The Call of the Weird (24 page)

A handful of times, I found a topic that might divert her for fifteen minutes or so into a race-neutral zone: the Beatles and Monty Python, Thomas Hardy (
The Mayor of Casterbridge
and
The Return
of the Native
are her favorite books). The rest of the time, April was a one-woman White Power radio station, finding a racist dimension in the most innocent topics:
The Lord of the Rings
(“For me, it was totally racial”),
Young Frankenstein
(“by Mel what’s-his-name— that Jew”), the Harry Potter films (“When the goblins in the bank came on, Lamb turned to me and said, ‘They look just like Jews!’”). It struck me that she is not only a racist, she is also a racial fundamentalist—someone for whom loyalty to race was the guiding compass of her life.

April said she had been racist all her life. Her parents had raised her that way—though she allowed that she’d passed through a “brainwashed lemming” phase in her late teens and early twenties. She studied journalism in college, but dropped out and worked as a horse trainer. She only got serious about White Power politics
around 2000, when her second marriage was breaking down. (Her first, the one that produced the twins, ended after her husband, a musician, got hooked on crack and crystal meth; now clean, he was totally supportive of her beliefs, she said.) In 2001, having shopped around and compared a few different racist groups, including a visit to the Aryan Nations in Idaho, April joined the National Alliance. Since then, she had been a tireless and dedicated white activist, leafleting local schools, writing letters, recruiting any white people she thought might be sympathetic.

We spent our second morning driving up to see April’s father, Bill, a cattle rancher who lives a few hours north. Bill grazes 500 head of cattle, every one of them branded with the official registered ranch brand—a swastika. I had been struggling to understand how April had become the way she is, and I was hoping Bill might provide some context.

Bill was seventy years old. He was wearing thick dark glasses, a cowboy hat and a torn Wrangler shirt. “Right now, all the people are so politically correct that they wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouth full of it,” he said, standing by his truck, which had a big black swastika on the side of it. I told him I was a multiculturalist. “Are you? When you get married, are you going to marry a white person or a nigger?”

This took me by surprise and all I said was, “Ugh.”

“What do you usually date? Do you usually date white women?” April asked.

I paused, and sighed, and said in a small voice: “Do Jewish women count as white?”

“No,” Bill and April said together.

“Not in our books,” Bill said.

“I think we should hope he marries some Jewess,” April said. “Won’t that be funny? A Jewish princess. She’s gonna have you right there.”

“Twisted right down,” Bill said. Then adopting a strange high voice he said: “Louis! I want a new ring, Louis! Flush the toilet for me, Louis! I can’t push the handle down!”

Bill went some way toward explaining April. But still, for singlemindedness, she was way beyond him. “My whole family agrees with all my beliefs,” April said, “but whereas they’re just believers, I’m an activist. They’re racialists. They’re nationalists. But they haven’t taken it to the next level.”

I wondered what it must be like for Lamb and Lynx, being exposed to April’s beliefs every day. To be fair, they seemed, much of the time, charming and well adjusted. But their mother’s skewed worldview would occasionally peep out. “Did you know Martin Luther King was a plagiarist and he liked to sleep with white prostitutes?” Lamb remarked on our first morning together.

Over lunch one day, Lynx told me how, though forbidden to have a Game Boy, she was allowed to play Ethnic Cleansing, a shoot-’em-up computer game put out by the National Alliance in which a skinhead goes through a ghetto shooting blacks and Mexicans. “They hide in bushes and they’re perched on basketball hoops and they make gorilla sounds,” Lynx said. “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!”

Once or twice, I heard them using racial slurs—muttering “jungle bunnies” as we passed some black people in the car. Introduced to a man from New Mexico, Lynx said, “You don’t look like a spic.”

But I also sensed a wistfulness in the twins, a desire to be like other girls—to be normal.

In August 2004, a month before the conversation about Folk the System and the sack races, and despairing of ever seeing April or the twins for my “follow-up,” I made arrangements to visit the headquarters of the National Alliance in West Virginia.

Antiracism watchdog groups say the National Alliance is now the largest neo-Nazi group in America. They put its dues-paying membership at between 800 and 1,500. Unlike the Aryan Nations, the National Alliance is secular. It doesn’t field candidates for elections, it considers its function to “educate the public.” Its website speaks about its goal of achieving “White Living Space.” “We will not be deterred by the difficulty or temporary unpleasantness involved,” it says, going on to describe the racial utopia it envisions, a place where young women will waltz, reel, and jig but never “undulate or jerk to negroid jazz or rock rhythms.” Marc Chagall is singled out for special opprobrium as a Jewish artist, along with Barry Manilow—the surreality of this pairing rather serving to undermine the supposed value of racial categories.

Oddly enough, given its stand on “rock rhythms,” the National Alliance raises most of its money selling Nazi skinhead music on its label, Resistance. It also puts out a quarterly skinhead music magazine of the same name. But in its broader character, the National Alliance is at the intellectual, elitist end of the White Power spectrum. It is the Gray Poupon of hate groups. It publishes a bimonthly current affairs magazine,
National Vanguard,
and a monthly newsletter,
Free Speech.
Both contain articles on supposed Jewish world domination that are largely free of racial slurs but no less hateful for it. In a recent issue of
Free Speech,
a review of a book called
Blood Ritual
contained the line: “Naturally, the Jews aren’t the only group who have practiced (and might still practice) ritual murder,” going on to mention the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. This combination of a seemingly reasonable tone with a flat-out bizarre racial message, tossed in casually in parentheses, is typical of the National Alliance.

