Natchez Burning (Penn Cage) Read online

  The two years he’d spent in and out of Albert’s store were the most vivid of Henry’s life. Nothing that happened to him afterward ever touched the live-wire euphoria he’d felt within the vibrating walls of that building, or the longing he’d suffered when he was trapped somewhere else, thinking about getting back to it.

  Most of the musicians who came through Albert’s store were fast-aging boys who would still be boys when they found their graves. Albert himself was a wise man of fifty who’d never let the world beat his dreams out of him. His eyes were deep brown pools set in a darker brown face, and his hands, unlike those of the other black men Henry knew, weren’t cracked and broken from backbreaking labor, but soft and long-fingered, like the hands of a surgeon or a classical violinist.

  Albert was so well liked in the community that during the nineteen years since the Japanese surrender, a practice unheard-of almost anywhere else in the South had become the norm there. Albert not only served white customers, but white women—white women were known to browse his store’s extensive library of sheet music—white women alone, with Albert the only other person present. Henry’s mother had told him this was highly unusual, but she herself bought hymn music in Albert’s store. Moreover, in those days, every family that could afford one had a piano in the parlor, and Albert had traveled the parish tuning the instruments for five dollars less than the white tuner charged. Apparently, the white husbands’ racism didn’t extend to paying extra to have a white man tune their pianos.

  Henry’s secret odyssey through Albert’s store had begun with piano lessons, first with the proprietor, but later with Albert’s daughter Swan, who’d been named after a black opera singer from Natchez. Born a slave in 1824, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield had traveled to London and sung for the queen in Buckingham Palace, where opera enthusiasts christened her the Black Swan. Albert Norris had known all about the Black Swan, of course. Swan’s mother had tried to call her Elizabeth, but the child had such beauty and grace that no one ever called her anything but Swan. Like her father, Swan was a musical prodigy, and by seventeen she was handling the majority of Albert’s lessons.

  One of Swan’s pupils was a gangly white fourteen-year-old named Henry Sexton. Despite Albert’s strong improvisational style, as a teacher he was a stickler for theory. Henry sometimes felt more bullied by Albert in the teaching room than he did by the redneck coaches on the football field at Ferriday Junior High. But Swan was different. She might run him through a few scales at the beginning of each lesson, but this bored her, and she only did it to please her father. She delighted in teaching Henry to play the songs he really wanted to learn, hits he’d heard on the radio, mostly. Henry lived for the hour he spent with the older girl every Thursday afternoon, confined in the eight-by-ten room with a Baldwin upright and a scent so primally feminine that he could hardly think of anything else.

  A narrow vertical window had been set in the door of the teaching room, and Henry had cursed it a thousand times. Albert used the window to keep an eye on Swan when she was teaching boys. Since the store was elevated off the ground, the floorboards always creaked, and Henry used those creaks as a Distant Early Warning System to keep track of Albert’s movements. The problem was, some customer was usually playing a piano in the main room, and this masked the sound of Albert’s walk. Bass guitars were even worse. To Henry’s everlasting gratitude, Albert sometimes taught piano in the display room at the same time Swan was teaching him. And it was one of these afternoons that Swan had given Henry the greatest shock, and the greatest gift, of his life.

  He’d been trying to copy her technique on Bach, which was torture when 95 percent of his concentration was on the shapely thigh of the beautiful girl sitting hip to hip with him. He was also praying she wouldn’t notice the taut little tent in his lap, which had become a regular feature of the lessons, and which Henry simply could not control. As he struggled to keep his left hand in rhythm, Swan’s hand settled on that tent as softly as a butterfly. Then she began to rub it.

  “Keep playing,” she whispered.

  Henry stopped anyway, his heart and lungs expanding like balloons hooked to a high-pressure cylinder.

  “Go on,” Swan urged, her big eyes flashing, “or I’ll have to quit.”

  Sweat poured off Henry’s face. He banged his left hand down on the keyboard, and Swan rubbed harder beneath it. Less than a minute later Henry shivered and began to smack the keys like a man with stumps for fingers—but he kept playing. Swan kissed his cheek and said, “Maybe now you can concentrate, boy.”

