The woman standing there was a few years older than she, and a good deal prettier, as such things were classically measured, her skin smoother, her bones longer, her face more handsome. Her sober clothes, to Julia’s experienced eye, were cheaply cut, her looped earrings inexpensive gold-toned, her flattened curls considerably overdone. Yet she carried herself with a certain casual authority, as though the world was a place she had with effort bested.
“May I help you?” she asked, her voice husky and cautious.
Julia managed, “I’m sorry. I was looking for, I guess, your mother.”
“My mother?”
“I’m looking for Theresa Vinney. Uh, DeShaun Moton’s mother.” It occurred to her that this was likely DeShaun’s sister, which might be even better.
“I am Theresa Vinney. I am DeShaun’s mother.”
A moment’s re-evaluation. Everything Julia knew about life was wrong. But why could this woman not be DeShaun’s mother? He had died at age sixteen thirty years ago. If she had been in her teens when he was born, she would be in her sixties now. Julia stared, stupidly. Theresa Vinney’s eyes were wide, the surrounding flesh heavy with worry. Yes. Sixty at least. Julia decided that her earlier judgment had been a hallucination: the woman was less handsome than haunted, less regal than on edge.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Vinney. My name is Julia Carlyle. I…I work at the university. Do you think you might spare me a few minutes?”
“I’m not married.” Frowning, as if waiting for eyes to roll. “You can call me Miss Terry.”
Julia nodded respectfully. “I would really welcome a few minutes of your time, Miss Terry. I’d like to talk.”
“About what?”
“About what really happened the night your son died.”
(II)
THE HOUSE WAS CRAMPED and shadowy but clean. They sat in the front room, on the kind of furniture purchased from a discounter on credit, the fuzzy green fabric protected by clear plastic slipcovers of the sort hardly anybody used any more outside of the inner city. The walls were decorated with photographs of children and grandchildren and nephews and nieces in numbers sufficiently impressive that Julia, whose brother was long dead, had no idea how anybody could keep them straight. A brace of shiny sports trophies stood on a table in the corner like forgotten idols, and Julia had a shrewd instinct that whichever young people had earned them played no longer whatever they had once played so well. Miss Terry served instant coffee in mismatched cups, one the remainder of an old ceramic set, the other bearing the logo of a fast-food chain.
Just a couple of girls chatting, Julia had decided on the way over. That was how she would play it.
Except that Miss Terry was nobody’s little girl.
Theresa Vinney admitted to sixty-one years on God’s earth, in the course of which she had borne five children. She had six grandchildren that she knew of, and a pair of great-grands. Julia tried to calculate the generations, but it beat her. Her boys, Miss Terry explained with disarming yet stern frankness, might well have given her more, but she didn’t know and, she suspected, neither did they. The eternal empiricist did the arithmetic. DeShaun Moton was sixteen when he was shot dead. If she was telling the truth about her age, the tough, stylish, and quite beautiful churchwoman sitting across from her on the plastic cover that crinkled whenever she leaned forward to sip her coffee had given birth to DeShaun when she was fifteen years of age.
Julia had donated money to teen-pregnancy prevention programs, she had even supported, to her husband’s cheerful disgust, condom distribution in the public schools. But she experienced the people she was helping only at a distance. Julia was no social worker, and not much of a volunteer—her job and her children kept her too busy. When Father Freed talked about giving over to the Lord one-tenth of your time, talent, and treasure, Julia usually decided that treasure was enough. For all her concern over the problem to which she, like many others, referred to as “babies having babies,” Julia had never expected the problem to sit her down in the front parlor and serve her coffee.
“You’re not from around here,” said Miss Terry, her eyes flat with accusation.
“Ah, no, ma’am.”
“You didn’t grow up in town?”
“No, ma’am. I grew up in Hanover.”
“Where’s Hanover?” she asked, quite unembarrassed.
“Uh, New Hampshire.”
The slow interrogation continued, Miss Terry’s voice that of a doubting schoolmarm. “And where do you live now, Julia?”
“In the Landing,” she confessed, miserably, the words burning like a fresh betrayal of her people. The Clan felt very far off.
