by Attica Locke
He had a hard heart for the folks out here.
Two trailers down, some of Marnie and Gil’s neighbors were doing a fish fry out of the back of a van that was covered in bumper stickers and had seashells glued to the doors, large rhinestones affixed to the luggage rack. There was a DON’T TREAD ON ME flag hanging in one of the windows, and a beach towel with the state of Texas crossed through with dixie stripes spread out inside the front windshield. Darren could hear the pop and hiss as cornmeal hit a vat of hot grease bubbling in an old oil drum. A white woman in her fifties stood next to a gas-station cooler full of cod or catfish, rolling another fillet across a plastic plate covered in meal and flour. Cigarette dangling from the corner of her red painted lips, she said with little fanfare, “Nigger Town’s that way,” the second Darren stepped from his truck. He kept a hand near the Colt .45 in his holster as a bearded man emerged from the van, tilting the whole thing to one side as he stepped out onto the dirt. He took one look at Darren and let out a whistle, two fingers in the corners of his mouth, then yelled out, “Gil!”
The door to the blue and white trailer opened suddenly, ricocheting off the side of the structure as Gil stepped out. He was still barefoot but now had a .38 tucked into the waist of his blue jeans. “The fuck?” he said. “’Less you got a warrant, you need to get back in that truck and get gone.”
The dude from the van started walking over, and in seconds it was two against one, and Darren remembered that he hadn’t told a soul where he was. He could draw, but it went against every rule of de-escalation in his training. He kept one hand near the Colt and held the other out in front of him to show he needed cool heads all around. “I’m here about Marnie’s kid,” he said.
“You talked to Rosemary?”
“Searched her place and everything,” Darren said. “He’s not there.”
A strange look flashed across Gil’s face. Darren thought he caught a flicker of fear, followed by a prolonged and affected look of utter bafflement. He ran his fingers through his loose hair, shook his head as if Darren had just told him water wasn’t wet. “Well, the little fucker sure as shit ain’t here. Maybe he ran off somewhere. Marnie don’t want to believe it, but he ain’t no saint, that one.”
“Need your help with something, Gil,” Darren said. “In case this ain’t a runaway type deal, in case that boy is out there somewhere in a lot of trouble.”
“I don’t have to tell you nothing.”
“Who is it, Gil?” the bearded neighbor asked.
The woman with the painted lips said, “Bo, you want your pistol, hon?”
“I’m a Texas Ranger, and you brandish a weapon, I’ll arrest you on the spot. This here, ain’t not a bit of this is any concern of yours. Go on, now.”
To Gil, Darren softened his tone, reminding himself that this was all about a nine-year-old no one had laid eyes on for three days. “I don’t need to come inside. I’m just hoping for a picture of the boy, something to show your neighbors, folks who live up that way,” he said, pointing past the trailer park to the part of Hopetown the woman cooking fish had so matter-of-factly called Nigger Town. “Sheriff Quinn got reports that a man by the name of Leroy Page might have seen Levi on Friday evening. It’s crucial that we confirm that as soon as possible. He’s the best lead we have right now.”
The bearded neighbor nodded to Gil. “You want me to get the others?”
Gil shook his head, smiling faintly now, wearing the look of a wolf having stumbled upon a wounded white-tailed deer. This gon’ be easy, his expression said. He yelled over his shoulder into the open door of the trailer, “Dana!” It was Marnie who came out of the trailer first. She was unsteady on her feet, her face flushed from an afternoon of drinking. Darren would recognize that gait anywhere. Dana, the teenage girl he’d seen earlier, poked her head out next. Gil told her, “Get this man a picture of your brother. One from the school, not them your mama took. Get it now.” Dana disappeared into the darkness of the trailer.
Marnie turned to Darren and started shaking her head. “What’s he saying, Gil?” she said, her voice clotting with snot before a sob wrenched itself free of her control and she wept. “He ain’t find my boy?”
