Kentuckiana is cursed. François-René de Chateaubriand, on vacation from the French Revolution, coursed down the Ohio River and got misty-eyed about the “magnificent country” of Kentucky, “which means ‘river of blood,’ ” he would scribble, wrongly. The lamplight of Louisville, seen from the river, became a chain of beacon fires bringing news from Old Europe, where King Louis XVI, who gave the city its name, would be beheaded. The aristocrat was scared and confused, yet dazzled by the river valley, so he plagued it with mythic questions:

Will the European generations on its banks prove more virtuous and free than the annihilated American generations of old? Will slaves not plow the earth beneath the lashing of their masters in these wastelands of man’s primordial independence? Will prisons and gallows not take the place of the open hut and the tall tulip tree where the bird built its nest? Will the richness of the soil not engender new wars? Will Kentucky ever cease to be a land of blood and let the monuments of art make the banks of the Ohio still more beautiful than the monuments of nature?

Had Chateaubriand been tough, more of a Daniel Boone, he might have left his boat and met a straightaway reply. He might have seen my ancestor, at that moment, crossing the muddy river into the newly conjured territory on the far shore. There Robert Sturgeon built Fort Vallonia. And it was from Fort Vallonia that he rode, dirty and drunk, into the territory of Shawnee Indians. And it was in Shawnee territory that Robert got shot to death, an event recorded in family lore as the Sturgeon Massacre of 1812 and in decaying state annals as the Indian Ambush, one of many pretexts for the extermination, in the war that followed, of natives in their seisin yard.

Gazing hard at the bluegrass, Chateaubriand saw death in its beauty. But he held out hope against the obvious, against Robert. The last great prose stylist returned with his blood vision to France. There he gave himself to the father he believed would protect him from the nastier democratic urges. I am talking about Napoleon.

Meanwhile, my family plot, the little cemetery of Sturgeons in the thinning wood, added one or two angry peasant types to its numbers.

I have had several reasons to visit Kentuckiana in recent years, all being the same reason, death, namely the uninterrupted death of my paternal line. My last trip to the family parlor at Crothersville, a sliver of corn country due north of Louisville, was for my father’s funeral. A year before that, my old man could be heard telling long stories that wound around, like the river in the valley, smoking Winstons at the same funeral parlor for his own father’s funeral. And so on. It was at my grandfather’s funeral, at the same sad parlor, that I last saw Todd Sturgeon, my father’s first cousin, in the parking lot.

I was avoiding the pastor, whose knuckles were tattooed like Robert Mitchum’s in The Night of the Hunter. Todd strode by, tall and handsome, in his fifties, with a big smile and all his teeth. I believe I was charmed near the gene, aware that I was meeting my Y chromosome at the funeral for my Y chromosome. So I struck up a conversation. I asked Todd about basketball because he had once been the head coach at the University of Indianapolis. He replied, not smoking, that he was too lazy to coach anymore and would soon retire altogether. Taken aback, at the gene level, I changed the subject to his sons. He told me his youngest had begun modeling in Brooklyn, unheard of in Crothersville. His smile then fell, finding the shape of his late father Roland’s thinly sinister moue. Todd did not mention his eldest son. Now I know why.

Todd’s eldest was Connor Sturgeon, my paternal second cousin, a syndication banker at Old National in Louisville. The gap between us, Connor and me, was about fifteen years, a generation in Kentuckiana time. There are, if you like, parallels beyond the chromosome. We both graduated at the top of our respective classes at regional public schools of questionable merit. I won spelling bees; Connor won a National Merit Scholarship. A high school basketball star, like his father and mine, Connor was voted Mr. Floyd Central by his peers; I was voted, more humbly, Class Teacher’s Pet.

We both, in our early twenties, had nervous breakdowns in Louisville after graduating from college. Connor had known nothing but success in his young life, racing through his undergraduate studies and a master’s degree in finance at the University of Alabama in four years, before starting at the bank. That is when he became depressed. My own melancholia dissolved after a spell as a janitor at the Highlands Latin School, where Wendell Berry taught Shakespeare to students while I cleaned. Connor’s mania ended when he murdered five colleagues at Old National Bank on April 10, 2023, and was himself shot to death by an officer of the Louisville Metro Police Department.

