Mortal Fear

Patrick Graham, my brother-in-law, rolls his eyes at me while carefully making sure I am the only one who can see him. Patrick and I went to school together and are exactly the same age. An oncologist in Jackson, Mississippi, he is married to Erin, my wife’s younger sister. His rolling eyes sum up a feeling too complex for words, one common to our generation of Southerners. They say, We may not like it but there’s nothing we can do about it except argue, and it’s not worth arguing about with our father-in-law because he won’t ever change no matter what.

“It” being racism, of course.

“What are you jabbering about, Daddy?” Drewe asks.

My wife is wearing a yellow sundress and standing over the wrought-iron table that holds the remains of the barbecued ribs we just devoured. Erin excluded, of course. My wife’s sister is a strict vegetarian, which in Mississippi still rates up there with being a Hare Krishna. This get-together is a biweekly family ritual, Sunday dinner at the in-laws’, who live twenty miles from Rain, on the outskirts of Yazoo City. We do it rain or shine, and today it’s shine: ninety-six degrees in the shade.

“Don’t get him started, honey,” my mother-in-law says wearily. Margaret Anderson has taken refuge from the heat beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat.

“I’m talking about my new office, baby,” Bob tells Drewe, ignoring Margaret.

Bob Anderson is a veterinarian and an institution in this part of the Delta. His practice thrives, but that is not what pays for the columned Greek Revival house that towers over the patio we are sitting on. In the last twenty years, Bob has invested with unerring instinct in every scheme that made any money in the Delta, most notably catfish farming. Money from all over the world pours into Mississippi in exchange for farm-raised catfish-enough money to put the long-maligned catfish in the same league with cotton. A not insignificant portion of that money pours into Bob Anderson’s pockets. He is a short man but seems tall, even to those who have known him for years. Though he is balding, his forearms are thick and hairy. He walks with a self-assured, forward-leaning tilt, his chin cocked back with a military air. He is a natural hand with all things mechanical. Carpenter work, motors, welding, plumbing, a half dozen sports. It’s easy to imagine him with one strong arm buried up to the shoulder in the womb of a mare, a wide grin on his sweaty face. Bob Anderson is a racist; he is also a good father, a faithful husband, and a dead shot with a rifle.

“I took bids on my building,” he says, looking back over his shirtless shoulder at Drewe. “All the local boys made their plays, o’course, first-class job like that. And all their bids were close to even. Then I get a bid from this nigger out of Jackson, name of Boyte. His bid was eight thousand less than the lowest of the local boys.”

“Did you take it?” Patrick asks.

Erin Graham-Patrick’s wife-turns from her perch at poolside. She has been sitting with her tanned back to us, her long legs dangling in the water, watching her three-year-old daughter with an eagle eye. Erin’s dark eyes glower at her father, but Bob pretends not to notice.

“Not yet,” he says. “See, the local boys somehow got wind of what the nigger bid-”

“Somehow?” Drewe echoes, expressing her suspicion that her father told his cronies about their minority competition.

“Anyhow,” Bob plows on, “it turns out the reason this nigger can afford to bid so low is that he’s getting some kind of cheap money from the government. Some kind of incentive — read handout-which naturally ain’t available to your white contractors. Now I ask you, is that fair? I’m all for letting the nigger compete right alongside Jack and Nub, but for the government to use our tax money to help him undercut hardworking men like that-”

“Are you sure the black contractor’s getting government help?” Drewe asks.

“Hell yes, I’m sure. Nub told me himself.”

“So what are you going to do?” asks Patrick, as if he really cares, which I know he does not.

“What can I do?” Bob says haplessly. “I’ve got to give it to the nigger, don’t I?”

“DADDY, THAT IS ENOUGH!”

Patrick and I look up, startled by the shrill voice. Erin has stood up beside the pool and she is pointing a long finger at her father. “You may do and say as you wish at your house any time you wish-except when my daughter is present. Holly will not grow up handicapped by the prejudices of this state.”

