“Please, man,” he said. “Just let me eat.”
I sighed. From the window where we sat I could see the road, the 4×4 and anybody approaching on foot. Even if somebody had taken it into his mind to hurt Jones, he wasn’t going to do it in Betty’s Diner. Elliot and I were the only white folk in the place, and the handful of people at the other tables were very deliberately ignoring our presence. If we saw any journalists, I could take him out the back way, assuming Betty’s had a back way. Maybe I was overreacting.
“Whatever,” I conceded. “Just be quick about it.”
It was pretty obvious that Jones hadn’t eaten much during his time in jail. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes sunken, and spots and boils had erupted on his face and neck. He devoured a plate of smothered porkchops with rice, green beans, and macaroni and cheese, then followed it with a slice of strawberry cream cake. Elliot nibbled at some fries while I stuck with coffee from the Mr. Coffee machine on the counter. When we were done, Elliot left Jones with me and went to pay the check.
Jones’s left hand lay flat upon the table, its only adornment a cheap Timex. His right hung on the stainless steel cross around his neck. It was T-shaped, and both its vertical and horizontal shafts appeared hollow. I reached out to touch it, but he drew back and there was something in his eyes that I didn’t like.
“What you doin’?”
“I just wanted to take a look at your cross.”
“It’s mine. I don’t want nobody else touchin’ it.”
“Atys,” I said softly. “Let me see the cross.”
He held onto it for a moment longer, then uttered a long “Shiiiit.” He lifted the cross from around his neck and let it fall gently into the palm of my hand. I dangled it from my fingers, then gave the shaft an experimental twist. It came loose in my hand. I let it fall to the table, exposing a two inch length of sharpened steel. I clasped the T in the palm of my hand, closed my fist and left the point sticking out between my middle and ring fingers.
“Where did you get this?”
The sunlight danced on the blade, reflecting in Jones’s eyes and face. He was reluctant to answer.
“Atys,” I said, “I don’t know you, but you’re already starting to bug me. Answer the question.”
He did some theatrical head shaking before he answered.
“Preacher gave it to me.”
“The chaplain?”
Jones shook his head. “No, one of the ministers comes to the jail. Tole me he was a prisoner too, once, ’cept the Lord set him free.”
“Did he say why he was giving this to you?”
“Tole me he knowed I was in trouble, knowed there was people tryin’ to kill me. Tole me that it would protect me.”
“He give you his name?”
“Tereus.”
“What did he look like?”
Jones met my eyes for the first time since I had taken the cross.
“He looked like me,” he replied, simply. “He looked like a man seen trouble.”
I replaced the shaft, covered the blade, then after a moment’s hesitation handed it back to him. He looked surprised, then nodded at me once in acknowledgment.
“If we do this right, then you won’t need it,” I said. “And if we screw up, maybe you’ll be glad of it.”
With that, Elliot returned and we left. Neither of us mentioned the knife to him. This time, there were no more stops, and nobody followed us as we made our way to Charleston and the East Side.
The East Side neighborhood was one of the original developments outside the old walled city, and had always been unsegregated. Blacks and whites shared the warren of streets bordered by Meeting and East Bay to the west and east, and the Crosstown Expressway and Mary Street to the north and south, although even in the mid-nineteenth century the black population was higher than the white. Working-class blacks, whites, and immigrants continued to live together on the East Side until after World War II, when the whites moved to the suburbs west of the Ashley. From then on, the East Side became a place into which you didn’t want to stray if you were white. Poverty took root, bringing with it the seeds of violence and drug abuse.
But the East Side was changing once again. Areas south of Calhoun Street and Judith Street that had once been exclusively black were now nearly all white, and wealthily so, and the wave of urban renewal and gentrification was also breaking on the southern verges of the East Side. Six years before, the average price of a house in the area was about $18,000. Now there were houses on Mary Street making $250,000, and even homes on Columbus and Amherst, close to the small park where the drug dealers congregated and within sight of the brownstone projects and yellow and orange public housing, were selling for two or three times what they were worth only half a decade before. But this was still, for the present, a black neighborhood, the houses painted in faded pastels, relics of the days without air-conditioning. The Piggly Wiggly grocery store at Columbia and Meeting, the yellow Money Man pawn shop across from it, the cut-rate liquor store nearby all spoke of lives far removed from those of the wealthy whites returning to the old streets.
The faces of the young men at the corners and the old people on their porches regarded us warily as we drove: a black man and a white man in one car, being tailed by a white man in a second car. We might not have been Five-O, but whatever we were we were still bad news. At the corner of American and Reid, on the side of a two-room house erected as some kind of art exhibit, someone had written the following lines:
THE AFRO-AMERICAN HAS BEEN HEIR TO THE MYTHS THAT IT IS BETTER TO BE POOR THAN RICH, LOWER-CLASS RATHER THAN MIDDLE OR UPPER, EASYGOING RATHER THAN INDUSTRIOUS, EXTRAVAGANT RATHER THAN THRIFTY AND ATHLETIC RATHER THAN ACADEMIC.
I didn’t know the source of the quotation, and neither did Elliot when I asked him about it later. Atys had apparently just looked blankly at the words on the wall. I guess he probably already knew all that it said from experience. Around us, hydrangeas were in bloom, and heavenly bamboo grew by the front steps of a neat two-story house on Drake Street, midway between a ruined building at the junction of Drake and Amherst and the Fraser Elementary at the corner of Columbus. It was painted white with yellow trim, and there were shutters drawn on both the upper and lower floors, slatted on the top floor to let the air in. A bay window faced out onto the street from beneath the porch, with the front doorway to the right, a mass-produced carved wood pattern above it for decoration. A flight of five stone steps led up to the door.
When he was certain the street was quiet, Elliot backed the GMC into the yard to the right of the doorway. I heard the sound of the doors opening, then footsteps as Atys and Elliot entered the house from the rear. Drake seemed largely empty apart from two small kids playing ball by the railings of the school. They remained there until it began to rain, the raindrops glittering in the glow of the street lamps that had just begun to shine, then ran for shelter. I waited ten minutes, the rain falling hard on the car, until I was certain that we hadn’t been followed, before I too headed into the house.
Atys-I was forcing myself to think of him by his first name in an effort to establish some kind of connection with him-sat uncomfortably at a cheap pine kitchen table, Elliot beside him. By the sink, an elderly black woman with silver hair was pouring five glasses of lemonade. Her husband, who was a lot taller than she was, held the glasses as she poured, then passed them, one by one, to their guests. His shoulders were slightly stooped, but the strength of his deltoid and trapezius muscles was still apparent from their definition beneath his white shirt. He was well over sixty years old, but I guessed that he could have taken Atys easily in a straight fight. He could probably have taken me.
“Devil and wife fighting,” he said, as I shook the rain from my jacket. I must have looked puzzled, because he repeated himself then pointed out the window at the rain and sunlight mingling.