God'll Cut You Down Read Online Free PDF

up.
    •   •   •
    O ne night, well out of my Jewish ghetto, as my head sloshed with alcohol, a girl holding a plastic cup of wine drifted over.
    “Hello,” I said.
    Her face twisted to fury.
    “If you’re going to take my Jewish background,” she shrieked, “and put it up on the television, you better do better than sniffing Eurasian underpants!”
    All heads on the rooftop turned to us. The Jewess escaped down the stairs.
    That was an hour ago. Now I’m hunched over my laptop at my dining room table for six.
    I punch in the address I’ve been punching in for weeks:
tripadvisor.com.au
.
    I punch the words into the box I’ve been punching in for weeks:
Jackson, Mississippi
.
    Tonight I go one step further. I slap my wallet onto the dining room table. I slide out my credit card. I bash in the numbers and hit confirm.
    •   •   •
    H ow can I
not
get on a plane to Mississippi? I’m a Race Trekkie. I
met
the dead white supremacist. Why would God and/or Fate have arranged that if not for me to now get on that plane? I know that man at the book publisher sneered when I told him my idea.
John, a book is a little more difficult than a comedy TV show.
I know I have no book deal. But the trial’s not going to wait for me. There’s not going to be a
second
white supremacist who I hung out with murdered. This is my sweet spot, right? As well as race and money and sex and death, this thing with Richard Barrett is about small towns, tribalism, and old ways. I’m going to escape my ghetto, thank God, for a new one across thesea.

2.
    MISSISSIPPI
The Airport
    I t’s winter in Mississippi and drizzling. My feet squelch on my untied shoelaces as I jerk my luggage across the parking lot at Jackson–Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport.
    Mississippi doesn’t waste any time. That
Jackson
is President Andrew Jackson, pro-slavery campaigner and master to three hundred slaves. That
Medgar Wiley Evers
was a black activist who collapsed and died outside his house in 1963 after a Klansman had shot him in the back. You land straight in a race war.
    And Mississippi wants to get something else out in the open, too. Tennessee Williams is looking down at me like I’m a piece of dirt. John Grisham wants to stab me. William Faulkner sneers.
    YES, WE CAN READ, says the headline on the welcome billboard. A FEW OF US CAN EVEN WRITE.
    Way to try to psych me out, Mississippi. Why not just put up a sign:
John, a book is a little more difficult than a comedy TV show
? All up, a dozen Mississippi writers scorn me from the billboard, glowing in the night, as I steer out of the airport.
    One Mississippi stereotype collapses as I drive into downtown Jackson. Jackson is the state capital, but from the little I can see, the Mississippi with white plantation mansions is somewhere else. I pull in to the motel, a hunk of concrete in a parking lot of concrete in a city of concrete.
    In the entrance, a black man in black is pacing with a thumping stick. I try to remember if motels usually have guards with thumping sticks out front.
    The man attending the front desk has a neck that flops over his collar. He looks at me as if an elf has just turned up on his doorstep. Overseas folk, I gather, don’t really stop by downtown Jackson. Or is that white folk? A gold Freemason ring, of all things, twinkles on his fat black finger as he signs me in.
    I’ll be the first person to stay in room twenty-two, he tells me. The motel fresh opened just two weeks ago.
    Glue fumes follow me through the lobby, up the elevator, down the hall, into my room, and into the shower. Those twenty hours of planes. Mr. Sandman has not only sprinkled sand in my eyes, but grouted over my nostrils and under my fingernails. I scratch the asthma tickle in my chest.
    I’m not going for the sympathy vote, but I can tell you I don’t really know what I’m doing. For weeks I’ve been reading true crime book after book after book for hints. I’ve got a month before the