A couple of africano boys on the other side of the gondola watched the exchange. Everyone proceeded on his way.
After a while Delvin made a course up the train to one of the two open boxcars and climbed in through the trap. Africano boys were in there talking. They saw Delvin and one waved him over. A burly boy with close-cropped hair said, “You the one that ofay kicked?”
“He didn’t exactly kick me,” Delvin said. “It was more of a step. Just missed being a stomp.”
“That white boy wants to fight about it,” another traveler said, a small, slender boy with not very recently conked hair, slicked back. He wore a long green shirt like some medieval woodsman. “All them white boys wants to fight. They gon come at us.”
“They sure like to mix it up,” another said, a blocky boy with a wide, friendly, scared face. “No questions about why or what for.”
“No why or what for in this world,” another said in a weary voice. He was tall and had narrow round shoulders.
“Long as they got the numbers,” another said.
They were all suddenly nervous.
A few pocket knives (if it came to that), a couple of round whittled sticks, a leather sap (the cracked leather showing the lead plumb underneath), and a bag of ball bearings in a canvas sack, these the weapons.
Down at the other end of the car a couple of unhappy, plain-looking white girls, one of them fat. The fat one interrupted chinning with her skinny buddy to hurl a couple insults at the negro end. A few white boys down there too, but they were just looking.
“Those men?” somebody asked, a dark-skinned boy unmemorable but for a small white scar cutting his left eyebrow in two. He was looking at the little group down the far end.
“They’s other ones coming,” said another boy—they were mostly, but for a couple, just leaving boy life for manhood, fresh travelers, hoboes, Chattanooga and upline angelicas trekked out of the hollows, headed west looking for work. They’d heard the mills in Memphis were hiring. The mills or the box factory or the riverside warehouses or the meat-processing plant, somebody, someplace. One, a skinny boy with pale gold freckles on a tan face, was so scared already his hands shook; he kept slapping them against his jeans. He was on his way to meet his sister in Tulsa, he said. She needed him to escort her down to Dallas for their brother’s wedding.
“I got to get on,” he said, and Delvin could tell he wanted to slip away. But he didn’t; he was afraid to, Delvin could see this too. Out the door he could see a river, lengths of shining water running between sycamore trees turning yellow.
“Can’t help from it,” he said slowly, referring to the fight; letting the words out carefully, as if they were precious, like special stones held back in a pouch or wrapped in cloth and stowed in a bindle. A whole speech. Like something from Shakespeare. His body buzzed with excitement. He was not particularly angry. But he wanted to experience—here, now—the exercise of his power, wanted to move harshly against something solid and strong. These white boys. They were hardly real to him. They came and went, and it was always the same with them, they knew only one way, had only one side.
“Knock these dicty jeffs on they diasticusses,” the tall boy said, and the others laughed.
The car smelled of cedar shavings. It was beginning to fill up. Two, three, more white boys swung in off the roof and others crawled through the trap at the far end. Tattered boys in denim and patched khaki, farm boys, city boys with shop grease under their fingernails. They too had weapons. Sticks and short lengths of cane pole, what looked like a corner off a metal bed.
The girls started yelling, calling the africano boys names. Nothing they hadn’t heard before.
The air in the car was cool, but Delvin felt a heat on him. He trembled and the heat seemed suddenly to fly out of him and he was cold. I must be coming down with something, he thought, and then thought, yeah, scaredy-catness. The edges of his body felt numb. His palms were sweating, his heart galloped. He had no weapon but his pocketknife and he really didn’t want to set down his soogan and the little cotton sack Mrs. Parker had filled for him; he didn’t want to draw that. He thought of Celia walking across a grassy lawn to her classes. The buildings, she said, were made of stone that changed colors according to the light. He pictured a rainbow, but the ones she named were hardly colors at all: charcoal, gray, brown like a mule’s back. Maybe Mr. Rome would find her one day. He pictured the little man reared-back reciting the wordy love message he had prepared, and choked a laugh.
One of the boys looked at him. “You pretty bugged-up,” he said.
The white boys moved away from the back wall. A dozen, fourteen, fifteen, a clenched little army. Road toughs, scared boys just looking for work, boys on the run from bad daddies, drunk mothers, no mothers, something sad in their eyes, something wild, something hateful. For a sec he wanted to stick out his hand.
Hopeless, Delvin thought, useless. But then he didn’t mind.
An ache in his shoulders, a sorrowfulness like a headache. He wrapped his right hand in his bandana.
The old time—the dream time—slipping away, he thought—it was something the professor said. As if we were supposed to hold onto it.
One of the white boys flung a rotten cucumber. It hit a burly stutterer colored man in the shoulder, Coover Broadfoot. Delvin knew him from the Chat-town streets, from games of clip poker in a house around the corner from New Bethel church, from the Emporium, from his auntie’s funeral, from Coover’s teariness, from the set of his head like a little soot-headed lamb’s.
Then somebody yelled and, their eyes slitted and wild, the white boys rushed among them, flailing and whipping their sticks.
The africano boys bunched up and all at once sprang at them, fought back hard and cunningly, striking the white boys across their faces, kicking at their knees.
Delvin caught a glancing blow against his upper arm but he didn’t feel it.
