Tomb of the Unknown Racist

by Blanche Mccrary Boyd

Estelle and I had first been drawn together by our down-home Charlestonian cadences. Her skin was a coppery brown and I was pink with Scotch-Irish forebears, but we soon found ourselves having coffee together after AA meetings, laughing while we exaggerated our accents. In a ridiculous attempt at Gullah I once said, “I be goein ta get me summa dat choklit cek,” and Estelle replied, “De choklit no good fo de skins.” Otherwise, Estelle spoke what she called “power English,” and my own accent had faded considerably. Still, within months of meeting, we began confessing our yawning nostalgias for the lazy rivers of the Low Country, the smell of swaying marsh grasses, the unhurried politeness of Charleston natives. Yankees, we agreed, were born rude, and the traffic up here was just awful.

  Estelle returned first; she had only been away for twenty years. She said she had always intended to go back home and start a clinic out on Johns Island, where her family lived, but as a pediatric nurse practitioner, she was surprised by the salary cut necessary to work at the Medical University in Charleston. When I returned a few months later, ostensibly to manage the care of my increasingly demented mother, Estelle was still living on her family’s land. “It’s fine out there. I don’t like all the driving, but I do have my own little cabin. And it’s good to be home. We catch shrimp and crabs right off our dock.” Nevertheless, she seemed glad to spend a few nights every week at my mother’s condo, whenever I needed personal time at the cottage I had rented at the beach on the Isle of Palms. Estelle let me pay her well and off the books, although only out of my mother’s funds. Still, this was an ethically complex situation, augmented by our personal relationship. Yet we seemed comfortable with each other, and I think she liked my mother. I know she liked me.

  After Estelle left, I finished packing, and an aide I trusted arrived carrying an overnight bag. I told Momma, who had little sense of time, that I was going to the grocery store, and then I took a cab to the airport.

  From the airport I called ahead to the police station in Gallup, the town nearest to where the children had been kidnapped, and the chief, a man named Ed Blake, got on the phone. Yes, he certainly would like to have a private conversation with Royce Burns’s sister.

  “It can’t be anybody except us,” I said. “And it has to be off the record, at least for right now. Are you okay with that?” I was surprised that he agreed to those terms.

  In Albuquerque, I rented a car and drove the hour eastward toward Gallup. Because of the time difference and long days, the afternoon light was still strong. I hadn’t been to New Mexico in twenty years, but it had remained serenely beautiful. Not as beautiful as Charleston, maybe, but flat like Charleston, except for the mesas and mountains inscribing the horizon. The sky, larger and bluer because of the dry air, overhung a landscape of orange and ocher and streaks of purple. The colors here were crisper and brighter.

  Ed Blake turned out to be a smart and surprisingly attractive man. His manner was genial, and his gray eyes, set deep in his weathered skin, appraised me with what might have been amusement. Although the sixties were long over, I still dressed as if I were on my way to a demonstration: black jeans or cargo pants, lots of pockets, boots, and dark tees with safari shirts or fishing shirts slung over them. Also, I carried a trout bag instead of a purse.

  Only the badge clipped to the pocket of Blake’s linen shirt revealed his official status. He wasn’t even wearing a gun. I judged him to be early fifties, maybe a few years younger than me. No, he hadn’t told anybody that I was coming to Gallup, although of course he would have to do that soon.

  At first, he let me do the asking. He said he’d been police chief for less than a year, hired away from Bowling Green, Ohio, where his grown children still lived, although, he added gratuitously, his ex-wife did not. Before Ohio he had worked as a detective on several small-town police forces before settling down as chief in Bowling Green. In his twenties, he’d even been an FBI agent, before realizing he wanted to do something less complicated, less political. He liked Gallup, he liked New Mexico, and he thought he might stay put for a while.

  I did not go near his use of the word political. “You were once in the FBI? A guy I went to college with became an agent, but he was a jock.”

  “I’m not much of a jock.” He patted his small gut like it was a trusted friend. “There’s an FBI branch right here in town. It was my good friend over there who convinced me I’d like it here in Gallup.”

