Oka Hofobi continued answering Dr. Mailer’s question, as if he’d never been interrupted. “Will they be friendly? Well, the party started yesterday morning when the Fair opened. It will last until the Fair shuts its doors next Friday evening. By the time we get to the fairgrounds, it’ll be after breakfast, so everybody will have a good start on today’s drinking. They’ll be friendly enough.”
The crunch of sawdust underfoot and the sound of lowing cattle gave the fairgrounds a festive agricultural feel. Across Founder’s Square, which seemed to be the Fair’s nerve center, Faye spotted Miss Neshoba County, who looked more comfortable wearing a tiara before noon than one might suspect. Whole neighborhoods of colorfully painted party cabins clustered around the Square and extended along all the boundaries of the extensive fairgrounds, just as Oka Hofobi had described them. Many of them had porches and all of those porches were full of revelers, who were spilling out into the congested walkways. Oka Hofobi had described the festivities as “a whole bunch of family reunions, all being held in the same place at the same time.” Faye didn’t think her own family had ever been this skilled at having a good time.
As she worked her way down the street, partiers called out to offer her, in quick succession, lemonade, sweet iced tea, and a Bloody Mary. Recorded music spilled out of many cabin windows, while the luckier hosts had guitar-playing guests lounging on their porches.
Oka Hofobi gestured at a lemon-yellow tin-roofed structure with pink trim. “Ready for this?”
Chuck responded by pushing past him and heading for a huge cooler on the side porch.
“Don’t hold back, Chuck,” Bodie muttered. “Manners are for wimps.”
Faye looked over Chuck’s shoulder and noticed that the cooler was full of soft drinks, but she had a good view through the cabin’s living room window, and nobody inside was drinking soda pop. “I thought this was a dry county,” Faye said. “What’s with all the liquor?”
Oka Hofobi’s grin showed white teeth made whiter by the contrast with his dark skin. “You can’t buy alcohol here. And you can’t sell it. But nobody ever said you couldn’t drink it. And there ain’t no law against giving it away. I don’t think.”
He took the others on a tour of the house in a vain search for the hosts. It was furnished with a motley mix of cast-off but comfortable furniture, and each room featured at least one large ice chest.
“Our hosts have gone to the Flea Market, Oka Hofobi. Every year, they collect a few more glamorous furnishings for this place.” It was Sheriff Rutland’s voice. She was in street clothes, which gave Faye a chance to look at her as a person, without the individuality-obscuring cloak of her uniform. Her facial skin was weathered yet resilient, like a young person who has spent all her years in the sun. Faye knew they were about the same age, since Neely had broadcast her birthdate to the countryside at large during the confrontation over Calhoun’s mound, and she wondered whether her sun hat was doing a good enough job of protecting her own skin. More sunscreen, she vowed to herself.
An ashy brown ponytail hung down Neely’s back, and her small, alert eyes were pale blue. Her attention was focused on an old man sitting in a wheelchair with his arms curled awkwardly around his body. Although he was so obese that his thighs hardly fit between the arms of the chair, something about him seemed withered. His unfocused eyes were the same blue as the sheriff’s.
“What do you want to do today, Daddy?” she murmured. “There’s a big political speech happening at the Pavilion in a few minutes. Would that be fun? It’ll be a few more hours before the races start, but we could go out for a walk. Maybe get some ice cream.”
Had the woman slept? Faye knew that she’d spent the entire night standing guard atop Calhoun’s mound. Remembering Oka Hofobi’s description of the Fair and its customs, Faye thought maybe the sheriff had slept in this cabin, coming here after sunrise and crashing for a few hours before assuming her second role as her father’s caretaker. Calhoun had spoken to her as if he’d known her all her life. The odds were good that she was insider enough to have snagged a bed here at Ground Zero of the Neshoba County Fair.
Other insiders lurked in the kitchen. Carroll Calhoun and a group of jocular men were pouring drinks far stronger than the cheap beer stocked in the coolers that seemed to be open to anyone thirsty. None of Calhoun’s drinking buddies were young; Faye would guess that the youngest was pushing sixty. The smallest of them, a slight man who had lost any muscle bulk he’d once had to age, reminded Faye of a porch lizard. He moved in spurts, separated by long pauses when nothing moved but his eyes. She pulled away from the kitchen door, not anxious to let those reptilian eyes rest on her.
