American Ghost (24 page)

The violence predictably fell according to racial lines, the white men all employees of the Hammond Lumber Company; the blacks, turpentiners from Camp Six, who were far down the caste system, considered dangerous and expendable.
*
For many years Kite's murder and the ensuing violence was shrouded in secrecy, the tree limb where he was hung neatly removed in 1975 by a city commission concerned with bad PR, though Hendrix
natives have never denied their participation in what is considered the last of the spectacle lynchings.

*
Local families such as the Hoyts still boast of owning pieces of the rope, and his fingers, which were severed as souvenirs, can still be found in Hendrix, though one native regretfully added that most of them were lost, as they'd been taken into Cleary the day of the lynching and thrown on black citizens' porches, in warning.

It ended there, on something of a cliff-hanger, with no further annotation, or explanation of why the lynching was so thoroughly attached to the Hoyts. To Jolie, none of it was new, and the most that could be said of it was that it settled, once and for all, the great mystery of why Sam was there—truly to dig into the lynching. Why, she did not know—and why he'd waited this long to post his findings, she knew even less.

What she did know was that she had surely been snookered, in a way that still rankled, making her sit back in Tad's ergonomic chair and rub her eyes, wondering who told Sam about the rope, which, as far as Jolie could tell, was pure myth. She knew that it wasn't either her uncle Ott or, God forbid, her father, if for no other reason than neither would have spoken of it with humor or spiced it with profanity. They'd certainly never discussed it with her, though she'd heard a good bit about it from Carl and her cousins, when they were young men intent on honing their reputations as Hendrix badasses. They'd heard all the details down at the fish camp on hunting weekends and took a lot of perverse, macho pleasure in rumors of the Hoyt participation, as evidence of their superior ferocity and strength. They might be dark and mixed and poor as dirt, but they didn't take any shit from anybody, they bragged, and with a wink sometimes added a smug “Ask Henry Kite.”

Jolie groaned to think of it, as a good many of her loyal constituents were from families who'd been run out of Camp Six and had settled up the road in Cleary, where they'd been absorbed into the local black community. They had contributed high cheekbones and green eyes to more than a few honey-skinned homecoming queens. They knew who
they were, and she them, and as long as she treated them with the same respect as she did every other man, woman, and child, they put up with her. They even swayed the vote in her favor after she took to the churches. It made for a delicate balance, and she'd be hard-pressed to talk her way out of it if Henry Kite's name resurfaced in any sort of public forum. She wished this tricky bit of political reality had occurred to her in her extreme youth, when she had been so caught up in sharing the magic of her elusive
ethnicity
with Sam Lense.

She was sitting there, tapping a nail on Tad's cluttered desktop, when the in-house line buzzed, so obnoxiously loud that she nearly jumped out of her skin. She dug around the paperwork to unearth the phone and found Faye on the line, Jolie's right hand and longtime city clerk, who was at that moment deep in the electric-bill drama, her voice harassed.

“What arre you doing, nosing around back there? We're dying up here. Can I give Farris a refund out of my purse, or do we really have to track it? I mean, Jol, we're talking four dollars.”

Faye had come up the ranks in a more human, less regulated time, and with great regret Jolie told her, “You have to do it on the program. Have Tad come in early. I know it's a pain. I'll be up in a minute.”

“Well, good,” Faye said in the honeyed tones of a South Georgia native. “We are floundahing up heah, could use a hand—and you have a visitor most insistent to see you. A black gentleman,” she said in a mildly strained voice, as if having to stretch her neck to see him over the counter. “I don't think I know him.” She added, after a pause, “Neither does Tamara.”

Tamara was the deputy city clerk Jolie had hired shortly after her election to—finally, forty-four years after the Civil Rights Act—integrate the city desk. If the man was black and Tamara didn't know him, he wasn't from Cleary.

A great weariness settled on Jolie's chest when she realized who it was. “Does he have a fur collar?”

“Yeah, and a hat. Looks like a
congress
man or something. Who is he?”

