5
When I was younger I could remember anything,
whether it happened or not, but I am getting old,
and soon I shall remember only the latter.
—MARK TWAIN
The cinder-block building by the Tennessee line looked more like a bunker than a bar. Wire mesh concealed windows the size of medieval arrow slits. Man-high razor wire ringed an adjoining yard. A military jeep painted in desert camouflage sat parked out front, beside pickup trucks and Harley choppers. Scarlet letters splashed across the building’s facade: REDBONE’S SALOON.
Inside, “Confederate Railroad” wailed on the jukebox. Behind the bar stood a man in a polka-dot cap and a T-shirt adorned with a swastika. This was the proprietor, Redbone. He served me a beer and huddled with a man whose shirtfront proclaimed: I’ve Got a Nigger in My Family Tree. The back of the shirt showed a lynching—a cartoonish black man, dangling from a branch.
A week earlier, Redbone’s Saloon had celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday with a “Thank God for James Earl Ray Party.” Flyers posted in the nearby town of Guthrie, Kentucky, proclaimed “Fuck Martin Luther King’s B.Day” and invited folks to play pool and eat “Chicken-Ribs-Fixins” for three bucks a plate.
That same weekend, a nineteen-year-old named Michael Westerman drove through Guthrie with a rebel flag flying from his pickup. Several carloads of black teenagers gave chase; one of the youths shot Michael Westerman dead. Then crosses started burning in Guthrie. The FBI, the KKK, the NAACP, and reporters from Kentucky and Tennessee all hustled to the Stateline town. So did I, startled by a newspaper squib—“Rebel Flag Is Catalyst to Killing”—that appeared in Carolina newspapers. Until then, I hadn’t realized the nineteenth-century conflict I’d set out to explore was still a shooting war.
But arriving late on a Saturday night, I knew little about the place, except what a gas-station attendant told me. The Kentucky side of Guthrie was dry, she said. If I wanted a beer, there were two bars in Tennessee, just across the state line at the southern edge of town. “There’s Billy’s, which is kinda country-and-western,” she said, “and Redbone’s. That’s a biker bar. Real bad news.”
The music at Redbone’s blared too loudly for conversation. So I sipped my Budweiser and studied the walls. Amidst the usual biker-bar decor—pictures of half-naked women splayed across motorcycles, a pistol mounted beside the words “We Don’t Bother Calling 911”—I noticed a curious anthology of hand-scrawled verse. The poems mingled biker and Confederate themes, evoking nihilistic scenes of the ruined South as viewed from the back of a Harley.
It was 1865, homes burnt to the ground,
Everything lost, I took my stand.
Riding through the fog,
Rebel flag in hand,
Fighting for my freedom,
Fighting for my land.
Beneath the poetry appeared a cryptic insignia: “F.T.W” Between songs on the jukebox, I turned to a man on the next stool and asked what F.T.W stood for.
“Who’s asking?” he replied. “F-B-I?”
This provoked howls from the bar. “I’m a writer, not a cop,” I said, inanely flashing a spiral pad with “Reporter’s Notebook” stenciled on the cover.
The man looked at me dubiously, but muttered, “F.T.W Fuck the World.”
Another man, bulging from a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt, lurched over and bellowed, “Write this in your damned notebook. We got a few people standing up for white rights. The rest are pussies who let niggers trample all over them. Like those boys who shot Westerman did t’other day.” He reeled for a moment. “You’ve got your KKK and your BBB—that’s Badass Black Brothers. Two sides of the same coin. If they want war, come on. Let’s get it on.”
He sat down with a thud and gazed blankly at a TV behind the bar. Male ice skaters in tights glided across the screen. As I scribbled down his words, I sensed someone looming behind me. Then a hot, beery breath whispered in my ear: “That shorthand or chicken scratches?”
I looked up to face a leather-clad giant with bloodshot eyes and long, straggly hair. “Shorthand,” I lied, hoping he couldn’t decipher my notes about swastikas and lynchings. He bent down, tore a few pages from my notebook, and stuck the wadded paper in his mouth. “You know,” he said, chewing loudly, “I shit out a turd this morning that was bigger than you.”
Unsure as to the appropriate response, I glanced around the bar for support. The other drinkers had vanished into a cloud of cigarette smoke by the pool table. Only Redbone remained, eyeing us warily from behind the bar. “The question is,” my inquisitor resumed, “should I beat the shit out of you right here and now, or let it slide this time?”
The veins in his neck began throbbing. One of his hands curled into a fist. I weighed whether to take off my glasses, so shards wouldn’t lodge in the back of my head, or keep them on in the faint hope that spectacles might cause the giant to let it slide this time. A snatch of poetry swam on the wall behind his head.
Like the Rebels of Old,
Still Bursting With Pride,
Don’t Take no Shit,
On Harleys We Ride.
I eased slowly off my stool, nodded toward the door and said, “Maybe I should just—”
The man grabbed my coat and ripped it cleanly from armpit to wrist. Redbone lunged across the bar and seized the man’s arm, shouting “Cool it!” I ducked under the giant and dove through the door, sprawling on the gravel outside. Then I sprinted toward the lights of town. Slowing to a jog, I reached the Kentucky line and a sign that read:
WELCOME TO GUTHRIE
BIRTHPLACE OF ROBERT PENN WARREN
FIRST POET LAUREATE OF THE UNITED STATES.
DURING ROBERT PENN WARREN’S childhood at the start of the century, Guthrie was a raw railroad town ringed by fields of dark-leaf tobacco known as “the Black Patch.” Warren, who lived in Guthrie until he was fifteen, later described his hometown as “very un-Southern,” a new community that lacked “a sense of belonging in any particular place or having any particular history.” Eighty years later, Guthrie exhaled the depleted air of a thousand other towns across the back-country South, bypassed by the interstate and drained of vitality by decades of migration to the city. Guthrie’s main street wound past a Piggly Wiggly, a pool hall, The American Cafe (“country cookin’ makes you good lookin’”), a hog-feed elevator, a garment factory, and convenience stores crowded with people scratching lottery tickets (locals drank on the Tennessee side of town but could gamble only in Kentucky).
At the end of the strip, next to the Tinytown Baptist Church, I found a rundown place called the Holiday Motel. The motel’s neon sign flickered WE ARE REASONABLE, which sounded comforting after the conversation I’d just had at Redbone’s Saloon. A large woman in a baggy housedress sat smoking behind the reception desk.
“I’d like a single room for the night,” I said.
“Why is that?” She had a German accent and stroked a schnauzer in her lap. A German flag and pictures of the Bavarian Alps adorned the wall behind her.
“Why do you ask?”
She shrugged. “Your car plates are out of state. Your coat is torn. You look pale. There is a Holiday Inn over in Clarksville, much nicer than this.”
I told her I wanted to stay in Guthrie to learn about Michael Westerman’s shooting. Then I mentioned my visit to Redbone’s.
“You crazy?” she exclaimed. “When that bar closes, that’s when I turn on my No Vacancy sign. They stupid to begin with, but once they start drinking and doing drugs, they have no brains left.”
As I filled out a registration form, a police scanner crackled behind the desk. “I’m nosey,” the woman said, twiddling the dial and looking through the motel’s picture window. “Not much ever happens here, until they shoot that Westerman boy.” She chuckled. “You know, I think there’s some pride. Guthrie had its first drive-by.”
I sat up most of the night with Maria Eskridge, sipping peppermint schnapps and sifting the trove of newspaper articles and gossip she’d collected on the Westerman killing—and on everything else in Guthrie. The daughter of a Munich brewmaster, Eskridge had married an American soldier and moved to his native Kentucky. While he worked a small farm, she ran the motel, which she freely conceded was a fleapit. “Holiday Motel—it is a sort of joke,” she said. “Who takes a holiday in Guthrie?” But she loved to gossip, and the motel gave her ample chance for that. She herself had become part of local lore, a strange blend of Bavaria and Kentucky who spouted things like “kiss my grits” with a guttural accent. “People here call me the crazy Kraut of Tinytown,” she said.
