4
There was plenty of room in the jail, but for safety’s sake they were kept now in two holding cells at the courthouse. Deputies, sweating in the heat, brought them up the back stairs to the third floor and through a side door into another holding cell, this a large room with benches around the walls and, screwed into blocks set into the walls, steel rings heavy chains ran through. The negroes—become the KO boys—were cuffed to these chains. Their legs were shackled. Nobody’d told Little Buster or Butter Beecham about working the cloth of their pants under the shackles, so they had sores now around their ankles. These sores that were beginning to ulcerate kept them awake at night. Delvin listened to them moaning and crying in the bunks across from him. He had gotten up to see to them but there was nothing he could do; he regretted forgetting to tell them about the tuck-in. He mentioned the problem to Billy Gammon and Gammon told the deputies, but the deputies didn’t care. His words bounced off their impervious eyeballs and lay withered and derelict on the floor. He thought maybe if I keep talking I’ll build a pile of words that’ll bury them, but he knew there weren’t enough words.
Gammon told the deputies that the doc said they’d have to delay the trial if the boys got sick or hurt and he’d heard the sheriff complaining already about how much the damn trial was costing the county; he tried that.
“You the ones costing the county,” Deputy Fred Wirkle said with a slapped-on smirk. “You ought to plead those jigs out and let us get on to frying em.”
Gammon gave a weak smile. “We were gon do that, but if we did these New York slickers would just start the appeals and then we would really be in a mess.”
“You the one’s a mess, Billy boy,” Deputy Bee Banks said.
He lived now in the hotel and liked being there in his little room that looked out on the alley. When it rained, water ran down the alley, carrying bits of grass and twigs and chunks of crumbling yellow dirt in a foamy stream that gurgled as it ran. It was as if he was living in a forest and not right in the middle of town. A maid came in every week to change the sheets and towels. He called his mother a couple times a week and they talked about how things were out on the farm. He had attended the state university and then the law school and she had made him promise to come back to Big Cumber county after that. He planned to leave as soon as the trial was over. Those two youngest boys didn’t understand yet that they were being tried. “But, mister,” fifteen-year-old Bony Bates said, “I aint done nothing. Tell em I aint done nothing.” The youngest, thirteen-year-old Little Buster Wayfield liked to play with a piece of string one of the deputies had given him. He made a cat’s cradle and swung a little acorn baby in it. He couldn’t concentrate enough to make out the charges. He smiled at whatever was said to him and reckoned, so he said, that the white mens were going to do what they needed to. Yes, Little Buster, they were. The boy didn’t seem to mind being in jail. He was a skinny child who had never gotten enough to eat and figured he was doing pretty well now. Most of the others couldn’t read or write. The one who understood best was the one who had started it all when he talked back to Carl Willis. Willis looked like a Sunday school boy. Walker was as black as Africa. Even among the colored folks he was considered low class. He had too much smartness in his eyes. But he was young too and Billy could see how scared he was. “How you going to get me free of this, Mr. Gammon?” he had asked. “What you going to do?”
It was obvious those girls were lying. One of them, the skinny one, looked like all she wanted to do was sneak off and forget the whole thing. Billy had talked to her about the Lord, His stand on deceit. She had gotten a sick look on her face when he told her that sending them to the electric chair on a lie was the same as murdering them. But she didn’t change her story. You got locked in, he knew that. Fear—and pride, the old devil. Marcus Worley, the county attorney, had told him if he ever came near those girls again he would have him disbarred. People talked like that, but they all had to live with each other down here. After these boys—white and colored—were gone the rest of us would have to go on living together side by side. It wasn’t like up north where people didn’t live together like we do down here. When you’re close, you got to have an assigned sacrificial lamb. Local version. “Hell, I aint hardly barred as it is,” he’d told Marcus, and they’d both laughed.
He’d grown tired of legal work, but it didn’t matter, still the years rolled on. His spirit had taken the shape of the suit the profession fit him for.
“Lord, don’t you let these crackers run me to the electric chair over some false testimony by women I don’t even know.” These words from Walker made sweat break out. The tone, the word crackers, made Billy want to slap the little seal’s face. Pullen had got to his feet and leaned over the table and said, “You better start practicing your manners if you want to come out of this alive, boy.” He was as bad as the prosecutors. Only Harris had been silent. Watching the exchange with a bemused expression on his hawkish face. He thought he was above all this. Thought he was smart enough to figure a way around a Dixie judge and jury. He’d find out on that one.
