Long Time Leaving (54 page)

So rather than try to infiltrate the Klan, I thought I would see whether it could infiltrate me. I'm a white Southerner, and I tend to like what you might call redneck institutions. I don't even consider myself too pure to spend time with people, of any race, who harbor vestiges of racism. I figured that if today's media-savvy Klan was rapidly attracting decent people across the nation, as it claimed to be, I would recognize its new appeal. I wouldn't be happy about it, because I don't see how anything could make me stop feeling ashamed of the Klan, but I have often told liberal Northerners, “You know, Klansmen are
people.”
Liberal Northerners have refused to agree. Many people love to hate Klansmen, from a distance. Hate, as we all—well, most of us—know in principle, is always too simple.

(I don't mean to suggest that Klansfolk are just like everybody else deep down inside, but I heard a Klansman say on TV that what he wants to inculcate in young (white) people is “the truth that their race is their nation.” That's about as clear-cut a definition of racism as I can think of. And it's something that a lot of people in many nations are inclined to believe, I'll bet, without admitting it to themselves.)

Okay. I might as well tell you the most disgusting part of this story first. With photographer Slick Lawson, who shares my ethnic tastes, I made contact with Roger Handley, Alabama Grand Dragon of the Invisible
Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and Terry Tucker, head of Special Forces. They arranged a special cross lighting for us. The Invisible Empire is the most visible of the nation's several Klan factions and also the most militant. Handley and Tucker have received a lot of national publicity for their insistence that a race war is coming and that the empire is going to be ready because of its commando training in the woods.

Personally, I can't recall the last riot that took place in a forest setting, but there is no denying that lonely dirt roads—when you are driving at night near Cullman, Alabama, with a Klan car in front of you and a Klan car in back of you—can give you a sense of enemies lurking. The lead car pulled over to the side, and so did we, and so did the car behind. It was a scene out of TV movies. The scene where somebody gets shot. Slick and I jumped out, Slick armed with his camera, me with my ballpoint.

It was a clear night, but all I could see were pine trees that didn't want to get involved. Nothing happened. We waited. I couldn't even hear any crickets.

Finally, Handley called to us from the lead car: “Uh, if y'all are ready, we can go on.” It turned out we had just stopped for Tucker to pee.

At the cross site, everybody seemed nice enough at first. There were maybe sixty people around, a number of whom, including Tucker, were dressed in Green Beret camouflage fatigues and carrying M-15 assault rifles. The Imperial Night Hawk had a long sword with a decorative blade that he was proud of. I was not fond of it, nor of the assault rifles, myself, but there were several women and children around, and people were chatting. “What you been up to?” “Nice night for it.” Nobody minded being photographed. Handley, a sheet-metal worker disabled by a bad back, observed that “lynching's not needed anymore.” People were complaining about affirmative action and blockbusting, and claiming that integration was ruining the public schools. Nothing you couldn't hear at a country club, I imagine. Every now and then, someone in a camouflage suit would dash off to check the perimeter, wherever that was, but that reminded me of scout camp except for the rifles.

Nobody said anything funny. That was astounding. Slick told a story— I think he made most of it up on the spot, from his army days—about the time he parachuted and landed on a picnic table, got potato salad all over his shoulder…. Klansmen chuckled but didn't come back with any tales of their own. They hefted their rifles and looked edgily toward the perimeter.

That's when I met Bill Riccio, twenty-four, a Birmingham car dealership
sales manager. Riccio said he was Alabama Grand Chaplain but shortly was introduced by Handley as the Great Titan, so he said he guessed that's what he was now, but at any rate he had held a religious post, and he was a pudgy, blond, rational-seeming guy. Even though his assault rifle was fully loaded and he said the FBI's file on him was 6,300 pages thick, I didn't feel threatened. He mentioned something about murdered black kids in Atlanta.

I figured this might be a point at which a new media-savvy Klansman might slip up and say something embarrassing. Something like “I, of course, deplore the idea of children dying,
but
.”

“What do you think about that whole thing?” I asked casually.

