Читать книгу Grievances - Mark Ethridge - Страница 9

The next morning, a blast of humidity and the high whine of cicadas greeted Brad and me as we left the house and crunched across the gravel to the pickup for the drive back into Hirtsboro.

“If there are any Sampson family members around, they’ll be at church,” Brad said as we parked near the fountain. “And if they’re not there themselves, someone at church will know where they are.”

On the right side of the tracks, a bell began to toll, slowly at first and then with increasing vigor as it summoned the white population to services. From the wrong side of the tracks, the breeze carried the strong chords of a piano.

We followed the music, drawn to a large white wooden-frame building with a simple steeple at the corner of two sandy streets. The church sagged from age but the exterior was freshly painted and the lawn neatly mowed. A sign identified it as the Mt. Moriah House of Prayer, pastored by the Reverend Clifford Grace. The front door was open and we could see the backs of the people in the congregation and, up front, two high-backed altar chairs covered in red velvet. Behind the chairs on risers fourteen members of the purple-robed choir—men and women, young and old, black—swayed as they sang “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.”

I had seen this scene before, but only in my mind. When I was little, my family would drive from Detroit to Florida for a week at the beach and on Sunday we would leave at the crack of dawn to drive home. Dad would fiddle with the radio as he drove, discovering each year that on Sunday mornings in the South, church was the only thing broadcast. With pianos, electric guitars, and singers and preachers that sounded like they meant it, black church services were much more entertaining than white. I would close my eyes as we listened, trying to picture the small country churches, their preachers, and their choirs.

By the time the choir finished with “Home is Over Jordan,” I was home, in the station wagon with Mom and Dad in the front and Luke and me in the back, rolling northward as we listened to gospel music, the car filled with the smell of Thermos coffee and smoke from unfiltered Chesterfields.

Brad and I walked in quietly and slid into a back pew. A few members of the congregation turned our way and nodded—an old women in a lavender dress and an ornate flowered hat; a teenage boy in a bright blue athletic warm-up suit; a teenage girl with a gravity-defying swirl of hair; a man in a suit; a farmer in a threadbare jacket and boots.

I picked up a Popsicle-stick fan with a picture of a radiant brown-haired, blue-eyed Jesus on one side and the words “Courtesy of Short & Sons Mortuary” emblazoned on the back. Except for Jesus, Brad and I were the only white people in the place. A tall, lanky man in purple liturgical robes rose from one of the altar chairs, partially blocking my view.

“Thank you and praise Jesus for the magnificent choir,” he boomed, leading the congregation in applause. When the clapping died, he said, “Before we end today we’ll follow our custom of sharing our joys and concerns. Joys and Concerns, brothers and sisters.” He stroked his salt-and-pepper beard and motioned to someone I couldn’t see.

“My joy is that I’d like to ask our church youth basketball team to stand up because they won the league championship last Saturday up at Bamberg,” said a woman. A round of applause and I saw the teenager in the athletic suit stand shyly.

A middle-aged woman near the front stood. “My concern is for my great aunt in Cincinnati who is in the hospital with surgery. I ask that the church pray for her.” She sat.

The preacher pointed to a woman in the congregation. “I ask your prayers for my daughter Delicia and her kids in New York and that things get worked out with her boyfriend,” she said.

A man in a blue suit stood. “I praise Jesus that the Men’s Association chicken dinner raised six hundred fifty-eight dollars last Saturday night for new robes for the choir.”

And so it went. A joy about a son’s promotion in the Army; a concern about an ill parent; a joy about a new baby; a concern about a nephew in jail; a joy that Reverend Jesse Jackson was running for president; a concern about “the way things are up in Columbia.” And then one that caused my heart to race: “I ask your prayers to give me strength to find justice for my loving son Wallace.”

“Amen!” the congregation resounded.

When the service was over, the minister greeted us at the door. If he was surprised to see two white men among his worshipers, he didn’t show it. He smiled a huge smile and extended his hand. “Welcome to a day the Lord hath made,” he said. “I am the Reverend Clifford Grace.”

“I’m Brad Hall. This is Matt Harper. I don’t believe we’ve met but I live at Windrow. My family—”

“I know who you are, Mr. Hall,” Rev. Grace interrupted.

