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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Pedestal
The monument stood seventeen feet tall in the center of Carthage Square, and Beaumont Thibodaux had polished it himself every Confederate Memorial Day for the past forty-three years. Even now, at seventy-one, with his knees complaining and his back seized up like rusted hinges, he climbed the stepladder with his chamois cloth and tin of brass polish, working the verdigris from the folds of the bronze soldier's coat.
Below him, the town of Meridian, Mississippi, went about its Saturday morning business. White women in cotton dresses pushed baby carriages past the hardware store. Men in suspenders gathered outside the barbershop, their voices carrying across the square in that lazy drawl that made every conversation sound like it might take all day. The Negroes kept to their side of Main Street, as they always had, as everyone understood they should.
"Looking fine, Mr. Beaumont!" called out Delphine Marchetti from the steps of her dress shop. "Your daddy would be proud!"
Beaumont raised his hand in acknowledgment but didn't turn around. His daddy. That was always the refrain. His daddy would be proud. His daddy, the hero of Shiloh, who had charged the Union line when his commanding officer fell, who had rallied the men of the 9th Mississippi Infantry, who had taken a Yankee bullet through the shoulder and kept fighting until the battle was won.
The bronze soldier gazed northward with empty eyes, his rifle raised, his jaw set in eternal determination. The plaque at the base read: COLONEL AUGUSTINE THIBODAUX, 1829-1898, HERO OF SHILOH, BELOVED SON OF MISSISSIPPI. Beaumont had composed those words himself, had paid the foundry in Memphis three thousand dollars—a fortune in 1919—to cast the statue. He had stood in this very square at the unveiling ceremony, just twenty-eight years old, accepting the gratitude of a town that wanted so desperately to believe in its glorious past.
The cloth moved in circles across the bronze, and Beaumont tried not to think about what lay beneath the metal. Not bone and sinew, of course. Just hollow darkness. Just the empty space where a man should have been.
"Mr. Beaumont?"
He looked down. Cornelius Washington stood at the base of the ladder, his hat in his hands. Cornelius was Ossie Mae's grandson, a young man of perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, home from that Negro college up in Nashville. He had his grandmother's eyes—watchful, patient, seeing more than they let on.
"What is it, Cornelius?"
"Grandma sent me to fetch you for lunch. She says you've been out here since seven and you'll make yourself sick in this heat."
Beaumont glanced at the sun, surprised to find it nearly overhead. The morning had slipped away from him, as mornings often did when he was tending the monument. "Tell her I'll be along directly."
Cornelius nodded but didn't move. He was looking at the statue with an expression Beaumont couldn't quite read. Not admiration—Beaumont had never expected that from Negroes, who had their own complicated feelings about Confederate monuments. But not quite contempt either. Something more like curiosity, as if he were studying a specimen under glass.
"Something on your mind, boy?"
The word came out automatically—boy—though Cornelius was a grown man with a college education, probably knew more about books and history than half the white men in Meridian. Beaumont saw the young man's jaw tighten, just slightly, before smoothing into careful neutrality.
"No, sir. Just waiting on you."
"Well, you can wait at the house. I said I'll be along."
Cornelius put his hat back on, a gesture that might have been defiance in another era, and walked away across the square. Beaumont watched him go, noting the straightness of his spine, the deliberate pace that was neither hurried nor dawdling. The boy had changed since coming back from Nashville. There was something in him now that hadn't been there before—a kind of coiled energy, like a spring wound too tight.
Beaumont turned back to the statue and found he couldn't remember where he'd left off polishing. The bronze face stared down at him, and for just a moment, he could have sworn it was accusing him of something.
