2
Billy Gammon, boy lawyer, studied the notes Baco had prepared and then he walked out into the hot fall day where leaves twirled up and lay back down as a breeze smelling of cotton fields passed through the square. I better just make something up, he thought. Those boys are headed in one direction only. And he wondered if life seemed shorter to those who only moved along a single, fixed road. He nodded as he passed the townsfolk, but many didn’t nod back. Nor did many in the Red Rooster, where he had dinner with Davis Pullen.
“What you think?” he asked Pullen, one of the lead lawyers, a chatty, florid man who had come in last in his law school class at the university but was in no way hampered by this, practicewise or mouthwise.
Davis chewed the edge of a yellow biscuit, put the biscuit down on his plate of soupy rice and chicken gravy and looked Billy in the face. This was Davis’s big courtroom trick, the straight-in-the-face look. He had such a wide simple face that sometimes the juries, taken aback by the foolish openness displayed before them, forgot what it was they wanted to do and signed off on a not-guilty verdict. Davis had a good reputation as a lawyer who could get a man off.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
This was one of his stock courtroom responses.
“Well, you know how most of us when somebody says we did something we can say hey man I didn’t do that and then we can show how we didn’t and we get to turn around and go back the way we came? I mean not just legally, but say if we get involved with a woman and then want to quit it, we can—”
“Maybe you,” Davis, a twice-divorced man, said.
“Ah, yes,” Billy said and ducked his head. “Or we buy something down here at Cohen’s department store and old Mr. Cohen will take it back if we get home and decide it don’t suit us. Or you can turn away from your sins—that’s the big one, I guess—and become a sanctified man.”
“You always sniping at the church,” Davis said.
“Well, I know we can ask for forgiveness and start over and all. But I wonder.”
“What is it you wonder, for Christ’s sake?” Davis pressed his finger to a spot of mustard on the tabletop and touched his finger to his tongue, tapping his tongue with yellow.
“If life is shorter for those who can’t get the use of any of these means.”
“Means to what?”
“Oh, never mind. I was just daydreaming.”
“You need to learn to pay closer attention to the matters at hand, little Billy,” Davis said, grimacing and spitting into his soiled napkin.
They’d sat with Baco while he went over his findings. They were lucky those two women had talked so much. Or maybe not. Maybe the prosecutors wanted to make it clear how good a case they had. The colored boys denied the charges. It was clear, or almost clear, that half of them had never even seen those two white women. It was all about a fight, the lawyers knew that. Even Mr. Lopellier Harris from New York could see that. Harris wanted to make the trial about race, but nobody was going to win in Dixie building a defense on race. Nobody was going to win this trial anyway, nobody on the defense side.
Sitting in the window of the Red Rooster—PLUSH & TASTY, so the sign said—a new restaurant that boasted the largest coffeepot in town (HOME OF THE BOTTOMLESS CUP, according to the printed menu, another innovation), Billy looked out at maple leaves fluttering along in breeze like little redwing birds. Four of the boys didn’t even know what they were charged with. The other four knew, and three of them could read, but only one of them, that Delvin Walker, the one raised at a undertaker’s—always the richest householder in the colored community, the one who showed up at the mayor’s office asking for favors, the representative of his people, who, like some african chief, was supposed to be able to keep peace with the natives, as it were—that boy Walker . . . he knew something was up.
Billy, looking out the window half dreaming of her, caught sight of Miss Ellen Bayride crossing the square, holding her flimsy blue hat on with one hand while trying to keep her armload of books from falling. “Just a minute,” he said to Davis, got up, dashed out to the square and caught up with her.
“Snatchy weather,” he said and suddenly almost forgot his own name. He had been waiting for days, ever since he saw her poking at a barking dog with her umbrella on the first day she got to town, to get a chance to speak to her. She worked for the big paper in the capital, brought in here because there were women involved. It was her job to get close to these women and pamper them and get them to give special admissions to her.
“Well, Mr. Gammon, you are a speedy fellow, aren’t you,” she said now.
“I was hoping I could help you out, here.”
“Do I look like I need helping?”
