More chuckles. The chancellor adjusted his glasses. “Lucas knew that the world was too dangerous a place for anything but the truth. He exemplified the sine qua non of teachers: it is not what they teach, but what they are. Let us join together in praising God for the life of Lucas Harper Jr.”
The great hymns followed: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” by Martin Luther. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the anthem from the Civil War. When we got to the pause before the “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” chorus, I heard someone in the pew behind me say, “Hit it!” It was a Dad trademark and it buckled Delana and me over in laughter.
When the chaplain announced “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” I could almost hear Dad say, “Isaac Watts. Probably better known for inventing the steam engine.”
I was fine until we got to the lines: Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all her sons away./They die forgotten as the dream flies at break of day.
Then I sobbed. Delana squeezed my hand.
Then Archibald Murphy ascended the pulpit. A tall, red-haired Southerner with a booming voice that commanded attention, Murphy had joined the journalism faculty the same year as my father. The editor of The Saturday Evening Post in the days when its weekly arrival was eagerly awaited in hundreds of thousands of households across America, he was a magazine editor’s editor, equally comfortable with news and fashion, with journalists and celebrities. He and Dad had bonded at the university, two giants retired from the day-to-day fray but delighted to be paid to tell war stories and to find and nurture the heirs to the traditions in which they believed.
Murphy stood at the pulpit until the congregation grew silent. He put on his reading glasses, withdrew a sheaf of papers from his pocket, and carefully arranged them. Then he put his glasses away and began to speak, never looking at the papers again.
“Lucas Harper Jr. edited our lives and attitudes and made them crisper, clearer, more logical and more worthwhile,” he began. He recalled Dad working with students on the university newspaper, “a wreath of cigarette smoke around his head, his tie loosened, cutting, shaping, chopping, flicking out ideas, concepts—using his mind like a blade, like a gimlet.
“You could see him on his feet, tracking a point. He could be oblivious to everything but getting at the truth. It was as simple and unacceptable as that, he was a fool for the truth. Needless to say, he never worked in very heavy traffic.” The congregation roared.
Murphy reminded us that Dad had no patience with individuals or institutions that “were violating the rightness of things.”
“Lucas could always find the clear and the sound reason for doing the right thing,” he said. “At Christmastime, he turned his newspapers’ readers into a community and a family. Yet he always seemed slightly startled by the good things that he did. I think there is no more fitting place to honor his memory than in the chapel of a university. Good-bye.”
At that, the congregation rose as one for two solid minutes of applause.
In the sunlight outside, Delana and I fought through the crowd of people who wanted to talk and caught up with Brad and Lindsay just as they reached their Volvo.
“It’s good to see you together,” I said.
Lindsay offered a somewhat sheepish smile. “Funny how the things that drive you crazy about a person become endearing when they’re gone. We seem to take for granted the ones we love the most.”
“There are always bumps in the road,” Brad said. Then he invited me down to Windrow just to get away when I was ready.
I hesitated but like a good fencer, Brad didn’t wait for my counter. “No reporting. We’re just going to float down the river and see the sights. It’ll do you good.”
I promised to take him up on it.
Delana and I stayed on the steps until all the mourners had drifted away. A woman who was familiar but whom I couldn’t place was one of the last.
“Thank you for coming,” I said.
“I’m Mary, your dad’s hospice nurse. He was a wonderful man. So smart. I really enjoyed him.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “He kept this in the pocket of his pajamas. I wanted you to have it.”
I took the piece of paper and unfolded it. It was a section of the People magazine article, the part where it mentioned me.
“He was so proud of you,” she said.
On the way home, Delana asked if I’d spend the night at The Farmlet. The next morning, after the sun had burned off the dew, we walked hand-in-hand to a thicket of blackberry bushes, near a spot brightened by a clump of daffodils and sheltered by tall pines.
I opened the plastic bag I carried and scattered Dad’s ashes among the small shoots of new green growth that pushed through the brown straw thatch, forever tying him and us to that place.
