The Quiet Game (6 page)

“How's he playing it?”

“He's not even mentioning race. He's in the former money capital of the slaveholding South, thirty percent of the black population receives some form of public assistance, and he acts like he's running for mayor of Utopia. Everything is New South, Brotherhood of Man. He's running as a
Republican
, for Christ's sake.”

“Sounds like a shrewd guy.”

“Will African Americans vote for him if he sucks up to the white vote like that?”

I can't help but laugh. “If Johnson is the only black man in the race, local blacks will vote for him if he buggers a mule at high noon on the courthouse lawn.”

Two pink moons appear high on Caitlin's cheeks. “I can't believe you said that. And I can't believe Johnson would stand for the way things are. The things I hear around here . . . sitting in restaurants, riding in cars with people. I've heard the N-word a thousand times since I've been here.”

“You'd hear it in Manhattan if you rode in the right cars. Look, I'd really rather not get into this. I spent eight years in the Houston courts listening to more bullshit about race than I ever want to hear.”

She shakes her head with apparent disgust. “That's such a cop-out. Racism is the most important problem in America today.”

“Caitlin, you are a very rich, very
white
girl preaching about black problems. You're not the first. Sometimes you have to let people save themselves.”

“And you're a very white
guy
putting black men on death row for state-sanctioned murder.”

“Only when they kill people.”

“Only when they kill white people, you mean.”

A surge of anger runs through me, but I force myself to stay silent. There's nothing to be gained by pointing out that Arthur Lee Hanratty is a white supremacist, or that I once freed a black man who had been mistakenly put on death row by a colleague of mine. You can't win an argument like this. We stare at each other like two fighters after a flurry of punches, deciding whether to wade in again or rest on the ropes.

“Hanratty's an exception,” Caitlin says, as though reading my mind.

This lady is dangerous. It may be a cliché, but her anger has brought color to her cheeks and fire into her eyes, and I am suddenly sure that a string of broken hearts lie in the wake of this self-assured young woman.

“I want to understand this, Penn,” she says with utter sincerity. “I need to. I've read a hundred books by Southern writers, Southern journalists, everything. And I still don't get it.”

“That's because it's not a Southern problem.”

“Don't you think the answer must be wrapped up in the South somehow?”

“No. Not the way you think, anyway. It's been thirty years since the last vestiges of segregation were remedied under the law. And there's a growing feeling that blacks have done damn little to take advantage of that. That they've been given special breaks and blown it every time. That they don't want an even playing field but their turn on top. White America looks at the Vietnamese, the Irish, the Jews, and they say, ‘What's the problem with the blacks?' The resentment you hear around this town is based on that, not on old ideas of superiority.”

“Do you feel that way?”

“I used to. I don't anymore.”

“Why not?”

“The Indians.”

“Indians? You mean Native Americans?”

“Think about it. Indians are the only minority that's had as much trouble as blacks. Why? Both races had their cultures shattered by the white man. All the other groups—Irish, Italians, Vietnamese, whatever—may have come here
destitute, but they brought one thing with them. Their national identities. Their sense of self. They congregated together in the cities and on the plains, like with like. They maintained their cultural identities—religions, customs, names—until they were secure enough to assimilate. Blacks had no chance to do that. They were stolen from their country, brought here in chains, sold as property. Their families were split, their religion beaten out of them, their names changed. Nothing was left. No identity. And they've never recovered.”

“And you parallel that with Native Americans?”

“It's the same experience, only in reverse. The Indians weren't stolen from their land, their land was stolen from them. And their culture was systematically destroyed. They've never recovered either, despite a host of government programs to help them.”

Caitlin stops writing. “That's an interesting analogy.”

“If you don't know who you are, you can't find your way. There are exceptions, of course. Bright spots. But my point is that whites don't look at blacks with the right perspective. We look at them like an immigrant group that can't get its shit together.”

She takes a sip of tea as she processes this perspective. “Does Shad Johnson have the right idea, then? Should Natchez simply sweep its past under the rug and push ahead?”

“For Johnson, it's the smart line to take. For the town . . . I don't know.”

“Please try to answer. I think it's important.”

“If I do, we go off the record.”

She doesn't look happy, but she wants her answer. “Okay.”

“Faulkner thought the land itself had been cursed by slavery. I don't agree.” I pause, feeling the writer's special frustration at trying to embody moral complexities in words. “Have you ever read Karl Jung?”

“A little, in college. Synchronicity, all that?”

“Jung didn't try to separate good and evil. He knew that both exist in every human heart. He called the propensity to evil the Shadow. And he believed that trying to deny or repress the Shadow is dangerous. Because it can't be done. He believed you have to recognize your Shadow, come to grips with it, accept it, and integrate it.”

“Make friends with the evil in yourself?”

“Basically. And the South has never done that. We've never truly acknowledged the crime of slavery—not in our collective soul. It's a bit like Germany and the Holocaust, only slavery is much further in the past. Modern generations feel no guilt over it, and it's easy to see why. There's no tangible connection. Slave owners were a tiny minority, and most Southerners see no larger complicity.”

“How does the white South acknowledge the crime?”

“It'll never happen.
That's
what's scary about what Shad Johnson is doing. Because the day of reckoning always comes, when everything you've tried to repress rears up in the road to meet you. Whatever you bury deepest is always waiting for the moment of greatest stress to explode to the surface.”

“You're the only white person in this town who's said anything like this to me. How did you turn out so different?”

“That's a story for another day. But I want you to be clear that I think the North is as guilty as the South when it comes to blacks.”

“You don't really believe that.”

