Grievances Read online

  But mostly it was because I was angry. I was angry at parents who encourage hate. I was angry at the cruelty kids inflict on each other. I was angry that an innocent boy named Jimmy had to be hurt for something he had nothing to do with. I was angry that he had to be taught to make a fist so that he could defend himself.

  Before we left, Brad took out his wallet, peeled off some twenty-dollar bills and offered them to Hudson. “For the bike. I should never have gotten you into this.”

  Hudson waved the money aside. “Cowardly bastards. One damn editorial. I’m gonna get ’em back.”

  On the drive back to Windrow, I asked Brad what Hudson had written.

  “Something outlandish and radical,” he said. “He wrote that Hirtsboro should try to solve the murder of Wallace Sampson.”

  Chapter Three

  The next morning, a blast of humidity and the high whine of cicadas greeted Brad and me as we left the house and crunched across the gravel to the pickup for the drive back into Hirtsboro.

  “If there are any Sampson family members around, they’ll be at church,” Brad said as we parked near the fountain. “And if they’re not there themselves, someone at church will know where they are.”

  On the right side of the tracks, a bell began to toll, slowly at first and then with increasing vigor as it summoned the white population to services. From the wrong side of the tracks, the breeze carried the strong chords of a piano.

  We followed the music, drawn to a large white wooden-frame building with a simple steeple at the corner of two sandy streets. The church sagged from age but the exterior was freshly painted and the lawn neatly mowed. A sign identified it as the Mt. Moriah House of Prayer, pastored by the Reverend Clifford Grace. The front door was open and we could see the backs of the people in the congregation and, up front, two high-backed altar chairs covered in red velvet. Behind the chairs on risers fourteen members of the purple-robed choir—men and women, young and old, black—swayed as they sang “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.”

  I had seen this scene before, but only in my mind. When I was little, my family would drive from Detroit to Florida for a week at the beach and on Sunday we would leave at the crack of dawn to drive home. Dad would fiddle with the radio as he drove, discovering each year that on Sunday mornings in the South, church was the only thing broadcast. With pianos, electric guitars, and singers and preachers that sounded like they meant it, black church services were much more entertaining than white. I would close my eyes as we listened, trying to picture the small country churches, their preachers, and their choirs.

  By the time the choir finished with “Home is Over Jordan,” I was home, in the station wagon with Mom and Dad in the front and Luke and me in the back, rolling northward as we listened to gospel music, the car filled with the smell of Thermos coffee and smoke from unfiltered Chesterfields.

  Brad and I walked in quietly and slid into a back pew. A few members of the congregation turned our way and nodded—an old women in a lavender dress and an ornate flowered hat; a teenage boy in a bright blue athletic warm-up suit; a teenage girl with a gravity-defying swirl of hair; a man in a suit; a farmer in a threadbare jacket and boots.

  I picked up a Popsicle-stick fan with a picture of a radiant brown-haired, blue-eyed Jesus on one side and the words “Courtesy of Short & Sons Mortuary” emblazoned on the back. Except for Jesus, Brad and I were the only white people in the place. A tall, lanky man in purple liturgical robes rose from one of the altar chairs, partially blocking my view.

  “Thank you and praise Jesus for the magnificent choir,” he boomed, leading the congregation in applause. When the clapping died, he said, “Before we end today we’ll follow our custom of sharing our joys and concerns. Joys and Concerns, brothers and sisters.” He stroked his salt-and-pepper beard and motioned to someone I couldn’t see.

  “My joy is that I’d like to ask our church youth basketball team to stand up because they won the league championship last Saturday up at Bamberg,” said a woman. A round of applause and I saw the teenager in the athletic suit stand shyly.

  A middle-aged woman near the front stood. “My concern is for my great aunt in Cincinnati who is in the hospital with surgery. I ask that the church pray for her.” She sat.

  The preacher pointed to a woman in the congregation. “I ask your prayers for my daughter Delicia and her kids in New York and that things get worked out with her boyfriend,” she said.

