Alex Cross's Trial

Chapter 19

I WAS SOON ENOUGH reminded of the dangers of the mission I’d undertaken for the president of the United States. Two days into my journey south, I was in Memphis, about to board the Mississippi & Tennessee train to Carthage, where I would switch to the Jackson & Northern for the trip to Jackson. I had just discovered some truly disturbing reading material.

I had been waiting when the Memphis Public Library opened its doors at nine a.m. A kindly lady librarian had succumbed to one of my shameless winks. She agreed to violate several regulations at once to lend me a number of back issues of the local newspapers, which I agreed to return by mail.

I had carefully chosen the most recent issues that carried sensational stories of lynchings on their front pages. Many of those appeared in the Memphis News-Scimitar and the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

I was instantly confused by one headline that declared, “Colored Youth Hung by Rope AND Shot by Rope.” The article explained that after the fifteen-year-old boy was strung up by his neck – he’d been accused of setting fire to a warehouse – the mob shot so many bullets at his dangling corpse that one bullet actually severed the rope. The boy’s body crashed to the ground, a fall that would surely have killed him had he not already been dead.

Another article blaring from the News-Scimitar concerned the lynching of a Negro who was the father of two young boys. The man was taken forcibly from the Shelby County Jail and lynched within a few yards of the entrance. The unusual thing here? A member of the sheriff’s department had gone to the man’s home and brought his sons to view their daddy’s lynching.

The “coverage” in these pieces read more like the review of a new vaudeville show or a lady pianist at a classical music concert. To wit:

The Everett lynching was far more gruesome than the Kelly lynching of but two weeks previous. Due to the unusual explosion of Thaddeus Everett’s neck and carotid arteries, this hanging was both more extraordinary and interesting than the afore-mentioned Kelly death.

And from the Memphis Sunday Times, a “critique” of a different lynching:

Olivia Kent Oxxam, the only woman privileged to be present at “Pa” Harris’s lynching in the River Knolls region, declared it to be “One of the most riveting events of my lifetime. I was grateful to be there.”

These articles made the lynchings seem so engrossing that they must surely surpass the new Vitagraph “flicker” picture shows for their entertainment value.

I folded the papers carefully and stashed them in my valise. Then I decided that the heat inside the train carriage was worse than the soot and grime that would flow in from the stacks after I opened the window. I made my move, but the damn window wouldn’t budge.

I was pushing upward with all my strength when the gentleman in the opposite seat said, “Even a strong young man like yourself won’t be able to open that window – without pulling down on the side latch first.”

Chapter 20

I LAUGHED AT MYSELF, then pulled on the latch. The window slid down easily. “I guess strength doesn’t help,” I said, “if you don’t have some brains to go along with it.”

My fellow traveler was middle-aged, paunchy, seemingly well-to-do, with a florid complexion and a gold watch fob of unmistakable value. He put out his hand.

“Henley McNeill,” he said. “Grain trader. I’m from Jackson.”

“I’m Benjamin Corbett. Attorney at law. From Washington.”

“Miss’ippi?” he said.

“No, sir. Washington, D.C.”

“Well, you are one very tall attorney, Mr. Corbett. I would bet those Pullman berths play havoc with the sleep of a man your size.”

I smiled. “I’ve spent my whole life in beds that are too short and bumping into ceilings that are too low.”

He laughed and put away the book he’d been reading.

“Are you a journalist, too?” Henley McNeill asked.

“No.”

“Well, I only ask on account of I saw you reading all those newspapers.”

I decided to see where the truth might take me. “I was doing a little research… on the history of lynching.”

He blinked, but otherwise betrayed no reaction. “Lynching,” he said. “In that case, newspapers might not be your best source of information.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well, sir, in my view, the newspapers don’t always tell the truth.

“Let me give you a point of observation,” McNeill continued. “Now, this is just the opinion of one man. But I’m a man who’s spent his whole life right here in Mississippi. And my daddy fought for the Confederacy alongside Braxton Bragg at Stones River.”

Henley McNeill seemed like a sensible fellow. This was the very type of man Roosevelt had in mind when he sent me down here to speak with the locals.

“The white man doesn’t hate the colored man,” he said. “The white man is just afraid of the colored man.”

“Afraid?”

“Not afraid in the way you think. He’s not afraid the colored man’s going to rape his wife or his daughter. Although, let’s be honest, if you turned a colored man loose on white women with no laws against it, there’s no telling what might happen.”

He leaned forward in his seat, speaking intensely. “What genuinely scares the white man is that the colored is going to suck up all the jobs from the whites. You just got out of Memphis, you saw how it is. It’s the same in all the big cities – Nashville, New Orleans, Atlanta. You got thousands and thousands of Negroes running around looking for jobs. And every one of ’em willing to work cheaper than the white man, be they a field hand, a factory hand, or what have you.”

I told McNeill that I understood what he was saying. In fact, it was not the first time I’d heard that theory.

“Yes, sir,” he went on. “The black man has got to figure out a way to get along peaceable with the white man, without taking his job away from him.”

He paused a moment, then leaned in to tap the side of my valise with an insistent finger. A smile spread over his face.

“And if the black man don’t come to understand this,” he said, “why, I reckon we’ll just have to wipe him out.”

Chapter 21

HOME AGAIN.

Home to the town where I learned to read, write, and do my multiplication tables. Home to the town where my mama fell ill, stayed ill for many years, and died, and where my father was long known as “the only honest judge in Pike County.”

My town, a little over three thousand souls, where I once set the Mississippi state record for the hundred-yard dash, shortly before I broke my leg in a fall from a barn roof. Where Thomas McGoey, the mail carrier, rang our doorbell and personally presented me with the letter announcing I’d been accepted at Harvard.

The last time I’d been home to Eudora was for my mother’s funeral, six years ago. I remember being startled at the time by how much the town had changed. Most astonishing to me then were the two gas-powered motorcars parked beside the hitching posts.

Many other things had changed since that last mournful journey to my birthplace. But on this day, while I waited for Eudora Station’s one ancient porter to summon the energy to unload my trunk, I found myself amazed to see how much this lazy little town resembled the one I knew when I was a boy.

The early-summer heat remained as overwhelming as I remembered, the whitish sun seeming to press down on everything under its gaze. The First Bank, Sanders’ General Store, the Purina feed and seed, the Slide Inn Café – everything was just the same.

Eudora Town Hall still featured an oversized Confederate stars-and-bars hanging in the second-floor window above the portico. The same faded red-and-white-striped barber’s pole stood outside the shop with the sign that said “Hair Cuts, Shaves, & Tooth Extractions” – although no one had gone to Ezra Newcomb for a bad tooth since the first real dentist moved to town when I was eleven.

One difference I noticed immediately was that many of the doorways – at the depot, at the little vaudeville theater, at the Slide Inn – now bore signs marking certain entrances as “White” or “Colored.” When I was a boy, everyone knew which places were for whites and which for Negroes.

At last the porter approached with my trunk and valises, accompanied by a gangly colored teenager. The porter asked, “Will we be taking these to your father’s house, Mr. Corbett?”

I frowned. “How’d you know my name?”

“Well, suh, the stationmaster tol’ me to hurry up and go help Judge Corbett’s boy with his trunk, so I purt’ much figured it out from there.”

I gave the old man a dime and offered another dime to the boy if he would carry my luggage on to my destination. He threw that heavy trunk up on his shoulders as if it contained nothing but air and picked up my pair of valises with one large hand.

