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Without thinking, Alex climbs over the railing, takes a deep breath, and flings himself into the frigid abyss, willing Connor’s promise to hold true.
CHAPTER SIX KWAME
“I don’t care what anyone has to say, Wade was murdered.”
Jedidiah Jenkins doesn’t beat around the bush. Kwame’s barely settled at the patio table on Jedidiah’s screened-in back porch when he blurts out this bold statement.
“No ifs, ands, or buts about it,” Jedidiah continues with an emphatic head nod to drive the point home. “Don’t care if no one believes me, either, including you, son. Because it’s the truth.”
“Sorry, hold up a sec. I’m not recording.” Kwame frantically sets up his Zoom H6 handheld recorder next to the sweating pitcher of lemonade on the table. He’d been so careful to get audio on his way in—the spin of the tires of his rental car in Jedidiah’s gravel driveway, the soft clicking of the engine cutting off, and even the “shit” he muttered under his breath when he realized he’d left the car in gear before turning the key. He also captured the first doorbell ring, and the second and the third, which is what it took for his host, who’s apparently losing his hearing in his advanced age, to finally answer the door. But Kwame forgot all about recording as they got to talking about last night’s Jaguars game—a nail-biter Jacksonville squeaked out with a field goal in the last fifty-two seconds—while Jedidiah led them through the cramped but tidy house to the patio. Kwame lays the device down next to his notebook and checks and double-checks the blinking red light.
“Oh yeah, that’s right. This is for one of those pod blasts, you said, right?” Jedidiah asks.
Kwame doesn’t correct him, “pod blasts” is close enough and not inaccurate when you think about it. He does hope to blast people with information, in a way.
“Yeah, exactly. You ever listen to one?” Kwame’s own parents could never figure out how to get to Spotify or Apple, and completely shut down when anyone used the term “download,” so he’d had to burn them a CD of the first season of What’s Done in the Dark. Ironically, figuring out how to do that in 2025 was a kind of reverse technological feat.
“Nah, can’t say I’ve ever heard one. But I know it’s like the radio, right? I used to listen to all these fishing shows on WJCT back when I had my mail route. You know I was a postal worker? Four decades of carrying the mail. A walking route—six miles a day. Same route, too, for thirty-five of those forty years. Over in Riverside, those ole big houses. Some of the people along the route pitched in together and bought me a fishing boat when I retired last year. Ain’t that something else? White folks’ll sure surprise you sometimes.”
Kwame was also touched when he read about the gift in the Florida Times-Union. That’s how he found Jedidiah in the first place. It’s the first piece that pops up in Google: NEIGHBORS SHOW LOVE FOR DEDICATED POSTMAN. The article also mentioned that Jedidiah was a graduate of the Tate School. That was all the confirmation Kwame needed to know he’d found his man.
From what Kwame gleaned from the piece and what he observes now, it seems like Jedidiah has had a decent life, a humble life, but he clearly isn’t retiring on a bed of money like all those other graduates of Tate probably were. He doesn’t get to have an empire of overpriced grocery stores. But he’s lived to a ripe old age, and that was victory enough for a Black man.
“People never fail to surprise me, Mr. Jenkins. White, Black, or green.” Kwame momentarily drifts to thinking about Simone, how surprised he was last week to see her in heels over Keds, with long red fake nails instead of the bitten stubs he’d known her to have.
“Okay, none of this ‘Mr. Jenkins’ business. Call me JJ like everyone else. And yes, it’s fine to record me. Don’t know who wants to hear an old man drone on, but you’re welcome to it.”
“Cool, thank you, so… JJ, you were saying that your friend met with a suspicious end.”
“That’s a nice way of saying they killed him.”
“Who’s they?”
“Now that I’m not exactly sure.”
“Can we just back up for a second?”
Kwame was used to sources being much less forthcoming; even if they weren’t hiding anything, it often made folks freeze up the second they saw a microphone. He usually had to be much more patient, put much more effort into building a rapport before he got to the heart of things.
“Sure, sure. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“How about we start with how you got to the Tate School in the first place?”
“You mean how does a scrawny kid, dark as night, from the Jim Crow South, get to an elite boarding school in a state he’d barely heard of?” Jedidiah pauses, rubbing his salt-and-pepper beard. The only real tell of his eighty-three years. Otherwise, he has the wardrobe—Nike gym shorts and slides with socks and a slick black hoodie over a white ribbed tank—and the muscle tone of a much younger man. Hauling all those heavy bags of mail for years was apparently as effective as any twenty-four-hour fitness regimen; though seeing that an elderly man’s calves are putting Kwame’s own to shame is pushing him to get back to the gym, stat.
“I grew up in a little dot of a place in Mississippi, might as well have been the devil’s armpit. That’s how hot it was. And could be that evil too. Bet you think this is hot?” Jedidiah motions to the air around them, where the humidity is in fact so thick it’s almost visible. Kwame is sweating his ass off in a bulky sweater, but somehow he’d been too distracted to bother checking details like weather and just threw on what he was wearing last night to make his seven a.m. flight in time. He may have an easy rapport with Jedidiah, but he still doesn’t feel he can strip down to his Hanes undershirt.
Jedidiah is momentarily distracted, staring at the empty concrete hole in the ground a few feet away. “Scorchers like this, I wish I’d kept up with the pool. Emptied it a few years back when my wife gone to the Lord—too much work. It was her dream to have a pool, not mine. But happy wife, happy life, you know. Anyway, what was I saying?”
“How you got to Tate?”
“Oh yeah, that’s right… I was in the seventh grade when one of my teachers, Ms. James, who, by the way, was maybe the most fine-ass woman my young eyes had laid sight on, told me and my folks about this new program at Tate. The school was taking applications to offer full scholarships to let a few Negroes in. I’d never heard of Tate myself, of course. Didn’t even know what a boarding school was, much less thought about going to one. When it was explained to me, it seemed crazy that someone would pay money to send their child away for school. But I was smart, whip smart. I’m not bragging, mind you, was just a fact. The good Lord blessed me with some top-of-the-line brains, but my school didn’t have any resources. You know how it was, used books from the white school, overworked teachers who barely got a decent wage. What do your parents do for work, son?”
Talking to Jedidiah this last hour, Kwame’s gotten a sense that the conversation is going to continue to turn, dip, and swerve like a line dance. He needs to just surrender to the rhythm… and the tangents. Also to remind himself that the tangents are usually exactly what gets him to the most interesting parts of the story.
“Mom’s a nurse, Dad’s an electrician. Has his own business.”
“Ah, that’s the way to go, work for yourself, not the man. My momma always said you can trust folks who work with their hands—hard to hide anything or fool anyone when you have to make it or fix it. I wanted to be a doctor, maybe, myself, ’til I realized I don’t take to blood too well. Ms. James knew I had potential, like I said. She was dead set on helping me see my way to college—Tuskegee or Fisk, maybe even Howard. So when she heard about the Tate opportunity, she gunned for me to go for it. A top-tier education like that could change my life. Naturally, I had my reservations, big-time. Or fear, really. Last thing I wanted was to leave my folks and my older sisters and move a thousand miles away to some place I’d never heard of, but my family was all about me going. When I got the letter that I got in, turning it down was not an option. Ms. James was right about one thing, though. It did change my life. For better and for worse.”
