April 2000
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
DEEP IN THE PINE WOODS OF EAST TEXAS, A TWO-LANE blacktop once known as Gun Barrel Lane rambles along the backcountry, through the ramshackle beauty of clapboard churches and abandoned shotgun shacks and rusting tin roofs that sag under the weight of time. A man could hide here, amid the tangle of side roads that stray off into the bottomlands of Henderson County, and never be found again — or so it must have seemed to former Alabama Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry when he came here twelve years ago seeking refuge. The land he settled on is hard to find: Densely wooded and remote, it is accessible by only one road — a crooked path, unmarked and uninviting — that retreats into the slash pine. At its end lie two white houses, one belonging to Cherry, the other to his eldest son, Tom. Father and son live side by side in this lonesome stretch of woods, no more than a dozen yards apart, bound together by the secrets of the past. For both men know that although Bobby Frank Cherry has tried to fade into obscurity among the pines, lawmen suspect him of having carried out one of the most notorious and depraved murders of the civil rights era, a church bombing that left four black girls dead.
Cherry has long maintained his innocence, but he has not escaped his son's own nagging doubts. Tom often gazes out the kitchen window and wonders at the past, uncertain whether to believe his 69-year-old father or the FBI, whose renewed investigation into the bombing has identified Cherry as its prime suspect. The law has been on his trail ever since dynamite ripped through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, killing eleven-year-old Denise McNair and fourteen-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley only moments before they were to hear a sermon titled "The Love That Forgives." The "massacre of innocents," as it was called in headlines around the world, sparked protest and outrage; the FBI, in turn, launched its most intense investigation since the Depression-era manhunt for John Dillinger. Its findings, which fingered Cherry and three other Klansmen, were eventually shelved by J. Edgar Hoover, who feared that a white Southern jury would never vote to convict.
Rumors that his father had a hand in the church bombing have followed Tom since he was a child. Now 47 and a long-haul truck driver, he bears a strong resemblance to his father, though his features lack the old man's hardness; his own face is round and expressive, and moved by sudden emotions. Ever since Tom was 11 years old, he has lived with the possibility that his father committed murder — and yet, this is the father he grew up adoring. Their story is one of an age-old struggle between fathers and sons, for every son learns in time that his father is all too fallible, and Bobby Frank Cherry turns out to have been very fallible indeed. Tom has long revered the old man and modeled his life after him — even going so far, in his youth, as to join the Klan before finding that he had no taste for it — but the revelations of the renewed investigation have tested even his allegiances. While Cherry's other children have rallied around him, Tom has remained tight-lipped about his opinion of his father's guilt or innocence. His silence has strained their relationship: The old man has not spoken to his son in more than a year, only scowling at Tom whenever they pass on the narrow road that leads through the pines.
Tom was at his father's side, along with several other Klansmen, when the sound of dynamite rattled through downtown Birmingham that September morning. Though the bomb was most likely placed at the church the night before, what Tom might have overheard that day or in the years that followed has been a source of great curiosity on the part of federal investigators. Tom has long viewed the FBI as the enemy; he was a child when, in the wake of the bombing, agents began lurking in the alley behind the Cherry home and following his father in unmarked cars down the streets of Birmingham. But as he has grown older and had children of his own, he has come to grasp the importance of this case; during the course of the renewed investigation, FBI agents showed him crime-scene photographs of the four girls — their bodies were broken and blistered, one burned beyond recognition — and he did not easily forget them. "My sister told me to quit riding the fence," said Tom. "She said, 'You're either with us or you're against us.' Well, I'm not with or against nobody. I don't run in a pack."
Tom and I spent many winter afternoons talking about Bobby Frank Cherry — a man I would never see in all my visits to the backwoods but whose presence was keenly felt. Tom sat at his kitchen table, smoking cigarette after cigarette and interspersing the conversation with nervous laughter; he would sometimes glance apprehensively at his father's house after he spoke, as if the old man might have overheard him. "When the investigation started up again, Dad said, 'They'll do anything to put a wedge between us,'" he said, shaking his head. "The FBI has played this family against each other, is what they've done." He and his father had never had it easy: After his mother died, when Tom was fifteen, Bobby Frank Cherry abandoned him, leaving him at an orphanage. But Tom renewed contact as an adult, following him first to Dallas and then to the backwoods of Henderson County in a determined bid to win his father's affection. "I don't know if we'll ever settle our differences now," he said, rising from his seat and jamming his hands stiffly into the pockets of his blue jeans. "There's too much that's happened between us, too much to try to forgive and forget."