“I’ll be staying at Maybelle Wilson’s,” I said. “I’m here on business.”

We crossed to the First Bank and turned left onto Commerce Street. It was right then that I had the feeling that I had entered into one of Mr. H. G. Wells’s fabled time-transport machines. “My God,” I said under my breath. “How can this be?”

Chapter 22

THERE BEFORE ME was my first sweetheart, Elizabeth Begley, instantly recognizable with her blond curls, her delicate face, a sweet young girl in a pretty pink-checked sundress.

I realized with a start this was neither a dream nor a memory. This really was Elizabeth Begley. And she truly was eleven years old!

Then I saw the very real and very grown-up Elizabeth Begley step out of Ida Simmons’s notions shop and call out to the little girl standing before me.

“Emma? You wait right there for me.”

I called out Elizabeth’s name. She turned, and her face lit up instantly.

“Why, good Lord! Ben Corbett! The heat must have gone to my eyes. This cannot be you!”

“It’s Ben, all right. Your eyesight is just fine.”

As was everything else about her. Elizabeth looked as beautiful as when I used to sneak glances at her all through our school years together. If anything, she’d gotten even prettier as a woman.

“Well, Ben, what brings you back to our little nothing of a town?” she asked.

I told myself to close my mouth, which had fallen open in astonishment, partly at the chance meeting, but also at the sight of this lovely woman.

“Oh, just some work for the government. Interviewing candidates for the federal bench, potential judges. And I suppose I needed a breath of good old Mississippi fresh air.”

“Honey, everybody in town is just gonna be beside themselves with excitement to see you,” Elizabeth said and beamed. “The famous Ben Corbett, the one we all thought had gone off forever to be a Yankee lawyer, has finally come for a visit! I know your father must be thrilled.”

“I hope he will be,” I said. “It’s a surprise. The job I’m on came up suddenly.”

I doubted that many people in town – especially my father – would be all that happy to see me. But that wasn’t the kind of information to share with Elizabeth. Instead I remarked that Emma was as pretty as Elizabeth had been as a girl, which happened to be true, and made both of them smile.

“I see you’ve still got honey on your tongue, Ben,” she said, with a hint of a blush. And then a wink, to show her sense of humor was intact.

“I’m just speaking the truth,” I said, smiling. It really was good to see her.

“Ben, I would love to stand here and visit with you and get more compliments, but Emma is going to be late for her dance class,” she said. “I do want to talk to you. Where is Mrs. Corbett? Did you abandon her at the station?”

“She stayed home,” I said. “The children are involved in their lessons.”

“I see,” Elizabeth said, with an inflection that suggested she didn’t quite comprehend that version of events. “It’s been too long, Ben,” she went on. “I hope we’ll see each other again?”

“Of course we will. Eudora is a small town.”

“And that’s why we love it.”

She took her daughter’s hand and headed off toward the shade of the oak trees surrounding the town square. I turned around and stood watching Elizabeth and Emma as they walked away.

Chapter 23

HERE’S SOMETHING I truly believe: a man should be able to walk through the front door of his childhood home without knocking. I was thinking this as I clutched the ring of the brass knocker on my father’s front door. I may have spent the first eighteen years of my life here, but it was never my house. It was always his house. And he never let me forget it.

It was six years ago, at my mother’s funeral, that I had last laid eyes on my father.

It hadn’t gone well. I had just buried the most understanding parent a man could possibly have. When the service was over, I was left with a stern, distant, conservative father who had no use for a lawyer son who leaned the other way. After the funeral luncheon, after all the deviled eggs and potato salad and baked ham had been consumed, after the Baccarat punchbowl had been washed, dried, and put away, my father had an extra glass of whiskey and began to pontificate on the subject of my “Washington shenanigans.”

“And if you don’t mind, what might those terrible shenanigans be?” I asked. “How have I disappointed you?”

“Believe it or not, son, y’all don’t have a lock on every form of human knowledge in that Yankee town you now call home,” he said. “The news does travel down to Mississippi eventually. And everybody I know says you’re the most progressive young lawyer in Washington.” I had never heard that word pronounced with a more audible sneer.

I didn’t answer. All the way down on the train, I had vowed to myself not to react to his temperamental outbursts.

“Your mother enjoyed that about you,” he went on. “Your Yankee free-thinking ways. But she’s gone now, God rest her soul. And I can tell you this, Benjamin. You’re a fool! You’re up to your knees in the sand, and the tide’s approaching. You can keep trying to shovel as hard as you can, but that will not stop the tide from coming in.”

“Thank you for the colorful metaphor,” I said. Then I went upstairs, packed my valise, and went back to Washington.

After that I heard from him only once a year, around Christmas, when a plain white envelope would arrive containing a twenty-dollar bill and the same handwritten note every year:

“Happy Christmas to yourself, Meg, and my granddaughters. Cordially, Judge E. Corbett.”

Cordially.

Chapter 24

NOW HERE I WAS, STANDING at his door again. And as much as it galled me to knock on that door, I could not come home to Eudora without seeing my father. I was sure he already knew that I was back.

Dabney answered the door. He had been my father’s house-man since before I was born.

“Good Lord! Mister Ben! Shoot, I never expected to open this door and find you on the other side of it. The judge is gonna be absolutely de-light-ed to see you.”

“Dabney, it’s good to know you’re still the smoothest liar in Pike County.”

He smiled brightly and gave me a wink. Then I followed him to the dining room, breathing in the old familiar smell of floor wax and accumulated loneliness.

My father sat alone at the long mahogany table, eating a bowl of soup from a fine china bowl. He glanced up, but his face did not change when he saw me – eyes icy blue, his lips thin and unsmiling.

“Why, Benjamin. How nice of you to grace us with your presence. Did somebody die?”

My father’s gift for sarcasm had not diminished. Immediately I found myself wishing I hadn’t come running over to his house my first day in town.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Sound body, sound mind. As far as I can tell. Why? Have you heard otherwise?”

“Not at all. I’m glad to hear you’re well.”

“What wonderful Yankee manners. I trust you are healthy yourself?”

I nodded. The silence between us was almost painful.

“So, Ben, you still busy up there freeing the slaves?”

“I believe it was President Lincoln who did that.”

“Ah, that’s right,” he said, a wisp of a smile coming to his face. “Sometimes I forget my history. Care for some turtle soup?”

Soup? On a ninety-degree night in Mississippi?

“No, thank you.”

“No turtle soup? Yet another in a succession of foolish choices on your part, Benjamin.”

My father did not ask me to take a seat at his table.

He did not ask what brought me to Eudora after six years, and I wondered if it was possible that he knew.

He did not inquire after Meg, or ask why my wife had permitted me to travel all this way by myself. He did not ask about Alice or Amelia.

I thought of Mama, how much she would have loved having two little granddaughters in this house. It was always too quiet in here. I remembered one of her favorite expressions: “The silence in here is so loud, I can hear my own heart rattling around in my ribs.”

Judge Corbett looked me up and down. “Where is your baggage?” he asked.

“I’m not staying here,” I said. “I’ve taken a room down at Maybelle Wilson’s. Actually, I’m here on business for the government. I have to check out some candidates for the federal courts.”

I could have sworn this news made him wince, but he recovered quickly enough.

“Fine,” he said. “Be about your business. Maybelle’s should suit you perfectly. Is there something else?”

I saw no reason to prolong this agony. “Oh, no. Nothing. It was pleasant to see you again.”

