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

  “Make yourself comfortable,” John Moore says, pointing at my throne. “That’s actually my seat there I sit in.”

  “Oh, okay,” I say. “Am I allowed to?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Yep, put your feet on the desk, I don’t care.”

  John Moore scoops up a John Moore pen from a bowl of John Moore pens on the desk and tells me I can have a second one, too, if I’d like.

  “I was actually raised on a farm,” he says, “and had the experience that every young person should have. It’s just a different lifestyle. You know, much slower.”

  I aim my John Moore pen at my yellow notepad.

  “How old are you?” I ask.

  “None of your business. I’m fifty-seven.”

  I ask him what he thinks about Mississippi’s reputation.

  “The view from the outside, a lot of it has been a big lie. The news media, for some reason, wants to keep Mississippi looking like the old slave state.”

  John Moore tells me Mississippi isn’t split between black and white anymore. He then tells me it is.

  “It’s still segregated because it’s not forced,” John Moore says. “You know, blacks like to go hang out with blacks, that’s their family. And, see, whites are the same way. There’s not something sinister or some conspiracy behind it all. It’s just the way communities behave. It’s just a natural thing. But that also is mutating over time, as the areas become more integrated.”

  A rattlesnake pokes its tongue at me on a little yellow flag on John Moore’s desk. DON’T TREAD ON ME read the words beneath the snake.

  “Just don’t try to force it!” John hisses. “That’s what has created a lot of animosity down through the years. The stinking federal government trying to force people to do things that if you leave them alone they’re going to do anyway. It’s kind of like setting the speed limit on the highway. You know, lots of people are gonna speed just because it’s the speed limit.” John Moore laughs. “You get the logic there? The speed limit’s seventy, so that means I’m s’posed to drive seventy-five!”

  John leans back in his throne, crossing his arms over his maroon polo shirt with JOHN MOORE DISTRICT 60 on the pocket. I suppose I get the logic, but I’m here for something else.

  “A few years back,” I say, “I came to Mississippi and did a documentary on this man I think you know, called Richard Barrett.”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Richard was tragically murdered, what, a couple of years ago or something like that?” John Moore says, not sounding like he knows the guy well enough to be number two in his will.

  “And I saw,” I say, “that you’ve gone to one of his Spirit of America Days.”

  John Moore pinks a little.

  “Well, no, I . . . I never . . . You know, that was kind of a . . . I never spoke at any of his things. I . . . I never went to one of them.”

  John Moore glances over at the rattlesnake for support.

  “Now, there’s a whole bunch of House and Senate members and governors and lieutenant governors that have spoken at it. At its . . . Which is actually . . . That’s one of those things. Richard Barrett was branded as a racist, and I’m telling you he was, but he didn’t hate blacks. Matter of fact, the guy that killed him, Richard had been taking care of him. The guy had been in prison, got out, couldn’t get a job. Richard paid him to do whatever he was doing—I don’t know and don’t care.”

  That “I don’t know and don’t care” is delivered as a knowing aside. I try to think of a reason that John Moore has said those words in that way that doesn’t involve sexual innuendo, but can’t.

  “The only association I ever had with Barrett was back, gosh, ten or eleven years ago.”

  John Moore tells me that each March, for years, a member of the House, a lady, would stand up from her throne and call for a resolution to recognize the Spirit of America Day. One day, ten years ago, the lady woke up sick. She rang John Moore and asked him to do it. “For sure, yeah, I don’t care,” he told her.

  That year, John Moore stood up from his throne and called for the resolution. He glanced up at the public gallery and caught the eyes of the young athletes. He didn’t see Richard, though.

  “He knew that he was branded a racist,” John Moore tells me. “He wouldn’t even get in the balcony, he would stay back. He knew it would cause strife on the floor, even though what he was doing was a good thing. They were good kids, you know. It wasn’t like they were skinheads or anything.”

  From then on, once a year, the phone rang in his office and Richard’s voice came through the crackle.

  “Look, my kids are coming on March the first. Will you do it again?” Richard would say.

  “Sure will,” said John Moore each year.

  “But that would be the only time we’d communicate,” John Moore tells me.

  “That was it?” I ask.

  “Yep,” says John Moore, not sounding like a man who’s number two on Richard Barrett’s will. “You know, admittedly, Barrett said and did some stupid things. I’m not going to sit here and tell you he was a wonderful, great guy. He was aware he had a lot of folks offended. And there was a lot of . . . There was even the . . . a family situation that he actually had . . . He actually had a sister and stuff that I . . .”

  John Moore’s mouth clunks and rattles to a halt. Did he see my blue eyes ping when he said sister? He reaches for a crystal bowl on the desk, between the John Moore pens and the rattlesnake flag.

  “Would you care for a piece of candy?”

  “Thank you,” I say, and pluck a red striped candy.

  “Compliments of the City of Jackson.”

  “I don’t know if I want to eat it or keep it,” I say, my mouth actually watering for more sister news.

  He plucks two more candies, one for me, one for himself.

