ACT I

The Delta in 1954 was a place that had forgotten how to forgive itself, and the humidity was the kind of humidity that pressed against your skin like a hand that wanted you to stay, and the roads were red and the stores were two, and the people were many and divided in ways that had nothing to do with the division that everyone named and everything to do with the division that no one named because it was the division that divided everyone from themselves.

Silas Hawthorne arrived in this place with a notebook and a reputation and a face that people trusted, which is to say that people did not trust him and therefore showed him things they would not have shown anyone whose face they trusted, because a trusted face is a mask that you recognize as a mask and therefore guard against, and an untrusted face is a door that is left open because no one thinks anyone will walk through it. Silas was a journalist for a newspaper in Memphis, which is to say that he was a man who wrote things down and then other people printed them and then other people read them and then nothing happened, which is the circle of journalism in the south, which is the circle of everything in the south, which is the circle that the Delta has been turning in for centuries and will continue to turn in long after the people who turn it have been forgotten.

He had been sent to investigate Crawford Blackwell, which was not a name that Silas had heard before, but which he was told had become the most important name in three states. Blackwell was thirty-eight years old. He had appeared in Memphis five years earlier with nothing—not money, not education, not connections, not a story that anyone could find. He had opened a grocery store on a corner that had been a corner for nothing for twenty years, and within two years he had owned three blocks. Within three years he had owned businesses in Jackson and Little Rock and every town between them, and no one could say how, and everyone suspected something, and no one would say what.

Miss Ada Mae was the first person Silas spoke to. She was seventy years old, which in the Delta is not old, it is experienced, and she had experienced everything that had happened in this town since before the war and before the war before that and before the war before that, and she sat on her porch with a fan that was not doing anything against the humidity and looked at Silas with eyes that had seen men lie to her face for sixty years and had taught her how to hear the truth in their lies.

"You're the man who writes things down," she said.

"I try to," Silas said.

"Then write this down: Crawford Blackwell is the most dangerous man I have ever met, and he has done nothing wrong that I can point to, and that is what makes him dangerous, because a man who can do nothing wrong and still control everything is either God or something that wears God's skin, and I have seen enough of both to know the difference."

ACT II

Reverend Williams was a small man with a voice that filled the church and then filled the town and then filled the spaces between the houses on nights when the windows were open and the humidity was so thick that sound did not travel but rather sat on top of everything like a blanket, and Reverend Williams had a voice that could lift that blanket and let people see that underneath it, the town was not the town they thought it was.

"Crawford Blackwell came to my church," he told Silas in the parsonage after the service, when the humidity had finally broken enough for the windows to be open and the sound of the crickets to get in and mix with the sound of the tea being poured. "He sat in the back row. He did not sing. He sat with his hands on his knees and his eyes closed and he looked like a man who was praying, but I have known men who pray for forty years and I know the shape of a praying man, and Crawford Blackwell was not praying. He was calculating. He was sitting there and counting the people and measuring the space and deciding what this church was worth and whether it was worth more to him as a church or as land."

"And was it?" Silas said.

"The church?"

"The land or the church. What did he decide?"

Reverend Williams smiled. It was not a kind smile. It was the smile of a man who has been calculating for a long time and has decided that kindness is a luxury he cannot afford. "He decided both. That's the thing about Crawford Blackwell. He decides both. He takes what you think is one thing and he reveals that it was always two things, and he owns both of them, and you are left with nothing, and you thank him for it."

Judge Thorne was a different case. Judge Thorne had been a judge for twenty years, which in the south is not a job, it is a position in the hierarchy, and the hierarchy is not written down but everyone knows it, and Judge Thorne knew that he was near the top, and Crawford Blackwell was arriving, and Judge Thorne knew that Blackwell was not interested in the hierarchy, which was what made him dangerous, because a man who is not interested in the hierarchy is a man who is building a new one, and the man who builds the new one does not ask the man who sits near the top of the old one for permission.

"You want to know about Blackwell?" the Judge said, in his chambers, which smelled of wood polish and old paper and the particular kind of power that comes from being the person everyone has to come to when they want something that the world will not give them freely. "Then stop asking people what Blackwell did. Start asking them what Blackwell did not do. Every action has an action that accompanies it that no one mentions because mentioning it would require admitting that the first action was not the important one. Blackwell's important actions are the ones no one mentions. That is where you will find him."

ACT III

Silas wrote three versions of the story. The first version made Blackwell a villain, because that is what a journalist does when he is sent to investigate someone and the people he speaks to describe someone as dangerous and mysterious and all-powerful— he makes them a villain, because the story demands it, and the story is always more important than the man. The second version made Blackwell a hero, because Miss Ada Mae's eyes and Reverend Williams's smile and Judge Thorne's chambers full of polish and paper told him that the story was not about a man but about a force, and forces cannot be villainized, they can only be understood, and the only way to understand a force is to write about it as if it were a hero, because a hero is a force that has been given a face, and Blackwell had a face, and the face was the most dangerous thing about him, because it was the face of a man who looked like everyone and therefore like no one, which is the face of a man who can be anyone, which is the face of power itself.

The third version was the truth, which is that Silas did not know what to write, and not knowing is the most honest thing a journalist can do, and the newspaper in Memphis did not print honest things, and so the third version was never written, and it existed only in Silas's head, where it lived as a pressure behind his eyes and a tightening in his chest, the same pressure and tightening that Thomas Whitmore had felt in Harlem twenty-five years earlier, because the pattern is the same everywhere, even in the Delta, even in 1954, even in a place that has forgotten how to forgive itself.

Silas left the Delta on a Tuesday. He drove north on a road that was red and the stores were two and the people were many and divided, and he did not look back, because looking back would require admitting that Blackwell was still there, in the place he had built, in the businesses he owned and the land he owned and the churches he had calculated and the judges he had not asked permission from, and Blackwell was there because Blackwell was the Delta, and the Delta was Blackwell, and neither would ever leave.

ACT IV

The newspaper printed a story about Crawford Blackwell six months later. It was a harmless story. It described a man who had opened a grocery store and built a business and employed people and given back to the community. It was a good story. It was well-written. It was entirely false.

Silas Hawthorne left journalism two years later and taught English at a small college in Tennessee, where he wrote books about literature that no one read and taught students who would not listen, and he lived a long life and died at seventy-four in a house that he had bought with money that had come from books that no one read, and on his deathbed, he told his daughter one thing, which was: "There was a man in the Delta who did nothing wrong and controlled everything, and I was sent to write about him and I could not, because the truth is not a story, and the Delta does not forgive itself, and the humidity presses against your skin like a hand that wants you to stay, and I stayed for three weeks and I left and I have been leaving ever since."

His daughter did not understand. She was twenty years old and the Delta was not her home and she had never felt humidity that pressed like a hand. She held his hand and she said, "Rest now, Daddy," and he did rest, and what remained was the chronicle of a watcher who watched a man who did nothing wrong and controlled everything and could not write about it, and the not-writing was the only truth he had, and it remained, and that is all.

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