“Tyler’s Landing.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Where they say DeShaun killed that girl.” A pause. “Where they killed him right back.”
“Yes, that’s right. I’m so sorry, Miss Terry.”
“They don’t have many of our people out there.”
“No, ma’am.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know exactly.” But she was remembering how Beth Stonington, the real-estate agent who sold them the lot, knew the number off pat when they asked, as if a list circulated weekly through the town, updated to show departures and arrivals. Kellen Zant used to call it “Nigger-scan.”
“Everybody’s white?”
“Almost everybody.”
Miss Terry nodded. Behind her head a framed poster advertised a long-ago exhibit at the university museum on the Underground Railroad. The popular magazines of the darker nation—Ebony, Essence, Jet—mingled on the floor beside her chair. Every year, Ebony listed Lemaster Carlyle as one of the nation’s hundred most influential black Americans.
Julia suspected he was in the top five.
“I’ve been out to your town a few times, Julia. I used to clean houses out there.” A grimace. “I can see why the white folks like it. It’s all neat and tidy, and none of our people. But for us? Our people? Tell me, Julia. Why did you want to live all the way out there?”
With her college girlfriends, with her Sister Ladies, with Mona, with Lemaster’s family, Julia had rehearsed a hundred different answers to this question. Now, face-to-face with DeShaun’s mother, she felt her glib and careful explanations sting her throat like thorns. “We wanted what’s best for the children. You know. Good schools, things like that.”
“Mmmm-hmmm.”
“And I…I guess I like the New England kind of atmosphere.”
“Mmmm-hmmm.”
“But I guess, most of all, we wanted to raise the children someplace where we would feel they were safe.”
This perked Miss Terry up. “Safe. My DeShaun was sure safe. Eight cops around him, he should’ve been real safe.”
“That’s what I want to talk about,” said Julia after a slightly desperate pause.
“Well, I don’t wanna talk about it.” Eyes bright and challenging. “We sued, but we dropped the lawsuit years ago. Why do you wanna go digging all this up again?” An angry laugh. “Eight cops, and DeShaun is dead. I don’t know that there’s nothing else to say anyway.”
The mother awoke. “Please, Miss Terry. I need your help.” She thought of Frank Carrington, insisting as they sat in the back of the shop that DeShaun was innocent; and of Vanessa, insisting at Hunter’s Heights that DeShaun was guilty. “I wouldn’t bother you except for my daughter. She’s in trouble.”
Eyes narrowing, suspicion and sympathy mixed. “And how is digging up the past supposed to help?”
“A couple of months ago, they found a…a body in the Landing. A black man. A professor. I don’t know if you heard about it.” Miss Terry said nothing, her expression unyielding, determined to make Julia say the rest. “The man who was killed…the professor…I think he was trying to find out what happened that night. He thought DeShaun was innocent.” Still the older woman sat like a stone. “Miss Terry, I’m the one who found the body, and my daughter…my daughter was doing research about DeShaun, and I think
something that she found is driving her mad.” There. The words were out. What Julia had never expressed so starkly, even to Lemaster, she had just confessed to this stranger who, even now, watched and waited. “Please. I have to know.”
“What do you have to know, Julia?”
“Why you dropped your lawsuit.”
CHAPTER 45
MISS TERRY’S TALE
(I)
TO TELL DESHAUN’S STORY, Miss Terry took a rambling course through her own. She had lived her life mostly in sin, she said, and in her time had done plenty of things of which she was not proud.
“I was born right down the street, in the university hospital, and I grew up in those projects they used to have, over in South Elm. The projects weren’t all black in those days. We had whites in there, some other colors, too. My mother worked for the university. They called her a ‘dietary specialist C’ or some such, but we all knew she was a cook. My father was a janitor in the public schools. When he was a little boy, he used to shine shoes for the kids at the university. Know how it worked? No? He would stand under the windows of the dormitory with a bunch of other boys, and they would throw the shoes out the window, the students would, and the Negro boys would all fight over them. Then the boys—whoever won—would take the shoes home with them and clean them overnight and, in the morning, bring them to the side door of the dorms. They couldn’t go in. In those days coloreds weren’t allowed.”
