Time's Witness (40 page)

Justin said, “Okay? Now! The man in the doorway. Number six. Number six happens to be Clark Koontz, late, of the Fanshaw Paper Company, and—” He clipped two more blow-ups to the board. The first, taken at night, showed a huddle of men talking beside a car in a crowded parking lot. Justin pointed at a thin, stooped fellow. “Here's our Mr. Koontz, again. This was taken four years ago. State fairgrounds in Raleigh, October fourteenth. You know these other gentlemen. There's number two, Sergeant Charlie Mennehy again. There's poor Willie the Wimp Slidell. And there's Winston Russell—in between prison terms.”

Justin tapped a second blow-up, cropped from the same scene, that focused on the car around which the men stood. I held the magnifying glass to a blurred figure in the driver's seat. I said, “It looks a little like Otis Newsome to me.”

“Doesn’t it though? October fourteenth. Now, maybe you remember what happened two days later, on October sixteenth, in the Williamsville auditorium?”

I remembered very vividly. At a concert rally for the benefit of the man running against Governor Wollston, then up for reelection, a huge amount of tear gas had been suddenly shot off throughout the hall. In the pandemonium, a lot of people got hurt and one person was trampled to death. He happened to be a black judge, among the few in the state, and a judge with a very liberal record, who was a powerful supporter of Wollston's opponent. Those responsible for the tear gas had never been identified; some blacks accused the Williamsville police of doing it themselves. There was a violent protest on the campus of a local black college. Governor Wollston sent in the state troops. The press commended his action. Three weeks later, Governor Wollston was reelected.

Justin now projected a slide onto the lab's wall: an enlargement of a single frame from a videotape taken at that concert, a quick pan shot of the audience. “There's the black judge who got killed. Now look at the guy, one row back, over to the left. Winston Russell. And I don’t think the tear gas was the main event. I think the judge was the main event.”

It was hard to be certain with that smudged image. It was also possible that Russell was a big fan of the folk singer performing that night, and it was possible that the group gathered around the car at the fairgrounds were discussing a blue-ribbon zucchini they’d just seen, and it was possible that it wasn’t Otis Newsome in the car anyhow. But I bet it was.

Justin said, “I want to go back to another Carolina Patriots get-together with a wire on. I want Preston to tell his cousin that good ole Jefferson Roy Calhoun is really gung ho to join the battle for white survival, really serious.”

“You didn’t tell those assholes your name was Jefferson Roy Calhoun? Jesus, don’t you think that was a little much?”

“Nothing's too much. I told them I was from Charleston, and how a black mugger had stabbed my younger brother to death, and how the courts had let him off. They ate it up.”

I said, “Forget it. There’re too many ways your cover could have gotten blown.”

“You saw what I looked like. Even if anybody had been there that
knew
me, they wouldn’t have recognized me. How do you think
I got to be president of the Hillston Players? Talent, that's how! I imitated you doing your hillbilly number.”

I shook my head. “Wait’ll your arm heals.”

“I was going to tell them a homosexual hippie broke it.”

“Hippies are a thing of the past, Justin.”

“That's what you used to say about the Klan.”

Justin's love of acting was also too exuberant for him to let his injury deter him from performing at the Hillston Playhouse in
Twelfth Night.
As the character he played, Sir Toby Belch, was a
lewd, belligerent drunk, Justin thought it quite likely that somebody
would
have broken the man's arm in a brawl, and so with his modern
plaster cast hidden by a doublet, he made much of his red silk sling on stage.

It was at the final intermission of this
Twelfth Night
performance that I was given, from an unsuspected source, another piece of my puzzle, one I hadn’t been looking for. G.G. Walker's uncle, Hamilton, was the source. The information had to do with Andy Brookside and Cooper Hall and what they might have talked about in that private plane.

Alice had cajoled me into escorting Justin's mother and her to the play's opening night, which due to “casting problems” did not take place until late February, considerably after its original date on the twelfth day of Christmas. So on a rainy Saturday I sat through three hours and twenty-two minutes of revels by amateur thespians who loved Shakespeare not wisely but too well. They hadn’t cut a word of his play, thereby blithely mystifying their audience with long swatches of totally incomprehensible Elizabethan jokes. Despite their slavish integrity, the Hillston Players always sold out the house. In the first place, there were so many of them, their families alone filled half the seats. In the second place, they were one of the town's Grand Old Traditions (Justin was a fourth-generation member), and so the Players were an annual event in the social calendar of Hillston. The Mayor and Mrs. Yarborough came. Lee was there, with a party that included Edwina Sunderland, as well as the department store widow, who clapped at odd moments.

