by Greg Iles
“Me too,” she says with a smile. “I liked Annie, by the way.”
“Thanks. She liked you too.”
As we step into the main dining space of the restaurant, a smattering of applause starts, then fills the room. I look around to see whose birthday it is, then realize that the applause is for me. A little celebrity goes a long way in Mississippi. I recognize familiar faces in the crowd. Some belong to guys I went to school with, now carrying twenty or thirty extra pounds-as I did until Sarah’s illness-others to friends of my parents or simply well-wishers. I smile awkwardly and give a little wave to cover the room.
“I told you,” says Caitlin. “There’s a lot of interest.”
“It’ll wear off. As soon as they realize I’m the same guy who left, they’ll be yawning in my face.”
When we arrive at our table, she stands stiffly behind her chair, her eyes twinkling with humor. “You’re not going to pull my chair out for me?”
“You didn’t look the type.”
She laughs and takes her seat. “I wasn’t before I got here. Pampering corrupts you fast.”
While we study the menus, a collection of classic Cajun dishes, I try to fathom how Caitlin Masters wound up in the job she has. The Examiner has always been a conservative paper, owned when I was a boy by a family that printed nothing that reflected negatively upon city worthies. Later it was sold to a family-owned newspaper chain which continued the tradition of offending as few citizens as possible, especially those who bought advertising space. In Natchez the gossip mills have always been a lot more accurate than anything you could find in the Examiner. Caitlin seems an improbable match, to say the least.
She closes her menu and smiles engagingly. “I’m younger than you thought I’d be, aren’t I?”
“A little,” I reply, trying not to look at her chest. In Mississippi, wearing a blouse that sheer without a bra is practically a request to be arrested.
“My father owns the chain. I’m doing a tour of duty down here to learn the ropes.”
“Ah.” One mystery cleared up.
“Okay if we go on the record now?”
“You have a tape recorder?”
“I never use them.”
I take out a Sony microcassette recorder borrowed from my father. “The bitter fruit of experience.”
Our waitress appears and takes our orders (crawfish beignets and iced tea for us both), then stands awkwardly beside the table as though waiting for something. She looks about twenty and, though not quite in Caitlin Masters’s league, is quite lovely. Where Masters is angles and light, the waitress is round and brown and sultry, with the guarded look of the Cajun in her eyes.
“Yes?” Caitlin says, looking up at her.
“Um, I was wondering if Mr. Cage would sign a book for me.”
“Sure,” I tell her. “Do you have one with you?”
“Well-I live over the restaurant.” Her voice is hesitant and terribly self-conscious. “Just temporarily, you know. I have all your books up there.”
“Really? I’d be glad to sign them for you.”
“Thanks a lot. Um, I’ll get your iced tea now.”
As she walks away, Caitlin gives me a wry smile. “What does a few years of that do for your ego?”
“Water off a duck’s back. Let’s start.”
She gives me a look that says, Yeah, right, then picks up her notebook. “So, are you here for a visit, or is this something more permanent?”
“I honestly have no idea. Call it a visit.”
“You’ve obviously been living a life of emotional extremes this past year. Your last book riding high on the best-seller list, your wife dying. How-”
“That subject’s off limits,” I say curtly, feeling a door slam somewhere in my soul.
“I’m sorry.” Her eyes narrow like those of a surgeon judging the pain of a probe. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Wait a minute. You asked on the plane if my wife was traveling with me. Did you know then that she was dead?”
Caitlin looks at the table. “I knew your wife had died. I didn’t know how recently. I saw the ring…” She folds her hands on the table, then looks up, her eyes vulnerable. “I didn’t ask that question as a reporter. I asked it as a woman. If that makes me a terrible person, I apologize.”
I find myself more intrigued than angered by this confession. This woman asked about my wife to try to read how badly I miss her by my reaction. And I believe she asked out of her own curiosity, not for a story. “I’m not sure what that makes you. Are you going to focus on that sort of thing in your article?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Let’s go on, then.”
“What made you stop practicing law and take up writing novels? The Hanratty case?”
I navigate this part of the interview on autopilot, probably learning more about Caitlin Masters than she learns about me. I guessed right about her education: Radcliffe as an undergrad, Columbia School of Journalism for her master’s. Top of the line, all the way. She is well read and articulate, but her questions reveal that she knows next to nothing about the modern South. Like most transplants to Natchez, she is an outsider and always will be. It’s a shame she holds a job that needs an insider’s perspective. The lunch crowd thins as we talk, and our waitress gives such excellent service that our concentration never wavers. By the time we finish our crawfish, the restaurant is nearly empty and a busboy is setting the tables for dinner.
“Where did you get your ideas about the South?” I ask gently.
At last Caitlin adjusts the lapels of her black silk jacket, covering the shadowy edge of aureole that has been visible throughout lunch. “I was born in Virginia,” she says with a hint of defensiveness. “My parents divorced when I was five, though. Mother got custody and spirited me back to Massachusetts. For the next twelve years, all I heard about the South was her trashing it.”
