God'll Cut You Down (16 page)

I ask a woman for Byron Jr., and she points to the dark entrance of the shed.

I drift out of the sun and into the shadows.

Okay, I’m not up at the shed anymore, I’m at the Wendy’s just down from that. Hell! He wouldn’t let me tape! Jesus Christ. I have to write this down before I forget.

Okay, here’s what just happened:

I walk into the shed. Three white guys—two fat and one regular—are playing cards. One points to an old man in overalls and a cap with a Confederate patch, standing near a table of knickknacks, including Franklin Mint figurines of a black mother reading Bible stories to her children. There was the same one in the
Jackson Advocate
office.

That man is Byron Jr.

“So where are you from?” says Byron Jr.

“Well, I work at the ABC, which is like the BBC in Australia. But this is my own solo project,” I say. “I’ve spoken to people who knew
of
Richard. But I need people who really knew him.”

“Well, I knew him,” says Byron Jr.

Every cough and word echoes in the shed.

I pull out my little Flip camera.

“Do you mind if—” I say.

“Well, you just hold it there,” he says. He tells me he’s going to need a percentage of book sales.

I tell him I don’t even have a book deal, but that I’m not averse to a payment for his services. Why not? The Rankin County Courthouse is getting a buck a page for transcripts.

He ushers me to the side.

“Well, my fee,” Byron mumbles gingerly, “is one thousand dollars.”

His eyes tingle. Is he worried he’s overplayed his hand?

“Hmmm,” I say.

“I don’t mind telling you, I told Dr. Phil and Oprah I’d need a hundred thousand plus expenses,” he says.

“Hmmm,” I say.

“Maybe,” he says, “I should have gone through this before you drove here for three hours.”

Rather than haggle, I take a different tack.

“Do you know Richard’s sister?” I say. (A thousand bucks for Richard’s sister is okay, I reckon.)

“No,” he says. “I didn’t even know he had a sister until the funeral.”

“You were at the funeral?”

“No, I didn’t go. I didn’t know until a few days later.”

“Do you know where it was?” I ask. “Or who took care of his estate?”

“No. But Rankin County, their courthouse would have to know. He didn’t even leave anything to his sister. He left it to a man, and the will said if that man didn’t come forward by a certain date, it goes to the Iraqi government.”

“The Iraqi government?” I squeak.

“Richard was peculiar like that,” Byron Jr. says.

Christ!

Byron slowed meaningfully over “a man,” too.

I’m pretty antsy standing in the shed. I’m pretty antsy because I can’t tape this. I’ve already missed gold for the book, including a rant about Martin Luther “Coon” and the Jewish media.

“I like Australia,” Byron Jr. says. “You messed up, though!” He either says we messed up because we let the Queen have the farms or because we took the farms off the Queen—can’t remember.

“Australia’s still mainly white, though,” he says.

He checks me out like one might a girl in a nightclub.

“Look at you,” he says. “Blue eyes, hair, skin.”

He says he doesn’t mind talking, but might stop if he thinks something falls more into the one-thousand-dollar category.

“You know, I’ll need someone to help me write my book one day,” he says. “But I’m telling you, I’m not going to fly over to California to be on
The Johnny Carson Show
to promote it.”

Nervously, I mention the Nationalist Movement web page story about Byron Sr. asking Richard to be his attorney.

Surprise, sur-fucking-prise—this was, says Byron Jr., not quite the truth. “In fact, it was the other way around—Richard was always coming to the jail begging to be my daddy’s attorney. We said no. He wasn’t screwed together right. He was strange.”

Byron Jr. sucks the air between his teeth and then with a spark in his eye describes how a few years ago he threatened to “stomp” Richard if he ever told lies about his daddy again.

“You never knew which side Richard was on,” he says. “Or if he was playing both sides against each other for money. I thought maybe he was an FBI informant. But he never told them anything they didn’t already know.”

A black man is standing a few meters back from Byron Jr.’s stall, looking on.

“Oh, sorry, were you waiting?” Byron Jr. says. He sounds impeccably sincere and polite. “I’m sorry to make you wait.”

