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wanted, but it didn’t seem to thrill her that much.
    Andi probably will graduate from VCU about the same time she checks the last eatery in town off her to-do list. Like the tortoise, her progress is slow but steady, a course or two a semester. I hope that, like the tortoise, she crosses the finish line one day.
    As we make our way across town through the slush, my mind is still reeling a bit from Peggy’s latest bombshell.
    “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” I asked after I’d finally dragged it out of her. Peggy has never had much of a filter between her brain and her mouth. She thinks it, she says it.
    “It wasn’t any of your business.”
    I told her that it sure as hell was my business, but she crossed her arms like some sulking little kid and told me to change the subject or get out.
    It isn’t exactly a big deal anymore to be of “mixed race.” Mixing the races might be the only thing that can save these Benighted States of America, although I’m sure we’d find some other reason to hate each other.
    Artie Lee, saxophonist and bon vivant, died when he wrapped a car around a sycamore tree while I was still crawling. I inherited almost none of his light-skinned African-American physical characteristics. Growing up in Oregon Hill, which was as white as Minute Rice back then, that was probably just as well.
    I can vaguely remember Peggy taking me over a couple of times to visit a black family in Highland Springs, when I was still pre-school age.
    The family, it turns out, was the Lees.
    You know the Hillary Clinton thing about it taking a village? Well, the Lees were a small town, everybody looking out for everyone else’s kids, everybody closing ranks around their weakest, sharing what they could. Kind of like America is supposed to be.
    And one of Artie Lee’s first cousins was Philomena, who was twelve or thirteen when Peggy began “seeing” Artie.
    “She was so bright, so sweet,” Peggy said, before she refused to say any more. “She used to take care of the younger ones, like she was their momma.”
    Philomena and Peggy kept in touch for a while, and Peggy said the late Artie’s cousin once even ventured over to visit her in Oregon Hill.
    “But she said people were giving her the evil eye, and she didn’t come back.”
    Peggy said she hadn’t seen Philomena since probably 1980.
    “When her son was arrested, maybe three years after that, somebody else answered the phone, and said she’d moved. And I never tried to get up with her again.
    “But I just know Philomena Lee wouldn’t have raised a boy that would rape a girl like that. He was—is—her only child, too. Don’t know what happened to the daddy.”
    A lot of that going around, I want to say.
    In adulthood, I have never tried to run away from my heritage, but back then, when I was a kid, it was easier to be “us” than to be “them.” My friends knew, and some of my enemies suspected and, it being the South, fights ensued. It was easier to just let people think I was something exotic without any of that old Dixie baggage attached.
    Sometimes, though, the truth will out no matter how hard you try to bottle it up. Faulkner was right about the past. You can drive a stake through the son-of-a-bitch’s heart, bury it deep, and it’ll still rise up waving the Stars and Bars.
    I checked around last night, and my best cops’ source, the re-doubtable Peachy Love, told me that they were already questioning Richard Slade about his whereabouts early yesterday morning. He said he was at home asleep, and Philomena backed him up.
    “But she’s his mother,” Peachy said. “It’s just a matter of time.” She’s probably right.
    I am obliged to take another crack at Philomena Slade. Maybe, with my genealogy brought up to date, she will cut me some slack if I play the family card. The white sheep returns.
    We have a great meal at Millie’s, as always. We both prefer its frantic, pants-on-fire ambience and heartburn specials