Beach Music (81 page)

The town of Waterford had finally, after forty years, grown accustomed to Lucy’s way of doing things. It knew the tenderhearted, deferential Lucy as well as it knew the vulgar, unaccommodating one. Five hundred townspeople came to her “Last Supper,” two hundred more than were invited. Lucy never stood on ceremony, and everyone in Waterford knew that her door was always open. And she always smiled in public. They all came to say good-bye to her famous smile.

Mike Hess had suggested the whole affair be catered and done up right but we had insisted on doing all the cooking ourselves. Like all of my close friends, he had fallen in love with my mother long before he ever got around to falling in love with girls his own age. When Mike gave his first interview in
Premiere
magazine, he told his interrogator that he first knew that small towns were the residences of goddesses when he went to his best friend’s fifth birthday party and caught a glimpse of Lucy McCall. Mike had spent so much time at my house as much because of Lucy’s good-natured flirtatiousness with young boys as his closeness to me, and I always knew it. Lucy was one of those charismatic mothers who took the time to listen
and counsel her children’s friends and by so doing influenced all of us, for better or worse, who were lucky enough to be around her.

The Red Clay Ramblers set up on the riverbank and played their sweet music for hours at a time. Senator Ernest Hollings held court on one side of the huge expanse of grassy yard that led from the back of the house to the water, and his Republican counterpart, Strom Thurmond, kissed the hands of every lady in sight as the air filled up with the smell of a feast bad for the arteries and good for the soul. Dupree had a pot of Frogmore stew simmering near the line of picnic tables and I could smell the pork sausage, mingling with the fresh corn and shrimp, cutting the air with its special tang of barnyard, field, and saltwater creek. Opposite me stood Dallas, dressed in jeans and shirt, shoveling oysters onto tin sheets spread over cinder blocks and heated by a fierce wood fire. He would place the oysters with great precision, evening up their exposure to the heat, until they would pop open from the force of their own interior steam and spill their fragrant juices onto the tin. Then Dallas would shovel the opened oysters onto picnic tables covered with newspapers and the perfume of those washed-down mollusks gave off a silvery, slightly metallic musk of a rained-on acre of spartina. Tee and the sisters-in-law served platefuls of barbecue, which glistened in a mustard-based sauce that made the pork look like it had been painted with gold leaf. Three open bars had the crowd garrulous and ice chests full of beer were packed down and there for the taking. The women had come gussied up because they knew from experience that Lucy did not know the meaning of the word “casual” and would come dressed to kill no matter how hard they tried to wrestle the secret of the dress code for the party from her.

Mike had been standing beside Lucy and Dr. Pitts on the veranda to form an informal receiving line that marched up the front steps, shook hands with the guest of honor beneath the shade of eight Ionic columns, then passed through to the center of the house and down the outside staircase following the music and the smell of good food. I had given Leah the job of recording the entire event for posterity on a camcorder.

“You’re the producer, the director, the soundman, and the gaffer
all rolled into one. Make like Fellini. Make us all famous,” I had told Leah.

For the rest of the afternoon Leah wandered, in her white dress, through the immense, good-natured crowd. She was now as much a part of Waterford as anyone there and each time she aimed her camera at a strange cluster of people, someone would notice her, step back, and introduce the entire group to her. More than once I heard some man or woman she had never met say, “Lawd, child, if you aren’t the spitting image of your pretty mama. Shyla took ballet lessons with my grandchild, Bailey, and if those two just didn’t have a time. She was graceful as a lily on stage. I know, child. I was there.”

Leah seemed relieved to have her camera between her and the lost country of memory these people claimed to see with such clarity when they stared at her features. Every time I overheard the name Shyla, I felt again the cold solitude of being motherless that was being pressed on Leah. And I was glad she had the camera as a fence to protect herself, an excuse to be invisible. Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.

