The Truth Hurts (3 page)

B
ETRAYAL

By Marie Lightfoot

—•—

CHAPTER TWO

June 11–12, 1963

Alabama

T
hey sped on, scared, with few words among them.

Miles down the road, the white men told James to duck down again.

Sometime later, when he felt the car slow to a crawl and then begin a winding climb up a gravel road, the one riding shotgun said quietly, “When we stop, open the door on your side as quietly as you can, just enough to get out of the car. There will be a door to a house right beside you. It’s unlocked. Run in. That’ll be where you stay for a few days until it’s safe to take you north. When you get inside, don’t turn on a light. Close and lock the door. There will be a bathroom for you. Clothes. Water. Food. Stay in there until someone comes to you in the morning. Oh, and unlock the door in the morning so they can get in.”

The one beside him muttered, “Good luck, James.”

The Plymouth stopped. Austin Reeves, the driver, said, “Go!”

Without another word, without pausing to thank them or even knowing if he should feel grateful—for who knew how this would end?—James did exactly as they directed him to do.

He found himself inside a bedroom. The only light slipped in around the drawn curtains at the window, and that derived from the moon. But he could see enough to tell it was all as they’d said it would be. There was a bottle of cool milk on a table under the window in the light of the moon, and he gulped it down like food. It was a few moments before he realized he hadn’t heard them drive away. He peeked out the window. They were gone, whoever they were. Wherever this was they’d brought him. In the single fast look he allowed himself, all he saw was a gravel driveway and a tree, a magnolia, its large, shiny leaves reflecting moonlight. But nothing about what he saw told him where he was. It could be anywhere, or at least that’s what he thought until he turned around again. He could make things out better in the darkness now.

No, James decided then, this couldn’t be “anywhere.” It was too nice, too grand for that. James had never been in a bedroom so nice. He’d never lived in a house with indoor plumbing, much less one with a bedroom with its own private toilet and bathtub and shower. For a dangerous instant, James wanted to laugh out loud, because he didn’t know if he could figure out how to make all the fancy white knobs work right in the bathroom.

When he ran water in the tub—figuring it out at the same time that he realized it didn’t take a genius to use inside plumbing—he nearly fainted when water pipes rattled and rumbled in telltale betrayal of his presence there. But the people who owned this house must know he was there, they must be on his side, he figured, and he relaxedenough to sink down into the first real tub bath of his eighteen years.

After that, he slept as if he had no worries but an empty stomach.

In the morning, he found food in the room, supplies that he hadn’t seen in the dark the night before when he’d been so hungry he thought his stomach would keep him awake all night. Now he saw that in a corner there was a large tray of food covered by a dark cloth. There had been crackers there all along, salami, milk that was warm now, though he drank it anyway. There was bread and cheese that had gone dark orange from sitting out too long, but he ate that, too. There was even a cake—an entire chocolate two-layer cake with chocolate icing—and a basket of cold fried chicken and another one of biscuits that were still soft inside even if their crusts had gone rock hard. It was the best meal he’d ever eaten outside of his grandma’s Sunday dinner, and the only reason her meals took first place over this one was that he had sat around her table in safety and contentment. Here, he ate alone with his worry about what was going to happen to him next. This was operating like a modern-day underground railroad, he understood that much by this point. So he supposed they’d come for him and move him along to another safe place and then another until he could catch a train or a bus or hitch a ride up north.

It wasn’t safe for him down home anymore, not since this last arrest.

Not that it had ever been “safe,” really. But James had no desire whatsoever to live anyplace but in the South. He’d heard about northern winters and hard factory work that sounded less like opportunity than it did like slow tedious death. But he did want to remain alive long enough to land someplace where he might have a chance to make his own decisions about his own life. He didn’t know if thatwas possible for a black man anywhere in the world. But he knew for sure that possibility was gone for him in Alabama now and probably in any of the neighboring states. He’d been in jail too often; he was too well known by law enforcement and by white supremacists groups, which were not always two different things. He was thought of as a troublemaker now, an agitator. He knew what happened more often than not to young Negro men who got themselves into this fix. Their own people got too scared or resentful to take them in—a lot of Negroes hated the protests and the voter registration efforts, because it rocked a boat that was already overweighted with fear and trouble. So there was probably no place for him to go and be safe around here, no place his own people would welcome him. And now, wherever he showed up, he’d be a marked man—the first to be noticed, the one to be beaten, jailed again, rendered ineffectual through sustained, vicious persecution by the people with the power.

