Maybe she did show me a little leg and lull my usually vigilant defenses. Am I that easy to manipulate?
“Get some clothes on,” my father says from the door, his face grave. “You’ve got visitors.”
“Who? You look almost scared.”
He nods slowly. “I think I am.”
Uncertain what to expect, I hover in the hall outside my mother’s living room. The hushed sibilance of gracious women making polite conversation drifts from the wide doorway. I walk through the door and stop in my tracks. Two black women sit primly on the sofa, delicate Wedgwood cups steaming before them on the coffee table. One is in her eighties, if not older, and dressed in an ensemble the like of which I have not seen since the Sundays I drove past black churches as a teenager. The skirt is purple, the blouse green, the shoes a gleaming patent black. Her hat is a flowered concoction of black straw and varicolored silk. Beneath the hat is a shining black wig, beneath the wig a raisin of a face with watery eyes that glisten amid the wrinkles.
The woman beside her looks thirty years younger and wears a much more subdued outfit, a pleated navy skirt with a periwinkle blouse. She looks up, and her gaze disconcerts me. Most black people I grew up with rarely made direct eye contact, locking their feelings behind a veneer of humility. But this woman’s gaze is unveiled, direct, and self-confident.
“You keep a fine house, Mrs. Cage,” the older woman says in a cracked voice. “A fine house.”
“You’re so kind to say so,” my mother replies from a wing chair on the other side of the coffee table. She wears a house-coat and no makeup, yet even in this state radiates a quiet, stately beauty. She turns to me and smiles.
“Son, this is Mrs. Payton.” She gestures toward the elderly woman, then nods at her younger companion. “And this is Mrs. Payton also. They’ve come to thank you for what you said in this morning’s paper.”
I flush from my neck to the crown of my head. I can only be looking at the widow and mother of Delano Payton, the man bombed and burned to death in 1968. Barefoot and unshaven, I make a vain attempt to straighten my hair, then advance into the living room. Without rising, the elder Mrs. Payton enfolds my right hand in both of hers like a dowager empress. Her palms feel like fine sandpaper. The younger Mrs. Payton stands and shakes my hand with exaggerated formality. Her hand is moist and warm. Up close, she looks older than I first guessed, perhaps sixty-five. Because she has not gone to fat, she projects an aura of youth that her eyes cannot match.
“Althea works in the nursery at St. Catherine’s Hospital,” Dad informs me from the door. “I see her all the time. And I’ve treated Miss Georgia for thirty-five years now.”
“Yo’ daddy a good doctor,” the elder Mrs. Payton says from the sofa, pointing a bony finger at me. “A good doctor.”
My father has heard this ten thousand times, but he smiles graciously. “Thank you, Miss Georgia.”
“I remember you makin’ house calls late at night,” Georgia Payton goes on, her voice reedy and difficult to follow as it jumps up and down the scale. “Givin’ shots and deliverin’ babies. Had you a spotlight back then to see the house numbers.”
“And a pistol in my black bag,” Dad adds, chuckling.
“Sho’ did. I seen it once. You ever have to use it?”
“No, ma’am, thank God.”
“Might have to one of these days, with all this crack in the streets. I told the pastor last Sunday, you want to find Satan, just pull up to one of them crack houses. Sheriff ought to burn ever’ one to the ground.”
We all nod with enthusiasm, doing our best to foster a casual atmosphere. Blacks visiting socially in white homes—and vice versa—is still as rare as snowfall in Natchez, but this is not the reason for the general discomfort.
“Mr. Cage,” Althea says, focusing her liquid brown eyes on me, “we really appreciate you speaking out like you did in the paper.”
“Please call me Penn,” I implore her, embarrassed by thanks for a few lines tossed off without any real feeling for the victims of the crime.
“Mr. Penn,” says Georgia Payton, “ain’t no white man in thirty years said what you said in the paper today. My boy was kilt outside his job in nineteen hundred and sixty-eight, and all the po-lices did was sweep it under the rug.”
Her statement hangs suspended in crystalline silence. I sense my father’s reflexive desire to answer her charge, to try to mitigate the behavior of the law enforcement figures of the period. But the murder remains unsolved, and he has no idea what efforts were made to solve it, if any, or how sincere they might have been. Althea Payton looks momentarily disconcerted by her mother-in-law’s frankness, but then her eyes fill with calm resolution.
“Are you still a lawyer, Mr. Cage?” she asks. “I mean, I know you’re a writer now. Can you still practice law?”
I incline my head. “I’m still a member of the bar.”
“What that mean?” asks Georgia.
“I can still practice law, ma’am.”
“Then we wants to hire you.”
“For what?”
“I think I know,” Dad says.
“To find out who murdered my baby,” the old woman says, “The po-lice don’t want to do it. FBI don’t want to. The county lawyer neither.”
“The district attorney,” Althea corrects her.
“You’ve spoken to the district attorney about this?”
Althea nods. “Several times. He has no interest in the case.”
Dad emits a sigh easily interpreted as, Big surprise.
“We hired us a detective too,” Georgia says. “I even wrote to that man on Unsolved Mysteries, that good-looking white man from that old gangster TV show.”
“Robert Stack?” asks my mother.
“Yes,” Althea confirms. “We got back one letter from the show’s producer expressing interest, but after that nothing.”
“What about this detective?” I ask. “What happened with him?”
“We hired a man from Jackson first. He poked around downtown for an afternoon, then told us there was nothing to find.”
“White man,” Georgia barks. “A no-good.”
“Then we hired a detective from Chicago,” Althea says in a tense voice. “He flew down and spent a week in the Eola Hotel—”
“Colored man,” the old woman cuts in. “A no-count no-good. He stole all our money and went back to Chicago.”
“He was very expensive,” Althea concedes. “And he said the same thing the first detective told us. The pertinent records had been destroyed and there was nothing to find.”
“NAACP