The official reason given for Connor’s murders, if we are to believe the Washington Post, is nepotism. There is a truth to this, I can confirm. The grieving survivors of this second Sturgeon massacre told the Post that Connor’s nepotistic rise at the bank led to his first failures as a man, that he responded as young American men do, with wounded pride, an AR-15 rifle, and 120 rounds of ammunition. Connor told the story a bit differently. He wrote that he aimed to kill rich white Americans to prove that a sick person could too easily get an assault weapon and kill rich white Americans. But I don’t think guns were his reason; they were his justification and method. And nepotism was but the half of it. The other half was nepotism, by which I mean property.

It was Christmastime, the season my father loved, eight months after the murders. I was thankful, as far as I could be, that he had not lived to see what my cousin had done.

My wife and I drove through Lights Under Louisville, a local holiday extravaganza in an old limestone mine, winding in slow motion around the bends, mesmerized by the numberless points of variegated light in that dark labyrinth. I thought of the inflatable Santa Claus my father would put in the living room, year after year, in place of a Christmas tree, and how he would always say, giving away the game to his children, “Now, Santa Claus spent a lot of money this year. I wouldn’t lie to you kids.” And he would not.

After half an hour, we exited the cavern, and I drove my wife to Old Louisville, where she liked to wander among the Victorian houses, moving through side yards with her camera, photographing the pastiche of imported details from any period or culture that marked out the taste of the original owners. She had survived an organ transplant months before my father’s death, and I enjoyed her peace vicariously, enjoying little else. From the car I watched her ramble around the neighborhood. I thought of Daisy Buchanan, the Louisvillian from The Great Gatsby, and wondered who her father might have been.

My mother, a born Kentuckian in exile across the river, calls them the Daddies, said with an accent. She and her mother, a head librarian, raised my siblings and me among the books of a one-room Kentucky library on the western end of the Ohio River floodplain. They incubated us deep inside a book-lined idyll sheltered from the Sturgeon line. And they taught us, in this unbidden realm of mothers, to understand Kentucky is a ledger of these Daddies, wherein our name does not register.

They play the long game, we were taught, the truly powerful Daddies, with lineages that stretch back to the founding of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. John Breckinridge, for instance, was a U.S. senator and Thomas Jefferson’s head cop. His son Joseph became Kentucky’s secretary of state; Joseph’s own son took the role of vice president under James Buchanan. At about the same time, the Clay family grabbed power. Henry “The Great Compromiser” Clay, the most famous of the lot, was speaker of the House and later secretary of state; his best-known son was James, a mere U.S. representative. Then there were the Harlans, as in Harlan County U.S.A. John Marshall Harlan, “The Great Dissenter,” became a justice of the Supreme Court; about a half century later, his grandson took a seat on the high bench. That takes care of the nineteenth century.

The twentieth century saw the rise of the Chandlers, beginning with A. B. “Happy” Chandler Sr., who served as governor before taking the helm of Major League Baseball; his grandson Ben served as state attorney general and U.S. representative. Of the Fords, father Ernest, state legislator in the Senate, begat Wendell H., lieutenant governor, governor, and, later, U.S. senator. Still kicking are the Browns, beginning with John Y. Brown père, whose namesake was governor and also the plan-man who spread the gospel of Kentucky Fried Chicken all over the world.

For more than two centuries, the good fathers have carved the Commonwealth into 120 counties, stripping the land bare and bequeathing it to white boys with sinister grins and dwindling resources. They squabble and bicker and stab each other in the back: “Who supported whose campaign?” “So-and-so is too rich to govern.” John Y. Brown Jr. never forgave Steve Beshear, former governor and father of Governor Andy, until he did. They’re all basically the same; all nepotists; All the King’s Men.

These days, Andy sits in the Governor’s Mansion at Frankfort. It was drawn up, my wife tells me, after the Petit Trianon, a château gifted to Marie-Antoinette, accessed, some say, by a special key encrusted with 531 diamonds. In this tiny realm, Marie-Antoinette might have said, Je suis moi.

