God'll Cut You Down (26 page)

“The guy who killed Richard,” I tell James, “said Richard made sexual advances on him.”

“Wow!” James says. “That’s weird. That’s really strange.”

“Does that add up in your head based on your experiences?”

“No, not at all,” he says. “That’s wild. I mean . . . it doesn’t sound right at all.”

James says Richard didn’t even stay in the same house as him and his mum. Richard put James and his mother up in his home in Pearl and he stayed in a house in Jackson.

Even without the sexual aspect, there’s a lot that’s familiar here. Another young man without a father, lost in the world, doing yard work for Richard, ending up in jail. But in this story, the young man is white.

I phone the number Vincent last called me from. I haven’t been cleared to visit him or received the letter for Mike Scott yet, either.

“You want to talk to Vincent McGee, huh?” says a man without a murble.

His cousin, Michael Dent, has picked up. Vincent’s stepfather, Alfred, drove Vincent to Michael’s house the night of the killing. Michael was arrested as an accessory along with Alfred, Tina, and Michael’s mother, Vicky. Michael is the only other one who ended up locked in prison.

“Do you want me to tell you all the story, man?” Michael says.

“Yeah,” I say, “I don’t mind.”

“Tell you the story for real?”

“Yep.”

“No, man,” Michael says suddenly, backing away. “I’m gonna let you and Vincent get on that shit.”

Vincent snaps the phone off Michael.

“Yeah, what’s up, man?” murbles Vincent. “Got the numbers?”

“Yeah, I got the Green Dot numbers,” I say. “But I need the Mike Scott letter.”

He swears he’ll pop the letter in the Monday post, but he needs the numbers now.

I cough up the numbers.

“You just spoke to Michael Dent, too, yeah?” says Vincent.

“Yeah, yeah,” I say. “So it seems like you’re friends again?”

“I wouldn’t say that, you hear? But listen, if anyone calls you and asks you for anything, don’t give it to them.”

“Oh, yeah,” I say, “sure.”

Vincent is murbling down the crackly line. He’s almost inaudible. The fridge hum is louder than Vincent. I walk to the kitchen and unplug the fridge. I can hear him a little better now. Something about a fight.

“So, how many inmates did you get in a fight with?” I say.

“I guess twenty murblestatic Michael,” he says.

“Wow, so your cousin Michael was also in the fight?”

“No! I said me and him were murble. Murble Meridian murble crumbly ensane.”

“Crumbly?” I say.

“CRI-MAN-LEE,” he spits.

Syllable by syllable, spit by spit, Vincent tells the story. He roused a
fight with twenty inmates. After the brawl, he was pulled into a van and driven to another prison, the East Mississippi Correctional Facility in Meridian. This is a prison for the criminally insane.

He needs three hundred dollars on Green Dot cards to buy another phone. He’s speaking from another prisoner’s, and he needs his own if I want to talk. He’ll ring tomorrow night for the Green Dot numbers.

“A’right?” he asks.

“Sure.”

“How long do you have on the phone now?” I ask Vincent. “Can you talk now?”

“Murble,” says Vincent.

“Okay, cool. So tell us why—I’m taping this—tell us why you got let go from the other prison and moved into this prison?”

“I got caught with a cell phone, then I busted six windows out, then got into a fight with another inmate, all this type of shit. You hear?”

“Sure.”

“But look,” he says, “I need those numbers real quick. I gotta go. I got some business.”

I walk under the fluorescent light in the kitchen and read him the numbers.

“A’right.”

“So when will you be able to ring me back for a proper interview?”

“I gotta get somebody to give me a cell phone, you know what I’m sayin’? Check this out, how much is this one?”

“That’s two hundred and fifty.”

“What’s the other one?”

“The other one is fifty. Before you go, tell me, why did you plead guilty when it was going to be sixty-five years?”

“I’m gonna tell you the truth why I pled guilty,” he says. “One simple
thing—that when I called my people, they weren’t ready to give me the help that I need, you know what I’m sayin’? I had all of those white officers at the county jail that were jumping on me and they were playing with my food, putting stuff in my food. So I was like, you know what I’m sayin’, so I was thinking I had to leave Rankin County Jail or they were gonna kill me, or they were gonna fuck me up by feeding me other shit.”

