Ginny Gall (35 page)

In the boxcar things had quieted down. No one was hurt badly, though Coover Broadfoot, one of the negro men from C-town, had been struck just above the eye and was now getting a bad headache.
Others had cuts, big pear- and plum-colored bruises, welts along the back and side. Davie Considine’s jaw—he was a white boy with, so the papers said, a dream to open a watch repair shop—where a negro boy (Bonette Collins) had whacked him with a piece of stovewood, ached. Several had stinging sensations where they’d been hit with limber pieces of bamboo, or numbness. Nobody was sure where the bamboo came from, but both colored and white now had it.

The girls were telling their story of how the nigra boys had overpowered them, over in an empty grain car—and some of them in
this
car—
before yall got here,
they said.
They done their ugly business.

The fat one did the talking. She was a hurt woman, unloved, mocked, mistreated since birth, no feature in her face anything but forgettable except her mouth, full, creased at the edges as if relentlessly gnawed, able to hold a sneer for years and back it with energized profanity, a girl, young woman of twenty-two, the adrenaline gushed alternately through like rancid gouts of factuality soothing a terrifying emptiness until she had come to believe or for seconds at a time was sure she believed or what did it fucking matter she didn’t have to believe a single goddamn thing about these crapface shines, it was time to stop this, stop
some goddamn thing
, by God.

In the car, sitting across from Delvin, a big negro man in overalls with a red-and-white-check lining was grinning like he had found true happiness. A sharp red line ran along the part in a man’s hair. A man tried to reach way down his back and another man, trembling as he did so, scratched the place for him. Another kept stretching out his arm and pulling it back. His crew was mostly smiling and talking fast. They had won. A man called Butter gripped himself in both arms as he leaned against the back, honey-colored wall. Beside him a small boy pronounced the name Bonette over and over, or maybe he was saying
bone it,
holding up a thumb that had blood—maybe not his—on it. Another man kept shooting out his fist, punching air. Others held their heads and smiled out the open door at the world that had noticed none of this. They had beat the white boys at their own game. They had been quicker and stronger and they had more heart. They hadn’t backed down. It felt good to be who they were.

We feel like we could run up a mountain and dance on the top
, Delvin thought. He pulled out his notebook and wrote:
One man keeps shaking his hands and jumping up and down on his toes like a boxer
, but his fingers were aching too much for him to continue.

All of a sudden he wanted to cry. He wasn’t the only one. Carl Crawford, Rollie Gregory—they looked like they wanted to cry too. Not for happiness. Some hard grief pressing down. He climbed up on top of the boxcar.

The train rolled along through grain fields, then woods, then clearings, then, out of nowhere—he’d seen this no place before—they passed the old country zoo outside Kollersburg. Under skimpy oak cages on stilts, chickenwire enclosures, sheds with open, wired-over doors. Animals, creatures from the woods, raccoons, porcupines, held prisoner inside. “Look a’yonder,” somebody said. Strange but familiar sharp-eyed creatures drawn up close so you could get a good look at them. Detainees, the unredeemable. Sun caught in the fur of a mangy bobcat, what fur there was, bristling the hairs, a peacock screamed and screamed again in the late daylight as if he didn’t care about anything but screaming, a bear—that must of been a bear—lay curled up like a dog, a camel bleated; and then they were gone.

The train rounded a long curve past a field of seeding sorghum. The dark gold knobby tops shook and gave in a nicking breeze. The train began to slow down. What’s that coming? Delvin thought. Not just the curve. Off across the grain field he could see the wind shake the tops of some beech trees, flicking the leaves over on their white sides, flicking them back. He wanted to leap up and jump off the train. Something said to, but he couldn’t make himself do it.

They were approaching the junction at Kollersburg. The train slowed. He got to his feet, danced a slow little step to get the feeling back in his legs. He climbed down through the trap into the car. The women were shouting again. Crows squawking. You get scared to the point you can’t turn it off. At the edge of their group a large man with blood crusted on his knuckles. He had a dazed look. Delvin thought he would like to speak to this man, but the train was coming
to a stop. He heard angry voices above the clattering and squealing of metal. Shouts. Men were running. The sound of horses. The train creaking to a stop.

