Roots of Murder

by R. Jean Reid

  Nell started to ask a follow-up, but one of the men took the stage and his amplified voice filled the space. He wasn’t a great speaker, but was reasonably funny and that made up for the rambling length of his welcome. Nell’s attention drifted in and out. Finally he got to the point of his speech, introducing the candidate. “Ladies and gentlemen and you two guys in the back, I want to introduce you to a great friend of mine, someone who probably needs no introduction, but I’m going to give him one anyway because I have to have a reason for standing up here jawing at you. I don’t need to tell you the usual stuff: son of a sharecropper, had an uncle who was lynched, first in his family to go to college.”

  Nell was taking notes, wishing she’d had the time to actually research the candidate. Suddenly she wondered how well the Pelican Bay Crier had covered this side of town. How much would the paper’s morgue contain on Marcus Fletcher?

  The introduction continued. “And most of you know his record in the civil—or not so civil—rights days. That’s when he got his nose broken. Good thing it wasn’t a pretty one to begin with. Most of us grew up reading his rantings and ravings in the Coast Advocate. Like Ida B. Wells, he wasn’t afraid to write about lynching and cross burnings. Most of us found out how right he was, that his rantings and ravings were those of a sane man fighting for freedom and justice.” He covered all the highlights of Marcus Fletcher’s life: his devoted wife, four children, one killed in Vietnam; named all the grandchildren; mentioned his banjo playing, even suggesting the very instrument was off to the side of the stage. Finally he ended with, “And here he is, the next mayor of Pelican Bay, or at least the most qualified.”

  The older gentleman who’d spoken so easily to Nell at the door walked to the dais. He looked directly at her for a second, smiled, then made eye contact with the rest of the audience.

  Press secretary and candidate, Nell thought to herself. And cagey enough to not quickly tip his hand. Most candidates, even long-shot ones, would have taken advantage of having a one-on-one chat with the editor of the local paper. He had instead studied her.

  His speech lasted no longer than the introduction had. There was the usual thanking of those who worked on his campaign, and then he said, “I have a simple platform, and it’s not my own words or even my ideas. They come from men, men who owned slaves, a few hundred years ago. We are all created equal, and we all have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let’s be real, folks. This isn’t a campaign about winning. It’s about having a voice.”

  Like Aaron Dupree, he talked about the importance of education, but his remarks focused on those struggling with poverty and hardship, and carried the knowledge that education was one of the few routes out. He was an articulate man, and Nell had to rate his speech as even better than Dupree’s. But without real hope of winning—Nell tasted the gall that it was only the color of his skin that made the real difference—Marcus Fletcher could afford to be eloquent and bold.

  After the speech, Nell waited for him to finish talking to those who came up to him. Finally, when he was shaking the last hand, Nell approached.

  “Mr. Press Secretary, is it possible to talk to the candidate now?” she asked.

  “I do believe that the candidate is ready for you, Mrs. McGraw.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Press Secretary, you’ve been most helpful. Now, Mr. Candidate, what impact do you hope running for mayor will have?”

  “The short answer? To make sure the people of Pelican Bay know they don’t have to travel far to view poverty and the effects of racism. The not-so-short answer, which I’ll give to you since you’re a newspaper and not a TV sound-bite machine, is to get the spotlight on a few things and maybe make them a little better.”

  “And which few things would those be?”

  “Street repair. It takes twice as long to get anything fixed in this part of town than it does in the richer part of town. No, that’s not just talk; for the last year, we’ve been keeping track and have a very boring report full of numbers on the average time for repair on Rail Street as opposed to Jackson Avenue. Then there are the schools. Seventy percent of students in the vocational tech classes are African-American. Six percent of students in the high honors track are. We’re a little over thirty percent of the population here in Tchula County.”

  “How do you think we got here?” Nell followed up.

  “What happens to a child, day after day, year after year, if you treat him or her like they’re just not quite as good, not quite as smart?”

  “Are you accusing the school system of institutional racism?”

  He looked at her for a long minute, gauging both her question and his answer. “I’m accusing the school system of not doing enough to overcome the ingrained racism that has seeped into our souls. Institutional racism? We’ve had black candidates running for some office or other here in Tchula County ever since Fannie Lou Hammer dared take on the Democratic Convention.” He glanced to her to see if she knew what he was talking about.

  “The 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City and the challenge to the all white delegation,” Nell supplied.

  “The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, MFDP.” He said the initials with practiced ease, as if they and the memories around them had come to rest in a deep, resonant part of his mind. “That was a time.” He paused as if remembering, then continued. “In all those years and all those candidates, how many of them did the Pelican Bay Crier cover?”

  Nell could say that she wasn’t sure and would have to do research. But she didn’t. Thom was an intelligent and liberal man and his father had been an intelligent and liberal man. And Nell couldn’t rattle off names and stories the paper had run on even the political yearnings of the black residents of the town. Marcus Fletcher had made his point with a sharp—and accurate—edge.

  Finally she answered. “I think it’s obvious we could do a … better job.”