  A man in a blue suit stood. “I praise Jesus that the Men’s Association chicken dinner raised six hundred fifty-eight dollars last Saturday night for new robes for the choir.”

  And so it went. A joy about a son’s promotion in the Army; a concern about an ill parent; a joy about a new baby; a concern about a nephew in jail; a joy that Reverend Jesse Jackson was running for president; a concern about “the way things are up in Columbia.” And then one that caused my heart to race: “I ask your prayers to give me strength to find justice for my loving son Wallace.”

  “Amen!” the congregation resounded.

  When the service was over, the minister greeted us at the door. If he was surprised to see two white men among his worshipers, he didn’t show it. He smiled a huge smile and extended his hand. “Welcome to a day the Lord hath made,” he said. “I am the Reverend Clifford Grace.”

  “I’m Brad Hall. This is Matt Harper. I don’t believe we’ve met but I live at Windrow. My family—”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Hall,” Rev. Grace interrupted.

  “Reverend, I’m sure it’s a surprise for you to see us here.” Grace didn’t react. Brad continued, “We’ve come because we could use your help.”

  “On Wallace Sampson,” Grace said.

  “How’d you know?”

  Grace laughed. “Mary Pell is a member here.”

  “I’m surprised she brought it up,” Brad said.

  “Word gets around. Mr. Hall, it’s been years since Wallace was killed. Rumors get started. People make guesses about who did it. And every Sunday, Etta Mae Sampson reminds us of a mother’s pain. It’s a poison in Hirtsboro, a devil that won’t be exorcised. So, it’s not a surprise when black people want to know who killed Wallace Sampson. But when a white man does, especially a Hall, that’s something different.”

  “Were you here when it happened?” I asked.

  “I was.”

  “Would you tell me about it?”

  “Later.” Reverend Grace glanced at his watch. “Right now, I’ve got to get on over to the county jail.” He smiled. “Services for the prisoners.”

  As we left, Reverend Grace pointed out Etta Mae Sampson’s white-frame house a block away.

  For reporters, going to see the family of someone who has died comes with the territory. I have had to do it maybe half a dozen times. Once you’re there, it often ends up being not as bad as it sounds. For one thing, survivors and family members usually want to talk. It helps them remember the dead and process their own grief. The other thing is that whatever you’re asking them to do is a lot easier than what they’ve just been through. After you’ve actually lost a parent or a spouse or a child, how bad can talking about it really be?

  Somehow all that logic never makes it any easier, though, and I was nervous as we knocked on the door of Etta Mae Sampson’s house. Potted red geraniums were positioned on either side of the front door. A woman in her fifties, her dark hair pulled into a neat bun, came to the door but stayed behind the screen. Mrs. Sampson was still dressed for church in her purple dress and matching shoes.

  “Mrs. Sampson, I’m Brad Hall and this is Matt Harper. I live at Windrow and Matt is a newspaper reporter up in Charlotte. I’m sorry to intrude. Mrs. Sampson, I’m wondering if we could ask you about Wallace.”

  “My Wallace?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did someone send you?”

  “No, ma’am. We’re here on our
own. Matt is writing a story about what happened.”

  Not so fast, I thought, but kept quiet.

  “Mary Pell works for you,” she said to Brad.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I know who you are.”

  She turned to me. I was prepared to produce my press card but Mrs. Sampson didn’t ask. Instead, she said, “I don’t understand. Why now? What kind of story?”

  I could have told her that Brad’s explanation that I was doing a story wasn’t exactly right, that Brad was the driving force and, at this point, I was still along for the ride, just taking a sniff, as those in the investigative reporting trade say. It’s a Cardinal Rule that you never promise anybody there will be a story. There’s just too much that can go wrong—from leads that don’t pan out, to fresh news breaking, to production mistakes, to idiot editors. Every reporter has had the experience of going home at night with every assurance his story was going to appear and maybe even on the front page only to search through the next day’s edition in disbelief because the story never ran.

