As dade cunningham and I come out of the Washington County courthouse into clear, dazzling October sunlight, I look around for the media, but apparently the word of his release hasn’t gotten around.
“What happens now?” Dade Cunningham whispers respectfully beside me. He is quite a specimen. Under his T-shirt his shoulders look like slabs of frozen beef. For a wide receiver he is more muscled-up than I would have imagined. His father is much darker, his features more Negroid than his son’s. Dade, I realize, looks remarkably like Jason Kidd, the incredible point guard recruited hard by the Hogs who ended up at California and turned pro after just two years. I wonder about his mother. I can’t imagine she is white, but she can’t be far from it.
“We’re going to my motel to talk.” I have checked into the Ozark Inn, a dump on College Avenue that actually looks okay on the outside. Inside, it’s better not to look too close. If cleanliness is next to godliness, the Ozark is not exactly on the highway to heaven. But for twenty-five bucks I didn’t expect the Taj Mahal, nor did I get it.
Dade nods gloomily, but based on our conversation so far, I realize he doesn’t have the slightest idea of the obstacles ahead. He will be arraigned tomorrow afternoon.
Now all we have to do is get out of here without saying anything to the media that will piss anybody off.
“If any body asks you a question,” I instruct him, “just say your lawyer has told you not to comment.”
Dade slows his long stride to match mine. He is a good three inches taller, and makes me feel as if I’m hobbling along on a walker.
“Even to my friends?” he asks naively.
“Nothing about what happened between you and Robin Perry,” I say, realizing I may be advising him to spill his guts to his coach later on today. Yet, he can’t tell his story too often, or he will trip himself up for sure.
In my room at the Ozark just down the street from the courthouse, I call Coach Carter’s office to leave my number and then Sarah to suggest we tentatively agree to meet for dinner at seven in the restaurant at the Fayetteville Hilton. I wouldn’t mind going by to see her room after all, I’m paying for it but she dismisses the suggestion.
“You don’t want to come up here,” she humors me.
“It looks like I’m doing the laundry for the whole dorm.”
Deftly, she changes the subject.
“Did you get Dade out of jail?”
“I’ll tell you all about it at seven,” I say.
“We’re going to talk right now.”
My daughter groans.
“It’ll be on the news, won’t it?”
“Probably,” I say, feeling guilty. This is supposed to be her turf now. Yet, why doesn’t she feel pride that her old man is in the news with a hot client? I guess I understand.
If love and hate are emotional kinfolks, pride and embarrassment share a common ancestor as well. It always surprises me that I want her praise and approval as much as she wants mine.
“Dade won’t be coming to dinner, will he?” she asks, her tone clearly indicating her preference.
I look over at Dade, who is pretending not to be listening I haven’t given any thought as to how he will be seen by other students. Given her own bloodlines, Sarah is hardly a racist, but she wouldn’t be wild about going to dinner with somebody who has been charged with raping a classmate. She knows all too well that the overwhelming number of the people I represent are guilty of some thing.
“No, and I may have to cancel. I’ll call if I do.”
“Okay,” Sarah says with obvious relief.
“I’ll see you at seven. You think you can find the Hilton?”
“Even I can find some things,” I say. Neither of us is noted for having a sense of direction. I hang up, thinking that Sarah has rarely displayed any subtlety in my presence What she is like with others I can only imagine.
Perhaps because of her mother’s early death, no third party has buffered our relationship. There has been no mutual interpreter. Sometimes in the past, her senior year in high school especially, emotions passed between us unfiltered by thought, creating situations that were often turbulent.
I hang up and suggest Dade call home from my room.
Collect, I tell him. I’m not getting enough to pay his phone bills, too.
Now it is my turn to eavesdrop. I am referred to as the “lawyer.” He looks over at me from the one chair in the room and says into the phone that “we’re going to talk.” I am reminded of my conversations with Sarah when she’s not in a mood to talk. Dade, I notice, is more respectful than my daughter, limiting his infrequent responses to “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am.” After a few moments, with a pained expression, he hands me the phone.
“She wants to say something to you.”
