THEY CAREENED THROUGH DARKNESS, THE LIGHTS OF Birmingham an indistinct glow above the shadowy tree line behind them, Mobile still hours ahead. Adam stared ahead sightlessly, worn down by all that he felt—by all that he now knew and wished he didn’t.
He was the rapist’s son.
He was the rapist’s son.
It was four days since he had come into this knowledge and still it lodged sideways in his throat, a lump he could neither swallow through nor breathe past.
He was the rapist’s son.
Mom, the rapist’s victim, lay curled in the back seat. The soft exhalations of her snoring and the hum of tires on macadam were the only sounds in a lonely world. His uncle concentrated on his driving. Few words had passed between them since Luther wheeled the big car around the small-town square and aimed it south, and for this, Adam was grateful. He thought of the silence as a sort of kindness.
Mom had bought chicken dinners for them, but only Luther had eaten, tearing into a drumstick with one hand, holding the vehicle steady with the other.
Adam had declined the proffered meal. He knew he should have been hungry—ravenous—after four days of bologna sandwiches and runny eggs, but he had no appetite. His mother had gone to sleep instead of eating. It looked like she might sleep through the entire journey. This, too, Adam considered a kindness.
And miles passed beneath the tires of the big car.
Then, without preamble, there came a sudden rustling of rain, big drops pattering hard against the roof of the car. Luther turned a silver knob on the dashboard, and with a rhythmic squeak, the wipers began sweeping water from the glass. Adam closed his eyes. More miles passed.
“You all right over there?” His uncle finally spoke out of the darkness.
“Yeah,” said Adam.
“You want to talk about it?”
And this was unexpected enough that Adam opened his eyes and glanced over. Since when did his stony uncle offer to talk about anything? Luther must have read his surprise. He shrugged. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “But still …”
“Nothing to say,” said Adam. “I wanted to find out, and I did.”
“Yeah, you did. You mad?”
Adam shook his head. “Not really,” he said. “It just … hurts is all. Hurts to know what happened, hurts to find out your mother has lied to you your whole life.”
“Don’t be too hard on her,” said Luther. “She did the best she could. It ain’t like tellin’ you the truth would have been easy. How you explain rape to a five-year-old?”
“I get it,” said Adam. “But I still wish she had told me.” He gave his uncle a pointed look and added, “Or you could have.”
“Wasn’t my place,” said Luther.
“Well, I guess now, at least, I understand,” said Adam.
His uncle glanced over. “Understand what?”
“Last week, when I asked you why you didn’t like George—I misread that, didn’t I? It wasn’t that you didn’t like him, it was that you didn’t like to hear me calling him ‘Dad.’”
It took a moment. Finally, Luther said, “Yeah.” Another moment. “I never liked havin’ to lie.”
Adam took this in. Then he said, “Luther?”
“Mmm?”
“You never liked me, either. Did you?”
He felt the car slow as Luther’s foot came involuntarily off the accelerator. Then his uncle caught himself and the car leapt forward again. “Don’t know what you talkin’ about,” he said. “I always liked you just fine.”
Adam shook his head. “You don’t have to lie,” he said. “You just said you don’t like lies, didn’t you? Besides, I’ve always known it. I mean, I could tell from the time I was a child, when George would bring me down here. I’m not saying you were mean to me. But you never treated me like a nephew, either. I couldn’t figure out what I had done. But now I get it.”
There was a moment. The water drummed against the roof of the car. The wipers squeaked.
Finally, Luther said, “It never had nothin’ to do with you, Adam. Not really.” He inclined his head back toward Mom, still sleeping in the back seat. “It had to do with her,” he said. “It had to do with my sister.”
“Not sure I understand,” said Adam, as Luther shook a cigarette loose from the pack in his breast pocket and punched in the lighter.
His uncle didn’t respond right away. The lighter popped up. Luther touched the electric fire to the cigarette. He lowered the window a fraction and blew out gray smoke, watched the wind shred the cloud. At length, Luther spoke again.
“Day she was born, I was six years old,” he said. “I remember everything about it. Remember these old women shooing me out the house. Remember how scared I was, hearing my mother screamin’ like some-thin’ tearin’ her up inside. And I remember when they brought me in there to meet my sister for the first time. Even let me hold her, though she so tiny I was scared I might drop her and break her. Everybody talkin’ ’bout what a beautiful baby. She this little wrinkled-up thing sleepin’ with a frown on her face like she mad about somethin’. Tell you the truth, I couldn’t see what the fuss was about.”
The memory was good for a chuckle. “Thing I remember most, though,” Luther continued, “is my father takin’ me aside that day, said we needed to have a talk, man to man. He tol’ me: ‘You got a big responsibility now, Luther. That’s your sister in there. That make you a big brother. Big brother has a very important job. He got to look out for the ones under him. He got to take care of them, protect them from gettin’ hurt.’”
