Chapter 20

I LAUGHED AT MYSELF, then pulled on the latch. The window slid down easily. “I guess strength doesn’t help,” I said, “if you don’t have some brains to go along with it.”

My fellow traveler was middle-aged, paunchy, seemingly well-to-do, with a florid complexion and a gold watch fob of unmistakable value. He put out his hand.

“Henley McNeill,” he said. “Grain trader. I’m from Jackson.”

“I’m Benjamin Corbett. Attorney at law. From Washington.”

“Miss’ippi?” he said.

“No, sir. Washington, D.C. ”

“Well, you are one very tall attorney, Mr. Corbett. I would bet those Pullman berths play havoc with the sleep of a man your size.”

I smiled. “I’ve spent my whole life in beds that are too short and bumping into ceilings that are too low.”

He laughed and put away the book he’d been reading.

“Are you a journalist, too?” Henley McNeill asked.

“No.”

“Well, I only ask on account of I saw you reading all those newspapers.”

I decided to see where the truth might take me. “I was doing a little research… on the history of lynching.”

He blinked, but otherwise betrayed no reaction. “Lynching,” he said. “In that case, newspapers might not be your best source of information.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well, sir, in my view, the newspapers don’t always tell the truth.

“Let me give you a point of observation,” McNeill continued. “Now, this is just the opinion of one man. But I’m a man who’s spent his whole life right here in Mississippi. And my daddy fought for the Confederacy alongside Braxton Bragg at Stones River.”

Henley McNeill seemed like a sensible fellow. This was the very type of man Roosevelt had in mind when he sent me down here to speak with the locals.

“The white man doesn’t hate the colored man,” he said. “The white man is just afraid of the colored man.”

“Afraid?”

“Not afraid in the way you think. He’s not afraid the colored man’s going to rape his wife or his daughter. Although, let’s be honest, if you turned a colored man loose on white women with no laws against it, there’s no telling what might happen.”

He leaned forward in his seat, speaking intensely. “What genuinely scares the white man is that the colored is going to suck up all the jobs from the whites. You just got out of Memphis, you saw how it is. It’s the same in all the big cities- Nashville, New Orleans, Atlanta. You got thousands and thousands of Negroes running around looking for jobs. And every one of ’em willing to work cheaper than the white man, be they a field hand, a factory hand, or what have you.”

I told McNeill that I understood what he was saying. In fact, it was not the first time I’d heard that theory.

“Yes, sir,” he went on. “The black man has got to figure out a way to get along peaceable with the white man, without taking his job away from him.”

He paused a moment, then leaned in to tap the side of my valise with an insistent finger. A smile spread over his face.

“And if the black man don’t come to understand this,” he said, “why, I reckon we’ll just have to wipe him out.”

Chapter 21

HOME AGAIN.

Home to the town where I learned to read, write, and do my multiplication tables. Home to the town where my mama fell ill, stayed ill for many years, and died, and where my father was long known as “the only honest judge in Pike County.”

My town, a little over three thousand souls, where I once set the Mississippi state record for the hundred-yard dash, shortly before I broke my leg in a fall from a barn roof. Where Thomas McGoey, the mail carrier, rang our doorbell and personally presented me with the letter announcing I’d been accepted at Harvard.

The last time I’d been home to Eudora was for my mother’s funeral, six years ago. I remember being startled at the time by how much the town had changed. Most astonishing to me then were the two gas-powered motorcars parked beside the hitching posts.

Many other things had changed since that last mournful journey to my birthplace. But on this day, while I waited for Eudora Station’s one ancient porter to summon the energy to unload my trunk, I found myself amazed to see how much this lazy little town resembled the one I knew when I was a boy.

The early-summer heat remained as overwhelming as I remembered, the whitish sun seeming to press down on everything under its gaze. The First Bank, Sanders’ General Store, the Purina feed and seed, the Slide Inn Café-everything was just the same.

Eudora Town Hall still featured an oversized Confederate stars-and-bars hanging in the second-floor window above the portico. The same faded red-and-white-striped barber’s pole stood outside the shop with the sign that said “Hair Cuts, Shaves, & Tooth Extractions”-although no one had gone to Ezra Newcomb for a bad tooth since the first real dentist moved to town when I was eleven.

One difference I noticed immediately was that many of the doorways-at the depot, at the little vaudeville theater, at the Slide Inn-now bore signs marking certain entrances as “White” or “Colored.” When I was a boy, everyone knew which places were for whites and which for Negroes.

At last the porter approached with my trunk and valises, accompanied by a gangly colored teenager. The porter asked, “Will we be taking these to your father’s house, Mr. Corbett?”

I frowned. “How’d you know my name?”

“Well, suh, the stationmaster tol’ me to hurry up and go help Judge Corbett’s boy with his trunk, so I purt’ much figured it out from there.”

I gave the old man a dime and offered another dime to the boy if he would carry my luggage on to my destination. He threw that heavy trunk up on his shoulders as if it contained nothing but air and picked up my pair of valises with one large hand.

“I’ll be staying at Maybelle Wilson’s,” I said. “I’m here on business.”

We crossed to the First Bank and turned left onto Commerce Street. It was right then that I had the feeling that I had entered into one of Mr. H. G. Wells’s fabled time-transport machines. “My God,” I said under my breath. “How can this be?”

Chapter 22

THERE BEFORE ME was my first sweetheart, Elizabeth Begley, instantly recognizable with her blond curls, her delicate face, a sweet young girl in a pretty pink-checked sundress.

I realized with a start this was neither a dream nor a memory. This really was Elizabeth Begley. And she truly was eleven years old!

Then I saw the very real and very grown-up Elizabeth Begley step out of Ida Simmons’s notions shop and call out to the little girl standing before me.

“Emma? You wait right there for me.”

I called out Elizabeth ’s name. She turned, and her face lit up instantly.

“Why, good Lord! Ben Corbett! The heat must have gone to my eyes. This cannot be you!”

“It’s Ben, all right. Your eyesight is just fine.”

As was everything else about her. Elizabeth looked as beautiful as when I used to sneak glances at her all through our school years together. If anything, she’d gotten even prettier as a woman.

“Well, Ben, what brings you back to our little nothing of a town?” she asked.

I told myself to close my mouth, which had fallen open in astonishment, partly at the chance meeting, but also at the sight of this lovely woman.

“Oh, just some work for the government. Interviewing candidates for the federal bench, potential judges. And I suppose I needed a breath of good old Mississippi fresh air.”

“Honey, everybody in town is just gonna be beside themselves with excitement to see you,” Elizabeth said and beamed. “The famous Ben Corbett, the one we all thought had gone off forever to be a Yankee lawyer, has finally come for a visit! I know your father must be thrilled.”