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

  “Vincent wanted me to give this to your mum,” I say, floating in the doorway.

  “God, they pretty,” says Justin McGee.

  “He dictated the card over the telephone,” I say. “You can tell your mum I’m leaving Saturday so I won’t be annoying your family anymore.”

  “Yeah,” says Sherrie from the couch, “but, you know, you ain’t no problem, you’re okay.”

  I pull out the affidavit and run Justin and Sherrie through Daniel Earl Cox’s story.

  “It’s really hard finding stuff in Mississippi,” I say. “Lots of secrets.”

  “Mm-hmm,” says Justin. “It’s something else down here.”

  My fingers reach in my bag and pluck out the shirtless photo of Vincent.

  “The lawyer Mike Scott showed me this picture,” I say. “He was saying it was taken down at Richard’s. And that the person in the reflection is Richard Barrett.”

  Justin blinks at the photograph.

  “Oh, that picture,” Justin says. “No, I took it.”

  Justin leads me through the living room to the hallway. The cream walls running down the McGees’ hallway match the cream walls in the photo. The doors in the hallway match the doors in the photo, too. The mirror glimmering in the photograph glimmers in front of my eyes.

  “It must have just been the flash,” I say. “Because the flash makes the arm look white.”

  “Yeah, I took it right here,” says Justin.

  I deflate. One of the smoking guns is no smoking gun after all.

  “Me and my little brother Eric,” Justin says, “Richard wanted us to help him one time. And we said, ‘How much money you going to pay us to help you?’ He said, ‘You shouldn’t wanna get paid every time you do some work.’ And I was scared ’cause he looked gay.”

  “So what do you reckon happened?” I ask him. “Do you reckon Vincent was angry ’cause he didn’t get paid, or do you think Richard tried to attack him or something?”

  “Oh no,” Justin says knowingly, “he got paid.”

  “So you don’t think it was because of that?”

  “No,” he says definitively.

  “You think maybe . . .”

  “I think there was something going on,” Justin says.

  Sherrie rustles on the couch.

  “Some people do things,” Sherrie says. “You need things and you’ll do it, but it’s not always the best thing, you know? Vincent would continue to do things for money. Big, large-lump sums of money, hundreds of dollars, you know? It’s just, if he need it, he would do it, but you don’t want the world to know it, so that’s the situation.”

  I scrunch up my nose. I wasn’t expecting this. Vincent’s brother and sister are steering me to the story embroidered with homosexuality.

  “Wow,” I say. “Because it’d be a big taboo for everyone to know that?”

  “Yeah, it would be embarrassing, right?” Sherrie says. “He couldn’t enjoy his life after that. Especially since he didn’t want to come out. I’m not judgmental. But anybody that prefers the same sex, they’re embarrassed about it, they hide it.”

  I’m crumpling my brow trying to sort out exactly what Sherrie is getting at. Anybody that prefers the same sex. Is she talking about Richard or Vincent?

  “Do you think Vincent . . .” I stop. I back up and rephrase. “It would have been just for money, though, wouldn’t it have?”

  “It would have just been for the money,” Sherrie says. “But at the end he got a good feeling behind it. If you’re getting whacked off, sucked off, you know, you’re gonna enjoy that.”

  “What, Vincent?” I say.

  “Yeah, he gets everything,” Sherrie says. “I don’t think he was doing the man. I don’t think he was suckin’ him. So he would be on his back and getting chopped off, as they say—his penis sucked. He was the one who was getting the service, but he was getting paid for his services—to be worked on, you know?”

  My face tightens. I’m flustered by Sherrie’s sharp turn into these vivid details. Is Sherrie speculating? Has Vincent talked to her?

  “How do you know that?” I say.

  “Because I don’t think he could be the one lickin’ anything, you know?”

  I blurt an awkward laugh. Sherrie and Justin laugh at my laugh. Sherrie makes another sharp turn.

  “If you notice the door on that house, they had bars on them,” Sherrie says. “If you don’t have the keys to those, you cannot get out of the house. So I think the only reason that Vincent would react that way is if everything was locked, you know, and the man had, you know, like, some kind of weapon and telling him, ‘I’m going to do this and do that,’ and Vincent had to do it in order to get out alive.”

  I think about Vincent telling me what happened and the feeling that there was something missing from the story of who did what first. What was the spark—did it originate in sex, or race, or money? They’re the three questions I had in Melbourne. But after asking them for so long, I’ve come to wonder whether they’re really three different questions at all. They are for the lawyers: When I asked Michael Guest whether there was a race factor to the crime, he said that would be a third explanation, after Vincent’s other explanations involving sex and money. But I don’t know that they are for Vincent, or were for Richard. For them, I think they’re all the same question. Everything I’ve found out seems to show that for both Richard and Vincent, race, sex, and money were all intertwined. They were all about power.

  Tina drifts in the doorway from outside. Her eyes meet the lilies in the vase and her face washes over with delight. The flowers overrule any apprehension she has about me. She pulls out the purple envelope tied to the vase with a white ribbon.