He waved for Dabney to ladle more soup into his bowl. He dabbed at his lips with a starched linen napkin. Then he deigned to speak.

“We should arrange another visit sometime,” my father said. “Perhaps in another six years.”

Chapter 25

“YOU NEED SOMETHING for your belly, Mr. Corbett?” Maybelle called in a loud voice from the front parlor of her rooming house.

I had found the Slide Inn Café all closed up for the night, but still I declined Maybelle’s invitation. “No, thank you, ma’am. I’m all taken care of.”

“Just as well. Ain’t nothin’ in there but some old pone.”

Maybelle’s had never been known for luxury. In fact, the only thing the place was ever known for was a string of slightly disreputable boarders through the years. Now, I supposed, I was one of them.

The original Maybelle had died years ago, about the time the house was last given a fresh coat of paint. But Eudora tradition dictated that any woman who ran the place was referred to as “Maybelle.”

Occasionally a shoe salesman or cotton broker spent a night or two at Maybelle’s. Once or twice a year my father commandeered the place to sequester jurors during a trial. And there were, inevitably, rumors about women of uncertain morality using the rooms for “business.”

A monk would have felt at home in my room: a narrow iron bed, a small oaken desk with a perilous wobble, and an equally wobbly cane-backed chair. On the bureau were an enameled-steel bowl and pitcher. And under the bed, a chamber pot for those times you didn’t want to make the trip to the outhouse.

In the corner of the room was one small window, which somehow managed to admit all the hot air from outside during the day and to hold it inside all night.

I stripped down to my Roxford skivvies and positioned the chair directly in front of that window. I suspected there was no breeze to be had in town that night. Luckily, my room was provided with the latest advance in cooling technology: a squared-off cardboard fan with the inscription “Hargitay’s Mortuary Parlor, The Light of Memphis.”

A lonely man sitting with his bare feet propped up on a windowsill, waving a funeral fan at his face.

Welcome home, Ben.

Chapter 26

IT WAS TOO DAMN HOT for sleeping. I figured I might as well do some detective work in my room.

I had put aside two newspapers from the collection of “lynching reviews” I’d brought from Memphis. Now was as good a time as any for reading.

These particular articles were of special interest. From the pages of the Jackson Courier, they told the stories of lynchings that had taken place right here in Eudora, and within the past three years.

I unfolded the first paper:

Word of an horrific death by strangulation reached our office this morning. By the time this reporter visited the alleged scene, no trace of said hanging was evident, save for a bloodied rope tossed aside in a pile of swamp grass.

The unanswered questions were obvious. Who told “this reporter” that the death was “horrific”? Why was he so careful to use the word “alleged”?

I picked up the other newspaper.

We learned of the death by lynching of Norbert Washington today. A witness at the lynching site in that area of Eudora called “the Quarters” said that Washington, a tobacco tanner at a plantation in nearby Chatawa, had been heard making rude and suggestive comments to a white lady in the Chatawa Free Library.

Upon investigation it was discovered that the town of Chatawa did not have a library, free or otherwise. That information notwithstanding, the eyewitness stated, “The hanging was most exciting, gruesome and, I must add, satisfying in its vengefulness for the niggerman’s impertinence.”

I was glad that I kept reading, even though I wanted to look away. The final sentences were, for me, the most startling:

When interviewed, Chief of Police Phineas Eversman said that he was unaware of any lynching that previous evening in Eudora. A visitor in Chief Eversman’s office, the respected Eudora Justice Everett Corbett, agreed. “I too know nothing about a lynching in Eudora,” Judge Corbett said.

I let the newspapers fall to the floor. No wonder Roosevelt needed someone to sort out this tangle of contradictions, half-truths, and outright lies.

Loneliness also gives a man time for thinking. It broke my heart to be so far away from my family – and to have left on this trip without a single kind word between Meg and me. From my valise I drew a small pewter picture frame, hinged in the middle. I opened the frame and stared at the joined photographs.

On the left was Meg, her smile so warm, so bright and unforced, that I found myself smiling back at her.

On the right were Alice and Amelia, posed on the sofa in our parlor. Both of them wore stiff expressions, but I knew the girls were seconds away from exploding into laughter.

I studied the images for a few minutes, thinking only good thoughts. I wished there were some way I could blink my eyes and bring the pictures to life so that all three of them could be here with me.

Chapter 27

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, I discovered that the current Maybelle, a pleasant and blustery woman, was not much of a cook. I sat at the dining room table, poking at breakfast: a biscuit as tough as old harness leather, grits that were more lumps than grits, and a piece of salt pork that was 100 percent gristle.

“Miss Maybelle, who belongs to that bicycle I saw leaning against the shed out back?” I finally asked. “I need to see a few people around town.”

“I keep that for the boy runs errands for me after school,” she said. “You welcome to borry it, if you like.”

Five minutes later I was rolling up my pant legs to protect them from bicycle chain grease. Two minutes after that I was sailing down Commerce Street. I felt like a nine-year-old boy again, keeping my balance with my knees while extending my arms sideways in a respectable display of balancing skills.

I was nine again, but everything I saw was filtered through the eyes of a thirty-year-old man.

I rode the bicycle two circuits around the tiny park in front of the Methodist church, took a left at the minister’s house and another left at the scuppernong arbor. At the end of the vine-covered trellis stood a simple white wooden structure that was unsupervised by anyone’s eyes and universally known among the young people of Eudora as the Catch-a-Kiss Gazebo.

It was here that I came with Elizabeth the summer I was fifteen. It was here, on that same wooden bench, that I leaned in to kiss Elizabeth and was startled down to my toes by an open-mouthed kiss in return, full of passion and tongue and spit. At the same moment I felt her hand running smoothly up the side of my thigh. I felt the pressure of her nails. My own hand moved from her waist to her small, rounded bosom.

Then Elizabeth pulled away and shook her head, spilling blond curls onto her shoulders. “Oh, Ben, I want to kiss you and kiss you. And more. I want to do everything, Ben. But I can’t. You know we can’t.”

I had never heard a girl talk like that. Most boys my age were hopeless when it came to discussing such matters – at least, in Eudora they were.

There were tears in Elizabeth’s eyes. “It’s all right,” I said, but then I grinned. “But we could kiss some more. No harm in that.” So Elizabeth and I kissed, and sometimes we touched each other, but it never went any farther than that, and eventually I went away to Harvard, where I met Meg.

Now I rode that bicycle fast down the lane, leaning into the curve, rounding the corner at the preacher’s house, faster and faster, remembering Elizabeth Begley and the first taste of sex that had ever happened to me anywhere but in my own head.

Chapter 28

I PEDALED THAT BICYCLE all the way from my growing-up years to the present day. And I began to see people I knew, shopkeepers, old neighbors, and I waved and called out “Hi.” A couple of times I stopped and talked with somebody from my school days, and that was fine.

I rode over to Commerce Street, past the Slide Inn Café, past the icehouse where a bucket came flying out of the darkness just in time to trip up poor George Pearson and send him to his death by hanging.

The exhilaration of my first ride through town was fading under the glare of a morning sun that was beating down hard. I was out of training for Mississippi summers. My thirst was demanding attention, and I remembered a pump at the end of the cotton-loading dock at the gin, just down from the depot.

I pedaled down Myrtle Street to the end of the platform that ran from the cotton gin beside the tracks of the Jackson & Northern line. I leaned my machine against the retaining wall and turned to the pump.

As I worked the handle and reveled in the water – half drinking, half splashing my face – I heard a loud voice behind me, an angry voice.

