“Well, fuck,” BB interrupted. “Did you tell him who you are?”
“No. Not yet. He’s—He didn’t seem like he was in any mood to listen. He’s running my license right now. But I . . .” Anton looked around wildly, trying to find an identifying road marker to let BB know where he was. “I’m northbound on Route 25. About an hour away from a town called Thomasville. And I need to know—whose car have I been driving?”
He finally had BB’s attention. “Anton. Are you feeling—unsafe? Dude, what’d he pull you over for?”
Anton shook his head impatiently. “I don’t know. I’m hoping he’ll just give me a ticket and I’ll be on my way. And he didn’t. Pull me over, that is. I had pulled over to take a phone call from my mom. And next thing I knew, he was up my ass.”
BB let out a low whistle. “Man. It’s another world down there, isn’t it? The South.”
Anton didn’t want to get into a goddamn political conversation right now. “BB,” he said desperately. “I’m telling you my location just in case. But mostly, I need to know whose name the car is registered under. In case he asks.”
“The car? Hell, I don’t know. My secretary arranged it. Probably a company car. We do business in Atlanta, right? It’s probably under Branson Industries.”
Anton looked in the rearview mirror and saw the trooper exiting his vehicle. “He’s headed back this way, BB. I should hang up. Can you make a few calls to find out and get right back to me?”
“Sure. I’ll be in touch.”
Anton hung up without saying goodbye, looking out of his side mirror as the trooper’s bulky frame filled it. He rolled down the window again and was relieved when the man handed his license back to him. “You didn’t tell me you were attorney general, sir.” The voice was still gruff, distant, but it was obvious that an olive branch was being extended. Anton had not misheard the note of deference.
“You didn’t ask my occupation,” Anton said lightly, draining the slightest hint of hostility or indignation from his voice.
“You here on business, sir?”
Anton’s right hand gave an involuntary flutter, but he steadied it immediately. “You could say that,” he said in a noncommittal manner. The “sir” was encouraging and Anton took solace from it. Now the best strategy was to get out of here before too many questions were asked.
They both spoke at the same moment, and Anton stopped, indicating with his hand that the trooper—P. Flynn was the name on his badge—should go first. “Oh, sorry,” the man said. “I was just asking, so the car belongs to a friend?”
Anton swallowed hard, uneasy at this turn in the conversation. He stared out of his windshield for a second and then came to a decision. “Yes. But it may be registered to his company.” He forced himself to look Flynn directly in the face, straining his neck to look up. “I made a call to my friend,” he said, aware of the small muscle throbbing in his jaw. “While you were—checking my driver’s license in your cruiser. I gave him my location and asked him to call back in a few minutes with information about who the car is registered to.”
He noticed with satisfaction that Flynn took a step away from the car. “That won’t be necessary, sir,” he said. “I’ve—Everything checked out fine. We’re good.”
The relief Anton felt was so palpable that his upper eyelid twitched in celebration. “Am I free to go, then?” he said, the authority back in his voice.
“Absolutely.” Flynn gave a small, tight smile that nevertheless softened his face. “Have a good day, Mr. Coleman.”
Anton waited until the trooper was back in his car before clicking on his turn signal, waiting until the lane was completely absent of traffic before getting back on the highway. He drove the speed limit for the next eight miles, until he was very sure that Flynn was nowhere near him. It was only then that he became aware of his ice-cold hands and feet and the throbbing in his neck from where the muscles had stood at attention for the whole encounter. The fear that he had felt was wildly disproportionate to what had actually happened. He had not even had the presence of mind to ask Flynn how he’d found out who Anton was. But even as his mind told him that the whole thing had not been such a big deal, his body gave him a different answer. What he had felt was a primal fear, something coded into his DNA, the fear of a black man pulled over by a cop on a stretch of road in Georgia. A black man. That was exactly who he was in this godforsaken place. In New England he was scarcely aware of his skin as he went about his daily life. It wasn’t like he was ignorant of the fact that cops back home routinely racially profiled black kids. Or that black men around the country were still prey. Trayvon Martin. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. The names were etched into his consciousness. But it had always been easy to put distance between himself and the Hoodie. The Cigarillos. The Overweight Guy choked like a dog on the streets of New York by a pack of cops. Those black men didn’t drive a Lexus. They did not have skin the color of copper, they did not make the cover of People magazine, they hadn’t been to Ivy League schools, they didn’t speak with a posh accent. And yet all this meant nothing to Trooper Flynn, who had eyed him with the same scorn that Anton had shown convicted felons and drug dealers. Trooper Flynn, who had just handed Anton one of the best lessons about his place in history that he’d ever learned.
