Black Water Rising by Attica Locke

Jay says, jotting down the information.
    “You get ahold of him, you tell him I don’t appreciate how he left my boat. He left dirty dishes on the floor. Didn’t even bother to straighten up or nothing. It ain’t right,” he says. “You tell him I don’t appreciate it one bit.”
    “Yeah, sure.”
    Then Jay adds, “You know if he talked to any cops recently?”
    “About what?”
    “Nothing,” Jay says, thinking better of it. He hangs up the line.
    Stella’s number is busy the first five times Jay tries it. When he finally gets through, the line rings some twenty times before Jay simply gives up.
    He thinks of calling the cops on his own, but can’t bring him self to do it.
    He remembers his own advice: Keep your fucking mouth shut.
    It’s a warning that lives under his skin, in his DNA. Keep your head down, speak only when spoken to.
    A warning drilled into him every day of his life growing up in Nigton, Texas, née Nig Town, née Nigger Town (its true birth name when it sprang up a hun dred years ago in the piney woods of East Texas). A warning always delivered with a sharp squeeze from his mother’s hand before crossing the street or going to school, and especially before going out after dark.
    He’s not proud of his fears, but there they are, pinching at him from all sides like too tight shoes, restricting his movements, limiting his freedom. A shame, considering the real reason he marched so many years ago was to prove fear was dead, that it belonged to another time, to men like his father.
    Jay sits at his desk, thinking about Jerome Porter.
    The same image always comes to him, like a well-worn photo graph in his mind, a snapshot of another time. It’s an image of his mother, eighteen, sitting in the front seat of her daddy’s pickup truck, Jay’s father, twenty-one and strong, behind the wheel. They were newlyweds, the way Jay always heard the story. His mother, Alma, was just starting to show. They were riding on a farm road that ran behind Jay’s grandmother’s place, a barbecue joint and greengrocer, where his parents were both working the summer after they married. Jay’s father was driving his young wife home ’cause she wasn’t feeling too good on her feet.
    There was another truck on the road that day, riding their bumper and honking the horn, two white men in the cab and a loaded rifle rack in the back window. This was Trinity County, 1949, a lawless place for men like Jerome Porter. The police were white. The sheriff and the mayor. And they made it known that the countryside belonged to them. There had been a rash of poul try theft that fall and winter, somebody (or bodies) sneaking onto people’s farms after dark, spiriting away valuable hens, some times going so far as to slit a guard dog’s throat in the process. Wasn’t no way to tell who it was, but white folks got it in their minds that it was niggers’ doing. They set up vigilante groups, guarding property with rifles and axes, questioning folks coming in and out of the grocery store, even harassing little boys coming out of the colored elementary school. They stopped people on local roads, demanding to search their cars and making citizens’ arrests if anything was out of order. And local law enforcement didn’t do a damn thing to stop them.
    Jerome, Jay Bird, as Alma called him, was careful not to go above thirty miles an hour. He didn’t want to give the men in the truck any excuse to stop the car, which it turns out they did any way by pulling their pickup ahead and blocking the road. Jay’s parents were in Alma’s daddy’s truck, and she knew he kept a pistol in the glove box. She reached for it, but Jerome told her not to make it worse. He got out of the car, let the men have a look around, and asked them politely to let them go on their way. “My wife’s not feeling well,” he explained.
    Something about the self-satisfied way he said it seemed to set them off. Maybe they didn’t have wives or didn’t like