Black Light

Stephen. And Earl, poor, beautiful, brave, doomed Earl. And you, Sam. You’re such a man. I don’t think I’ll find your like in the East.”

“Connie, you don’t have to go, you know.”

“Yes, I do. If I lose another man out here, I might not recover.”

She was still beautiful and Sam had loved her secretly for many years.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get the boy for you.”

“Poor child. He’ll grow up without knowing his father.”

“Well, that’s one thing I don’t care to worry about,” said Sam. “He’s better off not knowing Jimmy.”

She just looked at him and something passed behind her eyes but whatever it was, she let it slide.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “About the hearing. I thought the judge would understand.”

This was the custody hearing: the child she had named Stephen after her own son and which she had raised for three months as Edie languished, and which she had held and comforted and loved when Edie had then died, was to be given to the Pyes. They named it Lamar and took it from her and drove off in a beaten-up old truck, a gaggle of tough-as-nails men and gristly women.

“The state paints with a broad brush,” she said. “It believes in family and in kin. I agree with that just as broadly. Occasionally, however, it makes a mistake. Oh well. If they love him, he’ll be fine, I suppose.”

Sam didn’t see much love in that brood, but he didn’t say anything. The bus pulled in. Miss Connie, of course, was rich; she didn’t have to take a damn bus. But she was also without airs, and if the bus was good enough to the poor white and black people she had loved and loved her, she would take it.

She smiled brokenly and climbed aboard while the driver loaded her considerable luggage into the compartment. He watched her as she found a seat. The bus shivered as the driver put it in gear and just as it lurched into motion, Connie turned and their eyes met and Sam made a little twitch of a smile and she smiled and disappeared forever. He always wondered: suppose he’d yelled, Connie, don’t leave, goddammit, stay with me. Connie, I love you, don’t go, please, we will work it out.

But he hadn’t and knew he’d done the right thing. He was married with three children and a pregnant wife; what could be done about that? Nothing. So Connie drove away on the bus and that was all there was to it.

Where her house had been there were now fifty houses and the tasteful sign before them, where once the Longacre mailbox had hung, read

LONGACRE MEADOWS, A SUBSIDIARY OF THE BAMA GROUP

, and the houses were white and looked spacious and well lived in, though they were spread with such rigid orthodoxy on the gridwork of new streets that nothing seemed spontaneous or alive, quite.

Sam turned in, watching damned Duane Peck turn in behind him, but soon forgot about the deputy as he tried to negotiate the dazzle of cutely named streets. It was almost more than he could handle: he felt sucked into a vortex of houses that looked exactly alike. When did this happen? he wondered. But by a religious miracle, the only one he’d ever witnessed in his eighty-six years, he happened upon Barefoot Boy Garth, as the street was preposterously called, and soon enough came upon a house hardly different from any other with the address 10567. How on earth could there be ten thousand other houses on this little lane? Anyway, he pulled into the driveway and sat for a second.

Now, when perhaps he needed it most, a blessed wave of clarity washed across him. He felt focused, alive, intense; he knew exactly why he was here and what he had to find out. He got out and went and knocked on the door. A young black woman answered, her eyes hooded in hostility.

“Yes?” she said.

He was a little nonplussed: most people in these parts called him “sir” axiomatically, possibly because they recognized him and possibly out of respect for his age.

“Ah, I’m looking for Lucille Parker.”

“What for?”

“It’s old business. About a letter she wrote me.”

“You’re not some cracker segregationist Bible thumper here to tell her the Lord took her other daughter.”

“Ma’am, I’m a graduate of Yale Law School and Princeton University. Though I respect the Bible, I’d never thump it. It is about Shirelle, yes, but I don’t believe God had anything to do with it.”

“You’re Mr. Sam, then. Go on back,” said the woman. “We heard you’d come around. Mama’s waiting for you.”

She led him through the neat house—Sam was amazed that Negroes lived so nicely; when had this happened?—and out back where the old lady sat on a lawn chair, under a scrubby little tree. The chair was a frail, almost gossamer thing, possibly bowed in strain; she was immense, serene and queenly in her bulk, sitting in her best purple clothes, sagacious and calm.

“Mrs. Parker,” he said, “I am Sam Vincent.”

“Mr. Sam,” she said. “I remember you from the trial.”

“Yes, ma’am. I remember you too.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “You never once looked at us or cared about us colored folks at all. You never talked to us or anything. Nobody ever visited us; we got us a phone call from someone at the Coroner’s telling us Shirelle’s body could be picked up. That’s all we ever got from anybody.”

“Ma’am, I ain’t going to lie to you. In them days, we hardly thought of colored people as human beings. It’s the way it was. I was the man I was and now I’m the man I am. But if I say I remembered you, I did: You wore a black dress because you were in mourning still. You wore a white hat with a camellia atop it and a veil. Your husband wore a dark suit; he wore horn-rim glasses and walked with a limp, I believe from a combat wound in North Africa. I came about this.”

He handed her the letter.

“Yes.”

“I can’t ever remember seeing it. I think a secretary must have put it in the file.”

“Because it wasn’t important.”

“Ma’am, if I’d have seen it, I’d have probably put it in the file too. It doesn’t have any evidence in it.”

“Only one white person ever told me the truth,” said Mrs. Parker. “That was Earl Swagger. He was a fair man. The day that man got killed was a sad day for this whole county. But Mr. Earl said he’d find out what happened to my baby. And I know if he’d a lived, he would have, fair and square, no matter what or who.”

Sam tried to be gentle.

“Ma’am, we found out what happened to Shirelle. Reggie Fuller killed her. And he paid for it. It’s a closed account. Nowadays, accounts don’t get closed so fairly. But we closed that one.”

“No sir,” the old lady said. “I know that boy didn’t do it, just like I said in the letter.”

Sam looked at the letter. She was quoting herself almost verbatim all these years later: “Mr. Sam, I know that boy couldn’t have killed my Shirelle,” she had written in 1957, a week before the execution.

“Mrs. Parker, everything scientific matched. I swear to you. I may not be no civil rights Holy Roller, but neither am I the kind of man who would railroad evidence.”

“I don’t care what the evidence said. That boy Reggie was over to my house when my Shirelle disappeared. He was in the house. He talked to me about her. He looked me in the eye. God would not let him look me in the eye and say he missed Shirelle if the night before he had killed her.”

“Mrs. Parker, I have been around murderers my whole life. Black or white, they are wired different. They can look you in the eye and tell you that they love you and make you believe it, and when you turn your back, they hit you over the head with a claw hammer and take your watch and drink your blood and forget about it in the next second. They ain’t normal, like you and me. A lie don’t carry no weight with them at all.”

“That may be true, sir, but Reggie wasn’t like that. Don’t you understand?”

“Ma’am, facts is facts.”

“Mr. Sam, Mr. Earl said the detectives would come talk to us. No detectives never did. What you call it when you solve a crime? What Columbo does.”

“Columbo is a made-up man. Investigation. You call it investigation.”

“You never did no investigation. You found your shirt, you found your blood and you electrocuted your nigger boy.”