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

  Green Dot Without the Dictaphone

  Vincent just rang again. Didn’t have the Dictaphone. I was driving. Now I’ve pulled over. He rang from a different number. It was all slurry. Like, “Aaaiiiiiii.” So he asked me about getting paid for my book. And I said, “Oh, listen, I really want to tell your side of the story, but it’s against the law,” and I told him about the “Son of Sam law” that says a criminal can’t profit from his crime. And he didn’t argue over it. He just assumed it must be the truth. Because it is. And then he was like, “Oh well, I could write the story.” And I said, “You can write some other story. You can write a novel or you can write about something else, but you won’t be able to get paid for this particular story.” So he said, “Oh, okay.” And he started talking about Walmart “Green Dot cards” or something. About whether I could put some money in that. So I just straightaway kind of cracked under the pressure. I said, “Well, you know, I don’t know about that.” Then he started talking about, well, how much could I put in a Walmart Green Dot card? So I said to him, “Well, listen, I don’t even know if I can, but if I can . . . Listen, before, I looked into how much money family and friends can put on a prisoner’s account, and the most you can put into that is three hundred dollars.” And he said, “Well, what?” Like he’s waiting for me to tell him something. He said, “You’re going to make a lot out of this book.” And I said, “Listen, I don’t know about that, but you know that’s what it says on the MDOC page—you can only put in three hundred dollars.” So then he said, “Well, how much can you put in a Walmart Green Dot account?” So I said, “Oh, I don’t know.” He goes, “Well, how much are you willing?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know, I guess three hundred dollars.” And he said, “Well, you know . . .” And then I said, “Well, how much were you thinking?” And so then, for some reason, then he goes, “Oh, listen, put in two hundred dollars in the Walmart Green Dot card.” And then he says there’s some number on the card and then I can ring him up with that number. So I kind of don’t quite know why he haggled me down to two hundred dollars. Maybe that’s something he knows about in prison, or something like that. Maybe he made a mistake.

  And then I said, “Oh yeah, what about visitation?” And then he said, “Oh listen, the form is still going through.” And he sounded pretty genuine, I guess. I mean, maybe he wasn’t.

  Anyway, so then that was that. So then I hung up. Then he rang back five minutes later and said, “Oh, don’t put it all on one card. Put a hundred and fifty on one card and fifty on another.” So I was like, “Oh, okay.” And then he goes, “Oh, and I think I can get . . .” and he said something about visitation on Thursday or Friday.

  It’s so delicate, this communication. Vincent has my number, I don’t have his. This is just going to happen as God and/or Fate and/or Vincent wants it to happen. Is Tina talking to him? What’s she saying to him about me? How perfect if I meet him in prison. That’s better than a trial. I’m kind of bummed that money has come into it. Not the money as such, but what it says about Vincent, about the role money has played in this crime perhaps. Wouldn’t this be better if he just wanted to tell his story and have the truth out there?

  The Reyeses

  Two doors up from the address I have for the Reyeses’ home, a skinhead is bashing a nail into a post on his white veranda. The house is white, the skinhead is pink, and the sky is overblown blue. I guess I don’t actually know he’s a skinhead. He could just have a shaved head. But his T-shirt is tight and white and my race antennas are going off.

  I reread the file propped up on my steering wheel:

  Vincent McGee did willfully, unlawfully, and feloniously . . . take, steal, and carry away $300 in Mexican Pesos, $200 in Mexican Paper Dollars, and one silver ring with a value of $300, property of Jamie Reyes.

  This was where the “white girl in there somewhere” comes into it, and, according to Vallena Greer, where Vincent got caught up in the race war.

  A car pulls into the Reyeses’ driveway as I walk to the front door. I immediately regret clomping across the grass rather than sticking to the cement path. A girl—Latin American? late teens? early twenties?—steps from the car. I tell her I’m looking for a Jamie Reyes. To talk about a Vincent McGee.

  “Come in,” she says warmly, like she’s been waiting for me. “I’m Daisy, Jamie’s my mom.”

