His grandparents didn’t know about his relationship with his mother’s old friend. Why would they? He had never talked about his first trip to Avondale, or the ones that followed. Wright and Jo didn’t care what he got up to after school, and the summer holidays were his to do what he wanted. Often when Thomas left the house after a silent breakfast his grandmother would light a cigarette outside and watch him walk into the distance. She’d say to herself: This one is going far.
There had never been physical contact between Mary and him, other than the accidental, friendly kind, what she might have called innocent, friendly touching. Thomas had never hoped for more. But he also didn’t look at anyone in the world the way he looked at her, or listen to anyone the way he listened to her. He didn’t pay attention to much, but when she opened her mouth to speak or beckoned him over, Thomas was immediately present, attentive, and considerate. She was his one true friend, the only one he could share his thoughts with. She was interested in what he had to say, the information he tried to convey. When he talked about asteroids, or described the Perseids, the experience of meteor showers lighting up the late-August night sky, she closed her eyes and he could hear her sighing at his side, not out of boredom but rather pure happiness, deep contentment. He knew this instinctively, the proof was that he never had to ask why she was sighing.
Over the years they had fallen into a routine, a way of being together that was amenable to both of them. She wasn’t his lover, nor was she his babysitter. Thomas filled out his college applications at Mary’s house. She helped him choose from the schools offering scholarships. Sometimes he would spend the whole day in Avondale, or further west on Martin Luther King, not too far from his old house, chatting with Mary or with all the other people who, as far as Thomas could tell, accepted him without a second thought, though he came from the other side of town where massive trees made it feel like the residents had occupied their homes for a thousand years. No one here looked at him sideways, with mistrust or disdain. His presence here was justified, understood, integrated, normal.
What happened on the morning of April 4, 1998, is so far out of the ordinary that we have to take a moment to underscore the fact that it all really happened. Because the events in question occurred decisively and instantaneously, our telling will give the impression of a rupture in the narrative of Thomas’s life. There was a before, there was an after. In the warmth of our own homes, here along the great river where winter is digging in its heels and we can see the smoke from the factories, thick and opaque against the steel blue sky, it’s hard to make out the contours of that day that changed the course of Thomas’s life. There is the distance and there are social mores and there is a whole other culture with tensions of its own, which we may be familiar with from history books and documentaries. We can try to plunge right in to what happened there, on that hot April day in Tennessee, but we know it won’t be easily believed.
Yet there’s no denying that it happened, it was in the papers the next day and on the evening news as well. His grandparents learned about it at the same time they learned how he’d been spending his days. Thomas found himself alone between two worlds, each unable to forgive what he had done, acts he was unable to find fault with, but whose impact and magnitude were undeniable. Of course, he felt bad about scaring the little girl, the consequences were dire and she would bear the scars her whole life, but people’s reactions on both sides were so far out of all proportion that he chose the one remaining option and slipped off to the hills.
That morning Thomas was euphoric. For the first time he and Mary had spent the night together in the big bed in the back room. They hadn’t touched, but for the first time he had felt a slight unease on her part when she realized her offer would be taken up: It’s late, if you want to sleep here that’s fine, there’s lots of room, it’s a big bed. He had looked up from his math book and pushed his glasses back on his nose and simply said yes, with a slight widening of his eyes, before turning his thoughts back to logarithms and prime numbers. Mary was standing up next to the microwave holding a mug of Cup-a-Soup. A half hour later, when she got back from the bathroom where she had changed into pyjama bottoms and a plain blue tank top, she had sat down on the bed where he was already pretending to sleep, under the sheets, on his back, arms at his sides, lying still like a recently deceased corpse intent on causing minimal disturbance. The house was silent. Outside you could hear the occasional squeal of a tire or burst of laughter. He hadn’t phoned to tell his grandparents he wasn’t coming home.