A big africano man, somebody he’d never seen before, picked up a medium-sized white boy with blond hair thick as a pelt and threw him against the side of the car. The boy landed on hands and feet, crumpled into a heap, slowly gathered himself, crawled a few steps and ran up against another africano boy, somebody called Rollie, a ruthless man missing his front teeth, who kicked him in the side. The white boy rolled like a stumplog rolling down a hill.
Delvin punched somebody, cracked somebody across the eyes with the side of his wrapped fist. Somebody whapped him in the back of the head and somebody else caught him with what felt like a firebrand across his lower back. It was a tall boy hitting him with a section of bamboo cane. He staggered away, knocked against another white boy who punched him to his knees. How did he get in this? He saw a blue-colored band of light weaving in among the roiling shapes. He was suddenly off to the side.
All the while the white women shrieked hatefully, their voices, especially the voice of the big woman with the piano legs standing foursquare grasping in her thick chalky hands a piece of broomstick, brandishing it—condemning, excusing nothing. She saw him and shook the stick at him and seemed about to come for him.
Somebody pulled him to his feet and he jammed himself back into the fray. At its densest it was a big pulsing congery of boys, a wild patch. He banged on somebody’s back. Somebody slugged him on the side of the head and he saw red bursts, flares. He was shoved against the wall that gave and bounced him back. The boards smelled of sweat and faintly of piss. He edged away and crouched, sprang up and hit a skinny white boy straight in the nose. The boy reeled backwards into another white boy who hit him and knocked him down. Delvin laughed.
The africano boys pushed the white boys steadily back until all but a few were huddled at the front of the car weakly brandishing their sticks and splintered cane poles. One africano boy whom no one knew, gripping his piece of broomstick like a baseball bat, kept hitting a stocky brutish-looking white boy who all the time kept shouting at him like he wasn’t being hit at all. The strikes made hollow sounds against his shoulders. Finally the africano boy threw down the stick and tried with his fists but the white boy knocked him on his ass with one blow. Two africano boys piled into the white boy and forced him back into the pack. Everybody was shouting, nobody coming around to the other’s point of view, nobody offering anything but slurs and insults, nobody in his heart giving in, or maybe only a few.
And then as suddenly as it had begun the fighting stopped. Everybody just quit. They could hear the train, clanka clanka clanka. It was as if some greater force had called out halt, or nothing had, or some strange interval timing, clockwork none realized he was party to but nonetheless faithfully followed, had crunched down to the last second of martial time and let them go.
They stood, or knelt, or sat on their aching butts scrunched against the wall, panting. None really cared to look directly into the faces of his opponents. Most’d had enough and didn’t stare. Eye contact slid and dissolved and some were crying and some were gasping in and out of a hatred and a sullen despicable remorse and others were dazed and some were silently praying and others were whispering to the blank places in their souls about what had happened and what had not.
Delvin drew breaths from way down in his body. Each one hurt a little and made him remotely dizzy but he knew he was okay. He had fought with strength and will to some degree. This surprised him slightly.
No one said much. A single epithet from one of the girls—“coon fucktards!” she yelled—but somebody, a white boy, made a harsh noise, just a cry, that shut her up, and that was it. The panting mixed with the clack of the train wheels.
Suddenly the smell of corn. Delvin looked out the door. They were passing a huge field of yellowing corn. Corn as far as he could see. The season rich with the sharp silky smell of it, rich already with the early yellows and reds. The tall sumac in the road ditches going red, the shaggy flowers like spires of imperial acknowledgment, the yellow goldenrod in big bunches thickly flowering so he wanted for a second to throw himself out onto it, soft bed of gold, and the smell of corn like a natural dust, ancient and soothing.
At Klaudio, just up the line, somebody jumped off the train—Cornell Butler, the papers said later—and ran to the police. Assault by negroes on white boys. And on two white girls. Rape? Yeah, yeah—something like that. You don’t even have to say it. A breeze picked lightly through the narrow leaves of a butternut tree just outside the sheriff’s office, as if looking for one special leaf.
The first accuser Butler was sweating and shaking, and he had the look about him of somebody who had suffered a great tragedy.
He looked heartbroke, the chief testified later. Just plain heartbroke.
It took one call to the stationmaster at Kollersburg. Then another to the Cumbly county sheriff. In a matter of minutes men in cars and pickups were on the road, racing to catch the train. A line of cars filled with outraged, murderous, bloody-minded, vengeful—and all the other dark indemnities—men. It wasn’t only the excitement. The men hurt in their hearts. Beat the boys and raped the women for christ’s sake.
Carrying guns and tobacco sticks and ax handles picked up at Burns’ Hardware on Harris street, they rushed toward Kollersburg. Some had experience with this sort of thing, a few were klansmen, others just attendees of lynchings and other routs and ambuscades, most were money-stretched citizens, hurled by this atrocity into sudden stumbling pellmell motion.
A breeze played in the tops of the long grove of red cedars just beyond the town limits they passed going as fast as they could, jangling and seething. Torn-looking bottom-heavy clouds were banked in the west. Art Luger ran over a something he later swore was a six-foot-long rattlesnake. Some men felt anguished with pain for the poor girls and for those ambushed boys, others felt only a satisfying urgency. Hard times had stiffened their souls.
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.