Butterfield, with Willie’s encouragement, set out to trace Bosket’s family tree. He was able to follow it back to the wretched days of the pre-Civil War South. Forget Margaret Mitchell’s fantasies. Butterfield sketches an era of unbroken brutality in which willful and treacherous men left carnage in their wake. Today we would say they lacked impulse control or were violent; in those days they were Southern gentlemen fighting duels over slights real and imagined. Butterfield focuses on Edgefield County in central South Carolina, where Bosket’s family served as slaves. This area spawned a whole litany of violence-prone scoundrels including U.S. Sen. Preston Brooks, who, in the name of honor, beat another senator nearly to death on the Senate’s floor, and “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, the state’s virulently racist governor. Killing was all too common in “bloody Edgefield”; at the turn of the century, the murder rate in rural South Carolina was higher than that reached in crack-ridden New York City in 1992. “All this violence,” Butterfield writes, “grew out of the old white Southern code of honor, an extreme sensitivity to insult and the opinion of others.”
With the end of Reconstruction, violence was no longer a problem just for white men. The contagion of reputation played havoc in the black community; poor men, with little else to defend, shed blood over slights, real and imagined. Willie’s ancestors, Pud, James, and finally his father, the furious Butch, walked the line from petty crime to gambling, brawling, stealing and murder. It’s an ugly tale, but remarkable, too. Until Jeffrey Dahmer came along, Butch may have been the most notorious killer in Milwaukee’s history. He butchered two men in a pawnshop after the owner showed him “disrespect” by refusing to return his salacious pictures or pay him $50. In prison, Butch’s life took a better turn. He took college courses and eventually graduated with honors as Leavenworth’s first homegrown member of Phi Beta Kappa. But once paroled, Butch was arrested for child abuse, then he killed again in an escape attempt. In his last crime there was no “honor” at stake, only desperation.
No rescue: Enter Willie. Abandoned and abused, Willie grew up a very angry young man. His life is a tribute to how badly the juvenile-justice system can work. At every step in his spiral, someone noticed how smart Willie seemed, how alert, how gifted. But there was no rescue for him. It’s a stunning description, but it also undermines the book’s central thesis. Undoubtedly “the rituals of honor and vengeance” play a role in teen killings, but not in Willie’s. His first was an unprovoked attack on a sleeping man who vaguely reminded him of a harsh counselor. His second grew out of a robbery; the penniless victim paid with his life.
Near the end of the book, there comes a moment when Willie might have been saved. Like his father, Willie is released and seems, momentarily, headed out of danger. Then he’s busted on a weak robbery charge, winds up in a system that remembers him only too well and is sent off to prison. Furious at his lot, Willie becomes an inmate famed for how dangerous he is. Eventually, he, too, acts out of bitter vengeance–attacking prison guards, bailiffs and, with words, even judges–until finally he’s left, at the age of 32, to languish in a Plexiglas-covered cell for another 75 years. There is no honor there. Newsmakers