  But telling Mrs. Sampson that there might never be a story would have been like saying, “Mrs. Sampson, I’m not sure your dead son is worth writing about.” So instead I said, “As I understand it, it’s an unsolved murder and it’s never really been investigated.”

  “It never was investigated but it isn’t unsolved,” she said matter-of-factly.

  She invited us in and offered us some iced tea. We sat in her living room—Brad on an old upholstered chair with a lace doily, me uncomfortably on the edge of a rocker, and Mrs. Sampson on a dark red velvet settee. A small television sat in one corner, a simple kerosene heater in another. Three photographs hung on the wall: two eight-by-ten color pictures, unframed but protected by Saran Wrap, of Martin Luther King Jr. and of JFK, and a cardboard-framed school picture of a brightly smiling boy of twelve or thirteen in a red and white striped polo shirt, clearly the child of the woman to whom we were talking, despite his lighter skin.

  If I ended up writing Wallace Sampson’s story for the Charlotte Times, I knew that Walker Burns would want that photo. I had learned that lesson when I’d neglected to get a photo for a front-page Sunday story about a teenager who’d accidentally been electrocuted at the state prison.

  “Oh, don’t worry about a picture,” Walker had said sarcastically. “We’ll just let the readers imagine what the kid might have looked like.” A breakneck four-hundred-mile, six-hour roundtrip drive to the boy’s parents’ house in Morehead City produced the photo just in time for deadline. I’ve never forgotten the lesson.

  “Wallace was twelve when that picture was made,” Mrs. Sampson said as she caught me staring at the photo. “I think about what he would look like now. Would he be tall, like his father? He was already pretty tall. He played on the church basketball team. Sometimes, I imagine that he’s all grown up and sometimes I see him in heaven and he’s my baby, with little angel wings. But every day, I think about what it would be like if none of this had ever happened and I came home and he was there, sitting there where you are, looking just like he is in that picture.”

  “Do you have other children?” Brad asked.

  “The twins. Praise and Rejoice. They’d grown up and both moved to D.C. by the time Wallace was born.”

  Sometimes I think that what I get paid for is to ask the rude questions, the ones everyone else wants to ask but finds too difficult. “Mrs. Sampson,” I said, “tell me about the day that it happened.”

  She closed her eyes, rocked back, and sat a long time before she spoke. “I told him not to be out late. There’d been trouble—a bunch of young hotheads in town. Wallace wasn’t part of that crowd. He was over visiting his girlfriend. It was Friday night and I said, ‘You be home before too late.’ He said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ That was the last thing he ever said to me, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  “I stayed in bed waiting up for him, waiting for him to come home. It wasn’t like Wallace to be late. And then someone knocked on the door and I knew it wasn’t Wallace because he would never knock. I got my robe on and it was Reverend Grace and he told me Wallace had been shot.” She wrung her hands, exhaled, and leaned forward. “They took him to Charleston, to the university, but he had already passed. I never got to see him. By the time Reverend Grace and I got there, they had done an autopsy. I didn’t want them to but they said they had to and they’d already done it. They said because of where he was shot, in the head, that I wouldn’t want to see him. But I wanted to. No matter what. He was still my Wallace, even if someone put a hole in his head. He was still my baby.”

  Softly, Wallace Sampson’s mother began to weep and I began to wonder what I loved so much about reporting.

  “He didn’t have a suit,” she continued. “He was only thirteen. So I gave Mr. Short at the mortuary his best school pants and that shirt in the picture to bury him in. All his school friends came. They wanted to see him one last time. But we couldn’t have an open casket.”

  She composed herself. “He’s buried up at the cemetery. You can go there. I go there every day.”

  “Why do you think Wallace was killed?” Brad asked.

  “Meanness,” she said, as if that explained everything. “The world is filled with so much meanness.”

  “Mrs. Sampson,” I said, “when we first arrived you said Wallace’s killing wasn’t unsolved. I thought no one had ever been charged.”

