Those Bones Are Not My Child (66 page)

Bingham turned sideways and went down the steps, the load balanced against the back of his neck. He stopped to kick aside a clump of ivy and purple flowers that had spilled over from the border of calcimined rocks and glimpsed a movie screen through the shutters of a side window of the carriage house. Over shots of an emblem, a circle with a cross inside and a red spot like a drop of blood, a saditty voice was saying that many seeming suicides and homicides by strangulation were actually accidents, self-induced choking while masturbating. Then another voice, an interviewer voice, asked a woman who wouldn’t shut up long enough to hear the question what bizarre sex practice had made her leave.

Bingham whistled to himself. Had the woman in the neat bush given him a bum steer? If sex was what that conference in there was about, the children of Atlanta were in deep trouble.

Mac took the floor when Mason and Baba folded back the shutters so the reel could be changed. “We’re so accustomed to thinking of the Klan as a paramilitary terrorist outfit, we often forget that it’s a religious
cult as well. I don’t know if this is the time for a discussion, but I regret that the narrator didn’t speak to the difficulty of trying to penetrate delusional systems to rescue its believers from psychological bondage.”

Mason turned his back to watch I Spy disappear down the steps when the brother in the cufi launched into reasons why enemies of the Black man should be left in bondage and not be the subject of any sympathetic discussion. Mason heard the thuds from below as the cartons were loaded onto the van.

“I was saying that for the benefit of Mr. Logan,” Mac interrupted. “Delusional systems pose the same problems in terms of deprogramming, regardless of the type of cult.”

“Yeah, well …” Baba leaned against the shutters, and Mason field-stripped his butt before flicking it out the window.

Logan declined to take the floor when Mac called on him. Earlier he’d informed the group about his yearlong attempt to locate his college-dropout son through the renowned group of specialists led by a brother named Patrick. He’d come to Atlanta from Athens, Georgia, when the cult theory of the killings gained currency.

“I’m anxious to hear from the Innis witness,” was all he would say, pinching the crown of the hat that he twirled on his lap.

“The film also failed to point out the difference between terrorism performed for political purposes and terrorism performed for religious purposes. I bring it up because many people who think it’s the Klan talk themselves out of it by saying that the Klan would boast were they involved. Political terrorists act to call public attention to an outrage. They commit acts in order to draw the media, politicians, and the public to the situation, or to provoke an uprising. Religious terrorists often act to call attention to a moral outrage, but in the classical tradition, the acts are committed purely to attract the attention of a deity.”

“You’re on to something,” Mason said, turning around.

“In other words,” Mac, encouraged, continued, “it’s the victim’s experience of terror that matters, not public acknowledgment of the deeds.”

Mason signaled the projectionist, who turned off the lights, though the film was not yet threaded.

“Pay attention to that business about masturbation and strangulation,”
B. J. spoke out in the dark, “especially when you look over the chart and see how many times ‘asphyxia’ is listed.”

“Rolling.”

The second reel of “Rough Cut,” footage spliced together with little attention to the finer points of cinesthetics, was, for the most part, interviews with people who had serious misgivings about their association with the Klan, or who had already left the fold (“Renegades listening to renegades,” Zala piped up), followed by panels: social psychologists, historians, political scientists, newspaper types, and law-enforcement persons discussing the “New Right.”

“What’s of interest, good people, is the repeated reference to factionalism. That’s in our favor. How many people here are members of the newly formed National Anti-Klan Network? Think you need to consider changing your name to include all right-wing terrorists?”

“Hold up,” Gaston interrupted. “He just mentioned dynamite bombings.”

The man on the screen—white, young, clean-cut—was sitting on a brown-and-beige plaid sofa in a knotty-pine den. A musket hung on the wall overhead. He slung one leg over the other and looked at the bottom of his shoe.

