Now in her seventies, she still had a belle’s beauty amplified by theatrical makeup applied with a professional’s precision, an elegant and completely perfect coiffure, and a manicure of uncommon beauty. She was a production still. She had those high, fine, sparrow bones of good breeding; she still wore dark, as if in mourning, though of course James Beaufueillet had died back in 1923 and she had married twice again afterward, each time acquiring a yet more sizable estate. She had therefore buried three husbands, given birth to eleven children, buried a few of them, been through the wars of ’98, ’17–’18, ’41–’45 and now this Korea thing. She served him lemonade; they sat on the screened porch of her house in North Jackson, in the center of the antebellum district, where old porticoed mansions spoke of days past but not dead, while outside, amid the cars, surreys and two-wheeled dump carts driven by white-haired Negroes were seen on the streets.
There was only one problem: she could not be hurried.
She would take her own sweet goddamned slow-as-molasses time.
“Now they were a family,” she began, her eyes locked firmly on that past, as if it were still within touch of her beautiful old hands, so slim, so elegant. “Timber family. The first Bonverite man was George, and he arrived in the eighteen forties, from Louisiana, I’d guess, the French in him, and he was an empire builder. Yes, sir, Mr. Vincent, where others saw gold beneath the trees where it never was, it was George Bonverite who saw the gold in the trees, where in fact it hid. But to timber you must have a mill, so George decreed a mill out of nothingness onto the Yaxahatchee, built with Negro slave labor and strictly applied discipline, and after building began to cut and ship the wood. Where the capital came from originally I don’t care to know, and perhaps you would be wise to avoid investigating. If he was from Louisiana, gambling had to be involved, and duelin’ and women, for the Bonverites, as it turned out, always had a taste for the women, their own and anybody else’s with a comely set of ankles, dimpled knees and buttocks like buttered apples.”
Sam took a deep breath.
She laughed.
“What a pleasure it is in this day and age,” she said, “to discover a man I can still shock. These young men, they’ve been through the war and everything, so they’ve not had the time for a moral education. You have, sir, and I do approve, though as an old gal who’s outlived them all, I may now and then give you two fingers of truth.”
“Ma’am, I shall try and get through it without calling for my vapors.”
Hurry on with it, old Circe!
“Oh, sir, you are a fine rascal, I can tell. Anyway, back to George Bonverite…”
And so the story crawled through the generations begat by begat, scandal and duel by scandal and duel as George and his heirs timbered in ever wider circles to feed the growing appetite of the state and the shipbuilders of Pascagoula, and for which they built themselves a grand house, called Thebes, after the storied Greek town of yore, presumably because old George the patriarch had a classical education somewhere in his abandoned background.
The Bonverites flourished, their great house Thebes flourished, and the town that grew to service it and the timbering flourished. Pascagoula ships sailed the world on Thebes lumber. But hard times, perhaps in payment for all the virgins deflowered and all the angered husbands slain by single .41-caliber pistol balls in duels, came in the twenties, when the region was all but lumbered out and the boom of the Great War had subsided. Though America was on the go then, the collapse of timber hit Thebes County hard.
“So old Joe,” recalled Mrs. Ridgeway, “who was the patriarch then, old Joe had to contemplate giving up. The town was on the collapse, nothing was growing, there was no work. He would lose it all. It must have destroyed him, for down here we hold our land dear, as I’m sure y’all do up North in Arkansas.”
“We do, ma’am.”
Get on with it, you old singer of songs!
“Down here, a man’ll do just about anything to hang on to his land. Without his land, he’s nothing, he’s got nothing, his family is nothing. So he had to come up with something. I don’t know if it was his idea or if it was the boy’s.”
“The boy’s?”
“The last Bonverite. Cleon, I b’lieve. Cleon Bonverite. Wonder what ever became of him? Anyway, either he or his daddy cooked up a way to save the house and the town. They had heard that over at Parchman, the nigras was escaping now and then, not a lot of it, but enough to get folks riled. Nobody got killed or anything, but you can’t have that now, can you, that is, felonious Negroes on the loose? It just won’t do, will it, Mr. Vincent?”
She batted her belle’s eyelashes at him.
“No, ma’am. I can see how it would get people upset.”
“So Joe reasoned, along with his boy, that Thebes had one thing left to sell, one last product. Its isolation. It was Joe who went to the state legislature, spread some money around, called in chits, did what had to be done, and offered up the idea of a prison for the very bad Negroes, which the Bonverites of course would operate themselves at a generous stipend. So the state ‘bought’ the land, though not really. The land never changed hands; it just meant a generous stipend was paid out each month to the Bonverites, and that for the minimum investment of a few barracks being built, old Joe no longer had to pay his field hands, he now got them for free from the state. The taxes went away as if they were a bad dream. Joe and the Bonverites were now sellin’ retribution against the angriest of the darks, and it was a product many people in this state were ever so eager for. It was a grand system, for it gave the white people a new and more terrible club to wield over the poor nigras, and the Bonverites had their place and their property assured, and new sources of revenue, and for a time the town once again flourished.”