I picked four daffodils and arranged them in a cross on the ground—one flower each from Mom, from Delana, from Luke and from me.
Chapter Twenty-One
The day before Palm Sunday I drove the Honda through light traffic at well below the posted speed limit on the familiar route to Hirtsboro and reached the white-frame Mt. Moriah House of Prayer just before 9:00 a.m.
I parked off the sandy street a half block away and watched from my car as a handful of people knelt on the ground creating signs with stakes, poster board and paint. A charter bus pulled up, its diesel engine rumbling as dozens of people filed out.
I pulled out my reporter’s notebook and jotted an entry, “Charter Bus. 44 blacks. 11 whites.”
It wasn’t how I’d planned to spend the weekend. But on my first day back in the office after we’d scattered Dad’s ashes, Nancy Atkinson had brought me a Manila envelope labeled Murders–Wallace Sampson.
“I decided to make him his own clip file so there’s a record of the real stories,” she’d explained. “Real clips as they appeared in the newspaper, not computer printouts. Just like the old days. Remember? The way the story started out.”
The most recent clips were Ronnie Bullock pieces documenting the growing calls for an official investigation into the killing of Wallace Sampson. One in particular, a four-paragraph brief, had caught my attention. Reverend Clifford Grace had announced a “Justice for Wallace Sampson March” from Hirtsboro to the Savannah County Courthouse ten miles away. The march would undoubtedly be the first organized civil rights protest in the history of Hirtsboro. I knew immediately that I had to be there.
Across the street, the front door of the Mt. Moriah House of Prayer swung open and three men led by Reverend Grace descended the steps carrying a large wooden cross on their shoulders. I recognized it as the cross behind the altar, the Lynching Cross. They carried it to a wooden shed behind the church, moved it inside and propped it upright against a wall. When they were done, Grace locked the shed door.
I got out of the Honda and walked through the crowd that had swelled to more than one hundred. I spotted Columbia bureau chief Henry Ashley interviewing someone from the NAACP bus. He saw me and waved me over.
“Walker told me you were coming,” he said. “He said it’s fine to double-cover it. But only one of us gets a byline. He says he can’t have the publisher thinking we have so many reporters that we can send two of them to a South Carolina civil rights march. Even if it is this one.”
I caught up with Reverend Grace who was with Brad Hall.
“Good of you to come,” Grace said.
Brad asked, “You reporting or marching?”
“Reporting. Journalistic objectivity and all that.” I nodded to the shed. “What’s with the cross?”
“Church has a plaster problem,” Grace said. “The cross needs to come down for a couple weeks while repairs are made.”
“Too bad it had to happen at Easter.”
“Oh,” he grinned. “I imagine we’ll get by.”
The march got underway an hour later. Walking under a banner which read �
��Justice for Wallace Sampson” and held on either side by the men who had helped Grace carry the cross, Reverend Grace, Brad Hall, and Etta Mae Sampson led one hundred fifty participants up the street toward the middle of Hirtsboro.
I copied some of the signs: SC NAACP March for Justice; Justice for Wallace Sampson; No Justice No Peace. A black youth I judged to be no more than thirteen, the age Wallace had been, carried one with a more defiant message: Indict the Killers.
I got in the Honda, zipped up a side street to the center of town, and parked by the railroad tracks as the marchers turned onto Jefferson Davis Boulevard. White faces stared unblinking from the windows of the Farmers & Mechanics Insurance Agency, the Great Southern Auto Supply and Appliance Store, the International Feed & Seed, Second Time Around, Classen’s Clothes, in fact from the windows of almost every business except the First Bank of Hirtsboro which was only open Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The door to the offices of The Hirtsboro Reporter opened. Glenn Hudson and his son emerged to the marchers’ cheers. They fell in at the end of the line.
A truck from a TV station in Columbia parked beside me. A cameraman hopped out, shot sixty seconds of tape, and sped away.