“What the hell makes you nigger boys think you can come high-walkin’ into our town looking for a job? All our jobs belong to white men.”

At the other end of the platform were two large and burly men I recognized as the Purneau brothers, Jocko and Leander, an unpleasant pair of backwoods louts who had been running the cotton gin for Old Man Furnish as long as I could remember. The two of them towered over three scrawny black boys who looked to be fifteen years old, maybe even younger.

“Well, suh, we just thinking with the crop coming you might be needin’ some mo’ help round the gin,” said one of the boys.

“That’s the trouble with you niggers, is when you set in to tryin’ to think,” said Leander Purneau. He spoke in a friendly, jokey voice, which put me, and the boy, off guard. But then he popped him a solid punch on the side of his face and sent the boy down onto his knees.

The other boys skittered away like bugs from a kicked-over log. Suddenly I really was back in the past, and the boy on the ground was in serious trouble, like poor George Pearson had been.

There was one difference now – I was not a timid little boy. I was a grown man. As I wiped my wet hands on my shirt, I considered what I was about to do.

If I caused a commotion, made a scene, called attention to myself, I might endanger my mission even before it started.

But if I did nothing?

Fortunately, the boy on the ground rolled over and jumped up. He sprinted off down the platform, holding his jaw, but at least he was getting away.

And at that very moment, I felt something cold and hard jammed against the side of my neck.

It felt an awful lot like the barrel of a gun.

A deep voice behind me: “Just put your hands in the air. Nice and slow, high, that’s the way to do it.”

Chapter 29

“NOW, I WANT you to turn around real slow, partner. Don’t make any fast moves.”

I did exactly as I was told. Real slow.

And found myself looking straight into the face of Jacob Gill. Jacob and I had been inseparable from as far back as I could remember, until the day I left Eudora for college.

“You son of a bitch!” I shouted at him.

Jacob was laughing so hard he actually held his stomach and doubled over. His laughter made him do a little jig of delight.

“You nearly gave me a goddamn heart attack,” I said. “You’re a jackass.”

“I know,” Jacob said, howling some more.

Then we hugged, seizing each other by the shoulders, stepping back to get a good look.

“How’d you even know it was me?” I asked.

“We don’t have too many yellow-haired fellows ten feet tall hanging around,” said Jacob. Then he added, “I saw you decide not to mix it up with Jocko and Leander. That was smart thinking on your part.”

“I guess so,” I said. I remembered the time Jacob left me in the swamp to watch what happened to George Pearson. I wished I could tell him why I’d held back this time.

“Hey, it’s near dinnertime,” Jacob said and lightly punched my shoulder. “Let’s go get some catfish.”

“That sounds good. Where we going?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve turned into such a big-city boy you forgot Friday is catfish day at the Slide Inn?”

Chapter 30

I PUSHED THE BICYCLE between us down Myrtle Street, toward the town square. Jacob stopped twice along the way to take a nip of whiskey from a pint he kept in his worn leather toolbox, and I said hello to a couple more people I recognized, or who remembered me.

The Slide Inn was alive with the hum of conversation, the smell of frying fish, the smoke from the cigars of the old fellows who always occupied the front table, solving the world’s problems on a daily basis.

“Why aren’t you staying at your daddy’s?” Jacob asked as soon as we sat down at a corner table.

“You know my father,” I said. “It seemed like Maybelle’s was the smart place to be. My father and I just don’t get along.”

“All right, then. But there is one question I been dying to ask: What in hell are you doing back in Eudora?”

“Nothing much,” I said. “I’ve got a little business to tend to.”

“Lawyer business?”

“Just a simple job for the Justice Department. I have to interview a few lawyers in the county, that’s all it is. In the meantime – it’s catfish!” I said.

Pretty soon Miss Fanny came from behind the counter bearing plates of crispy fried fish, sizzling-hot hush puppies, and ice-cold sweet-pickle coleslaw. The first bite was delicious, and every bite after. I asked Miss Fanny what time the place opened for breakfast, and made up my mind never to suffer through another of Maybelle’s breakfasts.

“Hell, I look old, but you still look like a high-school boy, Ben,” said Jacob. “Like you could run ten miles and never even break a sweat.”

“Oh, I did plenty of sweating just riding that bike a dozen blocks,” I said. “It’ll take me a while to get used to this heat again. How you been keeping yourself, Jacob?”

“Well, let me see… you probably heard I turned down the offer to be ambassador to England… and that was right after I passed on the chance to be president of the university up in Tuscaloosa. Well, sir, it was shortly after that I made up my mind that the profession I was most suited for was as a carpenter’s assistant.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Honest work.”

“Yeah, me and Wylie Davis are the men you want to see if you need a new frame for your window screens, you know, or a new roof for your johnny house.”

Then there was silence, a good and acceptable kind of silence – nothing nervous or uncomfortable about it. The kind of quiet that is tolerable only between old friends.

It was Jacob who finally broke it.

“They were good days, Ben. Weren’t they?”

“They were great days.”

“We were friends! Right through it all.”

“The best,” I said. “We were like brothers.”

We clinked our iced-tea glasses. Then Jacob spoke.

“But there is one thing I need to make very clear to you, Ben.”

“What’s that?” I tried to keep the note of concern out of my voice.

“You said we were like brothers?”

“Yeah? That’s what I said.”

“I just need to remind you of something.”

“Well, go ahead, Jacob,” I said.

“I was always the pretty one.”

Chapter 31

ENOUGH!

Enough idle thoughts about my long-ago romance with Elizabeth Begley.

Enough turning over in my mind the painful lack of affection between my father and me, the disgust in his face when he saw me for the first time in six years.

Enough reliving an old friendship like Jacob’s and mine.

Theodore Roosevelt hadn’t sent me to Eudora to take a rickety bicycle ride down memory lane. I had a job to do, and it might even help change history.

I paid the bill for our lunch, and Jacob left two bits for Miss Fanny. Then he headed off up Commerce Street to help Wylie frame a new roof for the front porch of the town hall.

An old black man stepped off the sidewalk as Jacob passed, not to avoid a collision, but simply making the customary show of respect. Black men of all ages had been stepping down off sidewalks to get out of my way since I was five years old.

I rode the bicycle back to Maybelle’s, changed my shirt, and set off on foot for the Eudora Quarters. On my way out, I made sure to tell Maybelle I had some interviews to attend to.

I considered trying to hire a horse and buggy, and couldn’t think of anywhere in town to do such a thing. My father had three perfectly good horses in his barn, of course, but I was determined to do what I came to do without him.

ABRAHAM CROSS, EUDORA QUARTERS said the slip of paper the president had given me.

It was time for me to meet this Mr. Cross.

Chapter 32

I KNEW THE STREETS of the Quarters almost as well as I knew the rest of Eudora. I knew the history of how it came to be. After the war, the slaves from all the plantations and farms in the vicinity of Eudora had been freed. Most of them had either left their previous lodgings or been turned out by masters who no longer wanted to provide housing for people they didn’t own.

So the freed slaves built their homes where no one else wanted to live, in a swampy, muddy, mosquito-ridden low place half a mile north of the center of Eudora.

They gathered fallen logs from the woods and lumber from derelict barns to build their little houses. They laid boards across the swampy, pestilential ground to keep their children’s feet out of the mud. They stuffed rags and old newspapers in the chinks in the walls to keep out the wind in winter.

They ate squirrel and possum, poke sallet and dandelion greens. They ate weeds from the field, horse corn, the leftover parts of a pig, and whatever else they could get their hands on.

