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

  “I think that, in my personal opinion, that Precious Martin was looking for the fame,” Cornelius says. “But see, once the story fizzled down, then it was time for him to go.”

  As I climb out of his truck I ask Cornelius if he thinks it’s true Richard slept with Vincent.

  “A lot of these guys that have been to prison, they have sex with men, and what they will do, they will let another man perform oral sex on them. If they’re the receiver of oral sex or if they’re penetrating another man, but the man is not penetrating them, in their mind they’re not gay—which is as stupid as you can get. I think that if anything was going on, that could have been going on.”

  Vincent’s “Story,” Finally

  “You’ve got some numbers, right?” Vincent says to my Hello.

  “Listen,” I say, “I’m telling you, we’re going to have to talk first. I want the story, or if you don’t want to give me the story, then that’s fine, but I’m not doing it anymore where I just keep on giving you numbers and you don’t tell me anything.”

  “You’ve got the numbers, though?”

  “Yes! Listen! If you tell me the story, I can give you some of the money now, and then if you send me the letter for Mike Scott, then I can give you the rest then.”

  “But look. I’m gonna send the letter, but I’m going to need all the money tonight before I give the story, you hear?”

  “No! If you tell me the story, I can give you about two-thirds of it tonight.”

  “What’s two-thirds?”

  “It’s a thousand dollars.”

  “A thousand?” Vincent scoffs, like I’ve offered him a buck. “A’right, c’mon. What’s the numbers?”

  “No, no, no!” I’m plodding about the room, my non-phone hand flailing about. “You’re going to tell me the story. I’m sick of this, Vincent. Tell me the story now, and then I’ll give you the numbers afterward.”

  “A’right,” he says. “You got the tape recorder on?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, what you wanna know?”

  “Well, let’s start with your Richard thing.”

  “Okay, well, look,” he says, “but by the time I tell you about the Richard thing, I’ll need the whole thousand.”

  “I’m just sick of this game!”

  “Listen, this ain’t no game, ain’t no game, okay? Let’s do it. You’ve got this recorded? What do you want to know, man?”

  “What happened between you and Richard, on the night?” I ask.

  “A’right. Shit, you know what I’m sayin’? He came to my house on the Thursday, right, you know what I’m sayin’. He came up standing there, yo, and he wanted to talk to me. So you know what I’m sayin’, we talked for a few minutes, and then he asked me, did I want to help him do something? And I was like, you know what I’m sayin’, ‘Not really.’ He came back the next day.

  “The next day I was just sitting around the house bored and he asked me to go back to his house with him, you know what I’m sayin’, to help him cut some trees down, you know what I’m sayin’, do the landscape around, you know what I’m sayin’, so it look good. Right? And so the next day, when I went down there and he brought me home, you know what I’m sayin’, he told me about some government plan. He’s like, ‘Come back to the house,’ and he was going to get, like, on the computer and show me this thing called . . . it’s some kind of government plan for convicted felons, you know what I’m sayin’, who are looking for a job. You know, I was tryin’a do right that time in my life. And so, you know, I went back to his house. I was down there on the computer on Facebook; he was in there on the other computer trying to look up, you know what I’m sayin’, the shit I was telling you about, the government program.”

  My ears are acclimatizing to Vincent, I think to myself. His murble sounds less of a murble.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say. “So there were two computers and he was looking up one and you were looking up the other?”

  “Yeah. This is where everything went the way it did, you know. We got into an altercation, you know what I’m sayin’. What he did, he pulled a brown kind of butcher knife right on me, you know what I’m sayin’, he was threatening my life, right? And so . . . you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Why did he pull a knife on you?”

  “I don’t know. You know what I’m sayin’, when I was down at his house he was making all racist comments, just like he was saying stuff like . . . He was making racist comments, but I just can’t remember every word he said. But it was R-rated. He was getting on my bad side, you know. We got into the altercation, and I got the best of him and I stabbed him. Is that all you want to know?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Some people are saying that he tried to rape you or molest you?”

  “No!” Vincent says, frustrated and squeaky. “That’s what my momma says. She wrote this thing and said he tried to do that, but he didn’t try to do that, you know what I’m sayin’? But he did, you know what I’m sayin’, get a grip on me, and I was, you know what I’m sayin’, defending my life. Like I said, he pulled a butcher knife out on me so I had really . . . just went into survival mode, and it’s a me-or-him situation. So I felt like if I didn’t kill him, he was gonna kill me.”

  “So why did you have to stab him sixteen times, though? Because you would have been able to have stopped him without that.”

  “You know what I’m sayin’, like, I blacked out, but I remember everything. He kept tryin’a get the best of me, so when I grabbed his knife and started stabbing him, when he was down, I tried to restrain him, but he kept on. I did try to restrain him, though, by tying his arms up. When I settled down, by that time he was already dead, you know, he was dying, you hear? You could feel it. I had to cover this crime up. The crime to say that I went to the house. The next day I came back and burned the house down, and it was just because, you know, like I had said, I was a convicted felon and I knew I couldn’t go to the police and tell the police, ‘Okay, this dude tried to kill me.’ They would be like, ‘Okay, what you doing going down his house?’ You know what I’m sayin’. I didn’t know he was involved in all this white supremacist bullshit, you hear?”