Somehow, almost uncannily, the story’s already echoing the Reyeses’ story—let down by his family, taunted by the petty power of the authorities.

“Why did you think they were trying to kill you in Rankin County Jail?”

“You see, every day we were fighting. The officers, they were making racist comments to me, you know what I’m sayin’? They cuff my legs and my arms and leave me like that for hours, and I’m being attacked and shit like that. So I had to get myself out of that situation quickly. So you know what I’m sayin’, they were taking my canteen and they were taking me downstairs in maximum isolation. And when I ordered my canteen, they won’t bring it to me. Shit, I had to do what I had to do, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Why did you think it was going to be safer in MDOC?” I say. “Wouldn’t another prison also be dangerous for you?”

“Listen, I gotta go. A dude’s coming for the phone.”

Vincent tells me he’ll call tomorrow.

When I speak to Vincent the next day, I ask him why he split with Precious Martin.

“I really don’t feel like talking that shit to no tape right now, you know what I’m sayin’? You might burn a hole in my shit. I don’t know what’s gonna happen—you might take my voice and make it say something
else.” That’s what Jim Giles was suspicious I’d do, too. “What day of the week is it?” He doesn’t know the day of the week?

“It’s Sunday night.”

“I’m gonna need three hundred dollars from you, you hear? Fo’ Friday.”

“What’s happening Friday?”

“I got something I need to do, you know what I’m sayin’? To help me in here, you hear?”

“I can’t just give you three hundred dollars. I’m going to need to interview you, you know? I’ve already given you six hundred dollars.”

“That ain’t shit. I ain’t trying to sound, you know what I’m sayin’, ungrateful, but that ain’t nothing.”

“Yeah, well, you haven’t given me much, either. Everything I want to talk about, you say, ‘That’s for another day.’ You haven’t gotten me visitation, you haven’t sent me the Mike Scott letter.”

“I’m saying, at the same time, you ain’t in my situation. I can’t just walk out and do what I wanna do. I got some kind of business tied up here, you know what I’m sayin’? I’m trying to get in, you hear? So I’m gonna need a hundred and twenty dollars. You know what I’m sayin’?”

We haggle. Instead of him flicking me a scrap here and there, I get to the heart of what I want. If he tells me what happened the night he killed Richard
plus
sends me the Mike Scott letter, I’ll give him fifteen hundred dollars.

A man bellows “VINCENT!” in the East Mississippi prison for the criminally insane. Vincent says he has to go. He says he’ll call back soon.

Janet Malcolm wrote a book
about
a true crime book and its author, Joe McGinniss. Joe buddied up to the killer. Told him he thought he was innocent, that his book would argue he should be a free man. So the killer opened up to him. The book came out. It did
not
argue anything
of the sort. Rather, it painted the killer as a guilty, narcissistic monster. The killer sued Joe for breaking their agreement. Five out of six jurors sided with the killer. They found a man jailed for murdering his wife and children a more sympathetic character than the deceptive true crime writer.

Janet Malcolm, in
her
book, slowly tortures Joe McGinniss for his deception. Janet says most writers do harm.

I’ve imagined Janet reading everything I write.

Vincent Thornton, Richard’s Nationalist Movement sidekick, was bequeathed Richard’s earthly possessions. Third in line was the government of Iran. Which for a while made me forget about the second man in the will: John Moore.

But tonight as I gobbled a catfish at a Jackson bar, my greasy fingers flicked through old Spirit of America Day booklets. Beneath a tiny photo in one booklet was the name
John Moore
. The man wore a business suit, a gold medallion pinned to his lapel.

I skidded to the apartment, leaving half my catfish in the basket, creaked open my silver laptop, and started to snoop.

It turns out searching for a John Moore in Mississippi is like searching for a Mohammad in Tehran. But with the photo in the booklet, I whittle down the John Moores to one: a Republican politician. He sits in the Mississippi House of Representatives. He represents District 60, which takes in Rankin County.

I pluck Richard’s will from my folder. Unlike the government of Iran, John Moore has signed off on it, as executor.

