by Safran, John
“Just kids, I don’t know,” I say. “Chywanna’s upstairs, but she’s coming.”
“I don’t even know why I did this shit!” he says. “Why am I doing this shit?” The dog at my feet is howling like an inmate in the East Mississippi prison. “This ain’t how it’s supposed to be, you hear?”
Through the murble and static, Vincent screams that I’ve messed it all up. I was meant to text a photo of the ring from Walmart. Vincent says he can’t propose with a dog barking. I can hear his feet thumping about the cell.
A basketball patters to my feet. I kick it back to the kids, dusting up most of my pants.
“Yeah, but you’ve got to look at it this way,” I say. “It’s, like, after I go, there’s not going to be anyone else to go and buy the ring and then kind of drop it off. You’ve got to take advantage of the situation.”
“I need to take advantage of the situation, right?”
“Right.”
“Where you waiting at?”
“I’m waiting by the trees and they’re . . . It’s a bit farther back from the house. Hang on, here she comes . . . I think.”
A woman in a pink quilted dressing gown and blue towel wrapped like a turban walks through the cloud of dust.
“Do you want me to pass the phone to her?” I say.
“WARDEN!” screams an inmate.
“Hi. Chywanna?” I ask.
The woman nods.
I hand over the aqua bag.
“This is what he wants me to pass you, and he wants . . . He’s in prison or whatever,” I say.
I hand over the phone. I’ve sticky-taped a lapel mic to the phone. I’ll be able to hear Vincent’s end of the conversation later.
She slides the phone to one of her ears poking from her turban.
“Hello?” says Chywanna.
“I swear to God, that white dude is crazy, you hear? I don’t know what he’s got going on, you hear?”
“Yeah,” she says flatly.
“You know what I’m sayin’, I said, ‘Go get me a ring.’”
“Oh my God!” she exclaims.
“Yeah,” Vincent says. “Listen, I’m trying to be down with y’all. I’m sayin’ I’m not gonna mistreat you or nothing like that, you hear?”
“Yeah,” she says flatly again.
“But listen, get the bag from him, tell him to give you the bag.”
“I got it.”
“Oh, I’ve got a question and I wanna know the answer. You know what I’m sayin’? Do you wanna be Mrs. McGee?”
Chywanna’s face twists to shock.
“This is how I feel, you hear?”
“Mmm, I don’t know,” says Chywanna dryly.
“Yo, the white dude got you a ring.”
“But . . . but . . .”
“But look, at the same time . . .”
“Hmm-mm.”
“Are you gonna wear my ring or what?”
Chywanna winces.
“Yeah, I will,” she says, not exuberantly.
“So, that’s all I wanna say, but look, shit, the white dude, that’s my nigga—we’re cool, you hear? At the same time, I ain’t just trying to shit on him, but he got a cheap ring.”
“Yeah.”
“You were sleeping?”
“Yeah, I was asleep.”
“Look, you know what I’m sayin’, you ain’t gotta get all mad and shit at me, right?” he spits a little angrily.
“Okay.”
“Put him back on the phone.”
I take the phone and my fingers motion to Chywanna that I will return. I walk through the dust to the trees.
“Man!” Vincent laughs.
Vincent and I giggle uncontrollably.
“But look, I appreciate you doing that, man, you know what I’m sayin’. She says she’s gonna wear my ring.”
I congratulate him.
“Well, listen, man,” he continues. “You need to be heading for the closest Walmart, you hear? For a Green Dot, you hear?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure. Okay, see you.”
I hang up and walk back to Chywanna. I run my hand through my hair and dust dances off into the sky.
She has plucked the ring from the box and is holding it between her thumb and forefinger.
“That’s it—so he asked me to do it,” I say. “He asked me to come, if that’s okay.”
“That’s okay,” Chywanna says.
“Sorry. Just be . . . you know, so just be careful with him.”
“Okay.”
“If you know what I mean. Like, he did sort of . . .”
I fumble out a photo from my bag and hold it up to Chywanna. Vincent’s knife glistens in the dead grass.
She returns her gaze to me.
“I’m gonna call him anyway,” she says.
“Okay, cool.”
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay, see you later.”
The little children buzz around Chywanna as she slides the ring on her finger and holds it to the sun.
D’Lo Water Park
I want to tell you about a detour on the way to the airport. I would have made it a daylong adventure, but my plane leaves in a few hours.
Two nights ago I knocked on the door of a fifteen-year-old boy. Well, he was a fifteen-year-old boy in the 1967 FBI file. He dragged a Viet Cong flag around the State Capitol with Richard Barrett and then lit the flag on fire. He’s now an old man. He lives in a cedarwood house that he built over the course of a year from trees he chopped down. His name was blacked out in the FBI files, but I eventually found out his name. L. E. Matthews. His father was a big deal in the Klan, said the files.
At the door of the cedarwood house he became immediately suspicious I was secretly taping him. I told him I had a Dictaphone in my bag but I hadn’t pressed record. He told me to remove the Dictaphone from my bag and made me remove the batteries. We sat in rocking chairs in his study and drank bourbon. He had a DON’T TREAD ON ME flag on the wall, like John Moore had in his pencil holder.
