God’ll Cut You Down: The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, a Murder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi by John Safran
My rating: 4/5 cats
i don’t really read a lot of nonfiction, so when i do, it needs to be either about a subject matter i have a deep personal interest in: food, sharks, byron, books/linguistics, etc, or it needs to be really fun.
and i thought this one was really fun.
it’s also deeply sad, but safran doesn’t really give you much of a chance to absorb the sad parts, because this book is kinda like this guy:
and it’s all flash and flutter before he is off onto another tangent of the story, another anecdote, another brief observation.
this is a super-voicey piece of narrative nonfiction with a trajectory that reads like a (fragmented) novel and a story that comes alive on the page with all wild immediacy.
i’d never heard of this guy before, although he’s huge in his native australia, but i’m not usually a fan of this kind of schtick. with the exception of louis theroux, i don’t usually have the patience for prank journalism – i generally find it annoying and too easy. it’s all just exposé-snark, where some fringe culture is infiltrated, allowed the damning freedom to express its beliefs to some wide-eyed and seemingly hapless interviewer to the point where they ultimately make a laughingstock of themselves and their beliefs to an audience who feels superior, and everyone has a laugh and goes home feeling better about themselves for not being in a cult/a juggalo/a snake-handler or in this case, a white supremacist. i’m already aware that i have little in common with white supremacists, that we have different values, and i find their belief system misguided, dangerous, and appalling, i don’t need a book to tell me that. and it seems kind of easy to mock these people, like laughing at a baby who has pooped itself. if you’re measuring your own worth by being better than someone who poops themselves, it’s really a hollow victory, isn’t it? and yet for all my initial resistance, i discovered that the man writes a well paced story, and his chapter names are intriguing, like:
the murble
the black man who cried
a fifteen-second memory
the clobbering sun
what did Kant say?
the whole book is made up of these short, choppy, almost disjointed sections, which backtrack, sidestep, overreach, and occasionally repeat themselves. but that’s what gives it its propulsive pacing, and although he is not addressing pacing here, per se, i think this quote contributes to his decision to write his story in this way:
There’s a New York professor called Harold Schechter who writes about true crime books. I’ve been reading him to figure out what I’m meant to be doing.
True crime stories are morality tales that explain how the world works, he says. That’s why people read them. They always reflect the time in which they were written.
True crime stories from Puritan days say the killer fell victim to the devil. That’s how their world worked.
Then Freud came along. Suddenly every killer was playing out a fantasy to kill his mother or father. That’s how their world worked.
The new trend – reflecting our progressive times – blames the killing on “the system.” The killer was a victim of racism or poverty or social isolation by capitalism.
and that’s all probably true, but i think this quote also speaks to pacing – the modern reader is one conditioned to headlines, snippets, online reading of brief fragments and this book is a rollicking, snippety read catering to the short attention-spanned.
basically, the book is about john safran, a journalist/documentarian/prankster, who had traveled to mississippi to interview a white supremacist named richard barrett, which was to conclude with piece of DNA “gotcha!” tomfoolery. safran never ended up using the piece, but he came away with a lot of bizarre soundbites like this:
“Okay, so I understand nationalism,” I say. “So, it’s not racism?”
Richard looks offended by the vulgar term.
“Well, it’s not so much a matter of what it’s not. Let’s talk about what it is. Nationalism is blood-based. Where you have a feeling for your own self, your own people, your own children, your own family, your own countrymen. It’s really what makes the world tick.”
“But so many young people today are a mixture of things,” I say. “Like they’ll have one Lebanese grandparent. So if you’re an American with one Lebanese grandparent…”
“You don’t have that,” Richard interrupts.
“Yes, you do.”
“Not really.”
I find it odd that I have to argue the point that mixed-race people exist.
the following year, richard barrett was murdered by a black man named vincent mcgee, in a case that seemed to have a lot of unanswered questions, including a possible sexual motivation for the murder, renewing safran’s interest in barrett. although he had never written a true crime book, he went back to mississippi for the trial, and to interview those connected to the case, and found himself with even more questions than those he had arrived with, in an unfamiliar landscape where racism was a deeply rooted code of behavior and tradition, and there were many things not so much talked about in polite society as simply understood.
barrett was a strange and inconsistent man, and some of the conversations he and safran had are bewildering, and keep you reading to see what else he’s gonna come out with. in fact, most of the people safran encounters in this book are curiosities in one way or another, and as the various aspects of the case get more and more tangled, nothing seems to add up, and safran is stymied. the book is as much about the case itself as it is about safran trying to find and write the story, in the tradition of In Cold Blood, but way more jaggedy. although it is not written in the same style, i think fans of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil will enjoy this, just in terms of its southern gothic tone, its mystery and its colorful “characters.”
i particularly liked this passage:
Everyone’s pretty joyless considering it’s a parade. No winks and secret smiles. Few seem to be into it on its intended level, and Mississippi doesn’t do meta, so no one’s enjoying it because it’s kooky.
safran himself is disconcerted by the messiness of the case; the inconsistencies in testimony, the unexpected obstacles he faces in trying to understand what actually happened, and the difficulties of constructing a cohesive narrative in the conflicting reports. he knew the story he wanted to tell, but the more he learned, the less he really understood.
If Vincent killed a white supremacist, fighting racism, he can be the hero in that story. If Vincent killed a gay man for hitting on him, that doesn’t work anymore. I wanted the narrative to be me and the brave McGee family against “the system.” I wanted to be hanging with the black activist lawyers, but they’ve cut me off. Worse, I got on smashingly with Jim, the white supremacist.
This story isn’t working out like it should.
even the racial beliefs of the white supremacists are illogical, it’s not (forgive me) black and white:
“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?
so he wanders and he flounders and he is frustrated by his inability to get to the bottom of the case and wonders how true crime books are ever written, when there is always so much unknown.
There’s this true crime book abut an Aboriginal death in custody. The author paints precisely what happens the morning of the man’s arrest. He was wandering down the street like so. A woman was lounging over by that house. He was whistling this specific tune. The sun shone like this. The police van pulled over like that.
It bugged me, the precision with which the author knew about the morning, while i was still floundering over whether Richard pulled up outside the McGees’ in a black SUV (like Vallena told me) or a bicycle (like Tina said). I spoke to the author, and as it happens, she didn’t really know any more than me. She just committed herself to a fair-enough version of events. None of the true crime writers know any more than me, they just commit. They just pull the trigger. Safran, pull the trigger.
and he does. or tries to. and although it never ends up being a tidy account of what actually happened, i think the process is fascinating, and i really responded to its conversational tone. the book is more than just a chronicle of a crime; it’s memoir, travelogue, a book about writing and race and history and community and sexuality and the impossibility of ever getting any kind of clarity in these kinds of horribly compelling cases.
a mess of a book, yeah, but an engrossing mess.
