For a long time yesterday, in the front room of the home James Byrd left recently to start a new life on his own, no one said a word. At least not to each other, writes Ed Vulliamy in Jasper.
The dead man's sister, Mary Verrett, mumbled something from the Bible she held on her lap, but that was directed at her God or at herself.
The Rev Jesse Jackson had been by the house the previous afternoon, before leading a prayer service, and plenty had been said then.
Last weekend, James Byrd had reminded his sister, Stella Blumely, not to be late for the big family get-together on Sunday, Father's Day. "I got my suit in the cleaners," she recalled him telling her. "I'm gonna be ready."
She said James liked to sing and play the trumpet. He had been trying to "get his life together" after a spell in prison, and his favourite song was a hymn called Walk With Me, Lord.
Another sister, Clara Taylor, came in from the steps leading from the yard. Byrd, she said, had no trouble getting around the town of Jasper, though he had no car. "It's not like Houston - people always give you a ride."
But last Saturday night, in this logging, bass-fishing town of 8,000, Byrd hitched his last lift. His murder was like some nightmare from the 1950s. Out on Huff Creek Road yesterday, just to the east of the town, was a phosphorescent circle of paint in the middle of which was written the word "HEAD". Byrd's right arm was also recovered, severed, in a ditch.
After a stop at a convenience store, John `Billy" King, who objected to his two companions picking up a black man, took the wheel. He then set about, as Shawn Berry's affidavit to the police puts it, "fixin' to scare the shit outta this nigger".
King, it emerged yesterday, wrote letters from jail that terrified even friends back home with their blood-curdling hatred. One of the recipients, a teenage woman who asked to remain anonymous, called the letters "just unbelievable. All about hating black people."
Deanna Tubb, now aged 22, married into King's extended family. She was unconvinced by the sheriff's claim that whites in the area were not racist. "The N-word is pretty common. A lot of people say it around here, even if they don't admit it."
Four years ago, the Ku Klux Klan moved in to try to stop the enforced desegregation of an allwhite housing project at Vidor, nearby. The lawyer who represented the KKK on that occasion, Rife Kilmer, said he was not surprised by Byrd's murder. "East Texas is more like the Deep South than the rest of Texas. There's a lot of quiet support for the Klan around here."
The drama in Jasper has the hallmarks of a movie such as Mississippi Burning.
"There is no Aryan Nation or Ku Klux Klan in Jasper county," Sheriff Billy Rowles announced to howls or derisive mirth from reporters and black people.
Darrel Flinn, the Grand Wizard of the local klan, corrected him yesterday. "You stated that the Ku Klux Klan is not active in Jasper county. I beg to differ. We have had a clavern since 1966, and continue to operate."
Sam Buentello, the assistant director of the Texas prison system's gang task force, told me yesterday that King and the third accused, Lawrence Brewer, had been monitored for affiliation to the Ku Klux Klan and a group called the Confederate Knights of America, a racist skinhead organisation, while they were serving time in a Tennessee prison for burglary.
The brotherhood has initiation rites which include murder. FBI officials - sifting through evidence - believe the killing might have been the trio's initiation rite, their having joined in prison.