when he saw a yellow-and-white house. Maybe this is it, he thought. He climbed the steps, determined to mind his manners. A thief should be polite and win goodwill.
“Good evening. Is Reverend Cooper here?”
A woman was standing in the doorway. “Yes, he’s here. Would you like to come in? I’ll call him.”
“Thank you.” Milkman entered a tiny hall and waited.
A short chubby man appeared, fingering his glasses. “Yes, sir? You wanted to see me?” His eyes ran rapidly over Milkman’s clothes, but his voice betrayed no excessive curiosity.
“Yes. Uh … how are you?”
“Fine. Fine. And you?”
“Pretty good.” Milkman felt as awkward as he sounded. He had never had to try to make a pleasant impression on a stranger before, never needed anything from a stranger before, and did not remember ever asking anybody in the world how they were. I might as well say it all, he thought. “I could use your help, sir. My name is Macon Dead. My father is from around—”
“Dead? Macon Dead, you say?”
“Yes.” Milkman smiled apologetically for the name. “My father—”
“Well, I’ll be.” Reverend Cooper took off his glasses. “Well, I’ll be! Esther!” He threw his voice over his shoulder without taking his eyes off his guest. “Esther, come here!” Then to Milkman: “I know your people!”
Milkman smiled and let his shoulders slump a little. It was a good feeling to come into a strange town and find a stranger who knew your people. All his life he’d heard the tremor in the word: “I live here, but my
“Sit on down here, boy. You the son of the Macon Dead I knew. Oh, well, now, I don’t mean to say I knew him all that well. Your daddy was four or five years older than me, and they didn’t get to town much, but everybody round here remembers the old man. Old Macon Dead, your granddad. My daddy and him was good friends. A blacksmith, my daddy was. I’m the only one got the call. Well well well.” Reverend Cooper grinned and massaged his knees. “Oh, Lord, I’m forgetting myself. You must be hungry. Esther, get him something to fill himself up on.”
“Oh, no. No, thank you, sir. Maybe a little something to drink. I mean if you do drink, that is.”
“Sure. Sure. Nothing citified, I’m sorry to say, but—Esther!” She was on her way to the kitchen. “Bring some glasses and get that whiskey out the cupboard. This here’s Macon Dead’s boy and he’s tired and needs a drink. Tell me, how’d you find me? Don’t tell me your daddy remembered me?”
“He probably does, but I met a man in the street and he told me how to find you.”
“You asked him for me?” Reverend Cooper wanted to get all the facts straight. Already he was framing the story for his friends: how the man came to his house first, how he asked for him….
Esther returned with a Coca-Cola tray, two glasses, and a large mayonnaise jar of what looked like water. Reverend Cooper poured it warm and neat into the two glasses. No ice, no water—just pure rye whiskey that almost tore Milkman’s throat when he swallowed it.
“No. I didn’t ask for you by name. I asked him if he knew where a woman named Circe used to live.”
“Circe? Yes. Lord, old Circe!”
“He told me to talk to you.”
Reverend Cooper smiled and poured more whiskey. “Everybody round here knows me and I know everybody.”
“Well, I know my father stayed with her awhile, after they…when they…after his father died.”
“They had a fine place. Mighty fine. Some white folks own it now. Course that’s what they wanted. That’s why they shot him. Upset a lot of people here, a whole lot of people. Scared ’em too. But didn’t your daddy have a sister name of Pilate?”
“Yes, sir. Pilate.”
“Still living, is she?”
“Oh, yes. Very much living.”
“Issat so? Pretty girl, real pretty. My daddy was the one made the earring for her. That’s how we knew they was alive. After Old Macon Dead was killed, nobody knew whether the children was dead too or what. Then a few weeks passed and Circe came to my daddy’s shop. Right across from where the post office is now—that’s where my daddy’s blacksmith shop was. She came in there with this little metal box with a piece of paper bag folded up in it. Pilate’s name was written on it. Circe didn’t tell Daddy anything, but that he was to make a earring out of it. She stole a brooch from the folks she worked for. My daddy took the gold pin off it and soldered it to the box. So we knew they was alive and Circe was taking care of ’em. They’d be all right with Circe. She worked for the Butlers— rich white folks, you know—but she was a good midwife in those days. Delivered everybody. Me included.”
Maybe it was the whiskey, which always made other people gracious when he drank it, but Milkman felt a glow listening to a story come from this man that he’d heard many times before but only half listened to. Or maybe it was being there in the place where it happened that made it seem so real. Hearing Pilate talk about caves and woods and earrings on Darling Street, or his father talk about cooking wild turkey over the automobile noise of Not Doctor Street, seemed exotic, something from another world and age, and maybe not even true. Here in the parsonage, sitting in a cane-bottomed chair near an upright piano and drinking homemade whiskey poured from a mayonnaise jar, it was real. Without knowing it, he had walked right by the place where Pilate’s earring had been fashioned, the earring that had fascinated him when he was little, the fixing of which informed the colored people here that the children of the murdered man were alive. And this was the living room of the son of the man who made the earring.
“Did anybody ever catch the men who did it—who killed him?”