She settled back in her chair. “My father always said the most important thing was dignity. He was a janitor, but his shoes were always clean, and whenever we went visiting, anytime he didn’t have to wear his uniform, he would put on his suit and his tie. He only seemed to have the one suit, the black, and the bottom was all shiny, but he wore it whenever he could. And a white shirt. He would walk up and down the block on his days off in his black suit and his white shirt. He looked like an undertaker, but the kids in the neighborhood, even the tough ones, they all respected him, Julia. They all did what he told them. This was back in the days when you could talk to your neighbors’ kids if they were up to no good, you could grab them by the arm and shake them and tell them to get on home and not get sued or arrested or what-have-you.”
Miss Terry paused, her smile of gentle reminiscence melting into something softer and sadder, a different set of memories tugging. She picked up a cookie from the foil tray, bit off a tiny chunk, put it back with the others. Julia, hating herself for her automatic mysophobic caution, made careful note of which one Miss Terry had nibbled, where she had placed it on the tray, which of the others it was touching.
“There were six children, and maybe it was too many for him, because he had a heart attack and died when I was eight. And we buried him in the same black suit. My mother we buried just two years ago. Eighty-seven years old. A tough lady, tried her best to keep the family together, Julia. But the times got a little wild, and most of us, the children, well, we got a little wild with the times. Not all of us. My middle sister even went to college—went to Hampton—Rebecca is her name, and she married a very sweet man. Rebecca’s a schoolteacher now, down in Virginia, where her husband has people. And one of my brothers, Neebie, we called him—Benjamin—he got out of town the other way, he joined the Marines. He runs an auto supply now, up in the state capital. Those two got out. The rest of us, well, we stayed right here in town, got into trouble, one thing or another. I have a brother who died in prison. I have a baby brother, fifty-five years old, living on the street. And one more sister, the baby. She does one thing or another. Says she’s clean now, but she’s still out there on the street.”
Julia thought of Hanover High School and the lives to which her teenaged friends, none of them black, had not unreasonably aspired: medicine, engineering, microbiology, law. Some wanted more than anything else to be mommies, but they envisioned—and generally had achieved—what Julia had, childbirth in consequence of a stable marriage. That was one way to grow up in this country. The other was what Miss Terry had described.
“I don’t say that everybody winds up on the street,” Miss Terry continued. “You listen to the white folks talk about us, they think everybody in this part of town is a pimp or a whore or using or dealing. Truth is, Julia, most people down here work for a living. It’s hard, because there isn’t any help except the Lord, but it can be done. It’s just, a lot of folks, the kids especially, they can’t do it.”
Miss Terry took another bite.
Julia at last had the rhythm of the conversation, and she knew better than to stop the flow. So, much as she longed to, she did not interrupt.
“I had my children when I was too young to know any better. I didn’t know how to raise them. I didn’t know how to keep from getting what Momma used to call ‘in the family way.’ And I didn’t use the sense the good Lord gave me, so I didn’t know I was supposed to say no in the first place. I was wild, like my baby sister. She looked to me, Julia. To see how to behave. And I taught her every wrong thing there is. She messed up her life because she saw me mess up my life first.”
“People make their own decisions,” Julia interjected automatically, quite forgetting her own resolution of a few seconds ago.
“Huh. Is that what they tell folks out there in the suburbs? Because, down here on the plantation, we have this idea that we’re supposed to be role models. Every adult is supposed to show every child how to act. Every older child is supposed to show every younger child how to act. My father told us that, over and over, before he died. And after he died, I didn’t want to be a role model any more. I wanted to do my thing and not worry about anybody else. It was just like that basketball player—what was his name?—the one who said he didn’t want to be a role model for kids.”
“Charles Barkley.”