The trial jounced on like a runaway wagon. The big girl, Lucille Blaine, could talk all day. She sneered even at the prosecutor. She wore a dark blue crepe dress with white leather belt and white shoes and you could hear her stockings sizzle like searing meat as she walked from the rear of the courtroom. In the high-backed rail chair she had the confidence of the unreachable. Poking from her bland extruded face you could see the ridges of stony refusal, the uncomplicitous aggrievement and hatred. The world has come to this, Billy thought. It was decaying to stone before our eyes but we took no notice. He had no love for these black fellows but sometimes he wanted to go into a small quiet room and weep there. Wrath, he thought, like the Bible turned inside out.
What had been done to this woman could not be undone and this scared him.
“I wouldn’t have no truck with a nigra,” she said. “Who would? They got diseases and, well, it would make me sick to my death.”
She showed her big shiny teeth to the jury and the jury shrunk back. She would eat the ones who disagreed. The courtroom smelled of gravy sandwiches and grease. “This one here, and those other ones,” she said, “came at me in that train car like I was a chicken they was trying to cut its head off with a ax. They was all laughing and they had a fire in their eyes. They pushed me down in this old messy straw. The straw dust got up my nose and made me sneeze. I couldn’t stop sneezing even when they threw my dress up over my head and went at me. I was crying and sneezing at the same time. And yelling to Jesus. That’s how I got the big bruise on my face. One of them—I think—and I think—and I think—” and Pullen stopped her because the judge wouldn’t and in his most affable manner asked the judge to explain to the young lady that she could only testify to what she had seen—not speculated. The judge smiled at the woman whom he would never have in his house, or even in his yard—or his street or his town that had a rose-twined arch under which travelers passed as they entered from the western environs—if he could help it, and reminded her of the rules. But when the traveler did it again, saying that she thought (and thought and thought and thought) it was—stopped by Pullen—the judge frowned at the lawyer and told him to quit harassing the witness. The traveler shed a smile like a bitter cry and plunged on, wielding her heavy knives and cannon and sorrow.
So she can’t let on, Billy thought—not anywhere on earth or in heaven—that she, a white woman, had let a black man have his way with her. (Somebody had—so the doctor said—but that somebody had probably paid and got his favor before she even left the rail yards up in Chattanooga. That was what she was doing on the train—working.) Even if the nigra paid, she had still let him. If she told the truth, the bottom might fall out of the bucket. Like everybody here, he thought—each one of us fighting and dodging and swinging whatever weapon we can lift—she was trying to fend off the shame of it.
“I was scared they was gon kill me,” Lucille said, Miss Blaine. “The way they threw me around.”
A tittering at this due to Miss Blaine’s massivity. She glared at the assembled, swung a glare at the lawyers and the judge. “A man is strong,” she said. “Too strong. If any of you was a woman you’d know that.”
Her face was bright pink, and grainy like watermelon, and she was crying now, tiny round dark tears like birdshot rolling down her cheeks. Billy thinking this. For a moment he hated her. Even though he knew if what she was saying wasn’t true now, it was probably true sometime, somewhere for her.
“They scratched me, and that one there”—she pointed at either Delvin Walker or Rollie Gregory, the largest and the oldest of the accused—“beat on me with his fist. Beat me like I was heaven’s gate locked against him. Hell’s gate.”
On she went, casting her net of hatred and fury. She swayed and lurched in her seat like a woman blown by storm—or like a woman, Pullen had said, dodging a whip. The white observers, leaning forward, their legs stiff, their hands working handkerchiefs, their faces rigid or slack-jawed with attention—that ripe individual over there sprawled in his chair like Caiphus or that old woman with her thin rouged lips lifted off her dog teeth or that young bailiff pressing with his fist a red mark into his forehead or the spiffy little judge with eyes squinched up into his bushy brows—all absorbing this, filling up with the befouled words, the words giving them something like life, but better.
And what was that? he thought. What was better than life? And what about the colored folk up in the balcony. They looked on with subreption and woe like a dullness and thinned-out hope in their faces.