Bob looks at Patrick and me and rolls his eyes, which from long experience we sons-in-law have no trouble translating as, What do you expect from a girl who ran off to New York City when she turned eighteen and lived among Yankees?

“Calm down, honey,” Bob says. “To you he’s an African American. Five years ago he was black, before that a Negro, before that colored. How am I supposed to keep up? To me he’s a nigger. His own friends call him nigger. What’s the difference? Holly won’t remember any of this in five minutes anyway.”

To be fair, Bob Anderson would never use this kind of language in mixed company-mixed racial company-or in front of whites he did not know and feel comfortable with. Unless, of course, someone made him mad. To Bob Anderson, “politically correct” means you salute the flag, work your butt off, pay your taxes, pray in school, and you by God go when Uncle Sam calls you, no questions asked. I could ridicule his views, but I won’t. Guys like Bob Anderson fought and died for this country years before I was born. Guys like Bob Anderson liberated Nordhausen and Buchenwald. Bob himself fought in Korea. So I keep my thirty-three-year-old mouth shut.

But Erin doesn’t. “Goddamn it, Daddy, I’m serious!” she snaps, her tanned cheeks quivering. “Holly’s like a sponge and you know it!”

Bob’s face glows pink. He half rises from his reclining lawn chair. “You hear that, Margaret? Your daughter just took the Lord’s name in vain, and she’s on me for calling a spade a spade! I think any civilized person would agree that blasphemy is far worse than saying nigger now and again!”

Margaret Anderson snores beneath her straw hat.

“No it’s not, Daddy,” Drewe says softly from the table. “But you’ll never understand why.”

I am enthralled by the continuing role reversal Erin and Drewe have been undergoing since they were kids. When they were teenagers, it was Drewe who almost daily pushed her father to the point that he locked her in her room or thrashed her with his belt. She constantly tested her limits, proving only that she was as stubborn as he was. Erin was a creature of equanimity, slipping through life with no resistance at all. Yet now that Erin is a mother, it is she who faces down Bob without fear or second thoughts.

As a child Drewe was a tomboy, curious, competitive, and tough. After puberty, she began to soften into a more feminine figure at the same time her intelligence put her at the top of her ninth-grade class. To prevent the inevitable taunts of being “too good” for everyone else, Drewe evolved a unique strategy. She became the wildest girl in the class. Or at least she seemed to. And one of her most convincing moves in this game of social survival was dating the wildest boy in her class-me. And so it was that I alone knew her secret. While the other girls were perpetually awed by the craziness of some of the things Drewe did, I knew, for example, that on those occasions when we managed to spend nearly all night together in bed, she stopped our passionate groping well short of “going all the way.” Yet she was perfectly content to let her friends think otherwise. And in the whirlwind of our relationship, no one seemed to notice that she maintained a 99.4 average in all subjects.

Erin was just as deceptive, but she took the opposite tack. A year behind Drewe, she effortlessly convinced every parent and teacher within thirty miles that she was a perfect angel while actually having sex with any guy who took her fancy, from clean-cut quarterbacks to pot-smoking cowboy rebels. Her grades were middling at best, but on the other hand, they were irrelevant.

Erin’s secret was her looks.

I gaze past Patrick and Bob: Erin has finally turned back toward the shimmering pool. I am now looking at what was once described as the finest ass in the state of Mississippi, and it still manages to make the one-piece bathing suit that covers it seem more revealing than a thong bikini. Even now, I am convinced that this thirty-two- year-old mother could give any high school senior a run for her money.

During 1979, Erin Anderson’s face appeared on the covers of six national magazines. Four days after she graduated from high school, she left Rain, Mississippi, for New York with five hundred dollars and the name of a modeling agent in her purse. Two months later she had signed a contract with the Ford agency. In quick succession came runway work, the six magazine covers, some TV spots. Then came a brief hiatus, and after that it was the