Burden

by Courtney Hargrave

  Criticizing “hate groups” for co-opting your message while at the same time eliciting their support is plainly hypocritical. But in a world where up is down and down is up, it becomes that much easier to peddle outright falsehoods and half truths. After all, most of what Mike Burden learned about southern history—and the history of the Klan—is not so different from the version peddled by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Only by normalizing Confederate iconography does it become possible to patronize a shop operated by an avowed Klansman in the name of “heritage.”

  And yet one wonders why John Howard even bothered to soften his image. Because no matter what he said to the press about “preserving history,” the outgoing message on his own store’s answering machine told a far different story. It was a four-minute-long racist rant—a recording made by none other than Michael Burden—billed as a Klan “hotline.” (The phone number was printed on the shop’s business cards.) The heart of the message was a recruitment plea: callers were asked if they were ready to turn over the country to “militant blacks” and “nigger hordes” who “want to breed with your beautiful, young daughters [to] produce a society of…welfare recipient mongrels,” thereby turning America’s cities into “jungles.” A local reporter caught wind of the message, but John Howard denied any involvement and began referring all calls to a spokesperson.

  That spokesperson turned out to be Barry Black, Howard’s Pennsylvania-based Imperial Wizard. As spokespersons go, he was an odd choice—Black had been even more antagonistic with the press than Howard. Not long after the shop opened, for example, he had promised to pull the Klan out of Laurens entirely—so long as residents banded together and purchased the Echo for “a million dollars.” With Black at the helm, the Redneck Shop’s public image would only get worse. In an interview with Vibe magazine, he boasted about a recent acquisition at the shop, an old black-and-white photo from 1913. “It was a black person hung for raping a white woman,” he said. “That picture’s worth—in a Klansman’s eyes—$1,000. We’ll probably have copies made and sell them at the store for $5 apiece. Maybe make postcards out of them.”

  He was talking, of course, about the photo of Richard Puckett—the same photo Rev. Kennedy had used in his protests. And the postcards (unlike his pledge to leave Laurens) were a promise Black made good on. By summer, reprints were available for sale, and sometimes given away as a “free gift with purchase.” Black could hardly claim credit for the idea, however. Commemorative photographs and picture postcards of lynchings had been extraordinarily common in the early part of the twentieth century, sold as souvenirs and sent through the mail as casually and as frequently as greeting cards. Black was merely resurrecting one of the ugliest (and most effective) forms of white supremacist intimidation.

  And still the customers came.

  Teddy Craine of Enoree stopped in to buy a T-shirt for his four-year-old son. “This is part of my past,” he explained to the Greenville News. “My great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy. The United States stands up for people’s rights. That is why we are here today. I don’t think our heritage should be put in a back room.”

  Roger Stow, a carpenter from Greenville, bought a Klan cap. “I see nothing wrong with selling Klan stuff because it is part of our proud heritage, whether blacks and white liberals like it or not.”

  Stephanie Wilke, twenty-two, told the Washington Post that she had no qualms about supporting the Klan or asserting her rights as a white person. “The blacks wear Malcolm X T-shirts,” she said. “These words are our heritage. It’s the South, it’s the rebel flag.”

  Would they have continued patronizing the shop had they known what Mike Burden was up to?

  Ed McDaniel might have been a nuisance, but his activism against the shop had been relatively tame. Rev. Kennedy, with his advocacy in the statehouse and warnings of an imminent race war, was far more dangerous. Or at least that’s what Burden came to believe. The day Hunter plowed his van into the shop, for example, mere hours after Burden had finished boarding up the windows, a sudden earsplitting crack—like the sound of a gunshot—sent nearly everyone inside diving for cover. It turned out not to have been a gun at all, luckily, just the sound of a fishing reel slamming into the boards, tossed at the shop by a group of mischievous kids. But the incident left everyone a bit shaken. And Howard had been quick to lay the blame at Rev. Kennedy’s feet, suggesting over and over again that the reverend was responsible for the escalation, that tensions were bound to get worse, that next time it really would be a gun.

