”But if I get in, they’ll be decided fairly.“

”Don’t kid yourself. No good deed goes unpunished. What makes you think you can get elected, anyway? You’ll have to get black votes to do it. A lot of them.“

I’ve given this a lot of thought. ”I think my record in Houston speaks for itself. I convicted black murderers, but I also convicted whites. I put away a notorious white supremacist, and I killed his brother myself. When I got here, I solved the murder of Del Payton. I think there’s gratitude in the black community for that.“ I take a quick sip of wine. ”And then there’s my father.“

Caitlin smiles in spite of herself.

”Dad’s treated the black community in this town for forty years-as equals, with kindness and respect. He’s built up a lot of goodwill. I’m my father’s son in most ways, and I think the voters would see that. Finally, the alternative to me is Shad Johnson. I think enough black people in this town have recognized Shad’s true nature to take a gamble on me.“

”What scares me,“ Caitlin murmurs, ”is that I think you’re right. I think if you run, you’ll probably be elected.“

”Would that be such a disaster?“

A soft sigh escapes her lips. ”For the town? Or for us?“

”Caitlin, this city is at the watershed point of its history. That’s saying a lot, when your history stretches back to 1716. The cotton economy is gone. The oil is all but gone. Industry won’t be coming back here until we fix the public school system. That leaves tourism. To make tourism work takes someone with vision, someone who can unify whites and blacks to sell a history in which blacks wereslaves to whites. That’s a tall order, but if someone doesn’t do it, this town will wither from twenty thousand souls to ten. It’ll be another black shell surrounded by a white ring of suburban homes, and it will cease to be a real community. I don’t want that to happen. More than that, I feel an obligation to try to stop it.“

She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. ”I know you do. You grew up here, and you know what this town once was.“

”And what it can be again,“ I say quietly. ”Natchez has become a place where we have to raise our children to live elsewhere. Our kids can’t come back here and make a living. And that’s a tragedy. A lot of people I went to school with would love to come back here to raise their kids. They just can’t afford to do it. I want to change that.“

Caitlin picks at her crab cake with her fork. ”What does your father think about this idea?“

”He’s not convinced that saving the town is possible. He’s also said that the Del Payton case proved I’m a crusader at heart.“

She smiles at some private thought. ”You’re a romantic, Penn. It’s one thing I’ve always loved about you. But sometimes…“ She shakes her head again. ”Do you want to know what I see?“

”Yes.“

”It’s going to shock you.“

”Fire away.“

”I see a town that doesn’t want to be saved. Black and white both, but mostly black.“

”Really?“

”Absolutely. When I came here five years ago, I lectured you on white racism.“

I laugh softly. ”You sure did.“

”But now that I’ve seen the reality up close, I understand white frustration. Black people here are just different. Not all of them, but so many. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because this was one of the biggest slaveholding cotton counties along the river. I don’t know. I used to think it was ignorance, but I’m starting to see it as willful ignorance, and maybe worse. Their belligerence in public places, their rudeness…there’s almost a pride in ignorance here. Black employees refuse to wait on white customers in stores. They treat incompetence as though it’s some kind of act of civil disobedience. I’m sick of it, Penn. And the black politicians…my God. I’ve watched black aldermen do patently illegal things and then brag about it. They don’t care whether something is legal or not.“

”White politicians abused the system for years, Caitlin. They just did it in a more subtle way.“

”I know that. But is that an excuse for blacks to repeat the abuses of the old system? The system Martin Luther King and Malcolm X died to dismantle?“

”No, but-“

”We talked about the schools before. You want to know the hard truth? The public high school here is ninety-eight percent black. Its budget is five times higher than St. Stephen’s- per student-yet it turns out the second-lowest ACT scores in the nation. Most St. Stephen’s graduates score well above the national average, and nearly all of them go on to four-year colleges. The same is true of Immaculate Heart.“

”There are black students in both those schools.“

”Very few, and they’re the exceptions that prove the rule. We talked about the single-mother statistics. You want to guess what color the huge percentage of those mothers are?“

”Caitlin, listen-“

”I know, I know, you’re going to give me your great analogy between African-Americans and the American Indian. Well, I don’t want to hear it. Too much water’s gone under the bridge. I’m tired of hearing about slavery and Reconstruction. Brown v. Board of Education was almost fifty years ago, Penn. What’s wrong with this picture? How obvious does it have to get before people admit the truth?“

”Which is?“

”The system is broken! And one of the reasons it’s broken down here is that it’s largely run by and for black people. They simply do not place a high cultural value on education, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise any longer.“

I can’t believe it. Like so many Yankee transplants, Caitlin has had a dramatic change of heart on the issue of race. But though I’ve seen it before, I would never have expected it from her. ”That’s a pretty racist view, Caitlin.“

”I’m not a racist,“ she asserts. ”I’m a realist.“

”If I said those things, I’d be labeled a racist. Does being from Boston make it all right for you to espouse those views?“

Her fork jangles on her plate ”I’m not some spoiled dilettante, okay? That’s what I was five years ago, when I got here. Now I have a personal stake in this issue.“ She takes my hand again and squeezes with urgency. ”Let them have this town, Penn. They want their turn on top? Give it to them. Let Shad Johnson turn this beautiful little city into another Fayette. You can’t stop it anyway. Not even if you’re mayor. Maybe after they run it down to nothing, they’ll learn something about running things.“

”What’s that?“

”That you have to give a damn. You have to sacrifice. You have to work.“

”This from the child of a multimillionaire?“

Her eyes flash with anger. ”You think my father didn’t work to build what he has? You think I haven’t worked?“

”Calm down. Of course he did. But he did it in a different context. He did it with certain advantages of law, capital, and…frankly, the old-boy network.“

Caitlin shakes her head in exasperation as the waiter delivers our entrées. Her blackened catfish smokes on the plate, and my duck looks perfectly seared. The only problem is that I’m no longer hungry. After the waiter leaves, I say, ”Well, at least I know where you stand now.“

She puts her hands together as though praying. ”Don’t do this, Penn. Let us have a life somewhere else. Someplace where this conflict doesn’t have to be at the center of our daily lives.“

I point at her plate. ”Are you going to eat?“

She looks down at her catfish and grimaces. ”I know you hate everything I’ve said. If I were the person I was five years ago, I’d be screaming invective at the person I am now. To someone with no experience of this place, I sound like a native redneck. But there’s no teacher like experience.“

”Why don’t we change the subject while we eat?“

Caitlin nods, then lifts her fork and breaks off a piece of fish.

”We can talk about anything but race, politics, or Drew’s murder case,“ I say.