“Well,” he said, “some people might think my opinion is kinda morbid. I don't think I better say. I'll say
this:
Little niggers grow up to be big niggers. And that's twenty of 'em we won't have to kill later. I'm not one to do anything to a child,
but
.”

There I was, standing out in the woods with this guy, feeling nauseated. Ashamed of myself for listening. Riccio went on: “I've taken a sales course; I've taken psychology in college. And I know what stimuli make people respond. There's gonna be a race war. And the white man will stand up.

“I got caught in the Birmingham riots when I was six. If it hadn't been for Bull Connor, who people call a brutal policeman—Bull Connor's police protected me. I've seen what animals niggers can be.” Is what he said.

Then the Klansmen who weren't in camouflage donned their robes-only one or two with face-covering hoods—and the speeches began.

Handley, a stolid type who looked like his back was bothering him, invoked Jesus and told us that Jews and “the ape nigger” were out to destroy white civilization, which he was proud to represent. It was a fine thing that the Klan had helped put President Reagan in office, he said, but when the new administration cut back on all the giveaway programs, the minorities were going to loot and burn. And this time white people were going to take up the gun against “this festering sore ape that's around our feet holding the white man back.” The Klan wouldn't be satisfied, he said, until the last minority person was either dead or jumping into the ocean to swim back to Africa.

Then he brought on Riccio. “Look at these little children!” Riccio cried. “These little blond-haired, blue-eyed children!” Actually only one of the three small kids who were standing in front of him, looking only mildly fascinated, was blond. “If it hadn't been for the Klan, there
wouldn't
be
any white children. Just be little brown kinky-haired animal-looking things crawling around.” Is what he said.

He denounced the TV show
Diff'rent Strokes,
in which “a white man takes in two nigger children, and these animal-looking things call him Daddy. These festering-with-hate ape niggers.”

A person said that, sure did. And the gathering's reaction—well, I've never been to a black sabbath, but this was not what you would expect the reaction of a black sabbath's gathering to be. More like a pep rally. At a small school.

Forty-two robed figures circled the cross, which was over twenty feet high and wrapped with rags soaked in diesel fuel (which was getting too expensive, Handley complained). They raggedly executed a cross-burning ceremony. “We do not burn the cross, we
light
the cross, that the forces of light may drive out the forces of darkness,” said Handley.

Foom!—the cross went up, and twenty or so onlookers went “Ooo” and “That's
a good
one,” and as the blaze died down, people took off their robes and chatted and rounded up their kids. Riccio, looking flushed, said: “Some other Klan groups don't have a real clear creed. They say niggers are all right just as long as they stay in their place.
We
say either they go back to Africa, or they can be fertilizer for our farms. One of the two races is going to be extinct from North America.

“And the Jewish problem must be settled, a Final Solution. I'm not going to hang up my robe until the last Jew is deported to Palestine or executed.” Meanwhile parents within earshot were, as I say, rounding up their kids.

Slick and I drove to Nashville and got drunk. We were not brimming with ethnic pride. I almost felt that I never wanted to hear country music or chew tobacco again. “I feel like putting on a tux and listening to chamber music,” Slick said.

“These people ought not to be out loose,” I was thinking. I remembered, with satisfaction, a high incidence of low foreheads, slack jaws, bad teeth. And rifles. And grins. They worked well for Slick visually. “These people are
scum,”
I thought.

That was the first time the Klan got into me.

Later, Slick and I spent time with the Tennessee branch of the Invisible Empire and with Bill Wilkinson, the empire's founder and national head: the Imperial Wizard. And our impression of the Klan became more humanized.

Wilkinson was visiting Tennessee from national headquarters, his home in Denham Springs, Louisiana. He wore conservative grey suits,
smoked decent cigars, and pretty much exclusively used the term
Negro.
In context, I almost began to feel fond of him, because he never once made me want to throw up. I've met people in, say, the entertainment business whom I liked less. I was willing to believe him when he said the Klan no longer condoned corporal punishment. It was with real embarrassment, I think, that he admitted having to banish a couple of Klans-men recently for tarring and feathering a couple of previously banished Klansmen.

