I flush from my neck to the crown of my head. I can only be looking at the widow and mother of Delano Payton, the man bombed and burned to death in 1968. Barefoot and unshaven, I make a vain attempt to straighten my hair, then advance into the living room. Without rising, the elder Mrs. Payton enfolds my right hand in both of hers like a dowager empress. Her palms feel like fine sandpaper. The younger Mrs. Payton stands and shakes my hand with exaggerated formality. Her hand is moist and warm. Up close, she looks older than I first guessed, perhaps sixty-five. Because she has not gone to fat, she projects an aura of youth that her eyes cannot match.

“Althea works in the nursery at St. Catherine’s Hospital,” Dad informs me from the door. “I see her all the time. And I’ve treated Miss Georgia for thirty-five years now.”

“Yo’ daddy a good doctor,” the elder Mrs. Payton says from the sofa, pointing a bony finger at me. “A good doctor.”

My father has heard this ten thousand times, but he smiles graciously. “Thank you, Miss Georgia.”

“I remember you makin’ house calls late at night,” Georgia Payton goes on, her voice reedy and difficult to follow as it jumps up and down the scale. “Givin’ shots and deliverin’ babies. Had you a spotlight back then to see the house numbers.”

“And a pistol in my black bag,” Dad adds, chuckling.

“Sho’ did. I seen it once. You ever have to use it?”

“No, ma’am, thank God.”

“Might have to one of these days, with all this crack in the streets. I told the pastor last Sunday, you want to find Satan, just pull up to one of them crack houses. Sheriff ought to burn ever’ one to the ground.”

We all nod with enthusiasm, doing our best to foster a casual atmosphere. Blacks visiting socially in white homes—and vice versa—is still as rare as snowfall in Natchez, but this is not the reason for the general discomfort.

“Mr. Cage,” Althea says, focusing her liquid brown eyes on me, “we really appreciate you speaking out like you did in the paper.”

“Please call me Penn,” I implore her, embarrassed by thanks for a few lines tossed off without any real feeling for the victims of the crime.

“Mr. Penn,” says Georgia Payton, “ain’t no white man in thirty years said what you said in the paper today. My boy was kilt outside his job in nineteen hundred and sixty-eight, and all the po-lices did was sweep it under the rug.”