Lancelot

wakefulness when a telephone rings in the middle of the night. That and an all-consuming curiosity. I had to know. If Merlin “knew” my wife, I had to know his knowing her.
    Why? I don’t know. I ask you. That’s what I want with you. Not knowing why, I don’t really know why I did what I did. I only knew for the first time in years exactly what to do. I sent for Elgin.
    Elgin was surprised to be summoned and more surprised to see me. No bottle, no drinks, no naps, no TV, no pacing the floor hands in pockets, but standing quiet and watchful.
    â€œSit down, Elgin.”
    â€œYes. sir.”
    We sat down in two slave chairs. Elgin. I remember, was doing tourist spiels that summer and still wore his guide jacket with the Belle Isle coat of arms on the breast pocket, a livery which no house servant had ever worn but which by my grandfather’s calculation should satisfy the tourist’s need for proper NBC guide and authentic Southern butler rolled into one.
    Elgin’s expression did not change. The only sign of his surprise was that though his face was turned slightly away, head cocked as if he were deaf, his eyes never left mine and had a wary hooded look.
    â€œElgin. I’m going to ask a favor of you.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œIt is not difficult. The point is, I want you to do it without further explanation on my part. Would you?”
    â€œYes, sir,” said Elgin without a change of tone or blink of eye. “Even if it’s criminal or immoral”—slight smile now. “You know I’d do anything you axed.”
    Elgin was a senior at M.I.T. and had what he thought were two reasons to be grateful to me, though I knew better than to rely on gratitude, a dubious state of mind if indeed there is such a thing. And in truth I had done very little for him, the kind of easy favors native liberals do and which are almost irresistible to the doer, if not to the done to, yielding as they do a return of benefit to one and a good feeling to the other all out of proportion to the effort expended. That was one of the pleasures of the sixties: it was so easy to do a little which seemed a lot. We basked in our own sense of virtue and in what we took to be their gratitude. Maybe that was why it didn’t last very long. Who can stand gratitude?
    I helped him get a scholarship, which took very little doing what with the Ivy League beating the bushes for any black who could read without using his finger and what with Elgin graduating first in his class at St. Augustine and winning the state science fair with a project demonstrating electron spin which I never quite understood.
    So Elgin was smart, Elgin was well educated. Elgin could read and write better than most whites. And yet. Yet Elgin still talks muffle-mouthed, says ax for ask, sa-urdy for Saturday, chirren for children.
    He was a slim but well-set-up youth with mauve brown skin, a narrow intense face, a non-Afro close clip as high off his ears and up his neck as a Young Republican’s, and a lately acquired frowning finicky manner which irritated me a little just as it irritates me in a certain kind of scientist who does not know what he does not know and discredits more than he should. Elgin was one of them. It was as if he had sailed in a single jump from Louisiana pickaninny playing marbles under a chinaberry tree to a smart-ass M.I.T. senior, leapfrogging not only the entire South but all of history as well. And maybe he knew what he was doing. From cotton patch to quantum physics and glad not to have stopped along the way.
    But he and his family had yet another reason to be grateful to me, a slightly bogus reason to be sure, which I in my own slightly bogus-liberal fashion was content not to have set straight. He thought I saved his family from the Klan. In a way I did. His father, Ellis, and mother, Suellen, our faithful and until recently ill-paid retainers, and his little brother. Fluker, had all been threatened by the local Kluxers because Ellis’s church (he was its part-time preacher) had served as a meeting place for CORE or Snick or one of those. They burned a cross, threatened to burn the church and come “get” the Buells. It is true I went to see the Grand Kleagle and the harassment stopped. The story which I never had quite the energy or desire to correct was that in the grand mythic Lamar tradition I had confronted the Kleagle in his den, “called him out” with some