There’s no such thing as home anymore, James thought, and he felt as if he’d drown in the wave of anger and loneliness, of pure sorrow, that swept over him then. His “home” at the moment was this room out of a fantasy. He could be lost in space, for all he knew.

Then he heard the sounds of other people in the house, a murmur of many voices—a woman’s laugh—a rattle of pans so close it made him jump off the bed, because it startled and frightened him. He spent the day listening closely, getting an impression of a family living on the other side of the wall. There was a man, a woman, at least one child, a baby. Those three were white people, he judged. There were two others who sounded like black women, just on the other side, and he guessed one was a cook, the other a housecleaner. He could hear them clearly, talking housework, a little gossip about people he’d never heard of, except one time when he thought one ofthem mentioned “Mr. Lackley.” That would be Lackley Goodwin, James thought, one of the three men who’d delivered him here. He never heard his own name, or any mention of the room he waited in.

No one visited him that day, though he sat nervously with the door unlocked.

But after dark, there was a soft movement at the door to his room. He watched the door slowly open, saw a tray with plates of food inched onto the floor and got only a glimpse of a pretty, soft black face. She was young, and she couldn’t see him, because he was standing behind the door, looking at her in a mirror above a dressing table.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She jumped, then whispered, “Rachel.”

“Thank you, Rachel.”

A hesitation, then, “That’s all right.”

She left the food for him, quietly closing the door behind her. James felt desolate when she closed the door. He wanted to cry out, Wait! Loneliness besieged him again. He missed her, without even knowing her. But he didn’t feel so bad that he couldn’t eat what she’d left for him. He wondered why she couldn’t come in and then he realized she might have been scared. Grateful for the hot food and cold milk, if resentful about being treated like he was dangerous or invisible, James wolfed it down.

Nothing happened until four hours later.

There was yelling.

That was the first hint that something was wrong in the other part of the house. They weren’t screams like there was someone in terror or pain. But they were sudden, loud, urgent, a man’s voice shouting, “Lyda! Lyda!” Then silence. Then a muffled sound of feet running on stairs, of doors slamming. Briefly, James heard water running in the kitchen on the other side of the wall where earlier that day he had heard voices that sounded like black women.

Then, so abruptly that it made him bolt off the bed and stand at rigid attention, the outside and only door to his room banged open, thrust back against the inside wall. A white woman ran in and said, in what he would always think of later as a breathless shout, even though it may have been merely a whisper: “You have to get out of here. People are coming for you. Be ready. I’m sorry. God be with you.”

He had a fleeting impression of beauty, of a ghostly presence, a small blond woman dressed in white. Strangely, later, he thought he remembered bare feet, pale, thin, tiny bare feet. Was she beautiful? He wasn’t sure. Was she as delicate in appearance as she was small in stature? He couldn’t have said, though he thought she was. What about her voice, was it light, soprano, alto, hoarse? A whispered shout was the only way he knew to describe what he remembered hearing that night. As quick as anything, she was gone again, leaving the door standing wide open behind her.

Shocked, frightened, James crossed to the window to peek out from behind the curtain, not daring to risk standing revealed in the open doorway. It was night again, not yet twenty-four hours since he’d arrived on the previous evening. The magnolia leaves looked black, the moon was one night thinner. He would never see this house or its grounds, never know exactly where he had been, or who had hidden him there, except that later that night his next deliverers—two different white people this time, one man and one woman—would slip and mention names.

“The Folletinos. Michael. Lyda.”

He would never be able to remember the whole context in which those names were set down. He only knew they were the identities of the people in whose bedroom he had spent the most luxurious night and day of his life up to then, the people who had provided him with clean clothes that fit and with good nourishing food and milkand white sheets and a pillow with an envelope of lacy white cloth.

“Where are your old clothes?” whispered the white woman who came with the white man in the car that crawled up the gravel drive to pick him up and take him away again. Not daring to speak, he jerked his thumb back over his shoulder.