But after thirty years in Guthrie, Eskridge still felt like a stranger, never more so than in the days since Michael Westerman’s death. She told me about the crude, scrap-lumber crosses that burned in the night, and about Michael Westerman’s funeral procession; rebel flags flapped from the 120-car caravan trailing the hearse to Guthrie’s all-white graveyard. Now, well-dressed strangers had begun appearing in town, distributing literature that proclaimed Michael Westerman a Confederate martyr, the first man to die for the rebel flag in 130 years.
Aryan Nation and other white supremacist groups had also turned up in Guthrie. “I know from Aryans,” Eskridge said, fingering one of the groups flyers. She reached inside her desk and pulled out a German newspaper clip from the 1950s. It showed a shirtless man with a shaved head, harnessed to a road grader. Eskridge translated the headline: “The Galley Slaves of Our Times.” The man in the picture was her father, imprisoned at Dachau during World War II for speaking against the Nazis. “That’s what an Aryan nation looks like,” she said, studying the photograph.
Eskridge had one other thing to show me. She led me across the motel’s forecourt to a fence enclosing picnic tables, beach umbrellas and a rectangle of patchy grass. “That used to be our swimming pool,” she said. Guthrie had no public parks or pools, so locals paid two dollars to swim at the motel. Then, two summers ago, several black kids paid their money and jumped in. “It was like we sent an electrical charge through the water,” she said. “As soon as the blacks got in, all the whites got out.” Whites demanded that Eskridge tell the blacks to leave. Her response: kiss my grits.
When whites kept complaining, Eskridge and her husband filled the pool with pond dirt rather than let it become the scene of racial strife. A dogwood and weeping willow now sprouted in the deep end.
“Enjoy your stay in Guthrie,” she said, handing me a room key and retreating inside with her schnauzer.
I STAYED TWO WEEKS at the Holiday Motel, enduring its lumpy beds and stained carpet and threadbare covers, which forced me to deploy my ripped jacket as an extra blanket. Each morning, I breakfasted on a Styrofoam cup of watery coffee and a scratch-off lotto ticket from the convenience store across the road. I visited Robert Penn Warren’s childhood home, a Victorian bungalow at the corner of Third and Cherry, now a well-kept but forgotten shrine open only a few hours each week. I went to church on Wednesday night and heard a two-hour sermon titled: “If you were arrested and charged with being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” Most other nights, I drank at Billy’s, where the same two songs—“If Hell Had a Jukebox” and “I Like My Women a Little on the Trashy Side”—played over and over again as the barmaid wailed along. I decided that if hell had a backwater, it would look a little like Guthrie, Kentucky.
But what Guthrie lacked in atmosphere it made up for in intrigue. The mystery began with the circumstances surrounding Michael Westerman’s death. Westerman and his wife, Hannah, had been high school sweethearts, about to enjoy their first night out since the birth of their twins five weeks before. They planned to buy Hannah a denim dress before going to dinner in Nashville, an hour south of Guthrie. En route, at about four o’clock, Michael stopped for gas at a convenience store called Janie’s Market, on Guthrie’s main street.
Westerman’s truck caught the eye of four black teenagers who were parked in a car nearby. The pickup was hard to miss: a big red Chevy 4×4 with a jacked-up chassis, a rebel-flag license plate, and a large rebel flag flapping from a pole in the truck’s bed. The car’s driver, Damien Darden, thought he’d seen the flag-waving truck before, cruising through Guthrie’s black neighborhood.
“Let’s go whip that dude,” he told his friends, speeding off to recruit others for the brawl. Because the Westermans’ truck had dark tinted windows, Darden and his friends couldn’t see that the pair inside were former neighbors and classmates.
Michael Westerman pumped gas and bought watermelon bubble gum, then sat chatting in the cab with Hannah. The two weren’t in any hurry. They’d left the twins with Michael’s parents and had the whole evening to themselves. Hannah told police that Michael had teased her and joked about “getting some” later that night.
Damien Darden returned to Janie’s Market trailed by two other cars, and pulled alongside the pickup. Several of the black teenagers later testified that a white hand reached out the truck’s sliding back window and shook the rebel flag. One of them said he heard someone in the truck shout “Niggers!” Hannah denied that she or Michael had said or done anything.
Michael pulled out of Janie’s and drove south into Tennessee. Hannah glanced back and saw the three cars from Janie’s trailing behind. “Kick it!” she said, and Michael floored the accelerator, hurtling down the two-lane highway.
At about the same moment, in the backseat of Darden’s car, a seventeen-year-old named Freddie Morrow told his friends he had a gun. “No you don’t,” the others taunted. Freddie reached inside his belt and brandished a cheap .32 pistol. Damien Darden sped up, gaining ground on the flag-bearing truck.
A few miles south of Guthrie, near a forlorn railroad siding, Freddie fired wildly out the window. Then the gun jammed. Damien accelerated and pulled into the oncoming lane. He and Michael now raced side by side, going eighty-five. Michael shoved Hannah to the floor. Freddie unjammed his gun, stuck his hand out the window and fired again.
Hannah didn’t hear the blast but she saw her husband clutch his side and moan, “Oh my God, they shot me.” As the truck slowed, she somehow scrambled over Michael into the driver’s seat. Damien’s car had stopped in the road just ahead; another car from Janie’s pulled up behind the pickup. Hannah thought the cars were trying to box her in. So she swerved off the road, did a U-turn, and sped back toward Kentucky as Freddie fired again.
By the time Hannah reached a hospital emergency room, Michael was in shock. A bullet had passed through his heart. Surgeons closed the wound and rushed him by ambulance to Nashville, where he died the next day. When police searched the Westermans’ truck, they found a single bullet hole in the door, Michael’s loaded .380 automatic on the floor, and his black cowboy hat with a big wad of watermelon bubble gum stuck to the brim.
The episode bristled with question marks. Who was Michael Westerman and what did he mean by flying the flag in a largely black town on Martin Luther King’s birthday weekend? Why had this so provoked Damien and his friends that they chased down and killed a white man in broad daylight? And why had violent rage over the rebel flag erupted here of all places, in Warren’s “un-Southern” hometown, in a state that never joined the Confederacy?
On a Sunday morning, I went looking for clues in the Todd County seat of Elkton. Located at the county’s main crossroads, ten minutes north of Guthrie, Elkton was home to the high school that both the Westermans and their assailants attended. It was also here that Michael had sometimes cruised with his rebel flag, circling the courthouse square and crawling past an adjoining stretch of fast-food joints. In a dry county with no mall or movie theater (or even a stoplight), looping between the Dairy Mart and the Dairy Queen provided what little action was available. Teenagers called this 1950s-style ritual “flipping the dip.”
When I arrived, the dip was flipping with rebel-flag-toting trucks. There were also two cars with holes crudely drilled in their rooftops and flagpoles poking out, like mutant hair follicles. One member of this ersatz color guard wore a rebel kepi and carried a loaded .22 pistol in his lap. He told me he’d only begun flying the flag since Michael’s death. “One goes down, two fill his space,” he said. Then, flag hoisted high, he shouted “These colors don’t run!” and sped off toward the Dairy Queen.
Nearby, a dozen people in jungle fatigues and combat boots stood at strategic points around the square, handing out flyers to the after-church traffic. I approached the troop’s leader, a bearded man with a walkie-talkie, and asked what was up. “Literature roadblock,” he said, handing me several flyers. The first was headlined: “The only Reason You are White! Today is Because Your Ancestors Practiced & Believed in Segregation YESTERDAY!” The second commanded: “I WANT YOU FOR THE ALMIGHTY KU KLUX KLAN!”
The literature was signed “Yours for White Victory, Ron Edwards, Grand Dragon for Christ, Race & Nation.” This was the same bearded man who stood before me, barking un-dragonlike orders into his walkie-talkie. “Cross the street only on the crosswalks, and stay on the goddam sidewalks!” he commanded his underlings. Then to me: “I don’t want us breaking any laws.”
Ron Edwards was a water-blaster by trade and ruler over “the Realm of Kentucky.” Two subalterns shared the corner with him: an Exalted Cyclops named Jim, and a Klaliff named Velma. Velma wore furry earmuffs, snug booties and green mittens with her military fatigues. “Jelly doughnut?” she asked, proffering a cardboard box.
Passing cars honked and gave the thumbs up. Several motorists swapped church pamphlets—“What Must I Do To Be Saved?”—for the Klan’s exclamatory literature: “Justice For Our People NOW!” Then a burly pedestrian in a farm cap stopped to grouse, “I’ve had enough of niggers telling us what to do.”
