“
As the others attacked, I stood up. “Anybody else want some fresh hushpuppies?”
Across the crowded tent, I saw Wallace Adderly making his way toward us.
Cyl DeGraffenried jumped to her feet. “I’ll come with you,” she said.
This was the first time she’d spoken to me directly since I found her crying in my office but I tried not to show my surprise. We picked up big cups of iced tea as we passed the drinks table and were halfway down the slope to where Isabel and Doris were frying up hushpuppies fast as they could when Wallace Adderly overtook us.
“Ms. DeGraffenried?”
I paused but Cyl kept walking.
“Ms. DeGraffenried!”
Without turning around, she said, “Yes?”
“Ms. DeGraffenried, have I done something to offend you?”
“Yes!” she snapped and continued walking.
I trailed along, just as puzzled as Adderly seemed to be, judging from the look on his face.
“When?” he asked. “What?”
Cyl stopped and turned and her eyes were as cold as the ice cubes in her tea. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“We know each other?”
“I know you, Snake Man.” She fairly hissed the word.
Adderly did a double take, then shook his head. “I’ll be damned! Little Silly. What’s-his-name’s baby sister.”
“Niece,” she snapped. “And his name is Isaac Mitchiner. My God! You took him into a snakepit and you don’t even remember his name? He’s dead, isn’t he?”
16
Wallace Adderly stared at Cyl as if she were a copperhead moccasin herself, coiled and ready to strike, and he unable to run. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about, Snake Man. Because of you, my uncle’s gone. Because of you, my grandmother’s grieved all these years. Because of you, she’s never known what happened to him. But you know and you’re going to tell her.”
“What you talking, lady?” His usual cool had slipped away, revealing the wary, street-smart kid he’d once been.
“You think I was too little to understand and remember how you carried him off to Boston?” Cyl was almost rigid with anger.
“Boston?” Adderly asked blankly. Apprehension suddenly left his face and he nodded as if distantly recalling something almost beyond the reach of memory. “Boston. Yes.”
People passing back and forth between the cookers and the tents gave the three of us curious glances but only Cyl’s body language betrayed the intensity of the moment. She may have lost her temper, but she didn’t lose control of her voice. Even enraged, her words were so low they could barely be heard above the clang of horseshoes against iron, the trash-talking kids at the volleyball net, and the lively buzz of a dozen or more conversations going on beneath the tents.
“Twenty-one years ago,” she snarled. “You came through here. You with your big hair and your big head, spouting about injustice and oppression and how black power was going to change all that. All these years of seeing ‘Black Advocate Wallace Adderly’ in the news and I never realized you were Snake until last Thursday.”
“I’ve never tried to hide my past,” said Adderly, recovering his urbanity, slipping back into it like a fifteen- hundred-dollar suit. “I was here to mobilize this area. To register black voters. Isaac agreed with what I was trying to do and so did your grandmother.”
“And look how you repaid her for taking you in, giving you a place to stay while you got Isaac stirred up. You helped him run off to Boston when he should have stayed here and straightened out his own life. If you’d left him alone, maybe he’d be here today. Maybe he’d be married now, with children of his own.”
Her brown eyes glistened with unshed tears and I followed her glance to the laughing, dark-skinned little girl who went flying by like a swallowtail butterfly in an orange-and-yellow-striped bathing suit, yellow barrettes bouncing in the sunshine as she flitted away from Dwight’s son Cal, who tried to tag her. It was Lashanda Freeman.
She glanced back over her shoulder to see how close he was, veered to elude him, and careened into Isabel, who was ladling hushpuppies from the deep-fat fryer.
Without thinking, Lashanda grabbed at the nearest object to keep from falling and her hand curled around the top of the cast-iron pot full of bubbling oil.
I watched in horror, expecting to see the whole pot come splashing over her, spilling hot grease that would fry that striped bathing suit right off her wiry little frame, but she was too small or it was too heavy. Even so, she
