Grievances Page 2

  Miss Nancy bent down in front of one of the cabinets and pulled out a drawer, releasing the unmistakable musty smell of aging newsprint. She fingered through a row of brown envelopes and pulled one labeled Murders–South Carolina.

  Inside were maybe a hundred clippings, most a paragraph or two long. They were arranged by date so it didn’t take me long to find the one I was looking for. It was yellowed but didn’t look like it had been touched since it had been put in the morgue. The four-paragraph clip had been stamped in red with the date it ran in the Times. It read in its entirety:

  South Carolina Youth Shot, Dies

  Hirtsboro, S.C. (AP) A 13-year-old boy was shot in the head shortly after midnight here Friday night.

  Wallace Sampson was taken by Hirtsboro Ambulance to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston where a spokesman said he was pronounced dead.

  Police said they were investigating.

  The shooting followed several nights of racial unrest.

  I scanned the rest of the clips. There were plenty of other briefs on stabbings and shootings and one longer piece about a Spartanburg preacher who’d been poisoned by his wife. But there had been no follow-up stories about the Sampson incident. I made a copy of the clip and returned the file to Miss Nancy.

  “Are you on to something, Matt?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, which was true. Most of these things never went anywhere.

  I headed back to the newsroom deep in thought. Some of Bradford Hall’s story checked out but that didn’t mean much. I knew nothing about him beyond what he’d told me. But I liked what I saw in him—curiosity, honesty, a willingness to pursue something, even against opposition, that he could have ignored. And of all the people with grievances I’d ever met, he was one of the most unusual: a Yankee blueblood investigating an unsolved South Carolina civil rights murder of almost twenty years ago.

  I slid into my cubicle and lost myself in a photograph I keep on my desk, one my father took of my late brother Luke and me in our swimming suits standing on a platform floating in the middle of a lake. We’re tanned, wet, and smiling. Luke, a head taller, has his right arm around my shoulder. Cradled in his left arm is a football, its leather soaked black from a game of catch that quickly escalated to spectacular diving grabs made while leaping into the lake from the platform.

  I was still in the picture when a stack of letters, held together with rubber bands, hit my desk with a thud. The top letter was addressed to “The Racist Reporter” with the name and address of the Charlotte Times. I thumbed through the others. More of the same.

  I looked up at the receptionist, who had known exactly for whom the letters were intended. “It’s such a shame, Matt. They’ve got you all wrong.”

  I shrugged. “I understand where they’re coming from.”

  “At least the demonstrators in front of the building are gone,” she said hopefully. “Did they ever find out where you lived?”

  Walker Burns has a saying: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” This seemed like a very good weekend to spend some time checking out Hirtsboro and Bradford Hall.

  Chapter Two

  The northbound traffic on the interstate faced me three-wide and stretched as far as I could see as I headed south toward Hirtsboro. The sprawl of south Charlotte spilled seamlessly into York County, South Carolina, and, except for billboards touting fireworks, video poker, and subdivisions with lower South Carolina taxes, there was little to indicate that life fundamentally changes once you cross the border to the Palmetto state.

  But it does. South Carolina was the last of the original thirteen colonies to join the union, the first state to leave the union after the start of the Civil War in Charleston, and the last to rejoin the country after the South had lost. South Carolina has always operated by a slightly different set of rules.

  Whenever things got slow on the city desk, Walker Burns would send a reporter to troll around South Carolina for a few days. Inevitably, that would produce a fantastic story along the lines of: blacks who weren’t being allowed to vote in a Low Country town that hadn’t yet gotten the word; a funeral home that kept as an advertisement in its front window the embalmed body of an Italian carnival worker (known locally as “Spaghetti”) who had died and been left behind when the show moved on; two NASCAR fans who wounded each other after staging an old-fashioned pistol duel over the question of which was a better race car—Ford or Chevrolet. (Technically, the duel had been written about previously. The new angle uncovered by Walker’s South Carolina bureau chief related to the claim by local officials that taxes should have been paid on the $1,725 in tickets sold to attend the duel.)