Meanwhile, the Daddies scrap the Commonwealth’s largest city for parts: Louisville now exhibits, by design, like a burial mound, the natural architecture of its own collapse. At the top of the pile sit the billionaire Brown children, scions of George Garvin—no direct relation to the John Y.s—refreshed with bourbon capital, shading more than ever into property development. A layer below are the fraying institutions, German-Catholic families, and the schismatic Protestants of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, leaking unto megachurches of no denomination.

It is a world Todd the father, with his leavening hand, did not fully understand. He did try to penetrate it. While at DePauw University in the Eighties, Todd befriended fellow basketball player James Sandgren, who parlayed the life laid out by the school’s vaunted Wall Street Journal alumni into a career in banking, a path I narrowly avoided at the same college in the early Aughts. Sandgren climbed the ranks, eventually becoming chief executive of commercial banking at Old National. He was Connor’s godfather.

In the months after Connor’s murders, Sandgren and Old National finalized a $9.5 billion investment in “historically underserved” communities across the Midwest and Southeast. Of course, we might ask what it means when Old National serves the underserved. In October 2021, the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana sued Old National into settlement for its severe redlining practices in the Indianapolis area, where a scant 37 out of 2,250 mortgage loans over a two-year period were offered to black borrowers. The complaint reveals that Old National slashed the number of branches in black neighborhoods, part of its “pattern and practice.” All the better, these majority-white neighborhoods, for the open-armed arrival of large-scale commercial property ventures of the sort that has helped make Old National one of the fastest-growing banks in the nation.

I dropped my wife off and drove to the Preston Pointe building in downtown Louisville, the site of Connor’s murders and abandoned by the bank because of them, and parked the car. I did not know what I was looking for there. The wide streets downtown always bothered me, and now I thought of the confused victims and bystanders running, exposed, away from the entrance of the bank. It was all glass, transparent, too easy to see inside. I found it an unnerving contrast to the building’s culmination, its terminus, a cowlick or upward swipe, an accusing finger. I thought of where Connor would have parked. The streets were too wide, probably built this way to forestall fire or flood, I thought, mocking a dreamed-of density the Daddies mistake for communion.

At Preston Pointe I found a ley line I could not see before, extending backward in time and horizontally through space. It is a string, wrapping in a ball the unruly mass of trailer parks and suburbs consolidated by the city-county merger twenty years ago. It connects the distant past, the tall tulip tree and open hut, the Victorian mansions of Old Louisville, and the offices at Preston Pointe, to a beige apartment complex off a semirural highway near a liquor store.

This is why the police hounds were sent to Breonna Taylor’s apartment. A wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Taylor’s mother, in July 2020, alleged that the city served her death warrant as part of the Vision Russell initiative, which aimed to, among other things, demolish the Beecher Terrace project and rebuild it as mixed-income units. Taylor’s ex-boyfriend was believed to have sold drugs in the West End neighborhood of Russell, out of a residence some ten miles from her address.

“Protecting lives and preserving property” is the reason given by the Commonwealth for calling in the troops in the wake of Taylor’s murder. It is why Governor Beshear activated 350 soldiers of the Kentucky National Guard to catch and kill protesters, who responded by damaging the statue of Louis XVI at Metro Hall, severing its right hand.

This is why Beshear, on the same day he signed a law placing limits on no-knock warrants, established the West End Opportunity Partnership to oversee a tax-increment financing district, or TIF. Sneaked through at midnight, the bill ignored recommendations put forth by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank, which says that most TIFs create retail projects that merely displace rather than create jobs. The bill included no provision for independent audits or performance evaluations, no concrete measures to prevent the displacement of black residents, no meaningful criteria for project selection. It leaves the fate of the West End to property developers, to Old National Bank.

This is the project Connor was primed for, or subprimed for. Hired as a commercial lender at a curiously young age, he went to work for a bank excessively leveraged in commercial real estate, holding more than $5 billion in multifamily homes “with no material exposure” to rent control. It is a bank whose $1.5 billion office portfolio averages loans of $3.1 million to “investment-grade tenants.” And it is an institution with an established history of redlining against black borrowers. If Connor had lived, if he had not murdered, he would have assumed a role in the Vision Russell initiatives and West End Opportunity Partnerships to come. He would have been tasked, by the good fathers, with letting the monuments of capital make the banks of the Ohio still more beautiful than the monuments of nature.