Expecting the accent of a poorly educated eastern Arkansas black woman, I am surprised to hear a rich contralto voice that rings with authority, though it still retains the drawl of the Delta.
“Mr. Page, what happens now? Is he out of school?”
“We’ll have to see about that,” I say.
“I wanted to talk to him first.” I haven’t even considered the possibility that the university would not want him to come back to school. I’ve only worried whether he will be kicked off the team.
“The incident happened off campus,” I continue “so ordinarily I would imagine it would be handled like any criminal matter. This might be different. I’ll just have to find out and let you know.”
“I’ve told Dade to do exactly what you say,” she in forms me, “but we expect you to consult with us. When will you be in your office again? I want to meet with you face-to-face.”
There is no give in this woman’s voice. No wonder Dade didn’t want to come home during the summer.
“Friday,” I tell her. Why are black women so much stronger than black men? If Roy Cunningham is in the house, he must be in the bathroom. I haven’t heard a peep out of him.
“Do you and your husband want to come over then?”
“One of us has to be in our store,” she says.
“I’ll see you Friday at ten. Roy has your card, doesn’t he?”
I find myself saying, “Yes, ma’am,” and grin at her son. After I hang up, I tell him, “Your mother doesn’t mince words, does she?”
Dade arches his muscular frame and yawns, showing strong white teeth. I doubt if he got any sleep last night.
“I’m surprised she let you off the phone so soon. She wanted me to go to Memphis so I’d be closer to home.”
“I’m from eastern Arkansas, too,” I tell him to let him know we have something in common. If you’re from the Delta, Memphis means more to you than Blackwell County.
Dade ignores my attempt at camaraderie.
“Did she sound mad?”
“A little,” I tell him.
“A rape charge is serious business.”
“Robin didn’t do nothin’ she didn’t want to do!” Dade shoots back, now rigid in the chair.
He must be scared to death. With the image of Rodney King’s beating by the LA cops forever embedded in the national consciousness, the literature of white justice is getting richer all the time. Why should he trust the system when he has up-to-the-minute documentation that it is still brutal beyond his worst nightmare? At this point I am just another white face who will be telling him what to do. I need to humanize myself to this kid if he is going to trust me. Probably he thinks of me as another coach. If he wants playing time, he’d better make me happy, and in this situation that means telling me what he thinks I want to hear. Convincing him that all I want to hear is the truth might not be so easy. I pull out a yellow legal pad from my briefcase and begin to make some notes, first establishing that he refused to give a formal statement to the police without a lawyer being present. Thank God for TV. He sounds so vehement that I find that I tend to believe he is innocent. I want to. Rape is too ugly a crime to pretend criminal defense work is just another way to make a living.
“Why don’t you start from the beginning and tell me when you first met Robin?” I suggest.
Instead of immediately answering, Dade bends down to tie a shoelace on his Nikes.
“How come,” he asks, obviously not yet comfortable with me, “they hired you?
Are you famous or something?”
“I’ve won some cases,” I allow, “but I’m a neighbor of your Uncle James. He introduced me to your father.”
Dade looks skeptical.
“You live on the same street?”
He knows as well as I do that there are few integrated neighborhoods anywhere in Arkansas.
“I was married to a woman darker than you are,” I explain, and give him a mini-version of my marriage to Rosa. I conclude by saying, “My daughter Sarah is a cheerleader for the junior varsity.”
“Sarah Page is your daughter?” Dade asks in amazement.
“I know who she is. Man, she’s a …” His voice trails off.
“A beautiful young woman,” I help him. What would he have said? A fox. A cunt? I know how guys talk about women. Or at least think, since some of us, anyway, have been forced to become so politically correct in our speech. As my friend Clan says, it’s still okay to want pussy, you just can’t say the word.
“Yeah,” says Dade, a smile coming to his face for the first time.
“She’s real nice.”
Her body, he must mean, since they hardly know each other. I realize I’m glad he isn’t coming to dinner with us.
Why? Racism? Or is it that I don’t want him sizing her up like a piece of meat? Yet, I’ve done the same a thou sand times when I’ve thought I wasn’t being observed.
