As he started up the eastbound span that arched over the red-tinged river, he saw the spire of St. Mary’s cathedral standing stark against the clouds. The sight lifted his heart. From this view, Natchez appeared to be the mythical City on the Hill. Sited on a high bluff over the river, the three-hundred-year-old town dominated the landscape for miles around, its churches taller than every other building but one. Natchez occupied the only such high point between Missouri and the Gulf of Mexico, and its citizens had egos to match it—or that’s what you believed when you grew up on the Louisiana side of the river. Living in the shadow of that bluff, Henry had felt a mixture of jealousy and resentment toward the people in the antebellum mansions across the water. He just knew that the folks on that hill believed they were better than he was. And from an economic perspective, they always had been.
The cotton barons of the nineteenth century—the “nabobs of Natchez”—had grown most of their crops on the Louisiana side of the river, but they lived on the bluff at Natchez, in palaces that would shame a sultan. High above the yellow fever and the riffraff that plagued the flatboat port at Under-the-Hill, they hunted fox, raced Thoroughbreds, and hosted glittering soirées while only a mile across the river the poor working sods tried to scratch out a living on the margins of the floodplain. The Civil War had taken the nabobs down a few pegs, but not to rock bottom, since the city had surrendered without a shot, dodging Sherman’s fury and remaining structurally intact. Several lean decades had followed the war, but during the Great Depression, a few wily old belles had restored their mansions, put together an annual Spring Pilgrimage, and started fleecing the Yankees and Europeans who traveled south to gawk at plantation palaces that dwarfed Tara from Gone with the Wind. Then, around 1940, some lucky redneck struck oil, and within ten years the city was rolling in cash again, selling black gold instead of white and lording it over every town for miles around. This second wave of wealth had brought Brody Royal his fortune, or the seed of it anyway. In the decades afterward, Royal had wisely diversified into a half-dozen other businesses that allowed him to ride out the oil bust of the 1980s like a southern John D. Rockefeller.
As if summoned by Henry’s thoughts, an oil field service truck bearing the blue legend ROYAL OIL roared out of his blind spot and passed him, headed east toward Natchez.
“I’m coming for you, you bastard,” Henry muttered, looking at his watch again and thinking of his upcoming interview. He could not afford to waste time with Shad Johnson.
Henry’s tires thumped as his Explorer rolled off the bridge, and he prepared to turn left, into the old downtown. It was during the fifties, he reflected, that a nasty streak of racism had taken root in Natchez. The seeds of that sentiment had come from outside the town proper. Though Natchez had been the slaveholding capital of the South, its leaders were Anglophiles who sympathized with the Union cause. Even those who didn’t were wealthy aristocrats who’d educated their sons in the Ivy League and sent their daughters to the royal courts of Europe. Their descendants had a far more enlightened view of race relations than most Mississippians. But by the 1950s, large numbers of poor whites had been brought in to work in the town’s new manufacturing plants, and with them came the extreme and sometimes violent prejudice of the working class. Hailing from places like Liberty, Mississippi, and Monroe, Louisiana—hard-shell Baptist country—these descendants of the archetypal Confederate foot soldier were the disaffected ranks that Klan recruiters found ready for action when the Negro started trying to achieve equal rights in the workplace. Men like Frank and Snake Knox, Sonny Thornfield, and Glenn Morehouse—guys who weren’t afraid to get their hands bloody while carrying out the will of the White Citizens’ Council members who preferred the status quo but wouldn’t risk their liberty or good name to maintain it.
Thankfully, things had changed since those days. Two years ago, the citizens of Natchez had elected Penn Cage mayor, and the former lawyer and author had worked hard to heal the wounds that remained in the city’s body politic. Cage’s election victory had surprised some, but not Henry. The author had a half a century of goodwill to cash in on—not his own, but that of his father, a beloved physician who’d always treated blacks just as he had whites. That goodwill bought the son more than a third of the black vote on election day, even with Penn running against a black candidate—Shadrach Johnson, the very man Henry was now headed to see.
Henry parked his Explorer in the shadow of the incongruously modern sheriff’s department building, retrieved his briefcase from the trunk, and walked across the street toward the DA’s office. Adjacent to City Hall and the courthouse, the DA’s building seemed to crouch under the slit windows of the sheriff’s department and the county jail. As Henry trotted up the stairs, his sense of dread intensified. Shad Johnson was a politician with his eye on the main chance. He would undoubtedly ask Henry some pointed questions, and Henry didn’t want to say any more than the law required. It would be good practice for dealing with the FBI later in the day, as he would almost surely be required to do.
Henry pushed open the door to the DA’s office suite and looked around the anteroom. A slim young black man in a gray suit sat before a modern desk, typing on a notebook computer. The last time Henry visited this office, the secretary had been a woman.
“Can I help you?” the young man asked without a trace of southern accent.
“I’m Henry Sexton.”
“Go in. He’s waiting for you.”
Henry hiked up his khakis with his free hand and walked through the tall door behind the assistant’s desk.
Shad Johnson waited behind an antique desk the size of a tennis court. He didn’t rise to greet Henry, much less make a move to come around the desk. A light-skinned black man, he regarded Henry with the cool superiority the reporter associated with men who wore their past laurels like social armor. Johnson’s dark blue suit probably cost ten times as much as the one Henry wore to church on Sundays. The wall to Henry’s right was covered with photographs of the district attorney with various celebrities and politicians, mostly African-American, who had come to Natchez to campaign for Shad in his unsuccessful 1998 bid for mayor. It took a moment for Henry to notice his video camcorder standing on a tripod in the opposite corner of the DA’s office.
“Were you surprised to hear that Viola Turner died this morning?” Johnson asked without preamble.
“Yes,” Henry admitted.
“Surely you knew she was ill?”