Walking along there now, as the neighborhood changed from poor white to poorer black, I saw a colored man sitting on the porch of a shack painted a gay shade of blue. He nodded at me.

I returned his nod. “Pardon me, do you know a man by the name of Cross? Abraham Cross?”

He never blinked. His eyes didn’t move from mine, but I had the feeling he was deciding whether or not I was worthy of the information I sought.

“Yes, suh,” he finally said. “If you just keep walkin’, you will come on a house with a strong smell of onions. That will be Abraham’s house.”

The sight of a white man walking on this street was not a welcome one for most of the people I came across. They kept their eyes down as they passed, which seemed to be customary now in Eudora but had not been the case when I was a boy.

Within minutes I caught the sharp tang of onions on the air. I saw thick patches of the familiar blue-green stalks in the yard of a small red house.

Suddenly, from the space between two houses, one little boy came running, followed by two more, and two more in pursuit.

“He gonna snatch you and eat you,” the lead boy shouted.

Then I saw what was chasing them – a wild pig, huge and hairy and grunting, bearing down on the boys with a pair of very bad-looking tusks.

“That ain’t the most beautiful animal in the world,” said a colored man standing on the porch of the red house.

I answered, “That is a face not even a mother could love.”

I looked closer. The man was taller than me, by at least three inches, and older, by at least fifty years.

“But she sure is beautiful when she’s angry,” he said.

We both laughed.

Then he said, “Begging your pardon, sir, but I get the idea you might be looking for someone.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I am looking for a man. His name is Abraham Cross.”

“Yes, sir. You lookin’ at him.”

I must have appeared surprised.

“You was expectin’ some young fella, weren’t you, Mr. Corbett?”

“No, I– I really had no idea who to expect…”

“Well, sir, I confess I was expectin’ a young fella myself. So I guess at least one of us was right.”

Chapter 33

MAYBE IT WAS because he looked like a picture of silver-haired wisdom. I just don’t know. But the truth is, I liked Abraham Cross from the moment I met him.

When he shook my hand, he grasped my shoulder with his other hand, so that I felt well and truly gripped.

“From this moment, Mr. Corbett–”

“Call me Ben,” I said.

“From this moment, Mr. Corbett,” he said pointedly, “I am happy to be of service to you as a guide and advisor. With luck, we may also become friends.”

I told him that I felt luck would be on our side.

He offered me a seat on his porch, which had a view of everyone passing along the boards from one end of the Quarters to the other. Abraham greeted everyone – man, woman, child – with a friendly wave and a personal word of greeting. I think if that hairy old boar had come back, Abraham would have waved and said howdy.

Abraham Cross had the way of a man at ease with himself. He wore dark woolen trousers, a neatly ironed white shirt, and a navy blue bowtie. I don’t know if he’d dressed up because he was expecting me or if he dressed this way every day.

On his head was a faded blue baseball cap with the initial P faded to near invisibility. I asked him what the P stood for.

“Pythians,” he said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“Weren’t they athletes in ancient Delphi?” I said.

“Well, sir, I may be old but I ain’t as old as the Greeks in old Delphi,” he said, laughing.

Then he explained.

His greatest love in his young life, he told me, was baseball. After the War between the States he headed north, where a few Negro teams played.

“Notice I said they ‘played.’ I didn’t say they ‘flourished.’ Anyways, I made the team in Philadelphia. We was porters and butlers, iron men, lawn mower men during the week. On the weekends we played baseball.”

At Abraham’s nod, I followed him off his porch and toward the little “downtown” of the Quarters.

We were passing the colored general store, Hemple’s, where you could see the canned goods inside through gaps between the boards. By the front door stood a neat pyramid of beautiful peaches.

Abraham reached into his pocket for a couple of pennies, which he took inside to the old man at the cash box. He came back out and selected a nice fat peach from the side of the stack.

“Were you any good?” I asked the old man.

He smiled. He looked past me to a broom standing just inside the door. He asked me to hand it to him.

“You want to know if I was any good?”

He held the broom short, like a baseball bat. Then he tossed that beautiful peach into the air.

He swung.

He connected. Tasting a fine spatter of peach juice on my face, I watched it sail up and up, into the hot afternoon sky.

“Don’t bother to go lookin’ for that peach,” he said.

“I believe it is gone,” I agreed.

“In a minute or two it’s gonna be in Loosiana,” he said with a grin. “They always said tall, skinny boys like you and me can’t play baseball. They say we too far from the ground. I’ll tell you something, I proved they don’t know everything.”

He wiped the broom handle on his shirt and put the broom back inside.

We walked a few minutes in silence. Then Abraham stopped, his face suddenly serious.

“I could talk baseball and swing at soft peaches all day,” he said. “But you and I have some other business.”

“Yes, we do,” I said.

“This is serious business, Mr. Corbett. Sad business. My people are worse off now than they were the day Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation.”

Chapter 34

“WE DON’T HAVE TO GO far to find a lynching tree,” Abraham said. “But I know how tired you young fellas get from walking in the heat of the day. I reckon we’d best take the hosses.”

The two “hosses” Abraham led out from a rickety blacksmith shop were mules – in fact, they were mules that had hauled one too many plows down one too many cotton rows. But those skinny animals proved their worth by depositing us, less than twenty minutes later, at a secluded swampy area that was unmistakably the site of a lynching.

Unmistakably.

A cool grotto tucked back in the woods away from the road. Big branches interlaced overhead to form a ceiling. The dirt was packed hard as a stone floor from the feet of all the people who had stood there watching the terrible spectacle.

Abraham pointed to an oak at the center of the clearing. “And there’s your main attraction.”

Even without his guidance, I would have recognized it as a lynching tree. There was a thick, strong branch barely a dozen feet from the ground. The low dip in the middle of the branch was rubbed free of its bark by the friction of ropes.

I walked under the tree. The hard ground was stained with dark blotches. My stomach churned at the thought of what had happened in this unholy place.

“Somebody left us a greeting,” Abraham said. “That would be the Klan.”

He was pointing behind me, to the trunk of a sycamore tree. About five feet up, someone had used an odd-looking white nail to attach a plank with crude lettering on it:

BEWARE ALL COONS!

BEWARE ALL COON LOVERS!

“I’ve never seen a nail that color,” I said.

“You never seen a nail made out of human bone?” said Abraham.

I shuddered, reaching up to haul the plank down.

“Don’t waste your strength, Mr. Corbett,” he said. “You pull that one down today, there’ll be a new sign up there next week.”

His face changed. “We got company,” he said.

Chapter 35

THE DOUBLE-BARRELED SHOTGUN pointed our way was almost as big as the girl holding it. It was so long and heavy I was more afraid she would drop it and discharge it accidentally than that she might shoot us on purpose.

Abraham said, “What you fixin’ to do with that gun? That ain’t no possum you aimin’ at.”

I was distracted by the fact that she was very serious and very pretty. She wore a simple cotton jumper, stark white against the smooth brown of her skin. A perfect face, with delicate features that betrayed the fierceness of her attitude. Deep brown eyes flashed a steady warning: keep away from me.

“What y’all doing messin’ around the lynching tree?” she said.

“You know this girl, Abraham?”

“I surely do. This is Moody. Say hello to Mr. Corbett.”

Moody didn’t say a word to me. She kept her barrel trained on my heart. If she was going to stare at me this way, I couldn’t help looking back at her.