  “So you didn’t know any of that beforehand?”

  “Not really. I heard murble Ku Klux Klan bull, but I thought that was just the talk and rumors and shit. I don’t believe nothing until I see it. I thought he was just really trying to help me. I thought he was a nice person, but he wasn’t.”

  “It sounds a bit strange that he just suddenly had a knife,” I say. “Like, what led up to that? Sounds like there must have been something that led up to the knife.”

  “No,” he says. “I was on Facebook and he was telling me, he thinks it’s time for me to get off Facebook, right? So I was like, ‘Shit, hold on, I’m comin’,’ you hear? And so, like, he just started talking real aggressive, you know what I’m sayin’, so I got aggressive back. And so, goddamn it, one thing led to another—he grabbed the knife. I had two knives on me because I walked around with knives on me, you hear? And so, shit, that’s how it happened.”

  Hmmm. All the pieces aren’t quite there.

  “So why did your mother say that he tried to molest you or sexually assault you?”

  “Because the police came to my house and they told my momma that if they catch me they were going to kill me. I guess her being my momma, she tried to make the situation less stressful for me ’cause she feel like I was just defending myself. But she knew she couldn’t just tell them, okay, he tried to kill me, because it wouldn’t look right, it wouldn’t sound right. People wouldn’t believe that. So she tried to do what she could to make it better for me, you hear?”

  “The investigator said that you said to them that Richard had paid you for sex.”

  Vincent pauses. I can hear inmates or guards clinking and plonking in the background at the East Mississippi prison for the crimi
nally insane.

  “He said that I said that?”

  “Yes. That’s what the investigator said.”

  “Who was the investigator who told you this?”

  “Wayne Humphreys and Tim Lawless.”

  “No! I never told them that. They were telling me shit, like, ‘Okay you’re going to be a hero to a lot of people’ and this shit, but I didn’t really care about that. Like I said, the police told my momma that the Klan were going to kill my brother, my sister. It’s all the truth. They said they were going to kill my people if they couldn’t catch me, and so, shit, that’s why my momma ended up telling the police that I was at my sister’s house. Because they threatened all my people’s lives. My momma had to move from her house to my aunt’s. She moved from her house just because the Klan members, they were murble, you hear?”

  “Wow.”

  “I don’t understand why they make those lies up, but no, that’s not true,” he says.

  I peer down at the next question squiggled on my yellow pad on the coffee table. I suck in the air.

  “The other thing I heard was that one of the reasons you’ve grown up to be so angry is that when you were young, one of your relatives molested you and you went and told your mother and your mother didn’t stand up for you.”

  Matter-of-factly, he tells me the name of the relative. It’s a name I haven’t heard before.

  “Yeah. I don’t know who told you that, right? But it wasn’t what you think. It ain’t nothing that happened. He didn’t fuck me or no shit like that, you hear? When I was little I had this relative who used to try to get on me when I was about eight, nine, ten, you hear? He had to be, like, twenty. My momma took me down to my uncle’s house and this other relative would come around. Shit, I used to tell my momma, ‘Don’t take me down there.’ Shit like that. And you know . . . I don’t know who told you this shit, but I would like to know the name of the person who told you, you hear?”

  “Did your family not believe you?”

  “They knew, they knew, the motherfuckers, they knew.”

  “Did they do anything about it? Like, scream at the guy?”

  “No, they didn’t do shit, you know what I’m sayin’? But at the same time, that just made me more the man that I am today. He gave me a low example of a man, you hear?”

  Another life lesson from Vincent that is so twisted I can’t figure out if it makes sense or not.

  “But your family didn’t, like, stand up for you?”

  “No. They didn’t do shit.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “That’s what I say, you know what I’m sayin’? But shit. I don’t know how you found that out, though, man, but like I said, I’m going to tell you the truth. I’m going to tell you the truth about everything to help, you hear?”

  I ask Vincent if Richard ever told him about his life.

  “No,” Vincent says. “I didn’t get in no conversation about his life. All I knew was he was a lawyer and he stayed down the street. That’s all I knew about him.”

  “Because the investigator said that Richard told you that he used to have a black boyfriend.”

  “No. He told me he had a black friend. This is what I heard. He said he had a black friend that used to work for him and he had got cut, he cut his knee off or some shit like that, with a chain saw.”

  “So Richard tried to hurt him?” I ask, led by something in Vincent’s tone.

  “That’s how I took it.” One morning Vincent was over at Richard’s house and Richard was on the phone, telling someone the story of the black man and the chain-saw accident. Vincent thought Richard was telling the story so he could overhear it. “Like he was telling me he could get me killed, you hear?”

  I look down at my yellow notepad and suck in the air again.

  “The other thing that I heard was last time you were in prison you were in a cell with a white guy and you got into a fight with him and you may have raped him.”

  “Who told you that?” Vincent says, baffled.