  “I thought I’d give you one of these, too,” I say. I hand her a copy of the affidavit and blabber out the Daniel Earl Cox adventure once again. “It kind of validates what you said happened. Who knows? It might come in handy one day.”

  “Okay.” She smiles. “Thank you.”

  I leave Tina to read the card Vincent dictated to his secretary, John Safran, while clomping around his cell in Meridian at the East Mississippi prison for the criminally insane.

  Dear Mom,

  I’m glad that you’ve been down with me during the good times and the bad times.

  You made me a better man by letting me learn the hard way.

  And I’m thankful every day that you’re still here with me.

  With Undying Love,

  Your son Vincent

  The Black Man Who Cried

  I found my way into one more house before I left Tina’s street. I saw a man getting his mail, began chatting, and he invited me in.

  The investigator Tim Lawless told me there was a black man who cried when he told him Richard Barrett had died. That black man is Moses. He’s sitting on the couch with his wife, Michelle. Why was Moses fond of him? Moses says Richard helped him with a legal matter, a civil one. That he was a nice man. And—this I almost can’t believe—Richard didn’t charge him! But there was more than that.

  “Summertime,” Michelle says, “he would stop and visit with my mother.”

  “Is your mother still alive?” I ask.

  “Uh-huh,” Michelle says. “She’s in the nursing home. He came and sat and talked with her. He wasn’t a person in the neighborhood that you were scared of because he didn’t bother nobody.”

  “Why do you think he chose your mother to speak to?”

  “I don’t know. He was a peculiar person, and I guess he just decided that she was all right and didn’t hold no prejudice toward him for what people said and what he was portrayed to be.”

  Richard the white supremacist sitting with the old black lady at the nursing home. That image will stick in my mind as surely as Richard’s body lying out on the lawn.

  One More Secret

  Giles Far
m is up this way, and I’m not sure I’ll be here again. I creep up Jim’s dirt path one last time to say good-bye. I catch him carrying a Netflix envelope from his mailbox to his trailer. He seems happy to see me. We have a chuckle over the time Earnest accidentally endorsed him in the Jackson Advocate, confusing him with a black candidate called Giles.

  “Yeah, that was funny,” Jim says.

  He wishes me luck with my book and tells me my next one should be about the Parkers, the white family murdered in 1990. I eye his Netflix envelope and ask him what DVD he’s rented. He tells me he can’t remember, but it’s clear to me he can. He slinks off to his trailer. One more secret. Why not?

  Erma McGee

  Okay. Pulled into the dust outside the shack. Clothes hung on the barbed-wire fence stretched out front. A homemade wheelchair ramp ran up to the doorway. A brown dog yawned at me. There was a cat figure-eighting my legs as I knocked on the door. An old man opened. I said, “Hey, these are for Erma. Does Erma live here?” Behind him a young-looking woman in a black T-shirt was stretched out on a mattress without a sheet, watching a staticky TV.

  “This is Erma,” said the old man.

  I felt like I’d walked into someone taking a shower. I say, “Vincent wanted me to pass these on to you,” she says, “Thank you,” and I say, “Cool. Okay. No worries. See ya.”

  I heard her fingers tearing the purple envelope as I pulled the door shut.

  Dear Grandma,

  I know I’ve made mistakes. But every day I’ve strived to be a better man.

  I seek knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. And everything I do is for you.

  I remember all the lessons you taught me and I love you to death.

  Hopefully I’ll get back to the streets and be the upstanding man you want me to be.

  I’m praying for you every day.

  Love your grandson,

  Vincent

  Chywanna Again

  “Hey, Chywanna,” I say into the phone—yes, Vincent’s mysterious woman was her. “How are you?”

  “Okay,” she says.

  “Hey, I just thought I’d ring you up because I dropped off something from Vincent, but you weren’t there to tell you about it.”

  She says nothing.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “No, I got it,” she says.

  “Oh, yeah, sure. But I just wanted to . . . Because I was in a bit of . . . I didn’t really . . . I was a bit uncomfortable about it because obviously Vincent’s in jail and stuff. But he asked me to do it, and I thought I’d do it as a favor or whatever. But I just . . . yeah. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t uncomfortable about it.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, cool. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. ’Cause I just . . . yeah, ’cause as I said on the phone last time, even though on the one hand, you know, I like Vincent and, you know, he’s fun to talk to and everything, he is, like, obviously a murderer, so that’s why I obviously . . . I felt a bit uncomfortable about just leaving the flowers there ’cause it might have seemed threatening to you or something.”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Okay, cool. I’m . . . Well, as long as you didn’t feel threatened by getting flowers from a guy who’s in prison for killing someone, then that’s good. Yes. Okay.”

  “So . . . okay.”

  “Okay. No, that . . . I just . . . yeah, I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t, like, scared or anything like that.”

  “Oh, no. It was fine.”

  “Okay, cool. Okay, excellent. Okay, see you later.”

  “All right.”

  Janet

  What would Janet Malcolm think?

  12.