He saw four white men race past the door, men carrying shotguns, one in a bow tie and a brown vest—like a lawyer, he thought, or a doctor—but he was carrying a double-barreled shotgun. And then the runners saw the men on the train and stopped and wheeled in a fury of shouts and spit popping from their lips and cried for
you niggers
(they shrieked the word) to come down out of there, trotting beside the open door, not waiting for the train to fully stop before they were giving orders.

“You get down or by God and Jesus we will shoot you where you stand.”

He knew what was happening, he saw it, but something off to the side, a lingering presence, said this is not so. Above the men’s heads a lone blue jay sailed along, dipping and rising. What was the matter with that bird?

“Oh, don’t let them kill me,” the skinny, wrenched girl yelled from back in the boxcar gloom.

Both doors filled with guns, leveled on them, on the boys, men, of color. You had a front gun row, a second, third and gallery of guns, safeties off. The ones who had participated in lynchings knew what to do, but the ones who had never seen a mob before also, instinctively, knew as well. It was as if they had been here many times. As if this furious clumping together, this scarifying, claiming vengeance or redemption, was as natural as sunlight.

Wading through the mob came the sheriff and his deputies, men in khaki carrying shotguns all of the same make and model, Colt Busters, .12 gauge pump-action, loaded with double-aught buckshot. They walked without looking to the side or with any waywardness, as if they were marching to their destinies and they understood and welcomed it.

A sharp, dingy despair cut across Delvin’s mind. He knew as if it was tattooed on the palm of his hand what was coming. But he
couldn’t believe it. From among the ruck of eight africano boys left in the car—one of them barely thirteen—he gaped at the irreversible future taking shape under a richly blue September sky. The afternoon heat was like hot syrup stuffing every crevice, heat so strong it was nauseating.

“Come on out of there, boys,” the sheriff said in his heavy, florid voice, Sheriff Benny Capers, born in 1880 in the Capers Park community over near Marksonville. As that Babylonian king called to Daniel in the lions’ den, the sheriff called to them.
What you doing sitting back there in the filth and the murk, Mr. Daniel?

“Wonder Where Is Old Daniel” was sometimes sung at funerals. Where was old Mr. Oliver? Where was Celia? Where was his mother?

Delvin’s body had become almost too heavy to move, but he wasn’t quite in his body, even as he experienced it doddering toward the door. How natural it was to do what he was told! How far there was to go! He was heavy but he floated. A line of tiny red ants flowed steadily along the joining of the wall to the floor. Where you going, ants? Where you come from?

The posse had dogs out there too, so he saw as he reached the door, already shuffling like a man in irons—dogs: curs and shaggy varmint-catchers and mongrel farm dogs had joined the party, yapping and snarling. Somebody close by had already shit his pants.

They made them jump. Stepped back so the boys jumped onto the hard yellow clay. Delvin banged his right knee but he wouldn’t feel it for hours. Not until the culprits, the lazy fools and black hooligans, had exited and been grabbed and rope-tied and hooded with flour sacks did they call for the women to come out. One by one the defiled were lifted carefully, almost delicately, down, the men trying their best not to injure these destroyed ladies any further. The big one still shouting.

The africano boys—some stoical, some dumbly distant, some crying under the hoods that smelled of biscuits, one yelling
It’s them
white boys
and pointing blindly and catching a blow, one shaking like he’d break—are slapped and prodded and loaded into the back
of Mr. Sandal Morgan’s slat-sided cattle truck and at the head of a convoy of trucks and cars hauled to the castle-like granite county jail in Klaudio.