There’s a difference though. I’ve never raped anybody.
Dade Cunningham may have. I understand now why Sarah would be uncomfortable.
“She’s a super kid.”
“Yeah,” Dade mutters, not at all expecting a dinner invitation nor perhaps even remotely desiring one unless I am going to pick up the check. What was I thinking when I mentioned it to Sarah? Most of my clients I wouldn’t trust to take out my garbage. Is it because this kid is a Razorback? Or have I gotten to be too impressed with the notoriety of defending high-visibility clients?
“What happened?” I prompt him.
He sets his jaw, and as he talks I can now hear his mother’s voice.
“Robin was in my communications class last spring. We sat next to each other and got to be friends in that class. She was okay. I’d be nervous right before I had to make a speech, and she’d talk to me, kind of calm me down. After the pros, I want to be a sports announcer like Greg Gumbel. Anyway, I started coming to class early, so Robin and I could go over stuff if I had a speech or something. It was easy for her. She talked all the time anyway. Some white girls you know are laughing at you as soon as they’re out of sight. She wasn’t like that.”
He pauses, and I ask, “Anybody in the class know y’all were working together?” I remember my own anxiety in a speech class taught by a retired Army colonel from Illinois My small-town eastern Arkansas accent sounded to me stupid and hicky. Try as I might, I couldn’t pronounce a single vowel to suit him.
“Mr. Page,” he said the last week of school, “you turn single letters into whole words.” I can imagine Dade’s embarrassment and consternation if he got an asshole like Colonel Davis. No matter how intelligent he may be, Dade has already given himself away by saying “wid” for “with,”
“chew” for “you.” Perhaps, when he really concentrates, he can sound the “s” on all his verbs, but I know from my own experience it is difficult to worry about form and sub stance at the same time.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“We’d just meet in the class room early, since it was empty. It wasn’t an everyday thing. She’d practice on me, too, when it was her turn.”
I try to form an image in my mind of the scene he has described. With his strong chin and firm mouth Dade is undeniably handsome. Throw in his coffee-with-cream six-foot-two-inch frame, his earnest manner, and status as a Razorback, and it is easy to see why even the whitest coed in the state would be interested.
“Did she flirt with you?”
“You mean, did she come on to me?” Dade asks, slinging his leg over the chair, which seems built for endurance rather than comfort.
“We kidded around some. I know it’s hard to believe, but I thought it was just a friendship thing. She was good in that class and could watch and tell you exactly what you were doin’ wrong and how to fix it.”
I put my pen down. This kid is growing on me. He doesn’t put out the arrogant, in-your-face trash I’m accustomed to seeing on TV from some black athletes. Yet, I know I’m seeing the side he shows to his coaches.
“Did you see her outside of class last spring?”
The chair groans as Dade shifts his weight.
“I invited her to a party off campus over at a friend’s place. She and a roommate came. Jus’ a couple guys from the team and two girls. Nothing happened.”
“Tell me about it,” I encourage him.
“Did you have sex with her that night? I hear she’s pretty goodlooking.”
“I didn’t even touch her, man!” Dade says vehemently.
“It was jus’ a party. I invited her, kind of to thank her for her help.”
“What were the names of the people there?” I ask, noting his aggrieved tone. Maybe he can’t admit he was attracted to her because of his father’s admonition to stay away from white girls.
“I’m going to need to talk to as many people as possible. The more I know about this the better off you’ll be.”
Dade rubs his right hand over his face. This isn’t his idea of fun, obviously.
“It was jus’ Harris and Tyrone and Tawanna and Doris. I don’t even remember her room mate’s name.”
I try to get comfortable on the bed. This is going to be like pulling teeth.
“Who are Harris and Tyrone and what are their last names?”
“Harris Warford and Tyrone Jones. They’re on the team, but they don’t play much. Tawanna Lindsey was with Harris that night. Doris Macy wasn’t with anybody.
She just kind of hangs around Tawanna. We cooked some ribs and drank a couple of beers. That’s all I remember.
We ate and listened to some music, talked some. Robin’s roommate, I remember, knew a lot about sports. She asked a million questions about different team members, stuff like that.”
