Free God'll Cut You Down by John Safran Page A

was Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell.” In fact, there’s a photo of me on my knees in the family living room with my hair gelled up, re-creating the
Smash Hits
cover propped up next to me. Billy Idol holds the Confederate flag taut; I’m holding my Confederate T-shirt in tandem.
    (There’s another photo of me from around that time sucking on a chocolate malt, on holiday in rural Victoria, Australia. Pinned to my denim hat is a tin badge—the Confederate flag. Did that come before orafter the T-shirt? I’m also wearing a blue Michael Jackson sweater my mum knitted, causing a fashion/race faux pas.)
    Because it’s sleeveless and large, I keep wearing the shirt as I grow. It becomes a type of Linus blanket and a conversation point:
Can you believe I’ve had this since I was eleven?
I can’t remember what I thought of the T-shirt when I was obsessed with rap, from the age of fourteen to the end of high school. I don’t recall the rappers on my cassettes addressing the flag controversy. Public Enemy, Run-DMC, LL Cool J, they’re all New Yorkers. Maybe worrying about the flag was just a Southern thing.
    What was I thinking when I wore it to university? University was nonstop dress-ups and dabbling with beats and punks and yippies and anarchists. I briefly pinned a yellow Holocaust star to my jacket, too.
    I do recall Malcolm the hippie at the ad agency, my first grown-up job, aged nineteen. (Yes, I’m still wearing the T-shirt eight years later.) I’m a copywriter, writing brochures for car dealers. In the office next to mine is a small-framed vegan who insists there is no connection between his small frame and his veganism. One night we spray-painted
Free East Timor
on the bridge reaching over a freeway. He heard the foreign minister would be driving past in the morning.
    We usually riled each other with sarcasm, but when he saw me in the office in the T-shirt he waited till I was alone and approached. He said gently, like I was an innocent
Dukes of Hazzard
fan, “Black people see that like a swastika.”
    What
was
I thinking? I’m pretty sure it was about dancing with white liberal taboos. There weren’t many (or any?) black people around me then. I’m pretty sure I didn’t want to upset black people.
    And then there was this weird moment. I’m out at a restaurant. Pretty swish, a birthday dinner, for one of the girls at the ad agency. Across the table is one of her friends—a black girl. If the Scientology auditor forced me to cough up more detail, I’d say I
think
her family had come from South Africa. She keeps eyeing my shirt and comes over after cake.
    “Love your T-shirt,” the black girl says. She’s serious. She then brings up the politician considered by many the most racist in Australia. “I mean, I don’t agree with everything Pauline Hanson says, but she’s right. You can’t just have nonstop immigration.”
    What an unpredictable response to my barely thought-out provocation.
    Was Richard Barrett doing a version of the same thing? An outsider, coming down to Mississippi, mucking around with things he didn’t fully understand, for some obscure reason of his own? Until he ended up way out of his depth?
    Just before leaving for Mississippi, I did a massive cleanout of my study. I found a clipping I’d torn out of an Australian newspaper in 2001: SOUTH’S FLAG RISES AGAIN IN MISSISSIPPI . The article says Mississippians had just voted to keep the Confederate symbol on their state flag, the last US state still hanging on to it. Above the headline is a photo of three people flapping giant state flags. They’re standing on the side of the road—in Rankin County.
    I feel I’ve been tied to a piece of elastic my whole life that’s finally pulled me to Mississippi.

3.
    THE MURDER
The Murder House
    T oday I’m going to go to the house where Richard Barrett was murdered. There are tingles dancing up my arms as I drive. Is that because I’m worried someone has moved in? Or just the general death