The Quiet Game

“Faulkner thought the land itself had been cursed by slavery. I don’t agree.” I pause, feeling the writer’s special frustration at trying to embody moral complexities in words. “Have you ever read Karl Jung?”

“A little, in college. Synchronicity, all that?”

“Jung didn’t try to separate good and evil. He knew that both exist in every human heart. He called the propensity to evil the Shadow. And he believed that trying to deny or repress the Shadow is dangerous. Because it can’t be done. He believed you have to recognize your Shadow, come to grips with it, accept it, and integrate it.”

“Make friends with the evil in yourself?”

“Basically. And the South has never done that. We’ve never truly acknowledged the crime of slavery—not in our collective soul. It’s a bit like Germany and the Holocaust, only slavery is much further in the past. Modern generations feel no guilt over it, and it’s easy to see why. There’s no tangible connection. Slave owners were a tiny minority, and most Southerners see no larger complicity.”

“How does the white South acknowledge the crime?”

“It’ll never happen. That’s what’s scary about what Shad Johnson is doing. Because the day of reckoning always comes, when everything you’ve tried to repress rears up in the road to meet you. Whatever you bury deepest is always waiting for the moment of greatest stress to explode to the surface.”

“You’re the only white person in this town who’s said anything like this to me. How did you turn out so different?”

“That’s a story for another day. But I want you to be clear that I think the North is as guilty as the South when it comes to blacks.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“You’re damn right I do. I may criticize the South when I’m in it, but when I’m in the North, I defend Mississippi to the point of blows. Prejudice in the North isn’t as open, but it’s just as destructive. Most Yankees have no concept of living in a town—I mean in a town—that is fifty percent black. No idea of the warmth that can exist between black and white on a daily basis, and has here for years.”

“Oh, come on.”

“What happened in Boston when they tried busing?”

“That’s a different issue.”

“Watts. Detroit. Skokie. Rodney King. O.J.”

She sighs. “Are we going to refight the Civil War here?”

“How long have you lived here, Caitlin?”

“Sixteen months.”

“You could live here sixteen years and you’d still be on the outside. And you can’t understand this place until you see it from the inside.”

“You’re talking about the social cliques?”

“Not exactly. Society is different here. It’s not just tiers of wealth. Old money may run out, but the power lingers. Blood still means something down here. Not to me, but to a lot of people.”

“Sounds like Boston.”

“I imagine it is. The structure is concentric circles, and as you move toward the center, the levels of knowledge increase.”

“Were your parents born here?”

“No, but my father’s a doctor, and doctors get a backstage pass. Probably because their profession puts them in a position to learn secrets anyway. And there are a thousand secrets in this town.”

“Name one.”

“Well … what about the Del Payton case?”

“Who’s Del Payton?”

“Delano Payton was a black factory worker who got blown up in his car outside the Triton Battery plant in 1968. It was a race murder, like a dozen others in Mississippi, only it was never solved. I’m not sure anybody really tried to solve it. Payton was a decorated combat veteran of the Korean War. And I’ll bet you a thousand dollars we’re sitting within five miles of his murderers right now.”

Excitement and awe fill her eyes. “Are you serious? Did the Examiner cover the murder?”

“I don’t know. I was eight years old then. I do know Dan Rather came down with a half dozen network correspondents. The FBI was up in arms, and two of their agents were shot at on the road between here and Jackson.”

“Why was Payton murdered?”

“He was about to be hired for a job that until then had been held exclusively by whites.”

“The police must have had some idea who did it.”

“Everybody knew who did it. Racist cowards motivated by the tacit encouragement of white leaders who knew better. A year before, they bombed another black guy at the same plant, but he survived. My father treated him. This guy was on the hospital phone with Bobby Kennedy every day, had guards all around his room, the works.”

“This is great stuff. My aunt went to school with Bobby.”

Her self-centered dilettantism finally puts me over the edge. “Caitlin, you’re so transparent. You want to hear the same thing every other Northern journalist wants to hear: that the Klan is alive and well, that the South is as Gothic and demonic as it ever was. Terrible things did happen here in the sixties, and people who knew better turned a blind eye. As a boy I watched the Klan march robed on horseback right out there on Main Street. City police directed traffic for them. But that has nothing to do with Natchez as it is today.”

“How can you say that?”

“You want to assign guilt? The Examiner printed the time of that Klan march but refused to print the time or location of a single civil rights meeting. Is the Examiner the same newspaper it was then?”

She ignores the question. “Why haven’t I heard people talking about the Payton case before? Even the African Americans don’t talk about it.”

“Because if you live here, you want to make the best life you can. Stirring up the past doesn’t help anybody.”

“But cases like this are being reopened every day, right here in Mississippi. The Byron de la Beckwith case. The retrial of Sam Bowers, the Klan Wizard from Laurel. You must know that the state recently opened the secret files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission?”

“So?”

“The Sovereignty Commission was like a racist KGB. They kept files not only on African Americans but on hundreds of whites suspected of liberal sympathies.”

“So?”

Caitlin looks at me in bewilderment. “So? Newsweek just ran a big piece on it, and Peter Jennings’s people have been calling around the state, trolling for stories. The Payton case could be reopened at any time.”

“Glad to hear it. Justice should be better served than it was in Natchez in 1968, but this isn’t some old trial with an all-white hung jury. This is an unsolved murder. A capital murder. No defendant. No suspects, as far as I know. No crime scene. Old or dead witnesses—”

“Nobody said winning a Pulitzer is easy.”

A light clicks on in my head. “Ah. That’s the plan? Winning a Pulitzer before you’re thirty?”

She gives me a sly smile. “Before I’m twenty-nine. That’s the plan.”