The White Road

Jones shook his head. “No, one of the ministers comes to the jail. Tole me he was a prisoner too, once, ’cept the Lord set him free.”

“Did he say why he was giving this to you?”

“Tole me he knowed I was in trouble, knowed there was people tryin’ to kill me. Tole me that it would protect me.”

“He give you his name?”

“Tereus.”

“What did he look like?”

Jones met my eyes for the first time since I had taken the cross.

“He looked like me,” he replied, simply. “He looked like a man seen trouble.”

I replaced the shaft, covered the blade, then after a moment’s hesitation handed it back to him. He looked surprised, then nodded at me once in acknowledgment.

“If we do this right, then you won’t need it,” I said. “And if we screw up, maybe you’ll be glad of it.”

With that, Elliot returned and we left. Neither of us mentioned the knife to him. This time, there were no more stops, and nobody followed us as we made our way to Charleston and the East Side.

The East Side neighborhood was one of the original developments outside the old walled city, and had always been unsegregated. Blacks and whites shared the warren of streets bordered by Meeting and East Bay to the west and east, and the Crosstown Expressway and Mary Street to the north and south, although even in the mid-nineteenth century the black population was higher than the white. Working-class blacks, whites, and immigrants continued to live together on the East Side until after World War II, when the whites moved to the suburbs west of the Ashley. From then on, the East Side became a place into which you didn’t want to stray if you were white. Poverty took root, bringing with it the seeds of violence and drug abuse. But the East Side was changing once again. Areas south of Calhoun Street and Judith Street that had once been exclusively black were now nearly all white, and wealthily so, and the wave of urban renewal and gentrification was also breaking on the southern verges of the East Side. Six years before, the average price of a house in the area was about $18,000. Now there were houses on Mary Street making $250,000, and even homes on Columbus and Amherst, close to the small park where the drug dealers congregated and within sight of the brownstone projects and yellow and orange public housing, were selling for two or three times what they were worth only half a decade before. But this was still, for the present, a black neighborhood, the houses painted in faded pastels, relics of the days without air-conditioning. The Piggly Wiggly grocery store at Columbia and Meeting, the yellow Money Man pawn shop across from it, the cut-rate liquor store nearby all spoke of lives far removed from those of the wealthy whites returning to the old streets.

The faces of the young men at the corners and the old people on their porches regarded us warily as we drove: a black man and a white man in one car, being tailed by a white man in a second car. We might not have been Five-O, but whatever we were we were still bad news. At the corner of American and Reid, on the side of a two-room house erected as some kind of art exhibit, someone had written the following lines: THE AFRO-AMERICAN HAS BEEN HEIR TO THE MYTHS THAT IT IS BETTER TO BE POOR THAN

RICH, LOWER-CLASS RATHER THAN MIDDLE OR UPPER, EASYGOING RATHER THAN

INDUSTRIOUS, EXTRAVAGANT RATHER THAN THRIFTY AND ATHLETIC RATHER THAN

ACADEMIC.

I didn’t know the source of the quotation, and neither did Elliot when I asked him about it later. Atys had apparently just looked blankly at the words on the wall. I guess he probably already knew all that it said from experience. Around us, hydrangeas were in bloom, and heavenly bamboo grew by the front steps of a neat two-story house on Drake Street, midway between a ruined building at the junction of Drake and Amherst and the Fraser Elementary at the corner of Columbus. It was painted white with yellow trim, and there were shutters drawn on both the upper and lower floors, slatted on the top floor to let the air in. A bay window faced out onto the street from beneath the porch, with the front doorway to the right, a mass-produced carved wood pattern above it for decoration. A flight of five stone steps led up to the door. When he was certain the street was quiet, Elliot backed the GMC into the yard to the right of the doorway. I heard the sound of the doors opening, then footsteps as Atys and Elliot entered the house from the rear. Drake seemed largely empty apart from two small kids playing ball by the railings of the school. They remained there until it began to rain, the raindrops glittering in the glow of the street lamps that had just begun to shine, then ran for shelter. I waited ten minutes, the rain falling hard on the car, until I was certain that we hadn’t been followed, before I too headed into the house.