Luther stared ahead into the rain. “My father the best man I ever knew, Adam. I admired him, looked up to him, wanted to be like him. And here he is givin’ me this important job. I mean, Thelma was my sister, so I already loved her, already would have took care of her. But gettin’ this trust, this responsibility, from my father, that sealed the deal. I’ve spent near forty-five years now watchin’ out for this girl, tryin’ to protect her. And mostly, I did. But then I end up going to Europe to fight for a country don’t give enough of a damn about me and mine to even prosecute the people that killed my parents.”
Luther fell silent. After a moment, Adam finished the thought for him in a quiet voice. “And while you were gone, she got raped,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Luther.
“You weren’t there to stop it.”
“No,” said Luther.
“So when you see me, it’s like a reminder.”
“Yeah,” said Luther. “Remind me I wasn’t there when she needed me. I was off in Belgium or France or some such, fightin’ for so-called freedom.”
“You feel like you failed her.”
Luther’s laugh was bitter. “You got a hell of a way with words, boy,” he said. “But yeah, you right. I feel like I failed her. Wasn’t never about you, Adam. I’m sorry I made you feel bad.”
“Probably didn’t help that the guy was white. I know you didn’t have much use for white people.”
It took almost a full minute for Luther to respond. Took so long that Adam thought maybe he wouldn’t. His uncle smoked quietly as he navigated through the rain, one hand resting easily on the steering wheel. Finally, he said, “You right. Never had no use for white people after what they did to my parents. I hated them all, if you want to know the truth. They stood for all the evil in the world, far as I was concerned. Them and they fuckin’ Jim Crow and Ku Klux Klan and the way they force you—even though you s’posed to be a grown-ass man—to tuck your head and grin like a little boy, step off the sidewalk if you see them comin’, humiliate yourself every goddamn day if you want to go on livin’.
“Hell yes,” he said, “I couldn’t stand nary a one of them motherfuckers. Still don’t trust all that many. But I try to give them the benefit of the doubt till they show me they don’t deserve it. Try to do that much, at least. I learned that some of ’em all right. A few. Your dad, for instance. Your granddad, for another. I seen a lot of ’em out there gettin’ ready to march when I went to Selma, so I guess they all right, too.” He took a last drag off the cigarette, tossed the butt into the rain and rolled up his window.
“‘Some of ’em are all right’? Are you trying to spare my feelings because I’m half white? It’s okay, Luther. Say what you mean.”
Luther cut him with a glance. “When you ever known me to bite my tongue, boy?”
Adam shrugged. “Almost never,” he conceded.
“Exactly. See, there’s a part of this you don’t understand yet. You know that letter you read, the one you took out of my box?”
“Yeah?” said Adam. He refused to feel guilty for what he had done.
“That letter where she told me about you,” said Luther, “it reached me in Germany, right before the end of the war. Never forget it. I was in this bakery givin’ these two old krauts a hard time. Her with her SS earrings, him with his Hitler mustache, picture of Hitler on the wall. Kraut bastards. And somebody run up and give me this letter. I tell you, it like to knocked me on my ass when I read it. Any other time, it might have made me hate white people even more than before.”
“‘Any other time?’” Adam was confused.
“I got that letter five days after we liberated a concentration camp,” said Luther. He glanced over. “They teach you any history in school?”
“Sure,” said Adam. “Well, I mean, Christopher Columbus, George Washington, the Smoot-Hawley tariff, and like that.”
“You don’t know nothin’ about the camps?” asked Luther.
Adam shook his head. “Camps?”
“Nuremberg trials? Genocide?” Luther’s glance was probing. “You know anything about that?”
“No,” said Adam, “not really.”
Disgust darkened Luther’s eyes.
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” said Adam.
Luther put another cigarette in his mouth, pushed in the lighter. After he lit his cigarette, he cranked the window down again to vent another gray cloud. Luther smoked quietly for a moment.
Finally, he spoke. “White people killed your grandparents, as you know. And for years that made me hate white people. All of ’em, without exception. But then, as I say, we liberated one of these camps.”
“What kind of camps?”
Luther’s gaze turned inward. “Death camps,” he said. “If there’s a worse place on Earth, you don’t want to know about it. Barbed wire fencing. Smelled like shit and piss and puke, all mixed together. Couldn’t breathe with your mouth open for all the flies buzzing around. Corpses stacked everywhere, like cordwood for a fire. They dead, but they seem to be twitchin’ and movin’. Then you look closer and you see it’s actually maggots crawlin’ all over ’em. A million maggots. That’s what make ’em seem like they movin’.
