“Good Lord!” Julia exclaims when I walk in the next morning.
“Did you fall asleep in your oven?”
“Just got a little too much sun” I say, checking for my messages.
“Shit!” she whistles.
“It looks like you laid out drunk all afternoon.”
As usual, Julia is revealing more of her own skin than is appropriate in a law office. Behind the counter that separates her from our clients, her lime sherbet colored skirt has crept up almost to her panty line, revealing two nicely tanned legs. I’ve seen belts wider than her skirt.
“I get to take off occasionally,” I mutter as I walk down the hall.
In my office I dial Dade’s number, waking him up. Instantly I wish I had called his parents first.
“I don’t want to take a lie detector test,” he tells me after I have explained why I called.
“I had a friend who took one and flunked it. I know he was telling the truth.”
My head still throbbing from yesterday’s fiasco, I go ballistic.
“This is your chance to get your charges dropped!
You might even get back on the team! Damn it, you’ve got to take it.”
“I don’t have to do anything!” he says.
“A white bitch says that I raped her, a white dude kicks me off the team, and now I’m supposed to let a white cop or lawyer hook me up to a machine and say whether I’m lying or not?
Get real, man!”
I back off and lower my voice. This is the first outburst of racism I’ve seen from Dade, but from his point of view, he makes sense. The only white person who has stood up for him was Carter, and he folded like he was holding a pair of deuces. I explain the test isn’t admissible in court and that he has nothing to lose, but it is like trying to convince a child not to be afraid of the dark. It occurs to me that Dade may be lying after all. Maybe he’s into drugs, too, or is trying to protect someone. I tell him I want him to think about it some, and that I will be calling him back.
As soon as I get off, I call his parents and get Roy, who doesn’t react much better.
“Why can’t the prosecutor make the girl take the test, and if she flunks, or won’t take it, dismiss the charges?”
“Cross doesn’t have to do anything,” I explain.
“But there’s no way Dade can lose by taking it.”
“Yeah, he can,” Roy says.
“If he takes it and don’t pass, you’ll figure he’s lying and won’t do anything else on his case. Let me hand you over to Lucy.”
This pisses me royally. In the last few weeks I might as well have closed my practice and moved to Payetteville.
“What have I done to give you the idea that I’m going to lie down on this case?” I ask, close to losing my temper.
I’m getting peanuts, and I’ve worried about this case until it’s about all I think about. I explain to her how important it is for Dade to cooperate with the prosecutor but get only a little further with her.
“Gideon, notice it’s always the black person who has to do the accommodating. Robin won’t take the test, but Dade has to. It gets old.”
“Well” I state the obvious “he is the one accused of rape.”
“If someone had made her take a test before the charges were filed,” Lucy complains, “Dade wouldn’t be in this mess.”
At least she has conceded that a polygraph test has some validity.
“I don’t doubt that for a moment,” I say, encouraging her, “but we didn’t have any control over that. Now we do.”
In the background I hear a customer complaining about the price of a jar of Maxwell House coffee, and Roy’s voice as he commiserates with her. They must be together twenty-four hours a day. The joys of small business. Finally, Lucy says, “I’ll talk to him, but it may take a while. He’s got his father’s stubbornness.”
“This would be far and away the best way to handle it,” I assure her.
“I don’t want to try this case in front of a Washington County jury if we can avoid it.”
“I know that,” she says.
Convinced she can bring Dade around, I tell her to call me back when she’s talked to him but that she doesn’t have to rush him. With the passage of a little time, Dade will begin to feel the pressure. Before I get off the phone, I decide to ask her, “Is your grandmother still alive?
Sarah and I are thinking of driving over Thanksgiving weekend to Bear Creek, and I thought maybe I’d go by and talk to her if you think that’d be all right.”
Lucy resists gloating.
“Certainly. I’ll call her and tell her you may be coming by. Let me give you her address.”
As she talks and waits on a customer at the same time, I wonder what my motives are. I still don’t believe there is any family connection. Am I sucking up to Lucy so I can be her son’s agent? Or am I doing this just to pacify Sarah? Unlike myself, she seems determined to know the truth. As a criminal defense lawyer, I realize most of the time I’d rather not know.
13
“Dr. Beekman says neither blacks nor whites used to celebrate the Fourth of July in some parts of the South,” my daughter instructs me from behind the wheel of the Blazer.
“Whites were reminded of the fall of Vicksburg, and it obviously meant nothing to African-Americans.”
Life according to Beekman. Anxious to get to Bear Creek, we have taken 1-40 east to Forrest City and then south on Highway 1, arriving on the outskirts of Bear Creek at noon.
“Proportionately, the South sent more men to Vietnam than any other region of the country,” I say, recalling something I think I read on the subject. A patriotic act or one confirming our stupidity, depending on your point of view. Thanks to a heart murmur, which has never affected me (other than probably to save my life), I was classified 4-R We turn off to the right onto Highway 79 and go for a mile before I announce, “Here’s where your grandparents are buried.”
There is nothing picturesque about Pinewood cemetery. Off the highway a good fifty yards, it is little more than a flat field, and it takes us ten minutes this cool Saturday in November to find my parents’ graves.
“I haven’t been back here since your grandmother died seventeen years ago,” I explain to Sarah as we finally come upon their markers. I bend down to pull up some weeds around the stone.
“You were too little to remember, but you came, too.”
Sarah, dressed in jeans and a bulky tan sweater, studies the simple tombstones.
“Were they racists?” she asks, squinting against the sun that has suddenly appeared from the low flying clouds.
“We all were,” I say, wondering how I can explain the South without sounding too defensive.
“Back then, I don’t think we believed that blacks were really human the same way we were. We thought they were so inferior genetically, that it was okay to treat them like we did.”
Sarah bends down to snap off a weed growing at a forty-five-degree angle from my father’s grave marker.
“You make it sound as if you weren’t responsible for your own racism.”
Surely she has learned in her history classes that a later generation can’t judge an earlier one by its standards.
“Of course we were, but back when we were in the middle of that era, it wasn’t so easy to accept we were wrong.
We had a lot invested in it.” To my own daughter I can’t admit that even today my mind contains an informal hierarchy of ethnic mental superiority: Japanese, Jews, followed by whites of northern European ancestry, and