“My friend has things to sell,” the black man says, “and was wondering, do you guys buy or does my friend set up himself here?”

“Both can work,” Byron Jr. says. He hands the black man a business card. “Tell your friend to call.”

The black man’s black female companion is hovering around the entrance of the shed.

“Oh, hello there, young lady,” Byron Jr. says. “Thank you for stopping in.”

Byron Jr. turns to me.

“See, I do business with niggers,” he says. “I don’t mind. I just don’t want them in my home. They can’t come over for lunch.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because they should be on the porch,” he says. He points at me. “You can come over for lunch. I’d pour you a cola and a tea. But not the niggers.”

He says
nigger
like a bondage dominatrix says
bitch
, with a glint in his eye and a curl in his lip.

“Nothing in my Bible says there should be desegregation!” he says. “There were twelve tribes! Twelve separate tribes!”

“Weren’t those tribes Jews?” I say.

“There were Jews and gentiles, but they were separate,” he says.

He then rolls through his Jew theory checklist. Including, but not limited to:

He can’t accept the Jews because they won’t accept Jesus.

If you check the history, the number doesn’t add up to six million.

Hitler was queer.

The “Hitler was queer” point provides an opening to ask about
those
Richard rumors.

“Yeah, he was always touching me,” Byron Jr. says.

He strokes my arm to demonstrate.

“He’d be, ‘Byron, come over here.’ I’d be, ‘I was going over there anyway, you don’t need to touch me!’”

One of the men playing cards chuckles and calls out to Byron, “You goin’ to be famous on TV?” Byron is not amused and hisses.

“People think Southerners are white trash. But if you spend time in Aberdeen, you’ll see—” Byron Jr. interrupts himself. “Well, there is a lot of white trash here, but there’s also blue blood, and you can trace me back to German and English aristocracy.”

Byron Jr.’s family has all served in the military, except his son, who is as a consequence the “reject of the family.” Byron Jr. doesn’t see him.

I glance over the black figurines on his knickknack table.

“Look,” I say. “So many black figurines. There’s even black angels.”

“Well,” Byron Jr. says, “I’ve never been to heaven, but I imagine there’s black angels there. You know, 80 percent of blacks are okay. It’s just the 20 percent.”

What? Eighty/twenty? Is an eight-to-two ratio high enough to go to all the effort of being a white supremacist? Maybe Richard worked on the same proportion.

I nod to the stone Confederate as I pass him by on my way to the Rankin County Chancery Court. Filed in its drawers are the last wills and testaments of the people of Rankin County.

I sit on a couch in the clerk’s office. I straighten the five pages on my lap.

I, RICHARD BARRETT, single and not having ever been married, a resident of and domiciled in the County of Rankin and State of Mississippi, being of good, sound, and disposing mind and memory, do hereby make, publish, and declare this to be my Last Will and Testament.

I express my thanks to my friends and compatriots, who labored selflessly along with me. My regret is that I could not have done more, personally, yet my joy is that we breathed the exhilarating air of the highest climes together. May you and yours complete the tasks I have endeavored to entrust to you, according to the inspiration, if any, which I have given to you.

It is my desire that I be remembered, if at all, as I was in life, only: therefore, I direct that as soon as practicable my remains be
cremated without public or private viewing beforehand, and that any ashes therefrom be dispersed and mingled with the soil, unceremoniously. It is my desire and direction that none of my organs, bodily parts, or any part or parcel of my body, whatsoever, be used for any type of “organ donor.” It is, further, my desire and direction that no military honors or memorials be conducted for me.

I roll my eyes at Richard positing he’ll have to modestly turn down the parade and medals that the Army were pressing upon him. I flip to page two. Richard hands out his worldly goods.

I give, devise, and bequeath all of my worldly possessions to VINCE THORNTON of Collins, Mississippi.

I guess that’s why the electricity bill at the Murder House was in Vince Thornton’s name.
A man
, said Byron De La Beckwith, Jr., suggestively. I wonder what sort of relationship Richard and Vince Thornton had?

If, for any reason, the aforesaid VINCE THORNTON predeceases me or is unwilling, unable, or disqualified to receive the bequest, hereunder, then I give, devise, and bequeath all my worldly possessions to JOHN MOORE of Brandon, Mississippi.

