Between Black and White Read online

  “Bo, damnit,” Cassie started, but Bo took a step back, looking them all in the eye one last time. Then he turned away and slowly walked back to his place at the bar.

  For a moment the four remaining patrons just stood there, not knowing what to do next. Then, finally able to move again, Clete Sartain nodded at Andy and walked briskly out of the bar. Andy returned the gesture and took his wife by the hand. “Let’s go.”

  A few seconds later Bocephus Haynes was the only customer left at Kathy’s Tavern.

  Bo gazed into his empty whiskey glass, feeling adrenaline rage through his body. He hadn’t seen Andy Walton out in public in almost a year. He had heard that Andy was basically a recluse these days, occasionally dropping in on one of his businesses but mostly just holed up on his farm. The last time Bo had seen him was at a gala the previous September to raise money for Martin College’s theater program. They had shared a glare from across the auditorium, but that was it. It seemed almost surreal to see Andy at a normal place like Kathy’s.

  Of all the nights to run into that bastard, Bo thought. Shaking his head, he looked into the glass, not seeing the ice cubes beginning to melt from the heat of the Jim Beam he’d just consumed. Instead, he saw images of his father as Bo remembered him best, wearing a faded St. Louis Cardinals cap and pitching ball with Bo in the front yard of the two-bedroom shack.

  The same yard where the men had come to take him. Andy’s boys.

  Forty-five years, Bo thought. Forty-five years . . .

  Bo sighed and looked up from his glass, intending to ask Cassie for another drink, but the bartender wasn’t there. He started to look around but then saw another woman’s reflection in the glass mirror above the bar. He blinked his eyes, not trusting them for a moment as the woman approached and put a hand on his shoulder.

  Over the years Maggie Walton’s flowing blond hair had turned a regal white, but otherwise she seemed not to age—her eyes still crystal blue, her posture erect, and her demeanor always perfectly composed. Even now it was easy to see how she had been Ms. Tennessee runner-up in 1964.

  “I think Cassie went to the restroom,” Maggie said. “Bo—”

  “I’m not in the mood for a lecture, Ms. Maggie. Now go on and leave me be.” Bo’s shoulders had tensed, and he grabbed his whiskey glass, rattling the cubes.

  “I don’t care what you’re in the mood for, Bo. I’m going to say what I have to say and then I’m going to leave.”

  Bo said nothing, waiting. Since he had moved back to Pulaski after law school in 1985, Maggie Walton had approached him on numerous occasions, asking him to leave her family alone, and he figured this would be no different. He would be respectful and polite, but he would not grant her request. He would never leave Andy Walton alone.

  “He’s dying, Bo,” Maggie said, her voice solemn.

  The words hit him like a bolt of lightning. He raised his eyes and met Maggie’s gaze through the reflection in the glass.

  “That was the real reason why we came here tonight—not my birthday. I wanted him to be around some of his friends. Do something normal. He . . . doesn’t have long.” She choked back a sob. “He has pancreatic cancer. Stage four. The oncologist says he’s probably got about a month, but it could be less.” She paused, and Bo saw her grit her teeth in the mirror. “I want you to let him die in peace, Bo. Do you hear me?”

  Bo said nothing, still shocked by the news.

  “You’ve spent every day of your life trying to make Andy’s miserable, and it’s time to let it go.” She paused and crossed her arms. When Bo remained silent, she slammed her right fist onto the bar next to him and spoke through clenched teeth. “Hasn’t this crusade cost you enough, Bo? Jasmine and the kids couldn’t take it anymore, could they?”

  Bo wheeled off his stool, his body shaking with anger. “Leave me alone, Ms. Maggie.”

  Maggie Walton had taken two steps back, but her eyes remained locked on Bo. “Could they?”

  When Bo didn’t answer, Maggie spoke in a calm, pitying voice. “You’ve lost your whole family, Bo. Has it been worth it?” She turned and walked to the door. Grabbing the knob, she spoke without looking at him. “I want my husband to die in peace.”

  2

  Birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan . . .

  It is the first thing anyone thinks of when Pulaski, Tennessee is mentioned. Google “Pulaski” on your computer, and the initial hits will show images of white-robed and hooded Klansmen marching on the Giles County Courthouse Square and carrying Confederate battle flags. Within the first few paragraphs of any newspaper article written on or about the town, you will see the words “birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.” It is an inescapable and unavoidable part of Pulaski’s past.

  On Christmas Eve, 1865, just eight months after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, six Confederate veterans met at a building on West Madison Street in downtown Pulaski and formed what they called a “social club.” Diversion and amusement were intended to be the club’s aims—not vigilante justice and terrorism. “Ku Klux Klan” was chosen as the name, because it came from the Greek word kyklos, meaning circle of brothers.

  Most white citizens of current-day Pulaski avoid talking about the Klan. However, if pressed, the standard reply is that the Ku Klux Klan of the 1950s and ’60s, which used violence and terrorism to fight the civil rights movement, was not the group envisioned by the Pulaski founding fathers.

  Bo chuckled bitterly as he peered at the commemorative plaque attached to the building on West Madison. After finally being cut off by Cassie, he’d left Kathy’s Tavern and walked down First Street to his office, got a pint of Jim Beam out of the bottom drawer of his desk, and headed back into the night. He was shaken by the conversation with Ms. Maggie. Andy Walton had a month to live. Maybe less . . .

  Bo needed to think, and his brain worked best on the move. He hadn’t really planned on walking anywhere specific, but his legs had taken him here.

  The road to hell is paved with good intentions, he thought, taking a sip of bourbon from the pint and spitting it on the plaque. Historians could spin the past however they wished. Bo had seen the Ku Klux Klan up close and personal through five-year-old eyes as they murdered his father.

  And he’d spent a lifetime trying to put the men who did it in jail.

  Bo had opened his law practice in September 1985, just a few months after graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law, and three weeks after his marriage to the lovely Jasmine Desiree Henderson. He’d done well in school, graduating in the top 10 percent of his class. Due to that success and his notoriety from being an Alabama football player with Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant’s 1978 and ’79 national champions, Bo had offers from numerous Birmingham, Huntsville, and Nashville law firms. Jazz had all but begged Bo to accept an offer in Huntsville, where she had grown up and where her parents still lived.

  But Bo would have none of it. From the moment he was accepted to law school, he’d known where he would practice.

  Home.

  Reluctantly, Jazz had agreed. Pulaski was only forty-five minutes from Huntsville, and despite being the birthplace of the KKK it was also the home of Martin Methodist College, an outstanding liberal arts school, where Jazz eventually accepted a position as an art history professor.

  Bo had never lied to his wife about his motives for going home. “I have to bring the men that killed my father to justice.”

  Jazz said she understood and, at least in the early years, grew to embrace Pulaski.

  The 1980s were a tumultuous time in Giles County, and Bo and Jazz moved back right when things were heating up. In 1985 the United States government declared that the third Monday in January would be celebrated as Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In the South the same day had historically been known as Robert E. Lee Day or Lee–Jackson Day in honor of the two famous Confederate generals.

  The uproar was immediate, and Pulaski became a battleground. The Ku Klux Klan staged rallies in January of 1986, 1987, and 1988 on the Gile
s County Courthouse Square, and other Klan groups held additional rallies throughout the year in Pulaski. These groups of Klansmen would stand in line to kiss the commemorative plaque that Bo gazed at now, literally bowing down to it like they were visiting a shrine.

  That is, they did until August 1989, when Donald Massey, the owner of the building, removed the plaque and welded it back on backwards. Bo ran his hand along the blank back side of the plaque, which was colored in green and black. Over the two decades since Massey’s grand gesture, Bo had seen tourists come and look for the plaque, ambling around downtown like zombies, unable to find it without it being pointed out to them. Bo had always lauded Massey’s reversal of the plaque as the perfect response. A figurative way for the town to turn its back on its unsavory past. Pulaski couldn’t disclaim the fact that the Ku Klux Klan breathed its first air downtown. But the town could fight back.

