We were drinking coffee at four o’clock in the morning, not saying much, when the phone rang. I grabbed it. A young man said: “We told you nigger lovers to leave. You stay and we’ll burn that house down with you in it. You stay and we’ll get the boy.” The boy was me.
I repeated what I heard. Junior broke the long silence that followed. “Maybe y’all better go a while. We guard the house.”
Junior was “much of a man,” as the colored people said. He was six-six and weighed more than three hundred pounds. His shoulders were wider, his chest deeper, and his arms bigger around than any human being’s I had ever seen. His skin was almost true black, and his voice registered at the lowest human octave I’d heard. A thick mustache and a wide mouth set off his full, round face. He smiled easily, talked a lot, and liked to joke around, but he wasn’t joking now.
“Shit, Junior. I can’t let some damn rednecks run me outta my house. We’re okay while the deputies are outside,” Daddy said.
Mama had gone to the front door and now she called. “They’re gone, and there’s a strange truck parked down the street.”
Junior drew a pistol. He led Daddy and Sam out the back door to slip around the side of the house to get a look at the truck. I was following when Mama grabbed my arm. “Unh-unh. You stay here.”
The truck suddenly roared away. It was red, but we didn’t get its make. Junior and Daddy were about to give chase but found that their truck tires had been slashed. When they were back inside, Mama looked at Daddy. “You think the sheriff is looking after us? I’m telling you, his people are behind some of this.” He didn’t answer.
Junior studied Daddy. “Buddy, if y’all stay, you going to have to find some protection.”
“You mean bodyguards?” Mama’s brow was furrowed.
“I mean a rough mother—” he caught himself and glanced at Mama “—a guy who going to shoot a few rounds if he need to.”
Daddy shook his head. “Where we going to find somebody like that, Junior?”
He studied Daddy. “You care what color they are?”
Daddy didn’t answer, but Mama shook her head at Junior. “We don’t care.”
Junior turned to Sam and gave a quick nod. Sam Ford was about sixty-five, a heavyset man wearing thick-lensed, horn-rimmed glasses. He was the husband of Orene, my grandmother’s cook. Sam spoke slowly—with the enunciation and diction of an old Negro who had never lived outside the Alabama Black Belt.
“I know ’bout this boy up in Chicago.” He paused, nodded slowly, and then settled his eyes on Daddy. “Some say he be the meanest nigger in Illinois.”
4
At the funeral home in Norfolk, Virginia, the solemn undertaker led my mother, William, and me into a small, dimly lit room furnished with a few straight chairs and a sofa bearing a design of deep red flowers and olive-colored leaves and vines. Someone in the room was wearing a musky perfume, which made the air feel even stuffier than its eighty degrees. The undertaker introduced us to Mrs. Herndon and Lena, Jackie’s fourteen-year-old sister. His mother was almost six feet, and wide in the hips and shoulders, which made her look strong, not fat. Jackie had strongly resembled his mother, but her features were thicker and fleshier. Her brow was furrowed and her mouth fixed tightly, the big brown centers of her eyes ringed in pink. Mrs. Herndon’s was the saddest face I had ever seen.
I hung back, grasping for words and trying to find the breath to say them, but Mama went straight to Mrs. Herndon and hugged her. The two mothers sat side-by-side and talked quietly, holding hands and passing a box of tissues back and forth. Mrs. Herndon’s hands dwarfed Mama’s, but like hers they revealed themselves as instruments of hard labor. Jackie had said she worked in a laundry.
Soon Mrs. Herndon raised her eyes and beckoned me over. I felt my knees go weak. “Jackie always said good things about you.” Her face was still perfectly sober.
“He was my good friend,” I said.
“Tell me what happened to him at the store that night.” Her voice was sharp, even angry.
I wanted to loosen my necktie so I could talk better, but it didn’t seem appropriate. I just started in, haltingly. I tried to keep my words even and measured. I told her about Alma—who had gone back to California the day after Jackie died, I’d read in the newspaper. I told about the storekeeper shooting at us and how I shot back—too late—and our desperate drive to the hospital.
“Have they charged this Buford Kyle with murder?” she asked.
“Ma’am, they just charged manslaughter.”
She frowned. “What is wrong with you white folks? What made this man think it was okay to start shooting my baby?”
You white folks. I shivered. I had lived most of my life alongside black people. I didn’t want to be herded into the same pen with Buford Kyle or George Wallace, or even my father.
At that moment, a tall black man strode directly to Mrs. Herndon. He spoke to her in a deep voice, glared at me, and then turned back to her. “This who got Jackie killed?”
I cringed. She shook her head in disgust, then looked at Mama. “I’m sorry, Mrs. McKee. This man is Jackie’s father.” She turned back to the man. “I ain’t taking your mess now, Melvin. Don’t come in here drunk, as usual, and expect me to take it.”
Jackie had told me that he hardly knew his father, that he had never lived with the family. I caught a strong whiff of liquor as the man leaned toward me.
“Is you the white man that took my boy to Alabama and got him killed?”
I thought he was going to hit me, and I doubled my fists. But Mrs. Herndon rose and called out for the undertaker, who hurried over with a man so big his suit looked ready to tear at the seams. They hustled Jackie’s father away from us.
“Goddamn. Treated like shit at my own boy’s funeral,” he snarled. He gave me a last brutal look on his way out. “I’m sorry, Tom,” Mrs. Herndon said. Somehow Melvin’s anger had dissipated her own, and she just wanted to talk to me about Jackie. She was proud of his interest in science. I told her how Jackie had helped me pass a geology course the past spring. He had told her he was going to the freedom school to teach science. I decided not to say that Jackie had changed his mind about that, which would have required saying more about Alma and her angry demands. I blamed Alma for Jackie’s death but I didn’t want to go into that now.
The undertaker returned to escort Mrs. Herndon to see Jackie. She stood, took Lena’s hand, and then looked back at Mama and me. “You come along,” she said. I froze. I’d been dreading this for the entire last day. I had never seen a dead body. Bebe had insisted on keeping Granddaddy’s casket closed. I especially didn’t want to see Jackie. I looked at Mama, hoping she would see my fear, but she nodded firmly toward Mrs. Herndon. I had no choice but to go.
Large sprays of roses, carnations, and gladiolas were crowded around the steel-gray casket, which gave the dimly lit parlor the cloying smell of a greenhouse. Mama took my hand and led me to a place discreetly behind Mrs. Herndon and Lena. They whispered quietly to one another as they leaned over the coffin. Finally they stepped aside and Mama pulled me forward.
He looked like a painted doll. The features were recognizably Jackie’s, except his eyes were closed. His skin was so uniformly creamy brown and smooth that it didn’t seem at all real. I had never seen Jackie in a suit, but his