Grievances Page 4

  “Reverend Grace, what brought you to Hirtsboro?”

  “I believe it was the grace of God. I was assigned to this church right out of seminary. It was the posting they all laughed about through school—the poorest town, the meanest whites, the sorriest blacks. But it was the right posting for a four-hundred-fifty pound twenty-four-year-old who was last in his class, stuttered, and jiggled like jelly with every step.”

  Brad and I exchanged quick glances and stared in disbelief at the fit man before us. “I came here miserable and it only got worse. And one day I begged God to just take back my body and let me die. He didn’t let me die but he did what I prayed for. He took control of my body. And with God in control, my weight began to drop. Because of my miracle I knew for certain that salvation was possible. And I began to understand that I had been called here for a purpose.”

  “What purpose is that?” I asked.

  “To get beyond the cross.”

  Reverend Grace led us into the darkened sanctuary. He walked behind the purple-draped altar and stood below a large rough-hewn wooden cross that hung on the wall.

  “In 1932, the Klan lynched a black teenager who was accused of raping a white Hirtsboro girl. There were no charges, no trial. They just hung him in a big oak tree, right outside of town. Later, the boy’s daddy cut the tree down and hauled the trunk home. He cut it into planks and made this cross and gave it to the church. You see, he could deal with what had happened if he thought of his son dying on a cross.”

  Brad approached the altar and touched the cross. “Why do you want to get beyond it?” he asked.

  “These people have lived under slavery since their ancestors were forced onto ships in Africa. The label changes but this is still slavery. The ones who can, leave town. Young people like Praise and Rejoice Sampson. The rest stay with only one thing to hang on: the salvation that comes in the next life. In Hirtsboro, justice is a gift from God and won’t happen in this world. But in the next life there will be justice and we will all live in glory. Meanwhile, the comfort of Jesus helps us ease the pain while we’re on this mortal earth. That’s what this cross means to them.

  “But to me, that cross is still a lynching tree. Every Sunday my congregation looks at a symbol that killings go unpunished, that there is no hope for justice in this life. I hate that cross. We have got to move beyond it.”

  “Reverend Grace,” Brad asked, “If God can perform a miracle on a four-hundred-fifty-pound young man, can’t the people of Hirtsboro believe that justice is possible now, on this earth and in our time?”

  “I haven’t given up. But it’s a lot easier to believe in heaven than it is to believe that things will change for people in Hirtsboro in my lifetime.”

  I saw an opening. “We can help them change, if you’ll tell us what you’ve heard.”

  “Even if I believed that, communication between priest and parishioner is sacred, a trust that cannot be violated.”

  “Like a reporter and a confidential source,” Brad interjected unhelpfully.

  Reverend Grace took my hands in his and looked into my eyes. “I can’t violate my parishioner’s confidences,” he said. “I can’t tell you what I’ve been told. But maybe I can give you a sort of roadmap. I tell you where to look, but I just don’t tell you what you’re going to find when you get there. I might be able to do that. I’ll pray on it.”

  “Please do,” I told him.

  An attractive woman waved to us from the deck as Brad and I arrived back at his home that evening,

  “She’s arrived,” Brad said happily. My impression of Lindsay McDaniel Hall was Newport Yacht Club—straight blonde bob, bright blue eyes, flawless skin, angular features and teeth that had paid for an orthodontist’s sports car. She wore white Keds, blue jeans, a simple white T-shirt, and minimal makeup. Brad Hall had married within his class.

  She smiled when we were introduced. “I hope you can stay for dinner.”

  I said I needed to be getting back.

  “Nonsense. We’re due at Brad’s father’s in half an hour. I’ll tell Mary Pell to add another setting.”

  “I thought we’d eat here,” Brad said, retrieving the book, the hat, and the plastic bags from the pickup’s floor.

  “It’s Sunday night.”

  “I know it is.” He slammed the pickup door. “I thought we’d eat here.”