  He nodded, seeming to know she had skipped a few of the easy and cheap answers and had had the grace not to deny the history of her paper. “You know, back in the sixties I thought things would be so different by now. That it would be the content of our character that would matter.”

  “Things are changing.”

  “They’re always changing. Used to think I might live long enough to see them changed.”

  Most of the lights flicked off; the chairs had been put away. Only a few people were lingering at the refreshment table and the lights seemed to be their cue to linger elsewhere.

  “Maybe my children and your grandchildren,” Nell said softly.

  “Maybe,” he answered as they walked by unspoken agreement to the door.

  They said nothing until they were outside. If they couldn’t talk of the future, maybe they could talk of the past.

  “Last weekend a pine tree was felled by the recent storms, out in what is now the state park,” Nell said. “It uprooted and exposed two human skeletons.”

  He looked at her sharply. For a moment he saw her, then saw something else. But he said nothing.

  “I’d like to find out who those people are and what happened to them. One was a young African-American female. One of them was shot in the back of the head.”

  Still he said nothing.

  “You ran a newspaper, Mr. Fletcher. Did you ever do a story about two people who disappeared around fifty years ago?”

  “I did a lot of stories. A lot of people disappeared.”

  His answer told Nell two things—he knew something, and he didn’t trust her enough to tell her.

  “I’ve been doing research,” she told him. “The land belonged to the Pickings family, part of a parcel they bought in the early sixties from someone named Elbert Woodling. They made a lot of money off that land, leased it to the paper mill, sold other pieces when the interstate came through.”

  “Did they now?” His question was opaque, simply telling her to
go on.

  “I’ll have to do more research, but the buying price seemed very low, even for the time. Even a family as limited in intelligence as the Pickings could have made money when they got the land that cheap.”

  “Are you planning to write a story?”

  “The story of long-ago murders should get front page, don’t you think? Especially when the bodies are found on property the sitting Mayor donated with the stipulation it remain wild.”

  Marcus Fletcher was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Very interesting. But Mrs. McGraw, there are a lot of old men like me still around. I think it’s a very intriguing story, but others won’t see it that way.”

  His words were a warning, not a threat. “True, Mr. Fletcher, but few of them will be as vibrant and fit as you are. Bigots in nursing homes don’t worry me too much.”

  “Just remember, those bigots have sons and daughters raised with different wishes and expectations than you and I have for our children.” He had walked Nell to her car and now opened the door for her.

  “Are you suggesting I not write the story?” Nell asked as she got in.

  He thought for a moment before answering. “I would like to see that story come to light, and the bitter truth is, you can write it in a way that I never could. But the past is stone and won’t change. Your present and future can be harmed. I both encourage you and warn you. If it’s the encouragement that holds, you might want to talk to a woman by the name of Penny March. She’s elderly now, in the Whispering Pines home.” With that he shut the car door for her.

  Nell rolled down the window. “No more clues about the two bodies in the woods?”

  He straightened up and started to move away, then turned back and said, “Two? There should be three.” He turned and walked away.

  Nell stared at his retreating back. Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. They had been found; two white men from the North and one black man. Nell slowly remembered the details. A tip had led to a recently built earth dam. Their families had asked they be buried together, but at that time even the cemeteries were segregated. James Chaney had been buried alone.

  What if they had all been black and no one, save the split earth fifty years later, had chosen to talk?

  Nell started her car and drove to pick up her children.

  seven

  The rain had finally passed in the night and the day was perfect and clear, one of those fall days that lulled Nell into thinking she could like this hot, humid, subtropical belt. When she was growing up, it was the winters that had to be endured, long endless days of cold and slush, but now it had changed to the summers, the heat arriving in March or April and lingering until September.

  A perfect day for digging bones, Nell thought as she dropped Josh and Lizzie off at school.

  Perfect in more ways than one, she considered as she parked behind several other vehicles. Nell McGraw, intrepid girl reporter, had a professional excuse for being dressed as she was: blue jeans, a T-shirt layered with an old sweatshirt, and her scruffy hiking boots. It also helped that there would be a woods teeming with graduate students, deputies, and other assorted people, rather than just her and Kate and the rictus grins of the skulls.

  Nell heard the voices halfway down the path. Her timing was good; the graduate students had just finished rolling up the rain-soaked and leaf-strewn tarps she and Kate had left.

  “Nell, welcome to our site,” Kate called as several people turned to stare at the newcomer. Kate’s greeting was followed with a flurry of introductions. Nell got the business cards of the two professors: Ellen Cohen, full professor and clearly in charge, and a much-younger assistant professor, Lynda Breeton. But none of the graduate students were as well equipped. She carefully spelled their names.

  As she watched, Nell understood the real advantage of graduate students: they were young enough to do most of the actual digging.

  There was a deputy from the sheriff’s department, but he seemed content to leave the bones to the experts. He either didn’t mind or didn’t notice a reporter taking multiple pictures of the crime scene.