Darren shook his head. “No, ma’am.” He heard a television playing. Jeopardy! or Wheel of Fortune, one of those. The applause was too bright, too much, coming out of the tiny trailer. Dana returned with a wallet-size photograph, bent at the corners. She held Darren’s gaze when she handed it to him. She had the same wide-set muddy-green eyes that stared back at Darren from the photo in his hand. Levi was blond, hair lighter than his mother’s and his sister’s, and he saw some of Rosemary in the boy’s face, something vaguely patrician in his bearing that did not fit the world around him. There was something else too. You had to look closely to see it, but it was there behind the eyes, the tiny upturn of his mouth. Rage.
8.
THE ORIGINAL settlement of Hopetown now called to mind a ghost town, the rotting wood shells of an old church and a general store standing gray and skeletonized, empty houses dotting the landscape, weeds and wildflowers coming up through the porch boards, tree roots tilting the foundations. And yet there was life back here, in this other Hopetown; fruit trees and cornfields and lush vegetable gardens stretched out in front of the few houses that still stood tall and proud, painted in yellows and shell pinks, dusky blues—except Leroy Page’s home, which was as white as the Christmas snow that occasionally fell on Caddo Lake. A strong smell of fresh paint lingered about the house when Darren climbed out of his truck in front of the cottage. It was one story with a large attic window, an unblinking eye on the world past Mr. Page’s tidy front porch. He was growing collards and turnips, rainbow chard and cucumbers, had a pecan tree shading one side of his house. He was picking the last of its harvest off the ground beneath the tree, his back hunched as he scooped up the nuts and dropped them into a crinkled paper bag in his hand. His house sat on a quarter acre next to the stables and a conical grass hut that rested atop a hillock, a mound of compact earth. Donald Goodfellow and his son were seeing to the three horses.
Leroy Page pushed himself to standing and nodded at Darren. “You can tell the sheriff we ain’t turned up nothing yet. Sun’s setting soon. We’ll be back at it tomorrow.” He hollered for Ray, Donald’s son, to run the pecans up to his grandmother. “Tell her I’ll take a half dozen eggs for ’em.” Ray, who’d come running as soon as the older man called his name, took the paper bag and started cutting across a field, heading for a yellow house twenty or so yards from Mr. Page’s. There were no streets in this part of Hopetown, at least none that hadn’t been overgrown by time and wild grass, so there was nothing separating neighbor from neighbor back here; it was as if they all shared the same plot of land, were all one big family. In fact, Ray’s grandmother, a short, compact woman with a face bronzed and freckled with moles, came out on her front porch to receive the bag of pecans and hollered out to Mr. Page, “Eggs is gone, Leroy, Lou and her girls got ’em first, but I got a tray of red-corn pudding in the oven. We serving at six thirty if you want to eat with us tonight.” Mr. Page nodded in a noncommittal way, the gesture likely impossible for the woman to decipher at a distance. To Darren, he shook his head. “Margaret knows I can’t eat her corn pudding. The Pages, black folks in Hopetown, we took ours sweet. The red in her red-corn pudding is chopped habanero peppers, and I’ll be up all night if I take even a bite of that.” He shrugged. “I grow ’em but can’t eat ’em no more.”
Darren told Mr. Page that he needed to follow up on a few things, that he was here on official business. The old man nodded agreeably. “Come on in, then. I don’t stay out here after dark no more, least not without my pistol.”
* * *
They moved through the dim house, passing framed family photos on the walls, sepia prints in mahogany frames. Stacks of newspapers crowded the hallway, along with fishing equipment, paint supplies, and abandoned quilting projects, swatches stuffed in an oak secretary. In the kitchen, a
radio sat atop the Frigidaire. A tinny Jessie Mae Hemphill blues was playing, the prayer of a country violin. Like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved.
“And you’re sure, Mr. Page, that this is the boy you saw locking up the boat shed Friday evening?” Darren held out the school photo.
The old man hardly glanced at it. “I known that boy since he was a baby,” he said, pulling a Miller High Life from the fridge. He popped the top with an opener he kept on his key ring. “It was the King boy, sure as I’m standing here.”
“And what time was this?”
“Half past six, maybe a quarter to seven.” He took a sip of the beer.
