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

  “5-1-2-3-7-6-7-2-3-6,” I say. “Hey, I might be seeing Richard Barrett’s sister today. So do you want me to pass on any message to her?”

  “What kind of message do you think I should say?” Vincent sounds thrown. “Like, I should apologize or something?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can I apologize?” he whines. “I can’t apologize when my life was in jeopardy, right? You know what I’m sayin’? I can feel her loss, but at the same time, I had to do what I had to do, d’you hear? Have you got the other two cards for me?”

  I begin to scratch the silver.

  “Where the sister stayin’ at?”

  “What?” I say, having heard him perfectly clearly.

  “I said, where she stay at?”

  “Oh yeah, no, she’s in another state. She lives in . . . She doesn’t live in Mississippi or anything. She lives far away.”

  I nicely dodge coughing up her location.

  “I thought you said you was gonna go and see her?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m not in Mississippi at the moment. I’m in Florida.”

  Christ!

  “Oh, you’re in Florida?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I mope.

  “What do the hos look like out there, yo?”

  “Oh, the females here—I haven’t seen any yet ’cause it’s just a Sunday so there’s not many women.”

  I recite the Green Dot numbers and tell Vincent I have to go.

  “Yo,” Vincent says as I’m about to hang up. “Tell Richard’s sister I say, hey, how’s she doin’?” He chuckles. “No, I’m fucking with you,” he says.

  I twist the key in the red rental. The map says two hours to Richard’s sister.

  Gerry Krafft

  The sun is overexposing every color in the street. The road surface is white, and the palm trees bend. The orange and white homes have plenty of breathing room on their big green lawns. Cement dolphins poke up where there are usually garden gnomes.

  American flags flap on poles in front yards. To Mississippian homeowners, that flag represents defeat in the Civil War, so the flag they hoist instead is the Confederate. Florida, it should be noted, is also in the South and also fought with the Confederacy in the Civil War. But here they are, and there Mississippi is.

  I park with an angry crank of the brake. I’m sulking because I cut myself shaving in the Shell gas station toilet. My neck is still leaking blood into toilet paper.

  Out my windshield, two black kids shoot hoops with a white kid and an Asian kid. The first thought that rolls into my head is, Oh, that’s unusual.

  I’ve been in Mississippi too long.

  A translucent curtain runs along the window next to Gerry’s front door (or at least, what I hope is Gerry’s front door). I squint and see a kitchen and a blond head bopping.

  A chesty tanned man creaks open the door.

  “G’day,” I say. “I’m looking for a Gerry Krafft.”

  “Hold on, man,” he says, turning to the kitchen. “Gerry!”

  Gerry can see me flailing as I grab for folders from my bag and fumble out the backstory, twirling from Race Relations to true crime books to Joe McNamee to DA Michael Guest to cemetery websites to her front door. Gerry understands I’m pitching to her to not slam the door in my face.

  “It’s okay,” she says gently. “I’m interested.”

  The Florida sun has tanned Gerry, without shriveling her. She doesn’t look sixty-four.

  “I can show you what I’ve dug up. I’ve spoken to the district attorney; I’ve spoken to the killer.”

  “Well, the guy got the death penalty.”

  She can’t have been following the case recently if that is what she thinks.

  “His reasoning,” she asks, “was because it was a dispute over what he paid him for the yard work?”

  “It depends who you want to listen to,” I say. “The investigators don’t think it was just over money.”

  “Well, I’ve had many conversations with . . . He was friends with a lot of high-end politicians,” she says proudly. “They said something about sexual advances, and I said, ‘You know what? Being a white supremacist, he would have never made a sexual advance on a black guy. Never!’” Gerry says she knows he wasn’t gay. “I knew his girlfriend in high school. They dated a long time, nine years, as a matter of fact. I put a fly in her soup when she came over for dinner.”

  I open my folder, hoping to show her a photo of Vincent. It opens on a photo of one of Vincent’s knives.

  “Oh hang on, don’t look at that!” I say, my face heating up.

  “The knife.” She giggles.

  Gerry says she’s surprised I found her.

  “The one thing he tried to do was to protect me,” she says, proud again, “because of his political involvement, so nobody even knew that I existed. He didn’t want them to.”

  Gerry tells me she had worked for the government in Washington, DC. She decoded messages from Vietnam during the war and had top security clearance. In The Commission Richard said his father worked with the foreign service. Secrets seem to have been the family trade.

  “He really left an impression everywhere,” I tell Gerry, trying to smooth my way into the awkward stuff.

  “Well, everybody that I’ve talked to said they had great respect for him,” she says.

  I hand the Sovereignty Commission report through the doorway. She lowers her eyes and scans the page. At age six . . . at age twelve . . . nothing further that could be done . . . borderline violence case. The psychiatrist told the Barretts that Richard hated them both intensely.

  She lifts her eyes. They’ve moistened, but she’s not crying.

  “He went to many, many, many psychiatrists and was an A-plus student, and he decided he couldn’t have restrictions so he went to live with my aunt.”

  “But why did he have to go to a psychiatrist?”