“Get them,” she mouthed at him.

Thank God for the big blue towels that were damp and dirty from his repeated washings and dryings of his own soiled self. Only by placing them between his body and his old clothes could he stand to pick up his jail clothes again. Even in the rush, the air of emergency, he had the thought: I hope these towels cover the smell.

They made him lie down in the backseat, like before, only this time he had the whole seat to himself and could stretch out more.

Nobody spoke, nobody explained anything, though at one point in the front passenger’s seat the woman began to cry. He was sure those were the soft sounds he heard. The man said nothing. Soon, the soft sounds of a woman crying stopped. It was then that she said a sentence that had the words
the Folletinos
in it, the sentence that informed James those were the people who owned the house. It also told him—he could not later explain why—that the white people in the front seat were angry, bitter, and sad about the owners of the house.

That was all he knew and all he would ever know for many years about those strange, somber, terrifying forty-eight hours in his life. He landed—two days later and many days ahead of schedule—at his sister’s ex-brother-in-law’s apartment in Cincinnati.

“How’d you get here?” they all wanted to know.

He had no urge to tell them. For one thing, he had no desire to give white people any credit, and he still wasn’t surethey deserved it, because he didn’t yet know how his new life would turn out. He felt a deep, burning resentment over the fact that a few—goddamned precious few, he suspected—white people might have been heroes in his life; he hated that, didn’t want it to be true, wanted to have survived entirely on his own, or solely with the assistance of Negroes like himself. Beyond that, he felt deep inside himself that betrayal was in the air, permeating everyplace he stepped, but that he, himself, would never contribute to it. He vowed to always remember everything he could, but he would keep those memories to himself until he began to meet a few others like himself. Once, one of them—another black man—said the name Folletino, and James perked up his ears.

“Who’re they?” he asked, cautiously.

“Racists,” the other guy informed him. “Dead ones.”

“But—” James started to say, then didn’t. It was an unusual name, but it must be different people. It didn’t make any sense if it was the same people who had hidden him and warned him to get out. Fed him. He wondered what had happened that night to those people. Maybe someday, if the world ever changed enough, if it was ever safe to go home again, he’d try to look them up, find them, ask them, maybe even say thanks. By that time in his life, James had already learned that heroes and villains came in all colors, and that he didn’t need any white people to betray him; like anybody else, he could betray himself well enough.

3
Marie

This isn’t actually my car, it’s a rental, because mine’s in the shop. But the cell phone’s all mine. I pick it up and punch in a number for my cousin, in Los Angeles. I’d better warn Nathan about this article, so he can let his parents know. I feel better, just thinking of calling him.

Before I can even say hello, he says, “Hey, Marie.”

“Damn,” I reply. “Sometimes I hate caller I.D. I can’t call and surprise you anymore.”

“Yeah, and it’s a lot harder to make dirty phone calls.”

As we both laugh, I imagine Nate seated in his office in his gorgeous cottage in the Hollywood Hills. He’s three years younger and much more glamorous than I am. He’s got F. Scott Fitzgerald’s golden, chiseled looks with the kind of light blue eyes that romance novels call “startling,” and he dresses to match. He’s athletic and slim and only slightly taller than I am, and I’m only five two. Even in these days of cancer warnings, he keeps his tan up, looking nothing like a grubby novelist, and not much like most other screenwriters I know, either. People stare at him wherever he goes, and it’s amazing to be around him because of that. There’s more than a touch of the dandy to my cousin, but he’s so unusual and pretty to look at, you just have to forgive him for that. Besides, there’s a horrible reason that he works so hard to keep up appearances. Nathan Montgomery is probably the most successful failed screenwriter in Los Angeles. He gets lucrative options on almost every screenplay he writes, but not a one of them has ever made it all the way through the pipeline to production. Not one. It’s enough to break a writer’s heart. I don’t know how he keeps going. I couldn’t do it. I think, What if I wrote book after book and they all got bought by publishers, but they never made it into print? No, it’s too damned hard. I couldn’t bear it. Like me, my cousin makes lots of money; unlike me, he has never had the satisfaction that comes from other people enjoying the finished creation.

