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  “Thank you, Mr. Page,” she replies formally.

  “But the main thing we’re concerned about is what happens to him in January.”

  “I am too,” I add hastily, “but this was an important step. If Dade continues to play and does well, it can’t help but improve his credibility at the time of the trial. If the season is successful, every juror in Washington County will know it. I’m not saying that things should work that way, but it’s a fact just like it’s a fact that we’ll have to overcome the color of Dade’s skin when the girl testifies at the trial. I don’t have any reason to believe there’s any less racism in the northwest corner of the state than there is in eastern Arkansas.”

  I hear the sound of a cash register while she says something to a customer.

  “Do you still plan on being in your office tomorrow?” she asks finally.

  “I can’t talk right now.”

  “I’ll be there,” I say, already having forgotten she is driving over to Blackwell County to visit me.

  “I have a hearing at nine, but it should be over before ten.” I’m pleading out a drug dealer who is managing to avoid serving time by turning over a thirty-thousand-dollar pimp mobile to the Blackwell County Drug Taskforce.

  What they will do with it I wouldn’t want to speculate.

  Five minutes later, I get hold of Dade in his room. It sounds as if he is having a party. I hope not. He has practice, and he damn well better have a good one. I congratulate him and tell him to keep his mouth shut. We have dodged one bullet. The next one won’t be so easy. I say that I have called his parents and for him to call me at my office if he hears from the university. I explain that Coach Carter will be taking a lot of heat and to make sure he thanks him.

  “What he’s done is controversial. Don’t let him down, and keep your cool when you read or hear something negative. It’s going to happen. Don’t say anything to reporters. This isn’t over yet.”

  “I know,” Dade says.

  You don’t have a clue, I think, but it will be no good to harp on it. Better that he have a good practice and concentrate on Tennessee.

  “It’s my job to worry about what happens next and your job to play football and keep your grades up, okay? I’ll be back up next week, but I’ll be in touch with you before then.”

  “Okay,” he says, a little sullenly. I know I am being condescending, but I have trouble doing one thing well at a time much less two. I doubt if Dade is any different.

  “Dr. Beekman,” Sarah says shyly, “this is my dad.”

  Beekman, a medium-height, sandy-haired guy in his early thirties, smiles easily, as if he has nothing to hide.

  “Charlie Beekman,” he says, rising from behind his desk and extending his hand.

  “Sarah speaks of you so often that I feel as if I already know you.”

  My dad the Neanderthal, probably.

  “I was on my way out of town and wanted to come by and see Sarah,” I explain, getting a good grip and squeezing hard. If he’s hitting on my daughter, I want him to remember this handshake.

  “I understand you’re interested in the sociology of the Delta.”

  He waves his hand for me to have a seat. I look at Sarah, whose expression is rapturous. She smiles at me as if God Himself had invited me to drop by for a chat. I sit down beside Sarah in a straight-backed chair with no arms like some dumb student about to get chewed out for failing his course.

  “The Mississippi Delta has so much potential,” Beekman says eagerly.

  “But it’s been terribly neglected academically in the last fifty years. Both communities African-American and white, contain some very talented people, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

  I shrug, looking around the room for clues to this guy’s testosterone count. Mounted on the wall behind him are familiar photographs of small-town life in the Delta, also rice fields, a cotton gin, the old bridge over the Mississippi connecting Arkansas to Memphis. The pictures don’t hold a clue to the poverty and racial tension.

  “We all seemed pretty ordinary at the time I lived over there,” I say, not wanting to give anything to this guy.

  “Of course, it was a different world back when I was growing up.” He nods, and I swear I think he winks at Sarah as if to say that, yeah, your old man is the real thing. A Southern cracker still fresh out of the box after all these years.

  “The Delta Commission’s goal was to find ways to keep people like you at home to build it up.”

  “I don’t think one more lawyer would have made much difference,” I say, trying to keep this conversation from becoming too serious. I haven’t got time to hear him lecture me on the revitalization of the Delta.

