And the man who cast it trembles. Or if he is dead, his sons tremble. They tremble by an unwritten law, one that a fellow Mississippian understood long before I was born and casually revealed to a reporter in a French hotel room in 1956, dispensing eternal truths as effortlessly as a man tossing coins to beggars in the road. He said, “The past is never dead; it’s not even past. If it were, there would be no grief or sorrow.” And ten years before him, my distant relation wrote, “There is always something.” And six decades after that, I thought: Please, no, let me remain in my carefully constructed cocoon of Not-Knowing. Let me keep my untarnished idol, my humble war hero, the one healer who has not killed, the one husband who has not lied, the one father who has not betrayed the faith of his children. But as I know now, and hate the knowing … Willie was right: there is always something.

So let us begin in 1964, with three murders. Three stones cast into a pond no one had cared about since the siege of Vicksburg, but which was soon to become the center of the world’s attention. A place most people in the United States liked to think was somehow different from the rest of the country, but which was in fact the very incarnation of America’s tortured soul.

Mississippi.

PART ONE

1964–1968

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals;
separated from law and justice he is the worst.

—Aristotle

CHAPTER 1

ALBERT NORRIS SANG a few bars of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Natchez Burnin’” to cover the sounds of the couple making love in the back of his shop. The front door was locked. It was after seven, the streets deserted]. But today had been a bad day. Albert had tried to cancel the rendezvous by switching on the light in the side room where he taught piano during the week—he’d even sent a boy to warn the man to stay away from the shop—but the two lovers had ignored his warnings and come anyway. He’d set up their rendezvous a week ago, by sending out a coded message during his gospel radio show, which was his usual method. But lovers who saw each other only twice a month—if they were lucky—weren’t going to be deterred by a warning light in a window, not even if their lives were at risk.