The pistol pushed into his waist. He imagined that Crookshank could see it impressed through his tee shirt. But he didn’t touch the gun. Jacks seemed not to know who he was, and there could be no redemption in killing him. “Listen,” he said to Crookshank. “Maybe I won’t kill you. You aren’t worth it to me. But he should at least know who I am. Make him know who I am.” He stood up and Crookshank recoiled in the rocker.
“He won’t remember you. I told you he’s mixed up. What you have to remember is that he helped you. He was the only one to do it. He and I. We got your momma away from here and in one piece, too. And this is your gratitude?” She leaned forward in the chair and flicked the fan. “What would your momma say about that!”
Crookshank’s sudden vehemence threw Lonnie off balance, his weight landed on this bad foot. What would Momma say? He knew but his mind was blank. He saw his mother on her death bed. Salvation. “She said she wanted salvation.”
“Salvation? What does that mean? Only Jesus Christ can give you salvation.”
“Has He given it to you?” Lonnie sneered.
“He doesn’t have to. I have been good to people. When my time comes, He will know that.”
“Who is he?” Jacks asked again.
“He’s Bertrand’s little white boy.”
Bertrand’s little white boy! Bertrand’s boy! “Bertrand was my friend,” Lonnie corrected.
“Bertrand!” Jack’s sat up straight; his face glowed with recognition. “That proud nigger?” He studied Lonnie. “He did have a little tyke that followed him around day and night. So, that’s you? All grown up.” He dapped his mouth his handkerchief. “And wanting to kill somebody, too!
“He’s not going to kill anybody. He just came to talk,” Crookshank said. “Take your seat, Johnnie.”
“Lonnie. My name is Lonnie.”
“Lonnie.” She fanned. “Take your seat, Lonnie.” He sat. For a moment the three of them looked out into the yard, the shadow’s lengthening. “You’re a good boy,” she said, turning to him. “I see you are. Mr. Jacks and I are good people, too. Lord knows, we’ve tried.”
“You have a funny way of being good. The way you killed Bertrand.”
“Bertrand.” Jacks said. “That proud nigger came to me, asking me … and I helped him.”
“We both did.”
Lonnie shifted on the ottoman. The gun slipped in his waist band and he drew it out of his pants.
“Take my advice, sugar,” Crookshank said, eyeing the gun. “Let it lay. It’s history. It doesn’t matter now. It was a terrible thing that happened, no doubt, and it upset a lot of people—me, included. But things have adjusted around it. It’s a wonderful thing about people. We can adjust and keep on. We don’t worry about old things like that.”
A pain fired in Lonnie’s temples and he slapped his hands on his sweaty face. “Oh, God,” he said, looking at Jacks. “Is that what you think? Is it that easy for you?”
“Easy? Nothing is easy.”
“You killed them. I saw you—”
Jacks breathed hard, looked at Crookshank, then to the fields beyond the porch, and back to Lonnie. “You don’t know what you saw.” He leaned forward in the wheelchair, both feet flat on the floor as if he were preparing to catapult himself toward Lonnie.
Lonnie leaned to meet him. “I saw you.”
“Saw what? See me shoot somebody?”
Lonnie shook his head. His neck was stiff. He hadn’t seen Jacks kill anyone. He had only seen him in the crowd and then driving past after the murders. “But you were there.”
Jacks sighed and sat back in the chair. “Many people were there, as I recall. Memory isn’t perfect, mind you, but as I recall, you were there, too. Yes. You were there, and as I recall it, I was there because of you. But of course, you were just a boy. Ten, twelve? You raised a complaint with Mr. Venable, remember? You said that the nigger Bertrand was bothering your mother, coming every day to your house under the pretense of chopping the garden.” The old man grimaced, stained teeth showing roots.
First Lonnie remembered Venable and Toby. Toby lay on the roadbed and Auntie was coming with the shotgun. Lonnie’s sight began to blur. Jacks and the expanse of fields beyond became watery. “Wait!” he said. But he could not think why he wanted Jacks to wait. “I wanted tomato slips … that’s what I wanted. I saw Mr. Venable with … a woman … a colored woman and … but I never told him anything about Bertrand.”