“Reverend, I’m sure it’s a surprise for you to see us here.” Grace didn’t react. Brad continued, “We’ve come because we could use your help.”

“On Wallace Sampson,” Grace said.

“How’d you know?”

Grace laughed. “Mary Pell is a member here.”

“I’m surprised she brought it up,” Brad said.

“Word gets around. Mr. Hall, it’s been years since Wallace was killed. Rumors get started. People make guesses about who did it. And every Sunday, Etta Mae Sampson reminds us of a mother’s pain. It’s a poison in Hirtsboro, a devil that won’t be exorcised. So, it’s not a surprise when black people want to know who killed Wallace Sampson. But when a white man does, especially a Hall, that’s something different.”

“Were you here when it happened?” I asked.

“I was.”

“Would you tell me about it?”

“Later.” Reverend Grace glanced at his watch. “Right now, I’ve got to get on over to the county jail.” He smiled. “Services for the prisoners.”

As we left, Reverend Grace pointed out Etta Mae Sampson’s white-frame house a block away.

For reporters, going to see the family of someone who has died comes with the territory. I have had to do it maybe half a dozen times. Once you’re there, it often ends up being not as bad as it sounds. For one thing, survivors and family members usually want to talk. It helps them remember the dead and process their own grief. The other thing is that whatever you’re asking them to do is a lot easier than what they’ve just been through. After you’ve actually lost a parent or a spouse or a child, how bad can talking about it really be?

Somehow all that logic never makes it any easier, though, and I was nervous as we knocked on the door of Etta Mae Sampson’s house. Potted red geraniums were positioned on either side of the front door. A woman in her fifties, her dark hair pulled into a neat bun, came to the door but stayed behind the screen. Mrs. Sampson was still dressed for church in her purple dress and matching shoes.

“Mrs. Sampson, I’m Brad Hall and this is Matt Harper. I live at Windrow and Matt is a newspaper reporter up in Charlotte. I’m sorry to intrude. Mrs. Sampson, I’m wondering if we could ask you about Wallace.”

“My Wallace?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did someone send you?”

“No, ma’am. We’re here on our own. Matt is writing a story about what happened.”

Not so fast, I thought, but kept quiet.

“Mary Pell works for you,” she said to Brad.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I know who you are.”

She turned to me. I was prepared to produce my press card but Mrs. Sampson didn’t ask. Instead, she said, “I don’t understand. Why now? What kind of story?”

I could have told her that Brad’s explanation that I was doing a story wasn’t exactly right, that Brad was the driving force and, at this point, I was still along for the ride, just taking a sniff, as those in the investigative reporting trade say. It’s a Cardinal Rule that you never promise anybody there will be a story. There’s just too much that can go wrong—from leads that don’t pan out, to fresh news breaking, to production mistakes, to idiot editors. Every reporter has had the experience of going home at night with every assurance his story was going to appear and maybe even on the front page only to search through the next day’s edition in disbelief because the story never ran.

But telling Mrs. Sampson that there might never be a story would have been like saying, “Mrs. Sampson, I’m not sure your dead son is worth writing about.” So instead I said, “As I understand it, it’s an unsolved murder and it’s never really been investigated.”

“It never was investigated but it isn’t unsolved,” she said matter-of-factly.

She invited us in and offered us some iced tea. We sat in her living room—Brad on an old upholstered chair with a lace doily, me uncomfortably on the edge of a rocker, and Mrs. Sampson on a dark red velvet settee. A small television sat in one corner, a simple kerosene heater in another. Three photographs hung on the wall: two eight-by-ten color pictures, unframed but protected by Saran Wrap, of Martin Luther King Jr. and of JFK, and a cardboard-framed school picture of a brightly smiling boy of twelve or thirteen in a red and white striped polo shirt, clearly the child of the woman to whom we were talking, despite his lighter skin.

If I ended up writing Wallace Sampson’s story for the Charlotte Times, I knew that Walker Burns would want that photo. I had learned that lesson when I’d neglected to get a photo for a front-page Sunday story about a teenager who’d accidentally been electrocuted at the state prison.