“So the first chance you got, you headed south to see for yourself whether we were the cloven-hoofed, misogynistic degenerates your mother warned you about.”
“Something like that.”
“And?”
“I’m reserving my judgment.”
“That’s kind of you. Do you like Natchez?”
“I do. It’s not sterilized or Disneyfied like Williamsburg. It’s still funky. Gossip, sex, whisky, and eccentricity, all behind a gossamer veil of Southern gentility.”
I chuckle. “A woman I grew up with decided to move back here after working ten years as a film producer in Los Angeles. When I asked why, she told me she was worried that she was losing her mind, and knew that if she did it in Natchez, no one would notice.”
Caitlin laughs. “That’s exactly it! What about you? Do you like it?”
“That’s like asking someone if they like their mother. I’ve been away for years, but no one who grows up here ever really leaves this town behind.”
She makes a note on her pad. “I was surprised it’s such a haven for gays. But the contrasts are disturbing. You’ve got a real race problem here.”
“So does Los Angeles.”
“But this is a purely white-black race problem.”
“And your paper contributes to it.”
She reddens. “Would you care to elaborate on that?”
“Sure. The Examiner has never dug beneath the surface, never urged people toward their better natures. It was always too afraid to upset the white elite.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“You talk like you don’t.”
“Trust me, I do. Let me ask you something. I’ve been following local politics pretty closely, and there’s something funny going on.”
“Like?”
“You’d think Shad Johnson, the black candidate, would be making race a major issue, trying to mobilize every black vote.”
“How’s he playing it?”
“He’s not even mentioning race. He’s in the former money capital of the slaveholding South, thirty percent of the
black population receives some form of public assistance, and he acts like he’s running for mayor of Utopia. Everything is New South, Brotherhood of Man. He’s running as a Republican, for Christ’s sake.”
“Sounds like a shrewd guy.”
“Will African Americans vote for him if he sucks up to the white vote like that?”
I can’t help but laugh. “If Johnson is the only black man in the race, local blacks will vote for him if he buggers a mule at high noon on the courthouse lawn.”
Two pink moons appear high on Caitlin’s cheeks. “I can’t believe you said that. And I can’t believe Johnson would stand for the way things are. The things I hear around here… sitting in restaurants, riding in cars with people. I’ve heard the N-word a thousand times since I’ve been here.”
“You’d hear it in Manhattan if you rode in the right cars. Look, I’d really rather not get into this. I spent eight years in the Houston courts listening to more bullshit about race than I ever want to hear.”
She shakes her head with apparent disgust. “That’s such a cop-out. Racism is the most important problem in America today.”
“Caitlin, you are a very rich, very white girl preaching about black problems. You’re not the first. Sometimes you have to let people save themselves.”
“And you’re a very white guy putting black men on death row for state-sanctioned murder.”
“Only when they kill people.”
“Only when they kill white people, you mean.”
A surge of anger runs through me, but I force myself to stay silent. There’s nothing to be gained by pointing out that Arthur Lee Hanratty is a white supremacist, or that I once freed a black man who had been mistakenly put on death row by a colleague of mine. You can’t win an argument like this. We stare at each other like two fighters after a flurry of punches, deciding whether to wade in again or rest on the ropes.
“Hanratty’s an exception,” Caitlin says, as though reading my mind.
This lady is dangerous. It may be a cliche, but her anger has brought color to her cheeks and fire into her eyes, and I am suddenly sure that a string of broken hearts lie in the wake of this self-assured young woman.
“I want to understand this, Penn,” she says with utter sincerity. “I need to. I’ve read a hundred books by Southern writers, Southern journalists, everything. And I still don’t get it.”
“That’s because it’s not a Southern problem.”
“Don’t you think the answer must be wrapped up in the South somehow?”
“No. Not the way you think, anyway. It’s been thirty years since the last vestiges of segregation were remedied under the law. And there’s a growing feeling that blacks have done damn little to take advantage of that. That they’ve been given special breaks and blown it every time. That they don’t want an even playing field but their turn on top. White America looks at the Vietnamese, the Irish, the Jews, and they say, ‘What’s the problem with the blacks?’ The resentment you hear around this town is based on that, not on old ideas of superiority.”
“Do you feel that way?”
“I used to. I don’t anymore.”
“Why not?”
“The Indians.”
“Indians? You mean Native Americans?”
“Think about it. Indians are the only minority that’s had as much trouble as blacks. Why? Both races had their cultures shattered by the white man. All the other groups-Irish, Italians, Vietnamese, whatever-may have come here destitute, but they brought one thing with them. Their national identities. Their sense of self. They congregated together in the cities and on the plains, like with like. They maintained their cultural identities-religions, customs, names-until they were secure enough to assimilate. Blacks had no chance to do that. They were stolen from their country, brought here in chains, sold as property. Their families were split, their religion beaten out of them, their names changed. Nothing was left. No identity. And they’ve never recovered.”
“And you parallel that with Native Americans?”
