The Truth Hurts (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE

June 11, 1963

Alabama

^“
W
e’re taking you to a house where there’s a room prepared for you. You won’t be the first man to stay there.”

His name was James.

He was very black, very scared, very angry, very young. Only eighteen. He’d gotten into a car with three white men who said they were there to help him. He hadn’t quite believed them, but refusing them had looked more dangerous than going with them. He had just been kicked out—literally in the seat of his pants onto the pavement in front of the Stuart County Jail—and he knew that if he hung around it would be bad for him. It wasn’t his town, it was a white town. Worse, he didn’t know a soul in the tiny black neighborhood, and even if he did, who was going to risk themselves for him, anyway?

If only he had a buddy, he thought, then maybe hewouldn’t have had to get into a car with these white men. He knew he’d feel braver in the company of a black friend. Maybe together they could have walked away, stolen away over fences and across the cotton fields. But everybody else who had been arrested at the voter registration line in Beauchamp three weeks ago was either still back there in that jail hellhole, or they’d already been sprung.

As the Plymouth sped along dark back roads, James was afraid to talk, but he had a million questions in his mind—who are you guys, why are you doing this for me, where are you taking me?

“You won’t be the first man to stay there,” the driver had said.

James had heard that word,
man
—heard the white man say it—and felt so overwhelmed by it that he nearly missed hearing the rest of what was said. Never, never before in his whole eighteen years had he ever—ever—heard a white man call a black male a man. He was so accustomed to being called boy that to hear this white man call him a man nearly knocked him over with shock. If he never heard it another time in his life, it would still be proof of something he had long disbelieved, evidence that had always eluded him that white people—some white people, maybe only these three out of all the world, for all he knew—could change. For whatever reason, whether they really wanted to, or not, apparently they could change the habit of their minds and their mouths.

His grandmother had always told him so. “You foolin’ youself, Grandma,” he had always shot back at her.

They made him fold himself in half in the backseat of the Plymouth so he wouldn’t be seen, which meant that he didn’t know that night that he was being delivered into the heart of whiteness, as he would call it ever after. All he knew was the information that his own senses delivered to him moment by moment—the rank smell of his own body,the feel of rough upholstery under his cheek, the sight of the plastic back of the driver’s seat, the bitter taste of his own unwashed mouth, and the oppressive sound of the silence among the four men in the Plymouth, a silence broken only by the hum of the tires on the road below him.

After a while, he decided that it wasn’t that they were ignoring him by not talking to him, it was more like they were even more scared than he was.

This was a revelation to him, too.

But he could see it clearly—the fear on their white faces, the tense way the driver stared straight ahead at the road, the way the shotgun passenger kept looking around in every direction, and how the man who sat in the backseat with James kept glancing out the back window, as if he was looking for headlights that might suddenly appear on the road. It was only their fear, their obvious fear, that kept James from believing he was being driven off to be lynched in the dark woods.

If these three white men were going to do that to him, they wouldn’t be scared like this, he figured. They’d be excited, maybe, and drunk, and maybe a little bit scared, but not much, because who was going to stop them and even if they got stopped, what cop was going to interfere? Or even if a cop did that much, like stop the car, make them all get out, that would be the end of it for the driver and his friends, and the cop would just take James back to jail for “protective custody.”

Or turn him loose on these white roads in the dark.

No, they were too scared for that possibility, he believed. Wanted to believe. So maybe they really were in the Movement. He’d heard of white people who risked their lives for it—like those Christians who hid Jews in Germany—but he’d never believed it, not really. His other grandma had always warned him to never trust a whiteperson,because when push came to shove, he was the one who was going to get pushed and shoved.

It was miles before somebody finally said something.

“Anybody coming?” the driver asked the white man in back.

“No,” answered the one beside James. He removed his gaze from the receding blacktop road long enough to say to James, “We’re on a timetable. We have to pass by a certain house in Stebanville within a certain time span so they know we’ve made it safe that far. Then we’ve got three other times to meet before we get you to where you’re going to be for a while.”

