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wasn’t your
maid or gardener, LuAnn. Not one. You had no inkling of the world
outside the narrow-minded one of Tallagurnsa, Alabama. Who got you
involved in the civil-rights movement? Who got you interested,
active in the antiwar movement?”
    “It was 1970, Eddie. I think I might have
found my way without you.”
    “Are you claiming that organizing the
memorial fund for Leon and Jimmy was your idea?”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “Here we are. Pull over.”
    “No!” I shook my head and set my eyes on the
road ahead, determined that we wouldn’t stop at the memorial “This
has nothing to do with our problems, Eddie. It’s past four now; I
want to get home. I’m not interested in thinking about tragedy
right this minute.”
    He grabbed the steering wheel and turned us
sharply onto the side of the road.
    I slammed on the brakes.
    “What happened? Where are we?” Jessie asked,
waking up. “Are we home?”
    “Daddy needs to stop. Everything’s fine,” I
said.
    Our car stopped not far from the huge old
pine tree that bore a large barkless gash a few feet from its base.
The tree. No one had expected it would live after taking the full
force of a head-on collision fifteen years ago when, not long after
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, two young black men
were shot driving to the state university a few hundred miles to
the south. The school was under a federal court order to integrate,
and had they made it there, Jimmy Turnbow and Leon Johnson would
have been the first black students to attend a white Alabama
college.
    They never got there. Leon was shot in the
head and died instantly, crashing his car into the tree. Jimmy was
shot crawling away from the wreck.
    “Let’s get out and look at the memorial,”
Eddie said. “Maybe it will jar your memory.”
    “No, thanks.” I locked my door and left my
seatbelt on.
    “I want to see,” Jessie said.
    “You’re really being a shit, Eddie,” I
said.
    “I think it’s important to see the tree and
the memorial and remember what happened here, because I know you
and I know you want to take your father up on his offer-the
restaurant, the house, Jolene. I understand that the Steak House is
an opportunity for you , but moving here is the wrong
opportunity for us . You can’t just pretend that Tallagumsa
is the perfect little place to live and raise a family; it’s not.
You can’t ignore all the bad things that have happened here. Didn’t
I hear you say something along those lines today? Or was
that just to irritate Jane and Gladys?”
    “Maybe you don’t know me at all anymore if
you think I need to listen to this stupid little lecture,” I said.
“My point was that I want to honor the past, but that doesn’t mean
I can’t look to the future, that I can’t see how much has changed.
The county has doubled in size over the last fifteen years, and
look at the state college. Teachers from all over the country would
not be here if Tallagumsa was the town it used to be, if Alabama
was the state it used to be. That’s why that reporter Ben Gainey is
here. The New South, Eddie.”
    Eddie got out of the car, came around to my side, and waited.
    I gave up, got out, and unhooked Jessie from
her car seat.
    We all walked to the tree.
    On this lonely stretch of roadside, the dirt
closest to the road gave way to clumps of grass and dandelions. Old
beer cans cluttered the landscape. Down the road a ways was a
house, a barn, a shack, and more farmland. Adjacent to the tree
were several acres of land that had recently been turned in deep
furrows for planting, probably corn or alfalfa. In the distance
were the green foothills of the Cumberland Plateau.
    Jessie picked a dandelion, blew on it, and
watched as its seeds sailed away, carried into the air by a light
breeze.
    Near the tree was a large commemorative iron
plaque on two waist-high steel posts. I didn’t have to examine the
raised metal letters on the plaque to know what they said. A young
college