There is no give in this woman’s voice. No wonder Dade didn’t want to come home during the summer.
“Friday,” I tell her. Why are black women so much stronger than black men? If Roy Cunningham is in the house, he must be in the bathroom. I haven’t heard a peep out of him.
“Do you and your husband want to come over then?”
“One of us has to be in our store,” she says.
“I’ll see you Friday at ten. Roy has your card, doesn’t he?”
I find myself saying, “Yes, ma’am,” and grin at her son. After I hang up, I tell him, “Your mother doesn’t mince words, does she?”
Dade arches his muscular frame and yawns, showing strong white teeth. I doubt if he got any sleep last night.
“I’m surprised she let you off the phone so soon. She wanted me to go to Memphis so I’d be closer to home.”
“I’m from eastern Arkansas, too,” I tell him to let him know we have something in common. If you’re from the Delta, Memphis means more to you than Blackwell County.
Dade ignores my attempt at camaraderie.
“Did she sound mad?”
“A little,” I tell him.
“A rape charge is serious business.”
“Robin didn’t do nothin’ she didn’t want to do!” Dade shoots back, now rigid in the chair.
He must be scared to death. With the image of Rodney King’s beating by the LA cops forever embedded in the national consciousness, the literature of white justice is getting richer all the time. Why should he trust the system when he has up-to-the-minute documentation that it is still brutal beyond his worst nightmare? At this point I am just another white face who will be telling him what to do. I need to humanize myself to this kid if he is going to trust me. Probably he thinks of me as another coach. If he wants playing time, he’d better make me happy, and in this situation that means telling me what he thinks I want to hear. Convincing him that all I want to hear is the truth might not be so easy. I pull out a yellow legal pad from my briefcase and begin to make some notes, first establishing that he refused to give a formal statement to the police without a lawyer being present. Thank God for TV. He sounds so vehement that I find that I tend to believe he is innocent. I want to. Rape is too ugly a crime to pretend criminal defense work is just another way to make a living.
“Why don’t you start from the beginning and tell me when you first met Robin?” I suggest.
Instead of immediately answering, Dade bends down to tie a shoelace on his Nikes.
“How come,” he asks, obviously not yet comfortable with me, “they hired you?
Are you famous or something?”
“I’ve won some cases,” I allow, “but I’m a neighbor of your Uncle James. He introduced me to your father.”
Dade looks skeptical.
“You live on the same street?”
He knows as well as I do that there are few integrated neighborhoods anywhere in Arkansas.
“I was married to a woman darker than you are,” I explain, and give him a mini-version of my marriage to Rosa. I conclude by saying, “My daughter Sarah is a cheerleader for the junior varsity.”
“Sarah Page is your daughter?” Dade asks in amazement.
“I know who she is. Man, she’s a …” His voice trails off.
“A beautiful young woman,” I help him. What would he have said? A fox. A cunt? I know how guys talk about women. Or at least think, since some of us, anyway, have been forced to become so politically correct in our speech. As my friend Clan says, it’s still okay to want pussy, you just can’t say the word.
“Yeah,” says Dade, a smile coming to his face for the first time.
“She’s real nice.”
Her body, he must mean, since they hardly know each other. I realize I’m glad he isn’t coming to dinner with us.
Why? Racism? Or is it that I don’t want him sizing her up like a piece of meat? Yet, I’ve done the same a thou sand times when I’ve thought I wasn’t being observed.
There’s a difference though. I’ve never raped anybody.
Dade Cunningham may have. I understand now why Sarah would be uncomfortable.
“She’s a super kid.”
“Yeah,” Dade mutters, not at all expecting a dinner invitation nor perhaps even remotely desiring one unless I am going to pick up the check. What was I thinking when I mentioned it to Sarah? Most of my clients I wouldn’t trust to take out my garbage. Is it because this kid is a Razorback? Or have I gotten to be too impressed with the notoriety of defending high-visibility clients?
“What happened?” I prompt him.
He sets his jaw, and as he talks I can now hear his mother’s voice.
“Robin was in my communications class last spring. We sat next to each other and got to be friends in that class. She was okay. I’d be nervous right before I had to make a speech, and she’d talk to me, kind of calm me down. After the pros, I want to be a sports announcer like Greg Gumbel. Anyway, I started coming to class early, so Robin and I could go over stuff if I had a speech or something. It was easy for her. She talked all the time anyway. Some white girls you know are laughing at you as soon as they’re out of sight. She wasn’t like that.”
He pauses, and I ask, “Anybody in the class know y’all were working together?” I remember my own anxiety in a speech class taught by a retired Army colonel from Illinois My small-town eastern Arkansas accent sounded to me stupid and hicky. Try as I might, I couldn’t pronounce a single vowel to suit him.
“Mr. Page,” he said the last week of school, “you turn single letters into whole words.” I can imagine Dade’s embarrassment and consternation if he got an asshole like Colonel Davis. No matter how intelligent he may be, Dade has already given himself away by saying “wid” for “with,”
“chew” for “you.” Perhaps, when he really concentrates, he can sound the “s” on all his verbs, but I know from my own experience it is difficult to worry about form and sub stance at the same time.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“We’d just meet in the class room early, since it was empty. It wasn’t an everyday thing. She’d practice on me, too, when it was her turn.”
I try to form an image in my mind of the scene he has described. With his strong chin and firm mouth Dade is undeniably handsome. Throw in his coffee-with-cream six-foot-two-inch frame, his earnest manner, and status as a Razorback, and it is easy to see why even the whitest coed in the state would be interested.
“Did she flirt with you?”
“You mean, did she come on to me?” Dade asks, slinging his leg over the chair, which seems built for endurance rather than comfort.
“We kidded around some. I know it’s hard to believe, but I thought it was just a friendship thing. She was good in that class and could watch and tell you exactly what you were doin’ wrong and how to fix it.”
I put my pen down. This kid is growing on me. He doesn’t put out the arrogant, in-your-face trash I’m accustomed to seeing on TV from some black athletes. Yet, I know I’m seeing the side he shows to his coaches.
“Did you see her outside of class last spring?”
The chair groans as Dade shifts his weight.
“I invited her to a party off campus over at a friend’s place. She and a roommate came. Jus’ a couple guys from the team and two girls. Nothing happened.”
“Tell me about it,” I encourage him.
“Did you have sex with her that night? I hear she’s pretty goodlooking.”
“I didn’t even touch her, man!” Dade says vehemently.
“It was jus’ a party. I invited her, kind of to thank her for her help.”
“What were the names of the people there?” I ask, noting his aggrieved tone. Maybe he can’t admit he was attracted to her because of his father’s admonition to stay away from white girls.
“I’m going to need to talk to as many people as possible. The more I know about this the better off you’ll be.”
Dade rubs his right hand over his face. This isn’t his idea of fun, obviously.
“It was jus’ Harris and Tyrone and Tawanna and Doris. I don’t even remember her room mate’s name.”