day. Maybe Vince paid the bills. Maybe Vince owned the house.
That double garage is begging to be snooped in. I wander casually down the driveway. With a quick peek back at the road, I thread my fingers under the roller door and heave.
No luck; it’s locked.
There is a crackle of pebbles behind me. Hell! I whip my head around, still squatting. An SUV, king-size and dark green, is slowly creeping past.
The SUV brakes.
It rolls back and turns down Richard’s driveway, blocking my car.
I spring up.
The SUV door opens. Out steps a small black woman in a pink tracksuit. Her hair is gray. She stares me down.
“Who are you?” says the woman.
I reverse-psychologically confidently stride toward her.
“I’m a writer.” I fumble through my pockets. “My name is John. Here, I’ll get you my card.”
“Oh,” she says. “I thought you might be the Realtor.”
“The Realtor?”
“Yes. I want to buy . . . Well, my friend wants to buy this place.”
I’m not in trouble (I think). I lower my voice like a funeral director.
“You know what happened here?”
“Oh, yes.”
The woman in the pink tracksuit tells me she lives not far from here. She had seen Richard stroll along the street, picking up trash, but had never spoken to him. She’d had no idea at the time that he was a white supremacist.
“I never seen anybody over here unless it was someone doing maintenance. Either air-conditioning man or something of that nature. But I never seen anybody visit him.” She points her chin to the house. “It’s a nice-looking house.” The sun squeezes through the clouds, and she squints. “Some ladies, we went out to lunch and we were just talking. And one was like, ‘I wouldn’t want to live in that house!’ And I said, ‘He’s gone! What can he do to you? Not a thing, not a thing.’”
A sunbeam bounces off her silver bangles and nearly takes out my eye.
“If I hadn’t just bought a house,” she says, “I’d try to get it, you know?”
“How soon after you heard about the murder,” I say, “were you kind of going, Ah, now there’s a house on the market?”
“Well, I was so caught up with what happened, I wasn’t thinking in terms of that. I was just so shocked at what had gone on, you know. He was such a reserved person. The one thing I thought—there may be a retribution from Klansmen for killing him. I thought the Klansmen would come and terrorize the neighborhood. That was my thinking, because someone had killed one of them.”
“Wow.”
“But when that didn’t happen, I sort of got to thinking, There’s a nice-looking house.”
She wishes me luck with my book, climbs in her SUV, and disappears.
I find myself at the tip of the property, where the driveway meets the road. I press the red button on the Flip and hold it out as a periscope.
Up the street, past the woods, the Flip catches a tiny black car in a tiny driveway.
“I think that’s, er, Vincent McGee’s house,” I tell my Flip. “Or Vincent McGee’s mother’s house, at least. That was only a few places up. Could be that one there. I don’t know. To be honest, um, I’m here on my own, so I’m a bit timid. There’s no one here to egg me on. I sort of feel like I’m already pushing my luck, for some reason. It’s pretty, um . . . it’s pretty quiet. Holy moly. Anyway, um, bye.”
How the World Works
There’s a New York professor called Harold Schechter who writes about true crime books. I’ve been reading him to figure out what I’m meant to be doing.
True crime stories are morality tales that explain how the world works, he says. That’s why people read them. They always reflect the time in which they were written.
True crime stories from Puritan days say the killer fell victim to the devil. That’s how their world worked.
Then Freud came along. Suddenly every killer was playing out a fantasy to kill his mother or father. That’s how their world worked.
The new trend—reflecting our progressive times—blames the killing on “the system.” The killer was a victim of racism or poverty or social isolation by capitalism.
Schechter’s point rings true. When I tell my Aussie friends about my case, everyone automatically assumes Vincent is a victim of Deep South racism. With little information they’re certain he’s been locked up unfairly by rednecks. He is even a hero for snuffing out a white supremacist. This is basically Django Unchained.
I want this to be the case. I’d love this to be the case. After all, I’m the Race Trekkie. But there’s already a niggle tickling my brain. That the way this world works is more lumpy and awkward.
The District Attorney’s Office
Except for the dead cat in that flower bed over there, the little town of Brandon is impeccably well kept. Neat little shops and dollops of flowers. This is the administrative center of Rankin County. So from where I’m slumped against a pole across the road, I can see that the district attorney’s office and the courthouse sit in the one sandy building. Behind the sandy building stands the county jail. I’m gobbling chicken gizzard nuggets from the gas station.
A puff of smoke floats out of the mouth of the black policewoman sitting in her police car in front of the sandy building. Next to the police car, a Confederate soldier statue juts out his chin. Chiseled beneath him is the Confederate flag and the inscription TRUTH CRUSHED TO EARTH SHALL RISE AGAIN. The telling feature isn’t the soldier or his old message, but what’s at his feet. Fresh flowers poke out from four black urns. This isn’t a dead relic left standing, it’s a living shrine to revere the men who nearly everyone agrees fought to keep the slaves. Every black person on his or her way to court must pass this shrine, with yellow flowers freshly arranged by a living white Mississippian.
An officer with a Polish name too long for his badge mans the metal detector at the entrance. Two white women scratch and shake next to him, CONVICT stamped on their shirts. This is part of their reintegration program.
Waiting for the old gold elevator, I kick my shoe into the carpet and type gizzard into my smartphone dictionary. Jesus Christ.
District Attorney Michael Guest
Michael Guest eyes me like my presence in his town is a bigger mystery than any case that has crossed his desk. Why has an Australian flown over for this? His pink cheeks and aqua eyes glow. He’s Caucasian even for a Caucasian, with the face of a boy-band singer hitting forty.
One fat file labeled Richard Barrett squats on his desk. The ed
ges of photographs temptingly poke out. I eye them like I might a custard tart.
I start with my go-to question, because it opens things up and I’m obsessed with people’s families.
“Are you and your family long-term Mississippians?”
“We are. We have lived . . . I married a girl, I went to high school here. My parents moved over here to Rankin County when I was elementary age. I was actually born in New Jersey. My dad was in the military and he was stationed up there.”
“That’s where Richard Barrett grew up,” I say. “New Jersey.”
“He and I have something in common,” responds Michael Guest.
I pull out my Flip camera, and Michael Guest speeds up his rocking in his big leather chair.
“Some of the things . . .” Michael says, wary eyes on the camera. “Because the case hasn’t been to trial, there may be some questions I can’t answer at this point.”
“So, what happened?”
“As far as the crime itself?”
“Yes, as far as the crime itself.”
Michael slows down his rocking.
The Crime Itself, in the Words of DA Michael Guest
Mr. Barrett lived in a rural Rankin County community. The defendant, Mr. McGee, lived several houses down. And from what we’ve been able to put together, the defendant would often do work for Mr. Barrett. Not so much as full-time employment but yard work, things of that nature. And on the day of the crime, Mr. Barrett had picked up Mr. McGee. He had taken him over to another county to do some yard work. Apparently there was another house that Mr. Barrett had over there.
