Excerpts

ONE I was badly shaped by my good fortune and so failed to see the darkness and the things that darkness hides. Until the stark moment came, evil remained distant to me, mere lecture notes on the crimes of armies, mobs, and bloodthirsty individuals whose heinous acts I could thrillingly present to my captive audience of students. For that reason, it wasnt unusual that I was thinking of old King Herod that morning, the torment of his final days, his rotting genitals, how theyd swarmed with worms. It was a vision of guilt and punishment, of afflictions deserved by an abuser of power, and I knew that at some point during the coming semester Id find a place for it in one of my lectures. It was a bright April morning in 1954, a little less than one hundred years since the beginning of a conflict that had, by the time it ended, orphaned half the children of the South. I was twenty-four years old, and for the last three years had taught at Lakeland High School. At that time, Lakeland was typically demarcated by race and class, with a splendid plantation district, where my father still lived, and a New South section where local tradesmen and shop owners congregated in modest one-story houses strung together on short, tree-lined streets. The workers who manned the towns few factories resided in an area known as Townsend, and which consisted of small houses on equally small lots, though large enough to accommodate the vague hint of a lawn. To the east of them lived that class of people for whom, as goes the ancient story, there has never been room at the inn, and which was known as the Bridges. A Negro netherworld made up the east side of town, unknowable as Africa itself, and with nothing rising from it, at least not yet, save the fervent voices of its ministers and the singing of its choirs, both of which, during the long, languid summers of religious revival, were broadcast by loudspeakers mounted precariously in the trees gathered round their always freshly painted churches. During these humid evenings, their voices stretched as far north as the antebellum mansions where the Deltas eternal rulers sat on their verandas, sipping iced tea and chuckling at the religious revelries of the "Nigra" preachers. As a boy Id sat with my father on just such a veranda, evenings that despite all that has happened since still hold a storied beauty for me. There was something calm and sure about them, and it would never have occurred to me that anything might shatter the sheer stability of it all, a father much admired, a son who seemed to please him, a family name everywhere revered and to which no act of dishonor had ever been ascribed. As a son I could not have imagined a more noble father than my own, save perhaps that fabled one whod once cut down a cherry tree, then refused to tell a lie. And so the event my father forever after called the "incident" took me completely by surprise, though he never failed to make clear that it had sprung from a long Excerpted from Master of the Delta by Thomas H. Cook All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.