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Hilly Lee sat in front of her small vanity and stared at her reflection in the mirror that held a large crack at the right top corner. That had happened the day she had come home from a hospital she had gone to for a lengthy stay after finding out what was wrong with her daughter. And why. She had stared at herself in the glass just like she was doing now. Then she had slammed her fist into the mirror, breaking it and deeply cutting her flesh. Frank had found her sitting here trancelike with blood pouring out of her. He had called the ambulance and doctored her wound until help arrived.
She eased her finger along the crevices scored deeply around her eyes, chin, and mouth. She was old, she thought, and looked it. It wasn’t just the years gone by, it was what each of those years contained that had left its marks: A life with challenges that were often far beyond her abilities.
But I’m still here. I made it this far.
As she thought of Lucy, her eyes closed and her lips trembled. She self-consciously rubbed at where the tooth had been that had caused all that pain, all that sorrow. The robbing of the life her daughter should have had.
Hilly had been a churchgoer, even up in the mountains, when she’d often shown up alone for the Sunday service because she had no one to go with her. She’d take a seat in the back and listen to the preacher say that God was always with you. For the longest time it seemed God was the only friend she had. And then she had moved here, had Lucy, and then had endured a difficult talk with another official representative of the Lord.
And Hilly had stopped regularly going to church after that, making excuses to folks for her absence that simply deepened her guilt.
Her son Jefferson was now lost to her, she believed. He had made his decision, and after what Hilly had read about the war, she agreed with him.
And then there was Robert. She unlocked a little box she kept in the vanity drawer and took out the photo. Seeing this had cost her oldest boy the fiercest spanking she had ever meted out. And yet he had done nothing really to warrant that level of punishment. The reason, the culpability, lay solely with her.
She gazed at the two people in the photo, and memories from more than forty years ago trickled back to her, like slow water over a faded dam. It was her in the photo, though she looked nothing like that now. And the other person...
Her eldest son had represented Hilly’s hope for something... different. And yet now, when he was seeking to do just that?
I’ve turned my back on him. I’ve said things to him that I never used to believe. I’ve taken the road all the rest did. And I don’t think there’s any going back now. For me.
She locked the photo back up as she felt the migraine coming on.
She soaked a washcloth and turned out the light. Placing the cloth over her eyes, Hilly lay down on the bed and prepared herself to suffer.
CHAPTER 22
THE NEXT MORNING JACK MARCHED with strident purpose up the steps of the Freeman County Courthouse. As he was passing by the clerk’s office Sally Reeves stepped out to confront him with a triumphant smile and blue-backed legal filing in hand.
“You need to read this.” She handed it over and Jack quickly ran his gaze down it. “Hearing’s on Friday,” she added.
He finished and looked up. “The commonwealth is seeking to have me removed as Jerome’s lawyer, because I cannot be considered adequate counsel?”
“Now you don’t have to tuck your tail between your legs and slink off to Mexico like poor George Connelly. You can just bow gracefully out.”
“Come on, the judges here know I’m more than capable of trying this case.”
“If you really believe this is about legal competence, Jack, you’re not as smart as I think you are. And I watched Howard Pickett on TV. You know who he is, of course.”
“I do now.”
“Well, he said that any white man who represents a Negro for killin’ white people should have his head examined.”
“Is that right?”
“And he also said that if this case doesn’t wake us up nothin’ will. The truth is we’ve had it with all this Civil Rights crap comin’ out of Washington. The government can’t tell us what to do. It’s why I’m votin’ for George Wallace. He’s the only candidate addressin’ the colored issue. They need to find their own country.”
“Sally, Black people helped build this country, including the damn courthouse we’re standing in.”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Only because we showed ’em how. And we saved them from runnin’ around naked in the jungle and gettin’ eaten by lions and such. And taught them how to speak English.”
“They were slaves, Sally. Are you really saying slavery is okay?”
“But that was just a little blip in our history, and I hate that people are tryin’ to make it some big deal. I never owned slaves and neither did my daddy or my granddaddy. And I’ve never done any harm to a colored person in my life. And we freed them.”
“No, this country fought a war over that and the South lost.”
“But my point is now they are free. And with all that, they want to go to our schools, eat in our restaurants, ride next to us on trains and buses, pray in our churches. Well, nobody’s tellin’ me who I got to associate with. They stay over there and we stay over here. Fair is fair.”