  “Because he was so smart,” she says defiantly. “You’re talking Einstein-level. Anyone who’s a musician and an artist and doesn’t accept anything less than an A is weird. Nobody understood him. I had to follow behind him in school, and the teachers said to me, ‘Why aren’t you like him?’ The teachers, they had never experienced anybody that had that deep level of intelligence. He was a chess expert. We played chess.”

  She stares into the street. Her face turns a little sour.

  “I think he cheated with me,” she says.

  She has been defending her brother to this point. This is the first fracture.

  I point my nose toward my open blue folder.

  “He reportedly had an argument with his aunt in New Jersey,” I read, “and beat her up, leaving her for dead, and stole her car, but she never tried to get it back.”

  “Well, that’s pretty true,” she says. “Because the car was still there in his house.”

  “What?” I say, surprised. “That’s true that he beat her up?”

  “I don’t know. She never disclosed that to me. Could have been. I don’t know that for sure.”

  The awestruck little sister seems to have vanished.

  I tug one more document from the folder.

  “I assume you’ve read his interesting last will and testament?”

  “No, I haven’t. Did he leave his money to Iran?”

  That’s a detail you can’t just guess out of thin air.

  “The government of Iran was on the will,” I say. “What was going on there?”

  “He was not generous in life. So whoever gets it, so be it.”

  “And he seems to be quite angry. I don’t know how wills usually are, but he says, I expressly decline to include any individual—”

  “No family members,” she interrupts.

  “Why do you reckon he was like that?”

  “He was not generous in life. For
my wedding he gave me a teddy bear.” Her voice sharpens. “He was at my wedding. As a matter of fact, he caught the garter.”

  “He caught the garter?”

  “I have pictures—he’s putting it on, and just laughing and laughing.”

  She tells me the man who catches the garter marries next.

  “So why do you think he never got married, then?”

  “Because,” she says, “he would not part with one dollar. If you get married, you have to share your money.”

  “And why do you think he was so cheap?”

  “I have no idea. As a matter of fact, we went to breakfast and there were, like, twelve of us, and everybody threw a tip on the table, and he took the tip. See, and those kind of things stick in my mind. That’s how cheap he was. And he had plenty of money. And he’d steal the tip off the table. So my father went back and, you know, put another tip. But yeah, I mean he’s the cheapest person I ever met in my life.”

  “Were your parents upset with his infamy?”

  “They never really talked about it. I think they were more hurt.”

  Gerry looks hurt, too.

  “When my mother died he left a message on my father’s answering machine: ‘Sorry for your loss.’” He didn’t attend the funeral. “I never hated him. I just never understood him.”

  “So why do you think he ended up with his racist views?”

  “My father wasn’t even born in this country. Where that came from I have no idea.”

  Richard’s grandparents were Christian missionaries from England who traveled to Venezuela, where Richard’s father was born.

  “As a matter of fact, one of Richard’s first friends was a black guy,” she continues. “He came over for lunch. So I don’t know what happened. You never know. I put it on the same level as what makes people serial killers, you know? You never know what happens in your brain to make you change. You never know.”

  I tell Gerry about Richard and his obsession with athletes and the Spirit of America Day.

  “He was not athletic,” she says. “I mean, I did all kinds of acrobatics, football, baseball . . .”

  “And he didn’t do anything?”

  “No.”

  I unconsciously brush my finger on my fresh shaving cut. The Florida sun has already baked it to a scab.

  “Just so you know,” Gerry says, “and I don’t know if this will help you or not—but as a very young person our rooms were across from each other. And we’d go to bed and he would be emperor of the universe. And we would talk back and forth. And he was going to rule the whole nebula of the planets. And I was like—if it was in today’s world—the Klingon. He was the grand emperor of the entire universe.”

  “You were the Klingon?”

  “Uh-huh. I was the enemy. But we would do this, you know, at night, talk back and forth—but he was always the ruler of the entire world.”

  She tells me Vince Thornton wants to give her Richard’s ashes.

  “I talked to a cemetery in Mississippi,” Gerry says. “I can sprinkle them over there. And whenever I get back to Mississippi, that’s probably what I’m going to do.”

  John and Vincent’s Road Trip

  I’m squeezing tight on the steering wheel, eyeing the green road signs as they roll over, looking out for the airplane symbol. In the passenger seat, Vincent slouches back. He’s in his yellow jumpsuit with one sandal on the dashboard. Fine! In fact, it’s my cell flipped open, thrown on the passenger seat. Vincent is chatting, though. I’ve put him on speakerphone. The road unwinds for two hours before I hit Miami International Airport, so I appreciate the company.

  “I went to speak to Richard’s sister just before,” I tell him.

  “What’d she say?” says road-trip-buddy Vincent.

  “She said he definitely wasn’t gay.”

  “That’s what I said!” Vincent complains.

  I turn to the passenger seat.

  “Hey, I heard about your girlfriend China. Is she still your girlfriend?”

  The question wobbles Vincent.

  “No,” he says, full of suspicion. “How’d you hear about that?”