“Oh, don’t worry about a picture,” Walker had said sarcastically. “We’ll just let the readers imagine what the kid might have looked like.” A breakneck four-hundred-mile, six-hour roundtrip drive to the boy’s parents’ house in Morehead City produced the photo just in time for deadline. I’ve never forgotten the lesson.

“Wallace was twelve when that picture was made,” Mrs. Sampson said as she caught me staring at the photo. “I think about what he would look like now. Would he be tall, like his father? He was already pretty tall. He played on the church basketball team. Sometimes, I imagine that he’s all grown up and sometimes I see him in heaven and he’s my baby, with little angel wings. But every day, I think about what it would be like if none of this had ever happened and I came home and he was there, sitting there where you are, looking just like he is in that picture.”

“Do you have other children?” Brad asked.

“The twins. Praise and Rejoice. They’d grown up and both moved to D.C. by the time Wallace was born.”

Sometimes I think that what I get paid for is to ask the rude questions, the ones everyone else wants to ask but finds too difficult. “Mrs. Sampson,” I said, “tell me about the day that it happened.”

She closed her eyes, rocked back, and sat a long time before she spoke. “I told him not to be out late. There’d been trouble—a bunch of young hotheads in town. Wallace wasn’t part of that crowd. He was over visiting his girlfriend. It was Friday night and I said, ‘You be home before too late.’ He said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ That was the last thing he ever said to me, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

“I stayed in bed waiting up for him, waiting for him to come home. It wasn’t like Wallace to be late. And then someone knocked on the door and I knew it wasn’t Wallace because he would never knock. I got my robe on and it was Reverend Grace and he told me Wallace had been shot.” She wrung her hands, exhaled, and leaned forward. “They took him to Charleston, to the university, but he had already passed. I never got to see him. By the time Reverend Grace and I got there, they had done an autopsy. I didn’t want them to but they said they had to and they’d already done it. They said because of where he was shot, in the head, that I wouldn’t want to see him. But I wanted to. No matter what. He was still my Wallace, even if someone put a hole in his head. He was still my baby.”

Softly, Wallace Sampson’s mother began to weep and I began to wonder what I loved so much about reporting.

“He didn’t have a suit,” she continued. “He was only thirteen. So I gave Mr. Short at the mortuary his best school pants and that shirt in the picture to bury him in. All his school friends came. They wanted to see him one last time. But we couldn’t have an open casket.”

She composed herself. “He’s buried up at the cemetery. You can go there. I go there every day.”

“Why do you think Wallace was killed?” Brad asked.

“Meanness,” she said, as if that explained everything. “The world is filled with so much meanness.”

“Mrs. Sampson,” I said, “when we first arrived you said Wallace’s killing wasn’t unsolved. I thought no one had ever been charged.”

“That doesn’t mean no one knows who did it. There are at least two who know for sure who did it.”

“Which two?”

“Whoever shot him. They know they did it. And God. I believe Wallace was God’s gift to me. God knows who killed Wallace. And God will make sure there is justice. Maybe not in my life. Maybe not on this earth. But God knows and He will have justice.”

“I, for one, would prefer to see justice now, on this earth, and not wait for God,” said Brad.

Mrs. Sampson looked him in the eye. “I know black folk that talk crazy like that. You’re the first white.”

“It’s not crazy and there are other people, black and white, who feel the same way.”

“Mary Pell said you were crazy. You got that article in The Reporter written, didn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And him down here?” She nodded at me.

“Yes.”

“Well, you all do what you want,” she said. “It don’t matter to me. God will deliver the final judgment.”

I asked to see Wallace’s room. Two pairs of pants and two shirts hung on nails. A baseball bat, its broken handle nailed and taped back together, sat in a corner. A lump formed in my throat when I saw a basketball trophy inscribed “Wallace Sampson–Mr. Rebound” on the bedside table. A picture of twin girls was tucked into a corner of a small mirror above a dresser. A tiny school picture of another girl was pinned to the wall along with a poster of Hank Aaron.

“That’s his girlfriend, Vanessa Brown,” she said, pointing to the little picture. “I never changed anything in here since the night he didn’t come home.”

I picked up a framed picture of a younger Mrs. Sampson holding hands with a black man in an Army uniform. “My late husband,” she said. He didn’t look all that tall to me.