He told me Southerners were their own racial group.
He goes, “Oh, the thing about Richard, he wasn’t a Celt. He wasn’t a Celt, and that’s why everyone was suspicious of him.” And L.E. talked about how his own family came here in the 1600s. He said, “I’m not American. I’m Southern.”
He asked, “How would you describe an American, John?” And I said, “Oh, I don’t know. There’s lots of different types.” And he said, “Exactly. That’s the problem.” He said, “As soon as you have too much diversity, you don’t have one thing, and it’s . . . You don’t have history pushing forward in the same direction.”
He and I drank and drank.
“A cat with a chicken, does that make sense to you?” he said. “A black man and a white woman make as little sense as that.”
He told me that in a couple of days’ time (so today) there would be one hundred and fifty to two hundred people gathering for a white nationalist event.
“The Klan!” I squeaked with a slur because of the bourbon.
“Not the Klan!” he hissed with a slur.
He told me it would be a meeting of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), some of whose directors had long ago been on the White Citizens’ Council. The group is holding a political meet-and-greet at a water park. Mississippi is entering election season. Everyone from county sheriffs to school supervisors is running for office. The Council of Conservative Citizens ran notices in the newspapers inviting candidates to come down and address its members. This is a tradition going back to the 1950s.
We stumbled out of his cedar house and pissed against the trees together. I told him I’d be there.
Anyway, that’s the background. So I drive from Chywanna’s for an hour, to a town called Mendenhall, and pull
into a forest. I thought water park would mean fun slides and dolphins leaping through hoops. But in this case it’s simply a forest with a river cutting through it. Perhaps a hundred white Mississippians are here at D’Lo Water Park. They are heating up barbecues and huddling around their pickup trucks. The sky’s mainly blocked out by the tall trees. There are a lot of mustaches. There are many fishing hooks pinned to trucker caps. Women are straightening tablecloths on picnic tables and pulling cakes out of the backseats of cars.
I’ve built up a little trust with L. E. Matthews after the bourbon and piss. He asks me to keep my Dictaphone in my bag, but doesn’t demand I pluck out the batteries before his eyes. He tells me not to tell people I’m a writer.
There’s an area with rows of chairs. Out in the front of this area is a podium with the state flag on either side.
Hang on. Not everyone here is white. Slouching in a chair near one barbecue is a swarthy woman. And a black woman is chatting to a white woman under a tree in the distance. And there’s a teenage boy who would be white in Melbourne, but not here. There’s the slightest slant to his eyes. What is going on here?
John Safran, Race Detective, swings into action. I drift to the teenage boy, my brain snapping together patterns.
The boy tells me he’s come with his parents. He points out his dad. He’s a bald man with a belly and a Confederate flag vest. He’s a Christian minister with the League of the South, a group that wants to secede from the rest of America. The boy points to his mum. She’s the swarthy woman slouching in the chair, one-quarter Cherokee, the boy tells me, making him one-eighth. When the whites first conquered America, they found most Native Americans to be savages, but, he says proudly, they found the Cherokees to be one of the “Five Civilized Tribes.”
So that explains the swarthy woman at the white nationalist rally.
The boy’s dad, in the Confederate vest, walks to the podium and recites a prayer. Then L. E. Matthews strolls to the microphone and tells the crowd how the day will run. He has a list of candidates who have asked to talk to the CCC. They will go first. If anyone else wants to make a political statement on the microphone, they should wait till afterward.
L.E. reads out the first name with a hint of pain: Audarshia Lee Flagg. She’s running for superintendent of education, Simpson County. The black woman I saw in the distance bounces to the podium to polite claps. She’s young and cheery. What is she doing here?
She tells the people about her teaching degree and how she loves children. Lord, she loves children! she tells us, and loves to see them happy!
The white crowd is awkward. There’s quite a bit of scratching arms and looking at the dirt.
“And I share your conservative values!” she chirps. “I want prayer in school! I will not be told I cannot teach the children to pray!”
Oh, Lord. Audarshia hasn’t Googled. She thinks the Council of Conservative Citizens is just a bunch of conservative voters. She’s young and has grown up in a new Mississippi. She doesn’t know she’s in a forest with a hundred white nationalists.
It is beautiful.
She continues chirping away. I look over at L. E. Matthews. He is miserable. He mopes to the microphone and reads out the next name.
Samm Tittle. She’s running against Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to be president of the United States! A white Southern belle makes her way to the front. A beautiful woman in her sixties.
“I don’t need a microphone!” she shouts as she paces back and forth in front of the podium. “I’m here for you, and it is an honor and it is a privilege to be in front of all you great Americans. Why don’t you all step in just a little bit more? Just a little tighter. I wanna make sure you all hear this ’cause this one’s for you, if you please. I’m proud, I’m proud and honored, to be standing here with all of you, my brothers and sisters, in this Council of Conservative Citizens. If Barack Obama can speak to the Congressional Black Caucus, I can speak to you, my brothers and sisters, conservative, God-fearing Americans who love our Confederate flag and honor it the same way we honor our American flag—because that is a beautiful history!”