My cousin began his suicide diary on April 3, 2023. He used an informal ledger, weighing reasons to live or die. It is fitting for a young banker, barely twenty-five, to use a ledger. And it is not so strange that, being a board member of Junior Achievement of Kentuckiana, he would write of his “need to make an impact, affect [sic] change somehow.” Although, it must be said, this platitude declines rapidly into dark repetition, a burst of vigilance searching for release. At the bottom of the first page is the first sign that Connor’s mania had found the shape of a plan:

Something snapped Monday. This is not an accident. I’m sorry I had to lie all week but this is something I have to do. It has all been planned, and it is flawed but I think it will work. I know I won’t be around to see it, and I know that makes me a coward. But I pray this can send a message to those with power that they are not invincible. I’m sorry for everything.

—Connor

Putting to rest intrigues of household scandal, he describes his condition: “good family, no issues, good grades, no debt ? did everything right.” He does not aim to be personally understood. He rather looks to make a positive “impact” through a story he knew the tabloid media would, and did, adopt. He is candid about the obvious, writing that he got his “foot in the door w/ career thru nepotism” at Old National. His reasoning is processional; it works itself up; it “manifests,” to use a phrase he might have used, the act of violence:

I have decided to make an impact. These people did not deserve to die, but because I was depressed and able to buy guns, they are gone. Perhaps this is the impetus for change—upper class white people dying. I certainly would not have been able to do this were it more difficult to get a gun (explanation of process)

– just walked in, 45 minutes, got AR-15

– I know our politicians are solely focused on lining their own pockets, but maybe this will knock some sense into them. If not, good luck.

A careful reading, or a caring one, if such a thing is permissible, reveals in Connor’s notebook the rationale of a planner, a doer who wants to die but cannot commit the act himself, who has tested the waters, once trying to drown himself while on a family vacation, but who cannot cross the river of self-preservation. He seeks a scheme that will ensure his own death by gun while at the same time making an “impact” through political violence. His prose is clear and toneless, all the better to show his true marks, whom he names: the white upper class, the Dems who get rich by doing nothing in the name of civility, the fat cats and politicians who line their own pockets. “They will not listen to words or peaceful protests,” he writes, but there were no peaceful protests against gun violence leading up to his murders. There were protests for Breonna Taylor. There were the violent crimes of the Louisville Metro Police Department. And there were the officers of the bank.

If Connor does not show a genuine concern for his future victims, he does reveal a basically dialectical reason for murder. He wants to die, so he constructs a situation that fits with his lost honor and sense of perverted justice. “I think it will work,” he writes, because if there is one given in Louisville, it is that the police, or even Beshear’s National Guard, will kill you to protect the father’s property. But this is not how a Sturgeon would speak to his parents. He offers instead a short rhetoric for leaving the family:

Mom & Dad,

I’m so sorry for what I have to do. You two have been the most supportive, understanding parents on the planet as I have struggled through the past few years. But I cannot take it anymore. . . . Last week, I walked into a gun store, and walked out with an AR-15, 3 additional magazines, and 120 rounds of ammunition 45 minutes later. . . . This country and its politicians have decided that money is more valuable than lives—let’s see if that changes once the fat cats start feeling the pain. They won’t listen to words or peaceful protests, so let’s see if they listen to bullets. Hopefully the lives lost tomorrow can save some in the future. Please do what you can to help others, and to stop the sale of WMDs to psychopaths like me.

I love you both forever.

Connor

In his final entry, dated April 9 and time-stamped 11:57 pm, a tone of voice suddenly emerges, a childish smugness about the execution of a plan. “I always knew I was A) cunning B) mean as absolute shit, and C) a WAY better liar than anyone gave me credit for.” The diaries end with full-page entries written in all caps: i am sorry and i can’t take it anymore. The thrill of execution gives way to psychic collapse.

On the morning of April 10, Connor posted a meme on Instagram, an image of Adam Driver as Kylo Ren that read, “I know what I have to do but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it.” Anyone who has watched the Star Wars movies knows that Driver’s character, moments later, kills his father.

At 8:15 am, Connor arrived at Preston Pointe, with its tall glass windows. He opened the trunk of his Mazda and pulled out a bag containing a fresh shirt, the AR-15 rifle, magazines for the rifle, and protection for his eyes and ears. He went inside the bank.