Mrs. Sampson sat on the edge of her dead son’s bed. “I’m okay during the day. But I have trouble at night. Sometimes I awake from my dreams and I am scared that I will forget him. So I come to this room and I lie on his bed and I pick up his shirt and I can smell him in it. Each child has their own smell. Did you know that? And my worst time is when I become afraid that I will forget what he looked like and what he smelled like. I think that no one will remember him. So I look at his picture and I smell his shirt and I hold the trophy and I think to myself, I am holding the very thing that he held. And then I am only just that far away from him. And I tell him, ‘You will never, ever, ever be forgotten.’”

As we said our good-byes I told Mrs. Sampson, “I’m sorry for your loss. I’m sorry to have to make you relive it.”

“Mr. Harper, I relive it every day. You can’t hurt me. I have already been hurt the worst that there is.”

We left, having dredged up a mother’s grief with no assurance that anything good would ever result from it. And without one of the things that we had come for. Because even though she had been hurt all she could, I just couldn’t bring myself to ask Mrs. Sampson for her dead son’s picture.

We met Reverend Grace later that afternoon after he returned from his jail ministry. He told us about the Friday night before the shooting when a group of about twenty young men threw stones at the Hirtsboro town police car near the wrong side of the tracks.

“The mayor called me down there to see what I could do,” Reverend Grace recalled. “I knew most of the crowd. Mostly they were boys. A few of them were troublemakers but most were good kids. Some had been drinking and they were full of themselves. There was all this stuff going on all over the country—protests at black colleges, marches in the streets—and people were facing down authority. There was this feeling of power, like nothing anyone from Hirtsboro had ever felt before. I tried to calm them down but they didn’t want to listen.” It ended with the arrival of six sheriff’s cruisers and twenty-four deputies.

“And that’s all there was to it,” Reverend Grace said. “The next night, Wallace Sampson got killed.”

“Reverend Grace, do you know why Wallace Sampson was shot?” Brad asked.

Grace paused. “I only know what people say.”

“Can you tell us?” I asked. “The truth shall make you free.”

Grace gave me a rueful smile. “Not in Hirtsboro, South Carolina.”

Being a reporter is all about trust. To get Reverend Grace to talk about what he really knew, he would need to trust me. It worked the other way, too. For me to evaluate what Reverend Grace said, I would need to know how much I could trust him.

“Reverend Grace, what brought you to Hirtsboro?”

“I believe it was the grace of God. I was assigned to this church right out of seminary. It was the posting they all laughed about through school—the poorest town, the meanest whites, the sorriest blacks. But it was the right posting for a four-hundred-fifty pound twenty-four-year-old who was last in his class, stuttered, and jiggled like jelly with every step.”

Brad and I exchanged quick glances and stared in disbelief at the fit man before us. “I came here miserable and it only got worse. And one day I begged God to just take back my body and let me die. He didn’t let me die but he did what I prayed for. He took control of my body. And with God in control, my weight began to drop. Because of my miracle I knew for certain that salvation was possible. And I began to understand that I had been called here for a purpose.”

“What purpose is that?” I asked.

“To get beyond the cross.”

Reverend Grace led us into the darkened sanctuary. He walked behind the purple-draped altar and stood below a large rough-hewn wooden cross that hung on the wall.

“In 1932, the Klan lynched a black teenager who was accused of raping a white Hirtsboro girl. There were no charges, no trial. They just hung him in a big oak tree, right outside of town. Later, the boy’s daddy cut the tree down and hauled the trunk home. He cut it into planks and made this cross and gave it to the church. You see, he could deal with what had happened if he thought of his son dying on a cross.”

Brad approached the altar and touched the cross. “Why do you want to get beyond it?” he asked.

“These people have lived under slavery since their ancestors were forced onto ships in Africa. The label changes but this is still slavery. The ones who can, leave town. Young people like Praise and Rejoice Sampson. The rest stay with only one thing to hang on: the salvation that comes in the next life. In Hirtsboro, justice is a gift from God and won’t happen in this world. But in the next life there will be justice and we will all live in glory. Meanwhile, the comfort of Jesus helps us ease the pain while we’re on this mortal earth. That’s what this cross means to them.