James didn’t move from his doubled-over position.

“It’s probably safe for you to sit up now,” the man beside him said.

He unfolded himself slowly. Even then, he listened to them with bent face and lowered eyes, in the subservient posture in which he’d always listened to white people. He wanted to blurt out “Where you takin’ me?” but he didn’t, he just listened hard. He felt ashamed. He knew he smelled. When the guards at the jail had hung him from the water pipes by his wrists two days ago, he had tried desperately to control himself, but finally his bladder had let loose and he had soiled himself inside his trousers. At least he had managed to hang on to his bowels, but when you didn’t get near washing water for three weeks and you lived in a ten-by-ten cell with five other men and an open hole in the ground for a toilet and people getting sick all around you, there wasn’t any chance you were going to come out smelling anything but rank. No shave in three weeks, either. He was ashamed to feel so offensive. A small, toughened part of him found humor in thinking that was the true proof of the helpful intent of these men: nobody but do-gooder Movement white people could have stood to ride for hours like thisin a closed car with him. It was so cool outside on this June night that they had to keep the windows rolled up all but a crack.

As if he’d read James’s mind, the driver suddenly said, “I’m sorry we couldn’t stop to let you clean up. You must feel like shit.”

“I smell like it,” James mumbled.

He saw the man beside him smile in the darkness.

“If you can stand to wait,” the driver continued, “there’s a place up ahead where it’ll be safe to pull in long enough for you to shower and they’ll give you clean clothing.”

“I can stand it,” he made himself say, in spite of his resistance to talking to them, “if you guys can.”

They laughed at that, too hard, too loud, from too much tension.

James felt the mood shift in the Plymouth then. There was a thaw, a sense that they were all in this together, whatever “this” was. James was pretty sure that he knew exactly what it was. Black people who persisted in trying to obtain their right to vote—their right to anything—tended to end up in jail, and when they got out they then tended to end up beaten, burned, hung, and dead. Especially young black men labeled “troublemakers,” like him.

They introduced themselves to him. “I’m Marty Wiegan,” the man next to him said, and then Wiegan pointed to the driver. “That’s Austin Reese.” He pointed to the man riding shotgun. “And he’s Lackley Goodwin.”

He committed a little something about each of them to memory. Marty Wiegan had thin black hair pulled in strands across his scalp. Austin Reese wore aviator glasses. Lackley Goodwin was fat. When he turned around to look out the rear window he saw a parking sticker for Jim Forrest College on the window. They didn’t look old enough to have kids in college there. Did oneof them work there? That made him nervous all over again, because the school’s slogan was “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever.” What was somebody who worked for Jim Forrest College doing giving him a ride from jail?

“We have a house for you to go to,” the fat man riding shotgun, Lackley Goodwin, told him while continuing to keep an eye on the scenery. “I’m sorry we can’t tell you where. In case we get stopped, it’s safer if you don’t know much. As far as you know, we’re just three crazy strangers giving you a ride home from jail.”

“My home’s not this way,” he told the men.

Apparently, they knew that. They didn’t bother to answer.

“How was it, in jail this time?” the man beside him, Marty Wiegan, asked in a quiet, respectful tone of voice.

They knew a little something about him, then, if they knew it was a “this time.” James turned his face to the window and shook his head, staring out at the trees racing past. He almost didn’t answer, because it was such a stupid question. What did they think it was like this time, or any time? Did he have to explain the word
bad
to them? Did he need to establish a whole new standard of horror for these white people?

“Bad,” he muttered.

“We only ask,” Wiegan said, with an apologetic air, “because we have to document this stuff. I’m sorry to ask you to talk about it, but we have to know, so we can inform the lawyers, so we have specifics to protest, facts to file, you know how it is.”

