“I had a friend who took one and flunked it. I know he was telling the truth.”
My head still throbbing from yesterday’s fiasco, I go ballistic.
“This is your chance to get your charges dropped!
You might even get back on the team! Damn it, you’ve got to take it.”
“I don’t have to do anything!” he says.
“A white bitch says that I raped her, a white dude kicks me off the team, and now I’m supposed to let a white cop or lawyer hook me up to a machine and say whether I’m lying or not?
Get real, man!”
I back off and lower my voice. This is the first outburst of racism I’ve seen from Dade, but from his point of view, he makes sense. The only white person who has stood up for him was Carter, and he folded like he was holding a pair of deuces. I explain the test isn’t admissible in court and that he has nothing to lose, but it is like trying to convince a child not to be afraid of the dark. It occurs to me that Dade may be lying after all. Maybe he’s into drugs, too, or is trying to protect someone. I tell him I want him to think about it some, and that I will be calling him back.
As soon as I get off, I call his parents and get Roy, who doesn’t react much better.
“Why can’t the prosecutor make the girl take the test, and if she flunks, or won’t take it, dismiss the charges?”
“Cross doesn’t have to do anything,” I explain.
“But there’s no way Dade can lose by taking it.”
“Yeah, he can,” Roy says.
“If he takes it and don’t pass, you’ll figure he’s lying and won’t do anything else on his case. Let me hand you over to Lucy.”
This pisses me royally. In the last few weeks I might as well have closed my practice and moved to Payetteville.
“What have I done to give you the idea that I’m going to lie down on this case?” I ask, close to losing my temper.
I’m getting peanuts, and I’ve worried about this case until it’s about all I think about. I explain to her how important it is for Dade to cooperate with the prosecutor but get only a little further with her.
“Gideon, notice it’s always the black person who has to do the accommodating. Robin won’t take the test, but Dade has to. It gets old.”
“Well” I state the obvious “he is the one accused of rape.”
“If someone had made her take a test before the charges were filed,” Lucy complains, “Dade wouldn’t be in this mess.”
At least she has conceded that a polygraph test has some validity.
“I don’t doubt that for a moment,” I say, encouraging her, “but we didn’t have any control over that. Now we do.”
In the background I hear a customer complaining about the price of a jar of Maxwell House coffee, and Roy’s voice as he commiserates with her. They must be together twenty-four hours a day. The joys of small business. Finally, Lucy says, “I’ll talk to him, but it may take a while. He’s got his father’s stubbornness.”
“This would be far and away the best way to handle it,” I assure her.
“I don’t want to try this case in front of a Washington County jury if we can avoid it.”
“I know that,” she says.
Convinced she can bring Dade around, I tell her to call me back when she’s talked to him but that she doesn’t have to rush him. With the passage of a little time, Dade will begin to feel the pressure. Before I get off the phone, I decide to ask her, “Is your grandmother still alive?
Sarah and I are thinking of driving over Thanksgiving weekend to Bear Creek, and I thought maybe I’d go by and talk to her if you think that’d be all right.”
Lucy resists gloating.
“Certainly. I’ll call her and tell her you may be coming by. Let me give you her address.”
As she talks and waits on a customer at the same time, I wonder what my motives are. I still don’t believe there is any family connection. Am I sucking up to Lucy so I can be her son’s agent? Or am I doing this just to pacify Sarah? Unlike myself, she seems determined to know the truth. As a criminal defense lawyer, I realize most of the time I’d rather not know.
13
“Dr. Beekman says neither blacks nor whites used to celebrate the Fourth of July in some parts of the South,” my daughter instructs me from behind the wheel of the Blazer.
“Whites were reminded of the fall of Vicksburg, and it obviously meant nothing to African-Americans.”
Life according to Beekman. Anxious to get to Bear Creek, we have taken 1-40 east to Forrest City and then south on Highway 1, arriving on the outskirts of Bear Creek at noon.
“Proportionately, the South sent more men to Vietnam than any other region of the country,” I say, recalling something I think I read on the subject. A patriotic act or one confirming our stupidity, depending on your point of view. Thanks to a heart murmur, which has never affected me (other than probably to save my life), I was classified 4-R We turn off to the right onto Highway 79 and go for a mile before I announce, “Here’s where your grandparents are buried.”
There is nothing picturesque about Pinewood cemetery. Off the highway a good fifty yards, it is little more than a flat field, and it takes us ten minutes this cool Saturday in November to find my parents’ graves.
“I haven’t been back here since your grandmother died seventeen years ago,” I explain to Sarah as we finally come upon their markers. I bend down to pull up some weeds around the stone.
“You were too little to remember, but you came, too.”
Sarah, dressed in jeans and a bulky tan sweater, studies the simple tombstones.
“Were they racists?” she asks, squinting against the sun that has suddenly appeared from the low flying clouds.
“We all were,” I say, wondering how I can explain the South without sounding too defensive.
“Back then, I don’t think we believed that blacks were really human the same way we were. We thought they were so inferior genetically, that it was okay to treat them like we did.”
Sarah bends down to snap off a weed growing at a forty-five-degree angle from my father’s grave marker.
“You make it sound as if you weren’t responsible for your own racism.”
Surely she has learned in her history classes that a later generation can’t judge an earlier one by its standards.
“Of course we were, but back when we were in the middle of that era, it wasn’t so easy to accept we were wrong.
We had a lot invested in it.” To my own daughter I can’t admit that even today my mind contains an informal hierarchy of ethnic mental superiority: Japanese, Jews, followed by whites of northern European ancestry, and blacks on the bottom. The evidence seems all too apparent. Yet, I dare not voice it, for fear Sarah will again tar and feather me with her own labels.
“But it was worse than that,” she insists.
“It wasn’t just stigma and forced separation in schools and in public.
They were exploited, cheated, even still being lynched in your parents’ generation.”
“True,” I concede, not wanting to argue over the details.
As I stand erect, my knees snap, and I feel dizzy. At my age, seeing my parents’ names so permanently etched in stone has made me aware of how much of my life I’ve already lived.
“But individual relationships weren’t all like that. You can care about somebody even if the relationship is based on paternalism. As soon as my mother got to know your mother, she forgot about her skin and loved her as much as I did. We weren’t as bad as it seems today.”
Leading me to the car left on the side of the road that runs through the cemetery, Sarah says over her shoulder, “Is that how you justify what your grandfather did?”
I sigh, knowing the situation is impossible.
“I don’t know what he did,” I say, catching up to her.
“That’s why we’re here.”
We drive into town, and as usual I am struck by the sad shabbiness of the buildings on Main Street. When I was a child, the town didn’t seem so poor. In a rectangular park that centers the town the most prominent structures are a statue of Robert E. Lee and a concrete platform used by politicians and musical groups. Underneath it are four separate bathrooms, an architectural reminder of segregation.