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The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. —JOSEPH CONRAD
in that harsh whisper that was now his speaking voice: “The South doesn’t change. You can try to hide the past, but it comes back in ways worse than the way it was before. Terrible ways.”
Her fingers playing across the scar on his chest like a pianist playing the scales. The scar was a gift, of sorts, from Red DeCrain, white supremacist, Christian nationalist, militia leader, and for seven minutes a wannabe martyr. Those seven minutes had changed all their lives. Titus’s, Red’s, and those of Red’s wife and his three sons, who all had been outfitted with grenade vests. The youngest boy had only been seven years old. His vest had hung loose on his shoulders like a hoodie he’d borrowed from one of his brothers. When he’d pulled that pin his face had been as blank as a sheet of
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Woah
Would she be so proud if she knew what had happened in Northern Indiana at the DeCrain compound? I don’t think so, Titus thought. No, I don’t think she’d be proud at all.
he hadn’t attended an actual church service since he was fifteen. He’d stopped going about the same time his father had started. Two years after his mother had died.
“George Orwell wrote that we sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who do us harm. I just want a sheriff’s department that makes sure those rough men don’t visit violence on the people they are supposed to keep safe. I was born here, graduated from high school here. Grew up swimming in Fiddler’s Bay, learned to drive on Route 15. Had my first taste of liquor over behind the Watering Hole. Charon is my heart and my home, but I know that those rough men have not always been judicious with their violence. I think the least a sheriff can do is
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he craved a new type of religion. The one based on blood and wine magic had failed them, in Titus’s opinion. Structure became his religion. Discipline was his crucifix against chaos.
Didn’t matter that Titus was a Black man who had run on a platform of reform. To a lot of Black folks, including Jamal, he was now blue instead of Black.
The moment he announced his candidacy he had made a choice to live in a no-man’s-land between people who believed in him, people who hated him because of his skin color, and people who believed he was a traitor to his race.
now his Blackness, a thing that was as intrinsic a part of him as his arms and legs, was being challenged by a man who six months ago was selling more Oxy and molly to his own people than he sold to the Tylers and Madisons of the county. The audacity was palatable. The hypocrisy was infuriating.
“How do you deal with having that in your head?” Carla asked. Titus put on his sunglasses. “I try not to dream,” he said as he walked into the house.
Waiting for the world to shed tears for your pain was like waiting for a statue to speak.
“Showing off that fancy college degree, huh, Titus? You know I couldn’t get into UVA. Too many quotas had to be filled.” “If that’s what lets you sleep at night, Scott, you go right on believing that,” Titus said. “I guess I’m a racist now, right? Seems like anybody who speaks the facts gets called that nowadays,”
Titus thought Scott was a spoiled brat. A spoiled brat who had never had to work for anything, who truly appreciated nothing but thought he was owed everything. Even a spot at the premier university in the state.
So a typical
“Terrible people can do good things sometimes. But they like doing the terrible things more.
Black boys who may not have been able to truly articulate how seeing that statue every day on their way to school made them feel but knew without a shadow of a doubt what that statue meant.
He wondered if this was how they were processing their ordeal. If the impermanent nature of social media was a refuge from the finality of death.
He could despise Latrell’s actions without reveling in his death. Those two things were not mutually exclusive.
You know who
“Think of the worst thing you’ve ever seen. Now imagine seeing it dozens of times. See it and hear the screams that come with it and the cries for mercy or for God or for mama and knowing that there will be no mercy, no rescue, no divine hand of God coming down to smite the devils. Think of seeing that and knowing that it will stain you forever like the fucking mark of Cain.”
It occurred to him he could have been talking about himself as well as Latrell. His secret was patiently waiting to be revealed. Hanging over his head like a dull sword of Damocles.
We all choose to be skeptics when the truth is inconvenient.
“They were Black children, Davy. People are probably looking for them, but blond hair and blue eyes make the news.”
Sometimes grief is love unexpressed. Other times it’s regret made flesh.
Titus had no illusions about who or what he was. For many people he was the devil. He accepted that. Only he was a devil that chased down demons.
son, faith is never foolish,” Albert said. “Pop,” Titus said as he brushed past his father and went into the house, “faith broke my fucking heart.”