But Billy didn’t have time to answer.
The big woman leaned back in her chair, settling her prayer-meeting dress around her. “I never stop feeling the hurt of it,” she said. Her cheeks glowed with suffering virtue.
She is trading her immortal soul, Billy thought, for a moment of irreproachable righteousness. It didn’t matter that she was lying. How could it? A moment like this was probably never coming again for a woman like this. It didn’t matter what the truth was. What mattered was filling head and heart with righteousness, for once finding something she could put her soul into. Like everybody, whether sorting through their own meagerness or fossicking their children’s lives for talents they didn’t have or stacking up cargo in the back room or abetting what they thought of as goodness—some something they could get behind with all they had. And the preacher, speaking from the rolled-down window of his Cadillac, saying, “Pass it on to the Lord, sinner.”
These thoughts zipped by and were gone.
Poor woman, he thought.
As they walked out last night from the hotel room they worked in now, Harris had said to him: “She’s going to have to stay mad all her life.” He was chuckling quietly as he said this, in wonder, a familiar wonder. Billy saw now what he meant. She was lying like a little boy saying it was trolls knocked him down and got his Sunday clothes dirty. Well, maybe it was trolls. And maybe this woman had been raped. Sure she had. She’d been raped and beaten and purely deceived, right from the set-out probably—this was what Harris had said as they sat out on the hotel’s second-floor porch, the old man smoking a cigarillo and drinking Spanish brandy from a tiny snifter—“misused and punished for things she didn’t do and lied to probably by every man she met. And now she has her chance to correct all that. These boys are the ones elected to pay the price for all those other boys who got away.”
“What can we do?” Billy had asked, as if he didn’t already know what the old man told him, or what was coming.
“Well, we will see,” Harris had said, tipping the snifter in his short pudgy fingers so the brandy almost but not quite spilled.
Now in the airy courtroom the old man from the Daily Worker’s legal auxiliary got to his feet. He began to ask the woman, Miss Blaine, questions about the details. What were the men wearing? Did she notice anything special about any of them? If they had pulled her dress over her head, how could she identify who had done what? Why was it she had not gotten blood on her? Walker and the others were cut in the fight and they were wearing clothes splashed with blood. Why was it that none of the white boys had at first mentioned that a rape had occurred? What about her history? Did she not work regularly as a prostitute on the Richmond & Hattiesburg freight lines? Wasn’t prostitution her regular means of employment?
The judge stopped this line of questioning. “We are here,” he said tapping the bench top with his forefinger, “to find out what happened on the afternoon of September eight.”
“Why were you on that train?” Harris asked.
“I heard about jobs in Memphis.”
“What jobs were those, Miss Blaine?”
“Housework, cleaning.”
“Have you done much housework, Miss Blaine?”
“My share.”
“Could you tell us the names of some of your employers?”
Miss Blaine had forgotten their names.
Harris asked about the treatments for gonorrhea, in Chattanooga and Roanoke, Virginia.
The judge stopped him again.
Harris picked away at her story through the warm fall afternoon. The courtroom smelled of sweat and overly saturated perfume. Delvin could smell from somewhere nearby the slightly sour odor of cow manure somebody’d tracked in. It was all he could do not to leap from his chair to argue with the white woman. “Tell me one true thing about me—ME!” he wanted to shout. He knew she wouldn’t be able to say one thing. She was like a locustwood knot, nothing to her but sap and hardheadedness. Mr. Oliver used to call him hardheaded. Well he should come see hardheadedness now. He looked around the courtroom, but there was no Mr. Oliver. He had left after their meeting in the jail and Delvin had not heard from him since. People had written him—Celia’s letters were the ones he cherished—and the Ghost had been in town for two weeks. Delvin had seen him standing outside the jail and waved to him. The Ghost acted like he didn’t know it was him waving. But the next day he showed up again, taking the same spot as the day before, next to the boiled peanuts stand. The steam from the boiler blew over Winston, alternately concealing and revealing him. He was as skinny as ever. Delvin had waved, but again the Ghost hadn’t acknowledged him. He was in the same spot most days of the two weeks and he never indicated that he had seen Delvin. He was in the courtroom too, on the second day, but Delvin had not seen him since.