“Whose place was it?” I ask, writing furiously.
“Eddie Stiles. He’s a student,” Dade says.
“He actually wasn’t there for the party. He jus’ lets us use it sometimes-to get away from the dorm.”
“Did you want to have sex with her in the spring?” I ask.
“She must have liked you, or she wouldn’t have come.”
“I don’t know!” Dade answers irritably.
“Nothin’ happened.
It was just kind of a social thing.”
Denial. I’ve never seen anybody operate without it.
“Dade, it’s okay if you liked her sexually even the first moment you saw her. It’s human nature. We are attracted to certain people. We can’t help it. All the lectures in the world can’t change that. A jury would understand that. In fact, I doubt if they would believe you if you didn’t admit you were attracted to her.”
Dade leans forward and rests his forearms on his thighs, staring straight ahead.
“We were jus’ friends-that’s all.”
I see I have a lot of work to do, but it can’t be done all in one day.
“Did you see her again outside of class in the spring?”
He shakes his head vehemently.
“Jus’ that one time.
School was about out, and we had exams. I went home.”
“Did you call her or ask her to do something before summer came and she couldn’t?”
“I might of called her once, but outside of class I didn’t see her.”
This kid has been brainwashed more than he realizes, but so far he is so sincere I feel good about him. Even if he is lying about his feelings, a jury in a normal case could get beyond that. The trouble is that he is black.
They’ll have to get beyond that first.
“So how did you be gin to have contact this fall?”
Dade folds his arms across his broad chest.
“She’s a cheerleader, so I’d see her at pep rallies, and I was in this course called public speaking with her. She didn’t get friendly like she was last semester until a couple of weeks ago, and then we started working together like we did before.”
“So it was her idea,” I conclude, watching his face carefully. This kid seems incapable of guile, but I remind myself I’ve had plenty of clients who had no difficulty believing their own lies.
“Now it seems that way,” he says thoughtfully.
“She’d talk at the first of the semester, but it was like she was too busy.”
“Had you asked her to work together, and she hadn’t wanted to, or what?” So far it seems that Robin called the shots.
“Not really,” Dade replies casually.
“You can jus’ tell.”
This kid is more sensitive than a lot of guys his age.
His light color may have something to do with that. Thus far, he seems about as far from a rapist as I can imagine.
“So you just started working together again?”
“Yeah,” he says blankly.
“We had a big speech coming up, and we agreed to get together and work on it a little bit the night before.”
“Whose idea was that?” I ask.
“Well, this fall we didn’t have a chance to practice be fore class. She had something before ten. I guess I did.”
“So did you suggest a place or she?” Robin could have easily manipulated this conversation. Dade seems as naive as most boys about girls. Yet, even if he is not, he gives the appearance of having been reluctant to push too hard.
“I remember talking about our rooms,” Dade says, “but you can’t study there with all the shit that goes on. I guess I suggested Eddie’s house if he wasn’t going to be there.”
Robin could have easily made this idea inevitable without saying a word about it. If this case goes to trial, one mother on the jury with a son the right age could hang up the case. Mothers know what idiots their male children can be.
“Who’s this Eddie again? What’s his last name and where’s his apartment?”
“House,” Dade answers.
“It’s a rented house on Happy Hollow Road. I don’t even know if it’s in the city limits.
Eddie Stiles. He’s just a student that kind of hangs around the players a lot. He’s okay. He lets guys use it pretty much whenever they want.”
“Is he rich?” I guess, wondering how common this arrangement is. With all the wannabes and hangers-on surrounding the Razorbacks, it can’t be terribly unusual.
I wonder if any NCAA rules are being violated.
“I heard his family owns a big funeral home in Tulsa,” Dade admits.
“He drives a new Cutlass.”
I wonder if he is black, but at this stage it seems rude to ask. I don’t want to turn Dade off. A lot of white kids have too much money; why shouldn’t one or two blacks?
“I take it that he wasn’t around that night?”
“I didn’t see him the whole day,” Dade says.
I assume the cops have talked to Eddie. He could help or hurt. Either way, I need to talk to him.