“But to me, that cross is still a lynching tree. Every Sunday my congregation looks at a symbol that killings go unpunished, that there is no hope for justice in this life. I hate that cross. We have got to move beyond it.”

“Reverend Grace,” Brad asked, “If God can perform a miracle on a four-hundred-fifty-pound young man, can’t the people of Hirtsboro believe that justice is possible now, on this earth and in our time?”

“I haven’t given up. But it’s a lot easier to believe in heaven than it is to believe that things will change for people in Hirtsboro in my lifetime.”

I saw an opening. “We can help them change, if you’ll tell us what you’ve heard.”

“Even if I believed that, communication between priest and parishioner is sacred, a trust that cannot be violated.”

“Like a reporter and a confidential source,” Brad interjected unhelpfully.

Reverend Grace took my hands in his and looked into my eyes. “I can’t violate my parishioner’s confidences,” he said. “I can’t tell you what I’ve been told. But maybe I can give you a sort of roadmap. I tell you where to look, but I just don’t tell you what you’re going to find when you get there. I might be able to do that. I’ll pray on it.”

“Please do,” I told him.

An attractive woman waved to us from the deck as Brad and I arrived back at his home that evening,

“She’s arrived,” Brad said happily. My impression of Lindsay McDaniel Hall was Newport Yacht Club—straight blonde bob, bright blue eyes, flawless skin, angular features and teeth that had paid for an orthodontist’s sports car. She wore white Keds, blue jeans, a simple white T-shirt, and minimal makeup. Brad Hall had married within his class.

She smiled when we were introduced. “I hope you can stay for dinner.”

I said I needed to be getting back.

“Nonsense. We’re due at Brad’s father’s in half an hour. I’ll tell Mary Pell to add another setting.”

“I thought we’d eat here,” Brad said, retrieving the book, the hat, and the plastic bags from the pickup’s floor.

“It’s Sunday night.”

“I know it is.” He slammed the pickup door. “I thought we’d eat here.”

She smiled uneasily. “Sunday night supper at Windrow is always at Dad’s, Brad.”

I began looking for a place to hide.

“We’ve had Sunday supper with my father almost every week of our married lives. I believe we can miss once.”

In my experience, we were one cross word away from an argument.

“Brad, we have almost nothing in the house. I’m sorry. If I’d known . . .”

“Father can be such a boor,” Brad said with a forced smile. “But if there’s nothing in our house, then Father’s it is.” And without much strain, the Halls pulled back from the brink.

That would never have happened with Delana and me, I thought. I could never pull back. One word spoken with the slightest edge or hint of anger would take us down the path of poisonous words and hurt. I admired how Brad and Lindsay Hall did it.

The sun was setting over the Savannah when we arrived at what was called, without irony, “the Big House,” the plantation home where Brad’s father spent much of the year. As Brad had explained it, his father lived alone except for the regular presence of Mary Pell, the housemaid, and a trickle of Yankee visitors who became a stream when bird-shooting season arrived on Labor Day.

Everett Hall was tall, silver-haired, and his tanned, creased face gave him the look of an outdoorsman—a look confirmed by the tweed shooting jacket he wore when he greeted us, holding a glass of red wine. I straightened my tie as he gave his daughter-in-law a kiss on the cheek and his son a handshake. Then he turned to me.

“This is Matthew Harper with the Charlotte Times,” Brad said. “Matt, this is my father, Everett Hall.”

“A reporter? Well, we’re delighted to have you here anyway,” Everett Hall said in a way that left unclear whether he meant it as a joke. “Drink?”

He refilled his glass. I accepted a glass of wine and followed him out to the veranda where the four of us watched the sun sinking over the Savannah and into the Georgia hills beyond. A great blue heron cruised up the river and lit on a branch overhanging an eddy. “He fishes there every night,” Everett Hall said. And soon the bird speared a wriggling flash of silver in his rapier-like beak and deftly slid it down its throat.

“Touché,” Brad Hall said quietly.

“Survival of the fittest,” said his father.