Atys—I was forcing myself to think of him by his first name in an effort to establish some kind of connection with him—sat uncomfortably at a cheap pine kitchen table, Elliot beside him. By the sink, an elderly black woman with silver hair was pouring five glasses of lemonade. Her husband, who was a lot taller than she was, held the glasses as she poured, then passed them, one by one, to their guests. His shoulders were slightly stooped, but the strength of his deltoid and trapezius muscles was still apparent from their definition beneath his white shirt. He was well over sixty years old, but I guessed that he could have taken Atys easily in a straight fight. He could probably have taken me.

“Devil and wife fighting,” he said, as I shook the rain from my jacket. I must have looked puzzled, because he repeated himself then pointed out the window at the rain and sunlight mingling.

“De wedduh,” he said. “Een yah cuh, seh-down.”

Elliot grinned at the incomprehension on my face. “Gullah,” he explained. “Gullah” was the term commonly used to describe the language and the people of the coastal islands, many of them the descendants of slaves who had been given island land and abandoned rice fields to settle in the aftermath of the Civil War.

“Ginnie and Albert used to live out on Yonges Island, but then Ginnie got sick and one of their sons, Samuel, the one who’s taking care of my car, insisted they move back to Charleston. They’ve been here ten years now, and I still don’t get some of what they say, but they’re good people. They know what they’re doing. He’s asking you to come in and sit down.”

I accepted the lemonade, thanked them, then took Atys by the shoulder into the small living room. Elliot seemed like he was about to follow me, but I indicated that I wanted a minute or two alone with his client. Elliot didn’t look too happy about it, but he stayed where he was. Atys sat down on the very edge of the sofa, as if he were preparing to make a break for the door at any moment. He wouldn’t meet my eye. I sat opposite him in an overstuffed armchair.

“You know why I’m here?” I asked.

He shrugged. “’Cause you bein’ paid to be here.”

I smiled. “There’s that. Mostly, I’m here because Elliot doesn’t believe that you killed Marianne Larousse. A lot of other people do, though, so it’s going to be my job to maybe find evidence to prove them wrong. I can only do that if you help me.”

He licked his lips. There was sweat beading on his forehead. “They goan kill me,” he said.

“Who’s going to kill you?”

“Larousses. Don’t matter if they do it theyselves or get the state to do it, they still goan kill me.”

“Not if we can prove them wrong.”

“Yeah, and how you goan do that?”

I hadn’t figured that out yet, but talking to this young man was a first step.

“How did you meet Marianne Larousse?” I asked.

He sank back heavily into the sofa, resigned now to speaking of what had occurred.

“She was a student in Columbia.”

“I don’t see you as the student type, Atys.”

“Shit, no. I sold weed to them motherfuckers. They like to score.”

“Did she know who you were?”

“No, she didn’t know shit about me.”

“But you knew who she was?”

“’S right.”

“You know about your past, about the problems between your family and the Larousses.”

“That’s old shit.”

“But you know about it.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“She come on to you, or did you come on to her?”

He blushed and his face broke into a shit-eating grin. “Oh man, y’know, she was smokin’ and I was smokin’ and, ’s like, shit happened.”

“When did this start?”

“January, maybe February.”

“And you were with her all that time?”

“I was with her some. She went away in June. I didn’t see her from end of May until week, maybe two weeks before…” His voice trailed off.

“Did her family know she was seeing you?”

“Maybe. She didn’t tell them nothin’, but shit gets out.”

“Why were you with her?”

He didn’t answer.

“Because she was pretty? Because she was white? Because she was a Larousse?”

There was just a shrug in reply.

“Maybe all three?”

“I guess.”

“Did you like her?”

A muscle trembled in his cheek.

“Yeah, I liked her.”

I let it rest. “What happened on the night she died?”

Atys’s face seemed to fall, all of the confidence and front disappearing from it like a mask yanked away to reveal the true expression beneath. I knew then for certain that he hadn’t killed her for the pain was too real, and I guessed that what might have started out as a means of getting back at some half-sensed enemy had developed, at least on his side, into affection, and perhaps something more.

“We was screwing around in my car, out at the Swamp Rat by Congaree. Folks there don’t give a shit what you do, ’long as you got money and you ain’t a cop.”

“You had sex?”

“Yeah, we had sex.”

“Protected?”

“She was on the pill and, like, I been tested and shit but, yeah, she still like me to use a rubber.”