he serve it?” Bebe said, her voice soft.
“Crucial thing is to get somewhere other than ‘hard-case’ prisons like Atmore.”
Images of knife fights and homosexual rapes were flashing through my mind and I was trying to swallow my fear when Joe Black led me out to the front porch so we could start getting ready for the trials. He said the issue in Kyle’s trial would be his motive, what provoked him to shoot. There might only be two witnesses, Kyle and me. When I asked about Alma, he said Taliaferro hadn’t located her. “Which is good. I mean, I would find her if I thought it’d help, even if I had had to hire that Jew who found Eichmann. But she puts a face on the outside agitator defense they going to use. From what you’ve said, she probably be a terrible witness.”
His look was sober. “You, on the other hand, going to be a good witness. You going to tell the truth, but I want you to tell the ‘lean truth.’ I mean not everything you know but what is most relevant to the question. Ya understan’?”
I wasn’t sure but I nodded like I did.
“So, Tommy, now tell me, you and this boy Jackie, how’d y’all get to be friends, or were y’all really friends?”
I then told him about Jackie, beginning with the first week of school when I was shooting baskets on the courts behind the dorm and was surprised when this very tall colored boy suddenly appeared. He had close-cropped hair that accentuated the delicate shape of his head. Jackie had asked politely if he could shoot with me. The first time I bounced him the ball he took three dribbles and then went up for a jump shot higher than anyone I had ever seen. He caught the ball on the first bounce and leaped again, this time twisting around in mid-air and laying the ball high against the backboard with a reverse spin. During the next week Jackie and I fell into the habit of playing pick-up basketball games every afternoon. We chose the teams, deciding after a while it would be more fun to be on opposite sides and guard each other. After two hard hours of running and jumping, we would go sweatily to the cafeteria. Jackie was a favorite of the black women who worked on the cafeteria line. They always asked how he was feeling and didn’t he want a little more mashed potatoes or an extra piece of cornbread. As Jackie’s constant supper companion, I got their favor, too: “Tommy, let me put this other chicken leg on top for you, honey.”
Joe Black was nodding. “Aw right. So y’all big friends from the basketball court. That’s good. Playground friends. Now, Tommy, the circuit solicitor going to ask you why you were driving through Yancey County that evening. What would you say to that?”
The true answer went back to my failed relationship with Beth Kaplan, whom I had dated through the fall and into the winter. My dorm mate Jeffrey, Beth’s childhood friend from Long Island, had introduced us. Short and buxom with a wild mop of kinky black hair, Beth kept up a steady flow of nosy questions, sharp opinions, and witty barbs on our first date to a Duke football game—she had asked me out—and then she bedded me that same night. I was taken aback and delighted. We dated all that fall, but after Christmas she began to withdraw and then she dumped me. She said she was tired of it. I was angry, hurt, and made to feel boring. I told her I loved her. “You’re not in love,” she retorted. “Just in heat.” I was devastated.
Her rejection made me look hard at who I was. I had gone to college thinking everyone would be like me—the best people from their hometown, learning and having fun together. But it wasn’t like that. Instead of a collection of high school stars like I’d been in Eden Rise, each one was unique—and in one way or another, superior to me. Compared to Jackie’s, my athletic skills were pitiful. Kids in every class were much smarter, and my grades reflected my mediocrity—mostly Cs. I couldn’t crack jokes or make funny comebacks the way Jeffrey and Beth did. I was a star in Eden Rise, but in the major leagues of Duke, I was barely even on the bench. I thought for a time I would stand out by becoming a party guy in a fraternity. The Sigma Nu house was full of good-looking, wealthy Southern boys who had grown up fishing, hunting, and watching football—a perfect fit for me, I thought. But I discovered I couldn’t conform to what they wanted. I knew it as soon as one of them said Beth’s last name, “Kaplan,” in a derisive snicker to her face. Worse, being Jackie’s friend made me as welcome in the frat as Martin Luther King. On a pledge workday when I was mopping the party room floor and several brothers were hazing pledges, Frank Strother, a senior from Birmingham who had rushed me very hard, had sneered at me. “McKee, you mop good. Just like a nigger.” Strother’s face dared me to say something, but I didn’t. “But you ought to be good with a mop, McKee, being a nigger lover like you are.” My hands tightened on the mop. “You hang around with that nigger all the time in the cafeteria. White folks not good enough for you?”
I charged him but the other so-called brothers pulled me away. After that day, I began to drift away from Sigma Nu, and maybe because of that, I’d had drifted into involvement with civil rights protest. I didn’t do it out of any great moral commitment. It was more that I hated the Frank Strothers of the world. And I needed Jackie’s friendship, especially after losing everybody else’s.
All this ran through my mind as I sat before Joe Black, but I couldn’t speak. How would this old man understand this convoluted story? It wouldn’t make sense to anybody else. So Joe Black plunged ahead on his own. “As I understand it, you were giving two friends a ride to their summer job. It’s what folks in Ruffin County are taught is the polite thing—give somebody a ride if they ask. Period. You follow me?”
I nodded. The lean truth.
“He’s going to ask you if you ever participated in any civil rights protests.” When I didn’t answer right away, Joe Black waited a moment. “Son, if you did, I need to know now. It’ll come out anyway.”
Alma Jones had stopped Jackie in the cafeteria and demanded that he participate in a march at the Durham town square in sympathy with the Selma voting protests. Jackie had gazed down at his sneakers. “Oh, come on, boy!” she had said angrily. “Last night they showed on TV how those Alabama police just beat hell outa those poor folks on a bridge. You gotta help!” She shot me a hard stare. “You too.”
I had seen the beating on the Sigma Nu television—my last time at the fraternity house—and listened to comments from Strother and others about “niggers getting what they deserved.” I was thinking of that when Alma demanded that I march, too. In downtown Durham the next afternoon, Jackie and I had joined about fifty people walking slowly down a commercial block. Alma spotted us and came over with a placard that read: “Selma: Let the Negroes Vote.” Jackie and I walked side-by-side up and down the block. There were more police and reporters than there were protesters. The next morning the student newspaper ran a story with pictures of the protest. There Jackie and I were in the background of one picture.
When I recounted this to Joe Black, he nodded. “Aw right, aw right. Let’s move on. The circuit solicitor’s going to ask why you took Kyle’s shotgun.” I just stared blankly at Joe Black for a while.
“You didn’t wanta take the chance of him start shooting at you again. Then he’s going to ask why you threw it away. You probably threw it away ’cause it wasn’t yours and you didn’t want some policeman to see it and keep you from getting this boy to the hospital. Ya understan’?”
Those were pretty good answers—better than the truth, because I didn’t really know why I did some of what I did.
“See, son, in this Kyle trial, your testimony is going to be a kinda dry run for when you get tried. You going to tell yo’ story in such a convincing way that some of those jurors going to believe you, even though they don’t want to.” He smiled. “Word going to get around the county the boy is telling the truth, and then they going to acquit you two weeks later in your trial. You hear me?”
I
