The Lynching Tree Read online

  And now this hanging was Pompan.

  Had I missed something?

  From the beginning, I had the feeling that the lynchers weren’t going to get caught. I had the feeling that this would be a mystery in Pompan for the next twenty years, one that would drive people away, or keep children inside, or cause sudden fistfights in supermarket aisles.

  15

  When I told Brenda that I was coming back to Pompan, the night after I told Clarise and Cedric, she said, “I wish you’d police your father. Now there’s a man who needs some policing.”

  My older sister had always lived in Pompan. Brenda lived three blocks from my parents, and ever since my mother died, she’d gone over and cooked dinner for my father twice a week. She specialized in rice and beans, “healthy food” she called it, which my father had probably gotten used to. When she wasn’t cooking for him, she must have been eating a lot of unhealthy because she was up around 200 pounds. I didn’t talk to her about her weight anymore; she was a grown woman with a nasty temper. The last time I tried she yelled at me, “What do you know about what I eat? Nothing. For your information, I’ve tried every shit-tasting diet out there—the all-grapefruit diet, the protein shake routine, the weight watchers. I exercise more than you, and here I am. Nothing wrong with the way I am.”

  Brenda was a big girl and she beat on me mercilessly when we were small. She slapped me around until I was twelve and then she stopped and made out like she had done me a favor, toughening me up.

  When my father started dating a younger woman, a white woman, it left a sour taste with Brenda. My sister had a network of spies around Pompan—she’d been popular in high school, still worked in the Pompan school department, and kept up with people—girls she knew in high school who now worked in groceries and waitressed in restaurants and owned flower shops around town, and there was little news of my father that didn’t reach her. She was relentless in her need to know every story about our father and in her need to share them with me. I didn’t really care who he was dating and I told Brenda so. She was worried that he was making a fool of himself seeing a woman so soon after Mother died.

  Brenda told her boyfriends that family was her greatest pleasure. But it was our father whom she was attached to; Brenda had nothing good to say about our mother until she died.

  I couldn’t imagine my father making a fool of himself. He never hesitated to use his charm on people and usually got what he wanted. At the start of my new job he made it clear that he didn’t like the idea of me working with the Pompan police. I thought perhaps he just didn’t want me nearby too, watching; Brenda was bad enough.

  16

  Every Saturday morning at Rutgers, Cedric went fishing. His cousin had started taking him when he was six years old, plucking him out of East Orange and the cement, and Cedric remembered catching that first slapping mackerel like it was yesterday. “Goddamn that was a beautiful fish. I kept it in the refrigerator in a plastic bag for weeks but it started to stink and my mom tossed it out one day when I was at school,” he once told me. Every Saturday he was out of our room by 4 AM catching a bus south to the Jersey shore. Most days he’d come back with striped bass that he’d prepare for his dinner. Cedric cleaned the fish right in our sink, slit open the bellies and let the guts run onto some newspapers he put down. Then ran his finger along the inside, rinsed out the last blood, and threw it on a Hibachi he took out of the closet, the little eyes shrinking in the heat. I never touched the stuff. It smelled like oil burning in a car engine.

  When I complained, Cedric said, “You’ve lost touch with the hunter in you. You’ve lost touch with hardship.”

  “I never had hardship. That’s you, man,” I answered.

  Freshman year, Cedric built curves into the corners of our room.

  “Africans don’t live in square rooms,” he said.

  “You’re from East Orange, not Mali,” I told him.

  Cedric had grown up on the city pavement and never really got used to the quiet of the woods around the school, the electric buzz of the streetlight just outside the window of the house we rented senior year, the cricket quiet of the neighborhood interrupted by silverware crashing and our next door neighbor’s maniacal laugh. The man collected antlers and we could see them through his side window.

  For one year we shared that big old house with the automatic broom the owners left behind and the ceiling fan in the living room. Cedric had a banner on the wall above his bed that read: Work Is For People Who Don’t Fish. His room was filled with his fishing stuff—poles and reels and lines and hooks.

  I always thought it was strange that despite all his fishing, Cedric had these smooth, soft hands. They were almost feminine with perfect round nails. Before Cedric, I had this picture of serious fishermen having ripped-up fingers.

  Cedric was the only one who took as much interest in the lynching as I did. We talked about it every day, even when the news about the hanging man wasn’t news anymore. He was hanged from a tree out in the woods behind the sixteenth green of the public golf course on the north edge of town; he was hanged by his own belt and had been dead about eight hours when he was found, purple-faced and limp.

  When Cedric first saw the picture of the lynched man he said, “Badness. The dude had his moment of truth.”

  “No pity?” I asked.

  “I’m not the judge or the executioner,” Cedric answered.

  Bob Esah, who’d been listening, said to Cedric, “You don’t take any shit, do you.”

  “Not from Cage,” he said. “You? Yeah I’d take shit from you.”

  17

  At Bryant, I no longer thought of the shape in front of me as a person; it was a shadow. I watched for the shadow to make a dash for it. To the left into the dark. To the right into the lights. I couldn’t guess which way.

