Cathy eyed me carefully when I edged hard into a turn at Tuscaloosa. We rode due south on the gentle rise and fall of pavement through pine thickets around Moundville and Greensboro. The little towns had run down in the decades since I left, their concrete streets now broken and potted, many storefronts vacant. Three out of four houses begged for paint. Compared to our prosperous suburbs, with our ever-expanding shopping malls and our French-imitation mini-mansions and our very black asphalt streets, these little towns could show us nothing new. Nearly all had lost population since the 1960s. The prosperous whites—including Cathy and me, the remnants of our small-town clan—had departed for more manicured places. I wasn’t sure where the blacks had gone, but most had abandoned that part of the world.
South of Greensboro the rolling of the land became gentler, the landscape more open. We had reached the Black Belt prairie, and soon our own little faded town rose up ahead. Eden Rise sits on the last ripple of that gently rolling prairie before it flattens out entirely. The Virginia planters built a village on the elevation when they gleefully moved to Alabama in the 1830s. They came to take advantage of the charcoal-colored soil that lay atop a great limestone formation. The Virginians expected this “self-liming” soil to combine with the hot sun and the big rains to make an Edenic paradise of cotton—having already worn out the garden soil in the Old Dominion. They brought along their large array of slaves, a fact I discovered when as a confused middle-aged man I decided to research the genealogy of my family. In looking for my ancestors I came across the massive property holdings—of both land and flesh—of the Randolphs, the Ruffins, the Cockes, the Withers, and the other first families of Virginia who were also the first families of this prairie garden. The thousands of Africans were the real cultivators of the new Eden. The owners of the land disappeared on Civil War battlefields, or if they survived, they left after the war for Birmingham or Atlanta or Mobile.
Other whites had soon presented themselves to take control, among them a Scots-Irishman named McKee who spawned my line. They all discovered what the first settlers knew—that, while the soil would indeed grow bumper crops of cotton, it turned into a glue-like mud with the first spring deluge, thus making harvesting the big crop a frenzy of work in the snatches of dry time between long periods when animals and equipment and Africans were stuck in the mud. Of course, by the time I was farming as a young man, improved drainage and wide-wheeled tractors mostly kept us from getting stuck.
The road into Eden Rise looked different from how it did in my childhood. The tin-roofed sharecropper houses had disappeared, and if they had been replaced, it was with a manufactured home, what we called a trailer-house when I was growing up—a rectangular box made of fiberboard and covered with beige aluminum. They were cleaner and nicer than the shacks they replaced, but like their inhabitants they sat unrooted on the land. Little in fact was now rooted in the Black Belt soil. I didn’t know of anybody now growing cotton within thirty miles of where I grew up. Much of the land around Eden Rise, including parts of our own, was used for catfish farming.
Still even an old dirt farmer like me had to admit that the catfish ponds, which covered several acres each, often in groups of three or four, were beautiful on this bright day as the sunlight bounced off the water. I pulled off the road and parked in front of a pond that we owned—though its slimy inhabitants belonged to a corporation based in Mississippi. On the pond’s bank, when most of the other flora had called it a season, lantana bloomed promiscuously. It lit the water’s edge a fiery red.
Having gotten this close to home, I didn’t really want to go into town and drive by our family home, or my grandmother’s, or the courthouse, the scene of so much trouble back in1965. These places would make me remember the injustice, now almost thirty years old, that Randy Russell wanted me to help him correct. I was happy to stop right here, amid the beauty of farmed fish. I got out of the car and stood looking at the water.
Cathy joined me. “So? Talk to me,” she said.
Randy Russell, President Clinton’s recent appointee as U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Alabama, had asked me to meet him at John’s Restaurant in downtown Birmingham. I had just dug into my snapper tails and coleslaw when he smiled tentatively and said he was going to file a criminal case for violation of civil rights in the 1965 Yancey County murder.
I jerked back hard from my food. I thought he had invited me to dinner because he was going to offer me a job on his staff. I had spent the previous evening pondering whether I wanted to give up teaching constitutional law at Cumberland law school.
“What?!”
“Yeah. I’m going to get a conviction this time.”
I was having trouble swallowing my food.
Russell went on. “I just feel like I’m supposed to do something about it. Make up for old wrongs, correct past injustices.”
I guess there had been a long silence at the table when he plunged ahead. “Tom, I’m going to need you to be a witness. You know, the main witness.”
“That was a terrible time in my life. I’m not going back there.”
He looked at me a long moment and then shrugged. “You’re a lawyer, Tom, an officer of the court. You have an obligation as a material witness.” When I didn’t respond, he shrugged again. “I can subpoena you.”
It sounded like a threat, coming from a thirty-something prosecutor who was still riding his Huffy when my best friend was murdered in 1965. I didn’t like it. “I’ve forgotten most of what happened,” I said.
He looked at me without blinking. “You can remember.”
As she gazed at the shimmering water, Cathy tapped her can of Diet Coke. “I heard Russell has an idealistic streak. Son of a Methodist preacher, isn’t he?”
My sister is good-looking at forty-five—tall and shapely in her Gap jeans and crisp Oxford shirt. Gray streaks add character to her thick, dark hair. She runs a usually profitable public relations firm, manages a mostly happy marriage to a busy surgeon, and has raised two generally well-adjusted teenagers. Her success as an adult, especially compared to my own irresolution, has earned my deference to her opinions about the big issues. But since that summer of 1965, I’ve also known she was something of a genius at human relations.
“You said you wouldn’t do it. Why do you need advice?”
“You understand why I don’t want to testify?”
“You’re trying to avoid a hassle.”
“So it’s the right decision?” I said.
“I didn’t say that. You decided, and it’s your decision.”
I looked over toward Eden Rise, hazy in the fall warmth. “What’s the reason to do it? You understand that these trials are just a quick fix for liberal guilt?”
The idea, of course, was not original with Russell. In the last few years, several far more notorious civil rights murder cases—Medgar Evers in Mississippi, the four girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham—had been reopened and old racists dragged into court before juries now including blacks. I had followed those proceedings with a distant skepticism, born partly of the assumption that whites didn’t ever get convicted of such crimes and partly from my lawyerly doubts about the efficacy of old evidence—dead witnesses, lost documents, and such. But those killers did at last get convicted, which made people believe they could shut the door once and for all on the past.
I had shoved into the shadows of the past the face of my friend Jackie Herndon, dead now for twenty-eight years. There too were the angry eyes of my father, the lazy face of the prosecutor, the sneers of the attorney defending Jackie’s killer, the contempt of townspeople who thought I had betrayed my birthright. The last thing I needed was to parade ghosts into a federal courtroom. The post-civil-rights-white-punishment-and-redemption trials became major media events. There wasn’t enough whisky in Birmingham to get me through that.
I suspected the insincerity of people using the past for today’s