Titus knew what men like Ricky were really disturbed by was the fact that people, mostly people of color, had the temerity to challenge the lie of antebellum honor and chivalry that had been shoved down the throats of every child in the South for generations.
“Evil is rarely complicated. It’s just fucking bold.”
Later, after his mother was in the ground, he realized the Word was just as corrupt as the men who read it. Old Testament, New Testament, it was just words with a little w, written by zealots as PR for their new cult founded in the memory of a dead carpenter.
Just a janitor tasked with picking up the pieces of someone’s broken life.
I could also have monkeys fly out of my butt. Don’t mean I’m gonna start buying bananas for toilet paper,”
Lol
A lot of times sociopaths will overcompensate with extreme emotions. They don’t really understand how real empathy, real emotions work, so they parrot it but they sometimes go overboard,”
the devil is just the name we give to the terrible things we do to each other,”
“But only the sinners bleed, Sheriff,”
“Faith is a fragile thing, Sheriff. Do you know that? They like to talk about mustard seeds and not walking by sight and all that shit, but the truth is it don’t take much to break your faith. Get sick, get broke, or lose your only son. Your faith will run out of town faster than a deadbeat daddy,”
Let me tell you something I learned in the Bureau. Doesn’t matter where you are from or where you live, people are people. They can be jealous or hateful or twisted and sick. They steal and they lie, and lie about stealing. They fuck each other’s husbands and wives or sons and daughters. They go to church every Sunday and hoot and holler about brotherhood and living in Christ, then they come right out and call you or me a porch monkey before they go home to beat their kids. Then have the nerve, the unmitigated audacity, to point at somebody else, at some other town, and say, ‘No, those are the
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the South is Christ-haunted. It’s haunted, all right. By the hypocrisy of Christianity.
it was in those painful moments that he realized adults didn’t really know more than kids. That everyone was making it up as they went along and religion was just another crutch, like liquor or weed.
Titus never forgot that the night his mother died his father had left two little boys alone to fend for themselves with just a vague notion of salvation for their mother. Time had dulled that injury, but there was still a thirteen-year-old inside of him that hated his father just a little bit for that.
“I make twenty-eight thousand dollars a year as a deputy. My daughter wants to go to University of Mary Washington this fall. My wife has had one mastectomy and might need another,” Tom said. “Tom, I’m sorry about Barbara and I hope Allison gets into Mary Washington, but don’t sit and tell me your hard-luck story when you pushing a Gladiator truck and Barbara is rocking a Lexus and Allison is in a Mini Cooper as we sit on your twenty-by-twenty deck on the back of your brick house overlooking your in-ground pool. Don’t disrespect me like that. At least don’t disrespect me any more than you
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CLOCKED!
God wasn’t here. This was the devil’s work. And the devil was a man.
“‘Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking of yourself less,’” one of his instructors had said at the Academy. It was years later when Titus realized he was quoting C. S. Lewis, but that didn’t make the statement any less true.
no place was more confused by its past or more terrified of the future than the South.
True madness is like an aura around someone. It glows blue like the flame from a gas fire.
the world is cruel and capricious and it doesn’t give a damn about you, and the church that she loved and the God that she prayed to heal her are just placebos that don’t fix the poison we swim in every day.
It wasn’t that she didn’t think he could protect her. It was the idea he might have to choose between her and his ex, or his father, or his brother. She couldn’t see a scenario where she was the one that he chose. It was this realization that drove her down Interstate 95.
All I do know is violence begets more violence and all violence is a confession of pain. Hurt people tend to hurt people.
“You wear a wig because you don’t like growing your hair out, do you, Gabriel? It kinks up on you. Did the Hillingtons make you hate that part of yourself?” Titus said. Royce frowned. “The Hillingtons made me realize that we serve a God who is a sociopath. He set us free and lets us do things to each other, terrible things, and he and his angels just watch and laugh like Romans in the fucking Colosseum. And who gets it worse than anyone? Niggers. They are the shit on the shoe of the human race. They live in a world where everything is put in place to fuck them up and fuck them over. I did
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This is great black horror
I know what that’s like. I know how it feels to pray to God for something that you want so bad and feel like he doesn’t care.
“You saved Lavon. You saved Kellie. You saved Charon. Now it’s time for you to save yourself, big brother,” Marquis said.
“Sometimes you gotta burn off last year’s crop to let the soil get renewed, Pop,”
