As he turned toward the next questioner, Cyl stepped between them and spoke into his ear. I don’t know what she said to him—“My Uncle Isaac’s bones have been found”?—but whatever it was, he excused himself with another smile, quickly took her by the elbow and led her through a nearby door to a covered areaway outside.
I was right behind.
Adderly gave me an annoyed glance. “Could you excuse us, Judge? This is a private matter.”
“I’m her friend,” I said above the dripping of the rain. For some reason Cyl seemed even more surprised by that than Adderly.
“Besides,” I added, “if you had anything to do with Isaac Mitchiner winding up under the floorboards of Mount Olive, it’s not going to stay private very long.”
For just an instant, Wallace Adderly looked as if he’d been sucker-punched. He recovered instantly though and said, “Look, is there somewhere we can go talk?”
“Need time to get your new story straight?” Cyl asked.
Nevertheless, she looked around vaguely as if expecting to see a place open up.
“This way,” I said.
While still in private practice with Reid and John Claude, I had come out here to speak to various paralegal classes—this is where Sherry Cobb got her training—so I knew a bit of the layout.
A quick splash down a bricked walkway took us to an unlocked door and the stairwell of a classroom building. At the top of the first flight was a small study lounge that was usually empty. We went inside, I flipped on the light and closed the door behind us. Inside were a black leather couch, three leather armchairs and a badly scuffed coffee table in between, handy for books, coffee cups or feet. A single window overlooked the front of the auditorium, where people were lining up with their plates for servings of the chopped pork.
Adderly took one of the armchairs, Cyl another. I opted to perch on the window ledge. To Adderly’s annoyance. For some reason, he seemed to think I was the one he had to worry about.
He didn’t realize that Cyl was no longer the trusting little Silly he remembered and her question came like a whiplash across his face. “Why did you kill him?”
“Hey, now, wait a minute here,” he protested. “A judge and a DA? Maybe I ought to have an attorney present.”
“You tell her what she needs to know,” I said, “or I guarantee you’ll be hearing the same questions from those reporters down there before you can get out of the parking lot. And ‘No Comment’ always sounds so much like ‘nolo contendere,’ don’t you think?”
He took a long moment to consider. “What I say stays here?”
I looked at Cyl but I couldn’t read her eyes.
“You’re an officer of the court,” the preacher reminded me.
Alarm bells were going off for the pragmatist, too.
“You’re stepping in quicksand here,” he warned.
I took a deep breath. Trust had to start somewhere. “It’s her call,” I said.
“Weird,” Adderly said at last. “I spend twenty years staying out of Colleton County and the first time I come back?” He shifted in the chair and crossed his legs.
What you have to understand is that things weren’t bad enough here. I never understood why the leadership sent me here in the first place. Yeah, this was Klan country—used to be big signs on both sides of Dobbs bragging about it, but not like other parts of the South or even parts of the North where we’d been ground down so far there was nowhere to go but up, nothing more to lose if we stood up for our rights. Desegregation had gone smoothly enough here. You had the usual prejudice and casual bigotry that’s still around today, but it wasn’t organized and systematic and black people here did have something to lose. They didn’t appreciate outsiders like me coming in to rock the boat, either.
“In two weeks, I maybe persuaded ten people to register to vote. ’Course, it might’ve been me, too. I was getting frustrated with NOISE. Seemed like all the effective action was happening somewhere else.”
“All the same, when word came down to get my butt up to Boston ’cause they were expecting violence with the new busing regulations, I just couldn’t get revved up for it. Isaac though, he would’ve caught the next Greyhound out of here if he’d had the money and a place to go. He wanted to leave in the worst way. You knew that?”
Silent tears ran down Cyl’s smooth brown cheeks as she nodded.
“I’m sorry,” Adderly said, “but I didn’t create the situation. There was a girl he loved, daughter of a preacher or an elder or somebody else whose shit didn’t stink, if you’ll forgive my crudeness. Her parents were dead-set against him so he got her pregnant, figuring they were so respectable they’d have to allow a wedding so that the baby wouldn’t be a bastard. Instead, her mother sent her somewhere up North to have an abortion.”
“Abortion?” Cyl looked shocked. “My grandmother said the baby was supposed to be given up for adoption.”
“That was what he let your grandmother think. Truth is, the girl’s mother told Isaac that he was about ten shades too dark. No daughter of hers was going to marry back into Africa or have his pickaninny baby either. Those where her exact words.”
“Isaac was hurting so bad, he took up with some white girl just to prove he could. ‘Too black for a black girl, just right for a white.’ That’s what he told me. He knew she came from a rough family, but he didn’t care.”
“Her cousin threatened to tell her brother and Isaac broke his nose with a two-by-four.”
Adderly stood up and walked over to the window where I was and stared down at the crowd that was laughing and talking and digging into the barbecue. He stood there for a long minute, then walked away. There was barely room to pass between the coffee table and the couch and the room wasn’t really long enough for pacing, but somehow he managed.
“It was all coming down on him and he begged to come to Boston with me.”
“Why didn’t you let him?” Cyl asked harshly.
“Girl, you forgetting the times? The circumstances? You think I had what I have now? That Isaac had two quarters to rub together?” He made another restless circuit of the room. “All he had was your grandmother’s generosity and some odd jobs he picked up in the neighborhood before barning season started. All the same, I did tell him that if he could get together the money for a bus ticket by the time I was ready to leave, I’d take him with me. There was no sexton at Mount Olive back then and they’d hired Isaac to do the yard work once a week. I walked over to help him that afternoon because I’d decided to leave for Boston the next day and I hoped that if he couldn’t come with me, maybe he could keep up the work, try to get out the vote that fall.”
His constricted pacing put my nerves on edge but Cyl sat motionless.
“He was cutting the grass when I got there, so I went back to what used to be the storage room, picked up the pruning shears and starting trimming that row of shrubs around back. I didn’t even realize anybody’d come up till I heard the lawnmower shut off and car doors slam, then loud male voices. I walked down to the corner and peeped through the bushes. There were five white men. Two had grabbed Isaac and a big guy was hitting him and yelling about his sister. Then he punched Isaac in the chest—right on the heart, I’d guess—and Isaac just sort of folded over like a rag doll.”
“The two guys holding him let go and he fell on the ground and one of them said, ‘Jesus, Buck! You’ve killed him!’ And Buck said he was faking, but the other guys were running back to their cars so Buck ran, too.”
He paused, as if expecting Cyl to speak.
She didn’t say a word. Just looked at him so steadily that he had to turn away.
“Okay, yeah, but that was twenty-one years ago. Easy enough now to say I should have gone running to the white sheriff and told him about five white guys I’d never seen before killing a black kid. I was a NOISE activist, for God’s sake! You think they’d take my word against theirs? And if I just walked away and headed for Boston, it would have been real easy for the white authorities around here to find a dozen reasons to come after me for Isaac’s death. I wouldn’t even have known who Buck Ferguson was if he hadn’t kept yelling about niggers fucking his sister.”