Eden Rise. Robert Jeff Norrell

by becoming a party guy in a fraternity. The Sigma Nu house was full of good-looking, wealthy Southern boys who had grown up fishing, hunting, and watching football—a perfect fit for me, I thought. But I discovered I couldn’t conform to what they wanted. I knew it as soon as one of them said Beth’s last name, “Kaplan,” in a derisive snicker to her face. Worse, being Jackie’s friend made me as welcome in the frat as Martin Luther King. On a pledge workday when I was mopping the party room floor and several brothers were hazing pledges, Frank Strother, a senior from Birmingham who had rushed me very hard, had sneered at me. “McKee, you mop good. Just like a nigger.” Strother’s face dared me to say something, but I didn’t. “But you ought to be good with a mop, McKee, being a nigger lover like you are.” My hands tightened on the mop. “You hang around with that nigger all the time in the cafeteria. White folks not good enough for you?”

      I charged him but the other so-called brothers pulled me away. After that day, I began to drift away from Sigma Nu, and maybe because of that, I’d had drifted into involvement with civil rights protest. I didn’t do it out of any great moral commitment. It was more that I hated the Frank Strothers of the world. And I needed Jackie’s friendship, especially after losing everybody else’s.

      All this ran through my mind as I sat before Joe Black, but I couldn’t speak. How would this old man understand this convoluted story? It wouldn’t make sense to anybody else. So Joe Black plunged ahead on his own. “As I understand it, you were giving two friends a ride to their summer job. It’s what folks in Ruffin County are taught is the polite thing—give somebody a ride if they ask. Period. You follow me?”

      I nodded. The lean truth.

      “He’s going to ask you if you ever participated in any civil rights protests.” When I didn’t answer right away, Joe Black waited a moment. “Son, if you did, I need to know now. It’ll come out anyway.”

      Alma Jones had stopped Jackie in the cafeteria and demanded that he participate in a march at the Durham town square in sympathy with the Selma voting protests. Jackie had gazed down at his sneakers. “Oh, come on, boy!” she had said angrily. “Last night they showed on TV how those Alabama police just beat hell outa those poor folks on a bridge. You gotta help!” She shot me a hard stare. “You too.”

      I had seen the beating on the Sigma Nu television—my last time at the fraternity house—and listened to comments from Strother and others about “niggers getting what they deserved.” I was thinking of that when Alma demanded that I march, too. In downtown Durham the next afternoon, Jackie and I had joined about fifty people walking slowly down a commercial block. Alma spotted us and came over with a placard that read: “Selma: Let the Negroes Vote.” Jackie and I walked side-by-side up and down the block. There were more police and reporters than there were protesters. The next morning the student newspaper ran a story with pictures of the protest. There Jackie and I were in the background of one picture.

      When I recounted this to Joe Black, he nodded. “Aw right, aw right. Let’s move on. The circuit solicitor’s going to ask why you took Kyle’s shotgun.” I just stared blankly at Joe Black for a while.

      “You didn’t wanta take the chance of him start shooting at you again. Then he’s going to ask why you threw it away. You probably threw it away ’cause it wasn’t yours and you didn’t want some policeman to see it and keep you from getting this boy to the hospital. Ya understan’?”

      Those were pretty good answers—better than the truth, because I didn’t really know why I did some of what I did.

      “See, son, in this Kyle trial, your testimony is going to be a kinda dry run for when you get tried. You going to tell yo’ story in such a convincing way that some of those jurors going to believe you, even though they don’t want to.” He smiled. “Word going to get around the county the boy is telling the truth, and then they going to acquit you two weeks later in your trial. You hear me?”

      I wanted to believe Joe Black, but I knew I was simply too scared to be a good witness. I couldn’t say that, though, because the little man with the big smile on his craggy face was willing me to think something else about myself.

      When we finally went back inside, Bebe was dozing in her chair. Joe Black and I were tiptoeing through the den when she raised her head.

      “Joe, dear, don’t go yet. I have one more bit of business to ask you about. Tommy, will you go get that pie from Orene and put it in Joe Black’s car so that it won’t spill?”

      When I came back, Joe Black was sitting on the ottoman, leaning in toward Bebe, talking in a very low voice. I could make out only a few words of what he was saying: “two ex-wives . . . goes to Las Vegas . . . circuit solicitors don’t make that kind of money.” Bebe arched her eyebrows. “Must have some powerful good credit.”

      As I walked Joe Black to his car, I said something about appreciating his work on my behalf. “I really don’t know why you’re taking on all this trouble.”

      He pulled a pure white handkerchief from his back pocket, bowed his head, and coughed into it. When he looked at me again, he wore a wistful smile and his cloudy blue eyes were wet. He leaned his head toward Bebe’s den and nodded slowly at me. “Son, I been in love with that girl in there since I was eight years old. I do anything in the world for her before she goes. Ya understan’? Anything.”

8

       Barbershop Cuts

      Marvin and I went into Eden Rise on the first Saturday morning after Jackie’s funeral for the simple reason that I needed a haircut. Crepe myrtles lined the four sides of the town square. A few water oaks, several dogwoods, and a big magnolia were scattered on lush Bermuda grass. Some azaleas clustered here and there, but their flowering days were almost over for this year. The local garden club had made sure that pink roses and yellow day lilies and some red cannas colored this June morning, along with a multi-colored bed of marigolds in the open area near the center of the square. The square’s man-made improvements were a couple of long benches and a monument to the Confederate soldier, armed and facing northward—awaiting as always the return of General Wilson’s raiders.