Jim and Velma quickly escorted the man to a rusted Buick, which served as the Klan’s recruiting office. I tagged along and climbed into the backseat with Velma while Jim sat up front, delivering the Klan’s sales pitch. “You move up quickly,” Jim said. “Any day now I’m going to be promoted to Great Giant.”
“My son just joined,” Velma added, “and he’s a Grand Titan already!”
The burly man seemed impressed. Jim went on: “You can get started today for just twenty-five dollars and two photos, and if your wife wants to join, too, the price is the same.” He paused. “That’s sort of a special we’ve got going this month.”
While Jim kept pitching God, Race and Nation, Velma showed me snapshots of her grandchildren. She talked about her crafts shop, the macramé she’d made for Christmas, and an upcoming cross-burning she hoped to attend. Before going, Velma had to pass an exam that would qualify her for full citizenship in the Realm. “It’s like a driver’s test where they try and foul you up,” she said. “I need to know the whole book of knowledge. Like if someone asks, ‘Why do we hate Jews?’ I didn’t know before, but I found out. It was Jews that put Christ on the cross.”
If she passed the exam—and avoided Klan infractions, such as committing a felony or sleeping with a black man—Velma would don a satin hood and robe for the cross-burning, which marked her full “naturalization” into the Klan. I asked why she and the others weren’t wearing their hoods and robes today.
“It’s a good look,” she said. “But we’ve had a lot of events lately. The cleaning bills will kill you.”
THE KLAN HANDED OUT 750 flyers and signed up ten new acolytes before melting back into the Kentucky hills, leaving Elkton Sunday-quiet. The only place open on the square was a luncheonette called the Town Grill. A petition lay on the counter: “We the undersigned believe the rebel mascot should stay at Todd County schools. We are the South, let us wave our pride.” The waitress explained that Todd County Central High School called its sports teams “the Rebels” and took as its logo two flag-waving Confederates. But just before Michael Westerman’s shooting, a committee of prominent citizens had quietly recommended that the school drop the rebel motif to ease racial tension.
To the waitress and many other whites, this assault on the rebel mascot by local elites, meeting behind closed doors, mirrored the assault on Westerman and his flag by angry young blacks. “They’re fixin’ to strip white people—whites that ain’t rich—of what little they got,” the waitress said.
The petition drive was led by a retired nurse named Frances Chapman. I called her from the grill to ask to come chat. En route, I stopped at Todd Central, a low-slung brick school with bright hallways and new computer labs. It looked like any other public high school, except for a vast mural in the foyer of the notorious mascot: two cartoonish Confederates clutching battle flags and blowing bugles emitting the words “Go, Rebels, Go.”
I was surprised that these flabby caricatures had provoked such a storm. They seemed to mock rather than exalt the Confederacy. But Frances Chapman didn’t see it that way. “The fat men, oooh, I think they’re wonderful!” she exclaimed. “They make me feel so proud.”
Chapman was a tiny woman with oversized glasses and an electric-green pants suit. Her words were equally arresting. As soon as I sat down, she showed me a newspaper story quoting her recent comments on a local radio show. “Slavery was not all that bad,” she’d declared. “A lot of people were quite happy to be living on large plantations.”
Chapman smiled sweetly. “Blacks just need to get over slavery,” she said, as though talking of the flu. “You can’t live in the past.”
I gently observed that she herself might be accused of living in the past by defending the rebel flag. “Oh no, that’s about now,” she said. “Blacks don’t really have anything against the flag. They just don’t want us to have it. They want the best jobs, the biggest money. Now they want this. If we lose the mascot, it’ll just be a matter of time before we lose everything.” Her voice quivered with rage. “Don’t put us where they used to be.”
It was the same bitterness I’d heard from Bud Sharpe, the pro-flag demonstrator in Columbia. For both Sharpe and Chapman, the rebel banner represented a finger in the dike, the last brake against a noisome tide of minority rights that was fast eroding the status of whites. “The pity of it is,” Chapman went on, “blacks have a great legacy. They had Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, George Washington Carver. They first learned dancing and singing—we learned that from them.”
Chapman had learned something else from blacks: the idiom and tactics of civil rights. She and her supporters had launched a school boycott, with scores of white families pulling their kids out of Todd Central and threatening to withhold county taxes unless the rebel mascot was retained. They also planned a sit-in at the next school board meeting. Chapman had printed a special T-shirt for the protest, adorned with the Confederate flag and the words: SHOW RESPECT—You’re in Rebel Country.
Seeing me to the door, Chapman raised her small fist above her head. “We shall overcome,” she said.
THE NEXT DAY at Elkton’s library, I learned a strange thing. Todd County wasn’t rebel country, at least not historically. According to the volumes of local history I perused, most Todd Countians supported the Union in the Civil War. Like much of the upper South, the county split along geographic lines. Whites from the county’s fertile plantations bordering Tennessee tended to side with the South. But the more numerous yeoman farmers in Todd County’s hilly north (where slaves were few) supported the Union. Kentucky also stayed in the Union, though the first Confederate Congress optimistically allotted a star for Kentucky on the Confederacy’s flag in hopes the state might secede.
Despite this history, almost all whites I spoke to echoed Frances Chapman, proclaiming their county rebel territory and believing it had always been so. As proof, they pointed to a 351-foot concrete spike soaring at the county’s western edge. The obelisk marked the birthsite of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who was born there in 1808 (only a hundred miles and eight months apart from his future antagonist, Abraham Lincoln).
The obelisk was identical in shape to the Washington Monument and two-thirds as tall. Rebel veterans, who first planned the memorial in the early 1900s, believed the father of the Confederacy deserved a memorial almost as lofty as the one honoring the father of the nation. But the shaft’s Ozymandian dimensions belied the slightness of Todd County’s claims on Jeff Davis. At the time of his birth, Todd County didn’t yet exist (it was carved out of neighboring Christian County a decade later). Nor could anyone say for certain whether the Davis’s log homestead had stood on the Todd side of today’s county line. Also, Davis’s parents were peripatetic folk; they moved to Louisiana when “little Jeff” was two. It seemed doubtful the Confederate leader had any memories of his old Kentucky home.
No matter. Each year on Davis’s birthday, Todd Countians crowded around the spike for a bizarre rite: the crowning of a local teenager as “Miss Confederacy.” Contestants were judged on their poise, hair, hooped skirt, and answers to questions such as, “What will you do while holding the title to promote and defend Southern heritage?” At the end of the pageant, a young man in Confederate uniform escorted the tiara-clad winner down the monument steps as a local band played “Dixie.”
Robert Penn Warren, who watched the monument’s construction as a child, later recalled the bemusement he felt as this “immobile thrust of concrete” soared above his native soil. Remembrance of the Confederacy, he wrote, “had never been of burning importance in Guthrie, where to a certain number of contemporary citizens the Civil War seemed to have been fought for the right to lynch without legal interference.”
But in the intervening decades, something curious had happened, an act of what psychologists today might term “recovered memory.” Locals had reclaimed a past of their own creation, in which Todd County was staunch rebel territory, a pastoral land of Southern belles and brave Confederates. “History, like nature, knows no jumps,” Robert Penn Warren once wrote. “Except the jump backward.”
AS FRANCES CHAPMAN had promised, hundreds of people packed the bleachers of a middle-school gym for the next meeting of the Todd County school board. Some wore kepis and rebel-flag bandannas, others the “SHOW RESPECT—You’re in Rebel Country” T-shirts Chapman had printed for the meeting.
A few black families sat by the exit, as did all four members of the Sheriff’s Department. The school board perched around a table on the gym floor, awkwardly conducting routine business. Finally, as the crowd grew restive, a board member set up a microphone and invited the public to comment.
The first to speak was a military widow. “My husband was a Yankee and I converted him to a rebel and I’m damn proud of it!” she shouted. “I will not compromise my values and equal rights to satisfy a minority. God bless America, God bless our rebel flag!” She threw open her cardigan to reveal the “SHOW RESPECT” T-shirt she wore underneath. The crowd behind her roared.