  She smiled uneasily. “Sunday night supper at Windrow is always at Dad’s, Brad.”

  I began looking for a place to hide.

  “We’ve had Sunday supper with my father almost every week of our married lives. I believe we can miss once.”

  In my experience, we were one cross word away from an argument.

  “Brad, we have almost nothing in the house. I’m sorry. If I’d known . . .”

  “Father can be such a boor,” Brad said with a forced smile. “But if there’s nothing in our house, then Father’s it is.” And without much strain, the Halls pulled back from the brink.

  That would never have happened with Delana and me, I thought. I could never pull back. One word spoken with the slightest edge or hint of anger would take us down the path of poisonous words and hurt. I admired how Brad and Lindsay Hall did it.

  The sun was setting over the Savannah when we arrived at what was called, without irony, “the Big House,” the plantation home where Brad’s father spent much of the year. As Brad had explained it, his father lived alone except for the regular presence of Mary Pell, the housemaid, and a trickle of Yankee visitors who became a stream when bird-shooting season arrived on Labor Day.

  Everett Hall was tall, silver-haired, and his tanned, creased face gave him the look of an outdoorsman—a look confirmed by the tweed shooting jacket he wore when he greeted us, holding a glass of red wine. I straightened my tie as he gave his daughter-in-law a kiss on the cheek and his son a handshake. Then he turned to me.

  “This is Matthew Harper with the Charlotte Times,” Brad said. “Matt, this is my father, Everett Hall.”

  “A reporter? Well, we’re delighted to have you here anyway,” Everett Hall said in a way that left unclear whether he meant it as a joke. “Drink?”

  He refilled his glass. I accepted a glass of wine and followed him out to the veranda where the four of us watched the sun sinking over the Savannah and into the Georgia hills beyond. A great blue heron cruised up the river and lit on a branch overhanging an eddy. “He fishes there every night,” Everett Hall said. And soon the bird speared a wriggling flash of silver in his rapier-like beak and deftly slid it down its throat.

  “Touché,” Brad Hall said quietly.

  “Survival of the fittest,” said his father.

  Dinner was served at an enormous table in a dark-paneled dining room with high-backed red leather chairs. Old portraits of Halls, Bradfords, and Everetts lined the walls. A small, stooped gray-haired black woman in a lavender maid’s uniform and white apron served cold vichyssoise as the first course. I hadn’t lifted my first spoonful when Everett Hall said, “Tell me, Mr. Harper, about what you do.”

  “Well, I’m a general assignment reporter. Basically I show up in the afternoon and work on whatever stories I’m assigned. Could be anything.”

  “Does it pay well?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then what attracts you to it?”

  “The opportunity to write, to be creative. Also, to make a difference.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, you can expose wrongs, crusade. Reveal information that others want hidden. H. L. Mencken said the role of the press is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I like doing that.” I had quoted that line many times and I said it then without thinking about my audience—the entirely comfortable. I knew it was a mistake even before Everett Hall’s already ruddy face deepened.

  He drank from his glass of wine. “Why does the press make
so many errors?”

  “Errors, sir?”

  “Mistakes of fact and of bias. I hardly read a story that I know something about where there isn’t an error.”

  I felt myself flush but I admit I’ve often observed the same thing. “There’re thousands of facts in the paper each day and almost all of them are right. It’s an imperfect craft. We get it as right as we can within the confines of deadlines and space.”

  “Well, you do a poor job of it.”

  There isn’t a journalist alive who hasn’t had to withstand an assault on his or her profession, whether from grandstanding politicians, crazed conspiracy theorists, or even readers legitimately upset about an error in a story or, even more often, an inaccurate headline. But I hadn’t expected vitriol with the vichyssoise. My surprise must have showed because Brad jumped in to deflect the tension.

  “Father, I wasn’t aware that you even read the Charlotte paper.”