“It’s the same experience, only in reverse. The Indians weren’t stolen from their land, their land was stolen from them. And their culture was systematically destroyed. They’ve never recovered either, despite a host of government programs to help them.”
Caitlin stops writing. “That’s an interesting analogy.”
“If you don’t know who you are, you can’t find your way. There are exceptions, of course. Bright spots. But my point is that whites don’t look at blacks with the right perspective. We look at them like an immigrant group that can’t get its shit together.”
She takes a sip of tea as she processes this perspective. “Does Shad Johnson have the right idea, then? Should Natchez simply sweep its past under the rug and push ahead?”
“For Johnson, it’s the smart line to take. For the town… I don’t know.”
“Please try to answer. I think it’s important.”
“If I do, we go off the record.”
She doesn’t look happy, but she wants her answer. “Okay.”
“Faulkner thought the land itself had been cursed by slavery. I don’t agree.” I pause, feeling the writer’s special frustration at trying to embody moral complexities in words. “Have you ever read Karl Jung?”
“A little, in college. Synchronicity, all that?”
“Jung didn’t try to separate good and evil. He knew that both exist in every human heart. He called the propensity to evil the Shadow. And he believed that trying to deny or repress the Shadow is dangerous. Because it can’t be done. He believed you have to recognize your Shadow, come to grips with it, accept it, and integrate it.”
“Make friends with the evil in yourself?”
“Basically. And the South has never done that. We’ve never truly acknowledged the crime of slavery-not in our collective soul. It’s a bit like Germany and the Holocaust, only slavery is much further in the past. Modern generations feel no guilt over it, and it’s easy to see why. There’s no tangible connection. Slave owners were a tiny minority, and most Southerners see no larger complicity.”
“How does the white South acknowledge the crime?”
“It’ll never happen. That’s what’s scary about what Shad Johnson is doing. Because the day of reckoning always comes, when everything you’ve tried to repress rears up in the road to meet you. Whatever you bury deepest is always waiting for the moment of greatest stress to explode to the surface.”
“You’re the only white person in this town who’s said anything like this to me. How did you turn out so different?”
“That’s a story for another day. But I want you to be clear that I think the North is as guilty as the South when it comes to blacks.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“You’re damn right I do. I may criticize the South when I’m in it, but when I’m in the North, I defend Mississippi to the point of blows. Prejudice in the North isn’t as open, but it’s just as destructive. Most Yankees have no concept of living in a town-I mean in a town-that is fifty percent black. No idea of the warmth that can exist between black and white on a daily basis, and has here for years.”
“Oh, come on.”
“What happened in Boston when they tried busing?”
“That’s a different issue.”
“Watts. Detroit. Skokie. Rodney King. O.J.”
She sighs. “Are we going to refight the Civil War here?”
“How long have you lived here, Caitlin?”
“Sixteen months.”
“You could live here sixteen years and you’d still be on the outside. And you can’t understand this place until you see it from the inside.”
“You’re talking about the social cliques?”
“Not exactly. Society is different here. It’s not just tiers of wealth. Old money may run out, but the power lingers. Blood still means something down here. Not to me, but to a lot of people.”
“Sounds like Boston.”
“I imagine it i
s. The structure is concentric circles, and as you move toward the center, the levels of knowledge increase.”
“Were your parents born here?”
“No, but my father’s a doctor, and doctors get a backstage pass. Probably because their profession puts them in a position to learn secrets anyway. And there are a thousand secrets in this town.”
“Name one.”
“Well… what about the Del Payton case?”
“Who’s Del Payton?”
“Delano Payton was a black factory worker who got blown up in his car outside the Triton Battery plant in 1968. It was a race murder, like a dozen others in Mississippi, only it was never solved. I’m not sure anybody really tried to solve it. Payton was a decorated combat veteran of the Korean War. And I’ll bet you a thousand dollars we’re sitting within five miles of his murderers right now.”
Excitement and awe fill her eyes. “Are you serious? Did the Examiner cover the murder?”
“I don’t know. I was eight years old then. I do know Dan Rather came down with a half dozen network correspondents. The FBI was up in arms, and two of their agents were shot at on the road between here and Jackson.”
“Why was Payton murdered?”
“He was about to be hired for a job that until then had been held exclusively by whites.”
“The police must have had some idea who did it.”
“Everybody knew who did it. Racist cowards motivated by the tacit encouragement of white leaders who knew better. A year before, they bombed another black guy at the same plant, but he survived. My father treated him. This guy was on the hospital phone with Bobby Kennedy every day, had guards all around his room, the works.”
“This is great stuff. My aunt went to school with Bobby.”
Her self-centered dilettantism finally puts me over the edge. “Caitlin, you’re so transparent. You want to hear the same thing every other Northern journalist wants to hear: that the Klan is alive and well, that the South is as Gothic and demonic as it ever was. Terrible things did happen here in the sixties, and people who knew better turned a blind eye. As a boy I watched the Klan march robed on horseback right out there on Main Street. City police directed traffic for them. But that has nothing to do with Natchez as it is today.”