A roar floods through the forest. Every person I can see leaps up and cheers. This is what they came for! L.E. is thrusting his fist above his head.
“That’s our history! That’s our history!” Samm says, pointing at the Confederate cross on the state flag.
Samm looks down at Audarshia, sitting near the front. Audarshia is beaming, still unaware she’s at a white nationalist rally.
“And,” Samm says with much energy, “it doesn’t have anything to do with a race, color, creed, white, black. Let me say to you that you are all fine people. You are God-fearing patriots, just like me!”
L. E. Matthews looks miserable again.
“I’m a Southern-born and -bred girl. From a poor family, may I say. I struggled . . . I struggled . . .”
Samm seems briefly distracted. She turns her attention back to Audarshia and points a finger.
“That lady right there. You take a look at her, because she’s done a lot of hard work and education and she’s just my kind of lady. And I don’t care whether she’s Democrat, black, white, Muslim, Jew—I don’t care!”
Only three other political candidates have come to D’Lo Water Park to pitch themselves to the CCC. Incredibly, another of them is black.
L.E. sits on a stump with his beer, deflated. How has it come to this? Decades ago the most powerful men in Mississippi—governors and senators and mayors—would line up to curry favor with the group. Now only four candidates have turned up. No big names. And two of them are black! I feel I’m watching the birth pang of a new era.
The beaming black woman unaware she’s at a white nationalist rally. The white nationalists too Southern and polite to cause a scene and tell Audarshia what’s really going on. There is no one in the world—not one of the seven billion—who would appreciate this bizarre scene more than me. I’ve been on a piece of elastic my whole life, being drawn closer and closer to this meeting in this forest today.
Jackson–Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport
“I’m saying, though, I’m trying to club with you, man.”
I think Vincent’s saying club, but I don’t know what it means. I’m scratching around my pocket. I can’t find my boarding pass.
“You know what I’m sayin’, I’m trying to get clubbed to Australia, see what you all got going on over there, you hear?”
“Oh yeah?” I say. “You want to come to Australia?”
“Yeah, I might escape from penitentiary, man, I might need somewhere to go. I might need you to put me up in a house for a couple of days, you hear?”
“You can’t be serious,” I say. “That’s a joke. Tell me that’s a joke.”
“No . . . yeah . . .” Vincent half laughs. “I wish that I could do that, you hear?”
“Yeah.”
“But shit, I’m saying, though, man to man, real shit, you hear? If I was to break out the penitentiary and me and you would be in conversation, we’d be chilling, we’d be kicking, and I ran to Australia, you wouldn’t let me come kick it with you?”
“Yeah . . .” I say, not sure how to answer.
“Man, you lying, man.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I say. “I’m a bit confused ’cause you sound very funny on the phone—like, I like you, except then when I look at the police file and then I’m like, Oh my God! Just say you have another spell and you suddenly start stabbing me or something . . .”
“I can see that, too, I can see you worrying about something like that, but shit . . . You know, man, fuck this. I was just thinking I’d come over there, man. Like I say, okay, if I was to break out, how would I get to Australia? What I gotta go through? Besides getting a passport.”
“No, you need a passport and a plane ticket. But I think that sometimes they know if you’ve got a crim
inal file—they know that you’ve got it so they stop you at the airport.”
“I’m saying, do you know where I can get there on a boat?”
“Oh! Maybe you can,” I say, suddenly lost in Vincent’s train of thought. “That’s a good idea. No, there’s people who come—that’s true. They don’t usually come from America, they usually come from the Middle East and they come from Asia. But yeah, people are always coming over on boats to Australia. So yeah, you can get there that way.”
“There’s some black people over there?”
“Yeah, we’ve got black people. Well, we’ve got Aboriginals—they’re like the black Australians, but we’ve also got some black Americans, and then also some people from Africa.”
“Oh yeah?” he says. “Hey, we’re gonna kick it, though, man, real talk. If I get out of this here . . . Have you ever been to the ocean?”
“Yeah, I’ve been to the ocean.”
“Yeah, I want to go to the ocean, you hear? I ain’t talking about no Mississippi Gulf Coast shit, you hear? I’m talking about the real blue ocean where you can see the bottom of that thing.”
“And you’ve never been to the ocean before?”
“I ain’t . . . I been to the bullshit, the little water, man, but I ain’t been nowhere, you know what I’m sayin’, the nice ocean, you know what I’m sayin’, you see on TV, you hear?”
“Yeah, sure. And what, to go fishing or something, or just to swim?”
“I wanted to swim. I don’t really like the fishing, you know what I’m sayin’? Take a couple of females down there and just, you know what I’m sayin’, have fun, you hear?”
“Well, you’ve kind of screwed it up a bit by being in prison, haven’t you?”
“Man, I told you, I ain’t gonna be locked up long, you know what I’m sayin’? I’m talking about I got a plan to get up out of here, man.”
“Which ocean do you want to go to?”
“I’m gonna go to the Atlantic Ocean,” Vincent says. “Where that located at?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure you can get there. There’s lots of good oceans in Australia if you manage to smuggle your way to Australia.”