  After this lesson, Henry ran home and washed his pants in the Whirlpool before his mother could get home from her second job at the church. Then he’d prayed eighteen hours a day for his next lesson to arrive.

  When the next Thursday came, Swan made him wait almost the whole hour before doing anything other than what Henry’s mother was paying her to do. But fifty minutes into the lesson, Elizabeth Swan Norris got up and moved to Henry’s right side, which was not her usual place, then took his right hand and guided it under her dress. Henry gulped when he felt what awaited his fingers. Her wetness confused and terrified him. Still, he let her move his fingers in circles over the hard little berry between her legs while she played piano with her left hand. When Swan finally shuddered against him, the music stopped. When her father looked into the window a few seconds later, he saw two kids on the piano bench and four hands on the keyboard. He did not see that two of the hands were wet.

  “Don’t you go falling in love with me,” Swan warned Henry that day. “If you start talking foolishness, I’ll stop these lessons. You hear?”

  “But . . . but . . .” Henry stuttered, knowing already that his heart was full of something that felt nothing like foolishness.

  “But nothing,” Swan snapped. “I’m just giving you some special lessons, that’s all. Lessons you need.”

  Five weeks of special lessons followed, each one ending with mutual ecstasy. Twice Swan freed Henry from his jeans and sucked until he almost screamed, and those times he felt what the preachers claimed being filled with the holy spirit was supposed to be like and what a heroin addict had told him it felt like when he’d shot up for the first time.

  Once during a “special” lesson, Albert actually left the store to run an errand. Swan didn’t waste time with preliminaries. She pulled Henry down to the floor, tugged down his pants, climbed astride him, and unbuttoned her shirt. He’d never seen or felt anything like he did that day, the swelling heat of Swan’s chocolate-tipped breasts and the near-religious glaze in her eyes. Swan had known exactly when he was going to finish, and she slid off him and helped with expert hands, laughing as he spent himself across the ebony piano bench. But Henry couldn’t laugh. After that day, he was in love, or in something even more profound. He was like the drug-addicted musicians Albert spoke mournfully about, the ones who couldn’t go more than a few hours without a fix.

  Henry could not stop thinking about Swan. His grades plummeted, and his mother noticed. He started riding his bike through the colored section of town, trying to get a look at Swan sitting on Albert’s porch. The first time she saw him doing this, Swan knitted her brow in an angry frown and did not wave. The next Thursday, Henry found Albert waiting in the teaching room, saying Swan was too sick to teach. Henry immediately stopped riding his bike on the wrong side of Louisiana Avenue.

  The next Thursday he found Swan waiting in the teaching room as though nothing had happened. When Albert started giving a church organist a lesson in the main room, Swan stood up and began playing the piano Jerry Lee Lewis style. As Henry gaped, she reached back with her right hand, flipped up her skirt, and pulled down her panties without stopping the bass line with her left hand. By this time Henry had lost his childish nerves. He dropped his jeans and plunged into her from behind, amazed that she could play so perfectly while he thrust so hard. But on this occasion Swan didn’t realize he was going to finish, and neither did he—not until the moment had passed. Suddenly Swan was
twice as slippery as before, and she jerked away from Henry as though he’d scalded her.

  “I’m sorry!” he cried, yanking up his pants in shame. “It was an accident!”

  Swan’s face went twice as dark as usual. “Boy, you and your little thang gonna get me with child!” She sat on the bench and looked down at her little bush while her father played a hymn on a Hammond organ in the next room. “Run up the street to the gas station and get me a pop,” she said crossly.

  Henry looked blankly at her. “A pop?”

  “A Dr. Pepper! A hot one, if you can get it. Hurry.”

  “What do I tell your father?”

  “Tell him . . . tell him you bet me a Dr. Pepper that I couldn’t play something.”

  “Like what?”

  Swan nearly swatted him. “What do I care? Charlie Parker. Get going, dummy!”

  When Henry returned, Swan took the ten-cent bottle of soda into the bathroom. It was only years later that he learned a fizzing Dr. Pepper had been a primitive method of birth control used by desperate girls in the days before the Pill.

