Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

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.