  “Is Sarah doing a good job for you?” I ask, more interested in Beekman’s present relationships than his academic pursuits. I want to ask the guy if he is married and how many kids he has, but Sarah would go through the roof.

  “She’s wonderful!” Beekman says enthusiastically.

  “Best student I’ve ever had work for me.” He smiles at her as if she had just agreed to go for a weekend in Cancun.

  I turn to Sarah, who is blushing.

  “I guess being a clerk in a video store during high school,” I say sardonically, “was more training than I realized.”

  “I do a lot of proofreading,” Sarah mumbles, obviously wishing her employer’s delight wasn’t so obvious.

  “I check citations, stuff like that.”

  “She’s great on computers, too,” Beekman gushes, “a really bright kid.”

  I hope he remembers the “kid” part. Beekman, I have to admit, with his warm brown eyes is a decent-looking guy. Not a hunk, but probably the type who knows how to talk to women. The sensitive kind, who gets half their clothes off before they know what they’re doing.

  “She was a good student in high school,” I say, hoping he’s getting the point. Beekman’s not wearing a wedding ring.

  Of course, it could be on a shelf in his closet. It would be tempting for a visiting professor not to bring a lot of bag gage. I stand up, knowing Sarah would have been more than happy for me to have confined this visit to a hand shake.

  “I’ve gotta get on the road,” I say.

  “Nice to have met you. Dr. Beekman. Hope to see you again. I’ll be back up several times this fall, I’m sure.”

  “Looking forward to it,” Beekman says, smiling easily.

  Sarah precedes me into the hall.

  “You didn’t have to come by,” she says, blushing again.

  “I couldn’t leave town without seeing one of the Seven Wonders of the World.”

  Sarah rolls her eyes.

  “You sound jealous!”

  “That’s ridiculous! It’s just that I’ve never liked professors much,” I say.

  “They’ve got too much time to think.”

  It is time to change the subject.

  “You heard about Dade, I guess.”

  “It’s all anybody’s talking about, except Dr. Beekman.

  He doesn’t care about anything but his research.”

  Sure, sure. My poor, naive daughter.

  “What are they saying?”

  She pleads, “Daddy, don’t try to use me, please!”

  “I’m not,” I say, a little disappointed in her unwillingness to help me out. I should understand, but I don’t. I tell her that I will be back up early next week. She gives me a quick hug, glad to be rid of me. Parents, like children, should be seen but not heard.

  “Do you think Coach Carter was wrong to leave Dade on the team?” I ask.

  “He’s innocent until proven guilty, isn’t he?” If she won’t serve as an informer, she can at least act as a sounding board.

  “I don’t know how I feel,” she answers stubbornly.

  “I’ve already heard there’s going to be a meeting of some women tonight to discuss it. I may go.”

  “That’s fine,” I say neutrally. She may eventually give me some details of campus gossip if I can resist pumping h
er so much.

  Driving home through the glorious fall foliage I wonder if I am guilty of projecting my feelings onto guys like Beekman. What do young women see in us old guys? It sure isn’t looks or staying power. And, in my case, it isn’t money either. Maybe women really are looking for their fathers. God help Sarah if that’s true.

  6

  on returning to my office from my plea hearing in circuit court I spot through the glass doors a woman I assume is Lucy Cunningham standing at Julia’s desk. Dade has her identical copper coloring, her handsome face. I see Julia’s lips move, and the woman turns to look at me as I push open the glass. She nods, unsmiling, before I can call her name. Not exactly pretty (though she may have been as a girl), she is a tall, striking woman with a full, sorrowful face. Whom does she remind me of?

  Coretta Scott King, the widow of the slain civil rights leader, whom, I realize, I’ve never observed to smile in all the years of seeing her on television.

  “Mr. Page,” she says quietly, with more dignity than usually heard in our waiting room, “I’m Mrs. Cunningham, Dade’s mother.”