She spoke lightly, teasing him. Confusion overtook him, but he fought through this, thinking it’s this confusion and the going on anyway that makes these women so valuable to us—and us realizing we’re willing to do it—every man in the world knows that. And, smiling all the time, knowing how stupid he looked, flushed, about to tip over, reaching for the books she now had under control, the woman laughing at him, her little blue hat cocked in a delightful way over one gray eye, he delighted in everything about her.
“Goodness,” she said, stopping at the curb under one of the big oaks. The leaves in the crown of the oak shifted slowly, mightily, from the pressure of the slow breeze. “I think I have them now.”
“Shoot, I thought I was timely,” Billy said, smiling, almost laughing, he felt so lighthearted. “What are those books? Can I take them for you?”
“Like in school?’
“No, just a natural cordiality on my part, here on a windy summer day.”
“Fall day,” she said.
“Can’t tell the difference in these parts, not really. Not til the heat finally breaks.”
“And when is that?”
“Some years it seems like never.”
It was a dream—small, indistinct—to both of them just then, the words like dream words they were not so much making up as snatching from the air, a happiness overtaking them like a sweet scent riding on the warm dry wind. The breeze touched their faces and felt to each like the gentle fingers of the other. Ellen blushed. Billy saw the color filling her cheeks just under the smooth raised bone as a sign sent especially for him. Each sensed what the other experienced. The woman—usually private, unembellished, strict with herself—bent slightly toward him, and he slid slightly sideways as if angling for a quieter, more private spot, both of them understanding. They walked quietly along beside each other. At the door of the Shawl House, the only hotel in town and, like so many of the hotels in these rural county seats, a monumental affair, built in this case of rough granite, its windows recessed like the windows of a medieval castle, they stopped. The confederate battle flag billowed beside the state flag above the front entrance; no federal flag flew anywhere in this town, not even in front of the post office.
He smiled at her—calm, complicitous—and she smiled back, so faintly that she could have denied it in any court, and he caught it. Despite this, he felt at their parting a mournfulness like the fading of a fine day, but he knew too this was a parting that contained a promise. He put his hand over his heart. It was a gesture, a gimmick, but he could feel his heart knocking.
“Yes,” he said to the question both of them held in mind.
She smiled, a gentling smile, the way a girl would smile at a pony. “Yes,” she said, “I guess . . .”
And turned and pushed through the big glass, brassfooted doors held open for her by an africano man in a forest-green embraided suit.
Crossing the square back to the little office they had rented in the Cotton Exchange building, his thoughts like birds returning crankily to the rookery of the trial, he considered that all they could do in this so-called legal case was present a clean recitation—that’s all it was really—of the events: a line of execution—sure, execution—for those boys to hold on to, all eight of them headed straight to the hangman’s noose. Most those boys could hope for was for Billy and crew to get them life sentences at Burning Mountain.
That evening in the jail with Harris and Pullen and all eight of the boys lined up on the long bench across from them, fielding questions, some of them without reason or any connection whatsoever to the situation at hand, Gammon experienced again the exhilaration of his afternoon walk. I need something to buoy me up, he thought, but she is better than something. Ellen. Don’t call the woman you love she. One of the boys was asking when he could go home. “I’m wore out sitting in this place,” he said, Arthur Bony Bates, a boy of fifteen with a pudgy, smooth-skinned dark face and slow, cloudy eyes.
“We are working on that, my boy,” Lopellier Harris—called Larry—said affably.
“I’ll say I slapped one of those white boys, and I did too,” Carl Crawford said, “but that’s the most I’ll say, I tell you that.”
“It’s violating those two women they got us on the hook for,” Delvin Walker said. He was a smallish, very dark-skinned boy, eighteen, the case file said, with broad shoulders and a quick, lively look in his hazel eyes.
“I didn’t violate nobody,” Butter Beecham said, a man in his twenties, a laborer for life, unable to read and write. “Nobody,” Butter reiterated.
“All right,” Larry Harris said.
Davis Pullen looked toward the windows that were painted over with whitewash. During the day, light came through the wash, but at night they were dull and blank. Under the table he made two fists on his knees—made them and slowly let them go. The dog lines in his face deepened.
