Bebe gave Daddy an I-told-you-so nod.
The little man looked up at Daddy. “I’ll go down there with you.” He read my father’s chilly reaction. “If you want me to.”
Daddy shook his head at Bebe, who was looking at him rather than at the lawyer when she said, “Joe Black, that would be very kind. We need you to do that.”
At 4 a.m. two Yancey County deputies appeared at the hospital. When they put my hands behind my back, I felt myself step away from my own body again. They put me in the back of a patrol car. With my hands shackled behind, I had to sit leaning forward for the forty-five minute ride to the jail. The only break from the panic of losing the use of my arms was the pain shooting up my cramping back. In the Yancey County sheriff’s office, time dragged. Mama, Daddy, and I were too exhausted to talk. A clerk took my fingerprints. As dawn broke, a parade of people traipsed through, and it took a while for me to realize they were coming by to look at the boy who had shot one of their neighbors.
Buford Kyle, I overheard, was in the hospital, shot up but surviving. Maybe when he was bandaged up they would haul him in for killing Jackie, and his neighbors would have someone else to stare at. I locked my eyes on the floor.
The justice of the peace read the charge against me: assault with a deadly weapon. When I heard him say, “including the possibility of ten years in jail,” I started to shake all over. Joe Black put his hand on my shoulder.
“Ain’t no way you going to get the maximum, son,” he said in a voice only I could hear. “Listen here, don’t even think about that. We going to do ever’ damn thing to make this trouble go away.” Then he stuck his right index finger into Daddy’s chest. “They ain’t going to be pushin’ us around down here, I guaran-damn-tee you that, Buddy.” Daddy just looked at him.
On the way to Eden Rise, Mama sat between Daddy and me and held my hand. “It wasn’t anything you did, Tommy. Just a tragic accident.”
I saw the clenched muscles on Daddy’s forehead. He didn’t wait long to get to the point. “Tommy, why were you driving these people down here anyway?”
“I just wanted company for the long drive, and he was my really good friend.”
He kept his eyes on the highway. “Son, don’t you know that was just asking for trouble? These counties are just crawling with nigger agitators, and people are really upset about it.”
Mama turned sideways in her seat. “Buddy—”
I interrupted her. “Jackie is not a ‘nigger agitator.’”
Daddy plunged ahead. “Tommy, ever since all the trouble at Selma, these damn people have been going around stirring up the colored to try to register to vote. The Klan has been meeting all around the Black Belt and threatening to hurt these agitators.”
“Daddy, I was just trying to get my friend where he wanted to go. We were almost there and this girl had to go to the bathroom and we stopped at this store.”
“You shoulda known better than to stop with an integrated group at a country store in the Black Belt.” His voice and mouth were tight.
“I’ve been going into stores with colored people all my life. I didn’t think about this being different. I was tired and just trying to get where we needed go.”
“Well, you shoulda known it was different with agitators from up North.”
“Daddy, Jackie was not an agitator—”
“Why didn’t you just give ’em bus fare? It woulda ended up costing a lot less.”
Mama’s face reddened. “Buddy! You shut up, you hear? It’s not Tommy’s fault.”
Daddy was blaming me. But racist though he was, he was right. I didn’t think about the danger, and I should have known. Jackie was dead because of my stupidity.
Suddenly I was choking. The warm wind that came through the window of Mama’s station wagon drove my breath back down my throat. Sweat oozed from every pore of my body, which itched. I stank from thirty hours of sweat. The sky should have been blue but the mid-day sun had washed out nearly all color, leaving it a dirty white. On the right, rows of young cotton plants wilted in the furnace. On the left, a herd of cows huddled in a thicket of willows by a stagnant stream. I caught the stench of decaying flesh just at that moment and saw two buzzards picking at carrion—it was a baby calf—outside the cluster of cows.
Then I looked forward and realized we were approaching the old store ahead on the left. I raised an index finger and pointed. Mama looked at me and then jerked her head forward.
“That’s the place?” Daddy said.
I nodded and he slowed the car as we went past. The bleached walls and the faded signs and the shattered gas pumps were now scorched by a sun that felt like it hovered only a few hundred feet above ground at noon. I trembled all over. I saw the man aiming the shotgun. I saw Jackie lying bloody in the gravel.
“Stop.”
Both my parents frowned and shook their heads.
“Stop!”
Daddy eased to the side of the road a hundred yards past the store. I opened the door before the car came fully to a stop and rushed into the weeds that lay between the pavement and a cotton field. I bent over and puked.
I stood up, and the sunlight blinded me. Then the gag reflex jerked much harder and I fell on all fours. Bile burned my throat from the bottom up like a garden hose was spewing acid from my guts. The sun scalded the back of my neck. I thought I was through after the third time, but my stomach kept wrenching my insides. My torso convulsed. I began to sob. By the time Mama got me to my feet and back in the car, by the time she wiped my greasy, stinking face with Daddy’s handkerchief and pulled my trembling head down to her shoulder, I didn’t think I would live through this torture. Nor was I sure I wanted to.
3
I awoke at 6:30 that evening and found Mama at the stove, stirring a pot and talking on the phone. She was frowning. “No, we have no comment. No, there won’t be any interviews.” She rolled her eyes at Daddy, who was standing across the kitchen, drinking a Budweiser and smoking a cigarette. “Sorry.” She hung up the phone and shrugged. “Newsweek.”
Immediately the phone rang, and Daddy answered. He listened a moment, and scowled. “You chickenshit bastards, you ain’t running anybody off, you hear?” He slammed the phone down.
Mama looked at him tentatively. “What did they say?”
He looked down at the kitchen tile. “‘It’s time for y’all to git on up North where there’s a lot of niggers to love,’” he repeated in a flat voice.
“Don’t people have any decency?” She took the receiver off the hook. It lay on the counter like a venomous snake.
My sister Cathy stood by the kitchen table, her arms swinging, her knees jerking up in rhythm. She was practicing her cheerleader routines. She shrugged at me. “The phone’s been ringing all afternoon.”
The afternoon newspaper lay spread on the breakfast table. There were pictures of Jackie and me under a huge headline, “Negro Student Killed in Yancey Shootout.” Jackie was pictured in his Duke basketball uniform. Next to him was my senior yearbook picture. The article said an “altercation” had left “the college basketball star mortally wounded” and “storekeeper Buford Kyle in serious but stable condition” at a local hospital.