state didn’t care so much about sports, there wouldn’t be any blacks up there in the first place. They’re not up there to get an education, and don’t you try to tell me any different. My husband and I moved from Forrest City to get away from them, but there’s only so much you can do.”
Eastern Arkansas. I can’t seem to get away from it either. If this is the kind of racism that Dade is going to face from his jury. God help him. I wonder if Jenny is sit ting on the stairs listening.
“Ma’am, the more I know now about what happened, the better I can advise my client. If I find out he doesn’t have a chance, I might ad vise him to plead guilty in the hope he’ll get a lighter sentence
Mrs. Taylor gives her head a vigorous shake.
“They damn well better have a trial. I know how you lawyers do. You want to sweep this under the rug like everything else that happens up there. A jury ought to string that boy up by his you-know-what.”
At this moment Jenny Taylor comes down the stairs and pleads, “Mom, please.” Jenny Taylor looks so much like her parent that I have the feeling I am looking at my own mother as a college girl. She must have been pretty.
Jenny is a brunette with big gray eyes and a full mouth. I introduce myself, and she smiles. Sarah must have been kind. She sits down by her mother on the sofa and says tentatively, “I don’t know much about this at all.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” I say, wishing her mother would go clean the bathroom or something.
“I just need to hear what you know about Robin’s relationship with Dr. Hofstra. I understand you’re in the same sorority house with her.”
“Not much,” Jenny says, nervously running her hands up and down her jeans.
“Robin told me during the summer that she was having an affair with him, but she broke it off before she came back this fall. I asked her about it after she had been raped, and she said he didn’t even call.
That’s all I know.”
Damn. This is what I was afraid would happen.
“What if I told you,” I say, before Mrs. Taylor can get in her two cents, “one of the cheerleaders said that Robin was still having an affair with him as recently as a week before the incident with Dade.”
“Who was it?” Jenny asks, her gray eyes narrowing.
“Lauren Denney,” I answer, thinking it must not be easy to be a girl.
Her young face becomes hard.
“Lauren’s the biggest liar at the university. She hates Robin and every girl up there who is as pretty as she is. Robin wouldn’t tell her that anyway. She couldn’t stand Lauren after this summer.
I’d be surprised if she said two words to her this fall.
Lauren was lying if she said that.”
I try not to sigh. Her mother gives me a look that makes me feel as if I were out scouting for guests to be on Geraldo Rivera. Sorority girls who lie. We talk a few more minutes, but I get nothing I can use. I tell her that I won’t be needing her as a witness and leave.
To keep the trip from being a total waste of time I drive across Greers Perry Dam and get out of the Blazer at the overlook to stare at the massive structure and think about the hearing next week. If Binkie Cross knows about Jenny Taylor, I’ll have no chance. As it stands now, I have no idea what the judge will do. If he doesn’t let Lauren testify, Dade is going to have an uphill battle. If it comes down to a question of nothing more than whom the jury believes-Dade or Robin-I can’t imagine an acquittal.
If I couldn’t believe that my grandfather had sex with a black girl from my hometown, how can I expect twelve men and women to believe Dade Cunningham when he tells them that he didn’t rape a white girl? Why didn’t I believe Lucy that day when she told me?
A few yards from the overlook I come upon a bronze plaque bearing a likeness of John IF. Kennedy, who I learn dedicated the dam on October 3, 1963. It is sobering to realize that this man, who was such a hero of mine, had stood in this same spot, and was murdered only a little over a month later. By joining the Peace Corps and working in the rural areas of the northern coast of Colombia, where most people had a mixed racial background, I thought I had overcome my racial prejudices, but maybe I didn’t. Why did I join? For years I have told myself it was some form of youthful idealism, a manifestation of the hubris that came with being American during our golden age of seemingly unlimited power before Vietnam so rudely interrupted our global fantasies. I remember seeing an American propaganda film ostensibly about Kennedy’s South American foreign policy, the Alliance for Progress, that was shown before the regular feature in the outdoor theater in the town where I worked on the Magdalena River. Actually, the film had been a testament to Jack Kennedy. God, how the Colombians had loved him. Only the Pope inspired more adoration.
“Ask not what your country can do for you,” his words had implored my generation of college students, “but what you can do for your country.” I remember tears coming to my eyes as he thundered, over Spanish subtitles, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”
Bear Creek was, in relative terms, as poor as Plato, Magdalena. If I was so hell-bent on saving the world, why didn’t I start at home in the thirteenth-poorest county in the United States? Perhaps the truth was that by joining the Peace Corps I was staging a mini-rebellion against the status quo. But if I had wanted to stand on my two feet and tell my mother and Bear Creek, Arkansas, to go to hell, why didn’t I have the guts to do so directly in stead of trying to organize in my hideously accented Spanish unbelievably poor communities to build out houses, schools, and health centers?
I stop to have lunch in a diner on the outskirts of Heber Springs and stare at the middle-aged waitress, a delight fully saucy confection of a woman with dyed blond hair and big breasts under a T-shirt that advertises her employer business: Leo’s Eats. Lewdly, I think of the message as a profoundly self-satisfied sexual communi cation. The feeling that I have been telling lies to myself for a long time is as inescapable as my own libido. I didn’t have the guts to stay in Bear Creek and say what I thought. I smile at the woman who, paid to please, or at least to bring the food out, grins as if she knows exactly what I’m thinking.
What did I think back then? Nothing remarkable for a twenty-one year old. That God was probably dead or at least sleeping and that east Arkansas was a pretty crappy place for treating blacks so badly. Yet, if I didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to come back to Bear Creek with my mixed-blood wife from Colombia and preach this un original coming-of-age sermon to my mother and her friends, what else have I been kidding myself about? Obviously my psyche and I have some unfinished business.
As I contemplate myself as a newly married ex-Peace Corps volunteer, I’ve always realized that Sarah is much more direct and assertive than I am, even though I’m al most fifty. She was the one who insisted that we return to Bear Creek to confront my past. She is like her mother not only physically but emotionally. Rosa was the realist in our family of three: she confronted her own breast cancer and mortality and insisted that I face it. My good intentions, I’ve always thought until now, were enough. I sip at the glass of weak tea in front of me and watch my waitress banter with the regulars. Enough for what? To call what I do living, I suppose. The women in my life have been grittier than I have and consequently have often dominated me. Should that come as a shock? Oddly, it does. Thinking I should be in control, I have tried to bully them with guilt, the coward’s ultimate weapon.
Rosa, when I brought her to Arkansas, accepted my decision not to move back to Bear Creek as my unquestioned right to decide where we should live. Later, when I offered the explanation that I had not returned home out of consideration for how she would have been treated, she wouldn’t buy. it
“You didn’t want to go! I did. She was to madre, no?” Leaving her own mother, Rosa expected to find another one. Not able to screw up my courage, I pretended I couldn’t have found a job and moved us to the center of the state.
I pay the check and point the Blazer south toward Blackwell County, thinking I’d go out to eat more often if all the help flirted with me like the waitress at Leo’s just did. As I settle in behind a Dodge Caravan on the winding road, almost obsessively my thoughts return to my mother and Bear Creek. Guilt and sarcasm. She was a master of both. She was stronger, too.
“Are you trying to kill me, son?” she asked when I had said I wanted to come home to live with my new bride.
“First, you leave me and go to South America, then you marry a nigra, and now you want to bring her home to live next to me. Was I that terrible as a mother? With your father sick all the time, maybe I was.” Weak. That’s what I was. Buying into all that. I should have told her that, by God, this is my wife and you’ll accept her and love