“That’s where I had to draw the line,” he said, jiggling his foot. “I joined because my father and my grandfather were members of the Georgia Klans. Back then ‘Night Rider’ meant scaring the Negroes. Whooping a few if you had to. Mostly you didn’t have to. They’re superstitious, so you can scare them. But now … And see, the biggest problem is that leaders don’t want to know. Criminal types in the ranks take things too far. Criminals and snoops. The leaders take a no-see attitude and that’s bad. I work for ATF, so they asked me—that’s the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. That’s mostly where the FBI snoops get the dynamite. So that’s where we got it, from the snoops.… I thought it was to scare people a little, not … You have to draw the line somewhere.” He shook his head and fingered his shoelaces. The camera stayed as he fidgeted.

“Leah was saying the other day,” Speaker said, “that that’s where the white Left should concentrate their work. With people like that.”

“And white feminists should work on the wives,” Zala added.

The man on the screen finally left his shoe alone and looked up. “If
the leaders would act like leaders, I’d’ve stayed. Because the country’s being handed over to the inferior races.…”

“They really do talk like that, don’t they?”

“… No-see attitude and the splits may be the downfall of the country, of all white Christian civilization.…”

“Burn, baby, burn.”

“Look at him. Damn, he’s about to cry!”

“Oh, wow!” the projectionist bellowed when the next scene came into focus.

“The Mystic Knights of the Sea meet the Knights of the Invisible Empire,” Mason said, recognizing the
Amos ’n’ Andy
show music.

Bingham ripped thick handfuls of ivy and flowers from the sides of the steps as he came up. He sucked his teeth in disgust when strains of a familiar radio theme from childhood reached his ears.

“
Amos ’n’ Andy
. Now that’s a doggone shame,” he muttered, walking quickly away.

“Now, I could be wrong,” Bingham argued with himself, tearing away the dripping lianas that had fallen through the top of the trellis. “The woman said ‘research,’ so maybe that’s research. Could be I’ve been on the road too long.”

He thought of a flyer someone had stuck under his windshield wiper his first day in Atlanta. A group of airline workers were raising a ruckus because they wanted to take up a collection for the dead children’s families, but the other members of the Metropolitan Airlines Association voted it down: “None of our business.” Well, what could you expect from people who spent their lives up in the air? Maybe he was in the same boat, his head in the barrels too long. He’d see what Miss Lady thought. She had her feet on the ground.

“But
Amos ’n’ Andy?
” He wiped his feet briskly on the mat.

The music, familiar to most from TV rather than radio, continued over a color shot of robed figures parading by the camera.
IN THIS SIGN WE CONQUER
, the motto said on the satin robes, green, purple, red, white. Then the film shifted to black-and-white. Dogs were being led from trucks—Dobermans, German shepherds, bloodhounds.

Close-up of an Alsatian husky snarling at a white man in blackface, who waves good-naturedly at the camera as another man pulls the dog away on a leash. The camera follows the parade of dogs past a panel truck and lingers. White men in short sleeves unload sections of a stage.

A jerky jump cut ends in a tracking shot of a series of tables. The insignia is on shirts, tie clasps, bumper stickers, necklaces, pillow cases set out for sale. Women and children behind the tables wave at the camera. Teenagers sitting on the hoods of cars wave too, then put on their robes. Another tracking shot shows book displays under the banner of the American Nazi Party. Other tables feature
Battle Axe News
, the organ of the National Emancipation of Our White Seed. Pamphlets and posters from the Minutemen and the Christian Identity Movement share a table.

“This is grainy,” the intern explained, “because it’s a blow-up from Super-8.”

“Shhhush.”

A large field. In the foreground, members of a kleagle, the women’s auxiliary, set up concession booths. Mid-ground, a stage being set up under the direction of the white man in blackface makeup. The camera follows him up a pole. He hangs a loudspeaker with a C-clamp. The
Amos ’n’ Andy
tape rises in volume—Kingfish and Calhoun outconning each other in a real-estate scheme. On stage the blackfaced white minstrel cuts a caper. People straggle over from the trucks. In the back field, men wrap burlap around a cross. Others wait with cans to douse it. Five men position themselves at the ends of the ropes, waiting the cue to hoist the twelve-foot cross for burning.

The camera swings back to the stage, where the performer is shuffling, scratching, drooping his lower lip out with lots of spittle. Those around the stage who spot the camera come awake to clap and stomp in time with the song:

Several do a half-hearted hambone to the refrain “And That’s Why Darkies Were Born.”

