Cross Justice (9 page)

THE WORD SILENCED
the room, and Bree’s face turned hard. So did Patty’s and Naomi’s.

You heard the word used every day on the streets of DC, one person of color to another. But hearing it from the lips of an old white Southern woman in reference to my dead father, I felt like she’d slapped me across the face with something unspeakable.

Her daughter was dead. She was distraught. She didn’t mean it. Those were my immediate responses. Then I noticed that my aunts weren’t as shocked as the rest of us.

“Aunt Hattie?” I said.

Aunt Hattie wouldn’t look at me, but she said, “Ethel didn’t mean to shame your father’s name or yours, Alex. She’s just telling it like it was.”

Pained, Aunt Connie said, “Back then, your father
was
Marvin Bell’s slave. Bell owned him. Your mother too. They’d do anything he asked.”

“’Cause of the drugs,” Ethel Fox said.

I suddenly felt so hungry, I was light-headed.

“You don’t remember Bell coming to your house when you was a boy to bring your mama or papa something?” Aunt Connie asked, spooning the eggs onto a plate. “Tall white guy, sharp face, slippery, like Ethel said?”

Hattie added, “All nice one second, meaner than a crazy dog the next?”

Something blurry, troubling, and long ago flitted through my mind, but I said, “No, I don’t remember him.”

“What about—” Aunt Hattie began, and then stopped.

Aunt Connie had fetched plates of potato pancakes, crispy maple bacon, and a mound of toast from the warming oven, and she set them and the freshly made scrambled eggs on the table. Naomi and I attacked the food. Stefan’s fiancée pushed at her eggs and bacon and worried a piece of toast.

I stayed quiet as I ate. But Bree asked all sorts of questions about Marvin Bell, and by the time I set my fork on my plate, stuffed to the gills and feeling a lot less light-headed and achy, there was a thumbnail biography of him developing slowly in my mind, some of it fact, but most of it opinion, rumor, conjecture, and supposition.

Slippery
described Bell perfectly.

No one at that table could peg exactly when Marvin Bell took control of my parents’ life. They said he’d slid into Starksville like a silent cancer when my mom turned twenty. He came bearing heroin and cocaine, and he gave out free samples. He got my mother and a dozen young women just like her strung out and desperate. He hooked my father too, but not just on the drugs.

“Your father needed money for you boys,” Aunt Connie said.
“Selling and moving for Bell made him that money. And like Ethel was saying, Bell had his hooks into them so hard, they were just like his slaves.”

Ethel Fox said, “Once, Bell even ran your daddy out of your house, tied him with a rope to the back of his car, and dragged him down the street. No one moved to stop him.”

Flashing on that memory of the boys being dragged on a rope line the day before, I gaped at her, horrified.

“You don’t remember, Alex?” Aunt Hattie asked softly. “You were there.”

“No,” I said instantly and unequivocally. “I don’t remember that. I’d … remember that.”

The very idea of it made my head start to pound, and I just wanted to go somewhere in the darkness and sleep. Both my aunts and Sydney Fox’s mother looked at me in concern.

“What?” I said. “I just don’t remember it ever getting that bad.”

Aunt Connie said sadly, “Alex, it got so bad, the only way your mom and dad could escape was by dying.”

Hearing that after so long a day, I hung my head in sorrow.

Bree rubbed my back and neck, said, “Is Bell still a dealer?”

They argued about whether he was. Aunt Hattie said that soon after my father died, Bell took his profits and went twenty miles north, where he built a big house on Pleasant Lake. He bought up local businesses and gave every appearance of a guy who’d straightened out his life.

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Ethel Fox snapped. “You don’t change your spots just like that, not when there’s easy money to be made. You ask me, he runs the underworld of this town and the towns all around us. Maybe even over to Raleigh.”

I raised my head. “He’s never been investigated?”

“Oh, I’m sure someone has investigated him,” Connie said.

“But Marvin Bell’s never been arrested for anything, far as I know,” Hattie said. “You see him around Starksville from time to time, and it’s like he’s looking right through you.”

“What do you mean by that?” Bree asked.

Hattie shifted in her chair. “He makes you uncomfortable just by being near, like he’s an instant threat, even if he’s smiling at you.”

