The Sins of the Father
In the backcountry of East Texas, Tom Cherry sits and wonders about the man next door. Did he commit the infamous bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, back in 1963, killing four little girls? All Tom knows for sure is that the man is his dad
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For the next eleven years, Cherry lived a quiet life in the Dallas suburbs, though it seldom included Tom. In Grand Prairie, his father had not so much welcomed Tom back into his life as he had called upon him now and then when he needed a favor. Then in 1988 another Alabama attorney general, Don Siegelman, who is now governor, announced he was reopening the bombing case. That probe was short-lived, but the stress of three investigations had taken its toll: Cherry, then 58, suffered a heart attack later the same year. He radically altered his life once he was on the mend, selling his carpet-cleaning business in Grand Prairie and moving himself and his fifth wife, Myrtle, to the backwoods of Henderson County. Tom — this time accompanied by his wife and children — once again pulled up stakes and followed his father. East Texas, Tom hoped, held more promise.
BOBBY FRANK CHERRY'S HOUSE STANDS in a clearing, beside a dog shed and an American flag that hangs dispiritedly from a pole, his land marked by a No Trespassing sign stuck firmly in the red soil. Tom helped his father clear this property more than a decade ago, uprooting pines with a backhoe and hauling away dead wood; he built his own house a little ways down the road, so close to his father's place that their yards back up to each other. Despite their proximity, the relationship between father and son has been as difficult as ever: Tom, now divorced, cannot remember the last time he and Bobby Frank Cherry shared a
Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. Their peculiar relationship was instead dictated by the whims of the father, who could be warm to his son one moment and derisive the next. Though the two men occasionally fished together on nearby Cedar Creek Lake or passed the afternoon sitting on each other's porch beneath the pines, Tom never became his father's confidant, finding himself instead at the mercy of Cherry's moods. "It was like a bad marriage," Tom said. "We had our ups and downs, and we'd have it out with each other, but he was still Dad."
The real test of the ties between father and son has proved to be the renewed FBI investigation: Neither man has ventured along the overgrown footpath that lies between their houses in more than a year, the distance seeming to grow as each day passes in silence. The impasse began not long after the Justice Department declared in 1997 that it was reopening the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing case in light of "new leads." The announcement came one day after the release of Spike Lee's 4 Little Girls, a stirring film about the bombing victims that questioned why only one man had been prosecuted for their murders when it was widely believed that others were involved. Tom remembered feeling, upon hearing that his father had been named one of the renewed investigation's prime suspects, the old sense of dread. "It brought back bitter memories," he said. "It had been a shadow over the family for so long, and I figured then that we weren't never going to be free from it." His worry only deepened when his brothers and sisters, many of whom had made their peace with the old man, rallied behind Bobby Frank Cherry and soon demanded to know where Tom stood.
The FBI had meanwhile brought long-lost family members before a federal grand jury in Birmingham to tell damning stories about his father: Cherry's third wife, Willadean Brogdon, testified that Cherry had boasted about the bombing; her daughter, Gloria LaDow, said that Cherry had bragged about lighting the fuse; Wayne Brogdon, Willadean's brother, told the grand jury that Cherry had recounted how he made the bomb. Even Tom's own daughter, Teresa Stacy, testified that she had heard Cherry speak about the bombing. "I heard my grandpa talk about it when I was ten or eleven years old," Teresa explained this winter, sitting in her living room in the suburbs north of Fort Worth, while her two young children played at her feet. Now 24, she is straightforward about her dislike for Cherry, whom she claimed once molested her as a child. But she has few doubts about what she heard at a family gathering in the late eighties. "He was sitting out on the porch with my uncle Bobby and my uncle Wesley, talking about how he'd blown up a bunch of 'niggers' in Alabama. It's sickening to think about. Four little baby girls dying, and your flesh and blood had something to do with it? Imagine how much those girls' parents have suffered. They've got it ten times worse than that old bastard ever will." Teresa holds no grudge against her father for his stubborn allegiance to Bobby Frank Cherry, only pity. "My father was deprived of love his whole life," she observed. "He's wanted to have a father so bad and so long that he's willing to overlook anything. But in his heart, I think he knows the truth."