Next, a lean, bleached-blonde woman strode to the microphone and jabbed her finger at the school board. “Listen to us—we put you there!” Flushed with rage, she said her son at Todd Central was forced to take off a rebel-flag T-shirt the week after Westerman’s murder. Metal detectors had also been installed at the school to prevent further violence.
“They even took away my boy’s pepper spray!” someone shouted from the bleachers.
“Sure ain’t right!” the woman at the microphone yelled.
The crowd began stamping its feet and chanting, “Discrimination! Discrimination!” As the woman returned to her seat, she pumped her fists in the air like a prizefighter leaving the ring.
The meeting went on like this for two hours. As the twentieth or so woman spat venom at the school board, it struck me that recent media attention lavished on “angry white males” neglected the considerable depths of female rage on display here, and everywhere else I’d been in Todd County. Nor did their wrath have much to do with the rebel flag’s historic symbolism. The banner seemed instead to have floated free from its moorings in time and place and become a generalized “Fuck You,” a middle finger raised with ulceric fury in the face of blacks, school officials, authority in general—anyone or anything that could shoulder some blame for these women’s difficult lives. Tonight, at least, these trailer-bound, factory-trapped women could vent their rage and affirm the race consciousness that blacks had exhibited for decades, even flashing their “RESPECT” shirts with Aretha-like pride.
Frances Chapman claimed the last word. Waving her petition, which now bore 3,000 names, a quarter of the county’s population, she shouted, “Don’t ever count us out!” Then she and the other whites stormed from the gym and into the flurrying snow. They lingered outside, waving flags and shouting, as though vaguely dissatisfied. Neither the school board nor the few blacks at the meeting had responded.
Inside the gym, a half-dozen black women stood waiting for the parking lot to clear. “I work in Todd County,” one woman said softly. “I pay my taxes and my children go to school, too. I feel like, why shouldn’t we have a say about the school mascot? Kids are killing kids over this. Don’t you think it’s time we at least start talking about it?”
I asked why she hadn’t made this sensible comment during the meeting. She looked at me as though I was crazy. “Who’s listening?” she asked.
Another woman had the blank, haunted look of a shell-shocked soldier. Before Michael Westerman’s death, she said, white rancor toward blacks was contained. “We were living with it. I felt like they respected us.” But now she wondered if she’d been fooling herself her whole life. “That flag opens up a racial door we’ve been keeping closed for so many years. It’s a way of saying what white people have kept bottled up.”
She paused as the sound of chanting—“equal rights for whites!”—drifted through the open gym door. The woman shook her head. “They’ve gone loco on us,” she said.
IN THE WEEK FOLLOWING the school meeting, I made the rounds of local officials, ministers and long-time residents, searching for clues about what was happening to Todd County. From both blacks and whites came the same, bewildered refrain. Though Jim Crow hadn’t been as rigid in Kentucky as it was farther South, the past three decades had witnessed extraordinary change. Blacks and whites mingled freely at schools, workplaces, restaurants and other public places. Yet for reasons no one fully understood, this intimacy had spawned a subterranean rage, which had boiled over with the shooting of Michael Westerman and the tumult following his death.
“We’re a little ol’ Southern Mayberry,” Guthrie’s mayor told me. “Or I thought we were.” A portly man of thirty-six, he’d campaigned for mayor of the town of 1,600 with the slogan “I’m a good guy and will work hard for you.” I found him fastidiously sweeping Guthrie’s diminutive town hall. “When I was a boy, no one cared about that flag,” he went on. “Heck, I never even thought of myself as Southern. But today there’s this intolerance, white and black. People feel they have to wave their beliefs in each other’s faces.”
A few blocks away, a middle-aged black storekeeper echoed the mayor’s words. “Kids today, they’re weaker and wiser,” she said, sifting turnip greens and smoking Kools. “A lot of things we didn’t pay attention to, they do. If we were called nigger, we shook it off. Just went about our business. Not now. It’s strange, my kids have white friends, which I never did. But they got white enemies, too.”
Michael Westerman’s brief life seemed to typify this paradox. He grew up on the same street of modest brick ranch homes as two of the black youths who would later be charged with his murder. They went to the same schools and shot hoops in the Westermans’ driveway. Michael’s father, a tenant farmer, served on the volunteer fire department with relatives of the black teenagers. Michael’s mother ran a sewing machine at Guthrie Garment, a plant whose workforce was evenly divided between black and white. At Todd Central, interracial dating had become common. A few months before Michael’s death, a black student was voted Homecoming Queen over several white competitors.
But amid this apparent racial amity, a low-grade guerrilla war brewed between some blacks and whites. Earlier generations of blacks in Todd County had quietly endured exaltation of Jeff Davis, the rebel flag, and the defunct nation for which it stood. Black athletes at Todd Central dribbled basketballs across a gym floor painted with the school’s rebel mascot; they wore class rings decorated with rebel emblems; they bought the “Rebel” yearbook, which for many years included a photo of two students annually anointed “The General and His Southern Lady” and pictured in hoop skirt and Confederate uniform.
“Back then, parents told you to sit your butt down, work hard and keep your mouth shut around white people,” said Kim Gardner, a Todd Central student in the late 1970s. I was visiting Gardner at her trailer outside Elkton. Her daughter Shanekia, a junior at Todd Central, sat beside her mother in tight jeans and Timberland boots, beneath a poster of Malcolm X. As I spoke with Kim, Shanekia shook her head. “We aren’t going to just take it like our parents did,” she said. “I keep telling Momma times has changed.”
Times had changed across the South, and in some ways Todd County was just catching up. Though black hostility to Confederate totems lay relatively dormant for two decades after the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s, it resurfaced in the mid-1980s and had escalated ever since. In 1987, the NAACP launched a campaign to lower Confederate flags from Southern capitols and eventually helped bring Alabama’s down. Black cheerleaders refused to carry the rebel flag at college ball games. Schools started banning “Old South” weekends and the playing of “Dixie.” In some cities, blacks called for the removal of Confederate monuments and rebel street names. And in 1993, black senator Carol Moseley-Braun successfully challenged renewal of the patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy insignia, which incorporated the Confederacy’s political banner.
But this growing militancy provoked a backlash among Southern whites, many of whom already felt aggrieved over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, affirmative action, and other race-tinged issues. Self-styled “Southern heritage” or “Southern nationalist” groups mushroomed across the region, preaching the gospel of states’ rights, regional pride and reverence for the Confederacy.
These groups also cleverly tapped into the culture of self-esteem and identity politics common across the land. When Spike Lee’s movie on Malcolm X launched a wave of “X” clothing, a counter-symbol quickly sprouted on T-shirts and bumper stickers across the white South. It showed the diagonal cross of the rebel flag beside the words “You Wear Your X, I’ll Wear Mine.”
BY THE TIME Marcus Flippin became a teacher and sports coach at Todd Central in 1992, students were brandishing their separate Xs like duelling pistols. A white kid would show up in a rebel-flag bandanna, a black kid in an X cap. A fight would break out, and the next day still more students would show up wearing Xs and start the cycle over again.
Flippin, one of only three black teachers at the school, became a sounding board for black students. “They’d see on the news about the flag coming down in Alabama, or ‘Dixie’ being banned,” he said, “and they’d come to me and ask, ‘How come whites still get away with that stuff here?’”
Flippin also realized that coaches of visiting sports teams were using Todd Central’s rebel logo to whip up their own black players, saying, “You know that flag represents slavery and the Klan. We have to go over and show those racists.” Flippin convinced school officials to repaint the gym floor with an innocuous outline of Todd County. This only enraged white students still more. Graffiti started appearing in school bathrooms: “KKK,” “Go Back to Africa,” “How to have a good time—kill Niggers!” One afternoon, as black students waited for a bus in front of the school, a white student drove by in his truck; hitched to the bumper was a chain with a black Barbie doll dragging from the end. Both black and white students started packing knives and guns in their cars and pickups.
Flippin tried to calm both blacks and whites, but felt he simply couldn’t break through. “I don’t know if it’s the movies, the music, the music videos,” he said, “but there’s no respect for adults, or for human life. You just had the feeling all the time that something bad was about to happen.”