He controlled the clock. Twenty minutes later he left his own corner office with the gun and extra magazines, heading for the conference room presumably because he knew a meeting for the officers of the bank was taking place there. He factored in five minutes for members to arrive, and began to stream his activities live on Instagram. He met his first victim in the hallway, firing the gun to no avail, reloading the gun before shooting her in the leg. Three seconds later he fired on the conference room. Positioned in the hallway, he shot and killed Joshua Barrick outside the room before turning his fire back within, killing James Tutt, Juliana Farmer, Judy Eckert, and Tommy Elliott.

“sturgeon,” the police report says, “does not actively move throughout the building or seek anymore [sic] victims based off his mannerisms.” Survivors fled the conference room and crossed the street to seek help. He would open fire again only when the LMPD arrived. His suicide diary leaves no question: this was not an attempt to escape. Twenty seconds after his attack began, he waited in the hallway. The only thing left to do now was die.

Over the next four minutes, he scanned his surroundings, at one point checking his watch, moving toward the front of the bank, where he awaited the officers. He fired two rounds at a police vehicle from the front entrance, looking through the glass windows to see outside; he fired two more rounds at the feet of civilians stepping off an elevator, without hitting them, perhaps as warning shots. When the first two officers approached, he again opened fire, hitting both; an Officer Wilt was also shot as fellow police officers tried to administer aid. For two and a half minutes, he paced from his ambush position to a window, where he looked for more arriving officers. At 8:43 am, and for the last time, he fired his gun at the LMPD and then was shot by an Officer Galloway in the leg, arm, and head, ending his life. Much of this violence was captured in footage from sturgeon’s livestream and police body cameras, newly required by law after the murder of Breonna Taylor.

I was speaking to my brother’s neighbor in Portland, at the whiter edge of Louisville’s West End, having just said hello, moments before, to his fast-talking daughter. She ran the counter of a convenience store nearby whenever the kindly owner was busy. The store is called 2 Brothers, but one of the co-owners had left the business after accidentally shooting an employee to death and narrowly avoiding prison. I struggled to ignore the pig roaming in the neighbor’s yard.

“You got coffee for me?” he said and laughed from the uncellophaned window of his red van. The neighbor had gained fifty pounds since I had last seen him, no doubt on account of stress. One of his sons, months earlier, had been shot and killed while trying to steal an unmarked police car. It turned out that an undercover cop was inside the vehicle, wearing a body cam. The young car thief—I believe he was the neighbor’s eldest son—had been wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun, with his girlfriend nearby. The whole recorded spectacle had made the rounds on the local news. I told him I was sorry about everything; no one should be shot over a car. “That’s not my son,” he said enigmatically, Laius-like. He was always smiling. We both waved at a black man in a Santa Claus suit parking his motorcycle down the street.

Source image of surveillance video, Old National Bank, Louisville © Louisville Metro Police Department/ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy

The West End, where my brothers live, shapes the base of the burial mound. It is not such a sturdy base, being a series of property borders within a border city that tellingly calls itself the Gateway to the South and not the Saloon Door to the Midwest.

This is a matter of history. After the Civil War, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and the well-worn glory of the Ohio River gave Louisville a Northern-industrialist luster that attracted the great migrants escaping Jim Crow and the lynch mobs. These blacks often worked as servants for whites and so lived on adjacent streets, in a checkerboard fashion, an arrangement briefly codified in a city ordinance. A 1917 Supreme Court decision overturned the ordinance, but this gave way to segregation with a different shape. In the Thirties, the Roosevelt Administration’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation began the redlining practices that continue unabated and that have proven so deadly today.

In the Forties and Fifties, a second migration to Louisville, spurred by the military-industrial complex, saw blacks working more in local plants. Ford’s jeeps. Curtiss-Wright’s aircraft parts. B. F. Goodrich’s synthetic-rubber tires. The arrangement changed again when Eisenhower’s urban-renewal programs destroyed neighborhoods in central and eastern Louisville, pushing black residents into the West End. Blockbusting there gave way to white flight when realtors helped black people purchase property in formerly all-white neighborhoods, leading white homeowners to panic and sell their homes on the cheap. Since that time, the city has witnessed cycles of white riots and black protests, the latter a bid to halt the Kentucky Derby of history.