“You told Mr. Venable that Bertrand was bothering your momma. That he was coming to your house, uninvited.”
“Yes, doing chores for her like he was her husband and refusing her money,” Crookshank said. “If it wasn’t true, you shouldn’t have said it. You knew the ways of folks around here. You knew folks wouldn’t stand for something like that around here. Why would you tell something like that, if it weren’t true?”
The planks creaked under Jacks’s chair. “If I am mistaken about Vernon, I am not mistaken about this: You told me the same!”
Lonnie turned away from Jacks and looked toward the front of the house. He couldn’t see where he had parked the Volkswagen in the roundabout. His head throbbed lightly and he took a deep breath. They are lying. Trying to confuse me. He had come for something. He squeezed the stock of the pistol.
“Yes,” said Jacks. “I recall it like it was yesterday—and the look on your mother’s face.”
Lonnie spun around, both hands on the gun’s stock. “Liar!”
“She had the look of … well, a wounded kind of look. Unsure of what to do, and, I’d say, she looked grateful that the awful truth had been revealed. She knew, if you didn’t, what would happen to that nigger. She wanted it to happen, no doubt. Yes, I’d say it was a look of relief. She was—”
“It’s a goddamn lie. Nothing happened between my momma and Bertrand. Bertrand just helped us was all. And you turned it into something filthy. Now you are trying to twist it about again.…”
“He lies about a lot of things.” Crookshank pulled herself by the arm of the chair and stood. “He is a pathological liar, if you ask me, but he isn’t lying about that. It wasn’t your mother’s fault, not at’all. She was just a poor war widow, and he came along, a big, educated, important sounding man. A school teacher—army man—he played on that bit, being an army man. I knew him well because he brought in the cakes that his woman baked up for me. How could your mother resist him, big as he was? Who knows, he could have used some kind of voodoo spell on her. They do that, you know, with chicken bones and such. And those educated ones, they bedevil white women! They want so badly to show themselves decent, they must have a white woman. You did right—you did the right thing by complaining to Mr. Venable. It’s unfortunate that things turned out the way they did, but that was the way they had to. You didn’t ask that man to bother your mother. You didn’t invite him to step into your daddy’s shoes. He brought that on himself and all the consequences that followed.”
All the consequences that followed! Lonnie’s mind replayed the meeting with Venable. He remembered Venable’s hindquarters flexing in the mottled light—and the grunting sounds—and running—and then being startled by Venable sitting by a tree—and asking for tomato slips—and, yes, he recalled, there was some talk of Bertrand. “But I never said—”
“I just regret they had to kill my girl. She was a sweet girl. The best cook I ever had.”
“I didn’t kill anybody,” Jacks said.
“Did I say you killed anybody?” Crookshank made a loud, mocking “tsk” and walked into the dark of the house.
“Well, now,” Jacks said after a pause, and then turning back to Lonnie, “Son? You look like you are about to burst out crying.” Lonnie wiped at his face. Just then, lightning forked brightly across the sky, and they both looked. It took several seconds for the grumble of the thunder to reach them. The storm had moved to the north and the sunset once again turned the west into a fire-colored landscape. Lonnie looked past Jacks into the yard beyond the end of the porch at
the old trees and their graceful shadows. He cleared his throat. “Okay, Mr. Jacks. Why, if you didn’t do it, did they … the others … have to kill him? I mean, why didn’t they just run him out of the county or something?”
Jacks wiped his mouth. “There were a lot of fellows down by the river that day. Vernon, Cook, maybe that deputy of his, some of the Greene County Klan boys. I’ll venture you that each man had his own reason for being there, and I couldn’t tell you half of them. Some maybe for sport, and some for revenge, and some for spite, and some for curiosity, and some for religion, and some just because they were too afraid not to be there. But none of those were my reasons. There is no one, easy answer—you think it’s like your A-B-Cs—the quick of it is Bertrand needed to be killed. Some people just need to be killed.”
Lonnie shook his head, throbbing less now.
“Now, listen. Listen and you will better understand me. Just listen.”