  “Someone from the prison.”

  “This is what really happened, you hear? I was in the cell just writing. He owed me a hundred dollars, all right? He didn’t pay me my money, so the first day I took his tray and everything so he doesn’t eat no food and I tied him to the railing. And I took a plastic cup with a handle on it and beat his ass for, like, three days. He was so hungry. I beat his ass and stick a bottle up his ass.”

  “You stuck a bottle up his ass?”

  “A bottle, yo,” he says. “That’s it.”

  “That’s it” is an unusual way to look at it, it strikes me.

  “But then he tried to get out of my cell, and the day he tried to run out of my cell I beat his head with a tray. I beat him up with a lunch tray in the face and shit, and that’s all that happened. I didn’t take none of my body parts and touch him, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. Sure. You just stuck a bottle up his ass.”

  “Right.”

  “Because he owed you a hundred dollars?”

  “Right. It was all about money. That’s what I’m about—money. Now that other shit, that shit is just to scandalize my name. It ain’t shit to me. I don’t understand why my own people are saying this shit. They the ones saying this shit—I don’t know why they’re the ones saying this shit, you hear?”

  “What about your last fight you just had, that got you moved to this prison?”

  “I took a do-rag from a dude, and he tried to come back to my cell late at night to get it back. And so when he opened the door, I hit him in the face with a tray. I had a hard tray left in my cell. I always keep a tray just in case I’ve got to hit them off in the mouth or something. So I had a tray and, goddamn it, we got into a fight. I hit him about twenty times. He folded up on the ground and he grabbed me, and when he grabbed me he hit me two or three times, and I spilled his ass on the floor. Hit his ass some more. And goddamn, when he left he was bleeding everywhere.”

  “But why did you hit him? What did he do to you?”

  “He tried to take the do-rag that I took from him back.”

  “A do-rag is like a head wrap?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did that make you so angry, seeing as it was his do-rag?”

  “Because like I said, he came in my cell. I felt already threatened. I was in a one-man cell. I’m the only person supposed to be in the cell, and this older dude, he comes to my cell. And so when he come to my cell and he come inside my cell, he already was eager to do something to me or I was going to do something to him. So I went ahead and did something to him first.”

  I tell him what Michael Guest told me. That he had pleaded guilty to avoid homosexual details rolling out in the court case.

  “No!” Vincent bleats. “I didn’t want a trial because while I was in Rankin County Jail all the white officers putting stuff in my food, putting stuff in my Kool-Aid, and all the white officers were jumping on me, threatening me. The only way I could get the lieutenant or captain to come down and talk to me is to flood my cell. Like block the toilet up and make it overflow or stick my arm out the door so a tray would hit somebody, or do something and make somebody come down, and that’s why I didn’t go to trial. I wanted to go to trial. I tried to get a speedy trial. But they wouldn’t even let me do that. When I talked to my lawyer Precious Martin, he was like the DA. He wasn’t ready to go to trial. He wanted to charge me twenty-four thousand dollars. At the same time I thought he didn’t really want to help me. Seemed to me like he was almost working for the Rankin County DA’s. Every time I would say something, he was like, ‘The DA ain’t ready for that.’ My sixth sense told me to fire him.”

  “So Mike Scott was a lot better, was he?”

  “Yeah,” Vincent says. “He was the real thing. He really didn’t have to do much because I just told him, ‘I’m ready to take a
plea and get out of Rankin County Jail, no matter what, and I’ll come back later to fight in court.’”

  A male bellows, “Vincent!” Vincent tells me his phone time is over. He says he’ll mail the Mike Scott letter in Monday’s postal round.

  Vincent couldn’t be ticking more prosecution boxes if he tried. Doing something to someone before they do something to him; attacking people who owe him money and an older dude who came into his space; blaming his own people for “saying shit” in his defense. It doesn’t sound like Richard would necessarily have had to have made a move on Vincent to provoke him.

  The call is over. I glance at my hands. The silver from the Green Dot cards is trapped under my nails.

  9.

  ROAD TRIP

  The Cemetery

  The clock radio glows 1:07 a.m. I think I’ve found her. I tumbled into her while not looking.

  I was poking around cemetery records websites, snooping for Richard’s mother’s grave. Attached to a record as an “associate” is Gerry Krafft. I thought he must be Richard’s mother’s executor or something.

  Then my brain thawed out: Gerry. Geraldine.

  I punched Gerry Krafft into the WhitePages. Eighty-nine listed across America. One listed in a city in Florida.

  Now I’m looking over Google Maps for airports. I could drive, but it’s thirteen hours and I reckon I’ll need a clear head to get in the front door.

  Okay, it’s now about three in the morning. I’ve booked a flight to Miami, Florida.

  On Google Maps they’ve got a street view—outside what I think is Richard’s sister’s house is an aqua-blue flag with a peace sign on it. So: The siblings have different tastes in flags.

  Miami Airport Parking Lot

  “What’s that noise?” snaps Vincent.

  “It’s just the air conditioner.” I’m slouched in my red rental at Miami International Airport dictating Green Dot digits.