The
Twelfth Night
cast was not, as Eddie Sunderland put it, uniformly gifted. Blue Randolph (forcibly retrieved from her
combination elopement and ski trip, and to judge by her sullen expression still angry about it) looked a lot like Cheryl Tiegs and sounded a lot like Shirley Temple, neither of which struck me as exactly what the Bard had had in mind for the Countess Olivia. On the other hand, I was perfectly convinced that this particular Olivia was too dumb to tell the difference between Viola and Sebastian, the twins that she’d fallen in love with, even though there was about a foot's difference in their heights, thirty pounds in their weights, a couple of octaves in their voices, and profound anatomical discrepancies in their physiques. Playing the Duke, Father Paul Madison kept forgetting to come on stage when called for, so that the others had to mill around throwing out lame improvisations like, “Methinks the Duke is somewhat
TARDY!
” This added considerably to the length of a show that didn’t need any help.

Some people said Justin's cavortings stole the evening. But the actor who interested me the most, and unsettled the audience the most, was young Mr. G.G. Walker, who played the part I’d turned down—Malvolio, the puritanical steward tricked by Justin's bunch of cronies into believing the Countess wants to marry him. This in-crowd doesn’t like Malvolio much because he objects to their boozing themselves blotto and bellowing dirty songs all night. But it's when he gets uppity that they really turn on him. That a house servant can so forget his place as to imagine Olivia loves him just drives them wild. And he's easy prey to their practical hi-jinks—like shutting him up in a dark cage and pretending they think he's gone crazy. Malvolio's jolly superiors find this all hilarious. Usually so does the audience.

Well now, when my man, the young high-stepping G.G. Walker, came on stage for the first time in his life, all in black, and I mean
all
in black, he took that audience by surprise. Then he took them with him places they weren’t sure they wanted to go. G.G. got them to laugh, and he got them to
stop
laughing. He may have blown a few lines and put his own inimitable twist on a few of the others (Instead of “Go hang yourselves all! You are idle shallow things. I am not of your element,” we got, “Y’all can go hang yourselves! Bunch of idle shallow things. Hey, I’m not in your element.”), but he was so
real
on that stage that he threw the whole
comedy out of kilter. When Malvolio crouched in the dark cage, while the clown kept claiming the place was all sunshine and light, I could hear the giggles die out, and the seats start to creak from the squirms in that Hillston audience. Then, when the clown told him, “Madman, thou errest. I say, there is no darkness but ignorance,” G.G. stood up, shook the bars of that cage, and he didn’t just shout, he wailed. “
I
say, this house is as dark as ignorance, though ignorance was as dark as Hell. And
I
say there wasn’t ever any man abused like me.
I am no more mad than you are.
”

Nobody laughed.

Peggy Savile, Justin's mother, leaned over to me and whispered, “This isn’t funny at all. Are we supposed to think it's
comic
that they’re treating him like this?”

I whispered back, “Peggy, I’ll say this for your boy Justin. As a casting director, he's got a lot of guts.”

Some members of the audience were offended by what they not so obliquely called “a break in traditions.” Judge Tiggs was over-heard (by Alice) to ask his wife, “What's a nigrah doing in this stupid play?” But most people were too polite to notice anything different, though at intermission quite a number made a special point of rushing over to Carl and Dina Yarborough in the lobby and telling them they thought the whole show was just simply wonderful, as if the mayor and his wife were somehow responsible for it.