“Well, if you know her,” I said, “maybe you should tell her not to go around pointing firearms at people.”

“Moody, you heard the man,” said Abraham. “Put it down. Now, granddaughter.”

“Oh, Papaw,” she said, “what you bring this white man out here for?”

Abraham reached out and pushed the gun barrel away. Moody pulled back from him as if he were trying to take away her doll.

“She’s your granddaughter?”

“That’s right.”

It struck me that the girl had seemed as willing to shoot her grandfather as to shoot me. She walked boldly up to me, around me, looking me over as if I represented some species of animal she had never observed before and already didn’t like.

“Mr. Corbett is here from Washington,” said Abraham.

“You working for him?” said Moody. “Why would you?”

“We working together,” said Abraham.

“Well, if you ain’t working for him, how come he calls you Abraham, and you call him Mr. Corbett?”

“Because he prefers it that way.” Abraham knew that wasn’t so, but he fixed me in place with a look that stifled the protest in my throat. “Mr. Corbett is here by the instructions of the president of the–”

“Abraham,” I said. “We’re not supposed to talk about any of this.”

He nodded, dipped his head. “You are right, Mr. Corbett,” he said.

Moody gave me a disgusted look and said, “You should have let me shoot him while I had the chance.”

Chapter 36

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, gumbo was not something most white people would eat, unless they were Catholic and lived down on the coast. Gumbo was food for black people, or Creole people. Like chitlins and hog ears, it was the kind of thing mostly eaten out of necessity. Or so most people thought. My mother’s cook, Aurelia, used to whip up a big pot of sausage-and-crawfish gumbo and leave it to feed us through Friday, her day off.

So when Abraham suggested we stop in at a little gray shanty of a saloon with a crooked sign on the door, GUMBO JOE’S, I was a happy man. Also along for the meal was Moody and her brother Hiram, a handsome boy of nineteen with aspirations to be a lawyer.

I was surprised at the idea of a Negro restaurant in Eudora, but when I stepped inside the place, I saw it was 95 percent saloon, with a little cooker perched beside the open window in back. On the flame sat a bubbling pot.

An old black man came out from behind the rickety bar. I couldn’t help flinching at the sight of him: he had no chin, and his right arm was severed just below the elbow.

Without our asking, he brought three small glasses and a bottle of beer. “Y’all want gumbo?”

“We do,” said Abraham.

So much for a menu.

Abraham poured beer into all three glasses, and I took one. It wasn’t cold, but it tasted real good.

“What happened to that man?” I said softly.

“The war,” said Abraham. He explained that the old man had been a cook for Pemberton’s army at Vicksburg. The Yankee mortar shell that crashed through the mess tent was no respecter of color or rank.

“He lost half his face fighting for the side that was trying to keep him a slave,” I said.

“Wasn’t fighting, he was cooking,” said Abraham. “A lot of us did. The pay was good. Better than we got staying home. Those was good times, if you didn’t get killed.”

The War between the States had been officially over for forty-three years but had never actually ended in the South. The Confederate battle flag still flew higher than Old Glory, at least at our courthouse. There were Rebel flags hanging on the fronts of stores and from the flagpoles of churches. Ever since I was a boy I had recognized the old faded butternut cap as the sign of a Confederate veteran.

There had always been men with wooden legs or wooden crutches. I knew that an empty sleeve pinned up inside a suit jacket meant an arm had been left on a battlefield in Georgia or Tennessee. Maybelle’s handyman, otherwise a handsome old gent, had a left eye sewn shut with orange twine. The skin around that eye burned to a god-awful dry red that would have scared me if I’d been a child.

“That old man behind the bar?” said Abraham. “Before the war, he was trying to become a professional fiddler.”

I shook my head. “And now he has no chin to lean his fiddle on,” I said.

Abraham’s face broke open in a big smile. So did Moody’s and her brother’s. “Aw now, Mr. Corbett, I was fooling on you. Old Jeffrey wasn’t no fiddler. He was slingin’ beer back before the war, and he been slingin’ beer ever since.”

Moody saw the look on my face and busted out with a guffaw. “Papaw, Mr. Corbett ain’t too swift, is he?”

Chapter 37

THE CHINLESS OLD MAN RETURNED, bearing in his good hand a tray with three steaming bowls of dark gumbo.

“Look like we maybe gonna have some music too,” Hiram said, and his face lit up in a smile.

Two or three men had drifted in, still shiny-sweaty from the field. They ordered beers and shot nervous looks in our direction. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how out of place I was in here. It was the Negroes’ place; who was I to come in and sit down as if I belonged?

At least they had the courtesy to let me sit there, which would certainly not be the case if one of them tried to order a beer in a white barroom.

I was delighted to see a grizzled middle-aged fellow taking out a banjo, tuning it up while his buddy drummed his hands on an overturned gutbucket. The thin, listless woman between them waited for the banjo player to plink a little chord, and then without any introduction or ritual, she set in to wailing.

The little hairs on my neck prickled.

“You heard the blues before, Mr. Corbett?” asked Hiram.

“I have – one time,” I said. “On Beale Street in Memphis.”

“You like the way she sings?” Moody said.

“I do,” I said. “I like it a lot.”

Moody shrugged, like she didn’t much care which way I answered her question.

“I’m a devotee of ragtime music,” I told her.

“You a what?” said Moody. “A deevo – what did you say?”

“Admirer,” I said. “I’m an admirer of ragtime.”

“No, that word you used – what was it again?”

Moody had a bold way of speaking. I must admit I wasn’t accustomed to being addressed by a colored girl without the customary “yes, sir” and “no, sir.”

“Devotee,” I said. “One who is devoted to something. I think it’s from the French.”

“That’s a pretty word,” she said, “wherever it come from.”

When that lament ended, the banjo man put down his instrument and brought out a battered guitar.

Once again I was swept up in the mournful repetition, the slangy bent notes from the singer echoed by the guitar, the way it all fell together into a slow, rhythmic chant of pure feeling. This music was made from leftover parts of old field songs and hymns and slave music, but to me it sounded like something entirely new, and something quite wonderful.

Chapter 38

MY BELLY WAS STUFFED full of gumbo and rice. My tongue still burned from the red pepper. I remarked to Abraham on the staying power of the cayenne.

“Here, take a chaw on this,” said Abraham. From his satchel he brought forth a length of brown sugarcane. I smiled. That’s what our cook Aurelia used to prescribe for a sore throat or any other minor childhood complaint: a suck on a piece of sweet cane.

“You got enough for family?” said Moody.

“I got plenty, but it don’t look right for a gal to chew cane,” Abraham said.

She put on such a pout that Abraham laughed and brought out a piece for her and another for Hiram.

“My granddaughter is incorrigible,” said Abraham. “I hope you can forgive her.”

“I don’t need him forgiving me,” she said.

Her grandfather’s face darkened. “Moody? Watch your mouth.”

She dropped her eyes. “Yes, sir.”

“See now, Mr. Corbett, she got so comfortable settin’ here next to you that she’s done forgot how she s’posed to act. If you was any other kind of white man, she could be in big trouble right now, sassing you that way. Same thing goes for Hiram. Even more so.” I had the feeling he said this more for Moody’s and Hiram’s benefit than for mine. Moody kept her eyes riveted fiercely on the floor beside our table.

“See, when you’re colored, you always about this close–” he held up his fingers, indicating a tiny space “–to sayin’ the wrong word. Or lookin’ the wrong way. And that means you this far from gettin’ beat up, or kicked, or punched, or cursed. Or gettin’ strung up and killed by the KKK.”