Thomas stared at the white label sticking out from Mary’s tank top, against her black skin. It was the last thing he saw before she reached to turn off the bedside-table lamp, and their first night together began. It would be a long one spent in half-states of slumber and brimming with mysterious questions whose origin he held suspicions about and whose source he wasn’t eager to determine. In his head, vague notions of applied mathematics blurred together with concrete images of kinky hair and dark lips. Several times during those long hours he thought a glass of water might be his salvation, but he had never fully woken up. Nor had he fallen totally asleep. The sheets absorbed his sweat.
They ate breakfast in silence and Thomas was euphoric without showing it, and when he left Mary’s house fairly early, they passed several groups of children walking down Wilcox Boulevard on their way to school, carefree like him, with a bowl of cereal in their stomachs and a fantastic day ahead of them, only just beginning. He felt a lightness, like someone who had just done a good deed, helped an old woman cross the street or lug a heavy grocery trolley up a staircase. On the sidewalk hopscotch squares were drawn in chalk and the word HEAVEN had no spelling mistakes.
It came out of nowhere and it was preposterous, over the top. On the corner of North Orchard Knob and Wilcox, a few minutes after leaving Mary’s with his backpack slung over his shoulder, Thomas came across a group of kids. One of the young girls was talking excitedly to her friends. She was waving her arms wildly and kept adjusting the straps of her outsized backpack and when Thomas saw her he understood she was telling a scary, emotionally charged story. It was going well, she seemed fully invested in her words; she put her arms and hands over her head, as if to imitate a monster or a ghost. As he drew nearer he began to understand her story and his smile widened. She walked backwards confidently, without once looking where she put her feet. The sidewalk seemed to echo her movements. She was small but her voice was commanding. We have no idea what went through his mind at that moment, but Thomas listened to the instinct telling him to join in the story, to become its protagonist. In our view he believed he could join in the story of the young girl marching backwards toward him at the head of a gaggle of enraptured friends. We believe he suddenly had the first wholly positive impulse of his life, at the age of eighteen, that morning, after a long night with Mary, a night that may have been the start of something new in his life, something akin to becoming a man, finding himself, but it’s hard to figure out because everything changed afterwards, and even those who liked Thomas started staring at the ground when he came near.
The little girl was backing toward him, telling her story, and the others saw him approaching but didn’t say anything, held rapt by their leader’s every word and gesture. Thomas, a few steps away from making his entrance, placed his index finger in front of his mouth to signal to the others to keep quiet. They immediately came on board as accomplices. Two or three jaws dropped in surprise, but they were the only open mouths. The kids all wore the same blue and white uniform, as if they were on their way to private school, though they were in fact heading toward the public school further east. According to the account published in the paper, the children were between seven and eleven. She was eight. Thomas’s signal was meant to show the children that his presence was a secret, and you could feel a sort of electrical charge in the air, like before a joke that is going to connect, just before everyone starts laughing, at someone in particular perhaps b
ut all together nonetheless. He let her back up a few more steps, and as she raised her arms one more time to imitate the monster she was imagining, Thomas also raised his arms and roared like a giant blond lion, right there on Wilcox Boulevard, under the scrawny neighbourhood trees, in the Chattanooga sun, but he didn’t get the chance to break into laughter along with the six or eight stunned kids in front of him because the little girl leaped into the air, started yelling, and, in some kind of nonsensical, over-the-top, unforeseeable, and completely unbridled move, she jumped into the street, to the left of the group, where, despite the nearby primary school, the posted speed limit was forty miles per hour.
A deformed, disagreeable sound came from her mouth a fraction of a second later when she was struck by the car. Ten feet further up, on the roadside, she was nearly killed instantly. The impact was brutal, she was thrown backwards and rolled over onto her backpack. We won’t describe it in detail but the vivid Technicolor images of that day have been lodged in our minds ever since.