“So he knows who you are? What you’ve seen?” Bree asked.

“Oh, I expect he knows,” Connie said. “He just don’t care. In Bell’s kingdom, we’re nothing. Just like Alex’s parents were nothing to him.”

“Any evidence linking Bell to Rashawn Turnbull?” Bree said.

Naomi shook her head.

Patty Converse seemed lost in thought.

I asked her, “Stefan ever mention him?”

My cousin’s fiancée startled when she realized I was talking to her, said, “Honest to God, I’ve never heard of Marvin Bell.”

I AWOKE THE
next morning to find my daughter, Jannie, at the side of my bed, shaking my shoulder. She had on her blue tracksuit and was carrying a workout bag.

“Six a.m.,” she whispered. “We have to go.”

I nodded blearily and eased out of bed, not wanting to wake Bree. I grabbed some shorts, running shoes, a Georgetown Hoyas T-shirt, and a Johns Hopkins hoodie, and went into the bathroom.

I splashed cold water on my face and then dressed, willing myself not to think about the day before and Marvin Bell and what my aunts said he’d done to my parents. Did Nana Mama know? I pushed that question and more aside. For a few hours, at least, I wanted to focus on my daughter and her dreams.

Nana Mama was already up. “Coffee with chicory,” she said, handing me a go cup and a small soft cooler. “Bananas, water, and her protein shakes are in there. There’s some of those poppy-seed muffins you like too.”

“Fattening me up?”

“Putting some meat on your bones,” she said, and she laughed.

I laughed too, said, “I remember that.”

When I was a teenager, about Jannie’s age, I’d gotten my height but weighed about one hundred and sixty dripping wet. I had dreams of playing college football and basketball. So for two years, Nana Mama cooked extra for me, putting some meat on my bones. When I graduated high school, I weighed close to two hundred.

“Dad!” Jannie whined.

“Tell Bree we should be back before ten,” I said, and I hurried out of the house with my daughter.

Jannie was quiet on the ride over to Starksville High School. It didn’t surprise me. She is incredibly competitive and intense when it comes to running. Sometimes she’s irritable before facing a challenge on the track. Other times, like that morning, she’s quiet, deep inside herself.

“This coach is supposed to be strong,” I said.

She nodded. “Duke assistant.”

I could see the wheels turning in her head. One of Duke University’s assistant track coaches ran the AAU team out of Raleigh during the summer. Some of her athletes would no doubt be on the track. Jannie was out to impress them all.

I pulled into a mostly empty parking lot next to the high school. At a quarter past six on a Saturday morning, there were only a handful of vehicles there, including two white passenger vans. Beyond them and a chain-link fence and bleachers, people were jogging, warming up.

“You’re here to train, right?” I said as Jannie unbuckled her seat belt.

She shook her head, smiled, and said, “No, Daddy, I’m here to run.”

We went through a gate, under the stands, and over to the track. There were fifteen, maybe twenty athletes there already, some stretching in the cool air, some just starting their warm-up laps.

“Jannie Cross?” A woman wearing shorts, running shoes, and a bright turquoise windbreaker jogged over to us. She carried a clipboard and grinned broadly when she stuck out her hand and said, “Melanie Greene.”

“Pleased to meet you, Coach Greene,” I said, shaking her hand and sensing her genuine enthusiasm.

“The pleasure is all mine, Dr. Cross,” the coach said.

Then she turned the charm on Jannie and said, “And you, young lady, are causing quite the stir.”

Jannie smiled and bowed her head. “You saw the tape of the invitational?”

“Along with every other Division One coach in the country,” she said. “And here you are, walking onto my track.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jannie said.

“Just for the record, you’ll only be a sophomore in the fall?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Coach Greene shook her head in disbelief and then handed me the clipboard and said, “I’m going to need you to sign a few forms here, saying we are not in any way, shape, or form considering this a recruitment meeting. This is summer work, and it’s all about training. And there’s an athletic release form from the Starksville school system at the bottom.”

I scanned the documents, started signing.

“Why don’t you take a lap and get warmed up,” Coach Greene said to Jannie, all business now. “We’ll be working two-hundreds this morning.”