  “And did your good friend fax you my brother’s file this afternoon? Unofficially, of course.”

  His thick brows rose in acknowledgment. “That is a very shrewd guess. I met him downtown to pick it up, so there’d be no official record of it reaching my office.”

  I glanced around. “He faxed you mine too?”

  He hesitated, then nodded.

  An imitation Navaho rug covered part of the stained linoleum floor. A tacky print of a sand painting hung behind him, and a bronze copy of a Remington cowboy rested on the corner of his oak desk. Its leg had been gnawed. “You have a dog?”

  “Nope, that was the last chief’s puppy. A Rottweiler named Daisy.”

  I had always suspected there might be an FBI file on me because of my involvement with radical feminism in the 1970s—I’d gone underground with a fugitive lover and ended up in a psychiatric hospital for several weeks—yet learning that it was true and that this man had been reading the government’s version of my earlier life was more than disconcerting. “Did it say I had an affair with the FBI agent too? Did he put that in his damn notes?”

  When Blake didn’t answer, I blunted my discomfort by recounting facts he already knew: My brother, Royce, had written a promising first novel that was still in print after more than twenty years, partly because of his notoriety and violent death, and yes, the introduction had been written by Norman Mailer. No, I did not know Norman Mailer.

  “I like Mailer’s work,” Blake said. “And I admired your brother’s novel very much, when it first came out.”

  These remarks seemed as odd as the one about an ex-wife, so I volunteered that our mother was senile and our sister now dead.

  “You sure look a lot like Ruby Redstone.”

  “That’s how I recognized her. And by her first name, of course.”

  He stared at me openly, and I let him look. I’m not as tall as my brother, but I have his quality of self-assurance, which is presence if you like me, arrogance if you do not. I thought he did. “You’re quite a family.”

  I smiled with my eyes. “I’m the only normal one.”

  “Being a writer is not my idea of normal.”

  “Oh, please, I’m not a writer. I once put together a redneck cookbook that sold a lot of copies. You should try my mayonnaise sandwich. The crushed Doritos are the key. My big break was getting to write for that soap opera about the Confederacy, Rise Again. They still run it a lot on cable, so now I get to live—somewhat frugally—on royalties. But Royce was a real writer, before he lost his mind. What is your idea of normal?”

  “Evelyn Roach?”

  “My alias? Give me a break on that. I assure you I would have chosen a different name if I could. False identities were a lot harder to come by than anyone realizes. Could you let me have a look at my file? Sometimes I get my own chronology mixed up.”

  He laughed out loud, which made me like him more than I already did. “Okay, Ellen Burns, do you think you can help us with this situation? We’ve got a mess here, and all this press is making it worse. Since the kidnapping took place on reservation land, the FBI is in charge at the moment. But they’re letting me hang around as if I have some kind of role.”

  “Do you think Ruby’s children were kidnapped?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Somebody hit her on the head pretty hard. And somebody tied her up.”

  “Yes, and Lightman Redstone insists that she could not have gotten free without his help.”

  “So, what’s your theory, Ed Blake? Is there any possibility my brother is alive?”

  He tilted his
head, studying me. “I don’t see how. The DNA evidence was conclusive. They claim they were confident.”

  “But now you’re wondering too?”

  “Do you think your niece will talk to you?”

  “She might not even know I exist.”

  He broke his gaze and stood up. “Let’s go find out.”

  We left his office and emerged into the dry, dusty street. I had a moment of disorientation because I realized I wasn’t in South Carolina before we got into his unmarked car, which smelled leathery and male. A scanner and crackling radio separated us, but he immediately turned them both off.

  Two press cars followed us out to the reservation through the glowing evening light. The hills were undulating and lovely, but the dry air kept making me sneeze. Only a tiny marker indicated when we entered the Nogalu reservation. Once we reached the deserted main street, most of the stores were closed or boarded up. Outside a local grocery, three children leaned against a bare wall, staring balefully at us. We entered an area of small reddish houses, some made from original sandstone, others built with cinder blocks or plywood and painted sandstone red. “Well,” I said, “it’s not Disneyland.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s surely not.”

