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

  Out from Daisy’s pocket the cops pulled a little pinch of pot.

  Out of Patrick’s pocket they pulled Mexican coins and Mexican bills.

  “Hey, that’s not his!” Daisy slurred. “They’ve taken that from my home!”

  The cops said, “Shut up,” and frisked Vincent.

  Out from Vincent’s pocket they pulled a knife.

  Vincent started spinning tales. He told them his name was Dave. He then told them his brother’s name and information.

  They soon figured out who he was. And that he was out on probation with a knife in his pocket. Vincent was arrested and charged with careless driving, public drunkenness, giving false information to police, no driver’s license, no insurance.

  And he was charged with one more thing: grand larceny, for the stolen Mexican money. The cops carted Vincent to Rankin County Jail.

  Daisy was charged with possession. Just shy of seventeen, she was sent to a different location, Rankin County Juvenile Detention Center in Pearl.

  The Sixth Circle of Hell—Juvie

  Daisy spent four days and nights in juvenile detention. She met girls who had to sleep with men for food. I’m not supposed to be here, she thought. Where are my parents?

  “Your parents could have gotten you out,” the jail officer told her, “but they didn’t.”

  What, are they just gonna leave me? she thought, distressed and furious.

  She had come in Friday morning, and on Tuesday morning, the judge decided to release her without a record but with an ankle bracelet. It was her seventeenth birthday.

  Jamie was, to say the least, furious. It was now summer holidays, and these would be the rules: no friends, no cell phone, no Internet. Each morning, Jamie would wrap up the computer modem and cords in her handbag so Daisy could meditate like a disgraced monk without distraction over what she’d done. Daisy and her ankle bracelet wallowed all by themselves in the house for months.

  Meanwhile, mother was having her own adventures with Daisy’s confiscated cell phone. A male called and left a voice message: “I’m gonna come to your house and I’m gonna shoot your family. You got my brah arrested. It’s your fault.”

  Jamie took the cell phone to the police and played the message. The policeman said, “Be careful.” That was it.

  Back home, Jamie called the number back.

  “If you come to my house, there’s only one person that’s gonna get shot, and it’s not gonna be me,” said Jamie.

  “Oh, I . . . I . . . I was just joking, I was just joking,” said the gangsta at the other end.

  Jamie was terrified.

  The Seventh Circle of Hell—The Trial

  Even that wasn’t completely the end. Daisy and Jamie were called to court to appear as witnesses in the first trial of Vincent McGee.

  Mum and daughter Reyes pulled up at the perfectly neat square in the center of Brandon. They walked past the Confederate soldier statue and into the Rankin County Courthouse. Daisy was terrified. This would be the first time she’d seen him, the car-kicker, the throat-choker, since the arrest. Two men had volunteered to go with her, to “be a presence,” keeping Daisy at ease, and perhaps warning Vincent not to try anything: an uncle who was a highway patrolman and a cousin who was a constable.

  Daisy and her two policemen sat down in the front pew.

  Vincent entered the courtroom.

  Jamie saw Vincent, her daughter’s beau, for the first time.

  “The sad thing was, when he walked in, he smiled,” Jamie says. “This big, bright, beautiful smile. I mean, he’s a handsome kid. And none of his family were there, and I just thought that was so sad.”

  “Well, his family continued not to be there when he was sentenced to sixty-five years,” I tell her.

  Jamie looks glum. “Really? Even though, you know, I’m sure they’re so sick of him and all that he’s done in his life, it was just sad that nobody showed up.”

  Vincent did have a beautiful smile. But the meaning of that smile was up for debate.

  “He felt very entitled, and when he walked into that courtroom, I mean, I saw it,” Jamie says. “It just, like, oozed out of him that he was this wonderful person that everyone should want to be like, when really he’s . . . I mean, he’s a murderer, you know? And who would want to be like that?”

  Fantastically, Vincent had declined a lawyer. It was announced he’d represent himself. To keep things simple, the prosecution focused on one charge, which happened to be the grand larceny: $300 in Mexican pesos, $200 in Mexican paper dollars, and Jamie Reyes’s three-hundred-dollar silver ring.

  Vincent had sat still through the mention of his other transgressions. But he snapped at the words grand larceny.

  “No! I didn’t do that!” said Vincent.

  The judge told Vincent to shut his mouth.

  Daisy took the stand. Vincent McGee, attorney-at-law, paced back and forth before her.

  “You really gonna say I did this?” Vincent said. “Are you really gonna try and blame me for all this that you did?”

  “Yes,” Daisy said.

  Vincent snapped.

  “Are you stupid?” he said. He started calling Daisy all sorts of names.

  The floorboards creaked where Daisy’s two policemen sat, as they prepared for something.

  “Get off the stand! This is done!” said the judge. He found Vincent guilty and gave him ten years for grand larceny, suspending nine of them. But that meant the four years suspended for assaulting the law enforcement officers came down on him, and so that morning Vincent was sentenced to five years in state prison. His ankles were shackled. His hands were cuffed to his belt. And then he was gone.

