Beneath The Surface

The Ancient Greeks told of a mania that masquerades as clarity, one that demands tearing a human being limb from limb and scattering his or her remains to the winds to quench some dire compulsion for cosmic order. That kind of bacchanalia, bloody and bestial, did not perish with the age of Sophocles. The remains of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper County, East Texas, are testament to its endurance.

Byrd's body was found on the morning of June 7, torn apart as if some wild animal had set upon it. His torso was at the side of a country road. His head and an arm were just over a mile away, ripped from his body as it hit a concrete drainage culvert. Police marked a piece of flesh here, his dentures there, his keys somewhere else--75 red circles denoting body parts and belongings along a two-mile stretch of asphalt. Fingerprints were the only key to Byrd's identity. The night before, the 49-year-old African American, on the way home from a family reunion, had apparently hitched a ride on a truck with three white men. They drove him to a wooded area, where he was beaten, chained by his ankles to the pickup and dragged down the road for at least two miles, maybe three. His body fell to pieces. Among the remnants, someone had dropped a cigarette lighter with the Ku Klux Klan insignia.

Primal myth now intertwines with a modern one, that of the New South. In Jasper, which is 55% white and 45% black, the New South is embodied in a black mayor and a white sheriff, both of whom came swiftly forward to declare the attack an isolated, containable hate crime. "We have no Aryan Nation or K.K.K. in Jasper County," said Sheriff Billy Rowles. Mayor R.C. Horn reinforced the notion: "We don't show any animosity here. This town has been about loving each other. If it was different, I wouldn't be mayor." Residents of Jasper (pop. 7,500) loudly decried the murder; so did relatives of the suspects. Ronald King, whose son John William, 23, is in custody, wrote to a local TV station, "It hurts me deeply to know that a boy I raised... could find it in himself to take a life. The deed cannot be undone but I hope we can all find it in our hearts to go forward in peace and with love for all." Even the Imperial Wizard from the nearby town of Vidor sent condolences. The Klan, he wrote, had nothing to gain from the "senseless tragedy."

But some citizens were not persuaded by the protestations of harmony. "How deep does this river run?" asked Herman Wright, an African American and the manager of a local sawmill. The remarks by Sheriff Rowles were greeted with hoots. In Jasper, people still wonder about the suicide a few years back of a popular black high school football player who dated a white girl. People ask, though without evidence, Did he really hang himself, or was he lynched? And just two weeks ago, a white youth was beaten up by black teens.