He put his hands under the table because they had started to shake. He tried with all his will to make them stop, but they kept trembling. His flesh seemed to have come loose from his skin. The thought made him wince so he looked as if he was hearing the unpalatable truth, which the jury noticed. He was so vexed it was all he could do not to leap up and run. He was going to run. If he wasn’t in too many pieces and he found a way. Big hollows inside his body, gaps, cut-through places, like in the hills where one hill fell off and another hadn’t hardly got started. And always these days a chill wind circulating, dipping icy fingers into troughs and low, damp spots. Sometimes he was as still as a thing that had never lived. Sometimes he trembled like a bent motor. Sometimes frozen, sometimes hot as a steam iron. The boys had begun to look to him to speak for them but he didn’t think he could. He could talk, and he could understand what the lawyers were saying, but he could hardly keep from busting into tears—from running. He was going to run.
Mr. Pullen had laid out the case, and though he said it was clear as day that the men hadn’t committed the crime, Delvin couldn’t see one good thing about what was coming. Even Little Buster, a child who didn’t know how to read and had to count on his fingers, saw that the joke was on the africano boys. “Might as well get to training for jail,” he’d said. “That is if they don’t light us up.” “We in that training now, fool,” Carl Crawford told him. But two of the boys were so ignorant they hardly realized they were in jail.
In his bed at night Delvin lay on his belly pushing his face into the cotton pallet, coughing up tears until his stomach cramped. My everyday path a road of fire. He jammed his fist into his mouth and bit down so hard the pain made him shiver and cry out. “That you, Delvin?” Bonette Collins called out. Delvin didn’t answer, but then when he saw in the dark that Bonette was getting out of his bunk he told him to stay where he was. “I’s all right,” he said. He tried not to let them see him crying, but they could each see the dismals in the others’ faces, the torment. They looked like their best friend had died. Or more, as if something promised—so ordinary and inevitable and such a sure thing they didn’t have to give it a thought—had suddenly been taken away. Something—slide of blood in the veins, the world’s itinerant sweetness—that you didn’t even know could be taken away, something you hardly even knew you had. But, gone . . . you were broken and scattered. The white folks made you feel small, sure. They made you feel you were wrong to be . . . yeah, to be. But this that was snatched away now was none of that. This was something else. “It’s like we was walking along,” Coover Broadfoot said, “and a mule fell out of the sky and hit us.” “I know which mule it was, too,” Bonette Collins said and the others laughed; they all knew. When you thought about what was happening—what was going to happen—you got so scared you couldn’t think straight.
This is grief, Delvin thought. We’re in mourning.
He wrote some of this down in the little notebook Gammon had told the jailer he needed for the case—not really a notebook but one somebody’d torn crossways in half; enough to write on. It had a mud stain on it and the pages were hooped where they’d gotten wet and dried out. You want to run right through the walls. Sometimes you can hardly draw breath; sometimes you can’t get any air in your breath. Carl said he thought he was drowning. We all think we are drowning. But we aren’t drowning and we have to breathe and we can’t . . . He tried to stick to what was going on right this minute. I am chewing a piece of hard yellow cornbread, he wrote, one chew, two, three . . . my fingernails are turning brown . . . and on he went, but his mind wouldn’t stay on bread chewing or his nails—or walking up and down or staring at the tin-sheathed wall where a window ought to be.
