trial starts. You can’t just rock up on the day of the trial and expect to be able to work out what’s going on. That’s what I learned from
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
: Arrive early and befriend the local yahoos. That’s how you paint a picture of the town, understand the context. Start getting an idea of what really happened.
What have I got? I’ve got the names of the killer’s lawyers from the news reports: Chokwe Lumumba and Precious Martin. And what names they are. I don’t even know whether Precious is a man or a woman. And Chokwe? I’ve also got the number of a black journalist, Earnest McBride. And there’s this white separatist podcaster, Jim Giles.
Out of the shower, I pace, one towel as a kilt, one towel as a cape. I wiggle my toes. The carpet feels like mini golf Astroturf. Everything here, from the bed headboard to the venetian blinds, is both brand-spanking-new and about to fall apart, like counterfeit Nikes at the market. You know, I saw on an Internet message board that John Berendt fudged the start of
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
.
John Berendt barely knew the killer Jim Williams; he had never met him at the time of the murder, and the entire first chapter of the book in which Williams’s violent lover comes in and throws a fit is made up (or at least is told in first person with Berendt as the observer when in fact he wasn’t there).
The pedants are even after Truman Capote.
Truman said he went to the house on Tuesday! It was Wednesday!
And all those true crime books were written before the Internet. These days, you can’t get away with anything. Everyone has a Twitter account. Just hours after I was crucified (literally, by the way) in a tiny village in the Philippines for
Race Relations
, an Australian journalist had tracked down a local online to see if my version of events matched what he saw. I unpack my Flip video camera and my Zoom Dictaphone. I’ll get everything on tape, so none of my frenemies can trip me up later.
My eyes fall on the bedside table, as yet untouched by a guest’s hands.
My God! I skip over and creak open the drawer. Can it be true? Will I be the first to open a brand-new Gideon Bible?
The spine indeed squeaks a most pleasing never-been-opened squeak. I flick the pristine white pages to John 8:44.
You belong to your father, the devil.
Ever since the Grand Dragon quoted that to me, it’s been my fave! Because
You
is the Jews and John is my name.
My neck already aches, and I’ve only been lying here two minutes. My lungs clench up. I huff and huff. A green leech crawls from my mouth into my Delta Air Lines serviette.
I puff my Ventolin puffer five times, rub my neck, and fall asleep.
The White Supreme
The sharp winter sun rises. Outside my window, down the road, four black convicts plod and mope. I know they are convicts because CONVICT is printed on the back of their green-and-white-striped shirts.They’re stroking a fresh coat of white paint on a fire hydrant. A black bus with tinted windows, marked SHERIFF , trails the men by a hundred meters or so.
I flick on the coffee machine in the kitchenette.
“If it pleases the court, this is Jim Giles, and you’re listening to
Radio Free Mississippi
,” says my laptop on the kitchenette bench. Jim pulls up his theme song, “Amerika” by Rammstein.
Jim Giles is a white separatist who lives in Pearl, in Rankin County. More specifically, he lives in a trailer on his mother’s farm. Each weekday morning he hunches over a microphone in that trailer and broadcasts
Radio Free Mississippi
live over the Internet. This one isn’t live, though. I’m working my way through his old podcasts, from the weeks after Richard’s death.
“I had a Rankin County deputy sheriff call me from a crime scene,” Jim says, “Richard Barrett’s crime scene where he had been killed, and he was trying to figure out did I do it! He actually lived fairly close to me, Barrett did, I still don’t know