T. Johnson - Welcome to Braggsville

No, sir.

I’m having a hard time understanding why some kids from Berkeley would put on blackface and stage a lynching. Even as a performance. I have a hard time believing that was your idea.

It was my idea.

Has anyone threatened you?

No, sir.

One last question. What about this rape? Rescinded almost immediately after being reported. Tell me about that.

D’aron explained that he had seen her in costume and overreacted.

Denver then wrote in his notebook for so long that he could have been adding a chapter to the Bible. As he left, he shook D’aron’s hand vigorously and thanked him profusely for his help. After he drove off, D’aron’s father asked what he’d wanted.

He kept asking about militias.

And you told him?

I don’t know nothing about a militia. We got no militia here. He’s been watching too many movies. I told him that.

What was he thanking you for, then?

Probably saving him the time of walking all through those woods looking for a militia or an old church that’s ate to ash.

We’re getting you an attorney. I don’t want you talking to no one else without an attorney, even that Hirschfield fella. He’s a shark all right, we never know when he’s gonna get hungry.

That’s right, added his mom, stirring a pan of cocoa. She wore capris today, which she usually wore only on vacation. She had taken a few days off from the mill to keep D’aron company. He thought she’d irritate him, but he found her presence soothing.

I didn’t trust him, she added. And I don’t want you telling people about that old church. I told you that. I thought you forgot about it. Don’t mention it anymore, you make us sound all — she waved the pot top like a fan — crazy!

What was that place anyway?

She gave him a stare, slamming the lid on the saucepan. Ha-ha. College makes you smart. It doesn’t make other people stupid. I’m not so sure it makes you so smart, to have a second say. She wiped a spot off the stove and sucked on her finger.

Seriously, Mom.

You were sick, and I told your Nana. No one can ever say we have nothing against black people. Nana knew all that root stuff, learned it from the best, but even she couldn’t lick this pickle. You had the colic so bad you didn’t eat for three days in the winter, then you got the pleurisy, and old Tag took you out for a spell and you come back fine.

Old Tag? There were rumors about Tag. She was her own mother and grandmother. She never died. She was really the midwife Nanny Tag and still lived back in there. Whoever crossed her suffered unspeakably. She knew all them like that? asked D’aron. Nana went to the Holler that much?

Sometimes. This time she made a call, someone else makes a call and someone else raises a flag and someone else starts a fire and someone else lets a cat aloose, and all that stuff they did back then, and the next morning at sunup, tapping at the back door, is this old lady shiny as a black cherry and smelling of wax and vinegar. Old Tag. It was your Nana’s doing and I raised hell about it, but it worked. So can’t no one say we have anything against black people.

And that ain’t the only reason, added his father.

D’aron considered that for a minute. He never thought his parents had anything against black people, but did they run that line on Charlie? Guilt a confession out of him? Who told you what we were doing? The night you called me in here. Who told you?

You were acting so strange. Every man is Sherlock Holmes to his son. His father laughed. That was a bluff. I had a pinch you were up to something.

That his father could so easily bluff him gave D’aron an unexpectedly sharp sense of security. Later, try as he might, he could remember nothing of the supposed early sojourn with Tag, though he did remember, and would always remember, the deacon there who chained himself to an anchor. How he dragged his burden along the aisle, splintering the floorboard, speaking in tongues for what felt like hours before collapsing in a heap, his sweaty suit shimmering like sharkskin, the heavy chain biting his ankle, tears streaming as he beat at his face with his fists, his hands finally going limp and the miniature crucifixes he held all that time tumbling to the floor, their tips red, all while his Nana gripped D’aron’s sweaty neck muttering her Amens. He and Jo-Jo once went out there on a dare. The church was burned down, but the chain remained. D’aron walked it, arms outstretched like an acrobat, from one low singed wall to the other, but never admitted to Jo-Jo that he’d been there before.

Grits and hash browns, bacon and sausage, eggs and toast. Two double portions scattered, smothered, and covered. No spice. Two cheesy egg breakfasts. Three waffles. Sheriff flipped over the ticket. Growing boys. Got the whole thing here. The waitress remembers y’all huddling like Comanches. Wasteful, too. Y’all shook Rick’s seeds good, leaving most of the food uneaten as you done. D’aron was again in Sheriff’s office, with the same gunmetal desk and same painted cinder-block walls and same sticky square-tube vinyl chairs and same photos of Chuck Norris and Buford Pusser sitting in judgment, exactly as they did when sixteen-year-old D’aron was brought in for driving like a choirboy who’d broken into the wine cabinet. The deputy made him sit in the cell for a few hours, where D’aron paced madly, as one did when fear and boredom peaked unendurable, and etched no less than seven hash marks in the wall, thinking at the time it was what hardened criminals did. It was the Friday before Thanksgiving vacation. Who was to say he hadn’t spent a week in jail? Back then, after an interminable lecture in this very office, Sheriff released D’aron into his father’s custody without booking him, expecting his father would do D’aron right. He’d since looked back on that occasion with laughter, but now felt the same again — terrified. Today, D’aron’s father was outside in the waiting room because Sheriff said D’aron might want some privacy in light of possible delicate subjects.

After the welcome home barbecue, Candice had said, People here aren’t that different, they just have accents. But if she could hear this, how their plan was being twisted, it would rock her little white-girl world, as Louis had always called it.

Everyone’s entitled to be an idiot, but a few folks ’round here figure you is abusing the privilege. Sheriff sighed dramatically and finger-raked his comb-over. You done showed your ass at the Waffle House, it seems, Little D.

That surprised D’aron because, first, they were scared, if anything; second, they tipped well; and third, at every interaction they were polite. True, someone did comment on one server’s alarming proportions, but mostly his friends found the place quaint. Charlie at one point nodded toward the waitress, a blue-haired Mabel with a charred-tip cigarette behind her ear, and said, She’s so sweet you need to brush and floss after you talk to her. Whispering, Charlie leaned in to say it, and they all followed suit to hear. He added, My mom says that about people and usually means the opposite, but this lady is the real deal.

D’aron had been proud of the Southern hospitality that morning, and for a moment it had given him hope against hope that the day would go well. The service could give you a cavity— Honey this and Sugar that. You want coffee, hon? Toast, sweetie? Juice, honey? Now you know you gotta git a waffle, sugar. Read the signs.

Even Candice ordered a waffle after the cook echoed the order in a deep voice, almost threatening, That’s right. Read the signs.

D’aron evidently had not read the signs, because Sheriff next mentioned the staff at Lou Davis’s.