Dinner was served at an enormous table in a dark-paneled dining room with high-backed red leather chairs. Old portraits of Halls, Bradfords, and Everetts lined the walls. A small, stooped gray-haired black woman in a lavender maid’s uniform and white apron served cold vichyssoise as the first course. I hadn’t lifted my first spoonful when Everett Hall said, “Tell me, Mr. Harper, about what you do.”

“Well, I’m a general assignment reporter. Basically I show up in the afternoon and work on whatever stories I’m assigned. Could be anything.”

“Does it pay well?”

“Not at all.”

“Then what attracts you to it?”

“The opportunity to write, to be creative. Also, to make a difference.”

“How so?”

“Well, you can expose wrongs, crusade. Reveal information that others want hidden. H. L. Mencken said the role of the press is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I like doing that.” I had quoted that line many times and I said it then without thinking about my audience—the entirely comfortable. I knew it was a mistake even before Everett Hall’s already ruddy face deepened.

He drank from his glass of wine. “Why does the press make so many errors?”

“Errors, sir?”

“Mistakes of fact and of bias. I hardly read a story that I know something about where there isn’t an error.”

I felt myself flush but I admit I’ve often observed the same thing. “There’re thousands of facts in the paper each day and almost all of them are right. It’s an imperfect craft. We get it as right as we can within the confines of deadlines and space.”

“Well, you do a poor job of it.”

There isn’t a journalist alive who hasn’t had to withstand an assault on his or her profession, whether from grandstanding politicians, crazed conspiracy theorists, or even readers legitimately upset about an error in a story or, even more often, an inaccurate headline. But I hadn’t expected vitriol with the vichyssoise. My surprise must have showed because Brad jumped in to deflect the tension.

“Father, I wasn’t aware that you even read the Charlotte paper.”

“I don’t have to. New York Times. Washington Post. Charlotte Times. CBS. It’s all the same. A liberal bias infects the whole media. You heard Mr. Harper say it himself. He wants to afflict the comfortable. People like us.” He took another swallow. “And comfort the afflicted. Whom do you mean by that?”

“The poor. The powerless. The exploited.” I was rising to the debate.

The elderly black woman picked that moment to enter from the kitchen and quietly began refilling the water goblets. Before I could answer his question, Everett Hall turned to her. “Mary Pell, do you feel afflicted?”

“Pardon, sir?” She stood back from the table, holding the silver pitcher.

“Mary Pell, this is Mr. Harper,” Everett Hall said.

I stood up. Mary Pell nodded but said nothing. “Mr. Harper is a reporter. He likes to comfort the afflicted. Are you among the afflicted?”

“I got my aches and pains, Mr. Everett, but the Lord’s blessed me.”

Everett Hall bored in. “Mary Pell, are you exploited at Windrow?”

“Father!” Brad said, but his father paid no attention. I sat down.

“Do we exploit you, Mary Pell?” Everett Hall demanded.

“I’m very happy at Windrow, Mr. Everett. You know that. Very happy.” Mary Pell smiled uneasily and retreated to the safety of the kitchen. I saw Brad mouth “I told you so” to his wife, who looked embarrassed and stared at her lap.

Everett was getting drunker and I knew there was no percentage in arguing. I tried to humor him, hoping to get us on lighter ground.

“Wait a minute? Afflict the comfortable? I don’t believe I said that. I’ve been misquoted! The press is always getting it wrong!” I said. Brad and Lindsay laughed. Mr. Hall didn’t.

“You said your business is creative. I understand that, because you make things up.”

I felt my face redden.

“I don’t and I don’t know of any journalist who does.”

“Your bias shows in what you select to cover. You look for bad things because there’s no story if they are good.”

“Correct. If things work the way they are supposed to, that’s not news. It’s news when they don’t. We play no favorites. Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, blacks and whites, men and women. Everybody’s fair game.”

“Afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted isn’t playing favorites? You ever see a newspaper crusade on behalf of some businessman getting harassed by the federal government even though he’s risked his own money and created jobs? It’d be okay for a white man to get screwed but stop the presses if it’s some poor black.”

Tell that to those Times readers who are sure I’m a racist, I thought to myself.

“You think the press would have gone after Nixon if he’d been a Democrat?”

“Without question.”

