The man who burned my stat sheets in 1962 was Warren Crowe, chairman of the school board, and Coach Wright said his name from the podium into a microphone that squealed like a stuck pig. The room went so quiet I could hear the ice in the pitchers. “Warren Crowe had a boy named Carl,” the coach said. “Carl was a halfback. He was second string behind Rufus Pettaway, and in the fall of 1962 he needed a scholarship, and Rufus was in the way. So Warren walked into the athletic office on a Monday night with a can of lighter fluid and a book of matches. I came in on a Tuesday and found the ashes.”
Every head turned toward the family table, where a heavy, silver haired man in a navy blazer sat next to Terrence with a napkin tucked in his collar. Carl Crowe. The business partner of Terrence for twenty years, the man who put up the money for the first car wash. He had gone the color of a boiled shrimp. Coach Wright held up the yellowed envelope. “I kept a copy of every game sheet, every year, in my own handwriting, in my own basement. Eleven touchdowns. I have been waiting sixty three years for somebody to ask me for it.” He looked straight at me. “Rufus, I am sorry it took so long.”
I stood at table twelve, with the busboy DeShawn holding my elbow, and I felt the whole room looking at my moth eaten jacket. I did not want to cry in front of those people, so I looked at the ceiling. My mother used to sit in the top row of the bleachers with her Bible in her lap and look at the sky when they threw things, and I understood suddenly how she did it. Then Terrence stood up from the family table, with the napkin in his hand, and started walking, not toward the stage, but toward me.
A yellowed envelope gave one daughter in law the length of a banquet dinner to bring her father in law back to the truth in Valdosta.
I gave my terms to Terrence, Lacey and Carl Crowe in the hallway behind the ballroom, with Coach Wright on his cane, DeShawn holding the door and the sound of the banquet murmuring behind us. I said that Terrence would speak from the stage before the evening ended and say what had been done. I said the school would put my name on the wall, in the same letters as his. I said that Carl would apologize in front of the room, in his own voice, with no notes. I said I would take no money myself, because money was never what was burned.
Lacey had started to cry, with mascara in two thin lines down her cheeks. She said she wrote “staff” on the name card because she was afraid, not because she was cruel. She said Carl had told her that morning that an old man in a letterman jacket might say something at the banquet, and that she should keep him out of the way. She said she did not know why, and she did not ask, and she was ashamed of both. “Pops,” she said, and then she stopped. “Mr. Pettaway. I am sorry.” I said, “You can call me Pops, Lacey. I have been called worse. I would like to be called it kindly.”
Carl Crowe, who had said nothing, snatched the yellowed envelope out of the hand of Coach Wright, meaning to run through the kitchen to the loading dock and burn it in the dumpster, as his father had done, and he bolted through the swinging doors with the envelope held over his head. The coach said, “Well, I do not believe it.” Terrence said a word that his mother never allowed in the house. I did not run. I have driven a forklift for thirty five years, and I know the kitchen at the banquet hall has only one way out.
The way out ran through the dessert line. Twelve busboys, led by DeShawn, who had slipped around from the other side, were coming through the kitchen in a perfect row with trays of hot peach cobbler held high, and Carl ran straight into the first tray. Cobbler went up. Cobbler came down. He slid across the tile on his back with peaches on his lapel, and the envelope skated across the floor to the polished shoes of DeShawn, who is twenty three and six feet five. “Sir, I believe you dropped this,” DeShawn said, and handed it to me.
Terrence spoke from the stage that same night, without notes, and told the whole room what his father had been through in 1962, what he himself had not known and what he should have asked. He called me up beside him. The room stood and clapped for five minutes. The school board voted on Monday to add my name to the wall of the Athletic Hall of Fame and to restore the stat sheets of 1962 in the record book. Carl Crowe resigned from the car wash business. His son came by my house the next week and shook my hand.
In the name of Bernice, who passed in 2020, I started the Bernice Pettaway Letterman Fund. It pays for scholarships and the restoration of lost records for athletes of the integration years whose accomplishments were erased, in Lowndes, Echols and Brooks counties. In the first year we restored the records of nine men and one woman, and the first was a retired shipyard welder from Quitman named Mr. Hollis, who ran the mile for the colored high school in 1961 and was never listed anywhere. Coach Wright, who turned ninety one, brings his basement boxes to every ceremony in a wheelbarrow.
In the spring they unveiled my name on the wall, in black and gold letters beside Terrence, and DeShawn brought the jacket from its garment bag, brushed and mended, with the moth holes patched by a lady at the dry cleaner. I put it on. It fit, mostly. I stood in the gym of Valdosta High School, in front of two hundred people and an eighty one year old boy named Rufus, and I heard the Bible of my mother creak somewhere in the top row of my mind. Terrence put an arm around my shoulders. “Daddy,” he said, “I put your name on the wall.”
