The next morning, I held my press conference at the foot of the City Market, in the same place where, according to Avery, Joe Magnus and Royce set off a bomb while they were still teenagers. When I was a child, locals always referred to this two-block open-air building running down the center of Market Street as the Old Slave Mart, but as Charleston was transformed from a lovely old city preserved like a jar of figs into a tourist attraction displaying the scalding virtues of preservation, the slave market, we were now assured, had really been the Old City Market, and the actual Slave Mart had been over on Chalmers Street. No human beings had ever been sold in this space, only blameless vegetables and fruits and quilts and jams and baskets made by pleasant old darkies wearing Aunt Jemima scarves. During the preservation movement, the first block of the City Market was rehabilitated into boutique shops, and the second block, the one Avery had pointed at, was stuffed now with vendors selling tourist wares. Silver sand dollars on little silver chains were favorites, as were the sweet grass baskets woven by “basket ladies,” canny black women who had begun to understand the value of their craft, brought to this country, like Gullah, from West Africa. The baskets were expensive, and though the women still sat on corners weaving them, the older ones teaching the younger to make the intricate patterns, they no longer kowtowed, ingratiated themselves, or bargained. These baskets were what I usually gave Yankees for presents, and next time I went to New Mexico I intended to bring one to Ed Blake.
By 10:00 A.M., the corner of East Bay and Market Street became congested with reporters and cameras. The midmorning cars moved by slowly, their occupants straining to see what was happening. I borrowed a wooden crate from a vendor, an elderly black man with professionally friendly eyes, and stood atop it, passing out my flyers with these basic lines:
BLACK GRANDDAUGHTER OF FAMOUS WHITE RACIST TO BE BURIED BESIDE HIM
Lucia Burns Godchild, the four-year-old granddaughter of deceased white supremacist Royce Burns, will be buried beside him Wednesday at 1 P.M. at Carolina Memorial Gardens in North Charleston. Ruby Burns Redstone, mother of Lucia and daughter of Royce Burns, is being held without bond in Albuquerque, New Mexico, charged with the murders of her daughter and her son. River, aged two, was buried last week in a private ceremony on New Mexico’s Nogalu Reservation.
Ruby Redstone’s mother was a Vietnamese immigrant with whom Royce Burns cohabited but failed to marry before disowning her and their child several years before his death.
The identity of Lucia Burns Godchild’s father remains unknown.
All who are concerned about the continuing presence of racism in our society are welcome to come honor the burial of this innocent child.
Calling hours will be at J. Henry Beecher’s tomorrow, from 3–6.
I read the flyer loud, which quieted everyone. Then I spoke more informally. “You may wonder why this announcement is being made at this particular location. I learned recently that back in 1969, my brother Royce Burns and his friend Joe Magnus, a terrorist who remains un-captured to this day, tried to set off a bomb on this very corner. They were protesting a strike by a group of black female hospital workers who wanted to unionize and win pay equal to the white workers. My brother and Joe Magnus’s attempt to set off a bomb here was so incompetent and ineffective it didn’t even make significant news.”
I paused and Claudia Friedman shouted her planted question: “What happened to Joe Magnus?”
“You’ll have to ask the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms about that. He’s probably working for them now.”
“Is your brother really dead?”
“I doubt it.”
In answering other questions, I pointed out that my brother and Magnus had tried to bomb this street corner many years before Royce wrote his novel The Burning Chest, and, yes, it was a book I once thought very highly of, and, yes, it did seem as if Royce Burns had been two separate people, not a schizophrenic but a good man who had an evil one waiting inside him.
My anger blindsided me, or else I wouldn’t have said what I did next. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the image of Lucia’s small body being professionally made up by an undertaker only a few miles away, this child who had learned to crawl backward before she learned to crawl forward and who had tried to protect herself by holding three pacifiers. Lucia was dead, and so was River, the snuggler who smelled like running water. Or maybe it was because Ruby was my niece and my doppelgänger and a damaged young woman and she had suffered horribly because of my brother and then had committed an unforgiveable act of her own. Or maybe I was still trying to come to grips with the fact that her children had been left to die inside a refrigerator.
The evening news and the paper the next morning reported some of what I had said: “I challenge the Ku Klux Klan, the Silent Brotherhood, the Aryan Army, the Posse Comitatus, the CSA, the Confederate sentimentalists, and any other of you racist cowards out there to try to stop me from burying Lucia Burns Godchild next to this man you revere, Royce Burns. Do you think I don’t know that y’all visit my brother’s grave like it is some sort of holy place? That you recite Confederate doggerel out there the same way you do at Magnolia Cemetery during your pompous, silly reenactments? I know about the midnight pilgrimages to my brother’s grave where you hold hands and sing ‘Dixie.’ ‘Heritage, Not Hate,’ my ass. Royce Burns was a terrorist who believed that white people were the only human beings.”