“New renter,” Jolie said shortly, and thought about dismissing him
with a time-honored dodge—telling him she was busy or at breakfast or due at a meeting. But she was known to give audience to all comers, including (and especially) Cleary's minority community. If she turned him away, Tamara and Faye would do even more eye-lifting. Between them, they were kin to everyone in the state and quick on the scent of scandal. “Send him to my office, then buzz me in five minutes for a meeting.”

Faye easily agreed, as this was standard procedure with walk-ins, who regularly captured Jolie around town and unloaded their angst over a multitude of injustices—not just inaccurate electric bills, but zoning irregularities, fees for Pop Warner football, the illegitimacy of the Federal Reserve, and the like. As a rule, they didn't require action, but a compassionate ear, which she was happy to provide, as long as they could fit it into a five-minute visit; otherwise she'd never get anything else done.

She closed down the website and hurried down the hall, hoping to be seated when he came in so she'd have the psychological refuge of the enormous desk. But Faye was quick on the draw and already waiting at the door with Hollis Frazier, whom she introduced in the over-the-top Bainbridge, Georgia, drawl she reserved for VIPs. “Missus May-yah, this is Mis-tah Fra-zah, from Mem-phas, to see you.”

Jolie didn't offer the old man a handshake—she was too peeved with his duplicity for that. She directed him to the leather visitor's chair, then thanked Faye and took her seat behind the football-field expanse of desk, which had once belonged to Hugh's banker father. It provided a nice psychological buffer between her and her citizens—a yard and a half of polished oak. Hollis Frazier seemed unaffected by the high-gloss barrier, taking in the well-appointed office and massive desk with great amiability, as if he found it endlessly amusing, a Hoyt ruling the roost in Cleary.

Jolie found his enjoyment more patronizing than otherwise and tried to move things along with a little honesty. “Not to be rude, Mr. Frazier, but my clerk will be buzzing me in about three minutes for a meeting. Was there something I could help you with?”

Hollis couldn't help but smile at her ill-temper, which gave her hazel
eyes a truly Hendrix glint. “Oh, I think you know how you can hep me, Miss Hoyt,” he answered, though Jolie really wasn't sure what he was after and held up her hands in a gesture of acquiescence, indicating that he was free to ask.

After speaking so plainly with Sam Lense, he'd given up all hope of anonymity and didn't beat around the bush. “I'm here on the matter of Henry Kite.”

To her credit, the mayor didn't wince at the name, but nodded briefly, as if she was braced for the question. “How so? I mean, what are we talking here? Reparations? Access to courthouse records? Pray be frank, Mr. Frazier. I do have other city business to attend to.”

Had Hollis not seen the real Ms. Hoyt the day before in all her down-home, hospitable glory, he would have been put off by her briskness, which was painfully correct and unyielding. But he knew her game, and if she wanted to play hardball, he was willing and able. “Well, according to eyewitness accounts, there are certain
souvenirs
—supposedly of Kite's—still circulating around Hendrix. Two of 'em belong to me. Or rather, me and my brother.”

“Two what?”

“Fangers,” he told her plainly, and held up his right hand with the middle two fingers bent to demonstrate. “Middle ones. Right hand.”

After three years in public office, Jolie was used to the gonzo requests made of the mayor of a poor, black-belt town, and like her father before her, she could exhibit iron control when she wanted to. She didn't blink at the strange request, but answered impassively, “Well, what makes you think I can hep you, Mr. Frazier? I'm the mayor of Cleary. I understand Henry Kite was killed down in Hendrix, long before my time.”

Hollis Frazier nearly smiled as he told her, “Mr. Lense assured me you could.”

Jolie was feeling far from happy with Mr. Lense at the moment, but didn't betray it openly, just murmured, “Mr.
Lense,
” in a small undertone, then smoothly came to her feet. “I'm sorry, sir, but I think you are
mistaken. You need to go over to the archives, at the capitol. They have a wealth of local history—and the staff to
indulge
you.”

She emphasized the word to stinging effect and, for the first time, drew something other than politeness from the manicured old man, who sighed hugely at her evasion, even as he rose to his feet. He replaced his hat on his head with great deliberation and seemed on the point of agreeable departure, but paused in the doorway. He glanced down the hall, as if making sure they were alone, then chided her in a small singsong, “Miss Hoyt, Miss
Hoyt—
don't even try thet high-handed white-woman
shit
wid me. I know who you
are—
how you come to be sitting behind that big
desk,
'stead of an ironing board.”

