Between Black and White (McMurtrie and Drake Legal Thrillers #2)(5)
The uproar was immediate, and Pulaski became a battleground. The Ku Klux Klan staged rallies in January of 1986, 1987, and 1988 on the Giles County Courthouse Square, and other Klan groups held additional rallies throughout the year in Pulaski. These groups of Klansmen would stand in line to kiss the commemorative plaque that Bo gazed at now, literally bowing down to it like they were visiting a shrine.
That is, they did until August 1989, when Donald Massey, the owner of the building, removed the plaque and welded it back on backwards. Bo ran his hand along the blank back side of the plaque, which was colored in green and black. Over the two decades since Massey’s grand gesture, Bo had seen tourists come and look for the plaque, ambling around downtown like zombies, unable to find it without it being pointed out to them. Bo had always lauded Massey’s reversal of the plaque as the perfect response. A figurative way for the town to turn its back on its unsavory past. Pulaski couldn’t disclaim the fact that the Ku Klux Klan breathed its first air downtown. But the town could fight back.
That sense of fight was never more evident than in October 1989, when just a couple months after Donald Massey reversed the commemorative plaque, the entire town of Pulaski shut down in response to the Ku Klux Klan’s decision to host a rally with the Aryan Nation on the courthouse square. On the day of the march, over 180 businesses, including Bo’s law office, closed in protest of the rally. Wreaths colored in orange, the international color of brotherhood, covered the town. Outside of one lone gas station that remained open, Pulaski, Tennessee had turned into a ghost town—at least for one day.
Jazz, whose parents had both marched with Dr. King in Selma, rallied behind the town’s struggle for separation from its Klan past. She and Bo became charter members of Giles County United, a group formed to counter the Klan’s rallies and which spearheaded the 1989 boycott.
When he looked back on it, Bo knew that those early days were probably the happiest of their marriage. He also knew that, while Jazz’s motives in participating in the town’s pushback against the Klan rallies of the late ’80s were pure, his own were selfish. He wanted the town to also embrace his own personal quest for justice against Andy Walton and the other members of the KKK that lynched his father on this very night forty-five years earlier.
But he could never garner any support for his cause. The excuses that each sheriff and district attorney that came into office gave were always the same. Bo had only been five years old when he “allegedly” saw his father lynched; Bo was the only eyewitness who had ever come forward; Bo could not see any of the men’s faces; Bo’s father’s body was found in the pond by the clearing, and it was an undisputed fact that Roosevelt Haynes couldn’t swim.
All they had to go on was the word of a five-year-old boy that he recognized Andy Walton’s voice, and that wasn’t enough.
Bo knew they were right—he knew he needed more evidence—but he also knew that the town had an ulterior motive in keeping the truth behind his father’s murder buried. Pulaski already had enough bad publicity as the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. It didn’t need to add a Klan lynching to its résumé. Unless Bo could bring forward conclusive evidence, the town was content to let sleeping dogs lie.
Sighing, Bo lit a cigar and trudged aimlessly up Madison Street.
Ten minutes later he stood in the grass in front of his home on Flower Street. Stomping out the cigar on the curb, he took a belt of whiskey and gazed gloomily at the “For Sale” sign that had gone up thirty days earlier. He knew they were asking too much, but his pride wouldn’t let him go lower. He didn’t need the money from a sale, so . . .
. . . it sat here. Like a monument to his failure at marriage and fatherhood. Bo closed his eyes, and he immediately became dizzy, the alcohol finally working its magic. He staggered forward and almost fell, catching himself with his left hand on the grass, while his right hand brought the pint bottle to his lips again. He heard Ms. Maggie’s sharp voice play in his mind over and over again. “Hasn’t this crusade cost you enough, Bo?”
A minute later he was ambling through the empty house. They had bought it when T. J. was two and Lila was just a baby—a response to needing more space. And from the second they walked in the door, it had been Jazz’s pride and joy. For almost two years she had directed a remodeling project, the goal of which was to preserve the historic nature of the home while doubling the square footage.
Mission accomplished, Bo thought, as he admired the hardwood floors, high ceilings, and oversized kitchen. And though the house had always given Bo a great sense of satisfaction—who woulda thunk that a dirt-poor black kid, the son of a murdered father and a mother who abandoned him, could grow up to own one of the nicest homes in all of Giles County?—it had never given him any joy. Truth was he was hardly ever here, and even when he was his mind was always elsewhere. Bo worked his cases daylight to dark, and during the evening hours he investigated his father’s murder. Since 1985 Bo had tried forty-five cases to a jury’s verdict, winning every trial but one. Initially, he cracked his teeth on workers’ compensation and pissant criminal defense matters, but things changed in 1993 when he hit Walton Chevrolet for one point five million in an SUV rollover case. In the blink of an eye, Bo was catapulted into the world of big-time personal injury plaintiffs’ cases, and the victory was extra sweet because it came at the expense of Andy Walton’s dealership. During this same time frame, Bo figured that he had spoken with over one hundred current and former members of the Tennessee Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which, at the time of his father’s death, had over two thousand members. Bo knew if he could just get one former Klansman to roll on Andy, the floodgates would open.