“Did you drive over together?”
“She said she’d meet me there,” Dade says.
I wonder about Robin’s motive. It sounds as if she wanted to be able to leave if Dade got out of hand. I am writing with my legal pad on my knees, and the bed creaks every time I shift my weight. Too bad the Ozark’s decorating budget didn’t allow for a table.
“Why don’t you just tell me from the moment she showed up what happened?”
Dade grabs the sides of his chair.
“It wasn’t ten minutes before she had forgot about the speech. You can tell when a girl wants to be fucked, jus’ the way she looks and acts.”
I interrupt, “How was she dressed?” I need to see a picture of Robin, so I can get an image in my mind of what happened.
“Skirt and sweater,” he says.
“She always dressed up, even for class.”
I remember seeing Robin, but it was from Row 42 in War Memorial Stadium at Little Rock during the Memphis game two weeks ago. As bad as my eyes are getting, I could have been standing next to her and not have recognized her.
“Did you have anything to drink,” I ask, “or could you tell if she had been drinking?” A good answer would be helpful here. If she had been juicing herself up beforehand, it would at least be arguable she had more than studying on her mind.
“I smelled wine on her breath, but we didn’t have any thing at Eddie’s. It happened pretty fast.”
“Did Eddie just leave his place unlocked?” I ask, glad I didn’t have a friend like Eddie in college. I got in enough trouble.
“He gave me a key,” Dade says.
“A couple of guys had them.”
I think I’m getting the picture.
“So it wasn’t uncommon to take girls over there.” Robin shouldn’t have been there. No woman asks for rape, a logical impossibility if there ever was one, but perhaps someone on the jury will want to punish her for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If they had really wanted to find a place on campus to study, it would have been easy enough.
“Not really,” Dade says.
“You got to get off campus sometimes.”
“So you’ve slept with girls over there before?” I say bluntly.
Dade makes an angry face for the first time.
“I didn’t rape nobody though. If you’re an athlete on this campus, you can get girls. That’s no shit.”
“Were you attracted to her?” I ask again, knowing this is a sore point with him, given the lectures he must have received from his parents.
I hear Dade’s stomach growl. Jail is a great place to be gin a diet. Patting his stomach through his wrinkled shirt, he says, “She wasn’t my type. A little thin, you know what I mean? No titties, no butt. I like girls with meat on ‘em.”
I scribble as fast as I can.
“So what did she do?” I ask, knowing there are a hundred details to fill in. But Dade seems in no mood at this first meeting to write a book on the subject.
He looks at a spot on the ceiling and says emphatically, “She wanted it. She came over to the sofa and took this paper out of my hand and sat down by me. She started writing on it, and talking, kind of bumping against me on the sofa. Hell, I knew what she wanted and I kissed her.
And before I knew it we were in the shower and damn she was hot! Shit! What else could I do? I only fucked her once, and then she got out of bed and took off like a bat out of hell. It was like she got what she came for, and that was all she wanted. While we were doin’ it, she didn’t complain or tell me to stop or nothin’.”
I look at Dade carefully, knowing he has had almost forty-eight hours to come up with this story. It could have easily been a form of “study rape.”
“When you say she was ‘hot,”
” I ask, neutrally, “try to remember exactly what she did or said.”
He shrugs, “She was all over me. Kissing me, rubbing my dick, hugging me. She even washed me. All the time talking ‘bout how she liked me and what a good body I got.”
I wish I had remembered to bring a tape recorder. Obviously her statement, which I should get tomorrow, is going to be quite a bit different.
“Is she going to be able to testify you hurt her in any way?”
Dade scratches his left armpit. He hasn’t had access to a shower in over forty-eight hours. I’ve had clients who contracted lice in jail.
“She didn’t holler or anything.”
“Did you use a rubber or any kind of birth control de vice?”
Dade admits candidly, “I never even thought about it.
It wudn’t like we stopped to talk about it.”
