“That’s fine,” I say neutrally. She may eventually give me some details of campus gossip if I can resist pumping her so much.
Driving home through the glorious fall foliage I wonder if I am guilty of projecting my feelings onto guys like Beekman. What do young women see in us old guys? It sure isn’t looks or staying power. And, in my case, it isn’t money either. Maybe women really are looking for their fathers. God help Sarah if that’s true.
6
on returning to my office from my plea hearing in circuit court I spot through the glass doors a woman I assume is Lucy Cunningham standing at Julia’s desk. Dade has her identical copper coloring, her handsome face. I see Julia’s lips move, and the woman turns to look at me as I push open the glass. She nods, unsmiling, before I can call her name. Not exactly pretty (though she may have been as a girl), she is a tall, striking woman with a full, sorrowful face. Whom does she remind me of?
Coretta Scott King, the widow of the slain civil rights leader, whom, I realize, I’ve never observed to smile in all the years of seeing her on television.
“Mr. Page,” she says quietly, with more dignity than usually heard in our waiting room, “I’m Mrs. Cunningham, Dade’s mother.”
She offers her hand. My immediate impression is that this sophisticated woman is not a likely candidate for wife of a black store owner in the rural Delta. She’s wearing a red-and-white-striped knit tunic over a matching red skirt and four-inch heels. She is my height and looks to be about my age. Her hand, soft to the touch, offsets some of her severity, and yet, such is her presence, that even Julia, unoccupied behind her desk, falls silent as I greet my client’s mother and escort her back to my office.
“Would you like some coffee?” I ask as she sits down across from me.
“No, thank you,” she says, studying my diplomas be hind my head.
“What else have you learned about Dade’s case?”
So much for small talk. I pull out my notes and for a solid hour we discuss her son. She questions me closely about what I have learned about Robin Perry. Women, if Lucy Cunningham is any guide, are ruthlessly cynical about each other. We men only think that we pursue women. Judging by her manner and questions, Mrs. Cunningham knows better, or perhaps she simply knows how the female sex reacts to her son. Are black women, I wonder, more suspicious than their white counterparts?
Rosa, I remember now, thought so. Black women were “in the bottom of the barrel,” my wife uttered once in that quaint way she had of translating English into Spanish and then rendering it back into the American idiom.
“I wonder if Dade sat down by her in that communications class,” she muses, in a soft bottom-land accent that is rich as the silt from the Mississippi River, “or whether she picked him out.”
I make some notes of my own.
“I’ll ask him,” I say, more impressed with her than her husband. Roy, in the few minutes I spent with him, seemed angry and bitter.
Lucy Cunningham is far more subtle and determined.
“He probably didn’t notice,” she says dryly.
“Until this happened, he was pretty full of himself.”
I nod, glad that she has a more realistic view of her son than her husband.
“It’s easy to see why he would have been,” I say, wondering what it would be like to be the object of all that attention.
“He’s movie-star handsome and a Razorback, to boot. Heady stuff for anybody in this state.”
Lucy Cunningham sighs and seems to look past me at the wall.
“Except for the one or two who are good enough for the pros,” she says, her voice soft and re signed, “it’s mainly a waste. They don’t go to Fayetteville to get a degree; they’re there to win games for the greater glory of the people who run this state.”
There is no bitterness in her voice. That’s just the way things are, her tone implies. I disagree. Sports is the only unifying force in Arkansas, the only successful enterprise black and white males share.
“Didn’t your husband follow the Razorbacks before Dade went to Fayetteville?” I ask, smiling, to let her know I take issue with her but don’t want a fight.
“As long as we win for you,” she rebukes me.
“We all get along together until something like this comes up.
Roy knows that. Do you think Nolan Richardson has any illusions about why whites think he’s become a good basketball coach in the last few years?”
“He’s very successful now,” I concede, hoping I haven’t alienated her. A white man’s naivete is par for the course.
“After his first couple of seasons, they said he was a good recruiter, but a bad coach,” she lectures me.
“If he starts losing again, they’ll say the same thing, meaning, he’s dumb. We know what most white people think about us.”
I blink at the bluntness of this woman, but I realize she must consider me different from the average white. Still, I am uncomfortable with the way this conversation is going and point to the front page of the Democrat- Gazette.
“A lot of people are supporting what Coach Carter did yesterday.” An informal survey by the paper showed more support than I anticipated. There was the expected grumbling by some women’s groups and some others, but no official word by the university that anyone had filed a complaint with the All-University Judiciary Board, the school’s internal mechanism for dealing with this kind of case, according to the paper. Predictably, some feminists were outraged, calling Carter “a Neanderthal who should be fired. Carter’s actions condoned violence against women, etc.”
Mrs. Cunningham has been making notes in a three ring binder notebook and taps the blue plastic cover against her lap.
“But a lot of people are upset by it, too. I hope it was a good idea to try to keep him on the team.”
I reassure her that it was.
“The best way to ensure Dade gets a fair shake at the trial is not to let anyone shift the burden of proof onto him beforehand. I know you don’t know me, but I want you to trust me on this.”
She says, unsmiling, “I know very well who you are, but you don’t have the slightest idea who I am, do you?”
Puzzled, I squint at this woman as if her identity will become apparent if I continue to stare at her. There is nothing about her that is familiar, but my memory for faces is so bad I could have easily met her in the past. Yet, someone with her direct manner and striking appearance would be hard to forget.
“I meet new people almost every day,” I say, as if this fact were a decent excuse.
“I’m from Bear Creek,” she says abruptly.
“Believe it or not, you and I have the same grandfather.”
“I beg your pardon?” I exclaim. Suddenly, ancient gossip, never substantiated, and fervently denied by my mother in a long forgotten conversation when I was six teen, spews up in my brain like mud dredged from a canal. Bobby Don Hyslip had called me a nigger-lover one broiling summer night at the Dairy Delight, and I had made the mistake of listening to him. Bobby Don, whose alcoholic father was a fixture at the Bear Creek city jail, had never liked me because he claimed that my father, a schizophrenic and alcoholic, had always received special treatment from the powers than ran the town until he died when I was fourteen. Bobby Don was absolutely correct.
His daddy. Barney, was a worthless river rat who fathered kids all over town and never worked two days straight at his job at the sawmill, while my father was a respectable druggist who owned his own business for twenty years until his illnesses got the best of him.
“You’re always actin’ so superior. You know your granddaddy knocked up a nigger bitch!” he had yelled out of his beat-up Ford.