John Moore? I don’t recall him from any Googling or Stormfront posts. I add his name to my list.

If, for any reason, the aforesaid JOHN MOORE predeceases me or is unwilling, unable, or disqualified to receive the bequest, hereunder, then I give, devise, and bequeath all of my worldly possessions to the GOVERNMENT OF IRAN at Tehran, Iran.

Christ!

Well, it’s Iran rather than Iraq, as Byron Jr. had claimed, but that hardly turns down the volume on inexplicable weirdness.

Richard adds one more note:

I expressly decline to include any individual member of my family as beneficiary under this, my Last Will and Testament, it being my intent that the same take nothing hereunder paid.

Curious—he’s already left them nothing; why hammer it home? What, I wonder, did his family do to him?

A friend back home bought me
Men Like That: A Southern Queer History
. The writer, John Howard, not only grew up gay in Mississippi, he grew up gay in Rankin County. He thinks outsiders mash together how Mississippians saw blacks and how they saw gays. He says they were two very different things.

Yes, Mississippians thought homosexuality was a biblical sin. But like many other vices, it was accommodated “with a pervasive, deflective pretense of ignorance.” In contrast, Mississippians didn’t overlook blackness.

The book covers a case from the 1950s in which two servicemen killed a gay man, claiming he had made sexual advances on them. This defense didn’t stop “the most extensive investigation the Jackson police department has participated in,” according to the city’s chief detective. It didn’t stop the district attorney pushing for the death penalty. One killer got life, the other plea-bargained down to twenty years.

The same year, Emmett Till was shot in the head and thrown in the Tallahatchie River. Two white supremacists were tried and acquitted of his murder. Soon after, knowing they were protected against double
jeopardy, the two struck a deal with a magazine and confessed to the murder. The case was never reopened, and they died old men. A couple of the jurors said they thought the men were guilty but didn’t think they deserved life in prison just for torturing and killing a young black guy.

I pull into JC’s, a gay bar in Jackson.
Men Like That
is thrown on the passenger’s seat like a street directory. I’ve underlined the gay bars in the book, wondering which have survived.

I
think
JC’s has. The squat and gloomy building hides up a street and is trying to act inconspicuous in the middle of a parking lot. There are no apparent windows and no signage. The reason I reckon this must be the place is an old tin drum out front has been painted in rainbow stripes, dulled by age.

I want to find someone who remembers little Richard Barrett skulking into gay bars late at night. Proof that the white supremacist was homosexual!

A nervous bald man in a lime-green T-shirt walks toward the door as I’m walking toward the door.

“You know what sort of bar this is?” he asks gingerly.

“Yes.”

“Because some tourists come in and
whoa!
”

A video bowling machine is pushed in a corner. Chandeliers hang from the low ceiling of the dimly lit room. Behind the bar sits an old woman with a hump.

The crowd is thin—two women and three men.

The old woman with the hump tells me she runs JC’s. Yes, she answers, she knew Richard Barrett.

“Oh, really!” I say excitedly. But alas (for me), she didn’t know him from his skulking into JC’s late at night.

“My ex-husband was a police officer, and Richard was always down at the station stirring up trouble. He’d be telling them he’d been appointed by the Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon to lead a march down the Jackson streets where the blacks were.”

“And he wasn’t appointed?”

“No, he wasn’t. And there was no march.”

I droop. I don’t need another story about Richard the exaggerating racist. I came to find the smoking gun about his secret gay life so that Vincent has a defense against the lethal injection, and I can show that white supremacists are self-hating frauds.

She says that Richard wasn’t wrong about everything, though. Mississippi was better before desegregation.

She writes down a name on a square piece of paper:
Eddie Sandifer
. He is a gay civil rights activist, she says. Eddie knew Richard.

I chat with the other folk in the bar. One man tells me that his gay friends won’t come to JC’s unless he drives, because someone takes photographs of the license plates in the parking lot and posts them on the Internet. Nevertheless, he agrees with
Men Like That
, that homosexuality here is overlooked “with a pervasive, deflective pretense of ignorance.”