Page 64 of The Reformatory

“Why, thank you very much,” Miz Lottie called after the father and son as they carried their plates away. The boy gave Gloria one more glance, half grinning when he caught her fussing with her hair. Gloria looked quickly away. Her friends at school, Doris and Rose and Pat, were forever discussing such clues from boys: what they meant, how to behave if a boy smiled, if a boy didn’t smile. Her bigger worries liberated her from that care.

Belle, a sharp-boned woman in a long apron, was already wiping the table with a damp, brown-stained cloth. “Just coffee? Breakfast?” she said, impatient. Gloria stared at the lawyer while Miz Lottie rattled a long food order.

Another spoonful of sugar. Then another. The two other men were speaking over each other, voices rising. Were they arguing?

“I’m not hungry,” Gloria said, but her stomach roared.

“Might as well eat,” Miz Lottie told her. “You see he’s a talker. He ain’t goin’ nowhere. That’s the state NAACP president with him, Harry Moore—another one I been tryin’ to reach about Robbie. But the lawyer’s from the New York office, which has more clout. So we’ll kill two birds with one stone.” Excitement wavered Miz Lottie’s voice.

Gloria’s stomach loosened with relief, and she was suddenly hungry again. “Sausage and biscuit, please,” Gloria said, trying to guess how much that might cost, if Miz Lottie could afford it. She’d left Gracetown too early to get her money from Miss Anne.

Gloria slipped her eyes to the lawyer again. While the man in the overalls spoke close to his ear, the lawyer was nodding, head bowed low, almost as if in prayer. “I know it,” the lawyer said. “I know.” Like a pastor would.

“So what about it, then?” the man in the tie said. “Been near six years—”

The lawyer looked sorry to his core. “Harry, the national office put everything down in Lake County and those Groveland boys—”

“What’s that gonna do for Willie?” the man in the overalls said, more loudly. The entire room rocked still, or seemed to. Bacon grease popped from the skillets, impossibly loud. Gloria wasn’t the only one eavesdropping on the lawyer; most of the men in the room, especially the ones from the mill, already had their heads turned his way, nursing coffee cups as they seemed to stare at the window just right of his head. Yes, they were watching his window as much as they were noticing the lawyer, tracking each passerby. How hadn’t she recognized it? Belle’s was a meeting place. Sometimes Mama had fried up chicken wings and made biscuits and stayed out with Papa and his meetings on the porch long into the night. The awful things they spoke of had been banished from the house.

The man in overalls wiped his brow with a napkin from the table. Or maybe he’d wiped the corner of his eye. “They been bragging,” he choked out. “Bragging how they did it.”

“I heard it with my own ears.” A testimony floated from the table behind Gloria, a man across the room. The silence grew heavy with unspoken stories.

“And he’s still the postmaster,” the man said. “Like it ain’t nothing. Not an ounce of shame. Not a goddamn ounce of shame between none of them.”

Belle made a shushing sound. “Don’t blaspheme in my house,” she said. “And we got company, gentlemen. I don’t know them like I know y’all.”

She nodded across the room, and Gloria noticed the only jovial faces: the two suit-wearing strangers and their lady companions in private conversations at smaller corner tables. Disconnected, without a care. A few curious eyes studied Gloria and Miz Lottie but quickly moved on, as if they already knew Robbie’s story as well as they knew the story of the unlucky boy named Willie.

Willie was dead. Gloria could have squeezed more knowing out of the room because it hung over her like rain clouds bloated purple and ugly, but she did not want their sorrows to drown her. They shouted their sadness to her anyway. Willie had been fifteen, only three years older than Robbie. Fifteen and dead.

The lawyer stood up—he was taller than Papa—and put his hand gently on the angry man’s shoulder to will his grief away with his touch.

“Thurgood is hurt over Willie,” the lawyer said, aware of his audience too. “Real hurt. All of us are. Up to the governor. But you know as well as I do… they won’t.” He motioned out the window, past the Coca-Cola sign, toward the street. “Those ‘decent’ friends and neighbors of the postmaster out there, they won’t do it. No indictment, no trial. We already tried. They saw Willie’s father’s statement saying they made him watch at gunpoint while they forced a child with hands and feet bound to jump from the bridge, and we still couldn’t get an indictment. There’s nowhere left to go. Not on this case. Our hands and feet are bound… same as Willie’s.” The silence in the room became terrible.

“What y’all gonna do in Lake County, then?” The man snatched his shoulder away from the lawyer’s touch.

“Maybe nothing,” the lawyer said. “But those boys still have a chance. The way this happened with Willie… we couldn’t help him. I wish we could. But if we can do something in Lake County, maybe it’ll make even a lowdown murdering coward like Phil Goff and his cracker thugs think twice. When word gets around that Negroes can get justice in Florida, maybe we can spare another family from what you’ve been through. Spare another town.”

His pretty words were plausible, stirring Gloria’s heart to pounding. A gray-haired man at the end of Gloria’s table clapped his hands slowly, both admiration and a call for quiet. “Y’all just picking at it,” he said. “Makin’ it bleed. You don’t watch out, it’ll bleed you to the grave.”

“He was my baby cousin!” the man in overalls said.

“Lemme ask you this,” the older man went on, speaking slowly, “and you know I don’t mean your family no disrespect…” Gloria expected him to say something especially disrespectful, of course. “What if the girl had made up a story, said Willie’d touched her or some such instead of just writing a li’l note? We lucky they didn’t burn down ‘Nigger Hill’—all of us. I’ll say what y’all won’t: the child had no business sending a love note to a white girl. Some of y’all ain’t raising these children to know these crackers like they need to.” He settled behind his newspaper pages, ignoring the groans around him.

“You wrong for that, Clement,” the man in overalls said. But eyes in the room looked away and voices fell to private grumbling.

The man in the black suit, Mr. Moore, sighed. “The national office got me out here trying to sell memberships at double the price—and folks say, ‘For what? Register to vote for what?’ ”

John Dorsey winced. “I know,” he said. “I hate the politics. But the Legal Defense Fund isn’t the problem. Thurgood is the first one to tell those fools at national that Harry T. Moore is the Negro’s hardest-working friend in Florida.”

“Don’t forget Harriette.” When Miz Lottie broke in, the man in the suit took off his hat.

For the first time, their talking stopped. Gloria felt sorry for the boy who’d died, but she was glad Miz Lottie had wrested away their attention.

John Dorsey turned and saw Gloria and Miz Lottie for the first time. “No, ma’am,” he said. “I could never forget Mrs. Moore and her cobbler.”

“The school system didn’t fire her for her cooking,” Miz Lottie said. When Harry Moore leaned over to greet Miz Lottie with a kiss to her cheek, Gloria thought she smelled soot in his hair. “You and Harriette still givin’ ’em hell?”