  Minutes later a court official walked over to the front pew. He crouched a little. He told Jamie and Daisy to stay put.

  “Don’t leave the building,” the man said, “because we don’t have him.”

  Vincent had escaped.

  “They ended up getting him,” Daisy tells me. “I mean, he couldn’t go far with the shackles.”

  Outside the Reyeses’

  I sit in the car with a dozen knots either tied or untied in my brain.

  Tina, Vallena, and Earnest said Vincent was charged with and convicted of grand larceny “primarily” as punishment for dating a white girl. Vallena thought Richard attacked Vincent years later for the same reason, as a warning from the Klan.

  Daisy is Mexican. That distinction mightn’t make any difference to Vallena, but would the Klan really get so worked up about a black man dating a Mexican? Tina, Vallena, and Earnest also said officers connected to Daisy’s family bashed Vincent in his cell. But the chronology’s all wrong: Vincent doesn’t meet Daisy until a year and a half after he gets out of jail for the fight with the two officers. The two police officers by Daisy’s side in the courtroom have, through a game of telephone, traveled backward in time and become the two officers in the cell in the minds of Earnest, Vallena, and Tina.

  Yet.

  Vincent was arrested for grand larceny, giving false information to police, careless driving, public drunkenness, no driver’s license, no insurance. The district attorney chose to pursue only one charge—the grand larceny for the stolen Mexican money.

  But weren’t the pesos in fact in Patrick’s pocket, not Vincent’s?

  In Daisy’s WEEK FROM HELL, recording events as they happened, she wrote: Patrick took dad’s Mexican pesos & gold clip & some coins.

  I had brought this up back in the house. That Patrick swiped the pesos, not Vincent. This distinction didn’t seem to strike Daisy as important. Why should it? Here was this psycho who choked her, kicked in her door, pimped a prostitute, and was driving drunk without a license. What’s one little extra thing on the list, even if that thing is not necessarily true? He was the one who brought Patrick into her life, so he was responsible.

  To Vincen
t and his family, however, this distinction is the main event. It’s the only event. Never mind choking a girl, kicking in a car, stealing vehicles, bashing China and selling her for sex, and drunk driving—these didn’t happen, or at the very least didn’t matter (and perhaps they didn’t know about most of them): He didn’t take the pesos.

  And I can’t get past it, either. Vincent might have deserved to be in jail for what he did, but still, he was put in jail for something he didn’t do.

  In its own messy, clunky way, this was the archetypal Deep South tale: a black man thrown in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

  It should be remembered that Vincent ended up serving a little under three years, rather than five, and less than two months after he was released he stabbed Richard in the neck so many times, Richard’s head nearly fell off. Some might argue this vindicated locking him up in the first place. But that’s not how justice is meant to work.

  There’s one other knot that revealed itself on the Reyeses’ couch with the neon cushions. A knot that was either untied or tied up twice as tightly, I don’t know anymore. Daisy said that when she was at the juvenile detention center, “the jail officers told me my parents could have got me out but they didn’t.” This sent Daisy into a flux of fury and distress. And there was a follow-up: “But then when I got out, my parents told me they weren’t able to get me out.”

  Her parents had tried and were denied. Someone had lied to Daisy, telling one of the cruelest lies of all: that she had been abandoned by her parents.

  This is uncannily similar to what happened to Vincent before the fight with the officers. McGee understood that he was to be released on this day and no one had come to pick him up. Upon being told that his mother had been notified to pick him up but had failed to do so, McGee became very unruly. Had Vincent been lied to as well? Had Tina been denied?

  I’ve been dark on Tina McGee for abandoning him that day. I’ve framed her choice as the tipping point, the action that set in motion another action that set in motion another, all rolling down a hill to that night in the crummy little house and the killing of Richard Barrett. But what if she did want to get Vincent out but was told she couldn’t, as happened with Jamie and Daisy? What if she couldn’t get in to see Vincent, just like she had claimed to me she wasn’t allowed to see him before the trial?

  What if this is the way that power asserts itself over the helpless in Mississippi?

  What if Tina is a better mother than I first thought?

  Lord it’s hard to work out what’s going on. Although I feel like I’m plodding in a concentric circle toward something. If I keep plodding, I’ll eventually get to the center, won’t I?

  Vincent’s Call

  The skin on my left wrist hurts. It hurts because I’m biting it. I’m biting it because I’m seething and I hate myself. For five minutes I thought my Dictaphone, with the lapel microphone sticky-taped to my cell phone, was recording.

  My eyes just caught the counter flashing 00:00:00:00. My finger torpedoes to the red record button.

  Vincent McGee is the man I haven’t been recording for five minutes. He’s sealed in his little cell. I’m hunched over my coffee table.

  Two Walmart Green Dot cards—one for a hundred and fifty dollars and one for fifty—sit on the table before me. He asked for the numbers right away. I said, “Hello,” and he said, “You got the numbers?” My fingernail scratched the silver panels on the cards—like on instant lottery cards—and I read them out.

