Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

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.