  That sense of fight was never more evident than in October 1989, when just a couple months after Donald Massey reversed the commemorative plaque, the entire town of Pulaski shut down in response to the Ku Klux Klan’s decision to host a rally with the Aryan Nation on the courthouse square. On the day of the march, over 180 businesses, including Bo’s law office, closed in protest of the rally. Wreaths colored in orange, the international color of brotherhood, covered the town. Outside of one lone gas station that remained open, Pulaski, Tennessee had turned into a ghost town—at least for one day.

  Jazz, whose parents had both marched with Dr. King in Selma, rallied behind the town’s struggle for separation from its Klan past. She and Bo became charter members of Giles County United, a group formed to counter the Klan’s rallies and which spearheaded the 1989 boycott.

  When he looked back on it, Bo knew that those early days were probably the happiest of their marriage. He also knew that, while Jazz’s motives in participating in the town’s pushback against the Klan rallies of the late ’80s were pure, his own were selfish. He wanted the town to also embrace his own personal quest for justice against Andy Walton and the other members of the KKK that lynched his father on this very night forty-five years earlier.

  But he could never garner any support for his cause. The excuses that each sheriff and district attorney that came into office gave were always the same. Bo had only been five years old when he “allegedly” saw his father lynched; Bo was the only eyewitness who had ever come forward; Bo could not see any of the men’s faces; Bo’s father’s body was found in the pond by the clearing, and it was an undisputed fact that Roosevelt Haynes couldn’t swim.

  All they had to go on was the word of a five-year-old boy that he recognized Andy Walton’s voice, and that wasn’t enough.

  Bo knew they were right—he knew he needed more evidence—but he also knew that the town had an ulterior motive in keeping the truth behind his father’s murder buried. Pulaski already had enough bad publicity as the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. It didn’t need to add a Klan lynching to its résumé. Unless Bo could bring forward conclusive evidence, the town was content to let sleeping dogs lie.

  Sighing, Bo lit a cigar and trudged aimlessly up Madison Street.

  Ten minutes later he stood in the grass in front of his home on Flower Street. Stomping out the cigar on the curb, he took a belt of whiskey and gazed gloomily at the “For Sale” sign that had gone up thirty days earlier. He knew they were asking too much, but his pride wouldn’t let him go lower. He didn’t need the money from a sale, so . . .

  . . . it sat here. Like a monument to his failure at marriage and fatherhood. Bo closed his eyes, and he immediately became dizzy, the alcohol finally working its magic. He staggered forward and almost fell, catching himself with his left hand on the grass, while his right hand brought the pint bottle to his lips again. He heard Ms. Maggie’s sharp voice play in his mind over and over again. “Hasn’t this crusade cost you enough, Bo?”

  A minute later he was ambling through the empty house. They had bought it when T. J. was two and Lila was just a baby—a response to needing more space. And from the second they walked in the door, it had been Jazz’s pride and joy. For almost two years she had directed a remodeling project, the goal of which was to preserve the historic nature of the home while doubling the square footage.

  Mission accomplished, Bo thought, as he admired the hardwood floors, high ceilings, and oversized kitchen. And though the house had always given Bo a great sense of satisfaction—who woulda thunk that a dirt-poor black kid, the son of a murdered father and a mother who abandoned him, could grow up to own one of the nicest homes in all of Giles County?—it had never given him any joy. Truth was he was hardly ever here, and even when he was his mind was always elsewhere. Bo worked his cases daylight to dark, and during the evening hours he investigated his father’s murder. Since 1985 Bo had tried forty-five cases to a jury’s verdict, winning every trial but one. Initially, he cracked his teeth on workers’ compensation and pissant criminal defense matters, but things changed in 1993 when he hit Walton Chevrolet for one point five million in an SUV rollover case. In the blink of an eye, Bo was catapulted into the world of big-time personal injury plaintiffs’ cases, and the victory was extra sweet because it came at the expense of Andy Walton’s dealership. During this same time frame, Bo figured that he had spoken with over one hundred current and former members of the Tennessee Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which, at the time of his father’s death, had over two thousand members. Bo knew if he could just get one former Klansman to roll on Andy, the floodgates would open.