Mississippians tell me Richard was an impotent outsider, that modern Mississippians rejected him and his views. So why is the most powerful politician in Rankin County in Richard’s last will and testament?

In the marble-and-stained-glass Mississippi State Capitol, the original 1903 golden elevator cranks me to the third floor. This is where the state legislature sits when it sits. It’s not sitting today. John Moore told me to meet him here. He’s the first Mississippian I’ve lured in under vague pretenses. I told everyone else I want to talk about Richard Barrett. I told John Moore I want to talk about Mississippi “and stuff.”

One hundred and twenty-two leather chairs, big as thrones, circle the House of Representatives. All are empty bar two, taken by the Johns Moore and Safran.

“Make yourself comfortable,” John Moore says, pointing at my throne. “That’s actually my seat there I sit in.”

“Oh, okay,” I say. “Am I allowed to?”

“Oh, absolutely. Yep, put your feet on the desk, I don’t care.”

John Moore scoops up a
John Moore
pen from a bowl of
John Moore
pens on the desk and tells me I can have a second one, too, if I’d like.

“I was actually raised on a farm,” he says, “and had the experience that every young person should have. It’s just a different lifestyle. You know, much slower.”

I aim my
John Moore
pen at my yellow notepad.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“None of your business. I’m fifty-seven.”

I ask him what he thinks about Mississippi’s reputation.

“The view from the outside, a lot of it has been a big lie. The news media, for some reason, wants to keep Mississippi looking like the old slave state.”

John Moore tells me Mississippi isn’t split between black and white anymore. He then tells me it is.

“It’s still segregated because it’s not forced,” John Moore says. “You know, blacks like to go hang out with blacks, that’s their family. And, see, whites are the same way. There’s not something sinister or some
conspiracy behind it all. It’s just the way communities behave. It’s just a natural thing. But that also is mutating over time, as the areas become more integrated.”

A rattlesnake pokes its tongue at me on a little yellow flag on John Moore’s desk.
DON’T TREAD ON ME
read the words beneath the snake.

“Just don’t try to force it!” John hisses. “That’s what has created a lot of animosity down through the years. The stinking federal government trying to force people to do things that if you leave them alone they’re going to do anyway. It’s kind of like setting the speed limit on the highway. You know, lots of people are gonna speed just because it’s the speed limit.” John Moore laughs. “You get the logic there? The speed limit’s seventy, so that means I’m s’posed to drive seventy-five!”

John leans back in his throne, crossing his arms over his maroon polo shirt with
JOHN MOORE DISTRICT 60
on the pocket. I suppose I get the logic, but I’m here for something else.

“A few years back,” I say, “I came to Mississippi and did a documentary on this man I think you know, called Richard Barrett.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Richard was tragically murdered, what, a couple of years ago or something like that?” John Moore says, not sounding like he knows the guy well enough to be number two in his will.

“And I saw,” I say, “that you’ve gone to one of his Spirit of America Days.”

John Moore pinks a little.

“Well, no, I . . . I never . . . You know, that was kind of a . . . I never spoke at any of his things. I . . . I never went to one of them.”

John Moore glances over at the rattlesnake for support.

“Now, there’s a whole bunch of House and Senate members and governors and lieutenant governors that
have
spoken at it. At its . . . Which is actually . . . That’s one of those things. Richard Barrett was branded as a racist, and I’m telling you he was, but he didn’t hate blacks. Matter of fact, the guy that killed him, Richard had been taking care of him. The guy had been in prison, got out, couldn’t get a job. Richard paid him to do whatever he was doing—I don’t know and don’t care.”

That “I don’t know and don’t care” is delivered as a knowing aside. I try to think of a reason that John Moore has said those words in that way that doesn’t involve sexual innuendo, but can’t.

“The only association I ever had with Barrett was back, gosh, ten or eleven years ago.”

John Moore tells me that each March, for years, a member of the House, a lady, would stand up from her throne and call for a resolution to recognize the Spirit of America Day. One day, ten years ago, the lady woke up sick. She rang John Moore and asked him to do it. “For sure, yeah, I don’t care,” he told her.

That year, John Moore stood up from his throne and called for the resolution. He glanced up at the public gallery and caught the eyes of the young athletes. He didn’t see Richard, though.