  “We were told more or less that our lives were gonna be…taken care of,” Burden said later. So when John gave him a new assignment, he took the job very seriously. For the next several weeks, when Burden wasn’t at the shop or spending time with Judy, he was doing reconnaissance on the reverend—trailing him around town, watching, waiting. “I knew where he lived,” he says of Kennedy. “I knew where he worked. I knew where he went. I knew what stores he liked, his favorite restaurant…” At some point Burden considered driving to a secluded spot on Kennedy’s regular route and faking car trouble, figuring that a reverend would surely pull over in order to help a stranded motorist. There would be no witnesses, as he later explained in interviews with The State, and the attack would look like a robbery.

  “The Klan has a saying,” Burden explained. “It’s Non silba sed anthar. ‘Not for self, but for others.’ ” The motto is a mix of Latin and Gothic, a holdover from the second Ku Klux Klan of the early twentieth century, and it had been drilled into him since his earliest days with John Howard. Why do Klansmen take security at rallies and other events so seriously? Non silba sed anthar—to protect their brothers in arms. Why was the Klan’s mission so important? Non silba sed anthar—it was in the service of the white race. Burden and his fellow Klansmen spoke the words often, almost like a passcode or private greeting. A little placard bearing the motto was tacked up next to the register in the Redneck Shop. And in Burden’s mind, stalking the reverend was just another way that he was putting the safety of his adopted family before his own needs. It was about defense and protection. It was honorable.

  * * *

  —

  In the days leading up to his second major rally, Rev. Kennedy led his church in a frenzy of activities: prayer vigils, community meetings, a silent ride through the center of town, and a bonfire gathering at New Beginning, all intended to raise awareness and encourage community participation. By Saturday morning, however, it was clear that his movement was losing ground. Just six weeks earlier, four hundred people had packed the square at his invitation. Now he was looking at a crowd of about fifty—a good third of whom weren’t protesters at all, but rather law enforcement officers and members of the media.

  “We could have had others come,” he told reporters, putting a spin on the disappointing turnout, “but we wanted to mentally prepare our people that there will be times when only a handful will be there to carry the load. It’s going to be a long, hot summer. We will not be intimidated.”

  With characteristic brashness, Kennedy blasted community leaders for not having done enough to address the Redneck Shop, and went so far as to call Governor Beasley a “liar” for suggesting that race relations in South Carolina were “good.” He threatened to bring his protests to the door of the statehouse, called for the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to join the fight, pleaded for more and stronger support from white citizens. “We can’t solve the problem with one race,” he said.

  But the plea wasn’t working. Local business owners were already tired of the disruption from so many protests. They didn’t care for Kennedy’s style, nor see much point in his antagonism—the shop wasn’t going anywhere. More than a few blamed him, publicly, for “blowing things out of proportion.” There was one person, however, with whom Kennedy was not losing momentum, but rather gaining ground. That was Judy.

  At first, she had been plenty sus
picious of Rev. Kennedy. She’d heard an earful from Mike and John, after all: that the reverend was supposedly behind the instances of random vandalism at the shop, that he was goading blacks into violence and jeopardizing her boyfriend’s livelihood. After she’d gotten a glimpse into the inner workings of the Klan, however, she hadn’t exactly been impressed with John Howard, either. Judy had always been told that she was part Cherokee, so when the inevitable chatter about the inferiority of nonwhites came up—when Howard launched into one of his tirades about the blacks or the Mexicans or the Chinese—she decided to confront him. “If you’re gonna hate the blacks because of the color of their skin, then why do you want me to be in the Klan?” she asked. “I come from Indian. You hate me ’cause I got Indian in me?”