Nudging Joe, who was head-down in the ice chest trying to comparison-shop about eight brands of cheap beer, Faye said, “Let’s go. I want to hear this politician speak.”
“What kind of beer you want?” The clicking and grinding of ice on aluminum competed with Joe’s soft voice.
“The coldest one you can find.”
Faye held the can to her face, sacrificing a few degrees of beer chill for the pleasure. Oka Hofobi handed her a blue plastic cup. “Put the beer in this before you go outside. This is still a dry county, and there’s no use asking for trouble.” Faye reflected that it sure was nice to know an insider when you were visiting such alien terrain.
She and Joe stepped out of the cabin, joining the flow of people heading toward the pavilion. Faye proceeded slowly on purpose, to give the others a chance to get ahead of them. She wanted to talk to Joe. Alone with him for the first time that morning, she finally could ask the question that had been bugging her for hours. “Why’d you dress so funny today?”
“What’s so funny? I’m dressed just like you.” And he was. He wore olive drab work pants, a button-front cotton shirt, and heavy boots, an ensemble that was astonishingly like her work-a-day clothes, only several sizes larger. Many, many sizes larger, actually. With an artist’s innate sense of style, he had wisely chosen a baseball cap that advertised a trucking company, rather than emulating her rather feminine floppy hat.
Why on earth wasn’t he wearing his usual garb—traditional Creek-style clothing and hand-made moccasins?
Faye stopped in her tracks to give Joe a good look-over, something she rarely did. When a woman’s closest, most intimate friend is a jaw-droppingly handsome man, her best policy is to try not to look at him without squinting. She succeeded in ignoring Joe’s finer points most of the time, except when some dazzled woman persisted in enumerating them.
Faye had spent most of the summer wrestling with the question of Joe, and she’d decided that a one-of-a-kind friendship wasn’t worth risking—not to pursue a relationship that would have two strikes against it. A nine-year age gap, with her being the older, and an even bigger gap in educational level, just seemed too big a chasm to make love work. Faye had decided to settle for true, pure friendship.
Still, it wasn’t smart to look at Joe too closely.
She did it anyway. Just this once.
His cotton shirt hung nicely over massive shoulders. Its casual drape highlighted his trim waist. Joe did not require buckskin trousers to look good in his clothes. Why did she find his new look unsettling?
A Choctaw woman passed them on the sidewalk. She stood out in the crowd, and Faye realized for the first time that nearly everyone around her was white. Ordinarily, long experience would have prompted her to take a racial headcount, a habit she thought was probably second-nature for anyone born non-white in America. Having spent the morning surrounded by Joe and Oka Hofobi and Toneisha, she’d let her defenses fall, and it had felt good.
Joe’s flustered glance flicked from the Choctaw woman’s face to the back of his right hand. The gimme cap hid his hair, except for the long ponytail down his back, but Faye knew its color, and the woman’s hair lacked the chestnut highlights that kept Joe’s hair from being completely black. His skin, with its unmistakable bronze tint, was still several shades lighter than hers, but Joe’s eyes be
trayed him most. They were a clear sea-green. Thrown into contact with people whose Native American blood had flowed unadulterated since before Columbus threw their world into a tailspin, Joe could no longer deny his murky racial status.
The world seemed less safe when Joe, the most centered individual she’d ever met, didn’t know who he was. Faye was shaken, but she slipped an arm around his waist and guided him through the crowd, saying only, “Nice shirt.”
As Faye and Joe straggled behind, she watched their colleagues break up into companionable pairs. Oka Hofobi and Dr. Mailer looked to be deep in some kind of scholarly conversation. Bodie and Toneisha, like most 23-year-olds, were as high-spirited and gangly as yearling colts. By now, they were far ahead of their older friends, hurrying from one novel sight to the next. Chuck, too, was drawing away from his slower-moving colleagues with his long, economical stride. As far as Faye could tell, he had been successful at avoiding eye contact with anyone in the teeming crowd.
