A few hazy frames of memory fluttered to the surface—a slim blue metallic knitting needle, a dirty gray tarp, mud-brown water rising against a rugged riverbank. Thoughts rushed in so fast I couldn’t tuck them back into the cubbyholes of my mind. All of them blurred with the sight of Michael’s bloody body. All the deadly images spliced together, playing on a silent loop in my head like short vignettes of death. The more I tried to shake it loose, the more intertwined the past became with the present. I blinked. Chillicothe. I blinked again. Atlanta. Blink. Chillicothe.
Chillicothe, Georgia, April 1978
The Georgia spring wind blew across Periwinkle Lane and our tattered neighborhood of shotgun houses and weed-covered yards with the promise of trouble. A brooding disturbance in the air made plain when Willie Jay Groover pulled his police cruiser up to Earthalene Jackson’s four-room shack across the street.
Nothing good was coming to the Jackson household.
Willie Jay Groover was the kind of man people in town talked about, but not in a good way. He was a wall-eyed man with dirty blond hair, angular features, and knuckles like walnuts. He always reminded me of a cottonmouth snake if it could walk on two legs: long and lanky with slow deliberate movements but ready to pounce without warning. Willie Jay was a human wrecking ball that crushed flesh and spirit.
As he climbed out of the patrol car, people slowly crept from behind their screen doors onto their weathered porches like timid children easing up to a freakish carnival sideshow. Some perched themselves along the curb to watch things unfold. Miss Birdie, the Jacksons’ next-door neighbor, sat alongside her cousin Miss Vera in a couple red vinyl kitchen chairs they’d dragged onto the porch. Both women stopped talking midsentence and moved to the front steps at the sight of the patrol car.
Sam and I sat quietly on the front stoop. My mother, Martha, leaned out the front window. “Who called the cops?” Her shrill voice sliced through the air. “What’s going on over at Earthalene’s?” Martha Littlejohn was probably ninety pounds dripping wet, a small, brown wisp of a woman you could topple over by blowing too hard on her, thanks to her steadfast diet of Thunderbird wine and Golden Flake corn chips. Martha had a habit of talking too fast and chattering on about nothing.
Willie Jay, dressed in a blue police uniform, strutted up Earthalene’s front porch steps and banged on her screen door with the side of his fist. And so, the show began. He slowly turned and scanned all of us now watching. Ms. Jackson’s front porch was his open-air stage and he held every curious eye on the block. Whatever happened at Ms. Jackson’s house would be a beneficial lesson for his raggedy little audience, a live and up-front deterrent to anyone who thought about running up against him in the future. Everyone within earshot watched and waited. Willie Jay banged again, rattling the old wood screen door.
“Mario Jackson, get out here. Now!”
Silence floated across the neighborhood. Willie Jay banged again. Finally, Miss Jackson appeared and stood at the door, not bothering to open it. She was a thin brown woman, dressed in a pink flowered housecoat with pin curlers in her hair. “Yes? Can I help you?” she asked, as casually as if she were waiting on a customer at the Piggly Wiggly where she worked.
“Where’s your boy, Mario? Tell him to get out here.”
“Mario ain’t here and I don’t know where he is.” Her voice more defiant this time.
Willie Jay rested a crusty palm on the gun at his waist holster. “You sure about that?”
Miss Jackson sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes. “I done told you, he ain’t here.”
Just as she was about to close the door, a second police car rolled up. Sheriff Butch Coogler stepped out. He spit a slick brown circle of chewing tobacco on the ground and hiked up his pants. Coogler was a short, fleshy man who barely reached past Willie Jay’s breast pocket. You almost never saw one without the other—Coogler made sure of that. He waddled up the front steps of the house. The two men stood on the porch peering through Miss Jackson’s screen door.
“I told y’all, Mario ain’t here. I ain’t got time for this.” She turned her back and started to walk away when Willie Jay gave a hard tug on the screen door, the cheap latch giving way.
Ms. Jackson shrieked. “Hey! You can’t just barge in my house!”
“I’ll just take a look for myself,” Willie Jay said as he barreled inside. It was like Ms. Jackson was invisible the way he stormed past her.
Miss Vera hustled down Birdie’s front stairs. “He can’t go in there. He can’t just bust in there like that.”