They both listened. Lonnie heard a breeze rustling in the oaks on the backside of the house. Two crossed limbs yawned as they rubbed one another. A whippoorwill sang in the distant woods and the insects—crickets—made a chorus. Suddenly it seemed the world was full of insects’ songs—clicking, buzzing and screeching. Jacks took in a deep breath. He seemed to be breathing in all the sounds, every sound the land made.
“I hear it all right, Mr. Jacks, but I don’t hear it the same way you do.”
“No. You don’t. You are not me.”
Lonnie looked at his hands, gripping the pistol. He remembered when he first saw the M1911, a 45 caliber, laying atop his father’s shirts in the duffel bag. “Bertrand was my friend.”
“Are you so sure? You are a white man. You are a part of what white men do.”
“I am not like that!”
Jacks turned to face the fields and said quietly, “We are all guilty and innocent alike.”
Lonnie raised the gun. His arms had tensed so tightly they were locked at the elbow. By degrees he moved his finger to the trigger. Then he loosened his shoulders and biceps and his elbows unlocked. Jacks didn’t seem to notice at first, perhaps because of the darkness seeping into the twilight, but when he did, he said calmly, nearly bemused, “You don’t know shit about guns, do you, boy?”
“I know enough to pull the trigger.”
“But do you know enough to aim?”
“Mr. Jacks, do you believe in salvation?”
Jacks looked out at his fields, again. The sun was behind the horizon and the storm clouds exploded with light.
“I am the redeemer who will bring you salvation.”
Jacks snorted. “You won’t kill me, son, but one day I will be dead. Sooner than later. I will die in the grand bedroom, here, at Woodbine. There will be fresh linen on the bed and soft pillows. I will not be thinking about Bertrand, or you, or your mother. I will be thinking about my own mother and my father. I will be thinking about Woodbine. When my last breath leaves my body, do you know what it will say?”
“It will say, ‘I’m a murderer.’”
Jacks turned back to Lonnie. “It will say, ‘I am satisfied.’”
His shoulders and elbows tightened and he squeezed the trigger, lightly at first, feeling the blade of metal in the crook of his finger, then harder. The trigger slid, and his arms sprang up with the recoil of the pistol. He didn’t realize that the sharp snap and blast he heard was the gun’s report.
The chair pivoted backwards on its wheels and crashed to the floor. Jacks remained in the chair. His left foot kicked weakly, then stopped. Crookshank came to screen door and opened it. She looked at Jacks and then at Lonnie, her face blank and white. She started to shut the door and then stopped. “I … I already called the sheriff.”
Gradually Lonnie took notice of her, dropped the gun. “You ain’t worth it,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
He felt his pulse pounding in his neck; his face felt flushed, and his body rushed pleasurably with each breath. He was strong. Clean. Yes, cleansed and strong. Baptized! He remembered the way Jack’s foot had twitched and the wheel on the chair turned round and round. “That son of bitch said that he would die in bed. Satisfied! But who is satisfied now?” He was crossing the concrete bridge again when it hit him where he was. He was at the river. The river, where once the iron bridge crossed. The water below was the color of muck and cut across with frosty rivulets. The car’s fender scraped along the bridge’s railing, and Lonnie jerked the steering wheel, over correcting, and braked the car half in the ditch at the end of the bridge. He got out and walked down to the bank. The river seemed much closer than what he remembered, and the smell was different, the smell of wet concrete. But the little shoal was still there, the place where Cook had dragged Bertrand’s wife, and where Bertrand and the others had lain when they were shot. He stood on the bank for a long time, breathing deeply and slowly, each breath filling his body from head to toe. Vaguely he remembered; vaguely he felt. The place was both outside and inside of him. Around him he felt the crowd, the three women from the town, the men with the beer, the boys swinging from the girders. They flitted on the periphery of his vision, shadows in the twilight. He walked down to the shoal, the sand crunching under his shoe. It was musical. The sound of the water, making the rivulets, splashing against the rocks. Musical. It was all music and dappled light and the smell of damp earth. He sat in sand, sat just where he imagined Bertrand’s heel had dug. Then he leaned his head back and looked into the sky. He had killed Jacks! He had redeemed himself. Yes! I am a redeemer! But the moment he thought it, he realized he did not feel redeemed. He didn’t know what redemption felt like. He had never felt it, or seen it. Besides, it was not redemption he wanted. He wanted salvation and salvation, if there was such a thing, had eluded him. What he was, was a murderer. Like Jacks. Suddenly, the music of the river stopped. Breath drained out of him. He felt cold, worn out, and useless. He fell back on the sand; the back of his head punched into the damp ground.
