A deeper sadness comes into Henry’s perpetually sad eyes. “I knew him well. As a boy, of course.” His face brightens a little. “As a matter of fact, I bought that guitar off a man Albert sold it to back in the fifties. Albert was a pianist by training, but he could play a mean guitar when he wanted to. But it was Jimmy Revels who taught me to play the slide like that—with a cigarette lighter instead of a bottleneck. Steve Cropper did the same thing on some big records. But you didn’t come here to learn about the blues.”

“I didn’t realize you knew Jimmy Revels, either. You’ve never mentioned that in your articles, have you?”

“No. I try to keep my writing as objective as possible. But I knew Jimmy pretty well. Luther Davis, too. I was close to Albert’s whole family, and most everybody who hung out in the store. That’s one reason I’ve never let those cases rest. Maybe the main reason.”

“Well, I admire you for it.”

Henry shakes his head. “I respect you more for taking on the Del Payton case. It’s easy to work hard at something when you have a personal stake in it.”

I don’t want Henry thinking I’m a better man than I am. “Honestly, when Payton’s family first came to me, I turned them down. They sort of embarrassed me into taking the case. You could say I took it out of white guilt.”

Henry goes still, his eyes smoldering in his mild face. “Don’t knock white guilt. Let me tell you something. There’s a PBS crew filming a documentary about my work. They’re covering a few other investigative journalists, too. And the question people always ask when the director shows them footage is ‘Where are the black reporters in this story? All you’re showing us is white men trying to solve these civil rights murders.’”

“How do you answer them?”

“With the same question. Where are the black reporters? I need all the help I can get. But it’s white men working these cases, almost exclusively. And I’m not sure why. Is it guilt, like you said? I’ll tell you this: when I read my list of black murder victims from the sixties, hardly a black person in America recognizes a name. There’s something wrong with that, brother.”

Henry leans back and flicks his fingernails across the open-tuned strings on the National. “Albert Norris was like a father to me, Penn. But Jimmy Revels broke my heart. And he never even knew it. Ain’t that something?”