  Walker says that for every mile you go deeper into South Carolina, you go another year back in time. By his reckoning, by the time I got to Hirtsboro I’d be in the antebellum South.

  As I cleared Rock Hill, the subdivisions gave way to peach orchards and rolling hills of red clay. I turned off the interstate near Columbia where the land flattened and the soil turned sandy. In the fields, tufts of picked-over cotton clung to dead, stripped black stalks like tiny flags of surrender.

  South of Bamberg, I pulled off the asphalt and onto the hard-packed sand that served as the driveway for a white-painted cinderblock Gulf station, next to the Orange Blossom Motel and Tourist Cabins. I pumped gas and went inside, where a wizened old man whose shirt identified him as “Shorty” smoked on a stool behind the cash register and watched the store, the driveway, and an evangelist on a small black and white television. I picked out a six-ounce glass bottle of Coke and a postcard that had a picture of black field workers piling cotton bales on a truck and the words “Every Yankee Tourist is Worth a Bale of Cotton and Much Easier to Pick.”

  “Be anything else now?” Shorty asked, grinding the butt of an unfiltered Camel into an overflowing ashtray.

  “I need a pen. Do you have a pen?”

  “Do what?”

  “A pen.”

  “I don’t believe we carry no pea-uns. I mean we used to carry ’em—diaper pea-uns and such but folks don’t hardly use ’em no more. I wanna say we don’t have any.” He lit another cigarette and returned to the TV.

  “I mean a pen.”

  “That’s what I said. Pea-un.”

  “Like you write with.”

  “Oh, you mean pin. No, we don’t have none of those neither.”

  An hour and fifteen minutes later, I arrived at the entrance to Windrow. Two brick columns and a simple black iron gate marked a dirt road that left the paved highway and went laser-straight through a thick forest of slash pines.

  The road was wide and well-maintained and in a few minutes I’d emerged from the pines. The road took a hard left and skirted a flat field of corn stubble that stretched to the horizon. Ahead, on a slight rise, stood the plantation home of Bradford Hall. He had described it as “modern.” What it was was a modern architectural wonder—stark, soaring walls, vast windows of tinted glass, angular porches. About the only thing it had in common with the columned antebellum Scarlett O’Hara plantation mansion of my imagination was its color—white.

  Two golden retrievers bounded out the front door and ran up to meet the Honda. They were followed by Hall.

  “I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you’ve come,” he said. The dogs sniffed my legs and eagerly wagged their tails. “Tasha and Maybelle agree. I’m sorry my wife Lindsay McDaniel isn’t with me to greet you but she’ll arrive from New York tomorrow. Let me help you with your things.”

  He showed me into the house. Its core was a massive two-story living room with a glass wall overlooking the rocky shallows of the Savannah River. A stone fireplace and hearth had been built into the wall but with no chimney to interrupt the view. Instead, Bradford explained, a hidden fan sucked the fireplace smoke down, out, and away. My room was off one of two spiral staircases that flanked the entrance to the
living room. From my bedroom, a sliding glass door led to a triangle-shaped porch that jutted out, like a ship’s prow.

  We walked out to the porch and looked over the river. “Nice view,” I said.

  “Thank you. It does what I intended. The magic of Windrow is the river, the animals, the plants. I wanted to live outside, but inside. I wanted to bring the outside in. There are no curtains. It makes Lindsay rather uncomfortable but the fact is, you don’t need them. We’re pretty much alone here. My father’s place is a couple miles away, at a different bend in the river, but it might as well be a couple of states away.”

  He pointed to a battered Ford pickup in the driveway. “We’re on our own until Lindsay arrives tomorrow. Lemme show you around.”

  A box of plastic bags, a safari hat, and a well-worn copy of South Carolina Wildflowers sat in the passenger seat. I tossed them on the floor and climbed in.

