I left the courthouse and drove back of town to Stella’s. I asked her for a ham and cheese sandwich. I was still wondering where to go to find that great human interest story. When Stella served me, I asked her. She told me I ought to go to church sometime. I told her that Cunningham wanted the story on his desk tonight, and Sunday would be too late.
“Always in a hurry, huh?” she said.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Well, I don’t know where to— Wait. You ever thought about Felix’s barbershop? Always a bunch of liars over there.”
“I didn’t think about that, but that sounds like a good idea.”
When I finished eating I left her a fifty-cent tip—being generous today. Any other time I would have left only a quarter.
Lucas Felix’s barbershop was a small square building. Maybe twenty feet by twenty. Lucas had the first chair as you came in, and Sam Hebert had the second. Both Lucas and Sam were in their seventies, and the chairs seemed just as old. The chairs were covered with dark green vinyl, but now all the worn places on the seats, the backs, and the armrests had been patched with black duct tape. The clients didn’t mind, because they all were as old as Lucas and Sam and the chairs. There were red, green, and black plastic chairs against the wall for the clients to sit in while waiting to be served. There were a television and a radio on a shelf in one corner of the room, and below the shelf was a drinking fountain. There were pictures everywhere, pictures of Sam and Lucas when they were young men and when they had all their hair. There were pictures of famous athletes like Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and Bill Russell. Then there were pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedy brothers Jack and Bobby. And one of Mahalia Jackson singing, and one of Malcolm X preaching, and one of Duke Ellington at the piano. There was also a poster on the wall with the price of haircuts, but the poster had been up there so long that the white paper had turned yellow, and the price of a haircut probably had not changed too much since then.
Most of Lucas Felix’s clients were old men, hardly ever any women, and no one younger than I, and I’m twenty-eight. I come there mostly to listen to the old men talk, but I feel that it would be unfair to just sit there and listen and not get a haircut sometimes, so I let Lucas give me an edge ’round the neck every now and then. Other times I go to Jack Bouie a couple blocks farther down the street, who is about my age and gives more modern cuts. At Lucas’s barbershop, the old men in there called me youngster. There are always five or six of them in the place from the time Lucas opens at nine o’clock in the morning until he closes at nine at night. Sometimes they are there to get a haircut, but most times just to have a place to come and talk.
I should mention another person who was always there, and that was Sweet Sidney, the shoeshine man. He’s in his seventies, maybe eighties. His name was Sidney Green, but everybody called him Sweet Sidney. People my age called him Mr. Sweet. Sweet Sidney was a reader of the Bayonne Journal. The Journal was only a weekly, but Sweet Sidney read it over and over daily. Whenever you came into the barbershop and he was not shining shoes, you would find him in the client’s chair reading the Journal. He read the supermarket ads, he read the obituary column, he read the ads on bass and trout fishing. Whenever the other old men couldn’t remember a piece of the story, they called on Sweet Sidney. Though he knew the answer, sometimes he would let them wait awhile before giving it. He knew that he was the intellectual of the barbershop, and they could not get their information faster anywhere else.
There must have been a half dozen of them sitting in chairs against the wall. Sweet Sidney as usual was reading the Journal. Lucas Felix had a client in his chair, and Sam Hebert was just finishing up with one.
“Well, youngster, I heard that Brady shot up the courthouse,” Sam Hebert said to me and grinned.
Sam Hebert was a small, thin-faced man with big teeth. He always had a smile on his face. Always.
“He didn’t shoot up the place,” I said.
“Not what man on radio said. Man on radio he said he shot up the place.”
Some of the other men looked at me. I was a news reporter, and maybe I knew things they did not know. Sweet Sidney went on reading his paper without looking up.
“He shot twice,” I said. “He shot his son, and he shot down in the floor when one of the deputies threatened him.”
“ ’Cording to man on radio, Mapes’s giving him couple hours to get his business straight.”
“What business Brady got to get straight?” one of the men sitting against the wall asked.
“Maybe he got to finish that grave?” Jack Shine said. Jack Shine was a tall, dark-skinned man in his late sixties. He made his living by hunting and fishing and selling his game to a store in Bayonne.
“It was finished,” Joe Butler said. “I went back the next day.”
“You didn’t tell me,” Jack Shine said.
“Wait, hold it,” Lucas Felix said. “What’s this stuff about a grave?”
“Coming back from hunting the other night,” Joe Butler said, “we passed by the graveyard. Saw a light. We stopped and looked. We had Clay with us. Scary as he could be. First thing he said: ‘Ghost.’ Jack said, ‘What a ghost doing with a lantern?’ Clay took off. Me and Jack got in the cane field to watch. We didn’t see Brady ’til he climbed out of the grave. We could hear him knocking the dirt off the shovel. He blew out the lantern. He passed right by us. Lantern in one hand, shovel ’cross his shoulder. Passed right by us. That was the day the trial started for that boy.”
“He knowed all the time he was go’n kill him,” Frank Jamison said. “He wasn’t go’n let his son go to Angola—not as terrible as that place is.”
Frank Jamison was a short, dark-skinned man, with a big head, broad shoulders, high butt, and short back. He had just gotten a haircut, and I could see the neat razor edge around the sideburns and on the back of his neck. He had been a salesman for an insurance company, but like all the rest of the men his age he lived on Social Security and a small pension. He sat back in Sam Hebert’s barber chair.
“Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later,” Jamison said. “The man who whipped children to keep them out of Angola. Some of the old people would rather see their children dead than to go to Angola. ’Cause if they ever came out, they would be dead inside—just broken.”
“Educate that youngster, Frank,” Lucas said.
Frank Jamison looked at me. He had known me since I was a child. Still he was skeptical of anyone younger than he or better educated than he was.
“Doing something for the paper?” he asked.
“Cunningham wants me to do a human interest story on Mr. Brady.”
“What does that entail?”
I could tell that he didn’t know what a human interest story was all about, so he had to throw in a word like “entail” that the rest of the people may not have understood.
“Something about his life: the way he lived, his friends, his church—something like that.”
“Well, he didn’t have too many friends, and he didn’t go to church either in his later years. Don’t suppose Cunningham wants things like that?”
“If y’all just talk about him, I figure I can find something to write about,” I said.
Frank Jamison looked at me suspiciously.
“You think this youngster is all right, Lucas?”
“Sure,” Lucas said. “He comes from good stock.”
“I know the stock. Been knowing the stock all my life. Him? You think he knows how to listen, and choose, and don’t write what he ain’t suppose to write?”
“You got my word on it,” Lucas said.
“Mine too,” Sam Hebert said. “You been to college, been everywhere. You still a Dodger fan, my man?”
“ ’Til the day I die.”
“Anybody a Dodger fan ’til the day he die is all right with me,” Sam Hebert said.
“If y’all say so,” Jamison said, still looking at me.