caused my heart to race: “I ask your prayers to give me strength to find justice for my loving son Wallace.”
“Amen!” the congregation resounded.
When the service was over, the minister greeted us at the door. If he was surprised to see two white men among his worshipers, he didn’t show it. He smiled a huge smile and extended his hand. “Welcome to a day the Lord hath made,” he said. “I am the Reverend Clifford Grace.”
“I’m Brad Hall. This is Matt Harper. I don’t believe we’ve met but I live at Windrow. My family—”
“I know who you are, Mr. Hall,” Rev. Grace interrupted.
“Reverend, I’m sure it’s a surprise for you to see us here.” Grace didn’t react. Brad continued, “We’ve come because we could use your help.”
“On Wallace Sampson,” Grace said.
“How’d you know?”
Grace laughed. “Mary Pell is a member here.”
“I’m surprised she brought it up,” Brad said.
“Word gets around. Mr. Hall, it’s been years since Wallace was killed. Rumors get started. People make guesses about who did it. And every Sunday, Etta Mae Sampson reminds us of a mother’s pain. It’s a poison in Hirtsboro, a devil that won’t be exorcised. So, it’s not a surprise when black people want to know who killed Wallace Sampson. But when a white man does, especially a Hall, that’s something different.”
“Were you here when it happened?” I asked.
“I was.”
“Would you tell me about it?”
“Later.” Reverend Grace glanced at his watch. “Right now, I’ve got to get on over to the county jail.” He smiled. “Services for the prisoners.”
As we left, Reverend Grace pointed out Etta Mae Sampson’s white-frame house a block away.
For reporters, going to see the family of someone who has died comes with the territory. I have had to do it maybe half a dozen times. Once you’re there, it often ends up being not as bad as it sounds. For one thing, survivors and family members usually want to talk. It helps them remember the dead and process their own grief. The other thing is that whatever you’re asking them to do is a lot easier than what they’ve just been through. After you’ve actually lost a parent or a spouse or a child, how bad can talking about it really be?
Somehow all that logic never makes it any easier, though, and I was nervous as we knocked on the door of Etta Mae Sampson’s house. Potted red geraniums were positioned on either side of the front door. A woman in her fifties, her dark hair pulled into a neat bun, came to the door but stayed behind the screen. Mrs. Sampson was still dressed for church in her purple dress and matching shoes.
“Mrs. Sampson, I’m Brad Hall and this is Matt Harper. I live at Windrow and Matt is a newspaper reporter up in Charlotte. I’m sorry to intrude. Mrs. Sampson, I’m wondering if we could ask you about Wallace.”
“My Wallace?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Did someone send you?”
“No, ma’am. We’re here on our own. Matt is writing a story about what happened.”
Not so fast, I thought, but kept quiet.
“Mary Pell works for you,” she said to Brad.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I know who you are.”
She turned to me. I was prepared to produce my press card but Mrs. Sampson didn’t ask. Instead, she said, “I don’t understand. Why now? What kind of story?”
I could have told her that Brad’s explanation that I was doing a story wasn’t exactly right, that Brad was the driving force and, at this point, I was still along for the ride, just taking a sniff, as those in the investigative reporting trade say. It’s a Cardinal Rule that you never promise anybody there will be a story. There’s just too much that can go wrong—from leads that don’t pan out, to fresh news breaking, to production mistakes, to idiot editors. Every reporter has had the experience of going home at night with every assurance his story was going to appear and maybe even on the front page only to search through the next day’s edition in disbelief because the story never ran.
But telling Mrs. Sampson that there might never be a story would have been like saying, “Mrs. Sampson, I’m not sure your dead son is worth writing about.” So instead I said, “As I understand it, it’s an unsolved murder and it’s never really been investigated.”
“It never was investigated but it isn’t unsolved,” she said matter-of-factly.
She invited us in and offered us some iced tea. We sat in her living room—Brad on an old upholstered chair with a lace doily, me uncomfortably on the edge of a rocker, and Mrs. Sampson on a dark red velvet settee. A small television sat in one corner, a simple kerosene heater in another. Three photographs hung on the wall: two eight-by-ten color pictures, unframed but protected by Saran Wrap, of Martin Luther King Jr. and of JFK, and a cardboard-framed school picture of a brightly smiling boy of twelve or thirteen in a red and white striped polo shirt, clearly the child of the woman to whom we were talking, despite his lighter skin.
If I ended up writing Wallace Sampson’s story for the Charlotte Times, I knew that Walker Burns would want that photo. I had learned that lesson when I’d neglected to get a photo for a front-page Sunday story about a teenager who’d accidentally been electrocuted at the state prison.
“Oh, don’t worry about a picture,” Walker had said sarcastically. “We’ll just let the readers imagine what the kid might have looked like.” A breakneck four-hundred-mile, six-hour roundtrip drive to the boy’s parents’ house in Morehead City produced the photo just in time for deadline. I’ve never forgotten the lesson.
“Wallace was twelve when that picture was made,” Mrs. Sampson said as she caught me staring at the photo. “I think about what he would look like now. Would he be tall, like his father? He was already pretty tall. He played on the church basketball team. Sometimes, I imagine that he’s all grown up and sometimes I see him in heaven and he’s my baby, with little angel wings. But every day, I think about what it would be like if none of this had ever happened and I came home and he was there, sitting there where you are, looking just like he is in that picture.”
“Do you have other children?” Brad asked.
“The twins. Praise and Rejoice. They’d grown up and both moved to D.C. by the time Wallace was born.”
Sometimes I think that what I get paid for is to ask the rude questions, the ones everyone else wants to ask but finds too difficult. “Mrs. Sampson,” I said, “tell me about the day that it happened.”
She closed her eyes, rocked back, and sat a long time before she spoke. “I told him not to be out late. There’d been trouble—a bunch of young hotheads in town. Wallace wasn’t part of that crowd. He was over visiting his girlfriend. It was Friday night and I said, ‘You be home before too late.’ He said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ That was the last thing he ever said to me, ‘Yes, ma’am.’
