Summer burned through and September breezed in, its usual hot winds unseasonably cool. Denver and I spent a lot of time together. We talked about what we’d been through and tossed around the idea of writing our story down.
But to tell the story, I needed to know more about Denver’s roots. Had the place he’d come from been as bad as all that? I had been to the plantation in Red River Parish many times in my mind. But the images I conjured had a back-lot quality, as though a stagehand were constructing them using props left over from Gone with the Wind. Denver’s vocabulary, meanwhile, was short on adjectives, leaving us just one choice. I knew I had to go with him back to Red River Parish to see and touch the place that had produced this man who had changed my life. Denver had another reason for wanting to go back: to close the door on the past.
Maybe that’s why he clammed up when in early September 2001, we hopped on Interstate 20 and began our pilgrimage. As we motored east in my new Suburban—the old one had logged too many miles by then—Denver was unusually quiet, and I asked him why.
“I ain’t slept much lately,” he said. “Been nervous ’bout this trip.”
He’d been back before, to visit his sister, Hershalee, and his aunt Pearlie May. But in 2000, Hershalee had died, just a few months before Deborah, leaving Denver feeling permanently untethered from the close family bloodlines that bind us to earth and give us place.
We hadn’t been driving long before Denver’s head hit his chest like a rock falling off a cliff. A minute later, he started snoring. For the next three hours, the trip sounded like the scenic route through a sawmill. But once we crossed into bayou country, something in the air seemed to quicken his spirit: He didn’t rouse slowly from sleep but suddenly sat straight up.
“We nearly there,” he said.
The Louisiana air was warm and moist, heavy with the residue of recent rain. Soon, we were whipping by cotton fields, and Denver’s eyes brightened like those of a young boy passing an amusement park. Outside the windows, acres unrolled, and vast blankets of milky-white bolls stretched away to meet rows of hardwood trees that formed a distant horizon.
“Looky-there now, ain’t that purty! Just right for pickin!” Denver shook his head slowly, remembering. “Used to be hun’erds a’ colored folks spread out all the way across them fields as far as your eyes would let you look. And the Man’d be standin by his wagon with his scales, writin down how much ever one of em picked. These days, all that cotton just sittin there waitin for some big ole monster-lookin machine to run through there and strip it off. Them machines cost a lotta folks their jobs. It just don’t seem right.”
Again, Denver’s love-hate relationship with his plantation struck me. It was as though he wouldn’t have minded so much being stuck in an agrarian time warp if he hadn’t seen so much injustice in it.
We drove about another half-mile, Denver’s nose practically pressed against the window. “Here, Mr. Ron. Pull over right here.”
I eased the Suburban onto the gravel shoulder, and the tires crackled to a stop at the edge of the cotton, white rows fanning out like bicycle spokes. Denver stepped down into a muddy aisle and we walked between the rows, Denver running his hand lightly over the fluffy bolls.
“I plowed and chopped and picked the cotton in this field right here for a lotta years, Mr. Ron . . . a lotta years.” He sounded wistful and tired, then brightened as he let me in on a trade secret. “This is a good day for pickin ’cause there’s a little bit a’ dampness in the air,” he said with a wink. “Makes the cotton weigh more.”
“Don’t you think the Man figured that out and factored it in?” I asked.
Denver paused for a moment then laughed. “I ’spect so.”
I pulled a tiny digital camera from my pocket, and Denver slipped into sepia-portraiture mode as if I’d thrown a switch. He dropped one knee into the dirt and peered seriously into the lens through designer sunglasses, looking about as much like a former cotton-picker as Sidney Poitier. I snapped off several shots, and he was still frozen in his touristy pose when the soulful call of a train whistle floated over the fields.
“Was that your ride you caught out of here?” I asked.
Denver nodded solemnly. I wondered how many times he listened to that whistle before he heard it calling his name.