  I thought: How futile it is for this shadow to run. It can’t outrun my gun.

  I thought: Shadow, don’t you move. Spare us both.

  I watched for other shadows.

  The weather had changed three times that day. In the morning there was a cold, slicing rain. Later, the sun came out, drying the ground fast, leaving a surprising warmth. Then it chilled down in the late afternoon. They were predicting snow.

  It was a pearly sky. It was an everlasting sky. I wanted to go home. I wanted to climb into bed, talk with a warm Clarise.

  At 11:50 PM, ten minutes before the end of our shift, when I got out of the squad car, it took a minute for my eyes to adjust. Two great maples stood on either side of the school, their leaves gone, framing the wall with the light sprayed on it. I was trembling. I was cold. I was not thinking really. I had no words. I could not think of the word stop. It was surprisingly quiet.

  The shards of light. Too little sleep. I was having a hallucination. Small things looked huge. The sky had closed in, compressing the air around me, pressing on me.

  Our car was half in the street and half on the curb. Its lights were angled slightly upward at the wall. There was a patch of grass between the sidewalk and blacktop and the wall where the small figure, the shadow, stood.

  I was cold and I was sweating around my collar.

  18

  Returning to your hometown is going back to your past. When I first came back to Pompan I would drive past the yellow house I grew up in. There were matching evergreens in front that needed to be trimmed every few months or they’d block the windows on either side of the front door. There was a small square of grass in front of each evergreen that ran all the way down to the sidewalk. The Japanese maple tree my mother planted when I was born was now full grown, an umbrella of thin branches.

  As long I could remember my father had collected Ellington records. There had been jazz in the house when I was growing up. Old 78s with that grainy sound like someone was pouring rice in the background. My parents’ big Victrola, fifty years old, with a heavy curved playing arm and a wide hood that closed like a casket. After inheriting the Victrola from her parents, my mother refused to g
et a modern stereo. “Who needs it?” she said as she danced around the living room in her long dark skirts and a scarf thrown around her neck.

  I couldn’t imagine my father in there alone, putting on lights, cooking himself a fried egg, turning on a TV. I thought of our whole family in the living room when I was a boy: my mother on the floor with us playing some board game, my father’s chair turned slightly away from the center. That position meant he was thinking out some deep problem and he would rejoin the activity when the problem was solved.

  When Brenda told me he’d been spotted in recent months in a bar-restaurant where the lights were kept low, drinking from butterscotch water glasses with his new woman friend and sitting in a corner booth past the space set aside for dancing, I thought he had given in to the loss of my mother in a way he wasn’t facing. My sister had broken up with her long-time boyfriend Lucas (who she never married, for unclear reasons) and was concentrating her full attention on our father, or rather was making sure (in her words) he wasn’t “slumming” with “comical-looking” women.

  I couldn’t imagine the three of us—my sister, father and me—in the same town again. The thought of being close to my sister wasn’t exactly a bonus to the Pompan police job. Nor was plotting against my father.

  He and I had never gotten along. He’d always been a man who felt sure, beyond any shadow of a doubt, of all that he did. I dreaded seeing him when my little league team lost, when I got “C” in ninth grade English, when I bought myself fancy sneakers. My friends admired my father and came to our house to hear him tell stories about his college baseball days, his war experiences. Stories that he never bothered to tell my sister or me who had only a superficial knowledge of his past.

  I never brought any girls home to meet him. I used to think it was because I was afraid of what he’d say to them. Later, I realized it was because of what he’d say to me about them—how they weren’t quick enough, or serious enough, or were too quiet.

  I was careful never to ask my father for anything. So my father had no right to ask me not to be a cop. If he was going to say anything, my mother must have talked him out of it.

  When my mother was sick and I came home from college, I dreaded seeing him even more because all his certainties seemed forced to me. How could he be so full of advice when my mother was losing her hair to chemotherapy?

  19

  When I was still at the Academy, Brenda told me the rumor that the police didn’t care who lynched Clarence Wilbourne; they were glad he was dead. Less work for them, bringing him in drunk every other day, answering some call that he was fighting. I didn’t disregard her; she knew everybody and everybody talked to her. Pompan was full of eyes and ears and she was full of hearsay, tidbits supplied to her by school friends. The only two persons she’d never gotten to confide in her were my father and me.

  When I started on the force, I made it my business to ask everyone I met their opinion of the lynching. But it was Brenda—whom I’d always believed thought only of food, romance, weekend plans and my father—who offered me the cleanest insights.

  “Black man didn’t do that lynching,” Brenda said. “No black man put out those black mannequins.”

  Now, two months later, the pain won’t let me rest in this white hospital room; it grows hotter and hotter until I dose myself from the pump beside my bed. The secondhand on the electric clock moves like one in my sixth grade classroom, circling slowly across from me; too much time passing. Pain brings on the logic of childhood when all that matters is truth and revenge. But neither is possible anymore. Among the memories that linger as I wake in this morphine haze is what Butras told me when he learned that I’d been asking around the station about the lynching.

