You’re not the first. Sometimes you have to let people save themselves.”
“And you’re a very white guy putting black men on death row for state-sanctioned murder.”
“Only when they kill people.”
“Only when they kill white people, you mean.”
A surge of anger runs through me, but I force myself to stay silent. There’s nothing to be gained by pointing out that Arthur Lee Hanratty is a white supremacist, or that I once freed a black man who had been mistakenly put on death row by a colleague of mine. You can’t win an argument like this. We stare at each other like two fighters after a flurry of punches, deciding whether to wade in again or rest on the ropes.
“Hanratty’s an exception,” Caitlin says, as though reading my mind.
This lady is dangerous. It may be a cliché, but her anger has brought color to her cheeks and fire into her eyes, and I am suddenly sure that a string of broken hearts lie in the wake of this self-assured young woman.
“I want to understand this, Penn,” she says with utter sincerity. “I need to. I’ve read a hundred books by Southern writers, Southern journalists, everything. And I still don’t get it.”
“That’s because it’s not a Southern problem.”
“Don’t you think the answer must be wrapped up in the South somehow?”
“No. Not the way you think, anyway. It’s been thirty years since the last vestiges of segregation were remedied under the law. And there’s a growing feeling that blacks have done damn little to take advantage of that. That they’ve been given special breaks and blown it every time. That they don’t want an even playing field but their turn on top. White America looks at the Vietnamese, the Irish, the Jews, and they say, ‘What’s the problem with the blacks?’ The resentment you hear around this town is based on that, not on old ideas of superiority.”
“Do you feel that way?”
“I used to. I don’t anymore.”
“Why not?”
“The Indians.”
“Indians? You mean Native Americans?”
“Think about it. Indians are the only minority that’s had as much trouble as blacks. Why? Both races had their cultures shattered by the white man. All the other groups—Irish, Italians, Vietnamese, whatever—may have come here destitute, but they brought one thing with them. Their national identities. Their sense of self. They congregated together in the cities and on the plains, like with like. They maintained their cultural identities—religions, customs, names—until they were secure enough to assimilate. Blacks had no chance to do that. They were stolen from their country, brought here in chains, sold as property. Their families were split, their religion beaten out of them, their names changed. Nothing was left. No identity. And they’ve never recovered.”
“And you parallel that with Native Americans?”
“It’s the same experience, only in reverse. The Indians weren’t stolen from their land, their land was stolen from them. And their culture was systematically destroyed. They’ve never recovered either, despite a host of government programs to help them.”
Caitlin stops writing. “That’s an interesting analogy.”
“If you don’t know who you are, you can’t find your way. There are exceptions, of course. Bright spots. But my point is that whites don’t look at blacks with the right perspective. We look at them like an immigrant group that can’t get its shit together.”
She takes a sip of tea as she processes this perspective. “Does Shad Johnson have the right idea, then? Should Natchez simply sweep its past under the rug and push ahead?”
“For Johnson, it’s the smart line to take. For the town … I don’t know.”
“Please try to answer. I think it’s important.”
“If I do, we go off the record.”
She doesn’t look happy, but she wants her answer. “Okay.”
“Faulkner thought the land itself had been cursed by slavery. I don’t agree.” I pause, feeling the writer’s special frustration at trying to embody moral complexities in words. “Have you ever read Karl Jung?”
“A little, in college. Synchronicity, all that?”
“Jung didn’t try to separate good and evil. He knew that both exist in every human heart. He called the propensity to evil the Shadow. And he believed that trying to deny or repress the Shadow is dangerous. Because it can’t be done. He believed you have to recognize your Shadow, come to grips with it, accept it, and integrate it.”
“Make friends with the evil in yourself?”
“Basically. And the South has never done that. We’ve never truly acknowledged the crime of slavery—not in our collective soul. It’s a bit like Germany and the Holocaust, only slavery is much further in the past. Modern generations feel no guilt over it, and it’s easy to see why. There’s no tangible connection. Slave owners were a tiny minority, and most Southerners see no larger complicity.”
“How does the white South acknowledge the crime?”
“It’ll never happen. That’s what’s scary about what Shad Johnson is doing. Because the day of reckoning always comes, when everything you’ve tried to repress rears up in the road to meet you. Whatever you bury deepest is always waiting for the moment of greatest stress to explode to the surface.”
“You’re the only white person in this town who’s said anything like this to me. How did you turn out so different?”
“That’s a story for another day. But I want you to be clear that I think the North is as guilty as the South when it comes to blacks.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“You’re damn right I do. I may criticize the South when I’m in it, but when I’m in the North, I defend Mississippi to the point of blows. Prejudice in the North isn’t as open, but it’s just as destructive. Most Yankees have no concept of living in a town—I mean in a town—that is fifty percent black. No idea of the warmth that can exist between black and white on a daily basis, and has here for years.”
“Oh, come on.”
“What happened in Boston when they tried busing?”
“That’s a different issue.”
“Watts. Detroit. Skokie. Rodney King. O.J.”
She sighs. “Are we going to refight the Civil War here?”
“How long have you lived here, Caitlin?”
“Sixteen months.”
“You could live here sixteen years and you’d still be on the outside. And you can’t understand this place until you see it from the inside.”
“You’re