I write, “no rubber” relieved at least his story seems consistent. I can see developing an argument that Robin was simply curious and decided to scratch an itch and felt overwhelming guilt afterward. Why shouldn’t she be attracted to him? They were friends; he’s a hunk. As routine a part of the culture as casual sex has remained, despite the threat of AIDS, it is not out of the realm of possibility that though Robin felt extremely ambivalent about what she was doing, curiosity and youthful desire got the better of her. Hormones and alcohol have been used to explain the behavior of young males since some body first slipped on a fermenting grape. If women expect to be treated like men, why doesn’t the same rationalization apply to them? A decent argument may be that it now does, but the difference is that they haven’t learned to stop feeling bad about behavior men take for granted. In concrete terms, ladies and gentlemen, my brain preaches, Robin Perry had a few glasses of wine beforehand, and wanted to see what it was like to sleep with an African-American who was a star football player.
He accommodated her, but by the next day she was feeling so terrible about it she claimed it was rape.
I go over his story again and realize I am convinced he didn’t rape her. There is something I find myself responding to in this boy. I might change a few things about him, but I would change a few things about myself as well.
“Assuming Coach Carter is willing to talk to you,” I say, putting down my notebook, “we need to decide if you should talk to him and tell him your story. It’s possible that he may let you stay on the team if you can convince him you’re innocent. Whatever you say can be used against you. The cops will talk to him, and if you contra dict yourself, it’ll be used against you.”
“I want to keep playing!” he says, his voice anguished.
“That’s what I want for you,” I say.
“But there’s a risk involved each time you talk.” I do not say that if he plays out the season and continues to do as well as he has done thus far, he will be worth a lot more money (assuming he is found innocent) to whoever negotiates his pro contract.
“What do you think I should do?” he asks, his brown green eyes searching mine as if I had been representing him all his life instead of just the last couple of hours.
Damn. Lawyers have too much power over other people.
“I think,” I say slowly, hoping I am not acting too much from greed, “that if you get the chance you should talk to your coach and tell him the same things you’ve told me.”
He nods affirmatively. I’ve told him what he wanted to hear, and I know it, too. In a year or two, I hope I can look back on this and not come to the conclusion that I exploited him. Shit, I may be so rich that I won’t even think about it.
“What is Coach Carter like?”
Dade grins.
“He’s pretty damn tough. I’m in shape though. I was dogging it in two-a-days in the beginning, and he chewed my ass out good till I got with the program. I didn’t think I was, but he was right. If you give it a hundred percent, he doesn’t get mad if you screw up.
He just comes over and shows you what you did wrong.
My grandmother died on Monday the week of the South Carolina game. He told me to go home and not worry about it that I’d start and have a good game. I did. If he doesn’t like you though, you might as well quit. He’ll run you off if he thinks you’re bullshitting him.”
Coaches. They are the closest things to dictators the United States has. Nazis, most of them. Probably the worse they are, the better their records. Frustrated drill sergeants and about the same level of intelligence. I hated my track coach at Subiaco. Hell, he wasn’t the one running 880 yards in ninety-degree heat. Still, I was the Class A state champion my senior year, the only thing I ever won in my life, outside a racquetball game at the Y. While we are talking, the phone rings. It is Carter, who tells me to bring Dade to his office at seven tonight.
Hoarse, as if he has been shouting, he asks me not to talk to the media. They will know soon enough. I call Sarah back and leave a message on her answering machine to meet me a five-thirty at the Hilton.
Dade understandably is anxious to get back to his room and take a shower, and I drop him off at Darby Hall, agreeing to meet him outside Carter’s office promptly at seven.
“Don’t talk to anybody about this,” I say, knowing it will be difficult for him to keep his mouth shut.
Sarah, who is not usually punctual, is waiting for me.
Though I saw her two weeks ago (for only a few minutes after the Memphis game, my blood quickens just seeing her face. She has been off at college for over a year, but still I haven’t completely adjusted to her absence from the house. During the few weeks she was home before and after the summer term I saw how much she had matured; with too much time on my hands, probably I have regressed.
“Hi, Daddy,” she says, in a re strained voice that signals her lack of enthusiasm for the object of my visit.
Despite her misgivings, she returns my hug. She needs me more than she thinks.
“You look thin,” I criticize.
