Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“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.”

“They was whores,” Bonette Collins said. He was a short, nearly square man, Little Wall by Wall he was called, a carpenter, he said, not even part of the group — if you could call them that — traveling out of Chattanooga. Billy thought of the families of these boys, the eight boys, how back home the word would go around the community — rape — of white women. The awfulest crime. Lengths of knotted manila rope rolled out from such accusations. We sit here among the dead. Two boys leaned on their hands, others had their hands on the table turned up like offerings, a couple clutched themselves in their arms; Walker patted one fist on top of the other. Everything for them was changed for good. They might as well have not gotten up, not drawn breath that morning. Back at home everybody would downface it. You couldn’t tell what the truth was. But he had found that juries seemed often able to choose between truth and falsehood. At least in the little trials for theft and robbery or threats or fraud. Except with negroes. Rarely did a negro get off. No matter how innocent he was. And now we have rape and murder — no, just rape. We’ll handle the murder.

He smiled at Davis Pullen, who was busily questioning Bonette as to where he was exactly at the time of the rapes.

“They have to establish a time for these occurrences,” Davis said. “We can refute em on that point. Anybody own a watch?” he said, and chuckled. Nobody did.

Harris listened without seeming to. He gazed around the room. These bleak, sullied rooms never bothered him. The facts in these cases were where the power was. The facts like stones set into a wall. The power in the wall and what was behind it, in the lives lived in the grease and stink of poverty pressing forward through time. The power was in the weight of these lives laid against the wall, and for him the subtraction of life breath by breath leading all the way back to the beginning of time, something more powerful than anything else he knew, a weight of reason and choices, a strength right now implacable from some toothless oldtimer long ago reaching out his hand for the piece of pre-masticated meat a child put into it, the look in the old man’s eyes meeting the look in the child’s eyes, and over there the breeze touching an old woman’s face, engendering an irresistible thought, and that man over there listening for the cry of a baby in the other room where his wife lay sick on a pallet on the floor, something hard and inescapable coming for him. He dismissed none of what he loved about these scenes, the million-year history of people roughed up and knocked down by the ones slightly stronger. He never talked about this, hardly brought it into his own mind, but he felt the weight of a righteousness laid against him, pressing into his days and into his sleep.