Greg Iles - Turning Angel

When I left Shad’s office this afternoon, I was in a state close to shock. Quentin had stripped more than the proverbial pound of flesh from the district attorney’s backside. He had verbally flayed Shad, shaming him to a degree I thought impossible. Quentin also extracted from Shad a written promise not to seek the office of mayor in the special election. This seemed a little much, and I wondered if Quentin had done this because he was considering a run for mayor himself. But when I asked about this after the meeting, the civil rights legend just laughed.

”This town needs an idealist,“ he said, ”not a cranky old pragmatist like me.“

As I sit watching the graduation crowd, Jan Chancellor introduces Melissa Andrews, the salutatorian. A tall girl with long red hair, Melissa reads from her text without once looking up, but she speaks with genuine emotion about the pain of leaving the cocoon of her class, and her anxiety about entering a world where friends and parents will not be there to prop her up. My gaze roams over the attentive faces, then wanders to the surrounding forest. Spring has truly arrived, and with it a desperately needed air of renewal. The evening breeze blows cool and steady, and the trees encircling the stadium are alive with the pale green leaves of new growth. If Natchez were like this year-round, people would move here by the thousands.

Suddenly, Jan Chancellor’s voice breaks into my reverie. ”…a distinguished attorney who switched careers in midlife to become a bestselling author, but to the people in this town he will always be the tight end on St. Stephen’s championship football team. Ladies and gentlemen, Penn Cage.“

I stand and hug Jan as I walk to the podium. She showed some courage over the past month, unlike some board members I could name.

Lawyers are notorious for being addicted to the sound of their own voices, but as I look out over the crowd, I recall my basic mantra of public speaking: Be sincere, be brief, be seated. Using a few notes scrawled on a legal pad this afternoon, I tell the seniors the things one usually tells graduates in a commencement speech: that their time has come; that the road out of this bowl no longer leads to Natchez, but to the wider world; that the world is theirs for the taking, if they but have the courage to reach out for it. I also tell them some harsher truths: that the world they will find beyond the borders of Mississippi looks very different from the one that nurtured them to this point; that the whites among them might soon find themselves the targets of prejudice for a change; that in the real world, it is often who rather than what they know that will gain them advancement. I’m candid about the fact that their education has not been as thorough as it might have been, but I also promise them that the emotional grounding provided by their multigenerational families will more than compensate for this. Though it’s not in my notes, I also pass along one lesson that has served me well in both careers:

”As a Southerner, you will constantly be underestimated by the people you deal with, and this tendency can work to your advantage. Learn how to use it.“

Having departed from my notes, I pause for a moment and look down at Mia in the first row. She’s watching me as though she expects something profound to fall from my lips, some inspiring conclusion to my thus-far-generic speech. But I don’t have any pearls of great wisdom. What I do have is a sudden realization that leaves me profoundly shaken. These kids are not coming back. Not the best of them, anyway. As I told Caitlin over dinner at the Castle, the parents in this beautiful and unique city are raising their children to live elsewhere. Somehow, we have let Natchez slip into such a state that we cannot offer our brightest students jobs to return to, even when they want them. And that is unacceptable. I will not raise my daughter in a town that offers her no future. With this simple realization comes certainty.

I’m running for mayor.

I leave the podium after an unremarkable conclusion, but as I walk to my seat, a new energy is building inside me. I know where I’m going now.

Jan walks to the podium again and introduces a girl whom she refers to as one of the brightest individuals she has ever had the privilege to know.

Mia Burke.

Mia rises from the first row and walks uncertainly up the steps to the stage. She usually walks with such self-possession that I wonder if she’s been drinking. If I recall correctly, I had a bit to drink myself on my graduation night.

Mia has to pull down the microphone to reach it with her mouth. There’s a shrill whistle of feedback, then silence. Mia holds up a sheaf of paper and speaks in a conversational tone.

”I wrote a whole speech for tonight. I’ve been thinking about it all year long. But now, looking out at you guys, I don’t want to read it. This class has been through a lot this year. Maybe too much. We lost…so much. We lost two great people, and we lost the last shreds of our innocence. I’m not sure we gained anything, other than experience. But I guess it’s not up to us to choose when we learn what life is really about.“

She looks down at the podium, seeming to gather herself. ”I know a lot of parents have been freaked out by what they learned about our class in the wake of Kate’s and Chris’s deaths. Of course, parents in every generation have been shocked when they somehow learned the truths of their children’s lives. That’s the way of the world. But now, in this time and this generation, I think they’re right to be shocked. I’m part of this generation, and I’m shocked. We seem to have reached a point in our society where every form of restraint has been broken down or stripped away. There are no rules anymore. In the nineteen sixties, our parents fought to achieve political freedom and liberation of the self. Well, now we’ve got it. We’ve got about as much freedom and liberation as anybody can stand. I’ve had a computer in my bedroom since I was five years old. I’ve had access to basically all the information in the world since I was twelve-not in a library, but right at my fingertips. At the slightest whim, I can view images of just about anything that piques my curiosity. And I have. But am I better for that? I don’t know.

“Don’t get me wrong, I like freedom. But you can have too much of a good thing. At some point you have to draw a line, agree on some rules, or all you have is chaos. Anarchy. So, I guess what I’m saying tonight is this: That’s our job, guys. Our class, I mean. And our generation. To figure out where freedom stops being a blessing and starts being a curse. Our parents can’t do it. They don’t even understand the world we live in now. Maybe that job can’t even be done for a society. Maybe it’s an individual decision in every case. But it seems to me that humans given absolute freedom don’t do a very good job of choosing limits.”

Mia sighs deeply, then gifts the audience with one of her remarkable smiles. “Natchez is a good place to be from. But now it’s time for us to go. I wish I could say something inspiring, but I guess this isn’t that kind of speech. I am hopeful about the future. I do believe I can change the world. I just know that it won’t be easy.”

She waves to her class with one long swing of her hand, then walks back down the steps to join them.

There’s a smattering of applause, but it soon dies. No one knows what to make of Mia’s honesty. In a rather subdued conclusion to the ceremony, Holden Smith passes out diplomas to the graduates. After he’s done, the seniors toss their caps into the sky as one, putting the stamp of conventionality on the proceeding at last.

I walk down the steps into the milling throng and make my way toward Mia. She’s surrounded by classmates and parents, so I stand a few yards away and wait. A few moments later, I see Drew and Ellen moving toward me through the crowd. A few people gawk as they pass, but most simply go about their business.