The bike’s white sidewall tires were flat. Struts of the frame intruded into the misshapen rear wheel so that it would not turn. The chain dragged on the ground.
Halfway across the street the boy gently lowered the bike and used his sleeve to wipe his eyes. Hudson shoved by me, ran into the street and scooped the boy up.
“My bi-i-i-ke,” the boy sobbed.
The boy clasped his father’s neck and buried his head in his shoulder. The man stroked his son’s hair and kissed him on the cheek.
“What happened, son?”
“I rode my bike over to Michael and Chris’s to play and they broke it. They had concrete blocks and they knocked it down and they just kept throwing them.” The little boy wriggled out of his father’s arms, hugged the bike’s broken frame and broke into a new round of sobs. “They said their dad told them to because you’re a nigger-lover.”
Hudson picked up Jimmy with his right hand and slung him over his shoulder. With his left hand he picked up the bike and carried them both to the sidewalk. “C’mon, Jimmy,” he said. “We’re going shopping.”
Brad and I watched them disappear into the Great Southern Auto Supply and Appliance store. They emerged a few minutes later, Jimmy riding a new red bike in circles around his father.
When they got back to the newspaper office Hudson took several copies of that week’s edition of The Hirtsboro Reporter and tucked them into his belt so that they covered his stomach. Then he showed Jimmy how to make a fist.
“Don’t wrap your fingers around your thumb, you’ll break it that way,” he said. “Put your thumb on the outside. Now, hit me in the stomach, as hard as you can.”
Jimmy poked at the newspapers.
“You won’t hurt me. That what the papers are for.”
Jimmy hit a little harder.
“I said hard!”
“Why?”
“Because nobody’s going to do that to your bike again.”
It took a few more times and a bit more encouragement, but eventually Jimmy hit his father as hard as he could.
I wanted to cry. I know some of it was because I had been moved by what I had just seen—by Hudson’s love for his son, his instinct to do whatever it took to protect him, and by Jimmy’s need for his father. My father never would have done that for me.
But mostly it was because I was angry. I was angry at parents who encourage hate. I was angry at the cruelty kids inflict on each other. I was angry that an innocent boy named Jimmy had to be hurt for something he had nothing to do with. I was angry that he had to be taught to make a fist so that he could defend himself.
Before we left, Brad took out his wallet, peeled off some twenty-dollar bills and offered them to Hudson. “For the bike. I should never have gotten you into this.”
Hudson waved the money aside. “Cowardly bastards. One damn editorial. I’m gonna get ’em back.”
On the drive back to Windrow, I asked Brad what Hudson had written.
“Something outlandish and radical,” he said. “He wrote that Hirtsboro should try to solve the murder of Wallace Sampson.”
The next morning, a blast of humidity and the high whine of cicadas greeted Brad and me as we left the house and crunched across the gravel to the pickup for the drive back into Hirtsboro.
“If there are any Sampson family members around, they’ll be at church,” Brad said as we parked near the fountain. “And if they’re not there themselves, someone at church will know where they are.”
On the right side of the tracks, a bell began to toll, slowly at first and then with increasing vigor as it summoned the white population to services. From the wrong side of the tracks, the breeze carried the strong chords of a piano.
We followed the music, drawn to a large white wooden-frame building with a simple steeple at the corner of two sandy streets. The church sagged from age but the exterior was freshly painted and the lawn neatly mowed. A sign identified it as the Mt. Moriah House of Prayer, pastored by the Reverend Clifford Grace. The front door was open and we could see the backs of the people in the congregation and, up front, two high-backed altar chairs covered in red velvet. Behind the chairs on risers fourteen members of the purple-robed choir—men and women, young and old, black—swayed as they sang “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.”
I had seen this scene before, but only in my mind. When I was little, my family would drive from Detroit to Florida for a week at the beach and on Sunday we would leave at the crack of dawn to drive home. Dad would fiddle with the radio as he drove, discovering each year that on Sunday mornings in the South, church was the only thing broadcast. With pianos, electric guitars, and singers and preachers that sounded like they meant it, black church services were much more entertaining than white. I would close my eyes as we listened, trying to picture the small country churches, their preachers, and their choirs.
By the time the choir finished with “Home is Over Jordan,” I was home, in the station wagon with Mom and Dad in the front and Luke and me in the back, rolling northward as we listened to gospel music, the car filled with the smell of Thermos coffee and smoke from unfiltered Chesterfields.
Brad and I walked in quietly and slid into a back pew. A few members of the congregation turned our way and nodded—an old women in a lavender dress and an ornate flowered hat; a teenage boy in a bright blue athletic warm-up suit; a teenage girl with a gravity-defying swirl of hair; a man in a suit; a farmer in a threadbare jacket and boots.
I picked up a Popsicle-stick fan with a picture of a radiant brown-haired, blue-eyed Jesus on one side and the words “Courtesy of Short & Sons Mortuary” emblazoned on the back. Except for Jesus, Brad and I were the only white people in the place. A tall, lanky man in purple liturgical robes rose from one of the altar chairs, partially blocking my view.
“Thank you and praise Jesus for the magnificent choir,” he boomed, leading the congregation in applause. When the clapping died, he said, “Before we end today we’ll follow our custom of sharing our joys and concerns. Joys and Concerns, brothers and sisters.” He stroked his salt-and-pepper beard and motioned to someone I couldn’t see.
“My joy is that I’d like to ask our church youth basketball team to stand up because they won the league championship last Saturday up at Bamberg,” said a woman. A round of applause and I saw the teenager in the athletic suit stand shyly.
A middle-aged woman near the front stood. “My concern is for my great aunt in Cincinnati who is in the hospital with surgery. I ask that the church pray for her.” She sat.
The preacher pointed to a woman in the congregation. “I ask your prayers for my daughter Delicia and her kids in New York and that things get worked out with her boyfriend,” she said.
A man in a blue suit stood. “I praise Jesus that the Men’s Association chicken dinner raised six hundred fifty-eight dollars last Saturday night for new robes for the choir.”
And
