“When I got my tongue back I ask how he knew this. He said he had been investigating over in Hueytown. Talk was the boy and the gal had been seen together outside the plant gate. More than once. She would bring her daddy some lunch. But that would have been about midnight. What kind of gal be hanging around a plant yard at midnight?”
The glider squeaked as Mr. Snodgrass leaned over the arm to pick up his bean can. Dr. Blackwood cleared his throat, apparently to interject, but Mr. Snodgrass held up an index finger with the hand that still held the revolver. “I asked him how he knew. Who he talking to? I was hoping against hope it wasn’t Grimes. But no, it was some of them rough boys, three or four of them, over at Hueytown High School.
“He looked kind of nervous when he said it and run his fingers through that stiff lock of hair on his head. Then he said, and he looked down, They told me the girl liked the nigger — then he looked up — That’s their word, sir — he called me sir, but he might as well had kept it at nigger. No offense. I don’t talk like that. Then he stared at me, that surprised look on his face. I could have slapped him into next week.
“But I bit down hard and said, And then what?
“The girl said that she liked the boy.
“I snorted I was so mad. But they didn’t do nothing to the girl. They just cut up the boy?
“Well, one of them said that the girl was his girl and he was glad somebody taught the, uh... well... the, uh, Negro a lesson he won’t forget.
“But the boy you talk to, he didn’t do it?
“The cub shook his head. Said the rumor was the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy. He said it like that was funny. I just grunted. I knew who they was. Those gray-sheet-wearing sonofabit’. Don’t wear white like the regular Klan and the meanest sonofabit’ there is. They the ones beat up Nat King Cole. Beat Shuttlesworth and his girls too.
“Then he wanted to know if I could confirm the relationship. What relationship? A colored boy don’t have no relationship with a white girl. A white girl is death to a colored boy and any colored boy with a grain of sense know that, so unless Reginald had himself a death wish—” Mr. Snodgrass was shouting, realized it and quieted. “But had I ever seen the boy with the girl? he wanted to know. And what if I had? Seeing them together don’t mean they was together. Lots of people wait by the plant gate if they know somebody that work up in there. And then, I noticed he hadn’t wrote a word on that tablet. Not one scratch. Something don’t smell right here, I thought. What paper you say you work for? He said again something about the Inquisitor. Something close to that. I said, And you ain’t gone use my name?
“Confidential, he said.
“Well, confidential or confounded, I told him just like that, I’m done.
“But did you see the two of the together?
“You need to leave.
“Just answer the question.
“You need to leave, right now.
“But what about the dogs?
“I got a dog, I told him. It’ll bark over here and bite over yonder. Now get! I stood up and made like I was reaching for my pocket. He got my meaning and soon went on out. I watched him from the door as he was sidestepping the mud like a sneak dragging his shadow behind him.” Mr. Snodgrass spat a big plug of tobacco into the bean can.
A car accelerated on a nearby street, its engine rising to a whine nearly as loud as the cicadas. The men sat up, looking out from our hilltop porch into the darkness where neither streetlights nor moonlight shone, to TV-lighted windows and the rooftops of Titusville. After a moment they relaxed, the sound of the car muted by distance.
Dr. Blackwood let out a curt sigh and reached into his jacket’s side pocket and took out a shiny flask. “I believe that deserves an ameliorative.”
“And a drink too,” Mr. Snodgrass said. The men passed the flask among them sipping and coughing. Out of the same pocket, Dr. Blackwood took a matching cigarette case, triggered a switch that popped it open, and offered it to the other men. Neither of them took a cigarette and he asked if they were “quite certain,” and picked a thin hand-rolled cigarette out of the case and placed it at the corner of his mouth. He snapped open a shiny lighter which flared blue, casting momentary light on his bony face. He blew out smoke through his nostrils.
“Snodgrass,” he said to my father, “is a highly imaginative narrator. I doubt if any fact in his tale is accurate. Ah yes, To make a poet black, and bid him sing! Snodgrass sings like a whip-poor-will.” Dr. Blackwood’s lips twitched. My father broke into a broad smile. Mr. Snodgrass spat into the bean can. “Yours was not the only encounter with that intrepid investigator. He ventured onto the campus and somehow found directions to my office in the basement of Ramsay Hall. It’s a close, windowless room, so damp at times that the covers of my books curl. But it is the garret from which I launch like Daedalus. Yes. Yes. I know why the caged bird beats his wing / Till its blood is red on the cruel bars. Barely did he knock before poking that scarlet pompadour into my sanctuary. My goodness, I rarely let my dear students in, and here he is, a white man, broadcasting imperium with a swagger as if he were the primogeniture of Czar Nicolas and Cleopatra. I can’t say I wasn’t startled, but I restrained from outburst and continued to jot down the rhyme which he had nearly joggled out of my head. I made him stand for a minute, before I looked up.
“May I help you? I inquired.
“He dragged my bergère, my good reading chair, from its place in the corner to the front of my desk. He made some hasty, excited introductions, and I was to believe that he was an investigative journalist from Philadelphia. The Inquirer, he said. But something was distinctly off about him, and every hair on my head prickled. Fill-er-delf-ia, he said. Not Fila-dail-fia or FIL-de-fia, as natives might say.
“The Inquirer? Oh, how prestigious, I said. I put my pen in the stand, and turned the pages of my cahier against the blotter. So kind of you to visit. He spoke rapidly enough for a Philadelphian, but there was a lilt that placed him farther south. Maryland, Virginia, perhaps. So I inquired, How does it go in the City of Brotherly Love?
“Just great! he said.
“I suppose they must be, this time of year, the weather so pleasant in the spring. And the Swann Fountain at Logan Square as lovely as Trevi, but much more restrained. It’s called Swann Fountain, you know, but there isn’t a swan to be found. Not a one. It’s only named for a family called Swann, not the fowl.