  “Well here, have one to eat, one for home. Get as many as you want. They’ve been sitting there for a while.”

  John Moore peels the cellophane from his candy and sucks it up.

  “After he had been dead for, gosh, two or three weeks,” he says through sucks, “I get this strange call from Florida. And it’s his sister.”

  A puff of joy poofs in my heart as Florida leaves his lips and is scribbled down on my yellow notepad. I feel like I’ve caught a rare butterfly.

  “Geraldine?” I say.

  John Moore dodges confirming the name.

  “Well, he kept all of that very secretive,” he says, “because he was afraid they would be hurt. See, he knew his reputation. And he loved his family very much—just like all of us do—and he was afraid for anybody to know where his family lived.”

  With a gulp that waters his eyes, he sucks his candy down his throat.

  “I connected his sister with our chancery clerk in Rankin County. A gentleman by the name of Larry Swales. He’s the one who kind of keeps up with all the wills. Richard’s sister and me, we probably had a thirty-minute conversation. Richard was always going down there.”

  “To Florida to meet her?”

  John Moore now dodges confirming Florida like he dodged her name.

  “She was trying to find out everything I knew. Which was nothing. Because you’ve just heard all the communication Richard and I had all these years, which was nothing,” John Moore says, like he’s not number two in Richard Barrett’s will.

  “On that point,” I say, “I’ve got here, and this is public record . . .”

  I pull Richard Barrett’s last will and testament from a manila folder on my lap.

  John Moore starts scratching his arm.

  “Oh yeah, the will . . .” he says.

  “Have you heard about this already?”

  “Oh yeah, yeah, I’ve seen it.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Okay, what . . . He called me and said, ‘Look, can I come over to your h
ouse and talk to you?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I guess so.’ So he came to the house. I didn’t even have a clue he knew where I lived, you know. And he said, ‘Look, you know, I’m . . . I’m not going to leave my estate to anybody, and I’d love to name you as one of the executors of my estate.’ I thought, Sure. Well I’m . . . I’m sitting there thinking, Okay, I’m as old as he is, I’m going to die before he does, so this is a nonissue.”

  My antennas flit.

  “And I’m telling you, when he left I folded the paperwork up and threw it in the garbage. ’Cause I’ll never have any use for it. And then lo and behold, it wasn’t a year or so after that he actually was murdered.”

  Hearing the news of Richard’s death, John Moore rang Larry Swales, the man who handles the wills.

  “See, I was named as the second guy,” John Moore tells me. “I said to Larry Swales, ‘So if this other guy’—and I couldn’t even remember the guy’s name ’cause I’d thrown the will away, I threw it in the garbage—I said, ‘If the guy doesn’t come forward, let me know.’ Well, the other guy came forward, so I never really thought about it again.”

  I ask him why he and this other guy—Vince Thornton—were in the will, but not Richard’s sister.

  He says he has no idea. “I mean, all you do as an executor is you read the will and you do what it says and that’s it.”

  “But don’t you also get everything if the other guy doesn’t?”

  “Well, not necessarily.”

  Perhaps not necessarily, but in the case of Richard’s will, yes.

  If, for any reason, the aforesaid VINCE THORNTON predeceases me or is unwilling, unable, or disqualified to receive the bequest, hereunder, then I give, devise, and bequeath all my worldly possessions to JOHN MOORE of Brandon, Mississippi.

  “I hadn’t read the thing before entirely,” John Moore says of the will he says he threw in the garbage bin. “But I think it actually says that the money was s’posed to be given to somebody or to something.”

  Having been given the world’s vaguest explanation, I move to the will’s number three—the government of Iran.

  John Moore looks like a pained man trying hard not to look like a pained man. A bead of sweat has grown underneath his nose. He wipes it off with a knuckle.

  “I knew it was there,” he says. “But, you know, it’s his money, he can give it to whoever he wants. Don’t tell me who I can give my money to, you know? Just as long as he wasn’t giving it to the Taliban or something.”

  I refrain from saying that many would think the government of Iran is the “something” in “or something.”

  Another knuckle to the nose brushes another drop of sweat.

  “You know, I think Barrett, from a reputation standpoint, got what he asked for. I can’t defend his reputation and I’m surely not going to defend his words,” John Moore says, after a fair while of defending his reputation and defending his words.

  “The connection—the will and stuff—I don’t know why. I guess because I had done this favor for him for ten years and that he might not have had any other friends. I don’t know if the only friends in the world he had might’ve been his few neighbors out there, that were all black. That’s what you need to do. Hunt down his neighbors.”

  I stand from my throne, thread my John Moore pen in my collar, and pocket my City of Jackson candy.

  John Moore eyes my Dictaphone.

  “Ever heard of Peavey Electronics?” John Moore says.

  I tell him I have not.

  “They build a lot of big sound systems. You know where they’re made?”

  “I think the answer’s going to be Mississippi.”

  “Meridian, Mississippi,” he says. “The founder started building sound systems under his garage. Now it’s a $250 million corporation.”