In his dream, he became the vulture. From the height of a thousand feet, the swells of fields and forests, framed on the horizon by blue ridges and transfixed by a glinting, snaking river, impressed his eye with such a sense of serenity that the landscape seemed newly dead, as it might be just after the Rapture. Nothing moved below. No mouse scurried along the edge of the fields. No mole poked its head through the broken loam. No squirrel scuttled up a tree trunk. Not even a branch stirred in the trees—shumards, loblollies, elms. At this height the wind buffeted his ears with such a constant and even whir that it washed out all other sounds. The updraft of the thermals caressed his feathers and warmed his body. He lay on the air, tensing and stretching his broad wings to better steady himself as he coasted the rising air in a half-mile wide circle. He felt powerful. Full of purpose, as he surveyed the hayfields, ripening in the sun, the margin between forest and field. I am the redeemer come to bring salvation! But all was motionless below. No buzzing blow fly, or ticking death watch beetle. No cackle from sister crow. No caw from brother jay. Suddenly, he smelled old death stinking up from a sandy strand along the river just down from the iron bridge. There were old bones, human bones—all sizes—there. Fragments abandoned, blood and marrow, long digested by bacteria.
But an animal moved in the landscape. It was a boy picking through bramble. The bramble snagged him, engulfed him like a wave, and weighed down on him. Still the boy picked through, struggled through. It would be impossible for him to escape, and yet, Lonnie knew, as he lay, looking into the blue-black, still sky, if he tried hard enough, there was hope.
AFTERWORD
You are a white man, play your role, America’s sotto voce chorus, is not a murmur but a roar in The Vain Conversation.
In this gripping story, the character Noland Jacks is explicitly reminded of his duty as a white man on several occasions, and, as the descendant of Irish immigrants, he requires not only a reminder but also a demonstration. In Anthony Grooms’ fine novel he receives both. Jacks learns to what roles a white man
is entitled in Jim Crow’s America.
You are a white man, play your role, the character of young Lonnie Henson is told indirectly. After his father returns from the war with a new eyes on race relations, young Lonnie will learn to what roles a white man is limited in Jim Crow’s America.
You are a white man, play your role. Of the three charged words in that admonishment—white, man, and role—which word most earns our attention? Which word most warrants our caution? Which word most deserves our fear? It is popular in the academy to describe social roles as “performances.” We “perform” gender. We “perform” race. We “perform” class. How do we perform those roles for which we are not cast, but conscripted? Roles we did not seek, but found ourselves playing unawares?
In the case of Noland and Lonnie, two characters a generation apart, this question haunts them throughout their days. In the Jim Crow South, what is the spiritual and moral configuration of the hierarchy of identity? Is Noland first white or a man, and are his actions indeed only a role, no more his true self than an actor donning puff breeches and a ruff to strut about for four hours is truly Iago, only a role, a veneer thinner than the bootblack Richard Burton wore to play Othello? And if Noland, who finds himself party to a murder not of his design, plays the vilest of roles for only a brief moment, can he ever truly leave the stage, or has the scripted hate seared his soul?
Inspiration for the answer might be found in science because Noland’s and Lonnie’s predicaments raise questions about possibility, change, transmogrification. At stake is not one man or one boy, but the entire United States of America, as well as the larger world—in long—anywhere people have been infected by colonialism, oppression, and racial or sexual or cultural terror. In other words, one of us is all of us, and if even one of us is truly incapable—not resistant, but fundamentally incapable—of transformation we are all damned—both citizen and state. This concern is especially relevant in the current moment, a time of turmoil and uncertainty, a time when populist surges are swelling into cataracts of sharp, stark fear.
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