Dr. Mailer, on the other hand, was making good on his plan to charm the natives. He nodded at anyone he could get to look at him. His manner was naturally so appealing that a couple of people stopped in their tracks to shake hands and introduce themselves, but he was oblivious to the miniature dramas staging themselves just a few feet away. Oka Hofobi, a lifelong resident who by rights should have found many acquaintances to greet, walked quietly with his head slightly bowed. Twice, Faye saw him crowded and jostled by people she thought she recognized from the confrontation at Mr. Calhoun’s mound.
It occurred to her that the rest of them could pack up and go home when their summer’s work was done, but Oka Hofobi would have to live here, among farmers who saw his work as a threat to their way of life. While she was pondering that uncomfortable possibility, she saw the young Choctaw take a staggering step to the right as he was jostled again, hard.
This had to stop.
A distinctive figure appeared in the distance, walking toward them. Unless Faye missed her guess, it was Davis, and she was glad. He must have seen Oka Hofobi’s discomfort. Older brothers weren’t known for tolerating mistreatment of their younger siblings, even when those siblings were past thirty.
Davis wore the traditional Choctaw broad-brimmed black hat with a beaded band, and so did the shorter man walking next to him. As they passed Oka Hofobi, the two men kept their eyes straight ahead, never acknowledging Davis’ own brother. If Faye wasn’t mistaken, the shorter man spit on the ground as they walked past.
She looked up at Joe, who said, “He’s okay, but I’m watching. I can get to him if he needs me, but I think he’d rather deal with this his own self.”
Oka Hofobi turned his head toward Davis and spoke a couple of words, but he kept moving. There would be no confrontation this morning.
The two men didn’t pause when they brushed past Faye and Joe, either. As they passed, Faye was almost sure she heard Davis say, “Graverobbers.” Then, as if he wanted to show off for someone he looked up to, the shorter man echoed him. As if afraid they hadn’t heard him, he raised his voice a little more and said, “Ghouls.” Then the two men were gone.
So the farmers saw Oka Hofobi as a threat to their property rights and the Choctaws—or two of them, at least—saw him as someone who’d be willing to desecrate their ancestors’ bones.
Poor guy. He was taking grief from everybody.
The Pavilion was crowded with people waiting for a look at one of Neshoba County’s most famous natives. Never mind that he hadn’t set foot in the county—no, in the state—since he graduated from high school forty years before. When a local boy does good, people like to bask in the reflected glory.
After a fawning and flowery introduction, Lawrence Johnson Judd, former U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan and high-ranking official in the Democratic Party, rose to address the excited crowd.
“My friends,” he began, “when you reach my advanced age, you develop mental clarity. Or,” he said as he chuckled and shook his head, “you try to do so.”
He pulled a pen out of his breast pocket and fumbled with it to avoid looking at his audience. Its gleaming gold metal contrasted with the cocoa-dark skin of his hands. Faye was intrigued. This was not the mannerism of a man who had spent his life in politics. It was as if coming home had transported him back in time and returned a shy boy to life.
“I guess I’ll come out and say this: I’m not here to talk politics. I’m more than sixty years old, and I’m looking old age in the face. My blood pressure and my cholesterol are high and heading higher, and I’m going gray. It is time to exorcise my past. When I was nineteen years old, I nearly died. Because I was a black man.”
It was as if everyone seated in the Pavilion expelled their breath simultaneously, stirring a breeze that had been absent from this sweltering day. Faye heard more than one person whisper, “Not again.”
“I was kidnapped from my own front yard by a man who threw a hood over my head and held a knife to my throat. He drove me so far into the woods that I thought my corpse might never be found. I was tied to a tree. Beaten. As the blows fell, I did my damndest to figure out what I’d done. Had I been so intoxicated by the speed of my souped-up car that I passed a white man who was driving a little too slow? Had I said hello to a white girl with the wrong light in my eye? I could hear my daddy’s voice telling me I needed to get right with God, just like he did every Sunday from the pulpit, God rest his soul, but I couldn’t concentrate on my salvation. I just desperately wanted to know what I’d done to earn an early death.”