I took a long sip from my beer.

“Everything a colored man does can be a crime these days,” he said.

“I don’t quite understand,” I said.

Moody’s eyes came up. “Let me tell him, Papaw.”

He hesitated, but then he said, “All right.”

“They’s a young fellow called Whitney,” she said, gazing intently at me. “He spent a day hoeing out the flowerbeds around ol’ Miz Howard’s house, then when she was done he told her how much it was. She didn’t want to pay. Said he hadn’t worked that many hours. Then she calls up the sheriff and says Whitney done said something dirty to her. Well, she got him arrested, but that wasn’t enough for ’em. They come drug him out of the jail and hung him up. Killed him. All because he asked for his pay.” Her eyes blazed.

“That’s the truth,” said Hiram.

“Sammy Dawkins brung his empty Co-Cola bottle back to Sanders’ store to get his penny back. Ol’ Mr. Sanders tells him niggers don’t get the penny back, just white folks. Sammy argues with him and next thing you know he’s in jail. For wanting his penny!”

“Keep your voice down,” Abraham said.

“There was a couple boys sitting on the sidewalk downtown. They was talkin’ to each other quiet like, telling about this strike of colored men up in Illinois. Well, sir, somebody overheard what they said, and next thing you know a bunch of men jump on these boys. One of ’em, they knocked out all his teeth.”

“We get punished for ‘boasting,’ and for ‘strutting,’ and for talking too loud, and for casting the evil eye. We get arrested for ‘walking too fast,’ or ‘walking too slow,’ or taking too long to say yassuh.”

Moody was furious now. Her voice carried to tables nearby. Some of the people stopped their own conversations to listen.

“Colored man looks at a white woman, they kill him just for thinkin’ the thoughts he ain’t even thought,” she said. “If he even looks at a white woman, it must mean he wants to rape her or kill her. When they’re the ones doing most of the raping and killing around here!”

“Now, calm down,” Abraham said.

“Don’t tell me to calm down! I know what it’s like. It happens to me too, Papaw.”

“I know, child.”

“You don’t know what happened yesterday. I was bringin’ the basket of ironing back to Miz Cooper, you know she got that boy Dillard, he’s not right in the head. Well, he out there pulling weeds in the kitchen garden. He looked at me. All I said was, “Howdy, Dillard,” and he says somethin’ real rude, like, ‘Maybe you want to go with me, Moody’ or somethin’ like that. I just ignored him, Papaw. I just kept walking. But he come up behind me and grab me, like, you know, touching my titties.”

“Hush,” said Abraham sternly.

“It’s what happened, Papaw,” she said. “Then he says ‘Aw come on, Moody, you a nigger girl, and ever’body knows that is all a nigger girl wants.’”

And with that, she couldn’t keep the tears in. She folded her arms on the table and buried her head. Hiram stroked her neck.

I spoke softly: “We’re going to do something, Moody. That’s why I’m here with your grandfather.”

There was silence. Then Moody looked up at me and she was angry.

“Go home, Mr. Corbett. That’s what you could do. Just pack up your bag, and go home.”

Chapter 39

“I GUESS YOU PRAYED for mail, Mr. Corbett,” Maybelle said as I walked past the kitchen of the rooming house the next morning. “And the Lord answered.”

She held out a plate with a pair of blackened biscuits and another plate with three envelopes. My heart lifted. But my happiness faded when I glanced through the letters and found that none of them had come from Washington.

I smiled down at the biscuits, thanked Maybelle, and put them aside for disposal later.

On my way over to the Slide Inn, I thumbed through the mail. First I opened a flyer inviting me to a “social and covered dish supper” at the Unitarian church in Walker’s Bridge, one town west of Eudora. In the right-hand margin was a handwritten addition:

“Ben – Hope to see you at the supper. Elizabeth.”

The next envelope also held an invitation. This one was a good deal fancier than the first, engraved on heavy paper, wrapped in a piece of protective tissue.

What was this world coming to? A fancy-dress invite from L. J. Stringer, of all people!

It was hard to believe that the sweet, kindly boy with whom I’d spent a good portion of my childhood was now in such a lofty position that he could send out invitations engraved on thick vellum. And that on his way to manhood, L.J. had invented a machine that shot twine around cotton bales in one-eighth the time it took four men to do the job.

The Stringer Automatic Baler. Without it, Cotton would no longer be King.

I eased into a rear table at the Slide Inn Café. I ordered coffee and a big breakfast of grits and eggs, patty sausage and biscuits. I thought about L. J. Stringer for a moment or two, but my heart was heavy at the absence of a single letter from home.

Why hadn’t Meg written? I didn’t really need to ask myself that. I knew the answer. But even if she was too angry – why hadn’t she allowed the girls to write?

I decided to detour by the post office just to make sure no letters had been accidentally sent to Judge Everett Corbett’s home.

Meantime I took a slurp of the Slide Inn’s good chicory coffee and tore open the last of my three letters, the one without a return address.

At first I thought the envelope was empty. I had to feel around inside it before I found the card.

It was a postcard, like any other postcard. In place of a picture of the Grand Canyon or Weeki Wachee Springs, the card bore a photograph of a young black man dangling from a rope. His face had been horribly disfigured. The whip marks on his bare chest were so vivid I felt like I could touch them.

On the other side of the card was a handwritten message:

THIS IS THE WAY WE COOK COONS DOWN HERE.

THIS IS THE WAY WE WILL COOK YOU.

WE KNOW WHY YOU ARE HERE.

GO HOME, NIGGER-LOVER.

Chapter 40

I DIDN’T GO HOME, of course; I couldn’t – my mission was only just getting started. So I actually talked to some candidates for federal judgeships. And I continued my secretive investigation for Roosevelt. I even squeezed in a few hours at L. J. Stringer’s party and remembered what a good friend he was.

A few weeks later, I felt I needed a haircut, and I knew where to go: Ezra Newcomb’s.

During my visit, I congratulated Ezra, Eudora’s only barber, on the sharpness of his blade. This resulted in my receiving a nine-point instructional course on the most important techniques involved in properly sharpening a straight razor. (The truth was, I had brought my own dull razor along, hoping to have Ezra sharpen it.)

“You got to start her off real slow, then you swipe down the strop real fast,” he was saying.

This was exactly the lesson I had gotten from Ezra the last time he cut my hair, when I was a boy of eighteen.

“Just don’t understand it,” Ezra said. “A boy goes all the way up to Harvard and they don’t teach him how to sharpen a razor.”

“I must have been out sick the day they gave that class.”

Ezra laughed and swept the bib off me with a dramatic flourish. He returned my sharpened razor to me. I handed him a quarter and told him to keep the change. He whistled at my generous big-city tipping habits.

Then I stood outside the barbershop in the bright September sun, admiring the dangerous gleam on the edge of the blade.

“Why, Ben, you’re looking at that razor the way most men look at a pretty girl!”

I turned around to see Elizabeth Begley standing right there beside me. We were practically elbow to elbow.

“I was admiring Ezra’s handiwork. In all my years of trying, I have never been able to put half as good an edge on a razor.”

“Oh, Ben, I don’t believe there’s anything you can’t do,” she said, “if you decide to go after it.”

Now what was this craziness? Was my old girlfriend flirting with me? Was I flirting right back?

I flicked the razor shut and slipped it into my pocket.

“Come walk me to Jenkins’s store,” she said. “I bought new boots for Emma and she’s already been through the laces. That’s not right.”

