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His uncles adhered to those ancient rules of southern living, for they understood how easily a colored man’s general comportment could turn into a matter of life and death. Darren had always wanted to believe that theirs was the last generation to have to live that way, that change might trickle down from the White House. When in fact the opposite had proved to be true. In the wake of Obama, America had told on itself.
For William, the Ranger, the law would save us by protecting us—by prosecuting crimes against us as zealously as it prosecutes crimes against whites. No, Clayton, the defense lawyer, said: the law is a lie black folks need protection from—a set of rules that were written against us from the time ink was first set to parchment.
It was a sacred debate that held black life as holy, worthy of continuance, and in need of safekeeping, a debate that Darren had been following since he was toddling between their long legs under the kitchen table, when the brothers still lived together, before they’d had a falling-out over a woman.
The belief that they were special, that they had the stones to endure what others couldn’t, was the most quintessentially Texas thing about them. It was an arrogance born of genuine fortitude and a streak of hardheadedness six generations deep, a Homeric shield against the petty jealousies and lethal injustices that so occupied white folks’ free time, their oppressive and intrusive gaze into every aspect of black life—from what you eat to who you marry to the clothes you wear to the music you play to the way you wear your hair to how you address them on the street.
“He was always saying Texas this and Texas that. How it isn’t that bad. Michael was always making excuses for these racists down here, had some kind of twisted nostalgia about growing up in the country that made him blind to all the rest of the bullshit down here.” “It’s not making excuses,” Darren said. “It’s knowing that I’m here, too. I’m Texas, too. They don’t get to decide what this place is,”
Most black folks living in Lark came from sharecropping families, trading their physical enslavement for the crushing debt that came with tenant farming, a leap from the frying pan into the fire, from the certainty of hell to the slow, hot torture of hope.
Wally’s and Keith’s lives revolved around the black folks they claimed to hate but couldn’t leave alone. It was, as his uncle Clayton would say, an obsession that weakened them, that enraged and eventually enslaved them within their own hearts, Darren thought.