  “Sorry, I didn’t get that,” I say, the Dictaphone recording now, and my teeth released from biting my flesh. “So they wouldn’t let you use the phone to get home, so then the fight escalated from there?”

  I’m asking Vincent about the fight with the policemen, the incident that rolled him out of juvenile detention into the adult prison system.

  “Right,” Vincent says, his voice tiny and crackly, traveling through his cell phone, across the Mississippi sky, and into my ear. Even tiny and crackly, his words echo off his prison cell walls. “’Cause I was in court and the judge released me. So I was trying to call somebody to come pick me up, but they wouldn’t give me access to a phone.”

  “It says in the report,” I tell him, “it’s because your mother didn’t come to pick you up and that’s why you got angry.”

  “No!” Vincent says. “That wasn’t the case—they didn’t want me to leave.”

  “Oh yeah, I understand,” I say. “They wanted to punish you for being in the Vice Lords gang?”

  “Say what?”

  “They wanted to keep you incarcerated for being in the Vice Lords.”

  “Something like that, you know what I’m sayin’?” he says. “They didn’t like what I was. They didn’t respect me. They thought they had more authority on me and all types of stuff like this.”

  Not quite the same lie as to Daisy, then, but certainly close.

  “I heard,” I say, “that sometimes the officers in juvenile detention centers, they tease and pick on the prisoners until they get angry and upset.”

  “Right,” says Vincent. “They do that all the time here. That’s what caused most of the fights, you hear? You see, I was behind my door. They had to open my cell in order for the confrontation to take place, you see?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I found that strange. Because they were saying you were being angry, but even if that was the case, you were already locked up, so there was no need for them to open up the door.”

  “Correct,” he says.

  I ask Vincent how old he was when he first met Richard Barrett.

  “I think I was around about fifteen, sixteen.”

  “And what happened? Where did you meet him?”

  “Me and my little brother, we were walking up the street. He called us to his yard and he was telling us about a job, you know what I’m sayin’? Paint his deck. So that’s how it went.”

  “And what happened with that job? Did both you and your brother do it, or only you?”

  “Just me,” he says. “You know what I’m sayin’, I went and did it. But I ain’t finished it because he tried to pay me in slave wages, you hear?”

  The vernacular “slave wages” sounds more heated when muttered in Mississippi.

  “He tried to give me a dollar for painting the whole building, you hear? I did the front part, and then I told him, ‘I don’t think I’m being paid fair. It’s too hard.’ So I was like, ‘No, I’m through.’ But he took me to the house to pay me for what I did, and he gave me a dollar.”

  He did that to other people. I’ve spoken to other workmen who he ripped off. And they were all very angry at him. One young man (white) I tracked down had started legal action against him and was still seething years later. “Is that the only time you worked with him? Or did you work with him a few times?”

  “A few times. I worked with him when I was twenty-two.”

  That was the time Richard ended up with a knife in his neck.

  “Why did you work with him again,” I say, “when you knew he hadn’t paid you money last time?”

  “I really don’t know myself, you hear? I really don’t understand, but, you know, one day he came to my yard. He sounded like he needed some help, so I was gonna go give him some help, you hear? He tried to pull the same stunt on me again, you hear? I wasn’t gonna have it—God knows, I had grew up.”

  To Vincent, growing up was stabbing a man. This was his lesson learned.

  “And so, how did the fight break out in his house?”

  “But look, we’re moving fast right now, you hear? That’s another topic for another day, you hear?”

  “Sure, no, I understand.”

  “Yo. You’re gonna write exactly what I’m saying and don’t twist my words.”

  Vincent says if I twist his words, it could mess up his future chances in the courtroom.

  “One ch
arge they gave me—I got manslaughter, arson, burglary—the burglary charge, they had no evidence. I just went along with it for the plea so I could get the time that I got. I got to go to the court and try to get the time back.”

  That burglary charge was twenty-five years. Why would you go along with another twenty-five years?

  “Send a letter with the questions on it, you know what I’m sayin’? I’ll take my time to think my thoughts.”

  “Sure,” I say. “You’re still at MDOC in Pearl?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I need those Green Dot numbers one more time.”

  I pluck the cards off the coffee table and hold them under the lamp next to the couch and read out the numbers.

  “A’right.”

  I tell him I also need a letter so I can talk to his lawyer, Mike Scott. We haggle and hit on a hundred and fifty Green Dot.

  I’d be lying if I said paying Vincent was weighing heavily on my conscience. I suspect he’s using his Green Dot money for little luxuries like cigarettes. I can’t help but think, So what? I used cash to hustle my way into the crucifixion ceremony in the Philippines in Race Relations. And the sperm bank in Palestine. Maybe I’ve just been greasing palms for too long.

  The Ballad of James Rankin

  When I first got to Mississippi, Jim Giles mentioned that one of Richard Barrett’s young men had been involved with a bomb crime.

  It’s taken me a while, but I’ve found him.

  The headline in the old newspaper reads: MAN HELD ON WEAPONS COUNT: 19-YEAR-OLD ALLEGEDLY SOLD SUITCASE BOMB TO UNDERCOVER AGENT FOR $130.