Darren ignored his own thirst and glanced at his watch. He took stock of the sky through the kitchen window, the view of Ray’s grandmother’s yellow house and the lake beyond. It wasn’t quite dark, but it would be soon. It was only six fifteen. The old man guessed what Darren was getting at. “I had my light on me,” he said, pointing to a homemade tool belt hooked on a nail on the wall from which hung a silver flashlight. “I was on patrol that night.”
“Yeah—what is that?” Darren said, remembering the horses and the guns, the feel of a posse on the hunt. “Some kind of neighborhood-watch thing?”
“It’s legal, whatever it is,” the old man said, eyeing Darren with mistrust.
Darren threw up his hands to show he meant no harm, that beneath the badge, he was still a black man. “With neighbors like you got,” he said, coloring his tone so it was clear he meant the residents of the trailer park he had to pass through to get to Mr. Page’s part of Hopetown, “I can’t say that I blame you.”
“They ain’t neighbors,” Mr. Page said, slamming the beer bottle on top of the shellacked wood of the kitchen table. “Them folks down there is trespassing.”
“What’s that, now?”
“They living on my land,” he said, gesturing to the house, the yard and gardens beyond, the stables and buildings, his indignation reaching all the way to the turnoff from FM 727, the road that led to Hopetown. “All this is mine.”
Leroy Page had been born in this house, his mama and his grandmama too, he said. His people had settled these parts as free blacks after the Civil War, had built a utopia on the shores of the great lake, tilled the soil with the values they held most dear—not just liberty and self-sufficiency, but also forgiveness. Forgiveness was a word from the masters’ Bible that they’d been forbidden to read. But grace came naturally to Leroy Page’s ancestors, was built into their DNA, a native intelligence that told them that true freedom was letting white folks go. You could rage over what they done, or you could be free. It wasn’t a twofer type of deal. “Black folks,” Leroy said, “are the most forgiving people on earth.”
Darren couldn’t place the look on his face, didn’t know if it was pride or shame he was witnessing. This was a point his uncles had often debated ferociously, whether forgiveness made black folks saints or stooges. The year Darren stopped going to church—claiming at twelve to be too old for Sunday school—William, back in the house in Camilla on some short errand his brother had allowed, sat Darren down at the kitchen table and said, “This family has flourished under the teachings of Christ, son; we have made a life based on fellowship and service and forgiveness.” Clayton actually snickered at the kitchen sink, where he was rinsing turnips that he’d grown in the garden himself. That word was dangerous, Clayton said. It gave white folks the idea that impunity was theirs for the taking, for in a world where forgiveness was forever being served like an all-you-can-eat buffet at the Lunch Bucket in town, what was their incentive to pass fair laws, to police with integrity, to refrain from spitting on folks on the street?
“It’s not 1966, Pop,” Darren had said, just to show he could keep up.
“No, it’s 1986, and you see that Alabama cracker that Reagan’s trying to put on the federal bench?”
“Sessions will never be confirmed,” William said, lighting one of the Lucky Strikes he smoked until his death. He had always kept a large box of matches on their kitchen table for this purpose, and it was the first time Darren noticed that Clayton had kept in place this reminder of his twin brother.
“The point is they have the gall to appoint a Klan-loving fool. Forgiving them for everything before the Voting Rights Act is what makes them think they have the right. We done we-shall-overcomed ourselves right into this mess.”
“But you marched, Pop,” Darren said. This conversation felt like a greater sacrilege than the talk of him skipping out on church. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you have to forever hold them to account. Look away at your own peril.” He set the wet turnips on a washcloth. “Forgiveness has a limit.”
It was a luxury black folks couldn’t afford, Clayton said.
William looked at his nephew. “Darren, maybe I need to head back to Sunday school with you since I don’t remember where in the Bible it said that.”
Clayton, he said, mistook his Christian faith for weakness. “I know who I am, who my people are. I know the power of our grace, of our faith. Real forgiveness has no limits,” he said, before allowing that, yes, Clayton was right, that “it’s only possible when the pain of the original offense has ceased.”