MARCUS FLIPPIN’S FIRST YEAR at Todd Central was the last for Michael Westerman, who graduated in 1993. A tall, slim teenager with long dark hair and an engaging smile, Michael was named the Future Homemakers of America “sweetheart” his senior year. A mediocre student, he struggled through with the help of his longtime girlfriend, Hannah Laster. They married soon after graduation and went to work at a sawmill owned by Hannah’s father. Michael cut timber, Hannah drove the forklift.
The sawmill lay on a gravel road in the hilly northern half of Todd County. Hannah’s parents, Billy and Nancy Laster, lived in a home they’d built themselves beside the mill. “None of this would’a happened if everyone had just stuck to their own,” Billy said. He was built like the oak trees that churned through his mill, and prescribed hard work as the remedy for all ills.
His wife hewed to a biblical injunction against cutting hair; hers was pinned in a gray helmet that rose a full six inches above her head. “Michael picked and plucked at people and laughed about everything,” she said. He raced his four-wheeler, played pranks, made animal noises, licked his sister’s face, told jokes about fat people. When he wasn’t cutting logs, Michael wore what amounted to a personal uniform: black Levis, black cowboy hat, cowboy boots and a huge silver-plated belt buckle.
“He loved Jeff Foxworthy jokes more than anything,” said Hannah’s sister, Sarah. She quoted a few of Michael’s favorites. “You might be a redneck if your family tree doesn’t fork.” Or: “You might be a redneck if you refer to fifth grade as ‘my senior year.’” Just before he died, Michael bought a decal for his truck windshield that said “Redneck Ride.”
The family said Michael first met Hannah on a bus to night vocational classes, where he’d studied welding and she nursing. Michael later used his welding skills to attach a flag pole to the diamondback toolbox in the bed of his pickup. Then, a few months before he died, he got a tattoo on his arm of the cartoon character Tasmanian Devil clutching a Confederate battle flag.
“It was a school symbol, that’s all,” Billy Laster said. “I don’t think he knowed the history of it.”
Sarah thought there was more to it than that. “The flag was a symbol of him,” she said. “He was a rebel, a daredevil, outspoken. He’d do anything.”
MICHAEL’S AUNT, BRENDA ARMS, gave Michael’s devotion to the flag a very different spin. A retired nurse and the self-appointed historian of the Westerman family, Brenda had given Michael his first rebel flag as a child. “Michael was raised with that flag, just like my own son,” she said. “It’s just part of our life.”
We sat in her kitchen drinking coffee from mugs decorated with the rebel flag. Brenda said Michael displayed the banner on his bedroom wall as a boy, then moved it from his bicycle to a three-wheeler he raced through the fields, then to his car, and finally to his truck. “It was his first flag,” she said, weeping softly. “He treasured it just the way I do the doll I’ve been carrying around since I was a little girl.”
Since her nephew’s death, Brenda had become the point-person for a parade of Southern groups seeking to contact the Westermans. First came members of a nearby chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. They volunteered to set up a bank fund for Michael’s widow and children, and deposited several thousand dollars to kick off the effort. They also helped Michael’s parents catch up on bills. Soon, solicitations for the “Westerman Twins Fund” began appearing in the Sons’ national magazine. “His death causes us to reflect upon the continued sacrifices made in the name of heritage and honor,” read a message accompanying the ad.
Southern heritage groups now planned a major memorial in Todd County for Confederate Flag Day in early March. Organizers had asked Brenda to read a short biography of her nephew. She handed me a flyer for the Flag Day event. It was headed: “In Honor of a Fallen Confederate Patriot.”
AFTER TWO WEEKS in Guthrie, I took the motelkeeper Maria Eskridge’s advice and decamped to the Holiday Inn in nearby Clarksville, Tennessee, where I could relax at night watching a basketball game on the bar’s cable TV. One evening, the bartender asked what brought me to the area. When I told him, he said, “Oh yeah, Westerman. He used to wash dishes here. Tight jeans. Shitkickers. The hundred-pound belt buckle. Your basic total redneck.”
He called over two waitresses, who offered an even less flattering picture of the Fallen Confederate Patriot. “How would I describe Mike? Goofy and obnoxious, kind of ignorant,” said a twenty-two-year-old named Lydia. “He’d do a few dishes, then sit reading comic books and annoying anybody who walked by. He took things to extremes.”
One night Michael had argued with a waitress, then picked her up and carried her around the kitchen. The waitress screamed “Put me down!” and struggled to get free, but Michael wouldn’t let her go. When a black cook intervened, Michael shouted “nigger” and other slurs. “Mike had a racial hang-up,” Lydia said. “He thought the races shouldn’t mix.” Soon after the incident—the third for which he’d been reprimanded—Michael was fired.
The waitress Westerman harassed that night had since taken another job. She wasn’t surprised by the news that Westerman had been killed while flying his rebel flag. “I hate to walk on a dead man’s grave, but the best word to describe him is bully,” she said. “Everyone around him needed to know he was bigger than them.” She paused. “I’m prejudiced too, I guess. But I know when to keep my mouth shut. He was the kind who never did.”
A FEW WEEKS LATER, I finally saw Michael’s truck, which Hannah drove in one of the half-dozen memorials held in her husband’s honor in the weeks following his death. This particular wake was organized by motorcycle clubs in Kentucky and called, with conscious irony, “Freedom Ride ’95.”
Arriving at the procession’s gathering point beside a Cracker Barrel restaurant, I found a sea of Harleys, bomber jackets, and T-shirts as loud as the bikes: “Drunk and Ready to Fuck,” “Shit Happens,” “Helmet Laws Suck.” Someone shouted “Pulling out!” and the iron horses charged down through the hills of southern Kentucky, rebel flags flapping in the wind. As I trailed the mile-long cavalcade, it struck me that I might be witnessing the largest assemblage of rebel flags since Appomattox.
The bikers growled down Guthrie’s main street to a vacant lot beside a grain elevator. Several bikers erected a makeshift stage and auctioned leather jackets and other items, with the proceeds donated to the Westerman family. Parked beside the stage was Westerman’s truck, with the rebel flag flying from a pole in back. Well-wishers filed solemnly by, poking their pinkies in the small bullet hole in the door and peering at Michael’s cowboy hat, perched on the dashboard with the watermelon bubble-gum still stuck to the brim.
Hannah, a tall, hefty woman with permed strawberry-blond hair, stood impassively beside the cab. I asked her why she thought Michael had displayed the flag. Was it Southern pride?
“He wasn’t into all the Confederate history and that,” she said, echoing her father. “He didn’t, like, dig into it.”
“School spirit?”
She smiled. “Michael was glad just to graduate from the place.” She said a few of Michael’s friends had started flying the flag from their pickups about the time he bought his truck. He decided to do the same.
“Why?”
Hannah shrugged. “He’d do anything to make his truck look sharp. The truck’s red. The flag’s red. They match.”
BY THE TIME of the Confederate Flag Day rally, six weeks after the shooting, Michael Westerman’s biography had undergone a rewrite. Now, according to official lore, Michael and Hannah first met during a school outing to Fort Donelson, a Confederate redoubt where one of Michael’s forebears served. The Sons of Confederate Veterans also claimed that Michael was an avid student of his family’s rebel genealogy and had planned to join their group. A Kentucky camp inducted him posthumously and helped refurbish his grave. Chiseled on the new granite headstone was Michael’s pickup and flag. Planted beside it was an iron cross identical to those marking the graves of actual rebel veterans, with C.S.A. on one side and 1861-1865 on the other, beside the Confederate motto, Deo Vindice. With God As Our Defender.
Michael’s new Confederate profile appeared to comfort his relatives, giving a larger meaning to what had seemed a senseless death, and drawing the family into a world beyond the provincial confines of Todd County. Michael’s parents, who had previously kept their grieving private, now began granting newspaper and TV interviews defending their son’s display of the flag. An SCV member connected to the Nashville music scene arranged tickets and backstage passes for the family to see Lynyrd Skynyrd, Confederate Railroad and other shows. Contributions to the Westerman Twins Fund poured in from sympathizers across the South, as did letters and poems. The Klan also sent its condolences, even offering the family help in writing thank-you notes.
But no one wanted the Klan to distract attention from the Flag Day memorial. The KKK more or less obliged, staging another “literature roadblock”—in robes and hoods this time—but donning street clothes before joining others at the cemetery. Aryan Nation also politely called Michael’s aunt Brenda ahead of time and agreed to leave its literature at home. The few skinheads who showed up kept a respectful distance from a 200-car convoy that wound down Guthrie’s main street, across the railroad tracks and past a corrugated-cardboard plant that adjoined the cemetery.