Now barrel chested and middle aged, Tom has a ragged smoker's laugh and his face is creased with hard living. His belongings betray a stubborn sense of family pride: He always wears a leather belt emblazoned with the Cherry name, and his house — a neat, prefabricated home shaded by pines — is decorated with an abundance of framed family photos. One, of his father as a young Marine smiling and leaning jauntily against a wall, suggests a simpler time. Tom dragged on a cigarette and furrowed his broad, ruddy face when I asked him if he doubted his father's claims of innocence. "I've had some questions, not necessarily doubting his story, but I have some questions that have been unanswered," he said. "Things that the FBI told me." The strain of the investigation was plain to see: His face was lined with worry, softened only by the occasional comfort of a cigarette, and his answers to my questions were circumspect. Had he told the FBI everything he knew? I asked. He looked up from the family photographs that he had spread out across his kitchen table, and his eyes shone with tears. "I've answered their questions," he said bitterly, "but I'm not going to help them hang him."
THE DEMONS THAT THE CHERRY FAMILY HAS BEEN running from all these years originated in the Birmingham of the fifties and sixties, where white men who saw themselves as the last defenders of the old South banded together to preserve their privileged place in a society divided by race. Birmingham was an industrial city of steel mills and coal mines, its population an uneasy mix of working-class whites and poor blacks who had come to the city from rural Alabama in search of opportunity. It was a city of tension and violence, with an undertow of racial hatred, where dynamitings of black-owned homes and businesses were so common that the city was nicknamed Bombingham. The Cherrys lived in a modest wood-frame house in the working-class neighborhood of Ensley, a white stronghold hemmed in by poorer neighborhoods that were rapidly integrating. Tom was the first-born of seven children and was named Thomas Frank Cherry after his father.
Tom shared not only his father's name and his likeness but a similar disposition: Hotheaded and stubborn, he often got into fights with the other neighborhood boys, wrestling them in empty lots on the northwest side of Birmingham. "I was like my dad then," he said. "I wasn't scared of nothing. I wanted to grow up to be just like him." Boisterous and impulsive, Tom was always careful to behave himself around his father, whom he revered. To Tom, Bobby Frank Cherry seemed larger than life: Tall and muscular, with thick, wavy blond hair, he wore a cocksure grin and a tattoo across his upper left arm bearing his name. Cherry kept a Luger tucked into his back hip pocket and a .38-caliber pistol in his boot, and his temper sometimes got the best of him. He struck his wife Virginia for not deferring to him — "My mother was just as ornery and smartass as he was," remembered Tom — and flew into a rage if his children tested his patience, once knocking all their plates off the kitchen table with a single, crashing sweep of his arm. Despite his meanness, he still commanded his son's respect. "My father was a hero to me," Tom said. "He was a protector and a charmer, the toughest guy on the block."
Bobby Frank Cherry made no secret of his hatred for black people, nor of his association with the Klan: Tom recalled that his robes, made of white satin and emblazoned across the heart with a red drop of blood, hung in the front closet of the Cherry house and a back-lit picture of a robed Klansman on horseback stood just inside the front door. The Klan had not been a presence when Bobby Frank Cherry was growing up in Mineral Springs, Alabama, during the thirties and forties, but by 1957, when the South was facing school desegregation and he was competing with black men for low-paying jobs, barely making ends meet working as a truck driver, it held its own particular appeal. The Klan bestowed a certain authority on him, and no doubt gave him a sense of power in a world that otherwise afforded him none. "It made him feel like a big fish in a small pond," said Tom. The demands of the Klan also allowed him to duck out of the house on the pretext of protecting the white race. He preferred the company of his fellow Klansmen: Hard-drinking and poorly educated like him, they spent their days working backbreaking jobs — as coal miners, meat packers, welders, and quarrymen — and raised hell at night. Many of them had records for petty crimes and a penchant for guns and whiskey; all shared fanatical views on the supremacy of the white race.
