Godll Cut You Down: The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, a Murder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi

Synopsis

Godll Cut You Down combines an unlikely journalist, a murder case in Mississippi, and a fascinating literary true crime story in the style of Jon Ronson. A notorious white supremacist named Richard Barrett was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 2010 by a young black man named Vincent McGee. At first the murder seemed a twist on old Deep South race crimes. But then new revelations and complications came to light. Maybe it was a dispute over money rather than raceor, maybe and intriguingly, over sex. John Safran, a young white Jewish Australian documentarian, had been in Mississippi and interviewed Barrett for a film on race. When he learned of Barretts murder, he returned to find out what happened and became caught up in the twists and turns of the case. During his time in Mississippi, Safran got deeper and deeper into this gothic southern world, becoming entwined in the lives of those connected with the murderwhite separatist frenemies, black lawyers, police investigators, oddball neighbors, the stunned families, even the killer himself. And the more he talked with them, the less simple the crimeand the people involvedseemed to be. In the end, he discovered how profoundly and indelibly complex the truth about someones lifeand deathcan be. This is a brilliant, haunting, hilarious, unsettling story about race, money, sex, and power in the modern American South from an outsiders point of view.