He imagined telling David about this encounter, how the older man’s jaw would clench at the thought of some ignorant prick cop mistreating his son like this, how he would mentally comb through his Rolodex trying to think of whom he knew down there in Georgia who could haul this trooper’s sorry ass into the office and chew him out for disrespecting the governor’s son. And yet this same man, who would be more upset than Anton over the trivial, routine incident, could not see his way to apologize to a powerless black woman whom he had robbed. Yes, that was what David had done, he had robbed Juanita Vesper of her one singular possession, and given that she was serving a needlessly long prison sentence at the time, it may as well have been at gunpoint.
Anton thought of what Delores had suggested—bringing Juanita back home with him. And he replayed over and over what David had said about never apologizing to him for what he had done. To his enormous surprise, he found himself agreeing with his father. David was right. He did not owe Anton an apology. At Carine’s house, tears streaming down his cheeks, Anton had remembered the housing project where he’d lived with his mother. Over the years he had forgotten the details about the bleakness of his early life. But what he remembered now was the boredom. The tedium of poverty. A tedium whose only antidote, whose only disruption, came from a gun burst of violence, of an unexpected scream shattering the quiet of a Sunday morning, or a stream of loud obscenities wafting from the streets at midnight. Maybe that’s why Mam used crack, Anton thought, to handle that tedium. He remembered how the energy in the apartment used to change when she had those people over. Even though she’d lock him in the bedroom so that he would not witness her using, he could hear the thud of the music, the sudden peals of laughter, the voices getting louder and higher. For the most part, it hadn’t frightened him. Rather, he found it reassuring, because it proved that there was more to their lives than soul-wrecking jobs and occasional visits to fast-food restaurants.
He wouldn’t have survived the boredom. Anton knew that now. In order to not succumb to it, he would’ve joined a gang. He had been a good boy, quiet and polite to his elders. But he was also intelligent, and that intelligence would have been his downfall. Some resourceful neighborhood drug dealer would’ve figured out how to make that brightness work for him. And Mam would’ve been able to protect him less and less, the crack eating away at whatever maternal protective instinct remained. No, David was right. Between being groomed by a shrewd dope dealer and rescued by David and Delores, there was no doubt that he had hit the jackpot.
It wasn’t Anton’s forgiveness that David needed to ask for. It was Juanita’s.
He was so struck by this thought that he almost drove past his exit. He saw it too late, slammed on h
is brakes, and yanked the wheel to the right, going over the striped lines to get on the exit ramp. For a split second he couldn’t bear to look in the rearview mirror, as if he expected Trooper Flynn to be right behind him. But the sun was low in the sky and the road deserted. Anton pulled into the parking lot of the first gas station he saw and once again called up the directions to his mother’s address. If he didn’t run into any traffic along the way, he would be there in about twenty-five minutes. He smiled with pleasure at the thought of climbing up those porch steps, his footsteps lighter this time, his eyes unclouded with hostility and suspicion, and of the look on her face when she opened the door and saw that it was him. Him. Her son. Come for her again.