  Three press vehicles and several unmarked cars were parked along the pocked paved road. Two TV trucks stared at the sky with round white eyes. Ed Blake explained that Ruby and Lightman were staying at his sister Loretta’s house because their own home had been roped off as a crime scene.

  Half a dozen men, two in dark blue uniforms with NOGALU RESERVATION police patches, guarded the door as well as the perimeter of the red dirt yard. They stared at me too, perhaps because of my resemblance to my niece.

  Blake knocked, then opened the front door without waiting, and I stepped in behind him. The room was shadowy and smelled of foods I could not identify. Ruby sat on a sofa wedged tight between two elderly shawl-wrapped women. She stood up, as startled by the sight of me as I had been of her.

  Again she wore a long, dark skirt and a white cotton blouse, this one unstained by blood. Her black hair looked wet, her brown-yellow skin slick with sweat or suffering. No one said anything while we stared at each other.

  Ruby’s face went through several changes that I could not decipher, but terror may have been one of them. “I’m your father’s sister, honey. I met you once when you were a baby.” I took a step forward, but she backed away, making a frightened, animal sound.

  When she moved toward me, I had the awful notion she might kneel. Instead she stepped so close I could feel her body’s heat. She rested her forehead gingerly in the crook of my neck, and I put my arms around her. “I came to try to help you.”

  She stayed still, breathing wetly into my throat. I gave Ed Blake a what-should-I-do look, because I did not want to be this vulnerable, and something terrible was happening inside my chest.

  3

  My brother, my brother, my brother. What can an aging lesbian outlaw do if her brother is a white terrorist and he might still be alive? After Royce’s death, I had been sad but relieved. Twice before he had vanished and emerged transformed. When his marriage to a Charleston debutante ended while he was still in his early twenties, he disappeared for almost three years; then he reappeared in Mendocino, embracing Santane and fatherhood and trying to write that novel. The second time he disappeared, the FBI declared him armed and dangerous, then dead. Was it possible he would reemerge again?

  Over the next two days I sat with his daughter while tides of rumors rose and fell around us. The white van with the dented front fender that Ruby claimed to have seen in the driveway had been spotted in Boulder, in Reno, in Denver, in Seattle. White separatists in Montana were brought in for questioning; other racists were being questioned in Idaho and Washington State. Yet no traces of the children had materialized.

  Ruby said little and ate almost nothing, drinking cup after cup of water. “I can’t swallow food.” She refused pain medication and even the antibiotics prescribed as a result of her wound. Nor would she drink the concoctions Lightman’s mother kept offering. When Lightman introduced me to his mother, she acknowledged me with a harsh stare. Lightman said he was so exhausted at night he didn’t know whether or not Ruby slept. He was a sturdy, silent man who seemed indifferent to my presence. His need to search—and perhaps his increasing doubts about his wife—drove him from the house early each morning.

  There was a great deal of pressure from the press and no one else took charge, so I stepped into an authority that has always come naturally to me. I became the family’s spokesperson, going out of the house several times to give short statements to a string of microphones and cameras, later trying to fend off a reporter at my hotel. “Ruby is doing as well as can be expected,” I kept saying, variously. “She is praying constantly for the return of her children.” I refused all questions about my brother—“My brother’s dead, that’s factual”—and even wrote a brief statement that Ruby agreed to read the second day, after which she contradicted me.

  She spoke these words woodenly: “I ask the men who took Lucia and River to please to take good care of them and release them unharmed. I do not believe you are evil men, not in your deepest hearts. Lucia and River, your father and I love you more than anything, and we are waiting for you to come back.” Then she crushed the note and began to sob. “Daddy, please come help me. I know you’re listening.”