I drove a mile down the highway, got out of the Honda, and waited for the march to catch up. Cars whizzed past, spawning whirlwinds of dust and grit that stung my skin and irritated my eyes. Henry Ashley parked beside me and we retreated to the edge of a ditch further away from the road. I studied the debris while we waited—beer cans, a hubcap, shotgun shells, a golf ball, a road sign, cancelled checks, and other paper in various stages reverting to pulp.
With the long-legged Reverend Grace setting the pace, the marchers stretched more than a quarter mile by the time the first group reached us. I studied their faces and made notes as they passed—Grace looking confident, even light-hearted through his salt-and-pepper beard; the NAACP marchers from Columbia looking like determined veterans; the members of the congregation of the Mt. Moriah House of Prayer, energized, less tentative than when they had started.
A faded red pickup slowed. “Go back to Africa!” the driver, an angry-faced middle-aged white man, shouted.
“Damn South Carolina,” I said to Ashley.
“You know, you’re as bad as the racists,” he scolded. “Don’t stereotype South Carolina. Reverend Grace. Mrs. Sampson. Glenn Hudson. All these marchers. These people are South Carolina, too.”
“Thank you for what you did,” Mrs. Sampson shouted.
All my reportorial instincts told me marching was wrong. Reporters are compelled to demonstrate objectivity, to never betray a particular point of view even though they usually have them. A reporter does not participate.
But my human instincts and the lessons of my father told me something else—that the world is too dangerous a place for anything but the truth.
This march wasn’t about politics or race or points of view or anything that ought to worry a reporter. It was about the pursuit of the truth. Truth does not have two sides. Truth does not keep to itself. Truth does not frown on commitment.
I believed in the truth of what we had written and I was willing to be a fool for it.
I tucked my notebook into my pocket and joined the crowd in the street.
Chapter Twenty-Two
At a Friday afternoon press conference in Columbia almost three weeks later, Solicitor Red McCallum announced that a South Carolina grand jury had indicted Magistrate J. Rutledge Buchan and former police chief Olen Pennegar Sr. for first degree murder in the killing of Wallace Sampson.
The indictment named William A. “Possum” Bascom as an unindicted co-conspirator.
Tipped by Henry Ashley who had gotten an off-the-record call from McCallum, Bullock and I drove down the night before. We arrived early at the South Carolina Department of Justice and claimed folding chairs in the front row as reporters and cameramen from outlets ranging from the New York Times to The Hirtsboro Recorder jostled for space behind us.
“The actions of this grand jury bring an end to a painful chapter in the history of South Carolina,” McCallum read from a statement as cameras clicked and automatic film advances whirred. “We hope this provides closure for the family and serves notice that the state of South Carolina is committed to the redress of grievances and to justice for all of its citizens.”
McCallum paused to wipe sweat from his forehead with a red bandana. “I’d like to say a special thanks to Hirtsboro’s own Bradford Hall, and especially to the Charlotte Times. Without their investigative efforts, this case would not have been solved and we would not be here today.”
“Have the defendants been arrested?” the New York Times reporter asked.
“Agents from the State Law Enforcement Division served warrants at the defendants’ respective homes and took both men into custody within the last hour.”
“Where are they now?” the Times reporter followed up.
“Because of his position, we believe it would be unsafe for Judge Buchan to be housed in the general prison or jail population. In addition, Mr. Pennegar has medical needs. Because of those factors, both men will be housed in the state prison hospital at least until their bond hearing on Monday.”
Bullock stood up. “Mr. Solicitor, can you tell us what was the connection between Wallace Sampson and the defendants? What was the motive? Also, who pulled the trigger?”
“That will come out at trial.”
Working from Henry Ashley’s office, Bullock and I produced the indictment story for the Charlotte Times’s first edition with less than an hour to spare.
Walker congratulated us on a job well done. “You got all the key stuff up high. Carmela’s taking it for the main story on the front page in every edition. We’re ridin’ this hoss all the way to the barn!”