Connor was not a lone wolf. He was, perhaps, a Remus, adrift on the Ohio instead of the Tiber, adopted by wolves, with a mythic twin. Connor never met his Romulus because the good fathers dealt wisely with them, and saw to their segregation, lest they joined and multiplied and rose up together.

Still, Quintez Brown existed—exists, in fact. He was a child of the West End. And he was, until he was not, one of the few writers in the Louisville press who took the history of segregation personally, who tied the city’s redlined past to the property quietism broken like a curse in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s murder. Brown had come to local attention at duPont Manual High School, where, as the president of the Black Student Union, he staged a sit-in against a principal who, Brown said, called himself a “wigger.” In 2018, Brown appeared in an MSNBC segment about gun control; he was selected, in 2019, after what he described as a slight application process, to take part in the Obama Foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance. That year, still a teenager, Brown began an internship at the Louisville Courier Journal, rounding out the newspaper’s coverage of race with lived-in if studious prose, here in a piece of juvenilia addressed to God:

God, I’ve heard many people try to explain why the boogeyman kills. Some say it’s because, just like me, his father had been incarcerated, his parents separated, and he’s the product of a broken household.

Some say it’s because of where we’re from—the West End of Louisville. A place that people might not necessarily think of having a chess team. A place people are convinced is “very poor, very dangerous and very badly run” as evidenced by our high crime rate, high poverty levels and Democratic leadership.

The “boogeyman” is a striking, arrested figure in Quintez Brown’s writing. He is certainly a symbol of what Brown calls “spectacular Black death,” the media’s transmutation of black skin into red meat. He is equally a cipher, the boogeyman, for an unnamed assailant who shot and wounded Brown’s father:

Maybe my stories won’t be published and you will never read this article because I forget to bring your attention back to my lead story about my father. I forget because I was too busy reflecting on how various institutions in society work together to maintain the status quo of the spectacular Black death. . . . 

I never wanted to ask who shot my father. I could only imagine it being the same omnipresent boogeyman that has forever terrorized our communities. . . . 

My father grew up during the Reagan administration’s war on drugs. His mother, my nana, grew up during the Johnson administration’s war on poverty. I grew up during the Bush administration’s war on terror. War has existed in my family for generations. Are we cursed people? Consider the answer our slave-owning Founding Fathers would give.

Quintez Brown hears the echo of Chateaubriand’s erotema: Are we cursed? Still, it is strange that the Courier Journal should publish Brown’s warnings, not merely because they address race with a worldliness the paper usually shucks for kernels of digestible history. Brown’s journeyman prose is overwhelmed by the vigilance needed for his project; his words bare the gap in local memory they mean to redress. Nonetheless, the Courier Journal was announced as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service on June 11, 2021, in recognition of the paper’s coverage of the murder of Breonna Taylor and its aftermath. Brown was the sole black writer cited among the nine journalists.

Eight days after the Pulitzer announcement, Brown vanished. “He was last seen Saturday at Algonquin Park,” a reporter for the Courier Journal wrote after his disappearance. “Friends posting on social media say he recently shaved his head and facial hair and was last seen driving a dark blue 2006 Nissan Sentra with the license plate 827 ABK.” He was found on a bench in New York City a couple of weeks later. “I found my mans!!!!” his father, Jacobe Daugherty, wrote on Facebook. “I wanna thank everyone who prayed for my son and family.”

After returning to Louisville, Brown went quiet for six months. He returned to writing the following January, no longer with the Courier Journal but in a Medium post. “During our short stay on this glorious planet,” he writes, “we all have been collectively dehumanized and reduced to political talking points.” His letter is an artifact excavated from the burial mound. Brown looks to “dialectical materialis[m]” and the “revolutionary consciousness of the masses,” which must go beyond “the ballot box of the ruling class” into other “modalities.” He does not consider, he does not express a genuine concern, that a general will so massive might not be swayed by this appeal. He wields instead the refrain of the cast-aside, the threatened Oedipus, disenfranchised, revealing in two sentences his lonely metamorphosis through the history of West End defeat: a high school student cleverly masking his anger with decorum; a thwarted bid into the consensus; and now his separatist moment. “Attempting to get within one of the two major parties has caused our leaders to become co-opted with their interests shunted to the background. They have become expendable.” It happens that being found on a bench, the airing out of being found by the media of which you were once a part, pierces the dignity built up by that media, MSNBC, and Barack Obama.

