Reverend Cooper raised his eyebrows. “Catch?” he asked, his face full of wonder. Then he smiled again. “Didn’t have to catch ’em. They never went nowhere.”
“I mean did they have a trial; were they arrested?”
“Arrested for what? Killing a nigger? Where did you say you was from?”
“You mean nobody did anything? Didn’t even try to find out who did it?”
“Everybody knew who did it. Same people Circe worked for—the Butlers.”
“And nobody did anything?” Milkman wondered at his own anger. He hadn’t felt angry when he first heard about it. Why now?
“Wasn’t nothing to do. White folks didn’t care, colored folks didn’t dare. Wasn’t no police like now. Now we got a county sheriff handles things. Not then. Then the circuit judge came through just once or twice a year. Besides, the people what did it owned half the county. Macon’s land was in their way. Folks just was thankful the children escaped.”
“You said Circe worked for the people who killed him. Did she know that?”
“Course she did.”
“And she let them stay there?”
“Not out in the open. She hid them.”
“Still, they were in the same house, right?”
“Yep. Best place, I’d say. If they came to town somebody’d see’em. Nobody would think of looking there.”
“Did Daddy—did my father know that?”
“I don’t know what he knew, if Circe ever told him. I never saw him after the murder. None of us did.”
“Where are they? The Butlers. They still live here?”
“Dead now. Every one of ’em. The last one, the girl Elizabeth, died a couple years back. Barren as a rock and just as old. Things work out, son. The ways of God are mysterious, but if you live it out, just live it out, you see that it always works out. Nothing they stole or killed for did ’em a bit a good. Not one bit.”
“I don’t care whether it did them good. The fact is they did somebody else harm.”
Reverend Cooper shrugged. “White folks different up your way?”
“No, I guess not…. Sometimes, though, you can do something.”
“What?” The preacher looked genuinely interested.
Milkman couldn’t answer except in Guitar’s words, so he said nothing.
“See this here?” The reverend turned around and showed Milkman a knot the size of a walnut that grew behind his ear. “Some of us went to Philly to try and march in an Armistice Day parade. This was after the First World War. We were invited and had a permit, but the people, the white people, didn’t like us being there. They started a fracas. You know, throwing rocks and calling us names. They didn’t care nothing ‘bout the uniform. Anyway, some police on horseback came—to quiet them down, we thought. They ran
“Jesus God.”
“You wouldn’t be here to even things up, would you?” The preacher leaned over his stomach.
“No. I’m passing through, that’s all. Just thought I’d look around. I wanted to see the farm….”
“Cause any evening up left to do, Circe took care of.”
“What’d she do?”
“Hah! What didn’t she do?”
“Sorry I didn’t come out here long time ago. I would have liked to meet her. She must have been a hundred years old when she died.”
“Older. Was a hundred when I was a boy.”
“Is the farm nearby?” Milkman appeared mildly interested.
“Not too far.”
“I sort of wanted to see where it was since I’m out this way. Daddy talked so much about it.”
“It’s right back of the Butler place, about fifteen miles out. I can take you there. My old piece of car’s in the shop, but it was supposed to be ready yesterday. I’ll check on it.”
Milkman waited four days for the car to be ready. Four days at Reverend Cooper’s house as his guest, and the purpose of long visits from every old man in the town who remembered his father or his grandfather, and some who’d only heard. They all repeated various aspects of the story, all talked about how beautiful Lincoln’s Heaven was. Sitting in the kitchen, they looked at Milkman with such rheumy eyes, and spoke about his grandfather with such awe and affection, Milkman began to miss him too. His own father’s words came back to him: “I worked right alongside my father. Right alongside him.” Milkman thought then that his father was boasting of his manliness as a child. Now he knew he had been saying something else. That he loved his father; had an intimate relationship with him; that his father loved him, trusted him, and found him worthy of working “right alongside” him. “Something went wild in me,” he’d said, “when I saw him on the ground.”
His was the genuine feeling that Milkman had faked when Reverend Cooper described the hopelessness of “doing anything.” These men remembered both Macon Deads as extraordinary men. Pilate they remembered as a pretty woods-wild girl “that couldn’t nobody put shoes on.” Only one of them remembered his grandmother. “Good- lookin, but looked like a white woman. Indian, maybe. Black hair and slanted-up eyes. Died in childbirth, you know.”
