A.K. shrugged. “Right after supper. Around seven maybe? Jeopardy was just coming on.”
“What’s happened?” asked April, pushing open the screen door and joining us on the porch. Her short sandy brown hair stood up in tufts because she was forever running her fingers through it when worried or distracted. She has a small neat body and good legs, but I knew that she wore that oversized T-shirt because middle age was thickening her waist in spite of all she could do to stop it. “Is it more trouble?”
“Somebody set fire tonight to that colored church over at Starling’s Crossroads,” Daddy said.
A.K. straightened indignantly. “Me? You asking if I did it? You think I’d do a thing like that?”
“Didn’t think you’d tear up a graveyard neither,” Daddy said mildly.
“There!” said Andrew. “Now you see what I mean? Once you lose your good name, you don’t get it back just because you say you’re sorry.”
April nudged him with the toe of her sneaker and he subsided.
“Who did most of the spray-painting at the graveyard?” I asked A.K. “Raymond or Charles?”
“They was both about equal.” (“Were both,” April murmured.) “Why?”
“Because there was writing at the church, too, and it looks like the same sort of printing as was on the Crocker grave-stones,” I said.
“Well, it won’t me,” he said huffily. “Wasn’t me,” he added before April could correct him.
8
The fire—now called the “burning”—made the late news that night. It also led the seven o’clock news the next morning as I was stoically resisting Aunt Zell’s hot buttered biscuits and breakfasting on an unbuttered English muffin and black coffee. (If they don’t hurry up and finish my house, I’m not going to fit through the door frame.)
Not surprisingly, every channel carried a call for federal investigators by a certain leading black activist, North Carolina’s answer to Jesse Jackson. Wallace Adderly had put himself in the news so much that most people were familiar with the sketchy outlines of his history.
Born on the wrong side of the river in Wilmington, Wallace Adderly joined NOISE (the National Organization In Search of Equality) in the late sixties when membership was both politically effective and majorly cool. NOISE was a splinter group of the Student Non-Violent Coordination Committee and was less violent than the Black Panthers, but more confrontational than CORE (Congress for Racial Equality). He and his cohorts crisscrossed the South, popping up in odd places to encourage voter registration drives, to protest unsafe working conditions, to harass segregated hotels and restaurants. Early on, he was charged with leading an unsanctioned protest march that turned into a riot. The judge offered to dismiss the case if he’d resign from NOISE.
“I’ll quit NOISE the day you quit Willow Lodge,” Adderly said defiantly, naming the segregated country club that was the stronghold of white male privilege in Wilmington.
The judge slapped him with contempt of court.
Sometime in the mid-seventies though, Adderly grew disillusioned with the NOISE leadership. On his own, he abruptly dropped out and, in his words, turned bourgeois, graduating cum laude from UNC-Wilmington. He ranked first in his law class at NC Central and aced the state bar exam on his first try.
Not that he automatically got his license to practice right away.
In view of his clashes with the law during his activist days, the board of examiners felt duty bound to conduct a hearing on his moral fitness. I’ve heard that certain Republican attorneys tried to influence the board to withhold his license because of his prison record, but the board ruled that most of his jail time stemmed from sassing judges and that the rest had been imposed for his attempts to eradicate racial discrimination. Two days after gaining his license, he opened a practice down in Wilmington.
Only he doesn’t always stay in Wilmington.
Turning “bourgeois” has made him comfortably middle class but it hasn’t banked his fires. He still does a lot of pro bonos and whenever a high-profile case with racist implications rears its head anywhere in the state, a call goes out for Wallace Adderly. At forty-something, he’s telegenic, quick-witted and politically savvy, and there are many who thought he should be running against Jesse Helms this time instead of Harvey Gantt.
That’s why I wasn’t surprised to see his face on every news channel that morning. The burning of a black church made it more than a local crime and the larger issues it symbolized would move it out of our local jurisdiction. I knew I’d soon be seeing some of my ATF pals on TV as well.
DA Douglas Woodall was shown on the scene and his voice was serious as he assured Channel 11’s Greg Barnes, “Our office is going to look very closely at all surrounding circumstances.”
Doug never overlooks any circumstances—or angles either, for that matter. The assistant he’d chosen to accompany him out to Balm of Gilead this morning was Cyl DeGraffenried, very photogenic and very black.
Sheriff Bo Poole was out there, too, with both black deputies, and he promised his department’s full cooperation, “But, Greg, I’d like to caution everybody about jumping to conclusions. We should remember that the preliminary findings of the president’s task force on church arsons indicate that most of these fires are set by individuals acting alone and not by members of hate groups.”
“Hate is hate, whether expressed by a group or an individual acting alone,” said Wallace Adderly, “and whatever the motive, it’s a black congregation hurting out here this morning.”
Channel 5 had obtained a copy of the amateur videotape I saw being filmed last night. It was fuzzy and the bright flames washed out a lot of details. You could make out a swastika and two K’s, but the letters looked black against the fire, not the green I knew them to be.
