“After my husband was killed in Vietnam, I was very lonely. That was 1967. About a year went by when it was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other, and get my work done. I was empty. Hollowed out. The only thing I could feel was worry—about Jimmy, who was working with the NAACP, and doing other things to help the Movement. But then, somehow, I fell in love with my boss, Dr. Tom Cage. I knew it was wrong, him being married, but I couldn’t turn away from that feeling he gave me. It was . . . the only thing that made me feel alive.
“But as good as that was, things started going bad very quickly. It was hard times for black folks, as you know. The Klan was everywhere, killing people on both sides of the river. What brought Tom and me together finally was that Jimmy and his friend Luther got into a scrape with some Klansmen. Part of that group you’re investigating now. But back then I just knew them as Klan. Most worked at Triton Battery, or out at the paper mill. One time I woke Dr. Cage at midnight to come patch up Jimmy, and he came, God bless him. Then the Klan who’d been in the fight showed up at the office, too. We hid in a treatment room till Tom got rid of them. Then he patched up Luther and Jimmy. That was when I first knew something was going to happen between Tom and me. That sooner or later we’d consummate whatever we’d been feeling.
“After that night, the Klan started hunting all over for Jimmy. Finally he went to hide out in Freewoods, which you know about from your work. Jimmy stayed there a few weeks, and it was during this time that Tom and I had our affair. It was like a dream, looking back. But you can’t commit a mortal sin and expect to get off easy. As soon as I missed my time that month, I knew I was pregnant. I didn’t tell Tom about it, for fear he might do something crazy, like leave his family, even though the selfish part of me wanted that very thing.
“Then the nightmare began. I came home from work one day and found five men waiting for me. I recognized them from the office. It was Frank Knox, his brother Snake, Sonny Thornfield, and a big fat boy named Glenn Morehouse. There was a boy with them, too. Now I know that was Forrest Knox, the state police man. They held me down and forced themselves on me. They stuffed a dishrag in my mouth to stop me screaming. Then they all took turns. They sodomized me, like it says in the Bible. I’m speaking as a nurse now, but they tore me up pretty bad inside. One of them used a Coke bottle. The whole time, they told me they were going to kill my brother when he came to get revenge for what they were doing. I knew I’d never breathe a word of what they’d done, but it didn’t matter. They spread the word themselves, and Jimmy did just what they knew he would.
“I got word that Jimmy and Luther had left Freewoods, and nobody had seen him or Luther since. I was going out of my mind. Then God smiled on me. Or maybe it was Satan, tempting me, I don’t know. But I went in to work, and those same men brought in Frank Knox, half-dead from a bunch of batteries falling on him. As soon as I got into the room alone with him, I knew I was going to make sure he went the rest of the way. His side was split open, and there was a good-size vein showing. I took the biggest syringe we had, filled it up with air, and shot it into that vein. I did that twice, then once in the antecubital. It took longer than I expected, but that air hit that man’s heart like Daddy’s twelve-pound maul, and that was the end of Frank Knox.
“When Tom came in to treat him, Frank was about gone. Tom asked why I wasn’t trying to save him. That’s when I told Tom what they’d done to me. He stopped what he was doing then and tried to comfort me. When we heard a siren, he hid the syringe and made things look like they should have looked. Once the ambulance men got there, Tom told them Knox had expired from his wounds.
“Lord, I’m losing my breath.” Viola takes a drink of water. “I told Tom our affair was over that day. But that didn’t spare us any pain. The next night Knox’s gang grabbed me out of my house about two in the morning. They took me to a machine shop out in the county. A place they used to question people. They had special equipment out there, for hurting people. You could see old blood on it. They had knives and chains and iron bars and torches. I . . . don’t want to talk about that.
“Anyway, that’s where Jimmy and Luther were being held. They were both in bad shape by the time I got there, but the Klansmen never let up on them. Thornfield kept at them about them running guns, and something about Black Muslims, but I don’t think Jimmy or Luther knew anything about that. If they had, they would have talked, bad as those men were hurting them. Snake Knox skinned off Jimmy’s navy tattoo with a knife. The others raped me some more, right in front of Jimmy. It was like the old nuns used to describe hell in my grade school. Like those forbidden paintings from the Middle Ages. I don’t even know how long I was in that place. Maybe that’s why they say hell is eternal.
“But then a man sneaked in there with a big pistol and took me out. He was Ray Presley, a man so mean that even the Klan was scared of him. He’d been a dirty cop down in New Orleans, and he knew everybody on both sides of the law. Presley had something he held over Dr. Cage, but he liked him, too. Presley saved me as a favor to Tom.”
With a quivering hand, Viola takes another tiny sip of water. “But Presley didn’t save Jimmy. Luther, neither. Something broke inside me that night, when Presley dragged me out of there screaming. I knew those men were going to kill my brother. Presley knew it, too. He told me nothing could change that, not even President Johnson. It was just the way things were. And I guess he was right.
“There’s not much to tell after that. I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of how Jimmy died or where they hid his body. I didn’t see those men kill Jimmy or Luther, though they shot Luther in the arm with a pistol while I was there. The bullet broke the bone. They were both still alive when Presley took me out of there, but my opinion as a nurse is that without medical attention, they would have died from their wounds, or from shock.
“After that . . . it’s all a blur. Tom tried to hide me, and Miss Nellie Jackson helped him do it. She was a good woman, though she’d been a prostitute and ran girls down on Rankin Street. They saved my life by doing that, but the fact is, I didn’t care anymore whether I lived or died. I knew I was carrying a child, but not even that mattered to me. I don’t think I expected to live the nine months till it was born. About a week later, I went north to Chicago. And that’s where I stayed, until I got lung cancer.”