Felix glanced at her furtively, ashamed, but Carmen was ashamed, too. She was mortified that she had seen so deep into her husband’s soul—it was pornographic—and she was almost as disgusted by her reaction as she was by his.
“This way, move, now,” the fellow was telling them, and he started to march them toward the second of the two Land Rovers.
“Carmen, I’m sorry,” he sniffled. “I’m sorry.” His apology only annoyed her further. He sounded like a little boy.
“No,” she told him, feeling more like his mother than his wife. “You’re right to be scared. We should be. But…”
He wiped at his eyes with his fists.
“But we’ll be fine,” she told him. She wasn’t so sure about their African porters and Muema, the lone surviving guide, and she wasn’t even so sure about Charlie Patton. But the white people from California? She had the sense this was all about them, and they were far more valuable alive than they would be dead.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Terrance Dutton
Terrance Dutton was among those spotted in Washington, D.C., last month, listening to the Rev. Dr. King, Jr., Mrs. Medgar Evers, and other speakers. The actor has always been a little “outspoken” when it comes to the changing politics of America, and most people in Hollywood know that to work with the Negro actor means playing as much by his rules as theirs.
—The Hollywood Reporter, September 15, 1963
They changed the tire and they left the camp.
The fellow who was driving didn’t look like the plantation scions who wanted to make sure that Terrance and his family never “forgot who they were” （the words of one elderly descendant of a local general from the Lost Cause）， other than the fact he was white. He was too solid and boxy to be the sort of southern white boy who drank booze with sprigs of mint in a highball glass, and he lacked those eyes that could transform in a blink from condescending but kind to acid if a Black man said the wrong thing. He was muscular and, it seemed, a little battle-scarred himself. He exuded weariness—maybe a war, Terrance surmised, but maybe a lifetime of petty degradations he himself had endured in one communist country or another—and the little hair he had on his head was as short as two-day-old beard stubble. Meanwhile, his partner, the one in the last row of seats in the Land Rover with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a pistol aimed at the back of their heads, seemed rather self-satisfied. Pleased with how things were turning out. Both of their captors spoke English, but Terrance couldn’t decide how fluent they really were. Terrance wasn’t positive, but he suspected that the rifle might have been one of Charlie Patton’s weapons.
The Land Rover had three rows of bucket seats and a solid row in the back. The driver was alone in the first row. Billy and Margie Stepanov were in the second. Their guard was in the fourth. And he and David and Katie were wedged together in the third, though Katie was more in her husband’s lap than in the bucket seat.
The camp was growing small in the distance as they bounced along the savanna, and Terrance was feeling more anger than fear. Yes, there was the helplessness of having to accept treatment like this because these two men had guns and they didn’t, and, yes, there was the unmistakable reality that these bastards were part of a group that had coolly shot an unarmed grandfather and two rangers—one who had his rifle out and was going to try to protect the Americans, but one who had simply failed to drop his gun quickly enough. Terrance was frightened, readily he could admit that to himself. But he was also furious. How the fuck had he escaped the humiliations great and small that dogged a Black man in huge chunks of America, only to wind up with two white guys holding him at gunpoint in Africa? Was there no place on the planet where he wouldn’t have to calculate whether a slight was worth a response or whether he should let the indignity breeze past him? Was there no place in the world where he wasn’t going to—in this case, quite literally—have to fight to survive?
* * *
.?.?.
He’d gotten death threats before when they’d been shooting on location, especially the two times he’d agreed to film south of the Mason-Dixon line. There was the cop drama, some of which was set on the Outer Banks off North Carolina, and there were those nightmarish six days when they’d filmed in Mobile. He hoped he’d never have to film again in the South, but he knew that his clout was limited. （How hard had Natalie Wood worked to get the authority from the studio to pick even one of her films? She’d told Terrance it was practically a cockfight when she announced that she wanted to be in West Side Story.） At least he would try never again to film in the South. But Tennessee would always be the deal breaker, his line in the sand: if he was ever sent a script for a picture that was set in Tennessee, either he’d put in a rider that his scenes were to be filmed anyplace but Tennessee or he’d pass. Now that he had moved his parents to California and his sister and brother-in-law lived in Chicago, he was never going to set foot in that state again. He doubted his parents or his sister would either. His parents had gotten a dog last year, an adorable little mutt from the shelter that was part terrier and, they joked, part pig. They doted on that animal like it was a newborn baby and he asked them why they’d never had a dog when he and his sister had been kids, given how much they adored having a pet. And it was only after the question had escaped his mouth that he had the flashback: they had had a dog. And someone had poisoned it. He was too young to have more than vague, inchoate memories of the animal, because he’d been three—maybe four—when someone had killed it, but he’d figured out early on how the dog’s murder had devastated his mother and how he should never, ever bring it up. And soon the memory was buried deep in the sludge of the hippocampus, unrecoverable until his parents, safely in Southern California, had gotten another pet and the lugubrious recollection had been exhumed.