  She offers her hand. My immediate impression is that this sophisticated woman is not a likely candidate for wife of a black store owner in the rural Delta. She’s wearing a red-and-white-striped knit tunic over a matching red skirt and four-inch heels. She is my height and looks to be about my age. Her hand, soft to the touch, offsets some of her severity, and yet, such is her presence, that even Julia, unoccupied behind her desk, falls silent as I greet my client’s mother and escort her back to my office.

  “Would you like some coffee?” I ask as she sits down across from me.

  “No, thank you,” she says, studying my diplomas be hind my head.

  “What else have you learned about Dade’s case?”

  So much for small talk. I pull out my notes and for a solid hour we discuss her son. She questions me closely about what I have learned about Robin Perry. Women, if Lucy Cunningham is any guide, are ruthlessly cynical about each other. We men only think that we pursue women. Judging by her manner and questions, Mrs. Cunningham knows better, or perhaps she simply knows how the female sex reacts to her son. Are black women, I wonder, more suspicious than their white counterparts?

  Rosa, I remember now, thought so. Black women were “in the bottom of the barrel,” my wife uttered once in that quaint way she had of translating English into Spanish and then rendering it back into the American idiom.

  “I wonder if Dade sat down by her in that communications class,” she muses, in a soft bottom-land accent that is rich as the silt from the Mississippi River, “or whether she picked him out.”

  I make some notes of my own.

  “I’ll ask him,” I say, more impressed with her than her husband. Roy, in the few minutes I spent with him, seemed angry and bitter.

  Lucy Cunningham is far more subtle and determined.

  “He probably didn’t notice,” she says dryly.

  “Until this happened, he was pretty full of himself.”

  I nod, glad that she has a more realistic view of her son than her husband.

  “It’s easy to see why he would have been,” I say, wondering what it would be like to be the object of all that attention.

  “He’s movie-star handsome and a Razorback, to boot. Heady stuff for anybody in this state.”

  Lucy Cunningham sighs and seems to look past me at the wall.

  “Except for the one or two who are good enough for the pros,” she says, her voice soft and re signed, “it’s mainly a waste. They don’t go to Fayetteville to get a degree; they’re there to win games for the greater glory of the people who run this state.”

  There is no bitterness in her voice. That’s just the way things are, her tone implies. I disagree. Sports is the only unifying force in Arkansas, the only successful enterprise black and white males share.

  “Didn’t your husband follow the Razorbacks before Dade went to Fayetteville?” I ask, smiling, to let her know I take issue with her but don’t want a fight.

  “As long as we win for you,” she rebukes me.

  “We all get along together until something like this comes up.

  Roy knows that. Do you think Nolan Richardson has any illusions about why whites think he’s become a good basketball coach in the last few years?”

  “He’s very successful now,” I concede, hoping I haven’t alienated her. A white man’s naivete is par for the course.

  “After his first couple of seasons, they said he was a good recruiter, but a bad coach,” she lectures me.

  “If he starts losing again, they’ll say the same thing, meaning, he’s dumb. We know what most white people think about us.”

  I blink at the bluntness of this woman, but I realize she must consider me different from the average white. Still, I am uncomfortable with the way this conversation is going and point to the front page of the Democrat-Gazette.

  “A lot of people are supporting what Coach Carter did yesterday.” An informal survey by the paper showed more support than I anticipated. There was the expected grumbling by some women’s groups and some others, but no official word by the university that anyone had filed a complaint with the All-University Judiciary Board, the school’s internal mechanism for dealing with this kind of case, according to the paper. Predictably, some feminists were outraged, calling Carter “a Neanderthal who should be fired. Carter’s actions condoned violence against women, etc.” etc.

  Mrs. Cunningham has been making notes in a three ring binder notebook and taps the blue plastic cover against her lap.