He didn’t, didn’t know about that end of it, because nobody had ever asked him before now. He only knew about anger and fear, action and reaction. Sometimes—most of the time—he didn’t really believe anything would change. He tended to join marches and voter registrationdrives out of a burning driving resentment more than anything else, and not because he believed any good might come out of it. In fact, only bad had come out of it for him up to now. Only pain, bruises, broken bones, indignity, disrespect, humiliation, failure, degradation, starvation in jail cells, and the impoverishment of somebody who spent too much time being angry and getting thrown in jail to be able to hold down a job. But it wasn’t as if he had any real job prospects in the world anyway. As long ago as when he was thirteen—five long years before this—he had decided that if the choice was between being a tenant farmer, which was tantamount to slavery, or being an “activist,” he might as well lay his life down for something more than a few acres of dirt that he’d never own outright.

For the next few miles, in a dry voice, without embellishing anything, James told them how it had been in jail “this time.” Marty Wiegan wrote it all down in a spiral-bound notebook and asked him to sign it, which he did, thinking, What the hell, if they don’t kill me for this, they’ll get me for something else. As he explained things to them, they didn’t say a word, not even a murmur at the worst parts. But he thought he saw shame and pain on their faces—he recognized it because he had seen it every day in the mirror—and that was a revelation, too.

They were approaching a town—a mere pause in the road with only four or five houses—and the driver slowed the car, as if he were going to stop at one of them. But the shotgun passenger said urgently, “There’s a truck around to the side. I don’t know whose it is. Keep going. Don’t stop!”

They held their breaths as they passed the small frame house with its lights on and an old green pickup truck parked in the shadow of it. Frightened into silence again,they kept on driving through the night. The truck didn’t follow them, but they kept on going anyway.

“Just go on to the Folletinos,” the shotgun passenger finally advised in a quiet voice that wasn’t meant to carry over into the backseat, where James heard it, too.

It was the only hint he got of his destination.

2
Marie

Somehow I manage to exit the Publix store, find my way to my car, and collapse into the driver’s seat without having hysterics.

“I’m not going to cry.”

That would be stupid. This was bound to happen someday. Today
The Insider,
tomorrow what?
People?
The Sunday book review of the
New York Times?
I can see it all now—an in-depth analysis of all my books, looking for clues to my past, to my psyche. Well, good luck to them! I’ve never had much luck following those clues to myself.

“Calm down.”

I’m already overreacting; tears would only drown the lily. This is not like me, to panic. I’m
not
going to race back in and purchase every copy of the damned tabloid in order to keep anybody else from seeing it, although God knows, I want to. But I can’t buy all of them in south Florida, much less the whole state, or New York City, where my publisher is, or the rest of the world, where my books are sold. And I’m not going to—

I don’t know what else I’m not going to do.

Thinking straight, that’s apparently one of the things I’m not going to do for a while longer.

What I’m
going
to do is force myself to open the tabloid,
The Insider,
and read what it says about me. “Read it,” I command myself. “It’s just a stupid tabloid story. It can’t hurt you.” Oh yeah? The problem here is that I’m really frightened and full of dread of the unknown, and what I really feel like doing is opening my car door and throwing up.

“Read it!”

I pull the newspaper from the grocery bag and prop it against my steering wheel. My hands are shaking. How interesting. Okay, here it is—the article, with a headline that makes me want to ball this paper up and then rip it to pieces.

M
ARIE
L
IGHTFOOT
H
IDES
R
ACIST
P
AST

“Damn you, damn you, damn you!”

Underneath that, it says, in the tabloid style of short sentences, unattributed quotes, and lots of exclamation marks,

Marie Lightfoot is famous for ripping the covers off other people’s lives in her best-selling books. But in an exclusive
Insider
story, we have just learned she is a stranger to the truth when it comes to her own life!

I’d laugh at the style if it weren’t for the substance.

In fact, Lightfoot is not even her real name, sources tell us.

Sources?
What
sources? Who? The “why” is easy enough to guess—at the bottom of each page there’s a notice saying “Cash for Tips!” and an 800 number for tattlers. It appears that somebody has betrayed me for $500, or more.

The real name of the popular author of
The Little Mermaid
is Marie Folletino. Informed sources tell
The Insider
that she is the only child of well-known segregationists from Alabama!