Faye looked around and was gratified to see tears on cheeks of every color. Sheriff Rutland had clapped her hands over her father’s ears, as if he were a child who shouldn’t hear such things. The man sitting beside her grasped the wheelchair’s handles to help her, and the crowd parted to let the three of them escape. Faye’s heart went out to the young sheriff. She had shown such courage in the face of yesterday’s racial conflict. Somebody had taught her right from wrong, and Neely’s solicitude toward her father made Faye think it had been him. He deserved peace in his declining years.
“As the violence escalated,” Judd continued, “I heard footsteps approaching, fast and hard. If it was a lynching party, I dearly hoped they would do their work quickly. Then the voice of my rescuer rose up like the terrible and beautiful voice of Jehovah, and he shouted, ‘Are you out of your mind? Stop that right now!’” Faye could hear the ministerial tones of the Congressman’s father echoing in the man’s words. “As the two men struggled, like Jacob and the mighty angel who gave him a new name and a new life, I took the opportunity to yank myself free.”
Standing in silence before a crowd listening rapt to his story, he raised an arm clad in an impeccably tailored shirt and rolled back the cuff to display the scars where he had flayed his own skin with the confining ropes. “I ran away, still ripping at the hood tied to my head, running headlong into trees, just getting away any way I could. I didn’t get a look at my attacker or my rescuer. I hid in a cave for a night and a day, like a beaten animal afraid to raise its head. There was a spring in the cave and I might have stayed there a week before I got hungry enough to crawl out into the light, but something in my gut told me it was time to be a man again. I found my way out of the woods and to my Mama. She gave me all the money she had, enough to get me on a bus to Detroit. I haven’t been home since.”
He rolled down his sleeve and fastened the cufflink. “Here’s what I know. My attacker took me far into the country, down miles of dirt road. Then he walked me deep into the woods. My savior came from even deeper in the woods, in the opposite direction from the way we came. I have no idea how he knew what was going on. There was a creek nearby, and a cave. I never knew about any caves around here, except for the one in the mound by Nanih Waiya Creek, and this wasn’t it. Maybe somebody here knows where it is. Maybe they know who tried to kill me and why. Or maybe they can find out. And, while they’re at it, I hope they find out who saved me, so I can thank him.”
/> He spread his hands and shrugged. “Or maybe they’re both dead. Even so, two people besides me knew what happened that day. I cannot believe that neither of them ever opened their mouths. Or that nobody ever noticed two white men coming home beaten and bloody on April 3, 1965. My guess is that they are both at least in their sixties. I’ve spent my career seeking justice for others. Help me find it for myself.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Faye saw Carroll Calhoun and his cronies step out of the thunderstruck crowd and disappear into the distance.
CHAPTER SIX
The house party was still rocking when Faye and Joe dragged themselves out of the crowd fighting to shake Congressman Judd’s hand. The partygoers who had taken time from their drinking to go hear his speech were readily identifiable. Their faces were blank with shell shock, which is quite a different look from simple intoxication.
Sheriff Rutland emerged from a bedroom, backing through the door and hauling her father’s wheelchair over a high threshold. Parking him next to a bright window right beside Faye and Joe, she sank into an armchair vacated by a woman smart enough to recognize total fatigue when she saw it. Neely turned her face to the window long enough to rake the heel of her hand across her eyes and Faye looked away. It wasn’t seemly to watch a sheriff cry.
“The man that did the beating would have to be someone at least as old as Mr. Judd,” said a man in a Molly Hatchet tee-shirt. “Late fifties at the youngest.”
Several people nodded. An underage boy holding a root beer said, “He could be a lot older, too. Could’ve been middle-aged at the time. Older, even.”
“Judd himself already said it,” said a woman with bottle-blonde curls. “The man who beat him could be dead. Probably is dead.”
“Well, if he’s not, let’s put him up for a medal.” The barest quaver in his voice gave a hint of the speaker’s age. It was Calhoun’s friend, the one whose lizard eyes gave Faye the willies.
Effigies Page 5