  Swan eventually got over her anger, and things continued as before, but most of what came after had been blurred by the passing years. What Henry remembered most was how tense that summer had been, how the sky would pile up each afternoon with slate-gray clouds that looked full of rain but brought only dry thunder. People on the street were grouchy. The white people were tense, the blacks scared or angry. The air felt so still that noises sounded different than usual. To make things worse, Henry’s father came home and stayed for three straight weeks. All he talked about was “nigger trouble” all over the South, and the “goddamn Kennedys twistin’ up LBJ.” Henry’s only escape was the hours he got to spend at school or with Swan.

  One August afternoon, while he and Swan sat on the store steps, Albert walked out, looked at the sky, and said, “This drought done turned the ground into a drum.” Swan poked a stick in the dust and said, “What you talkin’ ’bout, Daddy?” Albert sat down and illustrated his words with his flattened hands. “The ground is the top head, the bedrock the bottom, and precious little water between. Every time a truck goes by, I hear the earth echo. Everybody’s prayin’ for God to send rain. White and black, they prayin’ the same words.”

  Henry liked it when Albert talked this way, and he wondered why he seemed more in tune with these thoughts than Swan. Swan lived so instinctively that she seemed to care nothing about codifying feelings into language. If it rained, it rained. If it didn’t, she’d make do with the heat.

  “Is it ever going to rain again?” Henry asked.

  Albert did something then that he’d never done in public: he laid a comforting hand on Henry’s shoulder and squeezed. “Son,” he said softly, “I think maybe a storm’s comin’ that could wash away everything we know.”

  Recognizing the anxiety in her father’s voice, Swan finally looked up.

  “You chil’ren be careful from now on,” Albert said. “Don’t let nobody see you together. There’s good folks and bad in this town, same as everywhere else. But right now the bad ones got the power. You hear me?”

  Swan locked eyes with Henry, and they knew then that nothing ever got past her father.

  Henry’s ringing cell phone startled him so profoundly that his arms flew up defensively. He felt as though he had awakened from a deep, feverish sleep. Shaking his head, he took his phone out of his pocket. The caller was a female FBI agent who often checked in to pick his brain for clues. He wondered if she’d heard about the death of Viola Turner. Henry couldn’t let himself think about Viola yet. If he did, he’d lose the objectivity he would so desperately need when he faced Glenn Morehouse. He muted the ringer of his phone and climbed out of his Explorer into the cold wind. Leaving the door open, he walked to the edge of the lot. One of the concrete pyramids that had supported Albert’s pickin’ porch still stuck up out of the mud. Henry planted his right foot on it. In spite of the coming Morehouse interview, his heart felt as empty as the lot before him.

  He looked down the deserted street. A three-legged dog was pissing on a fence, while farther on, a black boy rode a rusted banana bicycle with what appeared to be grim purpose. Forty years ago, this street would have been jumping with the sounds of Albert’s piano. People would have been laughing and dancing on their porches, looking forward to the evening, when they would head over to Haney’s Big House to hear a name band. Now the druggies Albert used to pity ruled the streets.

  The fire that killed Albert Norris had killed more than a man, Henry reflected. It had killed the store, and with the store had passed the magic that flourished there, the living hope of black and white interacting with trust and respect rather than fear and hatred. Henry often wondered why no one had ever built a new business on this site. Some people believed that an evil lingered in this earth after the murderous fire, like a dissonant chord that never faded. The tragic truth, Henry knew, was that bad feelings didn’t linger any more than good ones did. There was no feeling here. The land itself retained neither Albert’s magic nor the horror of his death. All that remained was the memory of an aging reporter and those few survivors who had shared the magic with him.

  And the killers, he thought. The Double Eagles who had burned Albert Norris to death—and either flayed or crucified Pooky Wilson—were still walking the streets of Ferriday, Vidalia, and Natchez. Henry was not a vengeful man, but the knowledge that those men lived while their victims lay in the earth ate at him like battery acid. While the Double Eagles watched their grandkids play Little League baseball, the families of their victims mourned grandchildren who had never been born. Worst of all, Henry thought, worse than the goddamned rednecks who had set the fires and wielded the knives and fired the guns, was the privileged millionaire who had ordered many of those murders. But if Glenn Morehouse lived up to his promise this morning, he might just give Henry what he’d craved more than anything else in his life: a weapon to take down an untouchable foe.