  “But a lot of people are upset by it, too. I hope it was a good idea to try to keep him on the team.”

  I reassure her that it was.

  “The best way to ensure Dade gets a fair shake at the trial is not to let anyone shift the burden of proof onto him beforehand. I know you don’t know me, but I want you to trust me on this.”

  She says, unsmiling, “I know very well who you are, but you don’t have the slightest idea who I am, do you?”

  Puzzled, I squint at this woman as if her identity will become apparent if I continue to stare at her. There is nothing about her that is familiar, but my memory for faces is so bad I could have easily met her in the past. Yet, someone with her direct manner and striking appearance would be hard to forget.

  “I meet new people almost every day,” I say, as if this fact were a decent excuse.

  “I’m from Bear Creek,” she says abruptly.

  “Believe it or not, you and I have the same grandfather.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I exclaim. Suddenly, ancient gossip, never substantiated, and fervently denied by my mother in a long forgotten conversation when I was six teen, spews up in my brain like mud dredged from a canal. Bobby Don Hyslip had called me a nigger-lover one broiling summer night at the Dairy Delight, and I had made the mistake of listening to him. Bobby Don, whose alcoholic father was a fixture at the Bear Creek city jail, had never liked me because he claimed that my father, a schizophrenic and alcoholic, had always received special treatment from the powers than ran the town until he died when I was fourteen. Bobby Don was absolutely correct.

  His daddy. Barney, was a worthless river rat who fathered kids all over town and never worked two days straight at his job at the sawmill, while my father was a respectable druggist who owned his own business for twenty years until his illnesses got the best of him.

  “You’re always actin’ so superior. You know your granddaddy knocked up a nigger bitch!” he had yelled out of his beat-up Ford.

  “You got high-yeller cousins runnin’ all over Bear Creek.”

  With that, he had peeled out in the gravel. That night when I got home I had confronted my mother who swore there wasn’t a word of truth in the story. I didn’t believe it then and don’t believe it now.

  Lucy Cunningham’s face softens.

  “I’ve known who you were since I was a little girl. Your daddy owned a drugstore on Main Street before he got
sick and hung himself in the state hospital.”

  This casual account of my father’s death, though correct, irritates me by its presumptuousness. Since he owned the only drugstore in Bear Creek, it does not surprise me she knows a little of my history. My paternal grandfather had been a small-town entrepreneur, owning a service station, the first car wash, a diner, and now that I remember it, according to my sister Marty, for a short while he owned a liquor store and the movie theater in the black section of Bear Creek. His proprietorship of the latter two enterprises was hardly proof he had a sexual relationship with a black woman.

  “Did you hear that growing up?” I ask. Granddaddy Page died from a heart attack when I was about ten.

  Lucy Cunningham gives me a knowing smile, but her voice is less intense.

  “Many times.”

  When I was growing up in Bear Creek, gossip was its major form of recreation, and racial segregation was hardly a barrier to its transmittal. It sounds like the kind of crap Barney Hyslip would make up and repeat endlessly at his occasional job at the sawmill. I have no intention of dignifying that kind of talk.

  “How did you get my name?” I ask, my voice stiff.

  Lucy leans back in her chair, apparently regarding me with satisfaction.

  “When you represented that black psychologist charged with murder, I saw your picture in the paper and realized who you were,” she says, folding her arms across her breasts.

  “James told me you lived right down the street from him and had been married to a South American woman darker than me.”

  Is she insinuating that a predilection for black women runs in my family? Of my childhood in Bear Creek I re call only selected vignettes, few having to do with my grandparents. Everything was subservient to my father’s growing paranoia that the Communists were taking over the country and his eventual hospitalization and suicide.

  “Rosa was truly a remarkable woman,” I say, determined not to sound defensive. I don’t feel comfortable with Lucy Cunningham. Why has she brought up the rumor about my grandfather?

  “Gloria told me your wife was beautiful,” Lucy Cunningham acknowledges.