As I kept eight pots of salted water turning out perfectly cooked pasta, it seemed as though the drama of my whole life paraded by. Mrs. Lipsitz, who had fitted my shoes during my entire boyhood, ordered spaghetti with pesto sauce from me as she stood chatting with Mr. Edwards, who sold me my first suit. He had come with Coach Small, who had taught me to throw a curve ball, and Coach Singleton, who had shared the secrets of downfield blocking with me. He stood near Miss Economy, who once made me sing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” solo on New Year’s Eve when the ice storm hit Colleton and killed an oak tree that had been growing along the river when Columbus discovered America. Over fifty black people mingled through the crowd and I thought again how lucky I was to have been raised by Southern parents who not only were not racists, but who worked with uncommon zeal to ensure that we were uninfected by the South’s virulent portable virus. Our
parents represented something very fine and dangerous at a time when Southern whites stood shoulder to shoulder to demonstrate their attention to ideas both insupportable and un-American.

In 1956, when I was just eight years old, my father, Johnson Hagood McCall, was a brilliant, if irascible, jurist. At that time, in the early apprenticeship of his drinking, lawyers dreaded his court because he did not tolerate lack of preparation or the wasting of his time. His tongue lashings of counsel were famous and withering. His court sessions were orderly and his judgments fair. Though Johnson Hagood was neither a good father nor an admirable husband, the law ennobled him and brought out aspects of character that surprised even him. But it was not a good time in South Carolina history to combine valor with a judge’s gavel.

He was a circuit judge of the Fourteenth Judicial District, and was away from Waterford for long periods of time in that position. The case that brought him to grief was simple but controversial in the rural county where it came to trial. A high school English teacher by the name of Tony Calabrese had been fired from his job for advocating openly in his classroom the integration of the public schools. Mr. Calabrese was employed by the Reese County School Board and Reese County was known all over South Carolina for the backwardness of its citizens. My father referred to Reese County as the “incest capital of the world” and he held its lawyers in utter contempt. Tony Calabrese admitted that he had advocated the integration of schools, but only as a teaching tool and only to stimulate class discussion among students who he felt were brain-dead and bereft of all ideas. It did not help that Tony Calabrese, who had been born in Haddonfield, New Jersey, to immigrants from Naples, was a practicing Roman Catholic and an open Republican.

As the trial unfolded, it became apparent to my father that the school board had not followed a single one of the procedures for due process when it fired Mr. Calabrese. On the witness stand, the teacher himself was fiery and unrepentant and gave the counsel for the school board all he could handle. Mr. Calabrese bristled with outrage and stated that the world of ideas would not be eclipsed in any classroom over which he presided and he would not be bullied by anyone for thinking whatever he saw fit to believe. As my father
listened, he thought that the trial of Tony Calabrese was a good thing for every small town to go through and he found himself silently cheering for the embattled teacher as the mood of the courtroom grew testier and more hostile. He began to identify with this incandescent plaintiff who had brought suit against an ill-prepared school board.

Toward the end of the trial my father asked Calabrese, “How did you get down here to Reese County, sir?”

Calabrese looked up and smiled at him, then said, “Just beginner’s luck, Your Honor.”

My father laughed, but his was the only smile in that grim-faced court. He ruled in favor of Calabrese, reinstated him with pay, then made the mistake of lecturing both the school board and the citizenry of Reese County.

“You cannot fire a teacher for discussing in class what is contained in the daily headlines of our newspapers. One may disagree with the concept of integration, but anyone who reads can see it is inevitable. You can fire a hundred Calabreses today, but integration will still be coming tomorrow. Calabrese was simply preparing your children for the future. His firing was an act of frustration, because you want so much to hold on to the past. I’ve read
Brown
v.
the Board of Education
over and over again. It’s bad public policy, but it’s good law. You cannot fire a man for teaching about a constitutional right. Integration’s coming to South Carolina, Calabrese or not.”

That night in Reese County ten men in masks came for Tony Calabrese, and though he struggled, they beat him half to death with fists and ax handles. They burnt his car and his house and they drove him to the state line of New Jersey, where they dumped him bound up in an oyster sack and blind in one eye. The ten men who assaulted Calabrese were never caught but were well known among their fellow citizens, who believed in their hearts that Calabrese had received a well-deserved civics lesson in the Southern way of doing things.