  “I don’t have to. New York Times. Washington Post. Charlotte Times. CBS. It’s all the same. A liberal bias infects the whole media. You heard Mr. Harper say it himself. He wants to afflict the comfortable. People like us.” He took another swallow. “And comfort the afflicted. Whom do you mean by that?”

  “The poor. The powerless. The exploited.” I was rising to the debate.

  The elderly black woman picked that moment to enter from the kitchen and quietly began refilling the water goblets. Before I could answer his question, Everett Hall turned to her. “Mary Pell, do you feel afflicted?”

  “Pardon, sir?” She stood back from the table, holding the silver pitcher.

  “Mary Pell, this is Mr. Harper,” Everett Hall said.

  I stood up. Mary Pell nodded but said nothing. “Mr. Harper is a reporter. He likes to comfort the afflicted. Are you among the afflicted?”

  “I got my aches and pains, Mr. Everett, but the Lord’s blessed me.”

  Everett Hall bored in. “Mary Pell, are you exploited at Windrow?”

  “Father!” Brad said, but his father paid no attention. I sat down.

  “Do we exploit you, Mary Pell?” Everett Hall demanded.

  “I’m very happy at Windrow, Mr. Everett. You know that. Very happy.” Mary Pell smiled uneasily and retreated to the safety of the kitchen. I saw Brad mouth “I told you so” to his wife, who looked embarrassed and stared at her lap.

  Everett was getting drunker and I knew there was no percentage in arguing. I tried to humor him, hoping to get us on lighter ground.

  “Wait a minute? Afflict the comfortable? I don’t believe I said that. I’ve been misquoted! The press is always getting it wrong!” I said. Brad and Lindsay laughed. Mr. Hall didn’t.

  “You said your business is creative. I understand that, because you make things up.”

  I felt my face redden.

  “I don’t and I don’t know of any journalist who does.”

  “Your bias shows in what you select to cover. You look for bad things because there’s no story if they are good.”

  “Correct. If things work the way they are supposed to, that’s not news. It’s news when they don’t. We play no favorites. Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, blacks and whites, men and women. Everybody’s fair game.”

  “Afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted isn’t playing favorites? You ever see a newspaper crusade on behalf of some businessman getting harassed by the federal government even though he’s risked his own money and created jobs? It’d be okay for a white man to get screwed but stop the presses if it’s some poor black.”

  Tell that to those Times readers who are sure I’m a racist, I thought to myself.

  “You think the press would have gone after Nixon if he’d been a Democrat?”

  “Without question.”

  “The press gave Kennedy a pass.”

  “Journalistic standards were different then.”

  He bolted down his wine. “Standards? You have no standards. Do you have to get a license to be a journalist? Do you have to pass some test? Is there a body of knowledge you have to master? No. You need a license to cut hair and give a manicure. But anyone can be a journalist.” Mr. Hall finished his salad. “That was delicious.”

  Finally, we had found something we could all agree on and I took the opportunity to chime in. “Wonderful. What kind of greens were they?”

  “Lion’s Tooth,” Brad said. “Genus taraxacum. Dent de lion. Otherwise known as dandelions.”

  But Everett Hall wasn’t about to quit the battle. He resumed as Mary Pell cleared our plates. “Watergate was the worst thing that ever happened to your business. It made every youngster in journalism school decide to go out and look for a coonskin to nail to the wall. Well, there weren’t that many coons out there that needed skinning. So people got it whether they deserved it or not. Politicians. Businessmen. Everybody. You said it yourself. Everybody’s fair game.”

  “Those who got it deserved it,” I said. “And that’s exactly our function—to keep everybody else honest, to make sure the people know the people’s business. It’s why the First Amendment is first. We’re a watchdog, a fourth branch of government—beholden to nothing but the truth.”

  “Fourth branch of government? And who elected you?”

  “Our readers, every day. If we don’t pass their test, if we’re not accurate and honest, we’re out of business.”

  “Which explains why the National Enquirer sells so many copies.” Mr. Hall raised his glass signaling a temporary end to the conversation and, I’m sure in his mind, victory. Brad shrugged and gave me an apologetic look.