“The press gave Kennedy a pass.”

“Journalistic standards were different then.”

He bolted down his wine. “Standards? You have no standards. Do you have to get a license to be a journalist? Do you have to pass some test? Is there a body of knowledge you have to master? No. You need a license to cut hair and give a manicure. But anyone can be a journalist.” Mr. Hall finished his salad. “That was delicious.”

Finally, we had found something we could all agree on and I took the opportunity to chime in. “Wonderful. What kind of greens were they?”

“Lion’s Tooth,” Brad said. “Genus taraxacum. Dent de lion. Otherwise known as dandelions.”

But Everett Hall wasn’t about to quit the battle. He resumed as Mary Pell cleared our plates. “Watergate was the worst thing that ever happened to your business. It made every youngster in journalism school decide to go out and look for a coonskin to nail to the wall. Well, there weren’t that many coons out there that needed skinning. So people got it whether they deserved it or not. Politicians. Businessmen. Everybody. You said it yourself. Everybody’s fair game.”

“Those who got it deserved it,” I said. “And that’s exactly our function—to keep everybody else honest, to make sure the people know the people’s business. It’s why the First Amendment is first. We’re a watchdog, a fourth branch of government—beholden to nothing but the truth.”

“Fourth branch of government? And who elected you?”

“Our readers, every day. If we don’t pass their test, if we’re not accurate and honest, we’re out of business.”

“Which explains why the National Enquirer sells so many copies.” Mr. Hall raised his glass signaling a temporary end to the conversation and, I’m sure in his mind, victory. Brad shrugged and gave me an apologetic look.

Mr. Hall pressed a hidden button under the table. I heard a faint buzzer in the kitchen and Mary Pell emerged to serve the main course—dove and quail bagged during a recent shoot. For the vegetarian Brad, she served something she called Brad’s Rice, which turned out to be a delicious wild rice hybrid he had developed and planted on several acres of Windrow that he had returned to cultivation. And, of course, there was more wine. A crisp white, this time. The conversation turned more pleasant and certainly more mundane, with me asking a lot of questions.

I have heard it said that people become reporters because they’re shy. They want to know everything about other people but, in the guise of objectivity, never have to reveal anything about themselves. They are afraid of involvement. They don’t want to participate in the action, they want to observe it. That may be true. But all I was trying to do was keep the conversation going in non-controversial directions. So I asked Brad about the process that had led to the rice. And his father about the quail and dove season and whether the river was low. And then about the stock market. Lindsay went on and on about Tasha and Maybelle, intuiting the dogs’ likes and dislikes and generally talking about them the way parents talk about their children.

I was beginning to think the interrogation hadn’t been so bad—a lively debate, although maybe a bit confrontational—but in the end, no more outrageous than behavior I’d observed in other tipsy, aging parents, including mine. But as Mary Pell, accompanied by a black man I assumed was Willie Snow, moved silently about the dining room clearing the main course, Everett Hall went after his son.

“Bradford, let me guess. You’ve induced Mr. Harper to come down here to help in your little wild goose chase.”

“I wouldn’t call it a goose chase.”

“I would. You propose to solve a killing that was thoroughly investigated twenty years ago.”

“If there was an investigation, it wasn’t good enough to find the killer.”

Everett Hall sighed. “Son, you’re stirring up things that don’t need to be stirred up. That editorial in The Reporter was stupid and naïve. It’s an embarrassment and everyone in town knows you’re behind it. How do you even know the kid was murdered?”

“For God’s sake, father! He was shot in the head with a deer rifle!”

“Probably by his own kind,” Everett Hall said, as Willie Snow swept up the crumbs that were left on the table. “Most killings of blacks are by blacks. Black-on-black crime. They keep killing each other off.”

Mr. Hall paused for emphasis, then, looking squarely at me and paying absolutely no heed to the fact that two black people bustled around his dinner table, added, “Which is just fine with me.”

“Father!” Brad and Lindsay said in horror.

“What? Nothing against the blacks. It’s just natural selection. People generally get what they deserve. The strong live and the weak die. It’s true of any race. Ain’t that right, Willie Snow?” Mercifully, the man had disappeared.

Mr. Hall did not let up.

