Part two...
While Mapes was trying to make sense of the killing and confessions of all the old men, Gil Boutan, a star football player at LSU and Beau's brother, gets the news that his older bro has gone to meet his Maker. Confused, angry, and hurt, Gil heads on back to the Boutan home and has a heart-to-heart with his not-so warm and cuddly daddy. Gil begs Fix not to do anymore of the evil things that he's done in the past, and Fix agrees—after he disowns Gil, that is.
Gil is pretty upset in more ways than one, but Luke Will—one of Beau's drinking buddies with a whole lot of hate, not a lot of brains, and ties to the Ku Klux Klan—is angry for a completely different reason. He promises that bad things are going to happen to Black folks in Marshall, whether Fix is there himself or not.
The next thing you know, it's back to Marshall Plantation, and Sheriff Mapes is just about as happy as a five-year-old on his sixth birthday when he finds out that Fix isn't planning on showing up. When he tells everybody the news, Mathu agrees to head over to the station and go down for killing Beau. Most of the old men are pretty upset, because they'd been secretly loading fresh ammo into their shotguns this whole time, and were planning on either taking Fix out, or going down in a blaze of glory.
That's when Big Charlie shows up. He admits to killing Beau in self-defense, and says he's ready to take his medicine and take his chances with the law.
But Charlie isn't the only unexpected guest who shows up late to the shotgun party. Luke Will and some of his redneck pals show up too, drunk and armed with guns of their own. When one of them wings Mapes (who's too fat to get up afterwards), a firefight kicks off. At the end of it, one of Luke's pals is wounded, and Luke and Charlie are dead. When the case goes to trial, the judge gives every surviving member of the battle at Marshall five years of probation. Mathu and his pals head back to Marshall, leaving Candy and Lou holding hands and watching the dust clouds that the truck kicks up as it leaves.
The author, Earnest Gaines was among the fifth generation of his sharecropper family to be born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. This became the setting and premise for many of his later works. He was the eldest of 12 children, raised by his aunt, who was crippled and had to crawl to get around the house. Although born generations after the end of slavery, Gaines grew up impoverished, living in old slave quarters on a plantation.
Gaines' first years of school took place in the plantation church. When the children were not picking cotton in the fields, a visiting teacher came for five to six months of the year to provide basic education. Gaines then spent three years at St. Augustine School, a Catholic school for African Americans in New Roads, Louisiana. Schooling for African-American children did not continue beyond the eighth grade during this time in Pointe Coupee Parish.
As of November 2013, Gaines lives on Louisiana Highway 1 in Oscar, Louisiana, where he and his wife built a home on part of the old plantation where he grew up. He had the church he grew up with moved to his property.
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