At the grave site, Confederate reenactors unfurled a rebel flag embroidered with the words “Michael Westerman Martyr” and fired their muskets in salute. Women dressed as Confederate mourners wept. The service concluded with the playing of “Dixie” and a eulogy by an SCV “commander” from Mississippi. Michael Westerman, he declared, had joined “the Confederate dead under the same honorable circumstances” as rebels who fell in battle. “He was simply one more casualty in a long line of Confederate dead of over one hundred thirty years of continuous hostility towards us and our people.”
The convoy wound across Todd County to the Jefferson Davis memorial, where members of the Westerman family briefly shared details about Michael’s life. Brenda Arms said, “Michael’s personal reason for flying the Confederate flag was to show the pride he felt in his ancestors who fought and died for the flag, as well as to show his Southern heritage.” His father, David, a ruggedly handsome man, said Michael died because of his “beliefs and his constitutional rights.”
Then a succession of speakers from across the South turned the memorial into an overtly political rally. An official with the Atlanta-based Heritage Preservation Association ripped into “the goose-stepping stormtroopers of the political correctness movement,” announcing that “the NAACP, Queer Nation and others have been fomenting hatred against the honorable culture of the South.” Jared Taylor, editor of a right-wing newsletter, cited statistics about black-on-white crime. “Any given black person,” he shouted, “is about seventeen times more likely to kill a white person than the other way around.” He listed brutal black-on-white murders, rhetorically asking the crowd each time, “Are we to remain silent?”
“No!” the crowd replied, with a few shouting, “It’s time for revenge!”
Michael Hill, an Alabama history professor, cast Michael’s death against a much broader canvas. Head of the newly formed Southern League, Hill called for secession from “a corrupt Yankee nation” and proclaimed: “The South represents the only remaining stumbling block to the imposition of an American police state.” This state, he added, would plunge America into a “New World Order” marked by a “Godless” and “mongrelized” multiculturalism.
Hill also linked Michael’s murder to FBI action against David Koresh’s band of Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and white separatist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. The message of all these incidents: “It is open season on anyone who has the audacity to question the dictates of an all-powerful federal government or the illicit rights bestowed on a compliant and deadly underclass that now fulfills a role similar to that of Hitler’s brown-shirted street thugs in the 1930s.”
Jefferson Davis, for one, might have been startled by these remarks. A plaque on the monument, a few feet behind the speakers, quoted from Davis’s last public speech, to a group of young Southerners shortly before his death: “The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes and its aspirations; before you lies the future. Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, and to take your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished—a reunited country.”
But the Flag Day speeches weren’t really about the South, and Michael Westerman had metamorphosed once again, from a fallen Confederate patriot to a front-line soldier in a contemporary war, one that pitted decent God-fearing folk against what Michael Hill called “an out-of-control government and its lawless underclass.”
This apocalyptic spin on a small-town tragedy appeared to confuse and alarm many Todd Countians, including Michael’s aunt Brenda. When I visited her a few days after the rally, she opened a trunk stuffed with literature that had begun turning up in her mail. “Some of this stuff is a little wild,” she said, handing me neo-Nazi newspapers, white supremacist screeds, and paranoid militia-style tracts. “South-Hating Liberals Are to Blame for This!” read the headline of one story on Michael’s death. Another, in a newspaper called Confederate Underground, described Michael’s assailants as “menacing black gangsters” and alleged that the cross-burnings following his death were a ploy by civil rights agitators to attract sympathy. A publication called “WAR: White Aryan Resistance” warned of a coming racial Armageddon.
Brenda closed the trunk and slipped a video of the Flag Day rally into her VCR. Midway through the tape, as the fiery speeches played again, Brenda began weeping. “I feel like my grandchildren will see another civil war,” she said. “Between black and white, not North and South. People just can’t seem to get along.”
WHILE DEMONSTRATIONS CONTINUED in southern Kentucky, the prosecution of Michael Westerman’s assailants wound through the Tennessee courts. Though the defendants were minors—one just fifteen—prosecutors won a motion to try them as adults on a stiff list of charges: first-degree murder, civil-rights intimidation (a reference to Michael’s right to display the flag) and aggravated attempted kidnapping (stemming from Hannah’s allegation that the teenagers tried to box her in with their cars). All except the triggerman, Freddie Morrow, were released on bail.
By law, juveniles couldn’t be housed with adults in Tennessee prisons. But Robertson County, at whose border the shooting occurred, lacked a juvenile facility. So Morrow found himself in solitary confinement at the county jail, an overcrowded pen under court order to improve its wretched facilities. The jail was a squat box the color of slightly-off salmon, with a rooftop exercise yard wrapped in chain link and razor wire. As I walked across the parking lot, inmates began rattling their rooftop cage and shouting.
“Yo, snow! What’s your name?”
“Hey sugar, come up and get some sweet stuff.”
“You coming to see Freddie?”
“They gonna fry that little dude?”
“Shut the fuck up!” a guard shouted, escorting me inside to a converted cell that served as the prison’s library. Then he brought in Freddie Morrow. Wearing orange prison pants and a white T-shirt, he stood a lanky five feet ten and flashed me a chip-toothed grin. His head was shaved but he had a wispy teenager’s goatee, which he fingered self-consciously. He looked even younger than his actual age of seventeen.
We sat knee to knee in the cramped cell and made desultory small talk about basketball. I’d heard from Freddie’s family that he’d become a passionate reader in prison and I asked him what books he’d most enjoyed. Morrow perked up. He’d just finished Native Son and said he identified with Richard Wright’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas.
When I asked why, he launched into the long, tangled tale of his own troubled upbringing in Chicago. The story unspooled in a rush of urban images: a struggling single-parent home (his father died in a car crash soon after Freddie’s birth), rough schools, drugged-out parties, gang skirmishes, pregnant girlfriends, curfew violations and juvenile court hearings. Eventually, Freddie’s mother sent him to live with in-laws in Guthrie, hoping the small-town atmosphere might calm him down.
At first it did. He began dating a girl and attended church with his relatives. The Kentucky quiet agreed with him. “I thought I was in heaven,” he said. But things started to unravel soon after he entered Todd Central. Freddie’s baggy pants and earring and inner-city slang aroused suspicion and fear among white students and teachers. Black classmates caused problems for Freddie, too.
“Being in gangs, that’s the main thing they want, they want to be bad,” he said. “They came and asked me about gang colors, stealing cars, crazy stuff.”
Before long, Freddie fell into his old ways, playing the part of street-savvy tough that both blacks and whites seemed to expect of him. He showed off the star-shaped tattoo marking him as a member of the Gangster Disciples, a notorious Chicago gang. He talked back to teachers and brawled with classmates. The way Freddie told it, these fights always followed the same pattern. Someone would provoke him, he’d walk away, then a taunt or internal prompt would lead to a fight. He kept repeating an odd, fatalistic phrase: “Go on ahead.” As in, “He picked up a bottle and broke it and was talking about putting it in my back, and I was like, ‘Go on ahead, just go on ahead.’”
At the start of his second year at Todd Central, Freddie fell in with a rough crowd in Clarksville, a mid-sized city ten minutes from Guthrie. He bought a Czech semiautomatic for $50 at an abandoned baseball diamond in Guthrie, and purchased bullets at Wal-Mart. Then one night he fired off a few rounds in the chill Kentucky air. “It felt good,” he said, “like all my worries was through.” He stuffed the gun under his mattress and didn’t take it out again until the Martin Luther King birthday weekend.
Just before Christmas, Freddie got into a fight after being taunted during a school assembly. Freddie was suspended, then told by school officials that he’d missed so much class time that he’d flunk for the second year running. It was during this suspension that he shot Michael Westerman. Freddie’s lawyer had barred us from discussing details of the killing. So I asked Freddie the question that had gnawed at me ever since I’d arrived in Guthrie. He was a newcomer in Todd County and didn’t know Michael Westerman. Yet the sight of Michael’s flag had apparently sparked so much rage that one teenager now lay in a Guthrie grave and Freddie sat here in solitary confinement, facing the possibility of life imprisonment (as a juvenile, he could not receive the death penalty). What exactly did the rebel flag mean to him?