The town was full of spectators. Sports and the bedeviled, thrillseekers, the estranged and crippled, common people, farmers drifted in on market days, old men riding in weathered wagons and children walking along beside, women in poke bonnets carrying tied-up packages by the string, aficionados of death row, reporters, profiteers, the falsely cunning and bereft. Some few of the africano women tried to bring them gifts. Food in wicker hampers or stacked in plates tied with a cotton cloth. Men wanted to look at them and the deputies brought a few of them back to the cell, white men, most of whom tried to look casual or tough—or maybe they were tough—leaning against one of the stone posts thumbing their galluses and leering. Some were calm, others stiff. Some had been walking around for weeks with a numbness on their skin, with a burning in closed places, with a sorrow so old and ugly they took a doctor’s pills to make it subside and stood on the back porch tossing bits of skillet bread to the dog or waked after midnight and went out in the dewy grass and called a name they hadn’t spoken since they were youngsters, parents of children who shuddered at their prayers and were losing weight and husbands of women who locked themselves in their rooms and sat on the bed fiddling with their rings—they had come here to see the living dead. More than one with his face like it was shellacked. Most sweating, some angry, some laughing. Most able to go on with their lives, even the man on a crutch the varnish was worn off of, or the fat man in a striped shirt eating a tamale from a piece of waxed paper. The fat man wiped his mouth with his bare wrist, leaving a streak of red juice on his cheek. A bouncy little man couldn’t stop grinning. A preacher dwelt in pentecostal gloom. Most—even those troubled in their spirit—were appreciative, relieved of the burden of chasing down these miscreants, of handling their black flesh or staring into their eyes in the last moments of their freedom, of being the ones sweating and running to catch up; they enjoyed now the blood surge that grew in strength as they walked the crooked jailhouse corridors toward the cell. Some experienced this episode as nothing more than a rectifying revenge—and Delvin thought, That is what it is: revenge by murder, and he had turned away and gotten sick in the slop bucket. They don’t know me, he thought. And behind him, outside the bars, hearts ticking, breath entering lungs and blood circulating through bodies, deep into the indwellings of the brain, clattering and banging out the news: Not me, not this time—not me.
Carl’s mother had come and Bonette’s and Little Buster’s, but they weren’t allowed back to the cell. The prisoners could hear people calling to them from the street. At night the voices were clear even in the heavy air. Men saying, We going to hang yu, jigs. We gon get yu tucked into hell. Gon slip up there and cut yu up. Burn yu. Women called too. Ha ha, they said, ha ha ha. A deputy would have to go out and tell them to be quiet. You run back in, Horton, and play with yo coons, somebody yelled and the crowd laughed. They were marginal folk, long dispossessed of love for themselves, mostly. Cunning but not smart. They wrapped themselves in the ragged tails of night. Somebody broke into song. Crooked hymn singing. From a hymnal nobody in the cell had ever read. The voices quoted scriptures of damnation and pestilence. None with green pastures in them. None with still waters. New scriptures, hot off the presses. Lo, from this place you will exit burning. Oh ye of the jig rind crisping. Yo body become ashes cast on the wind. Where you will dwell forever.
He paced the cell back and forth until he was tired or one of the other boys told him to please, dammit, quit. Or somebody with a problem, some ordinary problem, some ailment or fabrication, some Bonette with a blister where he’d rubbed his thumb against his bunk or Carl with a knee that hurt or Butter whose throat always ached from all the crying in his sleep, took his attention. Delvin would dip the tail of his shirt in the water bucket and press it against the back of Buster’s neck while the slim boy clutched his hand. He could feel Buster’s pulse through the cloth. “I’m about to buster out of my skin,” Buster said, and laughed at his only joke. Delvin sat up with Carl, who liked to pray. With Rollie, who lied about everything. Rollie’s long, up-curled lip made him look like he was about to say something important, but he never did. He had the training for these ministrations and he knew they would help ease his own panic. He was the one called most often to confer with the lawyers, especially by Gammon, the young man from down the road in Tuxer. Gammon seemed not so scared of him. In the courtroom at the two tables pushed together in an L shape Gammon sat beside him and often scratched notes to him on the large pale brown sheets he carried into the courtroom. It’s going to be all right, he wrote; foolishly, Delvin thought. Things are going to work out. No, they aint, Delvin had written back. Things have already been busted to pieces. Beyond fixing. That was the point, wadn’t it? But the words, written down, scared him. When Gammon scribbled his note on the same slip of paper and passed it to him, Delvin scratched his own words out.
It was from the Klaudio courthouse that he tried his first escape. During a recess in which the prisoners were taken out of the courtroom to an unoccupied office belonging to the state farm agency in the company of the lawyers and a burly jailer who spit tobacco juice into a white ceramic mug he carried everywhere, Delvin made his first jump. They were on the third floor and looked out of three tall windows cracked to let a little air into the room. They had taken the chains and shackles off because the accused were supposed to be sufficiently cowed. Gammon was talking to him about his love of football when the bailiff stepped out to get a fresh chaw of tobacco. Brown’s Mule. He hadn’t thought about escaping, or not in the way he was used to thinking. A pressure—was that it?—had built up. Something, a scraping in him, low distant rasping he hardly noticed, and this worrisome discomposing in his body—this jumpiness: they had built up. Azalea bushes planted around the courthouse were not in bloom, but they were thick with gray-green leaves. Which meant the ground underneath them after these late rains would probably be soggy.
