were Walker’s ultimate bad assignment threat. “That’s okay,” I said. “Has he been drinking?”
“Doesn’t appear so.”
“Is he wacky?”
“Well, pardner, your job is to figure that out,” he said as he headed back to the city desk. “But I don’t think we’re lookin’ at another Colonel Sanders.”
Colonel Sanders was a deranged but harmless man who had visited the newsroom regularly for several years. He told anyone who would listen that he’d been a colonel in Korea and that he’d been captured by the Communists who had inserted a transmitter in his brain. The VA, he said, had turned down his disability claims because they were all part of the same conspiracy, as were a number of Congressmen to whom he had also written without result. Reporters new to the story were shown the correspondence.
When Colonel Sanders died a pauper and with no known relatives, the newspaper did a story and Walker Burns took up a collection to give him a proper burial. Because a portion of the fund was diverted for election-night pizzas, there was only enough for cremation and a simple urn, which, along with Colonel Sanders’s ashes, was delivered back to Walker, whose name was on the forms from the funeral home.
Colonel Sanders still sat on a corner of Walker’s cluttered city desk, next to the police scanner. Over the years, a baseball cap had been placed on top of the urn and a cigar stuck out from under the lid. Colonel Sanders no longer talked, but in the heat of deadline, he was talked to a lot.
I draped my blue blazer over the back of my chair, loosened my tie, and motioned to the receptionist to send the man over.
He wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, open-at-the-collar Oxford blue shirt, gray slacks, and brown walking shoes. He was narrow-shouldered, trim, and a little pale. He moved delicately through the newsroom. He could have passed as a teacher at a boarding school. I judged him to be in his mid-thirties, just a bit older than me.
He reached the cubicle and extended his hand. “I’m Bradford Hall.”
“Matt Harper.” We shook hands.
“Thank you for agreeing to see me.”
“It’s what I get paid for.” I didn’t say it in a mean way, but it was important to establish distance. I was there to collect information, not become an advocate. There’s usually a point where you have to tell people like Hall that the paper won’t be covering their story.
“Oh, thank you,” he said, reaching inside his coat pocket for his wallet. “I wasn’t sure how it worked. How much?”
“No. No. No. It’s not like that. The newspaper pays me. You don’t have to pay me unless you’re buying an ad or a subscription in which case you’ve come to the wrong guy. What brings you to the Times?” I was thinking I might be done with Mr. Hall in a hurry. Obits, here we come.
He glanced around the newsroom. “Is there a, uh, better place we can talk?”
It was late in the afternoon. The time for planning tomorrow morning’s edition was past and the actual work of writing, editing, and laying out the paper was picking up, the pace marked by the muted machine-gun tapping from several dozen keyboards. The desks were full. The conference rooms were empty. I selected the one with the fewest coffee stains on the carpet and some framed Charlotte Times Famous Front Pages (Man Walks on Moon; Billy Graham at White House; Kennedy Shot) on the wall. I slouched into a well-worn brown couch; Bradford Hall sat on the edge of a matching easy chair. He wasted no time.
“I am here because your newspaper has a reputation for being concerned about justice. I’ve read about what the Charlotte Times has done in the past. You led the way on civil rights. The Times supported the sit-ins and school busing. The Times was about the only Southern newspaper to say something nice about Dr. King.”
“True,” I said with some pride.
“Well, I’m in the middle of something—something that has to do with justice and with civil rights. I think it might be a story.”
I looked hard at Bradford Hall. On the surface, there was nothing to identify him as crazy. No impossibly smeared eyeglasses or overcoat in summer or sheaves of clippings and “affidavits” spilling out of a battered briefcase.
“Go on.”
“First off, I’m not from here.”
“I could tell.”
He laughed. “I’m told I haven’t lost my Yankee accent. But, these days I live mostly in South Carolina at our family plantation along the Savannah River, although from the rest of the family’s point of view, I’ve become not very welcome.”
“What happened?”
“They feel I ask too many questions.”
Something about how he said it got my attention. Nothing gets a journalist going like someone telling him that he’s asking too many questions. We get paid to ask the questions, however rude. We will decide, not the people we are questioning, when there are too many of them. I didn’t even know Bradford Hall. And he wasn’t a journalist. But I knew I didn’t like anyone telling him he was asking too many questions. I sat up straight on the couch.
“About what?
“A shooting. A murder, really. In Hirtsboro, a tiny little town by our plantation. The victim was a thirteen-year-old black kid named Wallace Sampson.”
“When did this happen?”
“Almost twenty years ago.” He sat back in his chair. “After some civil unrest.”
I took out my reporter’s notebook. “What was his name, again?”
“Wallace Sampson. He was shot in the head with a deer rifle shortly after midnight. He was in the black part of town. They took him to the medical school at Charleston but he was already dead. No one was ever charged. I don’t know if anybody even investigated.”
“But you have been.”
“Yes, I guess I have.”
“Why?”
Bradford Hall eased back into the brown chair and it seemed to swallow him up. “You know,” he said after a while, “my father asks me that. My wife asks me that. Sometimes, I even ask me that. The only way I can explain is if I start at the beginning.”
For the next two hours I watched through the thin slits of the conference room windows as the sun set, the sky flushed pink, then darkened to deep blue and black. In the newsroom, dayside reporters packed up and went home. Copy carriers shuttled between the news desk and the back shop, carrying the early proofs of the next day’s pages. My colleagues on the night shift busied themselves with their assignments, trips to the coffee pot, and the occasional detour to catch a careful nonchalant peek inside the conference room. Reporters are paid to know what’s going on. Closed doors make them nervous.
He talked. I mostly listened. Because for Bradford Hall, starting at the beginning meant starting more than three hundred and fifty years ago when his family came over on the Mayflower. In succeeding generations, he said, Bradfords had served as governors and senators and preachers and philanthropists. His
