“Iced tea,” I say reluctantly.
“No beer?” Sarah asks, surprised. She orders a Coke.
Each of us imagines the other wants alcohol. I explain that I have more work to do, but she steers the conversation away from the case and tells me about the project she’s working on for the professor who gave her a job this summer.
“He’s writing up the results of this massive interdisciplinary study on the Arkansas Delta,” she says.
“It’s a spin-off of the Delta Commission. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you?”
I fiddle with my silverware, trying to concentrate.
Some kind of economic development scheme to beef up that portion of the southern states the Mississippi runs through. No dice. The country is broke. Congress didn’t want to pay for it, and neither did the states who would supposedly benefit.
“It didn’t really get off the ground, did it?” I ask, watching our waiter nudge another boy who looks our way.
“It’s spawned enormous academic interest in the region,” Sarah says self-importantly, oblivious to the attention she is attracting.
“It’s almost as if the portions of the South where slavery was the most concentrated have been punished. Parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana are like Third World countries. They’re desperately poor!”
The boy brings our drinks and practically sits down at the table with us. I’ve never heard Sarah display the slightest intellectual interest in her courses. All she has cared about was the grade, not the subject matter.
“Is the poverty a big surprise?” I comment.
“We kidnapped people from a totally different culture and virtually turned them into farm animals until machines made them obsolete.”
Sarah nods as if I’d said that two plus two equals four.
“But that doesn’t explain why the Delta’s still statistically behind the rest of the country after the invention of tractors and cotton pickers and other laborsaving de vices,” she lectures me.
“Why hasn’t the Delta prospered like the rest of the country? It’s intellectually dishonest to say that the South got behind after the Civil War and was raped during Reconstruction and never caught up. That’s a Southern myth. Besides, when one observes countries such as Germany and Japan after World War Two and Taiwan and South Korea today, it’s a radically different picture. Those countries are booming economically. But the Delta is virtually a wasteland. Why?”
I think I’m supposed to ask. Every time I’ve mentioned Bear Creek in the last couple of years her eyes have glazed over. Small wonder: she’s heard all my boyhood stories a dozen times. Somebody, Professor Birdbath, or whatever his name is, has found a switch I didn’t know existed. I’m not sure I like it. She sounds ridiculous.
“Observe” Germany. Can’t she and Birdbreath simply look at it? I powder my tea with two packets of Equal and say, “I give up. What’s wrong with us?”
Sarah hasn’t even looked at the menu. She says, “The theory, being developed by Professor Beekman and others, and it’s only provisional, is that in places like the Delta, the need to control social relationships is more of a motivating factor than economic self-interest. In other words, in other geographic regions of the country, indi gent blacks are effectively ghettoized and isolated in a social sense, but in the small towns of the South there is no way to do that. You can’t move to the suburbs in Bear Creek.”
Amazed by the transformation of my daughter into a pretentious junior graduate student, I stir my tea until I’ve almost created a whirlpool. If Sarah ever read the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette at home, she has kept it a well-guarded secret. Not that I care.
Surely she has more interesting things to do at this stage of her life than worry about the unsolvable problems of humanity, or so I thought. Since she doesn’t want to be pumped about Robin, I wouldn’t mind simply visiting with her, but she seems too serious. Professor Beekman has seen to that.
“I assume you’re talking about political power,” I say lamely, never having given a moment’s thought to the Delta’s economic problems since I left there for good a quarter of a century ago.
“Is this Professor Beekman you work for black or white?”
Sarah cocks her chin at me, a sure sign I have annoyed her.
“What conceivable difference does that make?” she says.
“These people are highly regarded in their fields.
Dr. Beekman is white, but the multi disciplinary team he heads has at least two African-Americans on it.”
“It sounds like awfully soft research.”
“It doesn’t have to be a mathematical formula to be true,” Sarah shoots back.
“I wanted to ask you something about Bear Creek, and I want you to think about this. Did you ever notice how light-skinned the leaders of the African-American community were before the civil rights movement caught on there?”
“Are you ready?” our waiter says, demanding attention from my daughter. This is the kind of place I could walk in naked and nobody would notice me.
I smile at the boy, who is hopelessly smitten.
“We better order,” I say, thinking I’m going to need my strength if I’m to get through this meal. A little more grimly than I would like, Sarah nods and studies the menu while I order fried chicken, the-cheapest meat dish on the menu.
Unaware of my shoestring budget for this case, she takes me at my word and tells the boy to bring her the club steak not the top of the line but no bargain either.
As soon as he is gone, Sarah looks at me expectantly.
“It never occurred to me to pay attention,” I confess, remembering the question.
“What researchers have observed is that the white power structure habitually handpicked the whitest-looking African-Americans they could find for socalled leader ship positions. These blacks were imitation whites. The civil rights movement, of course, changed all that.”
“It sounds like,” I point out, “blacks discriminate on the basis of color, too.”
“As a reaction,” Sarah says stubbornly, “against whites choosing lighter-skinned Negroes to be their leaders.”
Tax dollars are being paid to study the skin color of small-town Negroes? No wonder there’s a deficit. Before I can respond, we are interrupted by a classmate of Sarah’s who visits until our food comes, and fortunately our conversation about her job never regains the level of intensity it had when we first sat down. This version of my daughter will take some getting used to. I bring the conversation around to the condition of her Volkswagen, and whether it will make it home for Thanksgiving. It better. I’ve put nearly a thousand dollars into the damn thing in the last two months.
Finally, as we get up to leave, she asks, “Now that you’ve talked to Dade Cunningham, do you think he’s guilty?”
Poor Sarah. What an uncomfortable position I’ve put her in.
“Well, I haven’t heard the girl’s side,” I say, picking up the check, “but after talking to Dade, I honestly don’t think he raped her.”
She bites her lip. I know she doesn’t want me doing this case, but if it works out, she could benefit in ways neither of us dreamed possible. I wonder what she has heard. She probably knows more than I do at this stage of the case. I decide I’d like to meet this Beekman and tell Sarah I might drop by her office tomorrow. It won’t hurt the man to know Sarah has a father who will be checking up on her. Some of these profs, as far as women go, are probably major-league hitters. Sarah is showing all the signs. I’ve never heard her talk like this before. If Beek man is interested, it is easy to understand why. Half the crew of the Hilton practically follows us to the door.
“Thanks, Daddy,” Sarah says, giving me a hug in the parking lot.
“That was good.”
Expensive, too, I don’t add. I still feel guilty about not being able to send her out of state, so it would be too cheap to complain about a meal. I watch her pull out ahead of me and marvel at how well she has turned out. I must have done something right, even if at the moment she sounds like one of those Southerners who finds out how good it feels to beat up on our benighted past. She is young and so self-righteous it makes me want to gag. Experience will knock some of that out of her, I hope.