I went doggedly on, trying to explain the links between Royce and The Turner Diaries and Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, until I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a short, boxy woman leaning over Nadine, who lay stretched out on Market Street with her top down. This woman was dressed as ambiguously as I was, but she looked tougher than I will ever manage, either because I don’t have the right genes or didn’t have the right childhood.
“Hey!” I jumped off my soapbox and pushed through the spectators, but the woman was gone by the time I reached my car. I thought she might be one of Joe Magnus’s sisters. There had been two of them, but there was no way to recognize them except by family resemblance.
Nadine assured me she was fine.
It would be several weeks before I would find out that my brother had not been a committed member of the Silent Brotherhood and that it was his fury over their assassination of Alan Berg that led to his presence at the fire on Whidbey Island. When the members of the Silent Brotherhood retreated to their temporary safe house—as federal agents pursued them—they found my brother waiting to argue race theory with Robert Mathews. Royce was trapped in the shoot-out because he intended to make it clear to Mathews once and for all that the Jews were crucial to the survival of the white race. He thought Mathews, a Christian fundamentalist, might be persuaded by a new argument Royce had concocted: the Jews were the original tribe of Judah, and the Europeans were actually the lost tribes of Israel. Mathews, however, remained implacably convinced about the Zionist conspiracy described in the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He might well have agreed that it was crucial to argue about Jews while other members of the Brotherhood were slipping quietly into the woods to avoid a fight they knew they could not win. Whidbey Island was a large area, but choosing a safe house on an island that required a ferry ride and then paying for it with counterfeit money did not seem entirely smart in retrospect. I like to imagine that Mathews and Royce were still shouting at each other when flares lit the sky and the FBI loudspeakers demanded immediate surrender of all occupants.
Estelle called me during her lunch break, furious about my news conference. “You are using this child as a pawn, Ellen.”
“Oh, my God, Estelle, you’re mad at me for this? You can’t be mad at me.”
“You hold a press conference and challenge the Klan and the entire gallery of right-wing nuts out there, and now you think you’re going to have public calling hours at Beecher’s? What on earth has happened to you?”
“It’s a bad idea?”
“It’s a stupid, dangerous idea. It’s a racist idea.”
“Racist? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Lucia wasn’t a symbol, and you, of all people, must know that. She was just a little girl.”
“But that’s what I’m trying to do, make her real. I thought you would understand. I’m trying to do what Emmett Till’s mother did by exposing her son’s body to public scrutiny.”
“Have you lost your mind? Emmett Till’s mother was black and he was her son, and what she did was revolutionary. You are a white woman riding in on a white horse like you think you’re some kind of hero. You didn’t even know this child, Ellen. This is not about Lucia, this is about you and your brother. This is about your ego and his.”
“Wow,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
In her wordlessness, the sound of her exhalation, I heard her anger lessening.
“I sure hope you’re not right, Estelle. Don’t you think white people have to stand up and fight against this kind of racial hatred?”
“I don’t know how to evaluate this particular situation, but I do know you’re being reckless and sound paranoid. BATF? You’re now making public accusations against BATF?”
“Don’t you think Lucia has been a pawn ever since she was born?”
“That’s your excuse? No, Ellen, she was a little girl, and what you have done has created a contaminated, dangerous mess.”
“I thought burying her quietly would be contaminated.”
In her long pause, I felt our uncertainty about each other growing.
“Estelle, disapproval from you feels just awful.”
She still didn’t answer.
“I hope we’re going be okay with each other.”
“So,” she finally said, “did your little Times reporter get here?”
“Yes,” I said, no longer holding my breath. “She and Momma sat through Wheel of Fortune together shouting answers at the television. Momma thinks Claudia is a relative. You’ll like her. She’s young, but she’s one of us. She’s only got about six months.”
“Was that thing you said about people singing ‘Dixie’ at your brother’s grave out there in the dark true?”
“I only know for certain that it was still happening a few years ago, mostly around the time they do that ‘Confederate Ghost Walk.’ You know about this? A bunch of sentimentalists in Confederate uniforms walking through Magnolia Cemetery at night? They sell tickets and do these little skits, trying to reimagine the Rebels buried there. Once they actually walked the crew of the Hunley through the gates of St. Peter. They made what they thought the pearly gates might look like and recited drivel. It’s been infuriating me for years.”
“You’ve got big trouble coming, girl, and I’m staying out of it. And you’d best stay out of bed with that reporter you’re crushing on.”
“Oh, please. I have a few boundaries left.”
“Right. I know all about your boundaries.”
“Nice bluff. You don’t know shit about my boundaries.”
“Ellen?”
“Okay, I won’t, I promise.”