  But despite his dogged efforts, he had failed. In fact, the only thing his investigation had done was bring danger to his family. Bo had lost count of how many times bricks had been thrown into windows of his home or he’d woken up in the morning to see the tires on his vehicle slashed. For the most part these actions were a mere annoyance, causing frustration and tension in his marriage and family life but nothing more.

  But things changed last spring when Ferriday Montaigne, a local bricklayer whom Bo had long suspected was present for his daddy’s hanging, asked Bo to visit him in the hospital. Ferriday had lung cancer and was dying. Bo had gone to the hospital, sensing that he was about to finally learn the truth, but Ferriday’s wife, on the advice of her husband’s physician, Dr. George Curtis, wouldn’t let Bo inside the room.

  Frustrated, Bo had gone home that night and was greeted by a crying Jazz, who pushed a manila envelope into his chest and stormed back to their bedroom, slamming the door. Inside the package were two photographs, one of T. J. stepping out of his car at Giles County High, the other of Lila walking out the side door of their home. In each of the pictures T. J.’s and Lila’s faces were in the crosshairs of a rifle scope. There was no cover letter included with the photographs, but the message came through loud and clear.

  Jazz was inconsolable. “Bo, your quest for vengeance may cost you your life. I can deal with that. I signed up for that when we married. But I will not, can not, let you subject our children to danger. Will you give it up? Tell me you will give it up right now.”

  When Bo didn’t answer, Jazz started packing. She was gone the next day, taking the kids to her parents’ home in Huntsville and telling Bo to sell the house. And though she hadn’t officially filed the papers yet, Bo knew it was only a matter of time before he was greeted by a process server. Jazz had already accepted a professorial position at Alabama A&M in Huntsville and enrolled the kids in the Huntsville city schools. She’s moving on . . .

  Bo took a long, slow sip of Jim Beam and did one last sweep of the house, remembering T. J.’s and Lila’s rooms as they had once been. A fish tank over the dresser next to his daughter’s bed. Posters of the Pirates’ right fielder Andrew McCutchen and the Saints’ running back, Mark Ingram, on the walls in T. J.’s room. Now the walls were completely bare, save a strand of leftover Scotch tape.

  Bo stopped when he made it to the kitchen. Through the double glass doors that led out to the backyard, he saw the only remaining holdover of his former life. A swing s
et, rusted from years of rain and use. Bo wished he could say he remembered pushing his daughter and son on that set, but he couldn’t. His only memory was staring at it through the empty kitchen as he did now. The only difference between that memory and tonight was that his wife and kids weren’t asleep in their rooms.

  They were gone, and Bocephus Haynes was alone in the world. Again . . .

  Bo took another sip of whiskey and felt the alcohol burn his throat while the words of Maggie Walton torched his soul.

  Then he locked up and stumbled outside, the reality of his predicament closing in around him like a solar eclipse. He had run out of time.

  Andy Walton was going to die before Bo could bring him to justice.

  3

  The stripper’s real name was Darla Ford. “Nikita” was her stage name, but it didn’t suit her. “Nikita” made Andy Walton think of a tall, thin Russian woman with a sexy foreign accent. A Bond girl.

  Darla Ford was none of those things. Five foot three with heels on, bleached blond hair, a voluptuous, almost-plump body, and a syrupy Tennessee accent, Darla was not 007’s type. Truth be known, she was a little wide in the hips to usually fit the bill for Andy, but Andy Walton had long since understood that you couldn’t typecast sex appeal. When Andy was around Darla Ford, he wanted her. She had “it,” whatever “it” was.

  “Closing time, Mr. Walton,” Darla said.

  He had been watching her put her clothes back on, which consisted of a black T-shirt strategically torn down the middle to show her cleavage, and blue jean Daisy Duke cutoffs. One of Darla’s many charms was that she still called him Mr. Walton, despite the fact that he had been a regular customer of hers for almost a year. He asked her about it once, and she just said it didn’t feel right calling him Andy. She was twenty-five, and he was over seventy. It would be “disrespectful” to call him by his first name.