“This was 1927?”
“If you say so, Mr. Vincent.”
“And then?”
“My, my, my, you are so inquisitive, aren’t you,” the old beauty responded. “Do pour me some more of that lemonade, won’t you, Mr. Vincent.”
“I will, madam.”
She was flirting, damned by vanity still!
He did, filling his own glass too, more to assuage her than to drink, for the stuff was foully sweet, almost a paste of sugar that had yet to dissolve and flakes of lemon rind and melted little round blobs of ice cubes.
The old lady took a greedy drink, needing another blast of sugar to stir her dry old bones and, fortified, went onward.
“Joe died. Don’t know why, or how, or by what hand. It was said he died in violence so terrible it could not be reported and that the nigras did it, though no man was accused, and in that part of the state an accusation was a guilty finding, and a trip to the nearest tree was a way to get your dried dead fingers sold as souvenirs. Yes, sir, even in the thirties such terrible things occurred.”
“Yes, ma’am. And the boy Cleon? Are you imputing he killed his own father?”
“I would never say such a vulgar thing.”
“But he vanished.”
“He vanished. He inherited nothing, though by whose decision I know not. There were rumors.”
“Rumors?”
“Of another.”
“Another? Another what, ma’am?”
“Why, sir, such things can’t be talked about. Not among decent white people. But since you are such a charming man, I will perhaps intimate that which should never be intimated. That is, there does seem to be something in the white man’s brain, some ancient thing, perhaps curiosity, perhaps fear, perhaps bravado, who knows, that makes him wish to lie with the gals of color. Are you familiar with this phenomenon, sir?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Sam, “not that I’ve ever—”
“Of course not, Mr. Vincent, as any old fool could see so plainly. But not all are as strong and sensible as you, much less a lust-engulfed creature like a bull-stud Bonverite man. So that, perhaps, is the origin of the other, if there was another. For whatever reason—it was all hushed up, you can understand, with only the
faintest reek of scandal—the boy Cleon disappeared. Or went away. The plantation with its great house Thebes, it was lost to the Bonverites. The state took it over, expanded it, put people in charge who care nothing about anything except whipping the nigra and cashing their checks. Why, I believe the new warden was named Jones, can you believe such a thing? And the people that run it to this day are uninteresting. They have no family, to speak of.”
“And the Bonverites are all gone?”
“It would seem so.”
“I see.”
“Do you, Mr. Vincent? Why, it’s our Southern tale, exactly the one that Mr. Faulkner up in Oxford has had such sport with, of generations of strong men with but the weakness of wanting to lie with the fetching high yeller, and of that weakness’s inevitable result, which comes in the form of nigras with strange ideas of importance, and intelligence much inflated, and devious minds, natural antagonists to what must be and must be defended. Yet now it is hard to defend, for when bloodlines are confused, moral certainty disappears, which equals moral downfall, sir. The Bonverites were a great family; they ruled an empire from a great house and dined on china imported from London. They helled and rode hard and made things happen with their deep schemes and their courage, and they lost it all in scandal, a man dead, his son fled in shame, the haunting suggestions of a shadow brother also vanished. Chaos, loss, pain. New inheritors named prosaically enough Jones come and know or care nothing about what came before. But that is the tragic story of what happened in Thebes, and that is why to this day no decent folk will visit it, for it is blasphemed ground. Would you care for more lemonade, sir?”
“Ma’am, no, I wouldn’t.”
“I have so enjoyed this. I do not get audiences as once I did when I was young and fair. It was so nice to have a gentleman caller.”
“I had a very stimulating experience,” you old monster.
SAM returned with a treasure. It was a name, the name Jones. How many Joneses could there be in Mississippi? And it turned out there were hundreds. He set about his task with a great deal of discipline, even though he was sure people would think him cracked if they knew what a thing he was up to.
He called the directory assistance or the switchboard of every single town listed in the gazetteer, and asked for the number of every person named Jones. It turned out there were over 450 of such people, and he called each and every one of them, acquiring a phone bill that set a record.
At each answer, he began the same way.
“Hello, I am Sam Vincent, Esquire, a lawyer from Arkansas. In regards to a law case, I am seeking a man named Jones who may have been for a time the warden of a penal farm in Thebes County, Mississippi. Is there any chance, sir [or ma’am, depending], I have the right Mr. Jones or at least a relative of that Mr. Jones?”
The answers he got ranged from the idiotic to the unprintable, but most were polite enough, though disappointing.
“No suh,” the Negro Joneses would say, “don’t know nothing about that Jones. Our people never had nothing to do with no jail.”
“Thank you, sir [or ma’am],” Sam would reply, “I am very sorry to have bothered you,” and another name was scratched off the list.
The white Joneses were more helpful; their sin was perhaps that they were too helpful. It turned out that most were obsessed with their own families, and kept him on the phone for what felt like hours as they took him through their family trees, and they were so flattered to have a listener interested in their lives, they spilled beans quite readily that hadn’t ought to have been spilled to anyone, much less an unknown caller.
