lively debate, although maybe a bit confrontational—but in the end, no more outrageous than behavior I’d observed in other tipsy, aging parents, including mine. But as Mary Pell, accompanied by a black man I assumed was Willie Snow, moved silently about the dining room clearing the main course, Everett Hall went after his son.
“Bradford, let me guess. You’ve induced Mr. Harper to come down here to help in your little wild goose chase.”
“I wouldn’t call it a goose chase.”
“I would. You propose to solve a killing that was thoroughly investigated twenty years ago.”
“If there was an investigation, it wasn’t good enough to find the killer.”
Everett Hall sighed. “Son, you’re stirring up things that don’t need to be stirred up. That editorial in The Reporter was stupid and naïve. It’s an embarrassment and everyone in town knows you’re behind it. How do you even know the kid was murdered?”
“For God’s sake, father! He was shot in the head with a deer rifle!”
“Probably by his own kind,” Everett Hall said, as Willie Snow swept up the crumbs that were left on the table. “Most killings of blacks are by blacks. Black-on-black crime. They keep killing each other off.”
Mr. Hall paused for emphasis, then, looking squarely at me and paying absolutely no heed to the fact that two black people bustled around his dinner table, added, “Which is just fine with me.”
“Father!” Brad and Lindsay said in horror.
“What? Nothing against the blacks. It’s just natural selection. People generally get what they deserve. The strong live and the weak die. It’s true of any race. Ain’t that right, Willie Snow?” Mercifully, the man had disappeared.
Mr. Hall did not let up.
“The kid probably deserved it. Probably a troublemaker.”
“Not based on what we learned at his house.”
“You went to his goddam house?” Mr. Hall asked. “In niggertown?”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that word. It’s an embarrassment.”
Everett Hall stared at his son. “Bradford, it’s your actions that are the embarrassment. I forbid you to continue. I will not have my son poking around niggertown and getting everybody riled up over some dead nigger kid. Except for you, no one cares.”
In the course of a short evening, Everett Hall had insulted me, my profession, black people, and his own son. I thought about the promise I had made to myself in junior high when a bully teased a black girl about her kinky hair and I had said nothing. As the girl cried in front of her locker and tried desperately to brush her hair straight, my brother Luke had tracked down the bully and made him apologize. “Nothing is funny when it’s at someone else’s expense,” Luke had explained. I had promised myself then that I would never stay silent again.
“I’ll tell you who cares,” I interjected, my anger rising. “Wallace Sampson was a thirteen-year-old kid. He had friends. They care. He had parents and sisters. I’m sure they care. And you know who else cares? Every black person in this town ought to care whether or not they ever knew Wallace Sampson. Because if the murder of Wallace Sampson doesn’t matter, then we’re still in a time and a place where the killing of any black person doesn’t matter.”
I caught my breath and added, “And if you were anything other than a blueblood fatcat who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, you might care, too.”
I detected a faint smile from Brad but his father was stunned. The room fell silent. Mary Pell and Willie Snow were nowhere to be seen but parfait glasses of blueberries and heavy cream had found their way to our places. I got the feeling that no one had ever spoken to Everett Hall this way before, especially not at Windrow where he was the lord and master.
“Enough,” Mr. Hall commanded, pushing himself away from the table. “This discussion is done.”
“Well,” Lindsay said brightly, as if it were just another meeting of her book club. “This has certainly been a lively evening. Such good conversation.”
Good-byes were awkward—compliments to the shooter of the birds and to the chef but no mention of the dinner-table controversy. As Brad drove us back to their house in the Volvo, Lindsay searched for some common ground that would bridge the gap between her husband and her father-in-law.
“Brad, I know you feel strongly about this. I admire what you and Matt are doing, but aren’t there people who deal with these things? The FBI or the state police or something?”
“There’s no federal crime for the FBI to be involved in.”
“It just seems like you shouldn’t do it on your own. You need some investigative expertise.”
“That’s why Matt is along.”
“You have so many other important things to keep you busy, like the Windrow plant book.”
“More important than finding a killer?”
“Well, it’s just not something we should be associated with. It’s such a local issue. It really should be handled by the local community.”
I wanted to say, “Do you think it matters to Mrs. Sampson who solves her son’s murder?” But I kept quiet on the grounds that I had staked myself out far enough for one evening. And besides, Brad had a better answer.
“Honey,” he said, “we are the locals.”
“Not in the same way they are. Look, Brad, we have a good thing here. A good life. You’re going to mess it up.”
“What’s messed up is that a thirteen-year-old was murdered and no one cares.”
Lindsay tried a new tack. “What about your relationship with your father?”
“What are your worried about, the inheritance?”
“That’s so crass!” she said. “Your father loves you. You are a Hall. You have a heritage to live up to. Don’t ruin that.”
We had arrived at the house. Brad turned off the engine but remained in the driver’s seat thinking. “The Halls used to have a heritage. My forebears took risks, crossed the seas over principles. But the genes have gotten weak. I don’t think my father or his brothers would cross the street for a principle. Honey, there’s no heritage to live up to. There is one to restore.”
I lay in bed listening to Brad and Lindsay sparring in the bedroom and realized Walker Burns was right. Even if we hadn’t traveled all the way back to the antebellum South, we weren’t far off. My dad was the editor of The Detroit Free Press during the Detroit riots of 1967. I’d heard the gunfire downtown from my bed in the suburbs. After the riots, the National Commission on Civil Disorders warned that America was moving toward two societies, one black, one white. Hirtsboro wasn’t moving that way. Hirtsboro had started out that way and almost two hundred years later, jerks like Everett Hall and even Lindsay were making sure nothing changed. They and the rest of their kind needed to be set straight.
Walker Burns was waiting for me when I returned from Windrow. “I got a good one for you today, Big Shooter,” he drawled, true to his Texas roots. Walker called all reporters Big Shooter when he was in a good mood, which is to say when news had broken out. “I guarantee you it’s a ‘Holy Shit, Mabel.’”
A “Holy Shit, Mabel” story was, by Walker’s definition, a story good enough that it would theoretically cause a woman to lean over her fence and say to her neighbor, “Holy shit, Mabel, did you see that story in the Charlotte Times today?”
I had intended to bring up the Wallace Sampson story with Walker first thing. I needed time—company time—to