And what then? he asked himself as he drove down the two-lane road. What’ll you do? Sleep on the couch tonight? Will she be okay with that? The giddy feeling deserted him for a moment as he considered the logistics and the inevitable complications his reentry into Juanita’s life would involve, but then he thought: First things first. First I’ll take her out to dinner. To the most expensive restaurant in the county. He sighed, the very thought of ordering a bottle of a good red soothing him, but then he remembered that she was a recovering addict. No, he’d have to do without alcohol tonight. And what if you run out of things to say to each other? he thought. What if you find her to be, you know, limited in her vocabulary or interests or general knowledge? The thought depressed him. But then he remembered the proprietary way she’d called him “Baby Boy,” the way she’d looked at him, looked through him, and he knew: He had a mama he could be proud of. What Juanita Vesper knew, what she had lived through and experienced, he could only read about in books. No, the danger was exactly the opposite—that he would disappoint her, that she would see through him and realize that he was made of cotton and straw, an empty suit lacking vigor and conviction. When she asked him why he’d returned, for instance, what would he say? That he’d had a change of heart? Or would he credit Carine for asking a question that had made him see what he’d been too blind to see on his own?
One thing he knew for sure he would tell his mam: the recently surfaced memory of when he’d returned to the housing project to find her. She had earned that story and its meaning—that her son had not forgotten her after two and a half years of living in luxury. That he had been willing to give it up just to move back into the dingy apartment with her. That in his deepest, darkest hour, in the hour of his abandonment, when he believed that she had forsaken him, he had sought her out.
Anton drove along in this manner, alternating between a chest-pounding excitement and a sobering dread. It was all too soon, too fast, too unexpected. This was to have been a quick trip to a new place—the South, so deceptively soft and beautiful, with its rich bloodred earth and magnolia trees and wildflowers growing alongside the highway—but it had become a different kind of journey. As long as Anton had known him, Pappy had had a big hand-painted sign hanging in his home office that read, “Know Thyself.” Anton had claimed the sign after Pappy had died, and it now resided on the floor in his own apartment. He had always intended to put it up, but as with so many things, he had not gotten around to it. That small procrastination, easy enough to explain away in his busy daily life, now assumed symbolic meaning. He had been raised by people whose creed revolved around Know Thyself, a family steeped in the wisdom of its secular saints, Emerson and Thoreau. Anton had no doubt that his father knew himself, even if it meant acknowledging the black stain on his own heart. Because, for all his flaws, David was a complete man, someone who knew exactly what he saw when he looked at himself in the mirror.
As did, Anton suspected, his mam. You couldn’t have twenty-five years of sobriety without knowing thyself. It was obvious in the clearness of those brown eyes—Juanita Vesper did not owe the world anything and did not expect that the world owed her a thing. Not a single thing. She had repaid her debt to society by sacrificing her proudest creation. No matter how modest her life, no matter how pinched and narrow her circumstances, when Juanita laid her head on the pillow at night, she knew that everything around her belonged to her. She had paid for all of it with her own flesh and blood.
Anton massaged the spot that throbbed in his temple. There was no way to recoup the years they had spent apart. Perhaps it was just as well, to have not witnessed the ugliness of her recovery—the withdrawal symptoms, the shakes, the tremors, the relapses. The slow return of light to her eyes. What would his life have been like if he had been returned to her after her time in prison? They undoubtedly would have lost their subsidized apartment, shabby and claustrophobic as it was. Would he have continued at the same school, where the teachers themselves spread the virus of discouragement and defeatism to their students? Would he have ever met someone like David, who believed in him, who was alternately encouraging and firm but whose very sternness was propelled by a belief that no matter what level of excellence he demanded from Anton, the boy was capable of delivering it? For a long time, Anton had loved Delores more, felt more comfortable around her, because she was easier on him. Delores was like Mam in that regard, soft, undemanding, loving. And he had desperately needed that after his abrupt parting from his mam. But it had taken David’s mix of sweet and sour, his glowing with pride and his glowering with disappointment, to drive Anton to achieve all that he had.
