Rise, Mama sat between Daddy and me and held my hand. “It wasn’t anything you did, Tommy. Just a tragic accident.”
I saw the clenched muscles on Daddy’s forehead. He didn’t wait long to get to the point. “Tommy, why were you driving these people down here anyway?”
“I just wanted company for the long drive, and he was my really good friend.”
He kept his eyes on the highway. “Son, don’t you know that was just asking for trouble? These counties are just crawling with nigger agitators, and people are really upset about it.”
Mama turned sideways in her seat. “Buddy—”
I interrupted her. “Jackie is not a ‘nigger agitator.’”
Daddy plunged ahead. “Tommy, ever since all the trouble at Selma, these damn people have been going around stirring up the colored to try to register to vote. The Klan has been meeting all around the Black Belt and threatening to hurt these agitators.”
“Daddy, I was just trying to get my friend where he wanted to go. We were almost there and this girl had to go to the bathroom and we stopped at this store.”
“You shoulda known better than to stop with an integrated group at a country store in the Black Belt.” His voice and mouth were tight.
“I’ve been going into stores with colored people all my life. I didn’t think about this being different. I was tired and just trying to get where we needed go.”
“Well, you shoulda known it was different with agitators from up North.”
“Daddy, Jackie was not an agitator—”
“Why didn’t you just give ’em bus fare? It woulda ended up costing a lot less.”
Mama’s face reddened. “Buddy! You shut up, you hear? It’s not Tommy’s fault.”
Daddy was blaming me. But racist though he was, he was right. I didn’t think about the danger, and I should have known. Jackie was dead because of my stupidity.
Suddenly I was choking. The warm wind that came through the window of Mama’s station wagon drove my breath back down my throat. Sweat oozed from every pore of my body, which itched. I stank from thirty hours of sweat. The sky should have been blue but the mid-day sun had washed out nearly all color, leaving it a dirty white. On the right, rows of young cotton plants wilted in the furnace. On the left, a herd of cows huddled in a thicket of willows by a stagnant stream. I caught the stench of decaying flesh just at that moment and saw two buzzards picking at carrion—it was a baby calf—outside the cluster of cows.
Then I looked forward and realized we were approaching the old store ahead on the left. I raised an index finger and pointed. Mama looked at me and then jerked her head forward.
“That’s the place?” Daddy said.
I nodded and he slowed the car as we went past. The bleached walls and the faded signs and the shattered gas pumps were now scorched by a sun that felt like it hovered only a few hundred feet above ground at noon. I trembled all over. I saw the man aiming the shotgun. I saw Jackie lying bloody in the gravel.
“Stop.”
Both my parents frowned and shook their heads.
“Stop!”
Daddy eased to the side of the road a hundred yards past the store. I opened the door before the car came fully to a stop and rushed into the weeds that lay between the pavement and a cotton field. I bent over and puked.
I stood up, and the sunlight blinded me. Then the gag reflex jerked much harder and I fell on all fours. Bile burned my throat from the bottom up like a garden hose was spewing acid from my guts. The sun scalded the back of my neck. I thought I was through after the third time, but my stomach kept wrenching my insides. My torso convulsed. I began to sob. By the time Mama got me to my feet and back in the car, by the time she wiped my greasy, stinking face with Daddy’s handkerchief and pulled my trembling head down to her shoulder, I didn’t think I would live through this torture. Nor was I sure I wanted to.
3
I awoke at 6:30 that evening and found Mama at the stove, stirring a pot and talking on the phone. She was frowning. “No, we have no comment. No, there won’t be any interviews.” She rolled her eyes at Daddy, who was standing across the kitchen, drinking a Budweiser and smoking a cigarette. “Sorry.” She hung up the phone and shrugged. “Newsweek.”
Immediately the phone rang, and Daddy answered. He listened a moment, and scowled. “You chickenshit bastards, you ain’t running anybody off, you hear?” He slammed the phone down.
Mama looked at him tentatively. “What did they say?”
He looked down at the kitchen tile. “‘It’s time for y’all to git on up North where there’s a lot of niggers to love,’” he repeated in a flat voice.
“Don’t people have any decency?” She took the receiver off the hook. It lay on the counter like a venomous snake.
My sister Cathy stood by the kitchen table, her arms swinging, her knees jerking up in rhythm. She was practicing her cheerleader routines. She shrugged at me. “The phone’s been ringing all afternoon.”
The afternoon newspaper lay spread on the breakfast table. There were pictures of Jackie and me under a huge headline, “Negro Student Killed in Yancey Shootout.” Jackie was pictured in his Duke basketball uniform. Next to him was my senior yearbook picture. The article said an “altercation” had left “the college basketball star mortally wounded” and “storekeeper Buford Kyle in serious but stable condition” at a local hospital. I was described as an “armed member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee originally from Eden Rise.”
“Oh God. Look at this! We gotta correct this! I’m not a member of anything. It was Granddaddy’s gun. They make out like I came down here hunting somebody to shoot.”
Daddy was rubbing his right hand. “Well, that’s how it looks.”
“That’s a lie. Next reporter calls, I’m talking to him.”
“The hell you will. Lyin’ bastards will write whatever they want to make us look bad.”
“Well, they’ll have to straighten it out.”
“You stay away from them.”
I turned to face my father. “You just want to sit here and let them lie about me?”
He took a deep drag on his Pall Mall. “I’m telling you to sit here and keep your mouth shut and don’t cause any more trouble. We’ve got a plenty already.”
“Go to Hell.” Whatever vessel it was that pumped my adrenaline had suddenly fired, and words came out automatically.
I tried to explain. “I didn’t make that happen. I just tried to keep that sonuvabitch from killing my friend. Anybody ought to be able to ride through Alabama without getting killed.”