Deputies, unable to conceal their disgust, march the boys through the jail and up the stone stairs to a windowless blind aerie at the top, unlock it with a flat brass key, and hustle them in to a complete blackness. Black on black, one says. They don’t bother to take the ropes off and they leave the negroes looped together by another knot-tied rope in the hot dark. A few of the men, blind and re-destined, are scared to untie the rope, but Delvin finds himself speaking up to say they will be better off without any ropes at all, mentioning this almost as an aside, the misery that has come on him during the roundup unabated, stinking and stuck against his brain, a fresh damp gray endlessness stretching in all directions, his voice inside it hollow, creaking, faltering as if the old familiar language is no longer his, never had been. Hoods still on, in the dark, nobody can see anything. Delvin carefully pulls a little slack and works his hood off; it is still too black to see. Two of the boys cry steadily. Two others start yelling when Delvin comes down the line unlooping the rope. They don’t want to be cut loose. Somebody elbows Delvin in the side, another jerks up a fist that catches him in the right temple, a lucky blow that knocks him silly on his feet. For a moment he is dancing among leaves in the street outside the funeral home. Celia twirls in a yellow dress under the big sweet gum trees. Two seconds later he is back in the cell. A monstrous, unavoidable despair reaches through time and blackness and finds him. He smells a stink he can’t entirely place—pork grease, shit, sweat, and something else, reptilian and indelible.

Man by man he goes on retrieving the rope, picking the knots loose and coiling the rope over his elbow and through his cupped left hand. The darkness, filled with heat and a mucosal moistness, presses on him. From the dark a voice that comes from no one says:
We will smother you.
He goes on, slowly, retrieving the raw manila rope.

Bam! it went, bam! in his head like a pile driver sinking cypress logs into heavy Aufuskie bay mud for the new highway bridge, the actual driver and the other in his head almost the same but not quite—this other bam! that went on in his head some days until it seemed anchored not in memory but in his soul, bam! of doors closing and days ending and of time itself like a heavy hammer banging down hard on his head. He lay dreaming on his bunk in Acheron State Prison infirmary, bunk you could call it that was nothing but a few sticks of cypress wood bound together with grass rope and covered with a pile of cotton matting that he lay on, sick, the doctor said, with malaria—ague, cold plague—the red dog, they called it in the barracks—lying on his back with a headache like the sound of those pile drivers, the ones inside his head and the ones outside, lay thinking of the cold black waters of the river he had escaped into last winter and gotten maybe two chilled miles farther down before he was fished out with a mullet net by the sheriff of Alderson county, cast naked onto the raw bank and beaten across the back with a rope until he couldn’t get to his feet when ordered to. He lay dreaming of the white piano in the Emporium his mother used to nod off to in the big red parlor after a long night’s work, and slept for forty hours in the grassrope bunk, waking only to sip a little water from the tin cup Milo had placed beside his bed. Dreaming of the big snake that had lived with him and the mosquitoes that bit him and the deer flies stabbing his chest and tiny gnats settling into his ears and supping at the corners of his eyes, making themselves at home, but even in the dream he did not mind any of these creatures because he was dreaming of a white bed in a big house that opened
along one side onto an airport where planes with big round propellors landed and took off and sailed away with him riding in the forward cockpit in a shiny leather helmet and a yellow silk scarf that trailed behind like a running streak engraved on the blue sky, flying to the sound of piano music.

“Well, what else can you call it,” Billy Gammon, young lawyer, says to his colleague, assistant and investigator Baco Bates, “what do you think of when you consider it, this
prison
—not theory now for these wandering boys, but fact?
General erasure
comes to mind, among other terms,
bottomless pit, universal solvent, comprehensive alimentary chute, maw of hell.
I know there are others.
Barathrum
. Into which everything they have is thrown—hopes, plans, memories of Mama mashing scuppernongs for the juice, of riding in a little square-nosed boat through the lily pads, of cutting the fool in church—you name it—memories of festiveness and of sobering up on well water and of usefulness and of that early unfortunate marriage to the sweetest girl you ever saw . . . you name it . . .
everything’s
got to go.”

He stops to look out the big picture window of the Shawl House restaurant across the square where the young men, known far and wide as the KO Boys, are just now passing hidden from view inside a big black panel van on their way the two blocks from the county jail to the courthouse. “Think of it,” Billy says, drunk at eight thirty in the morning, hardly ever undrunk these days and what of it, he would say, smiling at you as if you are his best friend once removed and the easiest person to believe in he has seen in a while, “think of the singular and well nigh mythological power of prison, Baco, of how no matter how strong or seemingly permanent that hard little flint representation, icy diamond of hopefulness or chagrin might be, that soul, I mean, you throw it through the doors of a prison and it is gone forever, dissolved into the dust and grease and sweat and the long black mordancy of that place. It makes me shudder just to think about it.”

The panel van, traveling as slowly as a hearse, rounds the corner at Cooper street, passing the Red Rooster café where several of the older men in the community sit at the back table having breakfast, the shadows of the sycamores passing soft hands over the top and sides of the van from which, if you are a small boy sneaked away from school to watch this, you would not have heard a single sound emanating, as if the truck carried not eight negro youths to what you could call their
job
, calling, life’s work really, or fate, over at the gray granite stone courthouse, but a load of silent ghosts.

“Jesus, Mohammed, old Confucius—you name it, Baco—truest of true loves, filial pieties of all kinds and duration, that time you stole granddaddy’s watch and sold it for passage to the Orient—”

“That wadn’t me,” Baco, a tall, bony man so skinny you thought he might crack in a big enough wind, fold in two, break apart and blow in sections away, says. “I stole a jewelry box, but I didn’t steal nary watch.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Billy says. “It could be a watch or a pair of patent leather dancing shoes or a celluloid collar you picked up off the street that had a bloodstain on it that was a clue to solving the crime of the century, or a crust of, I don’t know, of grease picked off the axle of the tumbrel carrying Marie Antoinette to the guillotine—it passes through that prison gate and disappears, gone to oblivion. Forever lost. Those boys’ lives and everything they got inside em, good or bad, is forever lost.”

As usual he has spoken too much. Baco looks with pity at him. He looks at Billy in the face, in his own face a mix of aggravation and fondness, and says, “You gon show up over there?”

“I suppose I might,” Billy says. “Sometimes I feel like I could stick my hand inside those gates and it would just disappear. I’d draw back a stump. Or I could walk right on in and I’d draw back . . . nothing. It gives me a curious relief to let my mind circulate among such thoughts.”

These are the early days of the trial, and it is time to get moving. A big man with an untrained shock of hair the color of iron rust, he hoists himself up and begins to make his way to the courthouse.

He knew nothing about working on a farm but they said that’s all right boy we will teach you. They handed him a hoe and sent him into the fields. He learned the short clipped swing and chopped cotton for twelve hours a day and returned to the barracks so tired he hardly cared about eating. “I’ll sleep this one out,” he said to Marcus Millens, and Marcus just smiled a weary smile and turned to his rack. In dreams he wandered in a wide plain that he was sure one day he would get to the other side of but in the dream never did. In the morning when it was cool he felt like a man come to a new life not this one. He scribbled in his notebook sometimes but often he forgot to. He liked to stand up in the middle of the field and let the breeze play off him. Scatterings of birds passed over and he liked to send something of himself along with them, a word or a thought. It was a way to hook himself to the living world, the world that wasn’t chained down in a prison. I will be loose from here by and by, he said. He had a curious smile sometimes that the other convicts remarked on. One or two tried to beat it off of him but they weren’t successful. He didn’t know he had the smile until they made it clear. I guess I got some feeling even I don’t know about. And he believed this after a while. He would get caught up in the smells. The crotty smell of the dirt and the limber woody smell of the cotton plants, the sweet stink of bug poison, the smell of his own body and the smells that sailed over the fields, little pickets of smells, of turnips and spicy wild berries and once in a while the smell of some creature, blood even, as if down the way some ferret or quail had met its end. The prison world was one of elimination and spareness and he tried to press against this. Sometimes by holding his own wrist and just staring at the ground he thought he could get loose, or smelling his shit that he dropped behind a bush he could approach another world, but even his surging, side-stepping thoughts became thoughts of this world and his shit smelled of the field peas and sidemeat they fed him here. Still there were times, seconds like an ace in the hole, that stirred another existence in him, some ghost of times that had not been in this world but were familiar. He felt sometimes as if he was on the
edge of something great. He liked to listen to the sound the wind made. Clouds like separate countries drifted from their absent worlds. He could smell Arabia or the Mongol steppes. He walked to the truck dragging his hoe to make signs in the dirt that might on their own mean something. He thought about the people he knew but this was hard on him and he tried not to do it. Cotton flowers were separately yellow or white as if there was a disagreement among them. The world was full of parts that barely fit and only fit for a little while. People turned aside, became memories or ghosts. In a split cotton boll the gray seeds lay twined in white fur. Everything would some day be far from here. He liked to taste the elements in the water he drank.

Baco is the one who’d accompany Billy down to the Shawl House where the big girl, Lucille Blaine, is staying, and according to the ruling of the judge—or close to it—she has to talk with him present at her deposition about what happened in the hours between four in the afternoon and six thirty o’clock on September 8, 1931, but of course she doesn’t want to talk or if she does what she has to say is that those
nigras
, especially
that
one
,
that
main one
who is so talkative,
that
Delvin Walker
, he is the one who did the most damage to her, the one who was first—and last—on the scene, he is the one ripped up her secret self like he was tearing flesh off the inner bones of her body . . .

“Lord,” she says, “that pinched little monster wouldn’t quit til I could smell the blood from my own body burning in my nose. Such pain as no human woman should have to experience was my pain”—
pain for life
possibly, Dr. Kates said in the deposition—“and still that black beast whanged away at me like I was the satisfaction to his Hell’s own fires . . .”

He has all this down in his notes, and more, and Billy has read it and laughed, turned the page around on the big wood table so it faced Baco and, laughing, said, “Maybe she would be happier on the Elizabethan stage than here among us,” pointing at her words that
as she had spoken them were soaked, weighted with a malice that he wished sometimes he could get across to those reading them.

But why worry about that, he thinks, because she is right here in front of them now, in the hot courtroom, testifying as to what happened on that hot day when the leaves on the tulip trees were just starting to speckle with fall. “Yeah,” she is saying, this Lucille who must weigh two hundred and fifty pounds (let’s see, two hundred and fifty-eight to be exact, according to Dr. Kates’s report), “oh yeah, that one over there was the first, and then the other with the big eye was next, and another, and then after that I kinder lost track, but I do remember those other three and maybe that last one too, the one, if he’s the one who walks with a limp.

“He stutters, too,” she turns to the judge and says. “I recollect that quite clearly. You fffffff-fat bbbb-bitch, that’s what he called me. He had a little old pecker like . . .”

And the judge, who looks half asleep, is taking notes as she says this—he’s not asleep, it’s just been his manner since grade school, Judge Montclair Harris—and raises his white head that still shows the nap mark mashed on the back and says, “That’s rich enough on the verbiage, thank you, dear.”

And Lucille looks at him as if she has caught him too in a lie and sits back satisfied as she always seems to be, and is these days, for the first time in her life, satisfied and abounding and content with herself and with life on this wretched earth that stinks in her nostrils like burning feathers off the peacocks on her granddaddy’s farm that her daddy shot out of hatred for his own daddy when he was drunk and burned their beautiful feathers in a yard fire—a world that every day attempts to reconvince her she is no good and shouldn’t have been the hell born anyway.
What a sad world
, a little voice under her breastbone says. The lower part of her face twitches.
What a sad, ruined world.
Some nights she sits in one of the big floral chairs in her room over at the hotel with her legs crossed like a man, rubbing the hem of her shift between her fingers, and cries until she thinks her heart will break. Well. It already
is
broken—that was accomplished years ago when her daddy shot the peacocks and bent her over his knee after she cried and beat her until her bottom broke. She will never forget that, by God, or none of the other beatings either and his was just the first.