  Profiles of the Silent Brotherhood and other white supremacist organizations from the 1980s, among them the Aryan Republican Army, the Posse Comitatus, the National Alliance, the CSA, and a group still living in a compound in Elohim City, Oklahoma, began to appear on TV. I called Estelle several times because I knew my mother could not be kept away from the screen, but she said Momma was delighted during the moments she recognized Royce. She thought he was part of the cast of The Young and the Restless, a soap opera she watched daily. When my own image appeared, she waved cheerfully and greeted me, untroubled by my lack of response.

  I did not know what to make of the fact that Ed Blake already owned a hardcover copy of Royce’s novel, which overnight became nearly impossible to buy. The signed first edition I had brought for Ruby she left on the table and did not touch, except to turn it over once and gaze at Royce’s photo, bearded, long-haired, well-muscled from outdoor living, leaning against the doorframe of their Mendocino cabin with his arms crossed, his expression quietly somber.

  “Do you remember when your father looked like that?”

  “Sort of.” She was holding a child’s coloring book in her hands and slowly tearing off the corners of random pages.

  “Do you remember living with him and your mother in Mendocino, next to the big redwoods?”

  “No, but I remember Rommel.”

  “You remember the German shepherd?”

  The stack of paper triangles drifted off the sofa. “I remember when Daddy shot him.”

  I said, stupidly, “Royce shot Rommel?”

  But Ruby said nothing more for the rest of that day.

  I had dinner with Ed Blake that evening, although I did not trust his motives in befriending me. We ate at his home because, he said, reporters were stalking both of us, and he was cautious about the new long-range microphones.

  Blake turned out to be a decent cook, steaks and chops and salads with strong, unpretentious seasonings. He lived in a log cabin with a ceiling of varnished cedar—“built from a kit, don’t be impressed”—and showed me pictures of his daughters, who were, like him, tall, thickly made, and surprisingly good-looking.

  “They look a lot like you.”

  “Ha. Poor kids.”

  “What happened to your marriage?”

  “We wore it out,” he said. “And she met someone else.”

  “You did too?”

  He put the photographs back on the pine shelf. “Listen, Ellen Burns, the road to hell is paved with mistakes. Don’t misinterpret me asking you to have dinner out here.”

  “Oh, please, I’m older
than you, not to mention more jaded.”

  “Actually, you’re two years younger. And jaded is kind of a pejorative word to use for people just because they’ve had real lives. I need somebody smart and knowledgeable to talk with about this situation, and there appears to be pressure on my friend at the FBI that hinders our frank communication. I think you and I might be able to help each other. Maybe it’s fortuitous that you’ve showed up.” He gestured past me toward the porch. “Let’s go outside now. I need to handle the chops and take that corn off the grill.”

  I walked behind him and spoke into his shoulder. “We have different agendas, Ed Blake. I will admit I’m impressed by a cop who can use the word pejorative in a sentence. Not to mention fortuitous.” He wore a green cotton shirt and jeans and smelled faintly of aftershave lotion.

  He held open the screen door and glanced down into my eyes. “Maybe some policemen are smarter than others. We both want to find Ruby’s children, don’t we?”

  “Of course,” I said, stepping past him. “I want to help Ruby too. But I need to find out what has really happened to my brother, and my guess is you know a lot more about that situation than you’re going to tell me.”

  He lifted the top of the grill, which rested on the red dirt yard below the porch. Growing grass seemed impossible out here. In downtown Charleston, grass was meticulously maintained. Blake was cooking with charcoal, and a cloud of pleasant aromas enveloped us. “I’ll tell you what I can,” he said, “if you’ll be straight with me about your brother.”

  So, while eating pork chops the first night and porterhouse the second, he gave me new information about Royce and his friend, Joe Magnus, and I told him part of our family’s history.

  4

  Royce, Marie, and I had been born into what seemed, in retrospect, wincingly ordinary circumstances. That is, we were white but not conscious about it yet, and we lived in a working-class neighborhood of houses built for returning WWII vets (whites only, of course). Our father, an ambitious plumber, had prospered in the postwar economy, and soon he owned a business with forty employees. We became the only house on our block with central heat, two bathrooms, and a fashionable new room called a “den.” But when I was twelve, our parents suddenly bought a rundown plantation outside of Charleston called Blacklock.