“It’s obvious you’re not eating right. I want you to order a steak tonight.”
Actually, she looks great. In her striped tank top and white slacks and with her usual exotic earrings (tonight metal in the shape of musical notes), Sarah will ensure that we get excellent service from the male employees at the Hilton.
“Oh, all right,” she says, in mock protest. When we sit down, she says, “You probably eat worse than I do, judging from what was in the refrigerator when I was home the last time.”
A waiter, obviously a student, comes over to check out Sarah.
“Would you like something to drink?” he says to me, unable to resist staring at my daughter.
With Dade’s interview with his coach looming ahead of me, I resist ordering a beer, though I would love one.
A sign of my less than successful coping skills now is that I drink more. Easy to recognize, but hard to do much about. The house has been too quiet with just me and Woogie. Several nights in the past year I have waked up on the couch in the den in the middle of the night after having an extra shot of bourbon I didn’t need or even want.
“Iced tea,” I say reluctantly.
“No beer?” Sarah asks, surprised. She orders a Coke.
Each of us imagines the other wants alcohol. I explain that I have more work to do, but she steers the conversation away from the case and tells me about the project she’s working on for the professor who gave her a job this summer.
“He’s writing up the results of this massive interdisciplinary study on the Arkansas Delta,” she says.
“It’s a spin-off of the Delta Commission. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you?”
I fiddle with my silverware, trying to concentrate.
Some kind of economic development scheme to beef up that portion of the southern states the Mississippi runs through. No dice. The country is broke. Congress didn’t want to pay for it, and neither did the states who would supposedly benefit.
“It didn’t really get off the ground, did it?” I ask, watching our waiter nudge another boy who looks our way.
“It’s spawned enormous academic interest in the region,” Sarah says self-importantly, oblivious to the attention she is attracting.
“It’s almost as if the portions of the South where slavery was the most concentrated have been punished. Parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana are like Third World countries. They’re desperately poor!”
The boy brings our drinks and practically sits down at the table with us. I’ve never heard Sarah display the slightest intellectual interest in her courses. All she has cared about was the grade, not the subject matter.
“Is the poverty a big surprise?” I comment.
“We kidnapped people from a totally different culture and virtually turned them into farm animals until machines made them obsolete.”
Sarah nods as if I’d said that two plus two equals four.
“But that doesn’t explain why the Delta’s still statistically behind the rest of the country after the invention of tractors and cotton pickers and other laborsaving de vices,” she lectures me.
“Why hasn’t the Delta prospered like the rest of the country? It’s intellectually dishonest to say that the South got behind after the Civil War and was raped during Reconstruction and never caught up. That’s a Southern myth. Besides, when one observes countries such as Germany and Japan after World War Two and Taiwan and South Korea today, it’s a radically different picture. Those countries are booming economically. But the Delta is virtually a wasteland. Why?”
I think I’m supposed to ask. Every time I’ve mentioned Bear Creek in the last couple of years her eyes have glazed over. Small wonder: she’s heard all my boyhood stories a dozen times. Somebody, Professor Birdbath, or whatever his name is, has found a switch I didn’t know existed. I’m not sure I like it. She sounds ridiculous.
“Observe” Germany. Can’t she and Birdbreath simply look at it? I powder my tea with two packets of Equal and say, “I give up. What’s wrong with us?”
Sarah hasn’t even looked at the menu. She says, “The theory, being developed by Professor Beekman and others, and it’s only provisional, is that in places like the Delta, the need to control social relationships is more of a motivating factor than economic self-interest. In other words, in other geographic regions of the country, indi gent blacks are effectively ghettoized and isolated in a social sense, but in the small towns of the South there is no way to do that. You can’t move to the suburbs in Bear Creek.”
Amazed by the transformation of my daughter into a pretentious junior graduate student, I stir my tea until I’ve almost created a whirlpool. If Sarah ever read the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette at home, she has kept it a well-guarded secret. Not that I care.
Surely she has more interesting things to do at this stage of her life than worry about the unsolvable problems of humanity, or so I thought. Since she doesn’t want to be pumped about Robin, I wouldn’t mind simply visiting with her, but she seems too serious. Professor Beekman has seen to that.