“Well, good luck with that,” Clayton said caustically as he filled a pot with tap water for boiling. “How long you and Naomi been married now?”
He meant it as a bitter joke, one he was man enough to laugh at. William chuckled too, but it sounded hollow and sad. Soon, the brothers went back to not speaking, Darren’s home life again emptied of his uncle William’s presence.
In Mr. Page’s kitchen, the old man finished his beer and opened another. For decades, he said, Hopetown had been a self-contained community, with a church and a school, a decent drinking hole with live blues and zydeco on weekends, a general store, and a meeting hall where they held nativity plays and elections. Leroy’s great-great-grandfather had been the town’s first mayor. Every member of the Page family, going back generations, had served on the town council at one point or another, up until the town lost its incorporation back in the late 1970s when black folks started leaving, preferring life in Marshall, Longview, or Dallas—places that offered more for them than a literal backwater in Marion County. Even Jefferson wasn’t enough of a draw; the town’s top industry was tourism, the reselling of an antebellum glory that hadn’t gone all that well for black folks the first time around. There were better jobs, better lives to be had far away from Hopetown. As black families left, one by one, Leroy bought up much of the abandoned land and vowed to stay in the place he considered his birthright, but time ate away at the plan like moths nibbling at boiled wool. To speak of it made his eyes cloud over, made his voice grow wistful and thick with longing. “I was gon’ die here,” he said. He nodded, admiring some picture of the place he held in his mind. “Yes, sir, this here, this little piece of heaven. I was gon’ spend the rest of what God give me right here—fishing, taking care of my horses, growing my collards and peppers.”
“I grow peppers too,” Darren said, the words shooting out with the eager delight of a man meeting a fellow countryman in a foreign place. He looked into the old man’s eyes, which were dark as roasted chicory and set in a face that was long and weathered by time, and he thought he understood the man at once, his connection to the land, to the roots that had raised him up. Mr. Page, too, seemed to regard Darren anew, saw something in him that met his approval. “My people got land too,” Darren said. “Down to San Jacinto County, twelve acres the Mathews family has held on to since not long after Hopetown was founded.”
“So you understand what it took to build all this. Don’t seem right to piss it away. But ain’t nothing left for nobody else but me, I guess. I’m the last one. My girls stayed through high school, out to Jefferson, but they were done come college. Got one in Dallas, the other selling real estate up to Arkansas. She on me to sell all this, come live with her family in Little Rock. They got a pool, she said
. What I’m gon’ do with a pool growing up next to that my whole life?” He pointed to the majesty of Caddo Lake, just a few yards out the kitchen window. It was past dusk now, and it was hard to tell the cypress trees from their gnarled shadows, what was real and what wasn’t. Again, Darren got a sudden image of Levi King out on that water, alone in a boat, just before sundown.
“What about the trailers, Mr. Page?” he said.
He remembered Gil Thomason’s shit-eating grin when he’d mentioned the name Leroy Page, and it niggled at him, the sense that he made a misstep back there. “You’ve had some trouble with the boy’s family out that way?”
“Ain’t had no problem with the boy’s grandfather. Lester Wayne. I rented him a few acres back in the eighties, when it was clear Hopetown was on the dying side of history. When it was just me and what’s left of Margaret and her people, Donald and Ray, Margaret’s sister and her kids. Some of her cousins.”
“You rent to them too?”
“Don’t charge nothing but a couple dollars a month, just to make the contract binding. My daughter Erika, she taught me that. But I won’t take no real money from the Caddos living here. This was all theirs to begin with, even before you and me, son. The Indians was here before the French, the Spanish, the English, and the Africans. You know what the Hasinai—that’s kind of like a tribe within a tribe, you feel me, them’s the Caddos what come from around here, north to Arkansas and down to Nacogdoches—anyway, you know what their word for ‘ally’ is? Tayshas. That’s right. Tayshas. Tejas. Texas. The people in my family have always looked out for the Indians. Just like they always looked out for us. Ally. That’s what we are. Friends. Family. I owe them my life.”