Nobody (including the Yarboroughs) ran over to say anything to the only other blacks in the lobby. There were a dozen of them, standing for protection in a huddle by a watercooler a few feet from where I was waiting for Alice and Peggy Savile to come back from the ladies’ room. The middle-aged couple with three teenaged daughters, I assumed to be G.G.'s parents and sisters. The rest of the group I already knew. Officer John Emory was there; I’d never seen him before when he wasn’t in uniform, and I was surprised that he was such a stylish dresser, in a modern-looking baggy suit with pleated trousers, and a dark checkered shirt. He held back shyly from the others; I assumed he hadn’t come in their party, but on his own. And he kept trying to look at Jordan West without her noticing, which wasn’t all that hard since she was deep in
conversation with a young psychiatrist—I recognized him because he did some pro bono work at human services, downstairs from me in the municipal building. Beside them, Martin Hall and Eric from the vigil group were talking to the oldest of the teenaged girls, while her sisters nudged her in the ribs and giggled. And bringing over two handfuls of little plastic glasses of wine was G.G.'s uncle, Hamilton Walker, resplendent in a soft brown leather jacket with boots and hat to match.

Now Ham Walker and I had met a number of times in connection with his work. Ham's predecessor, the late Woodrow Clenny, had called himself, with perfect justice, Hillston's “El Primo Pimp.” Ham, however, preferred the term “executive manager of a hostess service.” I was idly wondering how many of the men in this lobby had had occasion to meet if not Mr. Walker in person, then one of his hostesses. I was imagining him strolling about, shaking hands with his clients, making remarks like, “How's it going, John? The girls in Canaan say hello.” But of course he didn’t do it; his interests were, as he often told me, “strictly business,” and publicly discomforting hypocrites was never good for business. I was also wondering what he made of his nephew's abandoning that very American interest in business in order to join picket lines and amateur theatrical companies.

At this point, G.G. himself, in tights and yellow ribbons, bounded into the lobby. The cast did not usually join its audience until after the play was over, and this additional break in tradition caused a ripple of whispers that followed behind the Players’ first black member like the trail of a loud taffeta cloak.

“Hey hey, the man's fan club!” G.G. pushed himself into the middle of his family group, slapping hands, hugging shoulders, kissing faces. They all offered as many congratulations as they could shout into his whirl of talk and embraces. “Don’t be shy, y’all. Listen, be more than happy to give you my autograph. Step up, watch it now. Don’t y’all crowd the
star.
Y’all like it? Listen, this is some weird show, I mean can you
believe
it? Awh, come on, Daddy, loosen up. Think Sidney Poitier, man. Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy. Those dudes are actors.
Rich
actors. Y’all hear me okay? Great. That's ’cause I’m
projecting.
Y’all got good seats? They said
they were gonna give me some prime seats. Mama, these
are
my pants. Right! That was the
style.
What's happening, Uncle Ham? Lookin’ good. Okay, I gotta split. I don’t do much in the last act. Watch for me. Martin, my man! Hang in there. Can’t every night be Tina Turner.”

He spun away through a crowd parting like the Red Sea in a silent movie. Alice came up behind me and pointed after him. “The Hillston Players,” she said with a grin, “will never be the same.” Then she pinched me hard on the shoulder. “And that, Mr. Mangum, is one reason why I love Justin Savile.”

“Who's arguing?”

“Oh, come on.” She patted her stomach through the blue silk dress. “Won’t be long—I hope—before I’m an old pregnant lady. Let me go on believing you’re secretly pining away for me, scheming how to send my handsome lieutenant out to be slaughtered in battle, like King David sent…who did he send? I want to say Uriah, but that's Heep, isn’t it?”

(Were these adulterous references really about Lee, who had just joined the Yarboroughs at the far end of the lobby?) I said, “Well, there's Uriah Heep, and Uriah, Bathsheba's husband.”

She gave me a stare. “For such a nonbeliever, you certainly know your Bible.”

I gave her a fatherly pat. “I know my
Das Kapital
too, honey, but that don’t make me no commie pinko like you used to be before you bought into the capitalist system.”

I got another hard pinch on the arm, as she said, “Honey, you’re the
right arm
of the capitalist system.”

“You know”—I rubbed where she’d pinched me—“maybe you’re already pregnant and it's turning you violent, Alice.”

“
No alcohol, no coffee, no Cokes, and a terminal case of gas
, that's what’ll be turning me violent. See you.” She went off, smiling, to hustle up some votes in the crowd.

I was watching her some, and watching Lee some, when I heard a polite cough beside me. It was John Emory. He restrained himself from saluting when I turned, but I did see his hand spasm at his wrist. “Sir, I have something for you.”