“The kid probably deserved it. Probably a troublemaker.”

“Not based on what we learned at his house.”

“You went to his goddam house?” Mr. Hall asked. “In niggertown?”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that word. It’s an embarrassment.”

Everett Hall stared at his son. “Bradford, it’s your actions that are the embarrassment. I forbid you to continue. I will not have my son poking around niggertown and getting everybody riled up over some dead nigger kid. Except for you, no one cares.”

In the course of a short evening, Everett Hall had insulted me, my profession, black people, and his own son. I thought about the promise I had made to myself in junior high when a bully teased a black girl about her kinky hair and I had said nothing. As the girl cried in front of her locker and tried desperately to brush her hair straight, my brother Luke had tracked down the bully and made him apologize. “Nothing is funny when it’s at someone else’s expense,” Luke had explained. I had promised myself then that I would never stay silent again.

“I’ll tell you who cares,” I interjected, my anger rising. “Wallace Sampson was a thirteen-year-old kid. He had friends. They care. He had parents and sisters. I’m sure they care. And you know who else cares? Every black person in this town ought to care whether or not they ever knew Wallace Sampson. Because if the murder of Wallace Sampson doesn’t matter, then we’re still in a time and a place where the killing of any black person doesn’t matter.”

I caught my breath and added, “And if you were anything other than a blueblood fatcat who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, you might care, too.”

I detected a faint smile from Brad but his father was stunned. The room fell silent. Mary Pell and Willie Snow were nowhere to be seen but parfait glasses of blueberries and heavy cream had found their way to our places. I got the feeling that no one had ever spoken to Everett Hall this way before, especially not at Windrow where he was the lord and master.

“Enough,” Mr. Hall commanded, pushing himself away from the table. “This discussion is done.”

“Well,” Lindsay said brightly, as if it were just another meeting of her book club. “This has certainly been a lively evening. Such good conversation.”

Good-byes were awkward—compliments to the shooter of the birds and to the chef but no mention of the dinner-table controversy. As Brad drove us back to their house in the Volvo, Lindsay searched for some common ground that would bridge the gap between her husband and her father-in-law.

“Brad, I know you feel strongly about this. I admire what you and Matt are doing, but aren’t there people who deal with these things? The FBI or the state police or something?”

“There’s no federal crime for the FBI to be involved in.”

“It just seems like you shouldn’t do it on your own. You need some investigative expertise.”

“That’s why Matt is along.”

“You have so many other important things to keep you busy, like the Windrow plant book.”

“More important than finding a killer?”

“Well, it’s just not something we should be associated with. It’s such a local issue. It really should be handled by the local community.”

I wanted to say, “Do you think it matters to Mrs. Sampson who solves her son’s murder?” But I kept quiet on the grounds that I had staked myself out far enough for one evening. And besides, Brad had a better answer.

“Honey,” he said, “we are the locals.”

“Not in the same way they are. Look, Brad, we have a good thing here. A good life. You’re going to mess it up.”

“What’s messed up is that a thirteen-year-old was murdered and no one cares.”

Lindsay tried a new tack. “What about your relationship with your father?”

“What are your worried about, the inheritance?”

“That’s so crass!” she said. “Your father loves you. You are a Hall. You have a heritage to live up to. Don’t ruin that.”

We had arrived at the house. Brad turned off the engine but remained in the driver’s seat thinking. “The Halls used to have a heritage. My forebears took risks, crossed the seas over principles. But the genes have gotten weak. I don’t think my father or his brothers would cross the street for a principle. Honey, there’s no heritage to live up to. There is one to restore.”

I lay in bed listening to Brad and Lindsay sparring in the bedroom and realized Walker Burns was right. Even if we hadn’t traveled all the way back to the antebellum South, we weren’t far off. My dad was the editor of The Detroit Free Press during the Detroit riots of 1967. I’d heard the gunfire downtown from my bed in the suburbs. After the riots, the National Commission on Civil Disorders warned that America was moving toward two societies, one black, one white. Hirtsboro wasn’t moving that way. Hirtsboro had started out that way and almost two hundred years later, jerks like Everett Hall and even Lindsay were making sure nothing changed. They and the rest of their kind needed to be set straight.