  There’s a lot of neon punching through in the living room. The cushions on the couch, the straws in our iced tea, Jamie’s cardigan, Daisy’s T-shirt. The Reyeses, mother and daughter, sit opposite me on the couch. Daisy’s stepfather, a relatively new addition, I gather, kicks around in the kitchen space. He’s not neon, he’s dull blue, and the dog slopping at his feet is dull brown.

  I don’t yet have my bearings as to how everyone here intersects with Vincent McGee.

  “I got the impression,” Jamie begins, “that the Aborigine people are kind of like the Native Americans? Just kind of tucked away?”

  Good Lord! This is pretty much the first time I’ve heard a Mississippian express curiosity about something going on outside Mississippi.

  “I’ve been to Australia,” she continues.

  Good Lord!

  “When I was in Sydney for just one day, I was walking around the harbor, wanting to do a whale-watching tour,” she says. “And there was this Aborigine man and he was sitting playing didgeridoo. And he had paint on and he was near naked, like a tribesman. And I stopped and took a picture of him and bought one of his CDs. I went on the cruise and then I came back and that Aborigine that had been sitting there now had jeans and a T-shirt on, and there was another Aborigine in his place. I guess it was shift change. And I just thought, Oh! You know, it was a little disappointing, just seeing him in his jeans and T-shirt.”

  “Very selfish of him,” I say.

  “I know—how dare you put clothes on!” she says, and we laugh like kookaburras.

  Already I can’t understand how the Reyes family got mixed up with someone who stabbed someone else sixteen times. I open up my manila folder marked Rankin County Circuit Court.

  “Something I came across in Vincent’s history was that he’d been charged for grand larceny and there was the name Jamie Reyes on the paperwork.”

  “Yeah, Daisy kind of dated him,” Jamie says. Daisy looks rueful.

  So there she is, sitting on the green couch: the so-called white girlfriend whose existence, according to Vallena, Earnest McBride, and Tina McGee, caused the Klan to seek revenge on Vincent.

  “Leave that one out,” says Daisy’s stepfather. I think he’s having a go at me, but he’s just telling Jamie to leave the iced tea pitcher out.

  I start reading aloud from my well-smudged Jackson Advocate: “Vincent McGee. Sent to prison at seventeen for dating a white girl.”

  Jamie and Daisy laugh.

  “That’s so funny,” says Jamie, “because Daisy’s not even white. Her dad’s Mexican.”

  For Vallena and Tina, though—black women who grew up in Mississippi, without many in-between people—that’s still white, just like Richard’s still Klan. I continue with Tina McGee’s telling of events: Vincent had a white girlfriend. And he and his friends had gone to her parents’ house for the weekend. I don’t know if the parents were gone or what, but some of the other people at the house said that Vincent stole some Mexican money or something. There were other people in the house, but they said Vincent took it, and they charged him with grand larceny and he got five years. They didn’t prove that he did nothin’.

  This is not how Daisy and Jamie remember it.

  “I have a little journal I wrote everything down in,” Daisy says.

  She leaves and returns with an exercise book.

  This is pretty much the exact scene in Capote where the friend of the dead girl retrieves the diary for Truman.

  The pages are covered front and back with big-loop, schoolgirl handwriting. The journal is
headed: WEEK FROM HELL.

  Daisy’s First Circle of Hell—Meeting Vincent

  Daisy’s “week from hell” really spanned two to three weeks, or six months I suppose, or continues now, if you want to look at it that way. Regardless, the time between meeting Vincent for the first time and him landing in Rankin County Jail was under three weeks. This is three years ago, when Daisy was sixteen.

  Daisy had been hanging out with a black girl from school called Jasmine. They had gone to Battlefield Park.

  “A horrible part of town,” Daisy tells me. “Part of Jackson. It used to be just a big park, ball fields. But the area around it, I mean, it’s horrible. It’s just drug- and crime-ridden.” There had been several murders in that park, just in broad daylight.