“I assume you’re talking about political power,” I say lamely, never having given a moment’s thought to the Delta’s economic problems since I left there for good a quarter of a century ago.
“Is this Professor Beekman you work for black or white?”
Sarah cocks her chin at me, a sure sign I have annoyed her.
“What conceivable difference does that make?” she says.
“These people are highly regarded in their fields.
Dr. Beekman is white, but the multi disciplinary team he heads has at least two African-Americans on it.”
“It sounds like awfully soft research.”
“It doesn’t have to be a mathematical formula to be true,” Sarah shoots back.
“I wanted to ask you something about Bear Creek, and I want you to think about this. Did you ever notice how light-skinned the leaders of the African-American community were before the civil rights movement caught on there?”
“Are you ready?” our waiter says, demanding attention from my daughter. This is the kind of place I could walk in naked and nobody would notice me.
I smile at the boy, who is hopelessly smitten.
“We better order,” I say, thinking I’m going to need my strength if I’m to get through this meal. A little more grimly than I would like, Sarah nods and studies the menu while I order fried chicken, the-cheapest meat dish on the menu.
Unaware of my shoestring budget for this case, she takes me at my word and tells the boy to bring her the club steak not the top of the line but no bargain either.
As soon as he is gone, Sarah looks at me expectantly.
“It never occurred to me to pay attention,” I confess, remembering the question.
“What researchers have observed is that the white power structure habitually handpicked the whitest-looking African-Americans they could find for socalled leader ship positions. These blacks were imitation whites. The civil rights movement, of course, changed all that.”
“It sounds like,” I point out, “blacks discriminate on the basis of color, too.”
“As a reaction,” Sarah says stubbornly, “against whites choosing lighter-skinned Negroes to be their leaders.”
Tax dollars are being paid to study the skin color of small-town Negroes? No wonder there’s a deficit. Before I can respond, we are interrupted by a classmate of Sarah’s who visits until our food comes, and fortunately our conversation about her job never regains the level of intensity it had when we first sat down. This version of my daughter will take some getting used to. I bring the conversation around to the condition of her Volkswagen, and whether it will make it home for Thanksgiving. It better. I’ve put nearly a thousand dollars into the damn thing in the last two months.
Finally, as we get up to leave, she asks, “Now that you’ve talked to Dade Cunningham, do you think he’s guilty?”
Poor Sarah. What an uncomfortable position I’ve put her in.
“Well, I haven’t heard the girl’s side,” I say, picking up the check, “but after talking to Dade, I honestly don’t think he raped her.”
She bites her lip. I know she doesn’t want me doing this case, but if it works out, she could benefit in ways neither of us dreamed possible. I wonder what she has heard. She probably knows more than I do at this stage of the case. I decide I’d like to meet this Beekman and tell Sarah I might drop by her office tomorrow. It won’t hurt the man to know Sarah has a father who will be checking up on her. Some of these profs, as far as women go, are probably major-league hitters. Sarah is showing all the signs. I’ve never heard her talk like this before. If Beek man is interested, it is easy to understand why. Half the crew of the Hilton practically follows us to the door.
“Thanks, Daddy,” Sarah says, giving me a hug in the parking lot.
“That was good.”
Expensive, too, I don’t add. I still feel guilty about not being able to send her out of state, so it would be too cheap to complain about a meal. I watch her pull out ahead of me and marvel at how well she has turned out. I must have done something right, even if at the moment she sounds like one of those Southerners who finds out how good it feels to beat up on our benighted past. She is young and so self-righteous it makes me want to gag. Experience will knock some of that out of her, I hope.
I look at my watch. Quarter to seven. Time to go see Carter. I turn left onto Dickson and head for the campus.
Carter’s supposed to have as great a football mind as Lou Holtz or Jimmy Johnson. It doesn’t matter. He could have an IQ of 7. There’s only one bottom line, and that’s your won-lost record. A 5 and 0 record says it all for the time being. I just hope he isn’t as politically correct as my daughter, or we are in trouble.