deputies and plainclothes detectives stopped by and shook hands, and it felt wonderful.
At noon I checked out a cruiser and drove down the bayou to Jeanerette and the community of shacks along the back road where Lemuel Melancon lived. He was sitting in a rocker on his tiny gallery, his body dappled with sunlight that fell through a pecan tree in his front yard. The wind was blowing in the cane behind his house, but his tin roof shimmered with heat.
I showed him front and profile photos of Billy Joe Pitts. Pitts was wearing a starched sports shirt printed with a tropical design, the fabric stretched tight against the expansion of his chest. The booking time on the photo strip was 11:16 p.m., but Pitts’s face showed no expression, not even fatigue, like the head of an unrepentant criminal upon a platter. “Is this the guy who was looking at my truck?” I asked.
Lemuel held the strip close to his face, then handed it back to me. “Could be. But it was dark. I can’t see good no more, me,” he said.
“It’s important, Lemuel.”
He took another look and shook his head. “What’d this guy do?” he asked.
“Helped plant cocaine on some Cambodians so their vehicle and cash could be confiscated.”
“I ain’t following you.”
“He’s a cop. You see him again, you let me know.”
Lemuel leaned back in his chair and looked out at the road, suddenly disconnected from me and a conversation involving a corrupt white police officer.
“Lemuel?” I said.
“Got to clean my li’l house now. Dust keep blowing out of the yard t’rew the screen, dirtying up my whole house. Just cain’t keep it clean, no matter what I do. See you another time, Dave.”
We live in the New South. Legal segregation has slipped into history; the Klan has moved west, into white supremacist compounds, where they feel safe from the people whom they fear; and in Mississippi black state troopers ticket white motorists.
But memories can be long, fear is fear, and race is at the heart of virtually every political issue in the states of the Old Confederacy, particularly in the realignment of the two national political parties. As I drove back to New Iberia, the fields of early sugar cane rippling in the breeze, the buttercups blooming along the rain ditches, I wondered about the memories of violence and injustice that my friend Lemuel Melancon would probably never share with me. But they obviously lived inside him, and I knew that as a white man it was presumptuous of me to ask that he set aside the cautionary instincts that had allowed him to be a survivor.
This was St. Mary Parish, historically a fiefdom where a few individuals controlled mind-boggling amounts of wealth. In the 1970s a group of Catholic Worker nuns tried to organize the sugar cane workershere. Some of the blacks and poor whites who listened to them discovered they had thirty minutes to move their belongings out of their houses.
A journey to the bedside of a dying school chum had led me back to the disappearance years ago of Ida Durbin. Had not two rogue deputies, Shockly and Pitts, tried to turn dials on me, my revisiting of a bad experience in my youth would probably have ended there, at a Baptist hospital, in a backward, piney-woods parish in central Louisiana.
But that parish, its sawmills, corporate cotton and soy bean fields, its catfish farms, along with its politicians and sheriff’s department, had always been owned by the Chalons family in St. Mary Parish.
Unconsciously I touched the stitches in my scalp where my attacker had clubbed me with a two-by-four. Was he sent by the Chalonses, over the disappearance or death of a prostitute in 1958? No, that was my old class-conscious paranoia at work, I told myself.
I kept telling myself that all the way back to New Iberia.
That evening, Clete Purcel picked me up at the house and we had dinner at a bar-and-grill that served food on a deck overlooking the bayou. It was dusk, the western sky ribbed with
At noon I checked out a cruiser and drove down the bayou to Jeanerette and the community of shacks along the back road where Lemuel Melancon lived. He was sitting in a rocker on his tiny gallery, his body dappled with sunlight that fell through a pecan tree in his front yard. The wind was blowing in the cane behind his house, but his tin roof shimmered with heat.
I showed him front and profile photos of Billy Joe Pitts. Pitts was wearing a starched sports shirt printed with a tropical design, the fabric stretched tight against the expansion of his chest. The booking time on the photo strip was 11:16 p.m., but Pitts’s face showed no expression, not even fatigue, like the head of an unrepentant criminal upon a platter. “Is this the guy who was looking at my truck?” I asked.
Lemuel held the strip close to his face, then handed it back to me. “Could be. But it was dark. I can’t see good no more, me,” he said.
“It’s important, Lemuel.”
He took another look and shook his head. “What’d this guy do?” he asked.
“Helped plant cocaine on some Cambodians so their vehicle and cash could be confiscated.”
“I ain’t following you.”
“He’s a cop. You see him again, you let me know.”
Lemuel leaned back in his chair and looked out at the road, suddenly disconnected from me and a conversation involving a corrupt white police officer.
“Lemuel?” I said.
“Got to clean my li’l house now. Dust keep blowing out of the yard t’rew the screen, dirtying up my whole house. Just cain’t keep it clean, no matter what I do. See you another time, Dave.”
We live in the New South. Legal segregation has slipped into history; the Klan has moved west, into white supremacist compounds, where they feel safe from the people whom they fear; and in Mississippi black state troopers ticket white motorists.
But memories can be long, fear is fear, and race is at the heart of virtually every political issue in the states of the Old Confederacy, particularly in the realignment of the two national political parties. As I drove back to New Iberia, the fields of early sugar cane rippling in the breeze, the buttercups blooming along the rain ditches, I wondered about the memories of violence and injustice that my friend Lemuel Melancon would probably never share with me. But they obviously lived inside him, and I knew that as a white man it was presumptuous of me to ask that he set aside the cautionary instincts that had allowed him to be a survivor.
This was St. Mary Parish, historically a fiefdom where a few individuals controlled mind-boggling amounts of wealth. In the 1970s a group of Catholic Worker nuns tried to organize the sugar cane workershere. Some of the blacks and poor whites who listened to them discovered they had thirty minutes to move their belongings out of their houses.
A journey to the bedside of a dying school chum had led me back to the disappearance years ago of Ida Durbin. Had not two rogue deputies, Shockly and Pitts, tried to turn dials on me, my revisiting of a bad experience in my youth would probably have ended there, at a Baptist hospital, in a backward, piney-woods parish in central Louisiana.
But that parish, its sawmills, corporate cotton and soy bean fields, its catfish farms, along with its politicians and sheriff’s department, had always been owned by the Chalons family in St. Mary Parish.
Unconsciously I touched the stitches in my scalp where my attacker had clubbed me with a two-by-four. Was he sent by the Chalonses, over the disappearance or death of a prostitute in 1958? No, that was my old class-conscious paranoia at work, I told myself.
I kept telling myself that all the way back to New Iberia.
That evening, Clete Purcel picked me up at the house and we had dinner at a bar-and-grill that served food on a deck overlooking the bayou. It was dusk, the western sky ribbed with
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