Jolie had heard similar statements often enough before and didn't blink. She remained unyielding, so that Hollis unbent enough to add, “I'm a reasonable man, Miz Hoyt, and willing to pay for your time. Ten thousand, cash. It would mean a lot to my brother,” he thought to offer, as it was the by-God truth.

But the ironing-board comment had possibly gone a little over the line, the mayor's face immobile as she cast a weather glance up and down the hallway, then leaned in and confided, “My grandmother was a whore, Mr. Frazier. I am not. But feel free to go on down round Hendrix and talk to anyone you meet. Ask whatever you like,” she added with an edge that crossed a line of its own, making Hollis lose his good humor and all trace of a smile.

“Is that a
threat,
Miss Hoyt?”

She didn't dignify the question with a reply, but turned on her heel and went down the hall to the clerk's counter, calling, “Faye? Could you draw Mr. Frazier a map to Hendrix and give him Jimmy Tarleton's home number?” To Hollis, she added in her finest civic voice, “Mr. Tarleton is the chair of the Historical Committee. Perhaps he could assist you with your
research
.”

She was too angry to talk and would have ended it there, but he stopped her with a final question, aimed at her back, which rang out down the high hallway. “Miss Mayor? What happened to the limb?”

She turned, her eyebrows politely lifted, her face a serious hue of deep red. “Pardon
me
?”

“The
limb,
where they hung Henry Kite. The tree's still there, but the limb's gone. Me and my brother, we wondered what'd become of it.”

Faye and Tamara looked up at the name like hounds on a scent, first at the stranger, then the mayor, who answered easily enough, in that smooth politician's voice, “Why, I believe the commission had all those old oaks pruned—oh, years ago. Perhaps Mr. Tarleton can help you on thet, too. He's also a member of the Beautification Board, which oversees Arbor Day, and the like. Good day,
suh
.”

If he made a reply, she didn't hear it, retreating to her office and physically restraining herself from slamming the door. She got it shut without violence and for a moment stood with her back to it, obeying the golden rule of the female politician (never let them see you cry). She drew a deep breath, able to control her tear ducts, though the rest of her body wasn't so obedient, her hands shaking as if she had the plague.

She held one in front of her, small and white and boringly Pentecostal; no polish, no acrylic tips; the hand of a woman who knew how to fry a chicken and strip a floor. She looked at it as if it were an alien member, shaking independently of her reason, as she had nothing to be so terrified of, not really. The impudent son of a bitch had her by the short hairs politically, but he didn't have the power to actually harm her. She'd learned a lesson with Sam Lense and made a point of being invulnerable. She had no local lovers or ailing father or mismatched children or hungry mouths to feed. She was young and independent and well connected and secure as anyone could be in these uncertain times.

It took her hand a few minutes to accept her head's reasoned argument, and when she finally got a grip and quit shaking, she sat at her desk and buzzed Faye, asking her to put in a call to Hubert Altman in New Orleans, and another to her brother, Carl.

“Try him at the church and house, both. Tell him I need to talk to
him—to call me at home, or here. Or listen, tell him I'm going down to Hendrix, to call me on my cell.”

“What about the planning meeting?” Faye asked. “It's scheduled for six—and you're meeting with Glen at five thirty.”

Jolie cursed under her breath. “I forgot. That idiot cell tower.” She blew out her breath in exasperation. “Well, call Glen and tell him I might be late—that it's a family emergency, can't be helped.” She was moving to hang up the phone when Faye lowered her voice to ask, “Well, what did the ol' gentleman want? Did he say Henry
Kite
?”

Jolie closed her eyes at the name and dissembled with little skill. “Yeah. He's a history buff, here on business. Owns some barbecue joints in Memphis, thinking of opening one here.”

Faye was too old and too blunt to be drawn into such an apparent lie and had begun to say as much when she broke off their conversation to speak to someone aside in a bright, cheerful drawl, “No trouble atall. You ah certainly welcome.” She came back to the phone after a few more pleasantries and resumed in a normal voice, “That was him. Nice old fellow, very polite.”