Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Vintage Departures)

by Tony Horwitz

“How would I describe Mike? Goofy and obnoxious, kind of ignorant,” said a twenty-two-year-old named Lydia. “He’d do a few dishes, then sit reading comic books and annoying anybody who walked by. He took things to extremes.” One night Michael had argued with a waitress, then picked her up and carried her around the kitchen. The waitress screamed “Put me down!” and struggled to get free, but Michael wouldn’t let her go. When a black cook intervened, Michael shouted “nigger” and other slurs. “Mike had a racial hang-up,” Lydia said. “He thought the races shouldn’t mix.” Soon after the incident—the third for which he’d been reprimanded—Michael was fired. The waitress Westerman harassed that night had since taken another job. She wasn’t surprised by the news that Westerman had been killed while flying his rebel flag. “I hate to walk on a dead man’s grave, but the best word to describe him is bully,” she said. “Everyone around him needed to know he was bigger than them.”