For later editions, we added mini-profiles of Buchan, Pennegar, Bascom and of Wallace Sampson. For the weekend, we cranked out a recap—known in the trade as a situationer—that brought occasional readers up to date and pointed out two of the questions that still remained unanswered: Who actually fired the deer rifle? Why was Wallace Sampson selected as the victim?
“We’re not done until we get that stuff figured out,” Walker said as he edited the story. “Maybe you’ll learn something at the bond hearing.”
Just like old times, Bullock arrived before dawn Monday morning. The Dodge had been repaired and sparkled with a new paint job. An invoice for the work sat on the front seat. “I figured I’d give the bill to Rut Buchan,” he explained. “I’ll bet he knows how to get it to the guy who rammed us.”
I called Delana before we left.
“Why so early?” she mumbled. “The hearing’s not until 10:00 a.m.”
“Ronnie. His stomach has an appointment at the Hungry Tummy.”
After breakfast, we drove to the courthouse and followed the freshly waxed pink marble hallways to the courtroom of The Honorable R. Horace Williams.
Nine heads turned to face us: Reverend Grace, Mrs. Sampson, Brad Hall, and Vanessa Brown in the front row; Glenn Hudson and a reporter from the Associated Press one row back; three beefy deputy sheriffs in folding chairs near the jury box. Bullock and I slid in beside the reporters. As I prepared to take notes Red McCallum entered and set up shop at a wide table on the left. Two men in suits followed, unclicking thick briefcases on a table to the right.
“The defense,” Bullock whispered.
J. Rutledge Buchan, wearing an orange jumpsuit, was escorted in by a deputy. Another deputy pushed a wheelchair holding Olen Pennegar Sr. Dressed in his Hirtsboro police uniform, Olen Pennegar Jr. followed close behind.
“All rise!” a bailiff commanded. “This court is now in session. The Honorable R. Horace Williams presiding.” All rose except Pennegar who sat in his wheelchair, swallowed by an oversize jumpsuit.
Judge Williams, a black man in his forties with gold wire-rimmed glasses, breezed through the
side door in black robes and sat down at the bench.
“Be seated. Counsel, please identify yourselves for the record.”
McCallum introduced himself, followed by the defense lawyers—silver-haired and distinguished Lewis Gasque for Judge Buchan and the much younger Ed Williams representing Olen Pennegar.
“Let the record show there is no relation,” Judge Williams noted to chuckles. “At least so far as Brother Williams and I know.” The lawyer blushed.
The judge began by noting that this was not a trial, merely a hearing on a defense motion to free the defendants on bail. Only two questions were relevant, whether the defendant was a flight risk and whether releasing the defendant posed a threat to the safety of the community.
Pennegar’s young lawyer argued that Pennegar was physically unable to be a flight risk or a danger to anyone. The courtroom stirred when he added, “Solicitor McCallum will confirm that he and I are in discussions about a possible plea bargain for Mr. Pennegar in exchange for his future testimony at any trial. We ask that he be released on his own recognizance.”
Gasque shifted in his chair and whispered to Buchan who shook his head. I inferred that Pennegar’s potential deal with the state was news to them.
Then the fireworks began. McCallum stood and said he wouldn’t oppose the motion to free Pennegar on bail or on his own recognizance. However, he said, “The state takes a very different position on the other defendant. In Judge Buchan’s case, we will be seeking capital punishment.”
A murmur went through the courtroom. “Damn!” the Associated Press reporter whispered. He scrambled out of our row and raced out the back doors to file a bulletin.
Vanessa Brown turned to Mrs. Sampson. “What’s that mean?”
“The death penalty,” she said.
Wide-eyed, Vanessa Brown clasped her hand to her mouth.
“Order!” Judge Williams commanded.
A red-faced Gasque jumped to his feet. “Your honor, that’s preposterous! These charges are the result of a fanciful collaboration between a known liar and reporters trying to sell newspapers. You know Judge Buchan. I know Judge Buchan. Everything he has is tied up in this community. He is innocent. He is hardly a flight risk.”
Grievances Page 27