The ex–carny pitchman tissues off his makeup on the front seat of his customized jeep. In a sweaty close-up he explains that his is one of the most important roles at a klavern.

“… from all walks of life—Telephone linemen, prison guards, teachers, librarians, salesmen, hospital workers, highway patrol. Matter of fact, less than twenty paces from your sound man, we got a sheriff and a hospital superintendent. All sorts of folks. Bluegrass pickers, and ex-carny people like myself.” He smiles, jerking his thumbs at his chest. “I’m the one that gets them in. I get things started. I got the best sound equipment in the state too. Why?” He leans forward to hear the question of why people join. “ ’Cause it’s neighborly. This is like a fraternity, you see. No, no, no sir”—he wags his head—“pranks, maybe, but no rough stuff.”

His image dissolves into another close-up, a young woman in a hooded robe. She turns to motion someone to her side. The camera pulls back to include a man who declines to be interviewed. The woman listens to the question and looks toward her husband again. He folds his arms across his chest and stays put, one eye on the cross preparations in the back field. He motions for her to answer the question.

“Some people can trace their roots back to the original Scottish clans,” she says. “Others—some of them are here too—can claim blood roots with the original patriots like William Simmons and Nathan Bedford Forrest. My mother is an officer in the DAR. My father was with a vigilante group that started up when the niggers come into the restaurants and stores. My sister used to run a booth with her husband’s outfit. Now we’re all together. Yes, my husband’s very proud of me. Hank?”

Hank does not want any part of it. The camera wanders away toward a group of teenagers helping youngsters into their robes. They complain that satin is hot.

A woman steps into the lens and invites the camera crew to her trailer. The camera focuses on the woman’s feet as she goes up the metal steps and onto the carpet. A dark-haired woman in a black pants-and-shirt uniform looks annoyed at having been caught scrambling over the seat from the trailer’s cab. She scowls at the woman who invited the camera in, then hands the woman a Dustbuster she’s plugged into the cigarette lighter outlet. The woman is nonplussed for a second. The uniformed woman bends her over with a slight shove to her back. The
woman kneels down and runs the vacuum over the carpet where bread crumbs have dropped.

“That’s right,” the woman in uniform says. “I’m with security. I worked my way up through the ranks. There’s a place for women in this man’s army,” she says, arms akimbo, legs astride. Women making sandwiches briefly glance over their shoulders at her. The camera backs out of the doorway at the direction of the security woman.

Outside by a truck, the security woman leads a black Labrador retriever over to a man dressed in a similar dark uniform. The woman speaks into a walkie-talkie, looking toward the far end of the field, where the cross is being doused by two men with cans, who jump back, stains on their pants. The cross is hoisted twelve feet high. The dog barks.

“That could be the same black Labrador retriever that Son of Sam got his instructions to kill from.”

“Hey now, Spencer.” Gaston was up reaching over heads to grab Spence by the shoulder before he could stumble toward a seat. Others greeted Spence’s arrival too, but were glad when the two men sat down and removed their shadows from the screen.

Zala looked over at her husband. He looked exhausted. He looked flushed. In the glare of the burning cross, he flashed her a broad smile. And she forgot what it was she’d been mad about for so long.

“Sounds complicated to me, Bingham. Mind if I call you Bingham? I can’t fix my face to say ‘Big Boy’ without smirking.” The housekeeper turned back to the loaf of date-nut bread on the cutting board.

“If that’s for the researchers, Miss Hazel, I’ll take it out.” He could tell by the way she paused before bearing down on the knife that she’d planned most particularly to do that herself. “That tray’s too heavy for you.”

“You plenty nosy yourself, Big Boy.” She waved her knife toward the pantry shelf where a Coca-Cola tray was filled with Styrofoam cups. “We’ll divide the load. And no sense dirtying up dishes. Come seven o’clock sharp, I’m through.”

“Not going with them?”

“I’m going home to New Orleans, sugar. I ain’t had a decent meal
since I left. You should’ve seen this pantry when I got here. But they don’t know the difference.”

“I get the feeling they’re running. I got the call for this job two days ago. Big rush to get out of here, huh?”