CHAPTER FOUR
JUNE–JULY 1998
AVONDALE—WOODMORE, CHATTANOOGA, TS
Here’s what happened next. Time started slowing down and speeding up in the same breath. Up and down the boulevard, front doors opened in unison, hundreds of front doors, it seemed to Thomas, and also one car door, driver’s side. A woman got out. She broke her high heel on the road, and ran over to the little girl lying a ways away, on the ground, not moving at all. The children’s cries were mixed in with the squealing of tires and other vehicles stopping to help or to look. Someone pulled out a cell phone, 911 was flooded with calls, and a few seconds later an ambulance showed up, followed by several police cars. People stayed put on their porches, or walked down the handful of steps to the sidewalk; most were still wearing pyjamas and were covering their mouths. The woman from the car was yelling in the face of a policeman who was holding her upright with a firm hand, so she wouldn’t collapse. It felt like nighttime, it was raining, the cruiser’s flashing lights shone bright as they revolved, but in fact it was day, the start of a brand-new day.
Thomas hadn’t moved. He couldn’t move a muscle. In a matter of seconds his life had taken an unexpected turn. A woman came over to ask whether he had seen what happened, while she tried to round up the other children and get them to go home to their parents, and he told her it had been his fault. He whispered it. She turned around and said “What?” — arms wrapped around the two young girls who were having trouble walking. He looked at the horrific scene, the tragic event he had caused, and his eyes lost focus and distances lost their definition and everything turned into a mass of disparate colours thrown thinly and haphazardly onto canvas. He never lost consciousness but felt like he was about to, it was close to happening, he felt something like a warmth in his ankles and his head at the same time. He said it again — “It’s my fault” — as a way to find focus by voicing these incriminating, honest words, the only ones possible. The woman, helped by neighbours, pushed the last of the children inside, the door was just yards from the scene, and she came up to Thomas and put a hand on his shoulder. He swallowed his saliva in his dry mouth and said it again.
“It’s my fault. I snuck up behind and scared her.”
“Ssssh. Of course not. It was an accident.”
“No, I wanted to startle her. On purpose. I wanted to startle her by sneaking up and yelling.”
“What?”
“She was backing up and telling a story and I made a sign to the other kids not to give it away, that I was there, and I yelled to scare her, and make her laugh.”
“Oh my God.”
Just like the others she covered her mouth with her hand, the same one that had been on his shoulder. As Thomas explained she slowly took it off and brought it to her mouth. She had brown skin like Mary’s and dark eyes. One of the policemen unfurling a long yellow roll of tape came over to them, he was black, he asked Thomas who he was, what he was doing there, what he had seen. Thomas told the same story one more time, in the same words, with the same neutral expression on his blank face and his heart pressed up against his throat and his mouth, somehow pushing simultaneously on his diaphragm and his uvula. The policeman’s expression changed. He turned to his colleague and yelled for him. The other cop came over, he had black skin and bloodshot eyes, as if he hadn’t slept all night, as if he had spent the night dreaming of this young girl who would be hit by a car a few hours later. He came over and the two of them talked privately, Thomas couldn’t hear what they were saying, or maybe didn’t want to. The neighbours kept going into their houses and coming out again, coming out to see and going back in to call up someone or turn on the TV to get a better sense of what was happening, because the journalists were arriving and unpacking their equipment. Everyone was black, from the paramedics pushing the stretcher the girl lay on to the drivers who had stopped and were talking on cell phones to the neighbours being told to back up by the police to the journalists and cameramen and sound men. The kids were all black and the little girl had her hair in braids held in place by silk ribbons, a yellow one and a pink one, and Thomas thought she had glasses too, but over there, where the black men were putting her on a stretcher, she wasn’t wearing them anymore. He wasn’t sure of anything anymore. He hadn’t really seen her face, she hadn’t had time to turn around, had barely pulled off half a turn. Her terrified arabesque was brought to an abrupt halt by the car. In the days that followed no one would ask him what she was wearing that day, it wasn’t part of the investigation, but it was what he would have liked to talk about because he remembered. Her face was blurry in his mind but he remembered her clothing, its colour and fabric.