  Mr. Hall pressed a hidden button under the table. I heard a faint buzzer in the kitchen and Mary Pell emerged to serve the main course—dove and quail bagged during a recent shoot. For the vegetarian Brad, she served something she called Brad’s Rice, which turned out to be a delicious wild rice hybrid he had developed and planted on several acres of Windrow that he had returned to cultivation. And, of course, there was more wine. A crisp white, this time. The conversation turned more pleasant and certainly more mundane, with me asking a lot of questions.

  I have heard it said that people become reporters because they’re shy. They want to know everything about other people but, in the guise of objectivity, never have to reveal anything about themselves. They are afraid of involvement. They don’t want to participate in the action, they want to observe it. That may be true. But all I was trying to do was keep the conversation going in non-controversial directions. So I asked Brad about the process that had led to the rice. And his father about the quail and dove season and whether the river was low. And then about the stock market. Lindsay went on and on about Tasha and Maybelle, intuiting the dogs’ likes and dislikes and generally talking about them the way parents talk about their children.

  I was beginning to think the interrogation hadn’t been so bad—a lively debate, although maybe a bit confrontational—but in the end, no more outrageous than behavior I’d observed in other tipsy, aging parents, including mine. But as Mary Pell, accompanied by a black man I assumed was Willie Snow, moved silently about the dining room clearing the main course, Everett Hall went after his son.

  “Bradford, let me guess. You’ve induced Mr. Harper to come down here to help in your little wild goose chase.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a goose chase.”

  “I would. You propose to solve a killing that was thoroughly investigated twenty years ago.”

  “If there was an investigation, it wasn’t good enough to find the killer.”

  Everett Hall sighed. “Son, you’re stirring up things that don’t need to be stirred up. That editorial in The Reporter was stupid and naïve. It’s an embarrassment and everyone in town knows you’re behind it. How do you even know the kid was murdered?”

  “For God’s sake, father! He was shot in the head with a deer r
ifle!”

  “Probably by his own kind,” Everett Hall said, as Willie Snow swept up the crumbs that were left on the table. “Most killings of blacks are by blacks. Black-on-black crime. They keep killing each other off.”

  Mr. Hall paused for emphasis, then, looking squarely at me and paying absolutely no heed to the fact that two black people bustled around his dinner table, added, “Which is just fine with me.”

  “Father!” Brad and Lindsay said in horror.

  “What? Nothing against the blacks. It’s just natural selection. People generally get what they deserve. The strong live and the weak die. It’s true of any race. Ain’t that right, Willie Snow?” Mercifully, the man had disappeared.

  Mr. Hall did not let up.

  “The kid probably deserved it. Probably a troublemaker.”

  “Not based on what we learned at his house.”

  “You went to his goddam house?” Mr. Hall asked. “In niggertown?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that word. It’s an embarrassment.”

  Everett Hall stared at his son. “Bradford, it’s your actions that are the embarrassment. I forbid you to continue. I will not have my son poking around niggertown and getting everybody riled up over some dead nigger kid. Except for you, no one cares.”

  In the course of a short evening, Everett Hall had insulted me, my profession, black people, and his own son. I thought about the promise I had made to myself in junior high when a bully teased a black girl about her kinky hair and I had said nothing. As the girl cried in front of her locker and tried desperately to brush her hair straight, my brother Luke had tracked down the bully and made him apologize. “Nothing is funny when it’s at someone else’s expense,” Luke had explained. I had promised myself then that I would never stay silent again.

  “I’ll tell you who cares,” I interjected, my anger rising. “Wallace Sampson was a thirteen-year-old kid. He had friends. They care. He had parents and sisters. I’m sure they care. And you know who else cares? Every black person in this town ought to care whether or not they ever knew Wallace Sampson. Because if the murder of Wallace Sampson doesn’t matter, then we’re still in a time and a place where the killing of any black person doesn’t matter.”