Tom insists that he has never heard Bobby Frank speak of the bombing and cautions that his estranged relatives who have testified before the federal grand jury all have their own axes to grind. He will concede only that there are many "unanswered questions" that have troubled him over the course of the investigation. How much Tom knows, and how much he may not be saying, no one else can tell: For though he stood by his father's side when Bobby Frank Cherry professed his innocence at a 1997 press conference — telling reporters that his father had become the victim of a "witch hunt" — Tom had known that his father's story was flawed. Even then, he told me, his father's alibi gave him pause: Bobby Frank Cherry claimed that he had stayed home the night before the bombing, when investigators believe dynamite was placed at the church, to care for his wife, who was suffering with cancer. But as far as Tom can remember, Virginia Cherry was not yet ill in 1963 and had not been diagnosed with cancer. Tom, however, could not muster up the conviction to say that perhaps his father might be guilty; instead, in conversations that spanned many winter afternoons, he vacillated between fiercely defending Bobby Frank Cherry one moment and doubting him the next. "If he's guilty of hurting them kids," Tom said at one point, "then he deserves what he gets. But if he's not? I want to see credible evidence, not the hearsay of an ex-wife."
Tom's ambivalence recently led him back to Birmingham, where he read through the thousands of pages of FBI files on his father that have now been made public record. He spent several days in the windowless archives room that lies in the basement of the Birmingham Public Library, looking for clues in the unwieldy files that bore his father's name. Though Tom reads laboriously, he pored over each page on which FBI agents had once tracked his father's every move, smoothing out the old sheets of typing paper that had yellowed with age and searching for clues, hoping to uncover the secrets to his family's past: Here lay his dead mother's words, his father's racist rants, the suspicions of the FBI's lead investigators. The files left Tom with more questions than answers. "I used to say, 'Leave it alone,' but I can't say that no more," Tom said. "I was real confident that Dad had nothing to do with it and that the FBI was the bad guy. There were just some things in those files up there that disturbed me. I think this needs to be cleared up, once and for all."
Bobby Frank Cherry stopped speaking to his son more than a year ago, angered over his belief that Tom was cooperating with the FBI. The last time they exchanged words, Tom remembered, his father had marched down the road to the end of his driveway, where he accused Tom of betrayal. "He thinks I've turned against him," Tom said, his face filled with anguish. Tom insisted that he has only done what any good citizen would do: He has answered the FBI's questions. "I don't know enough to send my father to the penitentiary," he said, "and I don't want to send my father to the penitentiary." The ensuing silence has devastated this loyal son, whose feelings for his father have long bordered on worship. Once boisterous and high-spirited, Tom is subdued now; when he talks about his father, the conversation is one of resignation and regret, his voice often breaking with emotion. "Dad's the type, if you don't agree with him on everything, you're a son of a bitch," he told me. "There's nobody right but him. He's right and he's always right — never wrong — and you can't convince him no different."
The last time i saw Tom Cherry, it was a brisk winter day in Henderson County, where a sharp wind was blowing off Cedar Creek Lake and rustling through the trees. That afternoon, we sat at Tom's kitchen table, as we had many times before, and spoke about his father. We could hear Bobby Frank Cherry chopping firewood in the distance, whistling to himself as he walked between the pines.
Tom tries not to think about the possibility of his father standing trial for murder, though everywhere he turns, there are reminders of the suspicions that have overshadowed this family for nearly forty years: As we sat talking at his kitchen table that winter afternoon, a tan Suburban with tinted windows drove slowly down the road beside Tom's house, braking at the end of his front drive. Tom pulled back the curtain that covered one of his living room windows and studied the vehicle outside. No one ever emerged from the Suburban, and after ten minutes or so, it abruptly drove away. "This happens a couple times a month," he said as he watched the Suburban disappear, his face ashen. "It's an intimidation tactic. My phones were tapped for a while. I still get strange calls, hang-ups in the middle of the night." Tom had no doubts that the onlookers had been the FBI. How forthcoming had Tom been with federal investigators? I wondered, curious about their evident interest in him. The answer is one only he knows for sure, though it was clear at that moment — when Tom looked fearfully out his window — that his father's burden has now become his own.
There was one question that had been nagging me ever since we had begun talking about Bobby Frank Cherry. The catalog of his cruelties was staggering: He had beaten his wife, he had abandoned his children, and he had allegedly abused his granddaughter. He was suspected of having had a hand in one of the most heinous hate crimes in memory, one that had left four girls dead. Yet Tom remained by his side, hoping that his father might again walk along the once well-worn footpath between their houses and welcome Tom back into his life. Why, I asked him, did he remain so loyal?
Tom blinked back sudden tears. "He's my father," he replied.
My Library
