STANDING ON THE BOARD SIDEWALK beside Jenkins’s display window was the dapper local photographer, Scooter Willems. Today he looked extra-fashionable in a seersucker suit with a straw boater. As always, he had his camera and tripod with him. I wondered whether he had just photographed me in action.
“Where’d you learn to fight like that, Ben?”
“Boxing team at college,” I said.
“No, I mean, where’d you learn to put your thumbs in a man’s throat like that? Looks like you learned to fight in the street,” Scooter said.
“I reckon I just have the instinct,” I said.
“Mind if I take your photograph, Ben?”
I remembered the night I first saw him, photographing George Pearson. “I do mind, Scooter. My clothes are a mess.”
“That’s what would make it interesting,” he said with a big smile.
“Maybe for you. Not for me. Don’t take my picture.”
“I will honor your wishes, of course.” Scooter folded the tripod and walked away.
I tucked my shirt into my torn trousers, and when I brushed my hand against my chin, it came back bloody.
Moody Cross stepped out of Sanders’s store with a sack of rice on one hip and a bag of groceries on her arm. She walked toward me.
“You are beyond learning,” she said.
I used my handkerchief to wipe off the blood. “And what is it I have failed to learn, Moody?”
“You can go around trying to fight every white man in Mississippi that hates colored people,” she said, “but it won’t do any good. There’s a lot more of them than there is of you. You can’t protect us. Nobody can do that. Not even God.”
She turned to walk away, but then she looked back. “But thank you for trying,” she said.