The shooting followed several nights of racial unrest.
I scanned the rest of the clips. There were plenty of other briefs on stabbings and shootings and one longer piece about a Spartanburg preacher who’d been poisoned by his wife. But there had been no follow-up stories about the Sampson incident. I made a copy of the clip and returned the file to Miss Nancy.
“Are you on to something, Matt?”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was true. Most of these things never went anywhere.
I headed back to the newsroom deep in thought. Some of Bradford Hall’s story checked out but that didn’t mean much. I knew nothing about him beyond what he’d told me. But I liked what I saw in him—curiosity, honesty, a willingness to pursue something, even against opposition, that he could have ignored. And of all the people with grievances I’d ever met, he was one of the most unusual: a Yankee blueblood investigating an unsolved South Carolina civil rights murder of almost twenty years ago.
I slid into my cubicle and lost myself in a photograph I keep on my desk, one my father took of my late brother Luke and me in our swimming suits standing on a platform floating in the middle of a lake. We’re tanned, wet, and smiling. Luke, a head taller, has his right arm around my shoulder. Cradled in his left arm is a football, its leather soaked black from a game of catch that quickly escalated to spectacular diving grabs made while leaping into the lake from the platform.
I was still in the picture when a stack of letters, held together with rubber bands, hit my desk with a thud. The top letter was addressed to “The Racist Reporter” with the name and address of the Charlotte Times. I thumbed through the others. More of the same.
I looked up at the receptionist, who had known exactly for whom the letters were intended. “It’s such a shame, Matt. They’ve got you all wrong.”
I shrugged. “I understand where they’re coming from.”
“At least the demonstrators in front of the building are gone,” she said hopefully. “Did they ever find out where you lived?”
Walker Burns has a saying: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” This seemed like a very good weekend to spend some time checking out Hirtsboro and Bradford Hall.
The northbound traffic on the interstate faced me three-wide and stretched as far as I could see as I headed south toward Hirtsboro. The sprawl of south Charlotte spilled seamlessly into York County, South Carolina, and, except for billboards touting fireworks, video poker, and subdivisions with lower South Carolina taxes, there was little to indicate that life fundamentally changes once you cross the border to the Palmetto state.
But it does. South Carolina was the last of the original thirteen colonies to join the union, the first state to leave the union after the start of the Civil War in Charleston, and the last to rejoin the country after the South had lost. South Carolina has always operated by a slightly different set of rules.
Whenever things got slow on the city desk, Walker Burns would send a reporter to troll around South Carolina for a few days. Inevitably, that would produce a fantastic story along the lines of: blacks who weren’t being allowed to vote in a Low Country town that hadn’t yet gotten the word; a funeral home that kept as an advertisement in its front window the embalmed body of an Italian carnival worker (known locally as “Spaghetti”) who had died and been left behind when the show moved on; two NASCAR fans who wounded each other after staging an old-fashioned pistol duel over the question of which was a better race car—Ford or Chevrolet. (Technically, the duel had been written about previously. The new angle uncovered by Walker’s South Carolina bureau chief related to the claim by local officials that taxes should have been paid on the $1,725 in tickets sold to attend the duel.)
Walker says that for every mile you go deeper into South Carolina, you go another year back in time. By his reckoning, by the time I got to Hirtsboro I’d be in the antebellum South.
As I cleared Rock Hill, the subdivisions gave way to peach orchards and rolling hills of red clay. I turned off the interstate near Columbia where the land flattened and the soil turned sandy. In the fields, tufts of picked-over cotton clung to dead, stripped black stalks like tiny flags of surrender.
South of Bamberg, I pulled off the asphalt and onto the hard-packed sand that served as the driveway for a white-painted cinderblock Gulf station, next to the Orange Blossom Motel and Tourist Cabins. I pumped gas and went inside, where a wizened old man whose shirt identified him as “Shorty” smoked on a stool behind the cash register and watched the store, the driveway, and an evangelist on a small black and white television. I picked out a six-ounce glass bottle of Coke and a postcard that had a picture of black field workers piling cotton bales on a truck and the words “Every Yankee Tourist is Worth a Bale of Cotton and Much Easier to Pick.”
“Be anything else now?” Shorty asked, grinding the butt of an unfiltered Camel into an overflowing ashtray.
“I need a pen. Do you have a pen?”
“Do what?”
“A pen.”
“I don’t believe we carry no pea-uns. I mean we used to carry ’em—diaper pea-uns and such but folks don’t hardly use ’em no more. I wanna say we don’t have any.” He lit another cigarette and returned to the TV.
“I mean a pen.”
“That’s what I said. Pea-un.”
“Like you write with.”
“Oh, you mean pin. No, we don’t have none of those neither.”
An hour and fifteen minutes later, I arrived at the entrance to Windrow. Two brick columns and a simple black iron gate marked a dirt road that left the paved highway and went laser-straight through a thick forest of slash pines.
The road was wide and well-maintained and in a few minutes I’d emerged from the pines. The road took a hard left and skirted a flat field of corn stubble that stretched to the horizon. Ahead, on a slight rise, stood the plantation home of Bradford Hall. He had described it as “modern.” What it was was a modern architectural wonder—stark, soaring walls, vast windows of tinted glass, angular porches. About the only thing it had in common with the columned antebellum Scarlett O’Hara plantation mansion of my imagination was its color—white.
Two golden retrievers bounded out the front door and ran up to meet the Honda. They were followed by Hall.
“I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you’ve come,” he said. The dogs sniffed my legs and eagerly wagged their tails. “Tasha and Maybelle agree. I’m sorry my wife Lindsay McDaniel isn’t with me to greet you but she’ll arrive from New York tomorrow. Let me help you with your things.”
He showed me into the house. Its core was a massive two-story living room with a glass wall overlooking the rocky shallows of the Savannah River. A stone fireplace and hearth had been built into the wall but with no chimney to interrupt the view. Instead, Bradford explained, a hidden fan sucked the fireplace smoke down, out, and away. My room was off one of two spiral staircases that flanked the entrance to the living room. From my bedroom, a sliding glass door led to a triangle-shaped porch that jutted out, like a ship’s prow.
We