“But the worst part ain’t the dead, it’s the living—if you want to call ’em that. We seen all these skeleton people, nothin’ but bones, walkin’ around like they already dead, but just ain’t figured it out yet. And one of ’em, she—I think it was a woman, but I ain’t never been able to say for sure—she come up and took my hand and start makin’ these awful noises and at first, I couldn’t even figure out what she was doin’. That’s when I realized, she cryin’. Only she ain’t got enough water in her to make tears.”
Adam looked over at his uncle and was surprised to see his own tears overflowing. Luther made no effort to wipe them away.
“Who were these people?” he asked.
“Jews,” said Luther, breathing out cigarette smoke. “The Nazis set up these camps, see, and they killed six million Jews before anyone could stop them. They hated ’em so much, they tried to kill ’em all and they damn near did. And I remember thinking it didn’t surprise me that white people treated colored people bad. I seen it all my life. But I never realized till that moment, white people could treat white people bad, too. ’Cause even though they be white, they ain’t the right kind of white, you see?
“So, to get back to your question: no, it ain’t helped matters none that the bastard who done this to my sister was white. But by the time I find this out, I’m also dealing with what I seen in this camp. So sometimes, it’s a little more to it than just, this one bad because he white.”
“You’re saying there’s exceptions to the rule,” said Adam.
“I’m sayin’ color is simple. People are complicated. Hell, the woman that killed the bastard, she was white, too.”
“His wife,” said Adam. “Flora Lee.”
“Yeah.”
Adam said, “He would’ve gotten away with what he did if she hadn’t shot him.”
Luther shrugged. “This America,” he said. “That’s the whole point of being white. Gettin’ away with shit.”
“It shouldn’t be that way,” said Adam.
“No, it shouldn’t,” said Luther. “But it is, just the same.”
They were silent for a few minutes. Then Adam said, “You know, in that letter she wrote, Mom mentioned how she almost got an abortion. I wonder if she ever wishes she had gone through with it. Might have made things easier all the way around.”
“You know better than that,” said Luther. “And if you don’t, you should. Your mama love you. Even when you was just a little somethin’ curled up in her womb, she loved you. And I tell you for a fact, she ain’t never wished she went through with no abortion. Not once.”
“Would have been easier,” repeated Adam.
“Would have meant life without you,” said Luther.
Adam shrugged. “Would that have been such a big loss?”
Luther stared at him. “What are you tryin’ to say, boy?”
Adam didn’t respond. “You think your mama don’t love you? Is that it?”
“You love somebody, you don’t act like you can’t stand to touch ’em. You love somebody, you give ’em a hug once in a while, don’t you?”
Luther looked over at him, “Your mama don’t hug you?”
Adam shook his head.
“Not even when you was a little boy?”
Adam shook his head.
Luther was silent for a long moment. Finally, he said, “Okay, I get it. She ain’t never showed you affection and that hurt you.”
“It ate at me,” corrected Adam. “It made me think there was something wrong with me.”
“Wasn’t nothin’ wrong with you,” said Luther.
“Yes, there was,” said Adam. And when Luther looked over in surprise, he said, “I was her rapist’s son. I still am her rapist’s son. That’s what I’ll always be.”
Another silence intervened. Then Luther spoke quietly. “You know,” he said, “you ain’t asked how she did it.”
“How she did what?”
“How she got that man to drop the charges against you. Don’t you want to know how?”
“She talked to him, right? She convinced him.”
His uncle shook his head. “Was a lot more to it than that,” he said. “This woman went up that hill and begged that man to let you go. I’m talkin’ about begged, do you hear me? Down on her knees in front of the bastard who beat you up, the man whose brother raped her. That man. She even kissed his motherfuckin’ hand. And when that didn’t work, she lied. Told him wasn’t no rape. Told him she wanted it, said she and the bastard who raped her was in love and that she lied about the rape. She even apologized to him. To that man.”
Adam felt his mouth fall open. “What? Why would she say—”
“Because she knew that’s what he needed to hear. So she told him that bullshit. You hear what I’m sayin’? Damndest thing I ever saw. But if she hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t be sittin’ here now.”
There was a moment. Then Adam said, “I wish she hadn’t done it.”
“I wish I hadn’t seen it,” retorted Luther. “But you her son. You was lookin’ at five years, maybe ten. So she did what she had to do. Don’t tell me she don’t love you.”
Luther’s eyes held Adam’s for a moment. Then he turned back to the road and lit another cigarette. Adam watched the shadowy trees fly past. He was struggling with the idea of his mother kissing the hand that had beaten him, begging for his freedom, downplaying her own ordeal in order to save him. Somehow, that knowledge just made everything worse. Made it harder. Perhaps his uncle knew that, because once again, he gave him the kindness of silence.
And they rushed down a highway swept with rain.