Two days later, Brown became the boogeyman. He bought a Smith & Wesson revolver and made his way to a shooting range across the river in Indiana. He retweeted a meme of Mark Watkins, the COO of the University of Louisville and a board member of the West End Opportunity Partnership, flanked on either side by Steve Poe, a hotel developer and UofL trustee, and Craig Greenberg, a Democratic candidate for mayor, all dressed in graphical flames, set beneath the words: “Will UofL be complicit in gentrifying the West End?” The court record goes on to state that Brown searched online for the address of Greenberg’s home and campaign headquarters and for information about his wife and child. He then took a Lyft to Greenberg’s neighborhood on the night of February 13, 2022, when it is believed his revolver jammed. He had loaded a bullet backward. After searching for gun shops in the UofL area, he returned home.

Quintez Brown certainly knew more about Craig Greenberg, his target, than what is written about him in the newspaper today. He is the son of Ronald Greenberg, a prominent businessman and a former executive of Jewish Hospital, a major medical center in Louisville that has been sued more than thirty times for unsanitary conditions, including excrement in care wards. Ronald Greenberg later became the chairman of the state council on postsecondary education, hence the family ties to the University of Louisville’s property aspirations. The younger Greenberg, for his part, found his footing as an attorney at the super firm Frost Brown Todd, where he worked on New Markets Tax Credits, a public-private program created to finance real estate. From there, Craig Greenberg helped launch and lead 21c Museum Hotels, selling it to a multinational, AccorHotels, in 2018. Laura Lee Brown, of the bourbon Browns, and her husband banked $51 million from the deal, retaining a 15 percent stake. Since Connor’s murders, Old National has moved from Preston Pointe to the building housing the offices of Frost Brown Todd, Greenberg’s old haunt, a few blocks away.

On Valentine’s Day, Brown bought a second gun, a Glock 17 with a case, three magazines, and a lock, for $742 at a pawnshop. He headed to Greenberg’s campaign headquarters at the busy Butchertown Market, where he fired six shots into a room of staffers, hitting the wall in every case except for the bullet that ripped through Greenberg’s sweater. The staffers barricaded the doors, and Brown withdrew. I imagine he took his time. He was arrested about a mile away with magazines, a backpack, and a Kappa Alpha Psi jacket.

“It’s all been since he started college. I haven’t really heard from him. He’s always busy,” his mother, Cecilia Brown, told the New York Post later that month. “He’s been living with his dad. I don’t know what was on his mind.” Brown had left the realm of mothers.

Much hay was made in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, especially for a state where guns are sold, more or less, with thimbles of bourbon. In a statement after the attempt on his life, Greenberg’s office said, “Our criminal justice system is clearly broken”—referring not to the American gulag, or to the police murder of Breonna Taylor, but to the proposition that “someone can attempt murder on Monday and walk out of jail on Wednesday.” The Louisville Community Bail Fund had posted a $100,000 bond to release Quintez Brown from jail, citing mental-health concerns. The media reported that Brown planned to mount an insanity defense, but it is hard to believe this strategy could have worked. The Department of Justice directed its Criminal Section chief to expedite review of crimes under section 245 of Title 18 of the United States Code. Brown would be charged under the provision that makes it a federal crime to willfully injure, intimidate, or interfere with a person “voting or qualifying to vote, qualifying or campaigning as a candidate for elective office,” or to make such an attempt.

Quintez Brown would be the first to point out that this section of the code was enacted as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, passed in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Title VIII of the same law, the Fair Housing Act, made redlining illegal. A Kentucky grand jury indicted Brown on March 28, 2022. In the wake of Thomas Crooks’s suicidal misfiring at Donald Trump, Brown pleaded guilty to federal crimes. He was sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison.

