Sycamore Row - John Grisham

layers of wrinkles around his glassy eyes. He said he had a bad heart and had once
smoked heavily.
Portia explained that she and her mother were trying to put together their family tree
and there was a chance they might be related to him. This made him smile, a jagged one
with missing teeth. Portia knew there was no birth record of a Boaz Rinds in Ford
County, but by then she knew perfectly well how spotty the record keeping had been.
He said he had two sons, both dead, and his wife had died years earlier. If he had
grandkids he didn’t know it. No one ever came to visit him. From the looks of the place,
Boaz was not the only resident who’d been abandoned.
He spoke slowly, stopping occasionally to scratch his forehead while he tried to
remember. After ten minutes, it was obvious he was suffering from some type of
dementia. He’d had a harsh, almost brutal life. His parents were farmworkers who
drifted throughout Mississippi and Alabama, dragging their large family—seven kids—
from one cotton field to the next. He remembered picking cotton when he was five years
old. He never went to school, and the family never stayed in one place. They lived in
shacks and tents and hunger was not uncommon. His father died young and was buried
behind a black church near Selma. His mother took up with a man who beat the kids.
Boaz and a brother ran away and never went back.
Portia took notes as Lettie prodded with soft questions. Boaz loved the attention. An
orderly brought them iced tea. He could not remember the names of his grandparents
and did not remember anything about them. He thought they lived in Mississippi. Lettie
asked about several names, all in the Rinds family. Boaz would grin, nod, then admit he
didn’t know the person. But when she said “Sylvester Rinds,” he kept nodding, and
nodding, and finally he said, “He was my uncle. Sylvester Rinds. He and my daddy were
cousins.”
Sylvester was born in 1898 and died in 1930. He owned the eighty acres that was
deeded by his wife to Cleon Hubbard, father of Seth.
If Monroe Rinds, father of Boaz, was a cousin to Sylvester, then he wasn’t really an
uncle of Boaz’s. However, in light of the meandering nature of the Rinds tree, they were
not about to correct him. They were too thrilled to get this information. Lettie had come
to believe her birth mother was Lois Rinds, the daughter of Sylvester, and she was
anxious to prove it. She asked, “Sylvester owned some land, didn’t he?”
The usual nod, then a smile. “Seem like he did. Believe so.”
“Did you and your family ever live on his land?”
He scratched his forehead. “Believe so. Yes, when I was a little boy. I remember it
now, pickin’ cotton on my uncle’s land. Remember now. And there was a fight over
payin’ us for the cotton.” He rubbed his lips and mumbled something.
“So there was a disagreement, and what happened?” Lettie asked gently.
“We left there and went to another farm, don’t know where. We worked so many.”
“Do you remember if Sylvester had any children?”
“Ever’body had kids.”
“Do you remember any of Sylvester’s?”
Boaz scratched and thought so hard he eventually nodded off. When they realized he