  “That’s before your time. Leave it alone,” he said.

  “Can’t,” I told him. “Black people are interested in lynchings, as a rule. Cops too.”

  Butras’ piercing stare set off alarms in my heart. I knew even then that using sarcasm with him was foolish. But at the time I also wondered: what did he care that I was asking questions?

  The first week, when I asked Tom Prescott in the squad room about the lynched man, Tom rolled his eyes. “The man was a drunk. Clarence Wilbourne. Spent his whole life in Pompan and nobody liked him. Always in a fight, always getting pulled off someone. Beat up women who for some reason didn’t turn him away fast enough. When he was locked up here last time, sobering up, he’d say his life was ruined by a Catholic pedophile priest, but nobody believed him. Listen, in this job, every day, we see men and women doing what they shouldn’t be doing. Clarence was the worst.

  “When we picked up his son Ronny for the lynching, we knew it was bullshit. We knew he wasn’t the one. But the FBI wanted to put an end to the speculation that it was a black on white crime. They wanted it over. We knew Ronny couldn’t think clear enough to have arranged that whole scene and lynched his father, although he had reason to. The man beat the shit out of his own kid.”

  20

  The first few days, I thought about Butras all the time, even at home. He gave me a lot to think about. If I asked him anything, he would talk for minutes, slanting the conversation every which way. It always came back to one or another part of Butras’ code of behavior.

  “You can’t try to jam people. You just can’t do that when you’re a police officer. They see Frank Butras and they say, ‘He’s a good guy and he’s a policeman. It’s pretty nice that he treats people like that.’ And then they treat you right. As an officer, you have to be fair and you have to be discreet in a town like this.”

  I knew that maybe Butras was not one of those white guys who wanted quick acceptance and the only way he knew to get it was to talk nasty, to talk like he thought black people talked to each other, and if he got a friendly enough response, the ice was broken. He was just trying to keep up the conversation.

  Butras put the pressure on me to make the choice: you want to find something to argue about today or not? I didn’t mind the game. It didn’t really bother me. But talking about these conversations with Clarise did, because when I was recounting my day I could feel the coercion, the pressure, from Butras. All the time I figured I could give as good as take, and after a few weeks, when things were better, I wouldn’t spend that much time considering the reasons Butras had for giving me shit. All new cops got shit.

  On the 4th, I just gave Butras the freeze back for a few hours after he got me really pissed off.

  After dinner I finally said to him, “Is it always going to be like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “You talking through your asshole.”

  “Yes sir,” Butras said, giving me a salute.

  I wasn’t afraid of Butras. Some days I found myself hoping he’d start a fight with me. Some days it would have pleased me to inflict some pain on his sad face.

  21

  I lifted five or six days a week after I broke my arm playing flag football freshman year of college. They sent me to the weight room for rehabilitation and I knew immediately that I’d be spending some serious time there. I was lifting every day for my arm, light weights, and I put on six pounds the first year. I kept lifting and put on another six pounds sophomore year, but I wasn’t lifting for my arm anymore.

  I was addicted to it, I guess. I went at it hard, got my mind off things. The air was hot and stinking and made me want to hurt the machine. Crush it. Mind on the steel and the blood thudding in my ears. I felt like I was flying.

  The guys who hung around the gym those first months saw my skinny arm getting bigger and they said, “You have to lift big to get big.” That’s the motto that gave me a huge boost. I had to constantly remind myself what I was planning to accomplish and then do it. My mind became strong and disciplined. It was a fast sweat for me, and although Cedric assured me it was dull, it wasn’t.

  The more weight you move for a set number of reps on a particular exercise, the larger your muscles get. That’s the fact. For my legs: squats, dead lifts, and leg
presses. For my back: chins, pull-downs, pulley rows, shrugs and dead lifts. For my chest: bench press, parallel bar dips, incline presses. For my abdomen: hanging leg raises and crunches. For my arms: wrist curls and barbell reverse curls.

  Cedric could never understand why I wasn’t at the gym very long, but he just wasn’t familiar with lifting. My workouts lasted only about twenty minutes, eight to ten reps per set.

  Clarise liked it, liked the way I looked. I heard her bragging on the phone to her friend Cheryl about my arms. She said, “Forearms are the sexiest thing on a man. Above the belt.”

  When my arm broke, I felt helpless and lifting was the opposite of helpless. During rehab, the moments of my greatest happiness came at the times of the worst pain.

  Now I awaken in almost complete darkness, the white sheets glowing, and I think of the weights. My life is in pieces. My father and Clarise and Brenda have given up hope, but they don’t remember when I broke my arm freshman year.

  22

  When I told Cedric that I would be the first black on the Pompan police he said, “Way past 20 and you’re still a fool.”

  He was working at the School for the Deaf in the city. His sister Marna was deaf and he’d learned sign language growing up. He didn’t know anything about police departments except not to trust them.