My sister Roxanne and I drove out to the forty acres in Lowndes County on Sunday afternoon in a rented pickup, the two of us, with Luther Banks in the back seat holding his VFW cap in his lap. The county road was red clay and pine. Luther pointed out the turns without looking, a man who had been there once in 1971 and never forgotten. At the end of a long track overgrown with broom sedge stood the ruin of the old farmhouse, roofless now, with a single stone chimney standing like a finger against the sky.
I put a ladder against the chimney. It was an old stone and brick structure, built in 1938 by my grandfather. At the top, forty feet up, the top opened onto the sky. But the letter said the third brick from the top of the interior, behind the damper, and so I climbed the inside of the firebox with a flashlight in my teeth, working my way up the soot blackened throat, until I could reach a loose brick. It came free with a scrape. Behind it was a rusted steel box the size of a loaf of bread.
We opened it at the foot of the chimney, on the hood of the pickup. Inside were three things wrapped in oilcloth. A deputy sheriff badge, number 14, from Lowndes County, 1974. A bundle of letters tied in twine. And a brown ledger with the handwriting of my mother on the cover: June Odom. What We Found. Roxanne read the first page aloud. Her voice caught three times. It began: On the night of August the ninth, 1974, Curtis found a young colored man lying in our pasture with a bullet in his back.
The truth hidden in a chimney will climb up to the sky in the end, carried by the breath of the faithful.
I closed my eyes while she read. The man was named Willie Earl Tate, nineteen years old, a delivery boy from the grocery in Hahira, who had been taken from his bicycle on the county road by two deputies and driven out to the farm. They had shot him in the back and left him in the weeds. My father, coming home from the night shift, found him still breathing. He had carried the boy to the porch. He had held him in his arms. And Willie Earl had said, in his last breath, the names of the men who killed him. One of them was Sheriff Dale Prichard.
They had buried him that night, my mother wrote, behind the oak at the corner of the pasture, because there was nowhere to take him. The sheriff was the law, and the sheriff was the murderer, and a white lineman and his wife were not going to be believed in 1974 in Lowndes County. They kept the badge, taken from the boy who held it, and wrote it all down, and put it in the chimney, and swore a promise on the Bible that someday, when the time was right, the boy would be taken home to his mother. I was six years old.
Sherry had known. I understood that now, standing in the weeds. In the last year of his life, my father had slipped into confusion, and she had listened to him talk about the pasture, and the boy, and the sheriff. And she had understood that a buyer would pay a great deal to keep the secret. The buyer was Prichard Timber, a company still owned by the family of the sheriff. They had offered her four million dollars for the forty acres. And she had married my father, and cremated him, and forged a will to deliver the land.
Roxanne called the FBI in Atlanta, which has a unit for old civil rights cases, and by Wednesday two agents were standing in the pasture in dark windbreakers with a ground penetrating radar. Luther Banks sat on a folding chair beside them, in his cap, saying nothing. At noon the machine began to beep. The agents flagged the spot with an orange pin. Under the oak at the corner of the pasture, at a depth of four feet, lay the unmistakable outline of a grave. A young woman from the crime laboratory knelt and began, with a small brush, to uncover bone.
The mother of Willie Earl Tate was dead, but his younger sister was living in Valdosta, an eighty year old woman named Ernestine Tate. She came to the pasture on a Saturday in her church hat, helped out of a car by two grandsons. She walked slowly across the grass to the oak. She looked down at the small white shape in the earth. She did not weep. She simply lowered herself to her knees with her cane beside her and said, quietly, “William, I have been looking for you for fifty one years.” And Roxanne and I turned our faces away.
Dale Prichard had died in 1999, but his deputy was alive, a man of eighty four in a nursing home in Quitman, and he confessed to the FBI in an afternoon. Sherry Lynn Odom was arrested in her kitchen in Valdosta on charges of forgery, fraud, and conspiracy to conceal a crime. The will of 1991 was upheld by the probate judge. Prichard Timber withdrew its offer and settled with the Tate family for a sum that was meant, I think, to feel like an apology, though no amount of money could be.
We buried Willie Earl Tate in the churchyard of his own congregation on a bright cold morning in December, with the whole of Valdosta in attendance, Black and white, standing shoulder to shoulder. The mayor spoke. A choir sang. My sister and I carried one end of the casket. At the end of the service, Ernestine Tate laid the badge on the wood and said it was time to put the sheriff in his place. Luther Banks stood at attention, with his hand over his heart, and the bugler played Taps.
I keep the forty acres now, and every spring I fly down from Alaska in the little Cessna and spend a week there, mending the fence and mowing the pasture. At the corner, under the oak, there is a granite stone that says WILLIE EARL TATE, 1955 TO 1974, BELOVED BROTHER, BROUGHT HOME. I sit by it at the end of the day with a thermos of coffee, and I say a few words to the boy, and to my father, and my mother. I tell them it is finished. And the smoke from the chimney rises in my mind.