“Well, sir, we never had a Jones who worked in a prison, but I’m sorry to say, we had a Jones who served time in a prison. He was a lawyer like yourself, sir, my aunt’s husband, and as luck would have it, his name was Jones too, like our family’s name, Willard Jones, and it turned out he was overbilling an estate to which he had been appointed executor, and he had to resign the bar after he got out of the prison. He’s now in Memphis, I think, and I believe he has passed the Tennessee bar, though of course there are no standards whatever in a primitive state like Tennessee,” and so forth and so on.
Sam wearied quickly of his ordeal by Jones, but there was no quit in him at all, so he kept at it, though he could feel his energy and interest lagging, and his voice growing dull and charmless. Of course he was at his worst when he finally connected.
“Well, what would this be in regard to?” the Jones on the other end asked, the first time he’d encountered an upward tweak of voice, signifying a nibble.
Sam looked quickly at his list to figure out where the hell in the maze of Joneses he was, and discovered that this Jones was the third Jones of McComb, Mississippi.
“Sir,” said Sam, “I am in the business of trying to authenticate the death of a Negro man at that prison much later, and I am trying to locate someone who could provide information about conditions there.”
“Under my father, conditions was as good as they could be. He was a fair man with a hard job to do, and he done it like he done everything, which is true-blue steppin’ to duty and our Christian god.”
The edge of hostility gave Sam something to work with.
“That is what I had heard. I had heard that this Warden Jones was a fair and a good man. If I can establish that, if I can enshrine his memory and make the court see what a good man he was, then possibly I can demonstrate that what happened after he left—let’s see that was—”
“It was forty-three. The gubmint took it over in forty-three.”
“I see. So he was there—”
“Thirty-six to forty-three. He wanted so bad to run his own prison, and he’d been at Parchman quite a while, and when he got Thebes after, you know, old man Bonverite got roasted up like a weenie, and it wasn’t much, but he worked it hard. He worked it so hard it damn nigh kilt him.”
“He sounds like a great man.”
“Nobody escaped under Wilson W. Jones and nobody died, neither. I’m not saying it was a nice place, now; it couldn’t be.”
“Of course not,” Sam said. “After all, its mission was the incorrigibles.”
“And I’m not saying no Negro wasn’t now and then mussed up a bit by the guard staff, but they had a hard job, and a great responsibility. They didn’t beat nobody so bad they died, and my pa was proud as hell of that. When they beat ’em, they beat ’em fair and square, lookin’ ’em in the eye, I seen it my own self many a time. And b’lieve it or not, the Negro, he likes it that way, too. He likes knowing the rules and what’s ’spected of him. You can’t give no Negro too much freedom, ’cause it makes his head spin and there’s all sorts of hell to pay.”
“And the government came in, forty-three you say, what was his—”
“He was upset when the gubmint came in—”
“It was the state government?”
“No, no, the U.S. gubmint. The Army. They took it over in forty-three. What they needed with it, I do not know. I do know that my daddy never got another prison, and he was a bitter man. He took the worst job in the system and made a go of it, and had a perfect record, and he went on to be assistant warden at several places, but never got to be top man again. He died of a broken heart, I would say.”
“Oh, I am sorry to hear that,” Sam said, anxious now to get off the phone and pursue this new direction.
“I am sorry, too.”
“So he is not alive and I could not get a deposition from him?”
“No sir, not unless you got a telephone number from heaven.”
“Well, then, I am so sorry to have wasted your time. But may I thank you for your father’s service. He sounds as if he were a good man.”
“Thank you, sir. That’s more’n he ever got from the state of Mississippi.”
The government took it over in forty-three. What on earth could that mean?
Sam puzzled this one over for a bit, and recalled that nothing he had read anywhere spoke of such a thing. Perhaps it wasn’t worth reporti
ng, simply some temporary wartime measure like a supply depot or a reporting station of an ancillary training facility for some arcane specialty, like ball-turret gunning, that needed some isolation to practice in. Or jungle survival; that made sense. Maybe they brought in young naval aviators and gave them a crash course in jungle survival, for certainly parts of that bayou were as wild as anything in the Pacific.
He tried to think of who he could call, and then came up with the name Mel Brasher, who was a staffer in Congressman Harry Etheridge’s office but had been a county chairman down here in Polk for a number of years before Harry had tapped his talents for the big D.C. job. Once Mel’s wife, Sherry, had been picked up for drunk driving after an election night, and Sam had seen to it that the case never came to trial and that nothing had happened to Sherry’s license.
So Mel owed Sam; now Sam meant to collect.
He got Mel, not right away, but soon enough, and after a de rigueur session of political gossip and a run-through of each fellow’s family and prospects, Sam got to the point.
“Mel, I’m stuck on a case here and I wonder if—”
“You just tell me, Sam. You know you can count on me.”
“Thanks. You want the long story or the short story?”
“Sam, it’s D.C., so I have to have the short. I’ve got fifty phone calls after this one to return, and I’ve got to make sure Boss Harry gets to the Silver Spring VFW post tonight.”