In some horrible way, he understood why David had done what he had. He also understood that the passage of time and its retrospective gaze could lengthen the shadows of an original deed and give it a more monstrous shape. The men who owned slaves were thinking about their cotton yield that year, and how to protect their wives from the roving eye of that particular Negro, and not about original sin. Anton had always believed that the great fatal flaw in Marxist theory was that it had never accounted for actual human behavior—the yawn, the stretch, the shrug, the looking away. And that was exactly what David had done. He had not battled with complexity, had not tried to figure out a way to remain a presence in Anton’s life after his mother was released from prison. What was unforgivable was not that David had wanted Anton to remain in his life or even his conceit in believing that he knew better than anybody else what was in the boy’s best interest. It was that he’d taken a shortcut and exploited Juanita’s situation. It was the oldest story in the world—the ends justifying the means.
The late-evening Georgia sky was throwing up streaks of murderous, ludicrous color. The color entered the car, turning Anton’s face and hands golden. He lowered his window, hoping for some evening cool, but the air was still heavy with heat, and he raised it again, escaping into the artificial coolness of the air-conditioning. He drove through a small town and then on an open stretch of road with fields on either side. Next he saw a few cows, and later, a few horses dotted the landscape, their bodies dark and vivid against the green fields. He passed a marsh, wood storks rising and fluttering in the distance, and the sight was so magnificent that he slowed down to watch. A little while later, he saw a patch of purple coneflowers that made him suck in his breath. Georgia, in its tender, maternal beauty, drew him in her embrace again, softening the memory of his encounter with Flynn. He remembered what Juanita had told him about moving north when he was a year old. Had Nana encouraged or resisted her migration? Had Mam thought about it much, how she would cope in a new place where the snow covered the ground for five months out of the year? What she would miss and what she would be happy to forget? Had she considered what it would be like to live with Betsy, who had just gotten a clerical job at the Higbee’s department store and who herself might not want too many reminders of her old life? What had it been like for this young woman, who’d had sex with an older man but had never tasted alcohol, who had just finished a semester of community college but had never seen the inside of an airport, who was about to leave her mother and the only home she’d known, to move to another city that she hoped would be kinder to her bastard son than the small, cruel place she was leaving behind? It hit Anton hard, how much of her story he didn’t k
now. How much catching up they had to do. This was why he was going back to her, to learn more of her story.
As for his own story, how much of it would he share? What would he tell her about Carine? How would he describe his relationship with David and Delores? Would it hurt or please her to know that he was the soft spot in their hearts, that they loved him as much as she did? Could he confess to the princely comforts of his life without insulting hers? Did he dare tell her that he probably spent more on books and dinners out than she earned in a month? Was David right? Would their blood tie prove to be thicker than the acute class differences between them? There was so much he didn’t know. But he was going to find out. In the end, that was the best thing he could say about himself—that he was ready to find out. At long last, he was willing to be a son. Oh, he had been a son to David and Delores, of course, had shone for them and made them proud. But what Juanita would require from him would be harder. Because what she would require was honesty, an absolute lack of pretense. Carine was the only other person in his life who had required this degree of nakedness from him, and he had dumped her. But Juanita was in his life now. And he could no more dump her than he could chop off his own hand.
Suddenly, he wanted all of them, wanted to gather them up—David and Delores, Juanita and Carine and Katherine, Uncle Connor and Brad—and place them in an orchestra that would play the music of his life. He wanted to leave out none of it—not the trombone, not the cello, not the cymbals or the violin. Synthesis. He needed a fusing together of all the strands of his life: past and present, black and white, poor and rich. He had lived for so long with pieces of his life missing, and as he drove through downtown Ronan and past the diner where his mother worked, it came to him what he must do, what he had come here to do: take her back with him. For a little while, maybe. Or for a long while. That decision, along with every other that she would make from here on out, would be hers. That much, he was sure, he could give her, the ability and the means to make her own decisions.
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