  “That doesn’t mean no one knows who did it. There are at least two who know for sure who did it.”

  “Which two?”

  “Whoever shot him. They know they did it. And God. I believe Wallace was God’s gift to me. God knows who killed Wallace. And God will make sure there is justice. Maybe not in my life. Maybe not on this earth. But God knows and He will have justice.”

  “I, for one, would prefer to see justice now, on this earth, and not wait for God,” said Brad.

  Mrs. Sampson looked him in the eye. “I know black folk that talk crazy like that. You’re the first white.”

  “It’s not crazy and there are other people, black and white, who feel the same way.”

  “Mary Pell said you were crazy. You got that article in The Reporter written, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And him down here?” She nodded at me.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you all do what you want,” she said. “It don’t matter to me. God will deliver the final judgment.”

  I asked to see Wallace’s room. Two pairs of pants and two shirts hung on nails. A baseball bat, its broken handle nailed and taped back together, sat in a corner. A lump formed in my throat when I saw a basketball trophy inscribed “Wallace Sampson–Mr. Rebound” on the bedside table. A picture of twin girls was tucked into a corner of a small mirror above a dresser. A tiny school picture of another girl was pinned to the wall along with a poster of Hank Aaron.

  “That’s his girlfriend, Vanessa Brown,” she said, pointing to the little picture. “I never changed anything in here since the night he didn’t come home.”

  I picked up a framed picture of a younger Mrs. Sampson holding hands with a black man in an Army uniform. “My late husband,” she said. He didn’t look all that tall to me.

  Mrs. Sampson sat on the edge of her dead son’s bed. “I’m okay during the day. But I have trouble at night. Sometimes I awake from my dreams and I am scared that I will forget him. So I come to this room and I lie on his bed and I pick up his shirt and I can smell him in it. Each child has their own smell. Did you know that? And my worst time is when I become afraid that I will forget what he looked like and what he smelled like. I think that no one will remember him. So I look at his picture and I smell his shirt and I hold the trophy and I think to myself, I am holding the very thing that he held. And then I am only just that far away from him. And I tell him, ‘You will never, ever, ever be forgotten.’”

  As
we said our good-byes I told Mrs. Sampson, “I’m sorry for your loss. I’m sorry to have to make you relive it.”

  “Mr. Harper, I relive it every day. You can’t hurt me. I have already been hurt the worst that there is.”

  We left, having dredged up a mother’s grief with no assurance that anything good would ever result from it. And without one of the things that we had come for. Because even though she had been hurt all she could, I just couldn’t bring myself to ask Mrs. Sampson for her dead son’s picture.

  We met Reverend Grace later that afternoon after he returned from his jail ministry. He told us about the Friday night before the shooting when a group of about twenty young men threw stones at the Hirtsboro town police car near the wrong side of the tracks.

  “The mayor called me down there to see what I could do,” Reverend Grace recalled. “I knew most of the crowd. Mostly they were boys. A few of them were troublemakers but most were good kids. Some had been drinking and they were full of themselves. There was all this stuff going on all over the country—protests at black colleges, marches in the streets—and people were facing down authority. There was this feeling of power, like nothing anyone from Hirtsboro had ever felt before. I tried to calm them down but they didn’t want to listen.” It ended with the arrival of six sheriff’s cruisers and twenty-four deputies.

  “And that’s all there was to it,” Reverend Grace said. “The next night, Wallace Sampson got killed.”

  “Reverend Grace, do you know why Wallace Sampson was shot?” Brad asked.

  Grace paused. “I only know what people say.”

  “Can you tell us?” I asked. “The truth shall make you free.”

  Grace gave me a rueful smile. “Not in Hirtsboro, South Carolina.”

  Being a reporter is all about trust. To get Reverend Grace to talk about what he really knew, he would need to trust me. It worked the other way, too. For me to evaluate what Reverend Grace said, I would need to know how much I could trust him.