  “My plant-hunting gear,” Bradford said. He wheeled the pickup down the driveway and out toward the main road. “General Sherman came right through here,” he said, sweeping his arm out the window and gesturing across a rolling cornfield that stretched to the horizon. “An English planter started Windrow in the early 1820s as a freshwater rice and indigo plantation. Confederate General Beauregard used the main house as a field headquarters for a while. But when the Yankees came through, they pretty much left the place alone.”

  “Why?”

  “In a hurry to get to the sea, I suppose. Anyway, it was lucky. My great-grandfather and his brothers bought it years ago for bird-hunting. They had their own railroad line from Augusta and they’d haul everything in—food, supplies, servants, guides and guests—entertain for the season and then return to Massachusetts and New York. My grandfather built a year-round place that my father lives in now. I spent my early years up North and went to school there but Windrow is where I really grew up.”

  We turned off the road and cut across the dry corn stubble, kicking up dust as we bounced to the top of a rise. In the distance the Savannah River stretched to the horizon like a piece of silver string. We returned to the road and had been driving about twenty minutes when I asked, “How big’s the plantation?”

  “We’re still on it.”

  “Oh.”

  He pulled to the side of the road and turned off the engine. “I have to tell you, I find it very embarrassing. The size. The houses. The help. The lifestyle. It’s how I was brought up. It’s who I am and I’m proud of what my forebears accomplished. But when you see how people live here, the disparity is appalling. It’s not fair. But that’s not a very popular position in my family.”

  “Did you develop this concern for social justice at Harvard?”

  “Didn’t have a chance,” he laughed. “Got thrown out after my sophomore year. The administration took exception to some of the plants I was cultivating in the botany lab.”

  I laughed.

  “It was the times,” he shrugged. “Anyway, I’d already finished all the good botany courses. Let’s head into town and I’ll give you a look at Hirtsboro.”

  Bradford started the pickup and did a U-turn. We stayed in the shade cast by the long shadows of the pines as we headed back down the road. A heavy sweetness filled the cab.

  “Daphne odora,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That sweet smell is from Daphne odora. Botanists identify lots of things by smell. It’s an ornamental shrub from the Mezereum family. In Greek myth, Daphne was a nymph who changed into a shrub to avoid Apollo’s advances. Her scent lingers, very fragrant as you can tell. Daphne odora is a very difficult plant. Short lifespan and nurseries don’t like to stock it. But at Windrow, it grows wild.”

  “It’s intoxicating.”

  “I understand she was quite an alluring nymph.”

  “Bradford, how’d you get into botany?”

  “Call me Brad. Not many kids to play with at Windrow, at least not many kids my parents deemed ‘up to Hall standards.’ So I made friends with the plantation animals, became a vegetarian when I figured out some of them were ending up on my dinner plate, and I started getting interested in Windrow’s plants.”

  “It seems like a good place to do it.”

  “It is. Botanically, Windrow is in a marvelous part of the world. It’s in a region that’s the northernmost subtropical point in the United States. I have in mind to do a coffeetable book devoted entirely to the botany of Windrow. You have pine trees and palm trees—more plant species than you could ever imagine. The frustrating thing is when you come across something that just doesn’t seem to have a name. Tracking down the facts becomes an obsession.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  It was mid-afternoon when we arrived in Hirtsboro. The sun scorched with the intensity of a heat lamp, glinting off railroad tracks that bisected the town and split treeless Jefferson Davis Boulevard, a lane on each side. Two blocks of one- and two-story storefronts faced each other across the boulevard. I took out my notebook and wrote down the signs as we drove by: Farmers & Mechanics Insurance Agency; the Great Southern Auto Supply and Appliance Store; International Feed & Seed; a consignment store called Second Time Around; Classen’s Clothes (Come to Classen’s for Classy Clothes!); the First Bank of Hirtsboro (open Monday, Wednesday and Friday) and, in gold letters in old English type, The Hirtsboro Reporter.

  “This town looks like the model train set my brother Luke and I had as kids,” I said.

