“Lord, yes. Medgar ate right in this house whenever he came through town.” Althea shakes her head sadly. “When Beckwith killed Medgar in June of sixty-three, Del changed again. He said the war had come home to America. Then President Kennedy was shot that November. Del had joined the NAACP by then, of course, and by 1965 he was in charge of voter registration for this area. Del was the highest-ranking black man at the battery plant. Even the white men liked him. They knew he knew his job.”

“Who do you think planted that bomb, Althea?”

“Well . . . the Klan, I guess. There were a lot of beatings out at the paper mill around then, Klan workers beating black workers. You know. Scaring them off. There was some Klan at the tire plant, and at the battery plant too.”

“A car bomb is quite an escalation from a beating. Did Del have any personal enemies you know of?”

“Del didn’t have an enemy in this world.”

He had at least one, I say silently. But it’s certainly possible that Payton was chosen at random, to send a warning to someone. “Did he seem any more worried than usual about going to work near the time of his death?”

She shakes her head. “We had some death threats, but we got those with every promotion Del had. He just kept on keeping on. He’d say, ‘Thea, we can’t let ’em get us down.’ ”

I remember the nightmarish weeks of the Hanratty trial, when death threats arrived almost daily. What courage it must have taken for Del Payton to get up every morning of his life and go to work with men he knew wanted him dead.

“He was depressed,” Althea adds. “Over Dr. King’s death. Martin was assassinated just five weeks before Del was killed. And Del was so saddened by that, because already he saw the Movement being taken over by advocates of violence. Men with bitterness in their hearts. Stokely Carmichael and the rest. Black racists, he called them.”

The more I learn about Del Payton, the more I feel that his murder was a terrible loss to the community in which I grew up. “Does anything else stand out?”

“No. The FBI asked me all this back when it happened, and I told them the same thing. One day Del went to work and just didn’t come home.”

I looked helplessly around the room. Del Payton has been dead for thirty years, but he is as alive here as a dead man can be. When Annie is a grown woman, will this large a piece of my heart still be reserved for Sarah?

“Do you remember the names of any of the FBI agents who talked to you?”