This was the sixth time they’d been in the room. This was the first time the bailiff had stepped out.
He was ready, but still, after the door closed behind the bailiff, he hesitated. Maybe the man was coming right back. Maybe the punishment for trying to escape was too severe. Maybe they would beat him. Maybe the lawyers, these rectifying white men, would desert him. Maybe he would be hurt in the fall.
Carl Crawford, carrying a strange formal quality, his face pimply with ingrown hairs, leaned toward Rollie Gregory, twirling his long fingers; Rollie laughed his crackly, misbelieving laugh. Little Buster Wayfield stared at the ceiling, moving his mouth like he was talking. Gammon was just telling him about Jim Thorpe, an Indian hero, an athlete, a performer for white men, who had been humiliated on a football field down in Florida a few years back by Red Grange and his team of NFL brutes, white men still paying the Indians back for Custer.
Then, click: he simply moved. A dart toward the window. He caught the look of surprise on Gammon’s face. Coover and Bony looked at him and Bony in a quiet voice that sounded to Delvin like a scream, cried, “Where you going?” Everything else, even the broad day outside and the whole fraudulent enterprise they were mired in, went quiet. The window was heavy but with a hard shove of one hand he forced it fully open and before anybody moved he was out into the air. He fell twenty feet. After the first four or five the fall seemed like flying. A sense of terrifying weightlessness filled him just before he crashed ass first into the azalea bushes. A branch tore through his pants and cut a deep scratch into the side of his leg. But he wasn’t hurt.
He rolled out of the bush, scrambled to his feet—the sight of the long red scratch under the khaki cloth almost made him sick—and began to run across the wide mushy lawn. A large woman in a pink dress stared at him with her mouth open. A man on the cement walk skipped a step as if he was getting out of Delvin’s way though he wasn’t anywhere near him. A voice cried out from the courthouse porch. “That’s one of them nigras.” Shouts went up, the noise beating against his body like hard rain out of the blue sky, but he was running, fleet, the town moving past him in a blur of little specks of life jumping—the squirrel hanging upside down from a catalpa branch, a little boy pop-eyed and grinning, a woman waving a yellow scarf in front of her face—all additions, subtracting as they went by, as he went by, plunging into space as he ran, each step a fall, each a bungle and bluster and a soaring, each carrying him nowhere and everywhere, and he was running, running . . .
He made it to the corner, dashed across the street, turned right and headed down past a big furniture store. There were three brown leather armchairs in the picture window, arranged looking out, empty—lonely, he thought. An outside staircase led up the side of the gray brick building across the street. He liked outdoor staircases. He was running hard. Up ahead the picture show had Joan Crawford and Clark Gable on the marquee. He had never seen either of them. There looked to be an empty lot on the other side of the theater and beyond it a large white frame building with bushes around it and past that a big yard and past that a little copse of mulberry trees. He thought he could make it to the trees and be gone. He smelled boiled peanuts. The sky was stripped of clouds.
Just then, without warning, a man tackled him. Delvin went sprawling onto his chest on the pavement. He tried to get up but the man held him. In a second another man was on him and then another. He could smell tobacco and raw vinegary sweat and corn whiskey. The men—white men—were cursing him. He writhed against the rough load of bodies—white bodies closer than any white bodies had ever been: hands, fingers gouging, elbows knocking, feet kicking and stomping and knees hitting him in the back and between the legs and an unshaven cheek scraping against his and he could hear somebody’s soft panting like the panting of a dog and somebody’s scratchy breath whistled in his ear and he almost laughed because the whistle seemed like the first bars of that song, what was the one? He made a whimpering sound that he had not known was in him. A woman somewhere close by was screaming. He kicked out with his feet, or tried to, but he couldn’t get traction, couldn’t reach any step or ledge to prise himself free.
It was no use. A silence like a gathering poison filled him.
The power that keeps the world spinning turned and stooped to him and the power behind this power bent down too and the others in the endless line and these powers looked at him and didn’t say anything or do anything and then they went on and he lay still.
“Ah me,” he whispered, “ah me.”