The woman laughs and shakes her head. “Same old Henry. I worry about that boy.”
She comes around the desk carrying a big purse and a cake box. “I sure like your books, Mayor Cage. My husband does too. And he don’t hardly read nothing anymore, so that’s saying something.”
“I appreciate it, Mrs …?”
“Whittington,” she says. “I used to be a Smithdale, ages ago. I only say that ’cause Dr. Cage treated me when I was a teenager. They don’t make ’em like Dr. Cage anymore.”
I give the obligatory smile I always do in these situations.
As Mrs. Whittington passes me, I feel her hand close on my wrist, and she looks into my eyes with the disarming sincerity of country people. “I mean it,” she says earnestly. “You take care of your daddy.”
I promise that I will, realizing as I do that the rumors must already be spreading outward through landlines and the cellular airwaves like vibrations through a spiderweb.
“We’ll be praying for you,” Mrs. Whittington says, and then she’s gone.
I hear the glass door being locked as I pass through the doorway into a larger room containing several small desks, a photocopier, and tall shelves holding big bound volumes filled with back issues of the Beacon. Seated behind one of the desks, playing an old National guitar with a shining silver resonator, is Henry Sexton, the lanky, unassuming baby boomer who has stirred up more trouble for ex-Klansmen than almost any reporter in the South. Henry nods when he sees me, but he keeps on playing, using a gold cigarette lighter as a slide, filling the room with crystalline wails that soar over droning low notes that ebb and flow like the moaning of a grieving man. With his graying mustache and goatee, he looks more like an old musician than a journalist.
“Come on in and sit down,” he says, scrunching up his mouth as he plays a particularly difficult passage; then he tosses out a flurry of blue notes that vanish into a shimmering harmonic at the twelfth fret.
“Sounds good,” I say, as he lays the National flat in his lap.
“I try to keep my hand in. Calms me down when I’m stressed out. Playing this guitar always makes me think of Albert Norris.”
As Henry takes his hands from the strings, I notice his hands are shaking. “Did you know him personally?” I ask, quickly looking up at his eyes.
A deeper sadness comes into Henry’s perpetually sad eyes. “I knew him well. As a boy, of course.” His face brightens a little. “As a matter of fact, I bought that guitar off a man Albert sold it to back in the fifties. Albert was a pianist by training, but he could play a mean guitar when he wanted to. But it was Jimmy Revels who taught me to play the slide like that—with a cigarette lighter instead of a bottleneck. Steve Cropper did the same thing on some big records. But you didn’t come here to learn about the blues.”
“I didn’t realize you knew Jimmy Revels, either. You’ve never mentioned that in your articles, have you?”
“No. I try to keep my writing as objective as possible. But I knew Jimmy pretty well. Luther Davis, too. I was close to Albert’s whole family, and most everybody who hung out in the store. That’s one reason I’ve never let those cases rest. Maybe the main reason.”
“Well, I admire you for it.”
Henry shakes his head. “I respect you more for taking on the Del Payton case. It’s easy to work hard at something when you have a personal stake in it.”
I don’t want Henry thinking I’m a better man than I am. “Honestly, when Payton’s family first came to me, I turned them down. They sort of embarrassed me into taking the case. You could say I took it out of white guilt.”
Henry goes still, his eyes smoldering in his mild face. “Don’t knock white guilt. Let me tell you something. There’s a PBS crew filming a documentary about my work. They’re covering a few other investigative journalists, too. And the question people always ask when the director shows them footage is ‘Where are the black reporters in this story? All you’re showing us is white men trying to solve these civil rights murders.’”
“How do you answer them?”
“With the same question. Where are the black reporters? I need all the help I can get. But it’s white men working these cases, almost exclusively. And I’m not sure why. Is it guilt, like you said? I’ll tell you this: when I read my list of black murder victims from the sixties, hardly a black person in America recognizes a name. There’s something wrong with that, brother.”
Henry leans back and flicks his fingernails across the open-tuned strings on the National. “Albert Norris was like a father to me, Penn. But Jimmy Revels broke my heart. And he never even knew it. Ain’t that something?”
Jimmy Revels broke my heart? This strange lament stops me cold. For a moment I wonder if Henry is telling me he’s gay, but he reads my mind and snaps this delusion with a laugh. “No, not like that. But we don’t have time to go into that story. Did you tell Shad Johnson I made a copy of what was on that hard drive?”
“No. I promised you I wouldn’t, and I keep my promises.”
“Thank you. I need favors from Shad from time to time.”
“Has he helped you in the past?”
“No. But he’s all I’ve got to work with over there right now.”
“My fiancée would tell you you’ve got nothing, then.”
Henry looks strangely uncomfortable.
“Do you know Caitlin?”
“I’ve met her a couple of times,” he says quietly.
His tone doesn’t sound favorable. “But?”
“Well …” He looks at the floor between us. “She’s big-time, you know? Pulitzer Prize and everything. I just work for a little weekly paper.”
“Don’t underestimate what you’re doing, Henry. I’ve heard Caitlin compliment your stories many times. She has tremendous respect for you.”