I drove up from Mississippi, where I’d been chasing gangsta rappers, through Tennessee, into West Virginia. The poorest state
in the Union, poorer even than Mississippi, West Virginia is shaped like a stain on the map. Landlocked, bounded by rivers and mountains, it felt a little like the land that time forgot. I passed rickety old barns; elegant white shuttered houses with porches; a general store that stocked “lye soap” and “Amish cheese.” The countryside reminded me of England. Rolling hills and leafy trees looked down on fields and white wooden fences.

The headquarters themselves were a few miles outside the tiny town of Hillsboro, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, which run like a spine up the border between Virginia and West Virginia and flow into the Appalachians. I drove up a rutted dirt road, past farm buildings and a mobile home, into the woods. There was a sign saying “No Hunting or Trespassing—Keep Out” and a small “life rune,” the logo of the NA, which looked like a capital Y with three forks. But no swastikas, no signs saying “Whites Only” as there were at Aryan Nations.

I was met by Shaun Walker. An ex-Marine and ex-skinhead and now the chief operating officer of the National Alliance, Shaun was a beefy man. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, and had a punctilious military manner—his hair was clipped at the sides and he was wearing a white button-down shirt and a tie with a tie clip. He also had the endearing habit of mispronouncing certain words. President Putin was “Pootnin.” He said “amalgation” for “amalgamation” and coined the word “sheerly,” a synonym of “purely.” Shaun took me on a tour of the headquarters, crunching up a gravel road to a Quonset hut—a hangar-like auditorium with 200 or more seats where they hold their biannual “leadership conferences.” The road was overhung with trees and crowded with bushes. Shaun cut an incongruous figure, deep in the wilderness, in his shirt and tie, as insects chirped loudly. He looked like some minister of a government in exile, biding his time, dreaming of the downfall of the occupying power.

“We want a white, sovereign homeland,” he said. “We’d like to use the existing borders. If we can expand the borders, that would be okay. If it’s a portion of the existing United States, that would be okay. There would be no permanent residence of nonwhites. You’d have to keep interracial mating away. If they want to come as tourists, okay, that’s not a problem. There’s only a problem if they want to move permanently or mix racially.”

When the National Alliance founder, William Pierce, bought the acreage in West Virginia in 1984, he’d envisioned it as a kind of proto-homeland, a first step on the road to an American Reich. “There was a prevalent idea of buying an area and selling parcels and starting a little whites-only community,” Shaun said. “That was the original intent. But communes don’t work. They never have.” By 1990, they had abandoned that idea.

We crunched up another gravel road to the warehouse for Resistance Records. Its shelves were stacked with boxes of racist CDs. Angry Aryans. Celtic Warrior. Blue-Eyed Devils.

“1993 is when the first American White Power CD was pressed,” Shaun said. “And eleven years later, we have around seven hundred, eight hundred, so the whole thing is geometrically expanding . . . We believe we’re the largest distributor.”

In a strip-lit back office was a store of other merchandise. Stickers saying “Earth’s Most Endangered Species—The White Race—Help Preserve It”; copies of
The Jews and Their Lies
by Martin Luther and
White Power
by George Lincoln Rockwell (the late American Nazi Party leader) alongside editions of Dickens, the Hornblower series by C. S. Forester and Seamus Heaney’s translation of
Beowulf.
Two or three young men were stuffing envelopes, answering phones, and filling orders. Shaun said they have eight full-time staff at the headquarters and another eight around the country.

“When are you going to put Lamb and Lynx on the cover of the magazine?” I asked.

“This month!” Shaun said. “We’re actually making their CD right now. Oh, the little kids love it. In fact, there are little kids around the country that write’em letters and stuff.”

Shaun handed me the latest issue of
Resistance,
which showed a severe-looking Lamb and Lynx, in short tartan skirts and white shirts, leaning against a brick wall, hugging their instruments. Indeed, Lamb’s skirt looked hiked up—most of her thigh was exposed— and she was almost scowling. It was hard to judge, but the overall effect was somehow a little off-key. But it was a delicate point and I wasn’t sure how to broach it.

“Why aren’t they smiling?”

“I don’t know. April showed the twins a bunch of photos they had taken and that’s the one they picked!”

“Because they’re being, ah, how do you read that?”

“Uh, I read that as that’s the picture April sent us! Ha ha!”

“Hmmm.”

On the way out of the warehouse, walking back toward the main office, Shaun shared his opinion of the Aryan Nations. Butler, then still alive, was a good person, he said. “But the organization is just slap full of crackpots. And it has been infiltrated by the federal government since time”—as Shaun put it—“immortal.”

“They did seem like they were marching, uh, goose-stepping to the beat of a different drum,” I said.

“When you go and you meet people, and their media spokespeople that come to you, and if they strike you as weird or oddballs, that’s bad. People aren’t supposed to be oddballs.”

I felt Shaun and I were getting on quite well at this point, so I lowered my voice and confided: “But being a Nazi is pretty weird.” “Well, maybe. George Lincoln Rockwell was quite charming!”

“I’m speaking as someone who likes weird people,” I said, backpedaling.

“Adolf Hitler had so much personality and charisma.”

“I’m talking about nowadays. To be a Nazi sympathizer in this day and age. It’s odd, because it goes against what so many people feel, and what I feel, which is just that we should get along with people.”

“Yeah, but the problem is, Mother Nature says otherwise. Why does ‘white flight’ exist? Why in America has 50 percent of the white population moved in the last forty years? Why do areas like Detroit and Camden, New Jersey, exist? Why did all the white people leave? Biology is the reason! You can’t change it! They could buy a house for 10 percent of what they paid in the white area.”

“That’s what I did.”

“But most whites will not. You, I guess, get along better with them.”

Later, back at my motel, I read the interview with Lamb and Lynx in the new issue of
Resistance.
Maybe because they were speaking to a white racist publication the tone was different to the one they’d taken with me: