Alex Cross's Trial

brother’s. “Aw now, Mr. Corbett, I was fooling on you. Old Jeffrey wasn’t no fiddler. He was slingin’ beer back before the war, and he been slingin’ beer ever since.”

    Moody saw the look on my face and busted out with a guffaw. “Papaw, Mr . Corbett ain’t too swift, is he?”

    Chapter 37

    THE CHINLESS OLD MAN RETURNED, bearing in his good hand a tray with three steaming bowls of dark gumbo.

    “Look like we maybe gonna have some music too,” Hiram said, and his face lit up in a smile.

    Two or three men had drifted in, still shiny-sweaty from the field. They ordered beers and shot nervous looks in our direction. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how out of place I was in here. It was the Negroes’ place; who was I to come in and sit down as if I belonged?

    At least they had the courtesy to let me sit there, which would certainly not be the case if one of them tried to order a beer in a white barroom.

    I was delighted to see a grizzled middle-aged fellow taking out a banjo, tuning it up while his buddy drummed his hands on an overturned gutbucket. The thin, listless woman between them waited for the banjo player to plink a little chord, and then without any introduction or ritual, she set in to wailing.

    Lawd, I been blue

    Since my man done left this town…

    The little hairs on my neck prickled.

    “You heard the blues before, Mr. Corbett?” asked Hiram.

    “I have—one time,” I said. “On Beale Street in Memphis.”

    Sho done been blue

    Since my man done left this town…

    “You like the way she sings?” Moody said.

    “I do,” I said. “I like it a lot.”

    Moody shrugged, like she didn’t much care which way I answered her question.

    “I’m a devotee of ragtime music,” I told her.

    “You a what?” said Moody. “A deevo—what did you say?”

    “Admirer,” I said. “I’m an admirer of ragtime.”

    “No, that word you used—what was it again?”

    Moody had a bold way of speaking. I must admit I wasn’t accustomed to being addressed by a colored girl without the customary “yes, sir” and “no, sir.”

    “Devotee,” I said. “One who is devoted to something. I think it’s from the French.”

    “That’s a pretty word,” she said, “wherever it come from.”

    He beat me, then he leave me

    And now he ain’t been coming round.

    When that lament ended, the banjo man put down his instrument and brought out a battered guitar.

    Once again I was swept up in the mournful repetition, the slangy bent notes from the singer echoed by the guitar, the way it all fell together into a slow, rhythmic chant of pure feeling. This music was made from leftover parts of old field songs and hymns and slave music, but to me it sounded like something entirely new, and something quite wonderful.

    Chapter 38

    MY BELLY WAS STUFFED full of gumbo and rice. My tongue still burned from the red pepper. I remarked to Abraham on the staying power of the cayenne.

    “Here, take a chaw on this,” said Abraham. From his satchel he brought forth a length of brown sugarcane. I smiled. That’s what our cook Aurelia used to prescribe for a sore throat or any other minor childhood complaint: a suck on a piece of sweet cane.

    “You got enough for family?” said Moody.

    “I got plenty, but it don’t look right for a gal to chew cane,” Abraham said.

    She put on such a pout that Abraham laughed and brought out a piece for her and another for Hiram.

    “My granddaughter is incorrigible,” said Abraham. “I hope you can forgive her.”

    “I don’t need him forgiving me,” she said.

    Her grandfather’s face darkened. “Moody? Watch your mouth.”

    She dropped her eyes. “Yes, sir.”

    “See now, Mr. Corbett, she got so comfortable settin’ here next to you that she’s done forgot how she s’posed to act. If you was any other kind of white man, she could be in big trouble right now, sassing you that way. Same thing goes for Hiram. Even more so .” I had the feeling he said this more for Moody’s and Hiram’s benefit than for mine. Moody kept her eyes riveted fiercely on the floor beside our table.

    “See, when you’re colored, you always about this close—” he held up his fingers, indicating a tiny space—“to sayin’ the wrong word. Or lookin’ the wrong way. And that means you this far from gettin’ beat up, or kicked, or punched, or cursed. Or gettin’ strung up and killed by the KKK.”

    I took a long sip from my beer.

    “Everything a colored man does can be a crime these days,” he said.

    “I don’t quite understand,”