  Henry wiped tears from his face. Why was he the only pilgrim standing at this place? There wasn’t even a memorial marker to commemorate Albert Norris. The man had been buried in his church cemetery, two miles from this spot, and Henry had never found flowers on the grave when he went to visit. Swan lived in Irvine, California. Despite some modest musical success, she’d been married three times and had lost both perfect breasts to cancer. She had a grandson who played in a band with a recording contract. He was the light of her life. After Swan read one of Henry’s stories about the fire (sent to her by a local girl she’d gone to school with), she’d sent Henry a picture of her grandson. The boy had Swan’s face but Albert’s wise eyes. Enclosed with the photo was a note: “I learned more about my father’s murder from your stories than I did in forty years of pestering the FBI. Thank you. Please add my name to your subscription list. P.S. You were a good student. XOXO Swan.”

  That solitary note would have been sufficient to sustain Henry through his battles with the angry Klansmen, indifferent government bureaucracy, and reluctant or hostile witnesses that waited in his future. But he’d received many more letters like Swan’s. That was why the best-intentioned warnings of friends always fell on deaf ears. Swan and Albert Norris had transformed Henry from a timid boy into a man. After being adopted by them, he’d no longer cared whether his biological father loved him or not.

  “What you doin’ over here, white man?”

  Henry turned slowly and saw the black boy on the banana bike sitting a few feet away. He looked about ten, and wore a New Orleans Saints windbreaker, but his eyes had the sullen defiance of a teenager.

  “Just lookin’ around. There used to be a store on this lot. Did you know that? A music store.”

  “I need five dollars, man. You got five dollars?”

  “What do you need five dollars for?”

  “None yo’ business. You got it?”

  Henry started to walk back to his Explorer, then took out his wallet and handed the kid a one-dollar bill.<
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  “Shit. Gimme that wallet, too,” the kid said. “I need that wallet.”

  Henry put his foot on the running board of the Explorer.

  “I said gimme that goddamn wallet!”

  Henry turned, half expecting to see a pistol, or at least a knife. But all he saw was the enraged face of a ten-year-old kid who wasn’t going anywhere but jail or an early grave. “You can’t have it,” he said gently. Feeling like Albert must have felt so many times, he said, “Go home to your mama and stay out of trouble.”

  “Fuck you, old man! Go home to yo mama!”

  “I wish I had time,” Henry said, feeling a stab of guilt. His mother was ill, and probably wouldn’t be with him much longer.

  He shut the door and started his engine, his mind filled with memories of Viola Turner, an emaciated woman wearing an oxygen mask, her eyes filled with urgency, righteous anger, and concealed fear. Henry had known that Miss Viola was dying, but somehow her actual death seemed counterintuitive. Impossible, even. She had not been ready to die, he was certain of that. But she was gone now. Another witness silenced.

  “But how?” he murmured. “By time? Or human intervention?” He supposed Shadrach Johnson would tell him when he reached Natchez.

  Henry switched on his CD player as he drove past the Arcade theater, and the wail of Little Walter’s overdriven harmonica filled the Explorer. After listening for a few seconds, he shook his head and hit the next-track button. Robert Johnson began sawing at rusty old guitar strings with his slide. Today Henry heard only death and sadness in the sound. He hit next again. This time the a capella opening salvo of Kansas’s “Carry On Wayward Son” shattered the oppressive silence. It might be cheesy, but Henry didn’t give a shit. He was old, he was white, and he needed something to stoke the hope that still smoldered in the darkest recess of his heart. One of the beauties of digital technology was that he could replay the crystalline opening harmonies a hundred times if he wanted to, with one touch of a button. No rewinding, no guesswork. He laid his forefinger on the replay button and hit it one millisecond before the band’s instruments kicked in, again and again, all the way to the highway.