Rising sometimes from the handsome oakwood chair as she speaks, she speaks all afternoon and well into the next day about how these eight boys, “and others too, I might mention, boys who must have flown away from that train on wings because I don’t see them here—yall couldn’t catch em?—how these eight and them, them two I mean in particular, raped me like stabbing knives into my most private parts and wouldn’t quit until I bled like that’s all they wanted me for was the bleedin’.”

Her hard plain broad face like a piece of cold raw field raised up, half molded and animated, and a bitterness in her eyes the world has distilled there, hatred whipped up stiff in her, durable as henge stone.

“Like I said, it was them two . . . and then them others.”

But Baco knows she is lying even if he doesn’t especially care one way or the other and has no love for nigras that is sure, inconstant loafers, vexatious to one like him who can be depended on in the worst conditions, hurricane or fire, etc., to do what he is supposed to do. Let em learn to get the job done first, he thinks. But this too isn’t accurate and he knows it. He was brought up in the care of a negro man who could repair watches or stoves or automobiles or any form of working device, and he was the most intensified man he has ever known, Harwell Sims over to Taxus county, where Baco is from. There were others, smart and dumb; it was mixed as everything is. And besides, as Billy says, anybody’d move slow when backbreaking work is all he is ever headed to.

This is beside the point because Baco is still the one who stood in the hotel room behind the lawyers with the fat girl who seemed as if her blood had been drained out and replaced with shop poison and then she’d been set back on her feet and propelled by this streaming toxicant into the world to bring havoc to these eight boys. Well, you
couldn’t do much about any of it. She had a way of speaking so filled with spite that you knew it was the spite itself she loved, the making of it and the stacking of it as high as she could get it, like a wall between her and what hurt her, stuff she didn’t talk about despite the ugliness she had no trouble revealing. And it didn’t matter because in a way everything she said was true.
She had been defiled.
All her life really. And she was a white woman who claimed that eight colored boys had raped her, and of course the doctor said
somebody
—
some
somebody—had recently enjoyed her favors. She also had a second on her motion. Hazel Fran. A scrawny duplicitous girl unable to read or write, a scatterbrained person hardly more capable than a child, if a child could have been as distracted and meager and without connection to human sociability as Hazel was. She clung to Lucille like a monkey to its mama. But he could see in her eyes the gray color of road dust that she was not telling the truth. Like a daunted child, it hurt her to lie. So he talked to her in a mild way, offering her bits of ginger candy from a little paper sack and speaking offhandedly of Jesus who was of course keeping a merciful eye on the proceedings, and he could tell she picked up on it. She liked the candy. But she too claimed that these boys had committed sexual battery. With thumb and two fingers she pulled down hard on her long nose like she wanted to pull it off, squeezing it at the end, and said, “You bet they went at it. Like some devil was gaining on them every second. It burned like fire.”

The red dog has him by the throat and swims him deep into the dark waters and it is as if the sides and boundaries of his body flop open and pour out his being like hot syrup, mingling it with the juices of the world until he experiences his spirit thinning out to a film and himself at the same time bobbing and cuffed by foul breeze and without the ability to gather himself. Plus a headache like an infernal hammering. In thick serpentine dreams he flies to Chattanooga and lies in the shed chuckling at the Ghost as the Ghost feeds iron filings to Old
Bob the lead horse, listening to Mr. O talk about his boyhood escapades as a gandy dancer in a Birmingham yard. Then a jump to a recount of the misery of Mr. O’s actual Klaudio jailhouse visit. How, accompanied by insults and taunts and by somebody smearing yellow plum jelly from a jelly and butter sandwich on the back of his suit coat, he entered the narrow room where Delvin sat shackled at a scratched and spit-sticky table. How he strode with a full resolve of dignity up to the table as if he was about to walk right through it to embrace Delvin, but before he was all the way there his strength gave out and he stumbled and staggered against the heavy table, crying out Delvin’s name, and then stood slumped and overcome until Delvin despite the guards yelling at him and his own shackled state climbed over the table and on the other side pressed his body against his benefactor’s, nudging him and poking at him with the edge of his wrist until the guards beat him down to his knees, picked him up and flung him back over the table into the big square chair he had leapt out of.