“Yes, Coach,” Jannie said, looking serious as she put her bag on one of the low bleachers and ran out onto the track.

I signed the last of the documents and handed the clipboard back.

“You’re here how long?” Coach Greene asked.

“Unclear,” I said. “We’re down on a family issue.”

“Both sorry and glad to hear it,” she said, and she shook my hand again before jogging back to several women wearing AAU and Duke warm-up jackets.

There were other girls and boys coming in now, younger than the college bunch already out on the track, some roughly Jannie’s age. Three of them wore Starksville Track hoodies. I took a seat in the stands, sipped coffee, and ate poppy-seed muffins while Jannie went through her prep routine: a slow lap and then a series of ballistic stretches and drills, increasing in intensity and designed to get her quick-twitch muscles firing.

The entire time, the other athletes watched her, sizing her up, especially the high school–age girls, especially the ones from Starksville. If Jannie noticed, she wasn’t showing it. She had her game face on big-time.

Coach Greene called in the athletes and divided them into training groups. Jannie was put with the local girls. If she cared, she didn’t show it. This was all about the clock.

GREENE CALLED FOR
60 percent effort, and the men went first, running the long left-hand turn of the two-hundred and then slowing into a trot back around. Greene sent the next groups in in waves. The seven college girls were serious athletes, strong and fleet. They seemed to dance down the track, barely touching the surface, their legs churning in a quick, powerful cadence.

Jannie watched them intently but showed nothing. When it came time for her group, the high school girls, to run, she went to the outside, letting the others have the favored lanes. Greene said something to her I didn’t catch. Jannie nodded and settled in.

They ran the staggers with no blocks, just taking off at Greene’s whistle. Some of the other girls, especially the three from Starksville, were surprisingly gutsy and kept abreast of Jannie through the slowdown. But you could see that they didn’t have her natural fluidness and stride.

The difference was more readily apparent two intervals later when Greene called for 80 percent effort. At the whistle, Jannie took off in a smooth, chopping motion that quickly gave way to the long, explosive lopes of a quarter-miler as she rounded the turn. She let up with ten yards to go and still beat the high school girls by three body lengths.

“Hey!” one of the local girls said angrily to Jannie, breathing hard. “Eighty percent!”

Jannie smiled and said, “That was seventy.”

Her tone was matter-of-fact, but the girl seemed to think Jannie was being condescending. Her face hardened; she turned and went over to her friends.

Coach Greene must have heard Jannie say she was giving only 70 percent, because she jogged over and said something to her. Jannie nodded and ran to catch up with the older girls.

“Drop to groups of four, ladies,” Greene shouted after them.

The college girls nodded to Jannie when she jogged up, but these were Division 1 athletes. After that moment of acknowledgment, they put on their game faces.

“Eighty-five to ninety now,” Greene called as the girls moved into the stagger.

At fifteen and a half, my daughter was as tall as or taller than most of the girls, but she didn’t have their strength or build. She looked slight next to them.

Jannie ran stride for stride with the two strongest girls until they were a hundred and fifty meters in. Then their conditioning and experience showed. They pulled away from her and crossed the slowdown mark a yard ahead.

“Ninety,” Greene called, and all the girls in that heat, including Jannie, nodded, their chests heaving.

They ran two more like that, and Jannie finished third both
times. Then Greene called for warm-down and stretching. The two fastest college girls went over and talked to Jannie; the local girls tried to ignore her.

Coach Greene came to the fence, and I went down to talk to her.

“Has she run in the two-hundred in competition?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Quarter-mile only. Why?”

“Those two that beat her, Layla and Nichole, they’re pure sprinters. Two-hundred’s their race. Layla was runner-up at the Atlantic championships, twelfth at NCAA nationals.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I think she wants the four-hundred.”

“I know,” Greene said. “She’s raw, but very impressive, Dr. Cross.”

“Thank you, I think.”

The coach said, “It’s a deep compliment. I …” She paused. “Think you might be able to bring her over to Duke next Saturday morning?”

“For?”

“There’s a group from Chapel Hill, Duke, and Auburn, all four-hundred girls; they train there. And I’d like my boss in my other life to see Jannie run.”