“How you doin’, Nathan? Do you have time to talk to me?”

“Of course, always, t’sup?”

“How do you know something’s up?”

“I can hear it in your voice. You sound like you’re thinking, I’ve got to be polite and find out how Nathan is, but I hope he tells me quick, ’cause I’ve got stuff on my mind.”

“Ah, I’m too easy.”

“So, t’sup?”

When I finish telling him about the tabloid story, he only laughs at me. “Marie, it was almost forty years ago! And it was them, not you. Nobody’s going to hold you responsible for what your parents did! Hell, you can’t even be accused of having come under their influence, since they made pretty damned sure they wouldn’t be around to shape your life in any way. I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic, but I don’t see why you’re so upset about this.”

“Nathan!”

“I’m sorry, I don’t. So you haven’t told the world all this. That’s your right, Marie. And now all you have to do is explain that it was too painful to talk about—I mean, your own parents disappeared, for God’s sake. You were just a baby! And worse luck, you landed with Julie and Joe, who are nobody’s candidates for parents of the century. Marie, people will understand why you chose to keep quiet about this. They’ll probably even admire you for not turning your private tragedy into publicity for your career. I mean, who is ever so discreet anymore? You’ll probably make the Ten Most Admired List, just for keeping your mouth shut for all these years. People will be grateful that they didn’t have to watch you angst all over their televisions. Nobody’s going to think less of you because of this, Marie. And if Franklin does, or his family does, then maybe you ought to think less of them.”

“Hey. I’m supposed to be the big sister who lectures you.”

“Yeah, well, you’re hysterical. Somebody’s got to be in charge.”

“It’s not just what people will think of me, Nathan.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s what people will think of them.”

“Who?”

“Mom and Dad. Michael and Lyda.”

I never know what to call them, how to refer to them. My parents.

“Marie, I hate to break it to you, but they deserve it.”

I don’t say anything. I’m thinking about what I do for a living. I write about mysteries. Murders. Disappearances. Terrible crimes. Tragedies that happen to perfectly innocent people who don’t seem to deserve their fates. I go to a lot of trouble to explain why these things happen. Who did them. Why they did them. Why victims become victims and killers become killers. I explain where and when and every detail of how so that people can understand as much as it is humanly possible to understand how such awful things can occur. Maybe I can’t just write off my parents, because I want to understand them. Maybe I want to understand them, because I want to forgive them. But how can I, ever?

“You can deal with this, Marie. What the hell, it’s only publicity.”

“And any publicity—”

“Is good publicity. Yeah, baby.”

“Love you.”

“Too.”

Of course, we’re too cute to bear when we get like this, and we probably ought to stop using that infantile farewell from our childhoods. But we cling, there’s no way around it, even acontinent apart, Nathan and I still cling to each other. I hope he hasn’t just said all that to make me feel better; I hope he’s got the right bead on things, but I don’t know why I’d think he would, since he never has before.

Speaking of preparing somebody for embarrassment, I punch in the number of the Howard County state attorney’s office and leave a message on his voice mail: “Franklin, look up the Web site for that tabloid newspaper that’s called
The Insider.
There’s a story about me that you’d better read, and the sooner the better. It mentions you. I’ll talk to you later. I’m really sorry about this.”

It’s still early, only 10:30
A.M.
My assistant is due at eleven. I feel an inner cringe, thinking of having to show this article to Deborah Dancer. While it’s true that my boyfriend knows everything about my family that I know, I’ve never felt an obligation to divulge it all to Deb. I think she kind of idolizes me, and I think I’ve kind of enjoyed it. What is she going to think now, of working for a boss who’s been labeled racist, and who didn’t even prepare her for the possibility of this embarrassment?

Having been lectured by a loving but astringent cousin, I drive home feeling as if I’ve been patted on one cheek and slapped upside the other. Which is pretty much how I felt years ago when I interviewed people who knew my parents. Few of them could seem to make up their minds whether they loved the Folletinos or hated them, including “James.” It was he who originally clued me in to the historical enormity of June 12, 1963, the night my parents “left.”

“First I was in jail,” he told me, “and then I was on the run, so I didn’t even know that it was a hell of a week in the South.”