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From red-line to renaissance
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And yet Atlanta is the most densely forested urban area in America, and its beauty is self-evident, every place but downtown. Beyond the business district, the stately homes, many modeled on those of the landed English gentry, are brushed, combed and landscaped into a forested dreamscape. When it comes to Atlanta's architecture, the traditional Southern pattern -- public gentility masking private ugliness -- is reversed: The city's public face is a sneer; beauty is reserved for the private realm.

The rest of the South looks at the killings as peculiar to Atlanta. But then, the South views Atlanta as the daughter who brought it untold riches by marrying for money, not love: Envy and enmity cannot be separated. They could have been rolling in all that money, other Southerners think, if they'd been willing to hike their skirts up that far. Indeed, one of the prime engines of Atlanta's economic growth, Hartsfield International Airport, was originally meant for Birmingham, Ala. But like good Southerners, Alabamans declined such an ill-conceived intrusion on Southern life. Atlanta took sloppy seconds and never looked back.

And yet the Barton killings had their roots in Alabama, where Barton was the prime suspect in the grisly deaths of his first wife and his mother-in-law. They were hacked to death in a lakeside campground. Alabama police and the district attorney were convinced from the start that Barton did it, but they couldn't prove it. And to top it off, Barton collected on the $600,000 insurance policy he took out on his wife just prior to her death.

Mayor Bill Campbell was on TV all weekend as the city came to terms with the enormity of Barton's act, and the last three months of killing. "We'll simply have to search our souls,'' he said. "Pray for this city," he said. Some Atlantans saw irony in Campbell's asking for calm and reason, since he recently acted with anything but, in an ugly and personal local battle over affirmative action. After the Southeastern Legal Foundation threatened to sue the city over its affirmative action policies, Campbell held a press conference and urged supporters to picket the homes of the foundation's members. "So when they're having their wonderful debutante balls," he sneered, "the participants will not be able to get by." His ally, state Rep. Billy McKinney, stepped up to the microphone and said, "We have finally hit upon somebody to hate."

Nobody's suggesting McKinney and Campbell's flame-throwing rhetoric had anything to do with Barton's act, of course. But it may be that the violence of the last three months will serve to wake Atlanta up to the fact that while the city may be busy, there's still plenty of time to hate, and Atlanta's biracial commitment to business has not solved its human problems.
salon.com | Aug. 3, 1999

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