“Barkley. Right. I always loved to watch him play ball, but, oh, Julia, he was just so wrong about being a role model. You don’t get to decide. You don’t get to choose. My baby sister, she did what she saw me do. And when I had children of my own, well, they did what they saw me do and what they saw all the other young folks do. I’m a churchwoman now, and I wish I had done it earlier, early enough to help my own kids, Julia. But back then God and I weren’t on speaking terms, except every now and then when I took his name in vain. And DeShaun, well, he was a wild little boy. He got wilder as time went on. I thought maybe I could handle him, because by that time I’d got myself saved. Still, without a father, I tried everything, but it was a war. I put him in Boy Scouts, I put him in that after-school program at the university, they got him a big brother, but after a while DeShaun just wouldn’t go.” A shudder as she remembered the next chapter of the story. “The sin of pride. I thought I could handle him, Julia. But I guess I must be a weak woman after all, way down deep inside, where it counts, because, no matter how hard I prayed, Julia, that boy was always too much for me. Oh, the devil was in him for sure. I was going to put him out of my house, he was just acting too much the fool and doing too much that was evil, but, before I could do it, he went and stole that car and got himself shot.”
No tears as her story ground to its sudden and violent halt: instead, a defiant glare, as though daring her guest to sass her. Julia knew she had to tread carefully. “I’m sorry, Miss Terry. I only have a couple of questions.”
“Julia, let me make this easier for you.” Her voice was cold. “My DeShaun was an evil little character. He stole cars. He got himself arrested twice for assault. The night that girl died, he was in the Landing. I believe that. He knew the Landing because I used to clean houses out there. He stole a car that night. I believe that. They said he was talking to that girl down on the Green. I believe that, too. And, yes, we did sue. But we dropped the lawsuit. We didn’t get no settlement or anything. We just dropped it. Are you satisfied?”
“No.”
“Why not? What did I leave out?”
“You told me you believe DeShaun was in the Landing that night. You believe he stole a car that night. You believe he talked to Gina that night.
What you didn’t say was that you believe he killed her.”
Silence.
“Nobody ever collected any forensic evidence, Miss Terry. Nothing linked Gina to that stolen car. We don’t know she was ever inside.” In the tiny, shadowed room, Julia leaned forward in her excitement, and watched Miss Terry flinch away. “I think you already knew all that. I think that’s why you sued. Now let me tell you something you might not have known. After Gina Joule talked to DeShaun on the Green—after!—she showed up at the home of one of her teachers, not a hair on her head out of place.”
More silence, but surging now, like the dark quantum foam before the Big Bang.
“I don’t think you believe DeShaun killed that girl. I don’t think you ever believed it. I think you filed the lawsuit because you didn’t believe it. And I think the reason you dropped the lawsuit without a settlement was that somebody paid you off.” Theresa Vinney made a snorting sound and shook her head but said nothing. “I think somebody else killed that girl, somebody powerful and rich. I think it got covered up. I think when DeShaun turned up it fell right into their laps.” Julia could not bear Miss Terry’s silence any longer. Her own anger rose, a mother’s, righteous and pure. “I think somebody came to your house, maybe sat right here, where I’m sitting, and told you if you dropped the suit he’d give you—what?—ten thousand? Fifty? A hundred? How much did he offer you, Miss Terry?”
“Why do you wanna mess with this?” the older woman asked.
“I want justice to be done.”
“Justice.” Another derisive snort, this one reminding her of Bay Dennison. “Julia, I’ve buried three of my five children, one from drugs, one from AIDS, and DeShaun, and not a one of them saved. Now, my little DeShaun got himself shot after he stole a car. They say he killed that white girl, and our people were ready to tear the place apart. But I’m his mother and I dropped the lawsuit, and that kind of shut down all the protests. People went back to their lives. And here you are, sitting in my living room, drinking my coffee, telling me you just stopped by to let me know, in case maybe I was worried, that it wasn’t DeShaun who killed that little girl, and then you insult me, you tell me I dropped the lawsuit because some black man came to my house and gave me money. I’m a churchwoman, Julia, not some money-grubbing little twist of tail. So—what I think, the best thing to do is to just let it go on the way it’s going on. Everybody knows DeShaun killed that girl. Let’s just leave it there.” Jerkily, Miss Terry was on her feet. “And now, Julia, honey, I think I have a few responsibilities to handle down at the church, if that’s all right with you. But I sure want to thank you for coming all the way over here to chat with me this morning, and I wish God’s blessing on you as you drive on home to your nice suburbs.”
Stephen L. Carter Page 42