“They were racists of the very worst sort!” our sources tell
The Insider.
“They belonged to the KKK, and worse!”

Rumors. Only rumors. Unproved rumors.

And there’s more!

I was afraid there might be.

Both of her parents mysteriously disappeared on June 12, 1963!

They have never been heard from since! Foul play is definitely suspected. But Marie has never divulged THIS true crime to her readers, even going so far as to change her name legally from Folletino to Lightfoot.

And now even her handsome boyfriend, a popular and respected Afro-American prosecutor in Florida, knows the terrible truth about his famous lover.

“His family is furious,” sources tell
The Insider.
“It breaks his children’s hearts to know their father is dating a woman from that kind of family!”

Like most sentences in tabloids, this one is ambiguously close enough to a truth to be un-actionable. I don’t think that anybody in Franklin’s family knows about my family history, but it is certainly true that his ex-wife is “furious” that he’s dating me, and his parents aren’t thrilled that I’m from “that kind of family.” In their lexicon that means “white.” As for “his children’s hearts,” it’s only his six-year-old daughter who dislikes me, not his three-year-old son, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it breaks her heart. At least, I hope not. That would break
my
heart. Did somebody from this rag actually talk to one of the DeWeeses, or did they just make this up, assuming they could link it to some kind of truth?

It hardly matters now. If there’s damage, it’s been done.

Maybe the worst of it is how they’ve trivialized my life.

My God, I hope I’ve never treated any of the people in my books like this. I hope I’ve never made innocent people feel as I do at this moment. I hope I’ve treated them sympathetically, allowed them to continue to hold their heads up even after my books came out. There’s no sympathy in this article for the child I used to be, no respect for the woman she became.

The Insider
says: this is a woman who writes books about the lies and crimes in other people’s lives. Now will she have the decency to face the public with the truth about her own ?

Decency? Why didn’t these people have the decency to call me first?

“What is she hiding ?” our sources want to know.

Why would anybody care?

We want to know, too! Will you tell your readers the truth NOW, Marie ?

Why
should
I? Even if I knew the whole truth, which I don’t.

“What a hypocrite! If she can lie for so many years about her own story,” said a former fan, “then how can we trust her to tell the truth in her books ? If she couldn’t even tell the truth to her own boyfriend, when does she ever tell it to anybody ?”

Oh, please.

“I’ll never buy one of her books again!” said the former fan.

How very convenient that they located an anonymous fan. I wonder if that might be one of their own editors?

Let us know what YOU think!

E-mail, call, or write to
The Insider
today!

That’s it. But now I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It looks so ridiculous, written like that. Surely any halfway intelligent person who reads it will have to wonder if they made it all up. But that won’t help with the people who
aren’t
halfway intelligent. And it won’t stop the story from spreading. It won’t stop rumors. It won’t stop my name from being linked with the damning word
racist.
It won’t stop people from hearing those rumors and believing them and deciding I’m a horrible person and they don’t want to read me anymore. And if enough people decide I’m despicable and they stop buying my books, then my publisher won’t want to publish me anymore.

“Stop it,” I command myself. “Don’t get maudlin.”

But I can’t stop people from seeing this, and I can’t stop the story from being almost true. I’ve written down some of it, the parts I think I know from questions I’ve asked of people over the years. I’ve even given it a title—
Betrayal
—in case I ever gather enough material to finish a book about it. I’ve got the beginning of it, the part I like, the part that could fool a person into thinking that Michael and Lyda Folletino were decent people.

It’s the ending—their ending—that eludes me.

A man named “James” was witness to part of it.

When I met him, “James” was only one on a list of several names that I’d compiled of people who might be able to talk about my parents. By the time I tracked him down he was fifty-two years old, living in the North. He told me that he still wanted to be identified only as “James.” He was an attorney by then—in his expensive gray suit, he looked like one—and when I interviewed him, he called himself “a compromised man.”

“I used to be principled,” he told me. “I once was brave and young and foolish and desperate. I think I liked myself better when I was desperate. Sometimes, I wish I was still afraid to die.”