Just before the little girl’s mother came running over, screaming and crying, overtaken by hysteria and demanding to know exactly what had happened, looking for the woman who had run over her daughter, the two policemen asked Thomas if he would please follow them, they had a few questions for him, would appreciate his co-operation. When Thomas didn’t move they repeated their request, and one asked whether he’d understood, and Thomas nodded, without looking in the right direction. They took him to the local station in a blue and white cruiser, to question him and get to the bottom of this whole story.
It was in the morning papers. Interviews with witnesses brought certain details to light, but most people in Chattanooga already knew what had happened because the TV news stations had been on the scene minutes after the incident. The little girl had been rushed to hospital and was in stable condition. Her name was Keysha-Ann. There was talk of contusions, lacerations, commotion, impact absorbed by schoolbooks, low speeds, careful driving. They used shopworn phrases: it was a horrible accident, it was no one’s fault, there was nothing the driver could have done. The poor young man who’d tried to make a bad joke was being punished with a disproportionate sense of guilt that must be haunting him as we speak. He’d been taken to the station, then to the hospital, they were worried about nervous shock. The other kids were fine; the girl would be okay. All the experts kept saying she would be okay, and then, the next day, during prime time, another kind of expert came forward to tell a different story, a reverend of impressive stature, who guested first on one show and then on another, asking the question that was on everyone’s mind but that no one in a town like Chattanooga, which sat shamefully atop the per-capita crime rates, in a state like Tennessee, in a supposedly free and equal country like the United States of America, dared ask: Why had this happened in that particular neighbourhood, I want you to ask yourself, why was the victim black, as usual, and what exactly was that young white man doing so far from his affluent neighbourhood, far from his private school, why are we dealing with another young black victim, one more, in a city with more than 1,400 violent crimes every year, a staggering 84 percent of them committed by black people, ask yourselves, look me in the eyes and answer this question — what business did this young white man have coming around making faces behind the back of an
innocent young black girl? The host nodded her head as she listened to this expert, who pointed his index finger skyward and then rapped on the table with it, a gesture he repeated soon thereafter, endowing his words with great authority. People listened in silence in front of their televisions, and later that evening the same phrases were heard again on the call-in shows. Thomas had been released from hospital after a few tests. The journalists wanted to talk to him. He’d gone home in his grandmother’s car and the journalists were waiting in their little tree-lined street. They wanted to know what he was doing in a predominantly African-American neighbourhood that day, what he was doing on Wilcox Boulevard before school. They wanted to know what was going through his head, if there wasn’t a touch of cruelty or, yes, racism behind his actions, and he took a roundabout route into his house, without saying a word, stunned by the force of so many questions all aimed at him. The next day it was clear: he was no longer welcome in Avondale.
Wright was the first to bring up the idea of a lawyer. He knew good people. The girl was going to be okay, she was just injured, but it was better to be safe than sorry, best to lay their options on the table as early as possible. Wright had welcomed Thomas, nearly hugged him, Thomas felt his grandfather had almost made a move to hug him. He saw Josephine heading to the backyard to smoke a cigarette: the first time she’d done that, she was avoiding the journalists in front of the house. Thomas had barely come into the hallway when Wright started talking to him about a friend of his, a lawyer who could surely counsel them, especially about this issue of the so-called underlying racism, the idea was completely absurd and, worse, it was snowballing on account of all this political-correctness nonsense taking over the airwaves. It felt like the story was spiralling out of control. No one was taking a moment to stop and think. Thomas had nothing to fear, Wright knew a good lawyer who could give them sensible advice and good counsel, the key was to lay low until people calmed down and the tension dissipated. He said much of this with his back to Thomas, peering out the window, like any elderly retiree wondering what the neighbourhood was coming to.
The Longest Year Page 6