Nonetheless, Brown’s six shots in Butchertown woke the Daddies. Their man had arrived. A PAC for Greenberg’s mayoral bid swelled with funds. Christy Brown, of the bourbon Browns, a founding board member of the Berry Center, as in Wendell, contributed $100,000. Laura Lee Brown and her husband contributed $75,000. After he won the election, Greenberg’s transition team included, notably, Laura Douglas, the former in-house counsel for Standard Oil who now runs the West End Opportunity Partnership, and Tommy Elliott, who was, at the time, senior vice president of Old National Bank. He would hold that position until Connor killed him at Preston Pointe—until Connor finished, in a sense, what Quintez Brown had begun.

“Tommy Elliott helped me build my law career,” said Governor Beshear after Elliott’s death. “Helped me become governor. Gave me advice on being a good dad.” Beshear called Elliott his “incredible friend.” Indeed, Elliott, in the Courier Journal, has been called “everybody’s friend” in Louisville.

My brothers sat in the living room inside watching Dawne Gee, local news legend, read a teleprompter. Our father’s death, and Connor’s murders, welled up and overtook me. I had lashed out at old friends, siblings, my mother, my wife’s father, a friendly mortician at a bar in the Highlands. That this reaction was unjustifiable, greater in force than any force exerted by my father, only exacerbated my state. A gentle, generous, lethargic man, no colossus, an encourager and advice-giver, his death erased his life along with the semi-collapsed house we had lived in as teenagers, leaving what should have been exactly a father-size hole. My brothers had returned to Louisville, buying separate, sturdy houses in Portland, it seemed to me . . .

I told them about the run-in with the neighbor and his pig.

“It’s like DNA-Day,” my eldest brother said. He was talking about the time he made my parents order 23andMe tests, aiming to, in his words, “finally find out what went wrong with this family. You know, the incest.” This turned out to be his short rhetoric for leaving the family.

My second-eldest brother has repaired the roof of his own house in Portland, with a little help from his best friend, Joel, who has “old, crunchy bones,” my brother says. Joel is tall and bearded, with a thick Kentucky accent, prone to the occasional biblical outburst. Together they dream of little more than parking an old RV, one so browbeaten nothing new can go wrong with it, down by the Ohio, hooking it up to a generator, and becoming river rats. Joel trades in what he calls “experiences,” by which he means the slightest favor done for him will be met with an expenses-paid trip to a music festival, with hallucinogens and whatever else is needed. During one of these experiences, Joel submitted from his cell phone an application for my brother to become a Kentucky Colonel. It was accepted.

The ceremony was held at Joel’s house in the Highlands. A large group assembled there: a woman I barely remembered, some old friends, a wiry man I had never met wearing a black robe of initiation. I was ordered to wait with my brother in a guest room with two of Joel’s old dogs while preparations were made, which seemed, by the sound of it, to mean whiskey shots. After ten minutes, the signal was given. We emerged from the back room, my brother now inexplicably shirtless and blindfolded. We walked slowly to the back patio, sounding a slightly out-of-sync chant, where my brother was told to kneel. Speeches were made honoring his deeds in Louisville; he was dubbed on either shoulder with a scepter extended with a fried-chicken drumstick. No bursts of vigilance now. For the first time in two years, I felt the sting of relief. The celebration that commenced was as meaningful as they come, bearing no relation to any ceremony a group of sound historical minds would ever want to attempt. This is how a curse begins, I thought, or gets lifted.

Nathanael West said, wisely, that families have no histories in America. Such a story told, even twice-told, is always lacking, never filling the whole picture because it is set apart. Until it piles within the burial mound, waiting to be unearthed, where every sack of bones is the second cousin of every other sack of bones. Between Robert Sturgeon and me, between Connor and me, there is merely the family cemetery, the sad parlor, the fraying chromosome, and the nontransferable deed.

Still, if I have wrestled with Connor’s words, it is because I wonder over his reasons, which whirl in my head like Winston smoke. If I have lingered over his face, it is because I cannot unsee, in its shape, my younger face. And I have struggled with Connor’s murders, and so has my family: pain when the subject is merely broached, falling smiles, downcast eyes. No, family resemblances do not collect into stories that pool into the tributaries of history, not along the Ohio River, with its annihilated generations. Fortunately, in this fatherland, I do not worry too much about my name.