  Whatever his true feelings, John neglected to share them. “He couldn’t give me an answer,” Judy says. “So I thought, ‘Mm-hmm. Okay.’ ” In the meantime, she continued to push Mike. “I would challenge him, you know? ‘All right, I went to a Klan meeting. Now let’s go do my thing.’ ” Usually that meant driving out to KC’s, a run-down honky-tonk out on Highway 221, to hear her favorite band play. And for a brief period, she seemed to be winning Burden over—they went out together, away from the Klan, nearly every weekend. But then some new “job” would come up, some new errand Mike was supposed to run for John, some new mission to fulfill. “I would tell her, it’s my duty,” Mike said later. “I’ve got to do this.”

  By the time she found out that Mike was essentially stalking the reverend, Judy was desperate. She had long since stopped going to meetings, socialized less and less with the few female members she’d gotten to know during initiation. And when she wandered into the courthouse square during Kennedy’s second rally, something clicked. “I was like, ‘This makes sense now,’ ” Judy explained. “Now I understand why John Howard doesn’t like him.” The more she listened to the reverend’s calls for nonviolent protest, for a coming together of the races, the more she understood that her boyfriend was on the wrong side. “I kinda understood where Reverend Kennedy was coming from,” she says. “And I thought, ‘You know, that’s right. What he’s sayin is right.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  A day or two later, Rev. Kennedy met with more disgruntled churchgoers—this time a young African American couple. “I know what you’re getting ready to say,” Kennedy told them, having at that point counseled quite a few young people who’d come by to discuss the relative merits of just blowing the place up. This couple was different. They were headed to the square, they said, where they intended to take care of the problem themselves—no more protests.

  “I said, ‘Give me your word that you ain’t gonna do nuthin like that,’ ” Kennedy remembers. He told them he was tired and frustrated, just as they were, but violence would only make things worse. He gave his standard exhortation about fighting back peacefully—he told them they couldn’t lower themselves to John Howard’s level, couldn’t mimic the Klan’s ideology and forsake the teachings of the Bible. But as he watched the man and woman climb into their car and drive away from the church, Kennedy figured he’d best follow them over there. “Sometimes when you fed up like that, when you tired…,” Kennedy said, shaking his head. This time, he feared, his words might not have done very much good.

  It was dusk by the time he pulled into one of the parking spaces on the north side of the courthouse. The streetlamps had come on, and the lights from inside the shop cast an orange glow across the whole of West Laurens Street. The couple, as promised, was outside raising hell, shouting epithets in the direction of the store and calling for the Klansmen to come out. Kennedy quickened his pace just in time to see John Howard step out onto one of the twin fire escapes above the marquee. He hadn’t, however, seen what happened seconds earlier: John hollering at Mike to get upstairs, and Mike, armed with a Makarov .380 pistol and a .22 in his pocket, ascending to the roof.

  Kennedy had almost closed the gap between himself and the couple, trying to conjure some strategy to defuse the situation, when he heard Howard suddenly call down to him. For all the time they had spent trading barbs in the press, it was the first time either man had ever spoken to the other. Full of false bonhomie, in a kind of singsongy lilt, Howard invited the reverend to come on inside. He suggested Kennedy might like to have his picture taken while wearing a Klansman’s robe.

  One floor above, Mike was crouched behind the redbrick parapet at the front of the roof. Down and to the right, he could see the top of Howard’s head, or at any rate the top of the Confederate-flag ball cap John usually wore to cover his bald spot. Mike curled his finger around the trigger and sat at attention, waiting for a sign or a signal. “I didn’t care about the consequences,” he said. “I will defend what’s mine at all costs. I had the shot lined up and everything. I had him in my sights.”