Harris carefully questioned each boy. He had arrived from New York by train three days ago and had hit the ground running, as Davis put it. “Running straight into a brick wall,” he’d added, cackling. The facts as the boys experienced them were straightforward and dire. One of those white boys, identified as Carl Willis, had stepped on the hand of Delvin Walker, and from this incident a fight had started.
“Did you hit him?” Harris asked.
“Eventually I did,” Delvin said. He wore a look of profound sadness. He knew what this was, this court assembly.
“Eventually?”
“He kicked me and nearly knocked me off the hopper.”
That was a kind of open railroad car, Harris knew, a barrel cut lengthwise and soldered open side up onto a frame, called a gondola. He had represented tramps and itinerants, connivers and confidence men, the beat down and humbled—and the beat and unhumbled—the working men whose particular plight he was touched by and whose coming rise he believed in or at least hoped for as most favorable to his own needs, a sometime house lawyer for the WOW and the Daily Worker. People down here looked at him as if they thought he might any minute burst into flames.
“I caught up with him in the fight that ensued,” Delvin said evenly.
“Okay, fellows,” Harris said. Three of the men or boys had started picking at each other. “Walker. All right, son.”
He began to ask the necessary useless questions about the fight.
“It was like a gladiatorial combat,” Delvin said. “Us in a ring with those white boys snarling at us.”
“A ring?”
“The boxcar. It was right next door.”
“So you fought—how many was it?”
“A dozen, fifteen.”
“And you held your own.”
“Held it and pushed back with it.”
He had teeth so white they seemed made of some substance other than enamel. Made from whiteness itself, Harris thought. “The fight was quite like a contest,” he said.
“Yessuh. Except it was just more of the same from those white boys.”
“In what way?”
“They always been throwing colored folks off the trains,” Butter Beecham piped up. “Can you use that against em?”
“They have thrown you off the trains before?”
“They always do that.”
“Yeah, yessir, you bet,” someone else cried, and for a few minutes there was a clamor as the boys expressed their outrage at the treatment from the whites, something scared and wheedling, something like a stark rage, underneath, just a rumor of it, unexpressed. Delvin remained silent.
When they got the boys quieted down Davis Pullen asked Delvin, “Did you know any of those white boys?”
“No. But they all got a tendency—or most of them do.”
“What is that?” Davis asked, but he knew the answer. Some darky complaint. They were always fussing.
This question would not be settled here, Harris thought. Might as well not bring it up. “What we need to stick close to here,” he said, “is the facts of the situation.”
“We held our own against them,” another boy said. A man actually, Coover Broadfoot also a partly educated man, the other negro who knew what was going on here.
“And then some,” somebody else said.
Harris’s assistant Sid Krim sat in a chair a few paces back from the table, taking notes. So silent, so perfect, no one even noticed him. Before bedtime tonight he would have a record typed up by one of the stenographers Gammon had hired from the capital. He would not get the slang right, or even what some of the boys considered proper english.
“They are saying you raped these women,” Billy Gammon said.
Several of the black boys laughed. Bony Bates began to cry. Delvin Walker looked scared and angry.
“They always gon say that, mister,” Bonette Collins, a fleshy-faced man, said. “They can’t hold a trial if they not saying that.”
“Were any of you close enough to those women to cause a problem?” In front of Harris, Billy didn’t quite know how to phrase it.
“Problem?” Rollie Gregory said. He was older, a slow-moving, hefty man from an apple farm outside Chattanooga, he’d said. Orchard, wasn’t it—not farm? “Problem?”
“Did any of you have sexual knowledge of this . . . of these two women?” and he gave their names.
“I don’t under—”
“Did you jelly em, boy?” Pullen said.
Gregory looked abashed, sick even.
“Lord, no.”
But some of the other boys had, or they might have, it wasn’t clear—might have taken a roll, paid for or offered free. They all denied it, though that young boy Arthur Bates, Bony, fourteen or fifteen, he looked sick about something. Probably he had gone with one of the women. But raped them?
“These women say you forced them.”
“You mean like tied em up?”
Rollie Gregory giggled. “They too hincty for that,” he said.
Gammon ignored him.
“Force can be that, yes,” Pullen said, “but it can also be threats. Menacing looks. Expectation of harm on the woman’s part.”