We walked the sidewalk of Commerce Street, which was fairly deserted at this hour.

“A little bird told me you were the guest of honor at the Stringers’ dress party the other night,” she said.

“I wouldn’t say guest of honor,” I said. “But I guess some people are a little curious what I’m doing back here.”

“You must tell them all you’ve come to visit me,” Elizabeth said with a smile. “That will get their tongues wagging.”

She laughed, and so did I.

“Speaking of people who love to talk behind other people’s backs…” She nodded in the direction of Lenora Godwin, who was walking toward us on the sidewalk across the street, apparently lost in thought.

“Lenora was at the party,” I said. “She’s still as well dressed as ever.”

“Did she look ravishing?” There was a slightly caustic edge to the question.

“She may still be the ‘Best Dressed,’” I said, “but I was wondering why the ‘Most Popular Girl’ at Eudora High wasn’t there.”

“It’s simple, Ben. She and her husband were not invited to attend.”

I was surprised to hear this. I knew that Eudora “society,” such as it was, was a small, intimate group. Surely Elizabeth would be included.

“I think you know my husband is Richard Nottingham, the state senator,” Elizabeth said. “Richard is known to be the political kingmaker.”

“I did know that,” I said.

“Well, then, put it together. L. J. Stringer never sits down to dinner with anyone more important than himself. Some people say that Richard will be the next governor,” she said.

“And what do you think, Elizabeth?”

“He certainly wants to be governor. But I… I don’t want to leave Eudora.”

We had reached Jenkins’s store now. “Thank you for walking with me, Ben. And for our talk. Now I have boot laces to buy.”

To my disappointment, she didn’t invite me in with her. But Elizabeth leaned in and lightly kissed my cheek, then disappeared into the store – the same one where my mother had collapsed when I was just a boy.

Chapter 41

MY MOTHER USED TO SAY, “When you’re truly in love, you see the face you love in your coffee cup, in the washstand mirror, in the shine on your shoes.” I remembered those words as I sat at my regular table at the Slide Inn, sipping a cup of strong and delicious chicory coffee.

Miss Fanny brought my breakfast of fried eggs, creamy salty grits, a slice of cured ham, and buttermilk biscuits, but I only had eyes for my coffee cup, and Mama’s words haunted me. I couldn’t stop thinking about Elizabeth. Yes, Mama. I see her face in the surface of my coffee.

Elizabeth.

If I were not feeling so lonely and abandoned by my wife, would I be having these feelings? Probably not. But I was feeling lonely and abandoned, and worse – aroused.

Elizabeth.

My reverie was broken by Fanny’s exclamation as she looked past me and out the window.

“That boy is like to drive me crazy, late as he is. Look at him, running up here like his shirttail’s on fire!”

A gangly colored boy of about sixteen was headed for the café in a big, sweaty arm – pumping hurry – such a hurry, in fact, that he almost dashed in the front door without thinking.

Then he saw Fanny and me staring at him. He remembered his place, ducked his head, and went around back.

Miss Fanny went to meet him. Through the window to the kitchen I saw the two of them in serious conversation, the boy gesticulating wildly.

I waited until Miss Fanny came back out front, then lifted my finger for more coffee. She brought the tin pot over to me.

“What’s the trouble?” I said.

“Big trouble,” she said quietly. “Seems like there was another hangin’ party last night.”

I kept my voice low. “You mean… a lynching?”

“Two of ’em,” she said.

Chapter 42

I TOOK ANOTHER SIP of coffee and noticed that my hand was shaking some. Then I folded my napkin and headed back through the kitchen as if I intended to visit the privy. On the way I detoured to the side of the room where the boy stood over a sinkful of dirty dishes.

“What happened, son?” I said. “Please, tell me everything.” At first the boy just stared at me without speaking a word. Fanny came up behind us. “It’s okay, Leroy. This here’s Mr. Corbett. He’s all right to talk to.”

At last the boy spoke. “You know who is Annie?” he said. “The one cook for Miz Dickinson? She got a girl, Flossie, little older than me?”

I didn’t know who he was talking about, but I nodded so he would continue.

“Well, it was that Mr. Young,” he said, “Mr. Jasper Young.”

I knew Jasper Young, who owned the hardware and feed stores. He was a quiet, grandfatherly man who exercised some influence behind the scenes in Eudora.

“What does Jasper Young have to do with it?”

“I can’t say.” The boy stared down at his dishes.

“Why not?”

He shot a look at Miss Fanny. “Lady present.”

“Aw, now, come on, Leroy. Not one thing in this world you can’t say in front of me!”

He wiggled and resisted, but at last he turned his eyes away from Fanny and fixed them on me.

“Mr. Young want some lovin’ from Flossie. She didn’t want to go along with it. So he… he force the love out of her.”

What an incredible way to put it.

He force the love out of her.

The rest of the boy’s story came quickly.

Flossie had told her mother of the rape. Annie told her husband. Within minutes, her husband and son, crazed with rage, broke into Jasper Young’s home. They smashed china and overturned a table. Then they beat Jasper Young with their fists.

A neighbor summoned a neighbor who summoned another neighbor. Within an hour, no more than that, Annie’s husband and her son were hanging from ropes in the swamp behind the Quarter.

“Where are they, exactly?” I asked the boy.

“Out by Frog Creek.”

That was not the place I’d visited with Abraham, but I knew where it was.

I practically ran all the way back to Maybelle’s. I didn’t ask if I could borrow the bicycle, I just climbed on and rode out the old McComb Road, toward the swamp.

Toward Frog Creek.

Chapter 43

I CAME UPON A VISION of horror, all too real. Two men, one young, one older, naked and bloody, dangling from ropes. Already the smell of rotting flesh was rising in the morning heat. Flies were on the bodies.

On the ground beneath the stiff, hanging bodies, amid the cigar butts and discarded whiskey bottles, sat a woman and child. The woman was about thirty-five years old. The boy was no more than four. He was touching the woman’s face, touching the tears on her cheeks.

The woman saw me and her face furrowed over in rage. “You go on, now,” she shouted. “They already dead. You cain’t do no more to hurt ’em.”

I walked closer and she drew the boy to her, as if to protect him from me.

“I’m not going to hurt anybody,” I said. “I’m a friend.”

She shook her head fiercely. No.

I wanted to comfort her terrible sobbing, but I stayed back. “Are you Annie?”

She nodded.

Now that I was close to the dangling bodies, I saw the welts left by whips, the bloody wounds covering almost every part of their bodies. The older man’s arm hung down from his shoulder by a few bloody tendons. As the younger man slowly twisted, I saw that his testicles had been severed from his body.

My voice finally came out choked. “Oh, I am so sorry.”

I noticed a pink, rubbery thing in her hand, something she kept stroking with her finger as she wept.

She saw me looking. “You want to know what it is? It’s my Nathan’s tongue. They done cut his tongue out of his head. Stop him from sassin’ them.”

I looked up. Blood was thickly caked around the older man’s mouth.

“Oh, Jesus!”

“Ain’t no Jesus,” she said. “There ain’t no Jesus for me.”

She wept so terribly I could not hold myself back. I knelt by her in the clearing.

For a moment all was quiet, but for her sobbing.

Then a noise. A rustling in the underbrush, a crackling of twigs. I saw birds fly up in alarm.

Someone was there.

No doubt about it.

Someone was watching us.

And then out came several people, some men but also women, black people from the Quarters come to cut down the father and son who had been murdered.