  Brad turned off Jefferson Davis and we cruised slowly through the neighborhoods behind the storefronts. Unlike with the train set, there was a right side and wrong side of the tracks. On one side, a few blocks behind the storefronts, fine old homes sprawled on large lots with sidewalks and landscaped yards adorned with huge, spreading magnolias and carefully attended azaleas. In the neighborhoods on the other side of the tracks, peeling-paint shotgun houses sat on small sun-baked yards. There were no sidewalks. The streets were sandy, narrow, and unpaved.

  “Savannah County is ninety percent black and always has been,” Brad said. “The land’s good for plantation crops like cotton, rice, and indigo. If you were white, you were a planter or maybe an overseer. If you were black, you were a slave. There wasn’t much else. After Emancipation, people who were here just stayed and there’s never been reason for anybody else to come. The white people, by and large, are descendants of the planters and overseers. The blacks are descendants of the slaves. It hasn’t been that long.”

  We returned to the center of town where the diagonal lines of parking spaces angled out from the railroad track like bones from a fish spine. Brad parked his pickup with its bumper sticker reading “Meat is Dead” next to a souped-up Chevelle with a bumper sticker reading “I Have a Dream”—along with a picture of the Confederate flag flying over the U.S. Capitol.

  “Let’s stop in at the paper,” Brad said. “I want you to meet the editor.”

  A young man with a large waist and green visor stood as we entered. Brad introduced me as a Charlotte Times reporter to Glenn Hudson and told him, “I’ve talked Matt into coming down here to look into the story.”

  “Great newspaper,” Hudson said. “If I can help in any way, let me know.”

  Out the plate glass window, I watched a boy about seven or eight years old struggle to push a bent and broken bicycle across Jefferson Davis Boulevard. As he got closer, I could see he was crying.

  The red bike’s front wheel was folded over into a crescent. Snapped spokes splayed out in all directions. The handlebars were twisted, the seat turned sideways. The bike’s white sidewall tires were flat. Struts of the frame intruded into the misshapen rear wheel so that it would not turn. The chain dragged on the ground.

  Halfway across the street the boy gently lowered the bike and used his sleeve to wipe his eyes. Hudson shoved by me, ran into the street and scooped the boy up.

  “My bi-i-i-ke,” the boy sobbed.

/>   The boy clasped his father’s neck and buried his head in his shoulder. The man stroked his son’s hair and kissed him on the cheek.

  “What happened, son?”

  “I rode my bike over to Michael and Chris’s to play and they broke it. They had concrete blocks and they knocked it down and they just kept throwing them.” The little boy wriggled out of his father’s arms, hugged the bike’s broken frame and broke into a new round of sobs. “They said their dad told them to because you’re a nigger-lover.”

  Hudson picked up Jimmy with his right hand and slung him over his shoulder. With his left hand he picked up the bike and carried them both to the sidewalk. “C’mon, Jimmy,” he said. “We’re going shopping.”

  Brad and I watched them disappear into the Great Southern Auto Supply and Appliance store. They emerged a few minutes later, Jimmy riding a new red bike in circles around his father.

  When they got back to the newspaper office Hudson took several copies of that week’s edition of The Hirtsboro Reporter and tucked them into his belt so that they covered his stomach. Then he showed Jimmy how to make a fist.

  “Don’t wrap your fingers around your thumb, you’ll break it that way,” he said. “Put your thumb on the outside. Now, hit me in the stomach, as hard as you can.”

  Jimmy poked at the newspapers.

  “You won’t hurt me. That what the papers are for.”

  Jimmy hit a little harder.

  “I said hard!”

  “Why?”

  “Because nobody’s going to do that to your bike again.”

  It took a few more times and a bit more encouragement, but eventually Jimmy hit his father as hard as he could.

  I wanted to cry. I know some of it was because I had been moved by what I had just seen—by Hudson’s love for his son, his instinct to do whatever it took to protect him, and by Jimmy’s need for his father. My father never would have done that for me.