  “I’ve been asking a lot of people things.”

  “I see. Oh, nigger, I see you know a lot. Who told you about her?”

  I won’t tell him. He’s pleading. I tell him I have to concentrate on the road, not have some screaming match.

  “She wasn’t my girlfriend in the first place. She was something like . . . like one of my hos, you hear?”

  “You pimped her out or something?”

  “You could say that. Ha! Whatever way it was, you hear?”

  “Was she in love with you?”

  “Ah, all women in love with me, you hear?”

  I can’t tell if he’s joking.

  “Someone says she once jumped out of your car.”

  “Yeah, she did!”

  I squint out the window, lower my eyes to the asphalt darting by, and imagine leaping from a moving car. My arms and legs feel the burn.

  “Because,” I continue, “she was pregnant and didn’t want to have the baby.”

  This wobbles Vincent, too.

  “Oh, for real?” he says softly, fascinated. “I ain’t know nothing about it, you hear? I didn’t know she was pregnant till she got to the hospital and she told me that she had a miscarriage, but she said she wanted the baby, you hear?”

  “Do you have a girlfriend on the outside now?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So how are you going to keep that relationship going, seeing you’ve got a jail in between you?”

  “Shit, you know, they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. If she gonna ride, she’s gonna ride—if she ain’t gonna ride, she ain’t. Right now, everything’s one hundred, though.”

  “But do you reckon she’ll wait sixty-five years for you?”

  “Ha-ha! Who said anything about doing sixty-five years?”

  Vincent says a day is knocked off for every day served, if he behaves.

  “I can get out in thirty!”

  “Thirty years is still a lot of time.”

  “Yeah,” he mutters sadly, “it’s a lot of time, dude. A lot of time.”

  The purple sky is dimming. I twist the headlights to full.

  “Do you know a lot about when your family first came to Mississippi?” I ask. “Like, your grandparents and your great-grandparents. How long have they been in Mississippi?”

  “I wouldn’t even know, you know what I’m sayin’? I know I’ve got some people staying in Las Vegas, Chicago, you know, I’ve got some people spread out, but I ain’t never heard . . . Nobody never did sit me down and talk to me about shit like that, you hear?”

  Vincent sounds as glum as “it’s a lot of time, dude.” Before I left Australia, my dad was telling me a story about his dad I’d never heard before, that he built planes in Germany. Then he immigrated before World War II and started building warplanes for Australia. He told the plant owners about the superior clutches they built in his factory in Germany. So the Australian plant changed designs, and the warplanes flew with the Safran clutch.

  “I ain’t never had no role models and shit. When I come around, my people, they tell me to just get out the house, you hear?”

  Vincent chuckles sadly. I ask him about his father, JD. “I met my dad really about three times in my whole life, right? The last time I met him, I stayed with him about a year. And that was the last time I’ve seen him, though.”

  “Oh really, how old were you when you stayed with him for a year?”

  “About twelve, going on thirteen. I would have liked to know him, you hear? I never had somebody, you know what I’m sayin’, just show me right from wrong. ’Cause I really didn’t know what right from wrong was till I got older and learned, you know what I’m sa
yin’? Like, you can say, ‘The Bible guides’ and all this. You can tell somebody something, but if you don’t give them the meaning and all that, and show them the example, then all they know is the words, you hear? I just knew the words—I ain’t know what they do, you hear?”

  “Where does JD live? Does he live in Jackson?”

  “I don’t know where he stay.”

  I don’t feel so bad that Cornelius and I haven’t been able to track him down, either.

  “When you got sentenced, sixty-five years, none of your family was there in the court.”

  “Nobody went—there wasn’t nobody there, you hear? There was nobody there but strangers. Even those strangers, you know what I’m sayin’, showing me more support than my own people, you hear?”

  I turn to phone-Vincent.

  “I was there,” I tell him. “I saw it.”

  “You were there?” Vincent sparks up.

  “Yeah, I was there. I saw it. You were wearing a yellow jumpsuit.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He giggles. “I didn’t see you out there, motherfucker!”

  “I was trying to be, you know, just inconspicuous.”

  “Oh, that’s what’s up.” He chuckles.

  I catch my face in the car mirror. A bedraggled near-Afro springs atop my head. The shaving cut scab runs down my throat.

  “Someone told me that the last time you were in jail you had some medication to keep you calm. And then when you left you stopped having the medication and that might have been why you got so violent.”

  “I was taking medication for seeing things, you know what I’m sayin’, because there was a voice in my head telling me to kill people dead.”

  My arms tighten up.

  “I had depression,” he says. “I was taking a lot of shit.”

  “So, even last time you were in jail there was a voice in your head saying to kill people?”

  “Yeah, it’s still in here, it comes around sometimes.”

  “Wow, that’s pretty scary. So what, you just suddenly start hearing a voice? What does it sound like? Is it you? Or is it like an angel?”

  “It’ll be a whisper and it’ll be calling my name, like, in a whisper, and I’d be looking there, and nothing’d be there. It’d be saying shit like Kill and shit like that. It’d be whispering to me, you hear?”