DeWeese-Boyd 19
Danny from recovering Burley does in fact serve the good it was intended to, namely,
Burley’s protection and well being. Clearly, it would be a dubious logic that supposes
that protecting someone bent on killing—for example, aiding and abetting Eric Robert
Rudolph—serves patriotic affection and fidelity. Jim Crow laws, on the other hand,
were legal statutes that patriotism, on Berry’s view, would have required one to resist
and oppose.
Wheeler, concluding his conversation with Bode and thus the Detective’s
business, guides the young detective into the waiting room outside his office where he
introduces a dozen of Burley’s close friends and relations who have gathered there both
to mourn Burley and to lend their support to Danny. Bode begins to question them, but
his questions merely prompt extemporaneous eulogies to the deceased. The young
Detective finds himself strangely in the midst of a conversation that is not his own, one
that by his lights he sees he hardly has a right to be in, since it is the conversation of
those to whom Burley belonged and who belonged to him.
The story culminates with Danny stepping into the waiting room. Bode comes to
his feet and starts aggressively interrogating Danny regarding his whereabouts over the
last twenty-four hours, and Henry quietly but firmly tells Bode to take his seat since,
lacking any substantive evidence, he has no right to question Danny. His defeat clear,
Bode “felt small and lost, somewhere beyond the law” (189). In the story, “Fidelity”,
this place beyond the law is the place where affection for one’s people and community
is preeminent. It is, “the larger, darker world not ordered by human reasons or subject
to them.”(1992, 179) Bode’s “small clear world of the law and it explanations” is not
Convention