Wilkinson is smooth on the radio. He looks a bit like George “Wallace, only considerably less pugnacious. His chin's not his strongest feature, but he's got some charisma, and also he's been on national television. When he showed up at a big Klan rally in Pulaski, Tennessee, people oohed and ahhed and clustered around for autographs. Young girls stole kisses from him and came away saying to each other, “Ain't he
a fox?”

He also articulates a clear economic argument—a story—based on white lower-middle-class self-interest. The Klan, especially in the South, which has long resisted labor unions, is the party of people who aren't supposed to have any self-interest but do. They feel, with some justification, that they are being forced out of jobs—by blacks who are favored under affirmative-action programs, by Mexican laborers who slip over the border, by Vietnamese who are resettled in this country and given a helping hand by the government. They are people whose kids can't make the basketball team anymore, whose neighborhoods are changing character, who are threatened by street crime. People who have never had much money or education but have always prided themselves on being white and knowing how to handle a gun. They resent the fact that their kids pick up black-culture mannerisms and phrases (“fox,” for instance) from TV.

The Klan today also prides itself on taking in women, Catholics, and longhairs. Both Riccio and Tex Moore, the Grand Dragon of Tennessee, described themselves as Catholics who've moved away from the church because it has turned its back on segregation. Of course, if the Klan were to exclude the long-haired, these days, it would be missing out on some of the scariest old boys in the world. For instance, the two hulking, stoned-looking perimeter guards at the Pulaski rally who identified themselves blearily as “extremely lapsed Mennonites.” They carried heavy-gauge guns and a stick with a circular saw blade set in it.

The Klanswomen we spoke to weren't shrinking violets. Mary Stickle, a former marine sergeant, said, “I'm proud to be a Klansperson” but
said she believed that the Equal Rights Amendment was “from the pits of Hell.” If women would stay home satisfying their husbands, she said, they wouldn't be out getting savaged by blacks. She told of a life of constant scrapping—from her childhood among five rough brothers (“They say I hit them with rocks, with the coal-oil bucket”) to her current life of harassment in a tough East Nashville neighborhood, where somebody had burned down her store and ransacked her house. She and her son had recently fought two women and a man and put them all in the hospital, she said, adding that she felt fortified since she joined the Klan—a number of fellow Klansmen, robed, had massed in front of her house. She is the Great Titan of Tennessee. I know I shouldn't have, but I liked her.

I also liked Phoebe Wair, secretary of the Tennessee Klan, who said that in the two years since she and her husband, Tommy (Grand Klaliff), had joined the Klan, “our marriage has been better than in the other fifteen. We're meeting good white people who don't drink. And it's something my husband and I can do together, that we can talk about.” She also said, “You know the Jews don't believe in Jesus? That's something I didn't know till not long ago. That kind of threw me for a loop.”

The Pulaski rally was held on the property of a cheerful silver-haired lady whose name I didn't catch. She believed that Adam was not the first man but the first
white
man, an improvement over the “pre-Adamic” races—that is, “the Egyptians, the Asiatics, the niggers.” The Bible, she said, “is the history of the white man. The Jews claim
they're
the people of the Book, but they're Canaanites and Edomites, not Aryans.”

While I was trying to sort that out, I overheard a conversation between two thirtyish men:

“You know, Teddy Kennedy is straight Communist.”

“I was in 'Nam. I don't like no Vietnamese. Hate 'em. Spent two years getting shot at by them people, and now they're bringing 'em over here and giving 'em a house.”

“And you don't get anything.”

“I believe fast as they build those houses, I can tear 'em down.”

All day before the Pulaski rally, a Japanese TV network crew followed Wilkinson around interviewing him. But when they showed up at the rally, the Japanese among them were kept out because they weren't Aryan. The American woman who was working with them got in, but two old boys cornered her at one point and said, “Are you taking things to them Japs? That can be
stopped,
you know. 'Cause if you can't stick to your own race, you're in trouble.”

Throughout the rally, security men with rifles and semiautomatic tommy guns and just-barely-legal sawed-off shotguns were contacting each other via crackly walkie-talkies. “Check over there. I think them Japs are sneaking in.”