  THE RING

  The Interrogation Room

  Maybe because I’m leaving tomorrow, everyone in Mississippi has rolled on down the road and left me here. There are new dramas. New murders. I bumped into investigators Tim Lawless and Wayne Humphreys today at lunch. They told me they’d just driven interstate to retrieve a human head. Things have come a long way since the DA wouldn’t let me peek in his manila folder the first time I stopped by. Now he’s letting me watch Vincent’s interrogation room footage, alone, on a computer in his boardroom.

  Michael Dent’s mother, Vicky, is boxed in a white cube. She sits in a chair in a pink-and-white-striped jumpsuit, a desk before her. The camera angle, high and pointing down, means only the investigator’s fingers, resting on the desk, have made the shot. It is Trip Bayles.

  Why Vincent Killed Richard, According to Vicky Dent

  “My boy Michael never went down the house!” she pleads. “Vincent did!”

  “Vincent did it all?” asks Trip.

  “He did it all, baby!”

  “Let me give you some history,” Trip says. “Has anybody told you this? You saw it on the news, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you learn about the dead man on the news?”

  “That he was a good man and he tried to help people.”

  “Is that what you saw on the news?”

  “Just saw a bit,” Vicky concedes.

  “He was a white supreme-ist.”

  Vicky leans in. “I don’t know what that means,” she says seriously.

  “That means he didn’t like black people very much.”

  “Well, I like everyone.”

  “Me too,” says Trip. “They one of those people that perform with the skinheads,” Trip says. “You ever heard of that?”

  “No.”

  “They’re really extreme racist white people.”

  “Oh, well,” says Vicky, “that’s his business. Long as he doesn’t mess with me, I love him.”

  “Well, he was one of them. You think Vincent killed him because of that?”

  “Maybe . . .” she says doubtfully, shaking her head. “I tell you the truth.”

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “I say Vincent killed that man and if he would have got away with it he would have killed another man.”

  “You think so?”

  “Baby, look at his eyes. That tells you everything.”

  “I haven’t talked to him,” Trip says. “Why do you think he killed him? To rob him or something?”

  Vicky shoos that away with her hand and leans in again.

  “He did it just to kill a man,” she says, then explains her reasoning. “They say when he was little he worked for the man and he gives a dollar. And they say on the news he’s mad ’cause this time he gave him twenty-six dollars. If someone gives you a dollar in the first beginning, why you go work for them again?”

  Now I’ve been given another explanation. Vincent needed to get a killing out of his system, and he knew Richard would rip him off, giving him the excuse.

  Vincent Pulled into the White Cube

  Vincent is slumped in the chair in his yellow jumpsuit in the white cube. This is ten hours after Vincent tried to light up the crummy little house. Trip Bayles’s fingers tap on the desk.

  “All right, man, tell me how it is,” says Trip.

  “This is the story, man,” Vincent says.

  “Let me hear it.”

  “Ah, I went down to his house—I’m telling the truth, can you give me a plea, man?”

  “We’ll see what we can do.”

  “A plea, you know what I’m sayin’? Something I try and come back out murble, you know what I’m sayin’?” Vincent looks up at the camera. “Is this being recorded?”

  “Everything you’re saying is recorded, audio.”

  “I need a lawyer here first.”

  The door of the interrogation room snaps open. Investigator Tim Lawless bursts in and sits behind the desk. This distracts Vincent from following up on his request for a lawyer. Was that on purpose?

  “Me being in the situation I’m in, there ain’t no
way out, whether I’m right or wrong,” he says, stressed. “Y’all know what happened, everything I’m gonna tell you is gonna be the truth. Y’all saying I killed the guy, you ain’t got no evidence.”

  “Tell us what happened,” Tim Lawless says.

  “I didn’t kill nobody, though.”

  “Tell me what happened,” says Tim.

  “When I left the house, he was still in good health.”

  “That’s not according to your momma,” says Trip.

  Vincent knows his mother has made a statement to the investigators.

  “The whole situation is, Vince, we know what happened. Okay? We know,” says Tim.

  “Is there a camera here?” says Vincent, looking up at the camera.

  “It is,” says Trip.

  “You’ve gotta give me one more cigarette.”

  “Well, here’s the deal,” says Tim, “and I ain’t trying to bribe you, ’cause I ain’t doing it. I’ll help you, but you gotta help me. Try to close this out. Take care of something. Sit down and talk. Look, what’s weighing on your mind?”

  “I can get another cigarette, though?”

  “Oh yes,” says Tim, “I’ll get you another cigarette. I’ve been straight up with you. We tell you we’re going to let you do something, we’re gonna let you do it.”

  “Where you gonna put me when I leave outta here?” says Vincent. “I ain’t violent, y’hear?”

  “We’re just gonna put you in a cell,” says Tim.

  “Like, in the back with the rest of everybody else?”

  “Well, yeah,” says Tim. “I mean, you know, I can arrange it if you want me to put you in isolation. I can do that for you. I can put you in the back, back there where it’s just you back there, your own place.”

  “No, I wanna be around other people,” says Vincent.

  “You want to be around other people?” says Tim.

  “I can’t function all by myself,” says Vincent.