The evening after the trial my father presided over a formal dinner of local officials and their wives who were meeting at our house to plan a political fund-raiser for a young politician by the name of Ernest F. Hollings, who was planning to run for governor.
News of Calabrese’s disappearance had reached Waterford and the sheriff had sent word that it might be wise to post a deputy at our house for the next week or so. Since my father felt no sense of danger in his hometown, he was not disturbed at all. But my mother was alarmed a great deal and as she prepared the meal that night, she checked all the approaches that led to the house and secretly put in a call to the sheriff to see if there was any late-arriving news about the abducted teacher. She was six months pregnant with my youngest brother, John Hardin, and she thought she knew much more intuitively than her husband how rural white people felt about the topic of integration. Dallas, Dupree, Tee, and I were put to bed early and all the locks were checked on the windows. The four of us had watched her break jelly glasses in the sink that afternoon and place the jagged fragments on the railing going around the veranda. As my mother took inventory of the situation, my father drank. The bourbon made him both self-righteous and less worried about the disappearance of Calabrese.

Because of Jack Daniel’s, my father faced the evening unafraid; because of Jim Crow, Lucy put my brothers and me all in my room for safekeeping with the dog, Chippie, guarding the door.

Lucy had set her dining room table with great care, and she watched the languorous, confident guests as they slowly drifted into the dining room toward the aromas of baked Cornish hens and wild rice and turnip greens. She watched Becky Trask and Julia Randel take their seats as elegantly as monarch butterflies settling on peonies, while their husbands held their chairs and the candelabra glowed.

I was sound asleep when I heard Chippie rouse herself from my bed and walk over to stare out of the window into darkness. The hair on her spine stood out, erect, and there was a steady growl in her throat. Getting up and going to her, I stared out of the window and saw nothing in the moonless night. But I could not calm Chippie.

“It’s nothing, Chippie,” I said, but the hair on Chippie’s neck said otherwise and there was a fierce humming in her throat that my words could not stifle.

Suddenly a brick crashed through the downstairs window and
landed squarely on the dinner table. Other bricks followed and I heard Becky Trask scream when one of them struck her on the shoulder and every chair was overturned in the frantic scramble to avoid that shower of bricks. The half-burned candles were strewn around the room and my father found himself pressed face to face with the town’s mayor, as a voice screamed out in the darkness, “We’ll kill you, you nigger-lovin’ judge. We’ll kill you dead.”

Then a fusillade of rifle fire burst through the window and I heard the women screaming and the men shouting for each other to do something. Then I heard a shotgun go off just beneath my window and it seemed as though someone was on the porch firing at short range below me.

“They’re gonna shoot us down like dogs right here on the floor,” I heard the mayor shout at my father and the shotgun rang out again as the attackers seemed to be running away into the night. Far off I heard a siren sound, which was answered by the steady, hysterical barking of Chippie, locked upstairs with my brothers and me.

In silence, the guests were lying on the floor when they saw a shadow cross the threshold of the front door, and in the dim, sputtering light of candles, they watched as Lucy returned her stillsmoking shotgun to its rightful place in the closet by the front door. My mother understood the nature of the white people of Reese County far better than my father did with all his degrees and all the finesse he brought to bear in arcane areas of legal dissent.

She had prepared the meal and loaded her shotgun just in case there were unwanted visitors who had come to do her family harm. She was firing from the hip when she first opened that front door and she would have killed any man she had encountered on that blacked-out veranda.

The incident marked the first of many times that the town of Waterford would have to revise their opinion about my mother.

My brothers and I heard the story of those night riders over and over again during our childhood. The bullet holes were never repaired in the dining room plaster or in the mantel over the fireplace. Those bullet holes served as sacred reminders that our father had the courage of his convictions and it was important to stand for something
of great value in a society that had debased itself with the fury of its own worst instincts. They also reminded us of a father we could take pride in, even though it was a father we hardly remembered. The shotgun pellets from Lucy’s surprising fusillade remain embedded in three columns of the veranda as both mementos and lessons for us, her children, and a warning to those who would approach our house with malice and treachery in their hearts. They did so only at their own peril. The Calabrese trial was my father’s finest hour.