“You're damn right I do. I may criticize the South when I'm in it, but when I'm in the North, I defend Mississippi to the point of blows. Prejudice in the North isn't as open, but it's just as destructive. Most Yankees have no concept of living in a town—I mean
in
a town—that is fifty percent black. No idea of the warmth that can exist between black and white on a daily basis, and has here for years.”

“Oh, come
on
.”

“What happened in Boston when they tried busing?”

“That's a different issue.”

“Watts. Detroit. Skokie. Rodney King. O.J.”

She sighs. “Are we going to refight the Civil War here?”

“How long have you lived here, Caitlin?”

“Sixteen months.”

“You could live here sixteen years and you'd still be on the outside. And you can't understand this place until you see it from the inside.”

“You're talking about the social cliques?”

“Not exactly. Society is different here. It's not just tiers of wealth. Old money may run out, but the power lingers. Blood still means something down here. Not to me, but to a lot of people.”

“Sounds like Boston.”

“I imagine it is. The structure is concentric circles, and as you move toward the center, the levels of knowledge increase.”

“Were your parents born here?”

“No, but my father's a doctor, and doctors get a backstage pass. Probably because their profession puts them in a position to learn secrets anyway. And there are a thousand secrets in this town.”

“Name one.”

“Well . . . what about the Del Payton case?”

“Who's Del Payton?”

“Delano Payton was a black factory worker who got blown up in his car outside the Triton Battery plant in 1968. It was a race murder, like a dozen
others in Mississippi, only it was never solved. I'm not sure anybody really tried to solve it. Payton was a decorated combat veteran of the Korean War. And I'll bet you a thousand dollars we're sitting within five miles of his murderers right now.”

Excitement and awe fill her eyes. “Are you serious? Did the
Examiner
cover the murder?”

“I don't know. I was eight years old then. I do know Dan Rather came down with a half dozen network correspondents. The FBI was up in arms, and two of their agents were shot at on the road between here and Jackson.”

“Why was Payton murdered?”

“He was about to be hired for a job that until then had been held exclusively by whites.”

“The police must have had some idea who did it.”

“Everybody knew who did it. Racist cowards motivated by the tacit encouragement of white leaders who knew better. A year before, they bombed another black guy at the same plant, but he survived. My father treated him. This guy was on the hospital phone with Bobby Kennedy every day, had guards all around his room, the works.”

“This is great stuff. My aunt went to school with Bobby.”

Her self-centered dilettantism finally puts me over the edge. “Caitlin, you're so transparent. You want to hear the same thing every other Northern journalist wants to hear: that the Klan is alive and well, that the South is as Gothic and demonic as it ever was. Terrible things did happen here in the sixties, and people who knew better turned a blind eye. As a boy I watched the Klan march robed on horseback right out there on Main Street. City police directed traffic for them. But that has nothing to do with Natchez as it is today.”

“How can you say that?”

“You want to assign guilt? The
Examiner
printed the time of that Klan march but refused to print the time or location of a single civil rights meeting. Is the
Examiner
the same newspaper it was then?”

She ignores the question. “Why haven't I heard people talking about the Payton case before? Even the African Americans don't talk about it.”

“Because if you live here, you want to make the best life you can. Stirring up the past doesn't help anybody.”

“But cases like this are being reopened every day, right here in Mississippi. The Byron de la Beckwith case. The retrial of Sam Bowers, the Klan Wizard from Laurel. You must know that the state recently opened the secret files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission?”

“So?”

“The Sovereignty Commission was like a racist KGB. They kept files not
only on African Americans but on hundreds of whites suspected of liberal sympathies.”

“So?”

Caitlin looks at me in bewilderment. “So?
Newsweek
just ran a big piece on it, and Peter Jennings's people have been calling around the state, trolling for stories. The Payton case could be reopened at any time.”

“Glad to hear it. Justice should be better served than it was in Natchez in 1968. But this isn't some old trial with an all-white hung jury. This is an unsolved murder. A capital murder. No defendant. No suspects, as far as I know. No crime scene. Old or dead witnesses—”

“Nobody said winning a Pulitzer is easy.”

A light clicks on in my head. “Ah. That's the plan? Winning a Pulitzer before you're thirty?”

She gives me a sly smile. “Before I'm twenty-nine.
That's
the plan.”

“God help this town.”

Her laugh is full and throaty, one I'd expect from an older woman. “Did you know that some of the Sovereignty Commission files are going to remain sealed?”

“No.”

“Forty-two of them. Some of them on major politicians. I heard Trent Lott's was one of them, but that turned out to be wrong.”

“That's no surprise. A lot of the most sensitive files were destroyed years ago.”

“Why haven't you explored any of this in your novels?”

“A sense of loyalty to the place that bore me, I suppose. A lot of people would have to die before I could write a book like that.”

“So, until then you write fluff and take the easy money?”

“I don't write fluff.”

She holds up her hands in contrition. “I know. I did a Nexis search on you.
Publishers Weekly
named
False Witness
the fourth-best legal thriller ever written.”

“After what?”

“
Anatomy of a Murder
,
The Caine Mutiny
, and
Presumed Innocent
.”

“That's pretty good company,” I murmur, painfully aware that
False Witness
was four books ago.

“Yes, but it just seems so obvious that you should be writing about all this. Write what you know! You know?”

Caitlin picks up the check and walks over to the cash register, her movements fluid and graceful despite the phenomenal energy that animates her. The restaurant is empty now but for the cashier and our waitress, who chooses this
moment to come forward with her copy of
False Witness
. I take the book, open it to the flyleaf, and accept the pen she offers.

“Would you like me to personalize it?”