  Down on street level, Kennedy had the distinct impression that he was being goaded, that Howard was trying to provoke him into a more direct confrontation, a feeling with which he was not entirely unfamiliar. “Any kind of reaction from a black man is a sin,” he said. “You can’t be reactionary to them. You have to make them react to you. This is the thing about fighting back—I even tell my kids this. There are reprisals, there are consequences whenever you take a stand, but the consequences are worse when you’re black. Because in their minds, the nigger oughta be in his place.” Instead of engaging with Howard, then, Kennedy focused on the couple. And instead of reiterating the conciliatory message he’d given in his office—since it hadn’t worked the first time—he took on the persona of a football coach giving a pre-game pep talk. “I’m gonna stick ’em with protests!” he shouted, pointing at the shop. “Back to back! We will not be intimidated! You intimidated?”

  The couple exchanged glances. “No.”

  “I said, you intimidated?”

  “No!”

  From his perch on the roof, Mike felt something akin to confusion. For weeks, he’d anticipated some kind of covert attack. He had followed Kennedy back and forth across town, trying to glean some insight into his plans, collecting intel on the man he considered the greatest threat to his shop and his person. But Kennedy, loud as he may have been—he was shouting about protesting and leading call-and-response chants and singing that ridiculous pump-it-up song—was actually moving the protesters away from the building. “He was down there sayin, ‘Y’all need to back up. This is the wrong way to do it. We can protest peacefully,’ stuff like that,” Burden recalled. “I think that was mainly the reason I didn’t fulfill the mission. He was no longer a threat.”

  * * *

  —

  Later that night, Burden arrived at Judy’s trailer with a kind of sheepish grin on his face. He paced back and forth in her tiny kitchen, then finally plopped onto the sofa and put his head in his hands. “You’ll never guess what I almost done.”

  Judy sighed. “What have you almost done now?”

  By then, Judy was well aware of Burden’s unnaturally close relationship with John Howard. She’d seen the way Mike seemed to hang on John’s every word; in fact, she was convinced that Mike was afraid to defy him. She knew, too, about the abuse Mike had suffered as a child. She knew that John had taken Mike in when he had nowhere else to go. But it wasn’t until Mike began to tell her about aiming a gun at the reverend that she understood how deep it all went.

  “What are you doin this for?” she said. “Because John Howard can’t stand to be around him? You’re gonna give up your whole life—and me and these kids. You’re gonna go to prison for the rest of your life. Do you think John Howard is going to be there for you then?”

  The more she pushed, the quieter Mike got—a personality trait to which she had long since grown accustomed. “When Mike gets real quiet and just sets there and looks at you? He doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, ’cause you done hit a nerve.” Finally, she scooted over to him and put a hand on his
knee. “Listen, I love you,” she said, “but you have got to break away from this.”

  Mike was not yet ready to renounce John Howard, but there was no denying that things were different now. He was no longer an orphan with nothing to lose. He suddenly had people who loved him—really loved him, without asking for anything in return. The sudden vulnerability was no less than terrifying. In love letters to Judy, written in small, blocky script and decorated with hearts and flowers, he poured out the emotions that he struggled to express in person. “The feelings that are with me do scare the hell out of me,” he wrote. “I’m supposed to be as strong as a rock, now this rock is crumbling.” Just a few months ago, he would have lashed out at anyone who dared challenge him or the Klan. Now he had to wonder if that sacrifice was worth it.

  “I think he was coming to me to talk it through,” Judy said later. “You know, ‘This is what I done. Is this right or is it wrong?’ I mean, he couldn’t even think for his own self. John had him so brainwashed.”

  From then on, she worked to replace John in that capacity. She struck up conversations challenging Mike’s ideology, and she started imagining for them both a different kind of life. Mike had talked idly about wanting to be a truck driver—some distant uncle had apparently been trucking for years—and it seemed like a good fit for him. He didn’t feel particularly comfortable cooped up inside or working in a factory, and anyway, there wasn’t even much factory work left in Laurens. A trucker’s salary might provide real financial stability; as it was, Judy was teetering on the brink of eviction. She just had to get Mike away from the Klan, and away from John Howard. Maybe away from Laurens altogether. “I kept pressuring him,” she said. “Let’s walk away from it. Let’s get out of it.”