  As she watched them carefully dig, Nell wondered about Marcus’s final remark. She debated mentioning it, but wasn’t sure how or if it was safe to reveal her source—an old man said there should be three bodies here.

  They were very carefully extracting the second skeleton. Nell got a close-up of the chain as it lay exposed on a screen shifter. It had been cheap when new and was now rusted and corroded. She got another picture of the bullet hole and confirmation from the senior professor that it was definitely a bullet hole.

  “Can this be mold?” one of the graduate students asked. He was pointing to a green stain on the pelvis bone of the second skeleton.

  Kate answered, “Not likely. It might be copper staining. This fellow might have had some pennies in his pocket.”

  Nell watched in fascination as the shifted soil slowly proved Kate’s words to be true. Out of the dirt came several coins. Four pennies, two nickels, and a dime.

  After careful cleaning, the student who found them read off, “1958, 1961, 1960, 1963, 1960, 1963, and 1952.”

  Ellen, the senior professor, commented. “That’s probably going to be some of our best evidence for dating these bones. Given the range of the coins, it’s likely they were buried here sometime around 1963. The pennies are the later dates and they probably reflect the year or close to it.”

  The work was slow, tedious, and painstaking. Nell made herself useful by fetching water for those digging but also spent a lot of time standing around, watching the earth being slowly moved and shifted.

  “Any guess as to sex, age, and race?” she asked Ellen when more of the bones were out of the ground.

  “Young, healthy—until he died—male, probably African-American. I’m guessing early twenties. Both his legs were broken at the time he was killed. You can tell by the edges of the bones. Old wounds would show healing; dead bone breaks different from green bone—living bone, that is. But I’d appreciate you not writing anything until I’ve had a chance to examine them.”

  “Tortured and murdered,” Nell said. “I’ll wait for your okay.”

  “Definitely not natural causes. What a lonely grave this is,” she said.

  “Both African-American?”

  “Probably. I’d have to do the measurements, check the tables to do more than guess.”

  “Think they tried to register to vote?” Nell said.

  “Someone wanted them silent and gone.” Ellen glanced at the deputy, then said quietly, “Do you think this will be investigated properly? Or do we dig up the bones to put them in a pauper’s grave?”

  “I intend to find out who these people were, and as much as I can, what happened to them. I’d like to think this will be treated seriously … but I don’t know.”

  “A newspaper story will make this hard to ignore.”

  “There will be newspaper stories,” Nell promised.

  One of the graduate students interrupted them. “We’ve gone several inches below where we found the last artifact. Should we keep going?”

  Ellen said, “We’ve probably found what we’re going to find, but a few more inches … ”

  Nell cut in. “There might be three bodies here. Can you go a little deeper?”

  Ellen looked at her, then said, “It’s a beautiful day for digging. The earth awaits you.” She waited until the graduate student conveyed the message to the others before turning to Nell and asking, “Three bodies? What makes you think that?”

  “I’ve been asking around and was told that there were three people missing, not two.”

  Ellen just nodded and said, “We’ll keep digging for a while. I wanted to look at the bones you took to the morgue, but they’re not going anywhere.”

  Time passed, broken by a quick lunch of shared peanut butter sandwiches, the rest of the hours marke
d only by occasional conversations and the sound of soil being shifted. A few birds added their voices, but mostly the woods were silent. An expectant waiting, Nell thought. Or maybe I’m just projecting my worries onto the trees. She wished she’d been as prepared as Ellen and brought some of the paperwork piled on her desk. All she was doing was sitting on a tree stump and waiting. She paced down the trail, wondering if she was sending the graduate students on a wild goose dig.

  Suddenly one of the students yelled, “I’ve found something! There’s another one!” His excitement rippled through the site.

  It didn’t touch Nell. Instead she felt the perfect day had been shattered. Another person had been tortured and murdered here. Still, she joined the huddle around the dig.

  The buzz from their find covered the sounds of voices coming from the trail, but finally the heavy masculine tones reached them.

  Chief Whiz Brown and two of his police officers strode into the clearing.

  “You got a permit for this?” he barked.

  “I’m sorry, but who are you?” Ellen asked.

  The sheriff’s deputy, who had been sitting off to the side almost dozing, tried to quickly stand up and almost tripped instead. Attempting to balance, he said, “I’m here overseeing this.” He didn’t give a very forceful impression.

  “Who are you?” Chief Brown shot back at Ellen.

  “Ellen Cohen, professor of forensic anthropology at Louisiana State University. I was asked”—she nodded at the hapless deputy—“to help investigate this site.”

  “You still need a permit to be digging in a state park,” he retorted.

  Nell wondered who had jerked his chain. That Whiz Brown had bestirred himself to worry about permits wasn’t likely. “Chief Brown,” she interjected. “I’m surprised to see you here. Unless the Board of Aldermen has changed the city limits, you’re beyond your jurisdiction.”

  He gave her a cold, flat stare. Nell stared back, refusing to look away.

  He finally turned back to Ellen. “I’m closing this thing down.”