  “So is ‘Battlefield’ a bit of a joke name for it?”

  “No, that’s what it’s really called.” A Civil War thing, apparently. (Of course.)

  Vincent was with a black kid called Patrick. The two boys slid up to Daisy and Jasmine.

  “Vincent had a beautiful smile,” Daisy says. “And that’s one thing that I notice about people when I first meet them, is their smile. I mean, if they keep their mouths clean. That’s the easiest thing to do.”

  I gently tighten my lips lest my smile be judged.

  Her WEEK FROM HELL catalogs other things she spotted on Vincent’s face.

  Star tattoo between eyebrows

  2 stars below right eye

  Playboy bunny on right side of mouth

  Teardrop & butterfly below left eye

  Do-rag and black bandanna tied in back

  “We are two young girls in a little white car, you know, with chrome rims,” Daisy says. “We just got to talking and exchanged numbers, and I think he called me later that night, and he was like, ‘I want to hang out with you.’”

  “He probably thought: Okay, this girl, she’s driving a really nice car, maybe she’s got a little money,” Jamie says.

  The next few times Daisy saw Vincent, each time he had a different vehicle. And there was always one window bumped out.

  Soon, as WEEK FROM HELL catalogs, Daisy got to see under Vincent McGee’s T-shirt:

  2 bullet scars on shoulder & back of neck

  Scar on spine in middle of back, going west to east, maybe 2 inches

  That’s the first I’ve heard of Vincent having been shot. I wonder if he really has?

  “I guess he had a lot of women, or whatever you want to say, you know, in his life,” Daisy says. “So I think that’s what drew me to him, was the confidence just in himself. In the sense that, I can get whoever I want to get, no matter, with no issues.”

  Just as Daisy met Vincent, her family left town for a vacation: her mum, Mexican Dad, and a cousin of Mexican Dad. Daisy had a holiday job, so it sounded normal, responsible even, when she told her parents, “Well, I’m going to stay here and work.”

  Back then the Reyeses lived on the county line, down Highway 49, part of Rankin County. It was the middle of nowhere, surrounded by woods.

  Hours after the Reyeses left for their vacation, Vincent, Jasmine, and Patrick moved into the house in the woods.

  The Second Circle of Hell—China

  Maybe a week after they had started going out (if that was what was happening), Vincent called Daisy from a hotel in Jackson and said he wanted her to come over.

  The hotel was run-down. Might not even get one star. Daisy pushed through the doors of the soiled lobby, where an actual flea jumped on her leg, and then pushed through the doors of the indoor pool area. In the fog and moist air, about to splash in, were Patrick and Jasmine. Cuddling up in the corner of the pool were Vincent and some girl.

  “Why did you call me out here?! What are you doing?!” Daisy’s questions echoed off the walls.

  “He pulled me aside,” Daisy says. “And he was like, ‘This is my girlfriend, but she’s not really my girlfriend—she goes out and makes money for me.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean by that, I don’t understand what you mean.’ And he said, ‘Well, I send her to do things and she does them and I get money.’ And I thought that was a little strange, so we kind of argued a little bit and then I was ready to leave.”

  But Vincent grabbed her phone so she couldn’t leave. The mysterious girl pulled herself out of the pool. She had scratches and scabs, like road burn, all over her elbows and knees.

  Daisy realized she’d seen a picture of this girl in Vincent’s room. He had said her name was China.

  “Was China her nickname because she was Chinese?” I ask.

  Daisy nods.

  I tell her what the investigators told me. Vincent’s first time in juvenile detention was because he’d beaten an Asian girlfriend to a pulp and threatened to cut her with a knife.

  Daisy tells me that Vincent had said China had thrown herself out of a moving car in an attempt to abort a baby. Daisy didn’t ask whether it was Vincent’s baby.

  “Are Asian people common in Jackson?” I ask, entertaining the possibility Vincent had two Asian girlfriends.

  “Not common at all,” Daisy tells me.