Freddie shrugged and looked at me impassively. “I thought it was just the Dukes of Hazzard sign,” he said. The Dukes of Hazzard was a popular TV show that featured a car decorated with a rebel flag. Growing up in Chicago, that’s all Freddie had known about the Confederate banner.
After moving to Guthrie, he gradually began to sense whites’ attachment to the flag and blacks’ hostility toward what they considered a symbol of slavery. “They was telling me about how they had a war for it back in the days and all this,” Freddie said. That was all he knew of the Civil War. To him, the banner was simply something whites knew that blacks hated. He suspected whites brandished the flag as a sort of schoolyard taunt, “just doing it out of spite, to see what we would do.”
Now they knew. Freddie’s words fit the picture of events I’d begun to form during my weeks in Todd County. What happened on that lonely road outside Guthrie wasn’t the portentous clash that outsiders—from the Southern League to the NAACP to journalists like me—imagined it to be. It seemed instead a tragic collision of insecure teenaged egos: one prone to taunts and loutishness, the other to violence and showing off. In a way, Michael Westerman and Freddie Morrow had a lot in common.
Freddie had grown morose during our three-hour chat. He talked of his frequent nightmares about the shooting, and began to cry. “No matter what I do—ever since I turned myself in I’ve been saying ‘sorry,’ but that just ain’t gonna do.” One night, he’d torn up a bed sheet and decided to hang himself. But a prison guard and former preacher pulled him back from the brink. The guard had since persuaded Freddie to study the Bible and think about the future. Freddie said he now planned to take up drawing again, a hobby he’d enjoyed as a child. He also fantasized about his release from jail, which he spoke of as though it was imminent.
“My main plan for when I get out is to be back in touch with my family, go to church every Sunday,” he said. He wanted to stay in Guthrie—nothing fancy, just settle down with his girl and get a job at an appliance factory where several of his relatives worked. “I was thinking when I turn eighteen I can get on at State Stove with my cousin Jeff,” he said.
INSTEAD, FREDDIE CELEBRATED his eighteenth birthday by moving out of solitary and becoming “rock man,” prison slang for toilet cleaner. His mother could no longer pay the private lawyer she’d hired, so a public defender took over the case. Meanwhile, back in Todd County, the atmosphere had calmed since the Flag Day rally. The county’s school board quietly shelved plans to change Todd Central’s rebel mascot, allowing Frances Chapman and her followers to declare victory and abandon their school boycott. Guthrie hired its first black cop. And when town officials learned that a new tattoo parlor in Guthrie acted as a front for the Klan, they quickly used building-code violations to shut the place down.
I went one peaceful afternoon to see the crowning of a new Miss Confederacy at the Jeff Davis monument. A succession of young belles sashayed past the crowd: twirling parasols, flicking fans, and smiling as best they could in their oxygen-depriving corsets. The winner, a tenth-grader named Rebecca, cinched the contest with her crowd-pleasing answer to the question, “What was the proper role of a Southern lady as a wife and mother?”
“As a wife, she supported and respected her husband and believed in the Cause,” Rebecca said. “As a mother, she looked after her children and spent a lot of time with them.”
Heritage groups kept a low profile at the Miss Confederacy contest, sensing perhaps that locals were weary of rallies and anxious to restore some normality to their lives. But outside the county, the mythical status of Kentucky’s teenaged martyr continued to grow, culminating in Michael’s induction into the pantheon of Confederate heroes at Franklin, Tennessee, one of the foremost shrines to Southern sacrifice. It was at Franklin one afternoon in the autumn of 1864 that the South suffered over 6,000 casualties in a frontal assault even braver and bloodier than Pickett’s Charge.
A Sons of Confederate Veterans’ museum at Franklin now featured a Westerman exhibit, including the rebel banner that had draped Michael’s coffin, a photograph of the teenager, and a retelling of his death that carried overtones of a nineteenth-century regimental history: The “Confederate Martyr” had “succumbed to his wound” after being “accosted by a carload of black youths who made racist remarks concerning the flag.”
The exhibit occupied pride of place in the museum’s foyer, right beside a portrait of Pat Cleburne, the most renowned of six Southern generals killed at Franklin. Cleburne had two horses shot from under him before leading his men forward on foot, waving his cap and shouting, “If we are to die, let us die like men!” He was found the next day, shot through the heart and stripped of his boots, saber and watch. Cleburne’s death site lay only a hundred yards from the museum, beneath the parking lot of a Pizza Hut.
THE TRIAL OF Michael Westerman’s assailants was held in Springfield, Tennessee, forty-five minutes south of Guthrie, in a brick Victorian courthouse with glass globes dispensing gum for a penny and clouds of cigarette smoke hanging in the air. The Westerman family sat behind the prosecution bench, wearing pictures of Michael pinned to their breasts. Friends and neighbors clustered behind, as did several SCV members and a publisher of Southern books who spent each break peddling copies of “Facts the Historians Leave Out,” a Confederate apologia from the 1920s. Two local Klansmen also sat in, sans robes and literature.
Across the gallery gathered a smaller group of blacks, mostly the defendants’ families. Conspicuous among them was Freddie’s mother, Cynthia Batie, who had come from Chicago by Greyhound. Afflicted with a crippling nerve ailment, she rode into the courtroom in a motorized cart.
There was no jury. The pool of potential jurors had proved overwhelmingly white and pro-prosecution, so the defense lawyers chose to try the case in front of a judge instead. In opening arguments, the defense likened the car chase and shooting to a schoolyard brawl that spilled tragically out of control. Freddie had fired wildly, intending only to scare the truck’s passengers. In the defense view, this amounted to manslaughter rather than felony murder, which carried a mandatory life sentence.
The lawyers also attempted what Freddie’s attorney called “the cockroach defense.” If you lack strong evidence that might exonerate your client, he told me, “you shit all over what the other side’s got.” As a result, much of the trial focused on holes in the police investigation. No ballistics tests were ever performed on Michael’s gun to see if it had been fired. Police failed to do gunshot-residue tests on the black teenagers’ car and didn’t inspect the damage to Michael’s truck until 116 days after the crime (better tests might have shed light on whether Freddie fired wildly or intended to hit the truck).
Questions also arose about Michael’s medical care. Emergency-room doctors had accidentally severed one of his phrenic nerves, which control the diaphragm. And in a bizarre twist, the coroner who signed Michael’s autopsy report was unavailable for questioning. He’d fled Tennessee amid allegations of incompetence and necrophilia; colleagues said he fondled corpses’ breasts and conducted anogenital exams that were “inappropriate and degrading to the deceased.”
These and other questions, as well as the recently concluded O.J. Simpson trial, raised hopes among the defendants’ families that the prosecution case would collapse due to flawed or tainted evidence. But the defense team—a public defender, two court-appointed lawyers, and a black attorney working on the case pro bono—didn’t have the sort of resources available to the O.J. “Dream Team.” And the defendants had made incriminating statements to police, before any of them had lawyers and before they knew that Michael’s wound was fatal.
The state also had two potent witnesses in Hannah Westerman and Tony Andrews, a passenger in the black teenagers’ car who had agreed to testify against his friends in exchange for two years’ probation. Hannah took the stand clutching a picture of Michael and told about the premature birth of her twins (named Michael and Michaela), the couple’s first night out, and Michael’s fateful stop for gas in Guthrie. She said neither Michael nor she did anything to provoke the black teenagers at Janie’s Market. Asked why Michael displayed the flag, Hannah repeated what she’d told me: “It matched his truck and made it look sharp.”
Tony Andrews corroborated Hannah’s story, calmly fingering Damien Darden as the driver and instigator of the car chase, and Freddie Morrow as the willing triggerman. But he testified that he’d seen someone in Michael’s truck reach out and shake the flag at Janie’s, just as Damien was having second thoughts about a brawl. Tony said this action, combined with one of the passengers hearing someone shout “Nigger,” reignited the teenagers’ desire to fight.