  I wonder where this is all heading.

  “It’s a slow culture. We’re the hospitality state,” John Moore tells me with his eyes locked on mine, “but don’t associate us being that way with us being dumb.”

  I feel a salty bead of sweat underneath my nose.

  Larry Swales

  So I go to see Larry Swales, the man in charge of the wills in Rankin County, to see whether he’s still got Richard’s sister’s phone number.

  Larry is silver-haired and in a particularly good mood. He was reelected chancery clerk last week. He calls his secretary into his office. “She knows how to use the computer better than me,” he chirps.

  “Barrett,” I tell her, and she punches the name into his computer.

  “Do you have a first name?” she asks.

  “Richard.”

  “Oh,” Larry says, “the man lit on fire?”

  “Yes.”

  This changes everything. Larry turns “Barrett Pink”—the color a lot of white people turn when you mention his name.

  “Well, I didn’t know him,” Larry says.

  (I never said you did.)

  “Always alone,” he flusters. “Didn’t have anyone.”

  Larry’s secretary interjects: “He wore knickers.”

  “Knickers?” I ask.

  She says he wore long socks up to his knees and shorts so wide, they looked like a skirt.

  Larry pulls out a nail file and starts filing his nails.

  “He had one close friend,” Larry says, “and I can’t remember his name . . . John? John Moore?”

  In the same way I can’t figure out why he’s filing his nails, I can’t work out why he’s clearly faking stumbling over John Moore’s name.

  Larry’s secretary tells me Richard’s sister isn’t in the database. I get up to leave.

  “John Moore,” Larry says. “He called up because he thought he was going to get all the money. That it was all going to go to him. And he was real mad when I said that it wasn’t.”

  These men in power who get nervous when Richard’s name comes up—I wonder what they know about the time Richard was quietly released from Rankin County Jail.

  Bearing Witness

  Janet Malcolm, I know what you think of us true crime writers.

  Being outsiders to these communities, poking our noses where they’re not wanted, looks bad on paper.

  But I caught up with the district attorney again and asked him why he took the death penalty off the table. He said because those cases are expensive and time-consuming, and with an execution in play, juries can be more reluctant to return a guilty verdict. But he also added: “We wanted to try to simplify this as much as we could. We didn’t want to add any more excitement to the case. I mean, with your being here—you know, there’s already kind of a following about the case.”

  Janet, to the district attorney, I was bearing witness, a little stone in his shoe, when everyone else had gone home.

  Black Man’s Chest

  Ten twenty p.m. It’s pitch-black in my bedroom. My cell phone hums on my bedside table, and I flip it open to a text.

  A black man has sent me a photo of his chest. No face. I squint. Is that a tattoo or just wiry springs of hair?

  The phone hums in my hand. Another text:

  Wrong person delete that pic.

  Three minutes later, another text from the same fellow:

  This michael dent so how I get a book I got a story to tell the real one

  I type back:

  Hi Michael you can be in the book im writing if you want

  He shoots back a text straightaway:

  Im gone tell u the whole story just be ready to record.

  Michael wants three hundred dollars in Green Dot cards.

  Michael Dent

  “Hey, Michael Dent?” I say. “It’s John Safran.”

  “How you doing?” Michael says. Not a question I’ve ever heard leave the lips of Vincent McGee.

  Michael owns a deep voice, fuzzed up by phone reception. I dri
ft to the kitchen and unplug the fridge. I flick off the ceiling fan.

  “Can you put me on your visitation list,” I say, “so I can come and meet you, please?”

  I called Vincent’s new prison. They said no media ever, and no visitors for Vincent anyway, because of the horrific fight that landed him in there in the first place. Vincent is still promising he can get me in, however.

  “See, I can’t get visitors because I’m in the hole,” Michael says. “In lockdown.”

  “Why are you in lockdown?”

  “Because it was a high-profile murder case.”

  “You’re still in lockdown all these months later because of Richard Barrett?” I say, surprised. “What, are they worried that some white prisoner is going to kill you?”

  “That’s what I believe it is.”

  “Richard didn’t have many friends,” I tell him, “so I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

  “I know. But once you’re in the Klan, they always stick together, so I don’t know.”

  Like James Rankin, Michael is in lockdown, alone, twenty-three hours a day.

  “You just have to sit in your cell?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Wow! And how big is your cell?”

  “Like a damn sandbox.”

  I tell him I heard Vincent’s been moved to another prison.

  “Yes, he got moved. He was busting out windows.”

  “He was trying to break out?”

  “No, but he busted five windows and he fought with the police.”

  Vincent sparked the riot in the one non-lockdown hour.

  “Have you got the story?” Michael says. “I mean, do you know what even happened?”

  I tell him I don’t really know what happened from Vincent’s side.

  “This is all I know of what happened, right? Vincent went and worked for the man. From what I know, the only reason Vincent went back down to the house was to get—well, to ask for—more money, so he could pay his ERS, because you know he was out on ERS.”

  “What does that mean?”