  Back at the pool, screams ricocheted from wall to wall: Daisy screaming at Vincent to give her phone back, Jasmine screaming at Vincent, China screaming at Jasmine to stop screaming at Vincent. Then China moved on to Daisy.

  “You need to quit calling Vincent,” screamed China. “I don’t know what you’re doing!”

  “He’s calling me!” yelled Daisy. “You know I’m never making a phone call. I don’t know which number to call. He calls me from a different number each time.”

  “I was scared,” Daisy says. “You know, I’d never been in a fight, I didn’t know what to do. I mean, do you push her? So she kept getting in my face and yelling at me and threatening me. At one point she did tell me she’d kill me, and I just thought, you know, Yeah right, you’re twenty-five pounds and you know I’m bigger than you—I’ll just step on you.”

  The Third Circle of Hell—The White Car

  WEEK FROM HELL catalogs another tattoo of Vincent’s: Mama’s name on right hand.

  And just one week and a half from their meeting at Battlefield Park, that right hand with Mama’s name was around Daisy’s throat. The two were at the house in the woods.

  “He wanted to take my car,” Daisy says. “And I told him no. And he ended up choking me and telling me, ‘I’m taking your car.’ I had red marks on my neck. It made me think, God—take my car and please leave. And he took my keys and left. From somebody who had never been in any kind of abuse in her life, to have somebody right in your face choking you . . . I mean, it scared me.”

  Daisy stares down at the WEEK FROM HELL in my lap.

  “Vincent did not like the word no,” she says. I picture Vincent demanding from Richard the rest of his wages, and Richard refusing.

  One hour later, Vincent came back with Daisy’s little white car. He had kicked in one of the doors.

  “When he came back, it was that, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.’ You know, that kind of manipulation. Making me feel like I was the one who was wrong for getting mad or getting upset.”

  The Fourth Circle of Hell—The Truck

  A couple of nights after the strangulation, Vincent and Patrick took Mexican Dad’s truck and burst a tire. The boys had no phone and walked back to the house in the woods.

  Daisy told them, “No problem.” The three of them plus Jasmine piled into the other truck on hand, belonging to cousin of Mexican Dad.

  They drove off to Mexican Dad’s truck, changed the tire, and split in two for the trip back home: Jasmine and Patrick in Mexican Dad’s truck, Vincent and Daisy in the other.

  The two drivers, Vincent and Jasmine, pushed it on the highway.

  They started speeding.

  Then racing.

  Other cars were beeping and flas
hing their lights.

  Vincent didn’t stop in time to turn down Daisy’s road. He just kept going. Jasmine swerved into Daisy’s road at the last moment, but there were lots of loose rocks on the turnoff. She skidded straight into an electrical pole. The transformer on the top of the pole fell off and crushed the truck.

  Jasmine and Patrick were okay, but Mexican Dad’s truck was totaled.

  The Fifth Circle of Hell—Arrest

  Daisy looks miserable for a cherry-cheeked girl in a bright lime top, sipping iced tea from a neon straw.

  “I don’t know why at that point I didn’t wake up and think, What are you doing? You just totaled your dad’s . . . What’s he going to think when he gets back from vacation and his truck is totaled? But, you know, things happened.”

  What happened was that Daisy, Vincent, Patrick, and Jasmine went to a party. Daisy took her first ecstasy pill. Patrick and Vincent went into a room—she didn’t know what they were doing in there, but they came out with red eyes. She was also smoking pot, falling down the back of the couch like a dollar coin.

  Time to go. Vincent got behind the wheel of cousin of Mexican Dad’s truck (not Daisy’s white car with the door kicked in, or the truck wrapped around the pole at the end of Daisy’s street). Vincent swerved off. Patrick was with them, but Daisy realized Jasmine had been left behind. Daisy’s eyes were pumping like little hearts. Now red was rolling in and out. Now a siren. Vincent was zigzagging on the road. Now she was pushed against a cop car, being frisked. They were squeezing her legs like they were trying to get toothpaste.