When Tony was done, the judge called a break and the families drifted out of the gallery, silent and stunned. Tony had fragged his friends, but he’d also blown a hole in Hannah’s story—and Michael’s reputation—by suggesting that racist gestures and remarks were made at Janie’s. As Freddie’s mother steered her motorized cart out of the chamber, she ran into Michael’s family standing just on the other side of the door. Hannah, arms crossed, fixed Cynthia Batie with a flinty-eyed scowl.
“What’s your problem?” Batie snapped.
“Bitch,” Hannah said.
“What did you say?”
“You heard me, bitch.”
Hannah’s family pulled her away as Batie yelled, “The truth is going to come out! Then we’ll see who the bitch is!” The two camps huddled at opposite ends of the hall, chain-smoking and venting their rage. Batie groused that Hannah and her family were bigoted rednecks. To Michael’s mother, Freddie’s crippled mother was a “motor-mouth with a motor,” an uppity city black just like her son. Watching the scene, it was hard not to see a depressing adult mirror of the anger and racial stereotyping that had afflicted their sons.
On the trial’s third day, Freddie took the stand. He showed none of the emotion or remorse he’d displayed during our prison chat. Instead he seemed numb with anxiety and dully mumbled “Yessir” or “I don’t know” as the prosecution asked one incriminating question after another. In the gallery, the county’s chief deputy leaned over and whispered to the man beside him, “He started in a ditch about six inches deep with a shovel. Now he’s in with a backhoe digging himself as deep a grave as he can.”
Ironically, it was left to the prosecution to point out the provocative role played by the rebel flag. The defense feared that dwelling on the flag, or on racial strife in Todd County, might bolster the state’s claim that the crime was premeditated, and also incriminate the defendants on the charge of violating Michael’s civil rights.
But in closing arguments, a defense attorney quoted Hannah’s testimony about the flag making the truck look sharp, rather than expressing any political belief. In his view, this undermined the charge of civil rights intimidation. “Aesthetics are not protected by the Constitution,” he dryly observed.
This prompted an emotional reply from one of the prosecutors, an owlish man who rushed to the podium carrying several tomes. The key issue, he said, wasn’t the intent of the person displaying the flag, but “stereotypical assumptions” made by those who saw it.
“If a person feels it is symbolic of keeping African-Americans back, then it’s easy to believe that the people displaying it are bigots.” Whites in the audience began to shift uncomfortably. “They’d get mad,” the prosecutor went on, “they might want to drag them out and beat them up. A stereotypical assumption was made in this case, and that’s why it happened.”
Then he opened William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and quoted Nazi laws proscribing Jews, which he said offered further illustration of how “stereotypical assumptions” led to violence. He opened another book, Carl Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln. “I’ll probably offend some people,” he said. Then he read part of the Gettysburg Address, lingering on the phrase, “All men are created equal.”
The prosecutor cited Lincoln to buttress his central point: whites had the same right to fly the rebel flag as blacks had to wear X caps. Still, it was strange to hear the Confederate Antichrist invoked in a Tennessee courtroom filled with family and friends of a man killed because of his rebel flag.
As the judge deliberated, the families stood at opposite ends of the courthouse, holding hands and praying. When the judge returned after a ninety-minute recess, the chamber filled with undercover police. There had been anonymous death threats against the judge, and police also feared a post-verdict brawl between the families.
Fingering a Styrofoam coffee cup, the judge spent several minutes staring at a legal pad. Then he read the charges against Freddie, finding him guilty of felony murder, attempted aggravated kidnapping, and civil-rights intimidation. “The court imposes sentence of imprisonment for life,” he said. Damien Darden received the same. The third defendant, a fifteen-year-old who had apparently just been along for the ride, was found not guilty on all counts.
Freddie’s head slumped on his chest. Damien stared blankly ahead. Behind them, relatives burst into tears, as did the women in the Westerman family. Except for Hannah. Striding out of the courtroom, she paused before a TV camera and declared, “They got what they deserved—well, they deserved to die.” But she seemed satisfied by her day in court. “It’s about time,” she said, “someone who’s white got to stand up and say, ‘Our civil rights were violated.’”
A FEW HOURS LATER, at Billy’s Bar in Guthrie, I watched Hannah again on the six o’clock news. The barmaid raised a beer bottle in salute and everyone at the bar cheered—before turning on the jukebox again. Down the street, at Janie’s Market, trucks pulled into the gas pumps with rebel flags flying from their beds. Banners also appeared in windows along the main street. But after a few days, this white triumphalism stopped. Most locals recognized the severity of the verdict: justice had been served, tribal blood money paid.
At the cemetery, I found two teenaged girls smoking beside Michael’s grave. They said Todd Central High School was calm now, but a chilly distance separated blacks and whites. “No one wants to talk—we go our separate ways,” one girl said. She flicked ash on the ground. “It’s probably for the best.”
The black teenagers I spoke to felt much the same. A growing number had decided to escape Todd County by joining the army at the earliest chance. Many of their parents now felt awkward and unwanted around local merchants and shopped in nearby Clarksville instead. Some blacks avoided going out after dark.
On the Sunday after the trial, I went to a service at Guthrie’s black Baptist church attended by members of the defendants’ families. Several relatives got up to thank the community for their support. “God will deliver his verdict, but in his own good time,” Freddie’s aunt said. “We look at the little pictures, He takes the big view.” Another woman wailed, “I don’t want to go to hell, Lord. It’s hell here.” Then the pastor set the trial in the broad context of black suffering. “We have been o-pressed and depressed for over two hundred years,” he said. “Ain’t nothing change but the years.”
After the service, Freddie’s mother invited me to her in-laws’ house, a small bungalow across from the church. Showing me a picture of Freddie at age two, hugging a Teddy bear, she pondered how her youngest child could have ended up in prison for murder. Perhaps, she said, it was her fault, for losing her job when Freddie was a young teenager; after that, she’d had to move to a rough area of Chicago she described as New Jack City. It was there that her son first got into trouble.
Or maybe adolescent hormones were to blame. “Boys got this thing, showing your manhood, that you’re bad,” she said. “It’s a man thing.” But she was also angry that racism and the rebel flag hadn’t really been aired at the trial. “The flag and ‘nigger’-calling—you can deny that it hurts you, but it builds up,” she said. “You keeping putting it on people, it’s going to blow up.”
She reached in her purse for a card from prison. The front showed a calm winter landscape with farms and horses. Inside, Freddie had scribbled a poem.
I’m hitchhiking to heaven. I’ll get there someday.
Others have made it now. I’m on my way.
I’m here on life’s highway. My thumb up high!
I can see the sinners laugh as they go by.
And there comes an Angel. Riding on a cloud.
That’s my ride to Glory. I’m Homeward Bound.
The card was signed, “Peace and much love Mama. I love you.” Freddie also asked her to pass on a message to his siblings and their kids. “Much love from little bro and uncle on lock down.”
Cynthia Batie began weeping and put the card back in her purse. “My baby,” she cried.
Ten minutes up the road, at the Westermans’ house in flat farmland north of Guthrie, fourteen rebel flags were on display. One flew at half-mast, the others draped across porch furniture. Inside, Hannah sat with her in-laws watching Oprah as her twin children frolicked on the floor. One toddler wore a rebel-flag shirt: “American by Birth, Rebel by the Grace of God.” The den was also cluttered with Confederate paraphernalia, most of it gifts from well-wishers across the South.
Michael’s mother, JoAnn, joined us. A wiry woman of forty, she said she now took tranquilizers and had entered counseling with her husband to deal with their son’s death. Returning to work at the garment factory had also been tough. “Blacks I consider myself close to, deep down inside there’s something in between us now,” she said. “We leave that void there and don’t discuss it.”
Michael’s father, David, offered to show me a home video. Images of Michael rolled across the TV screen: as a baby, as a seventh-grader on the football team, at home making a science-fair telegraph with his father, at the senior prom with Hannah, and finally, cradling his newborn twins. David Westerman began to cry. A modest, soft-spoken man, he was, like Freddie’s mother, still trying to make sense of what had happened to his son.
“Look at this,” he said, opening an album of family history he’d been given by his sister, Brenda Arms. David ran his finger along a list of rebel ancestors: one captured, another shot dead at Gettysburg, and a private “killed in action, 24th May, 1862.” His age was listed as nineteen.
“Just like Michael,” David said. He wiped his eyes. “They say that war ended a long time ago. But around here it’s like it’s still going on.”