Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“Lord, don’t you let these crackers run me to the electric chair over some false testimony by women I don’t even know.” These words from Walker made sweat break out. The tone, the word crackers , made Billy want to slap the little seal’s face. Pullen had got to his feet and leaned over the table and said, “You better start practicing your manners if you want to come out of this alive, boy.” He was as bad as the prosecutors. Only Harris had been silent. Watching the exchange with a bemused expression on his hawkish face. He thought he was above all this. Thought he was smart enough to figure a way around a Dixie judge and jury. He’d find out on that one.

The trial jounced on like a runaway wagon. The big girl, Lucille Blaine, could talk all day. She sneered even at the prosecutor. She wore a dark blue crepe dress with white leather belt and white shoes and you could hear her stockings sizzle like searing meat as she walked from the rear of the courtroom. In the high-backed rail chair she had the confidence of the unreachable. Poking from her bland extruded face you could see the ridges of stony refusal, the uncomplicitous aggrievement and hatred. The world has come to this, Billy thought. It was decaying to stone before our eyes but we took no notice. He had no love for these black fellows but sometimes he wanted to go into a small quiet room and weep there. Wrath, he thought, like the Bible turned inside out.

What had been done to this woman could not be undone and this scared him.

“I wouldn’t have no truck with a nigra,” she said. “Who would? They got diseases and, well, it would make me sick to my death.”

She showed her big shiny teeth to the jury and the jury shrunk back. She would eat the ones who disagreed. The courtroom smelled of gravy sandwiches and grease. “ This one here, and those other ones ,” she said, “came at me in that train car like I was a chicken they was trying to cut its head off with a ax. They was all laughing and they had a fire in their eyes. They pushed me down in this old messy straw. The straw dust got up my nose and made me sneeze. I couldn’t stop sneezing even when they threw my dress up over my head and went at me. I was crying and sneezing at the same time. And yelling to Jesus. That’s how I got the big bruise on my face. One of them — I think — and I think — and I think—” and Pullen stopped her because the judge wouldn’t and in his most affable manner asked the judge to explain to the young lady that she could only testify to what she had seen — not speculated. The judge smiled at the woman whom he would never have in his house, or even in his yard — or his street or his town that had a rose-twined arch under which travelers passed as they entered from the western environs — if he could help it, and reminded her of the rules. But when the traveler did it again, saying that she thought ( and thought and thought and thought ) it was — stopped by Pullen — the judge frowned at the lawyer and told him to quit harassing the witness. The traveler shed a smile like a bitter cry and plunged on, wielding her heavy knives and cannon and sorrow.

So she can’t let on, Billy thought — not anywhere on earth or in heaven — that she, a white woman, had let a black man have his way with her. ( Somebody had — so the doctor said — but that somebody had probably paid and got his favor before she even left the rail yards up in Chattanooga. That was what she was doing on the train — working.) Even if the nigra paid, she had still let him. If she told the truth, the bottom might fall out of the bucket. Like everybody here, he thought — each one of us fighting and dodging and swinging whatever weapon we can lift — she was trying to fend off the shame of it.

“I was scared they was gon kill me,” Lucille said, Miss Blaine. “The way they threw me around.”

A tittering at this due to Miss Blaine’s massivity. She glared at the assembled, swung a glare at the lawyers and the judge. “A man is strong,” she said. “Too strong. If any of you was a woman you’d know that.”

Her face was bright pink, and grainy like watermelon, and she was crying now, tiny round dark tears like birdshot rolling down her cheeks. Billy thinking this. For a moment he hated her. Even though he knew if what she was saying wasn’t true now , it was probably true sometime, somewhere for her.

“They scratched me, and that one there”—she pointed at either Delvin Walker or Rollie Gregory, the largest and the oldest of the accused—“beat on me with his fist. Beat me like I was heaven’s gate locked against him. Hell’s gate.”

On she went, casting her net of hatred and fury. She swayed and lurched in her seat like a woman blown by storm — or like a woman, Pullen had said, dodging a whip. The white observers, leaning forward, their legs stiff, their hands working handkerchiefs, their faces rigid or slack-jawed with attention — that ripe individual over there sprawled in his chair like Caiphus or that old woman with her thin rouged lips lifted off her dog teeth or that young bailiff pressing with his fist a red mark into his forehead or the spiffy little judge with eyes squinched up into his bushy brows — all absorbing this, filling up with the befouled words, the words giving them something like life, but better.

And what was that? he thought. What was better than life? And what about the colored folk up in the balcony. They looked on with subreption and woe like a dullness and thinned-out hope in their faces.

But Billy didn’t have time to answer.

The big woman leaned back in her chair, settling her prayer-meeting dress around her. “I never stop feeling the hurt of it,” she said. Her cheeks glowed with suffering virtue.

She is trading her immortal soul, Billy thought, for a moment of irreproachable righteousness. It didn’t matter that she was lying. How could it? A moment like this was probably never coming again for a woman like this. It didn’t matter what the truth was. What mattered was filling head and heart with righteousness, for once finding something she could put her soul into. Like everybody, whether sorting through their own meagerness or fossicking their children’s lives for talents they didn’t have or stacking up cargo in the back room or abetting what they thought of as goodness — some something they could get behind with all they had. And the preacher, speaking from the rolled-down window of his Cadillac, saying, “Pass it on to the Lord, sinner.”

These thoughts zipped by and were gone.

Poor woman, he thought.

As they walked out last night from the hotel room they worked in now, Harris had said to him: “She’s going to have to stay mad all her life.” He was chuckling quietly as he said this, in wonder, a familiar wonder. Billy saw now what he meant. She was lying like a little boy saying it was trolls knocked him down and got his Sunday clothes dirty. Well, maybe it was trolls. And maybe this woman had been raped. Sure she had. She’d been raped and beaten and purely deceived, right from the set-out probably — this was what Harris had said as they sat out on the hotel’s second-floor porch, the old man smoking a cigarillo and drinking Spanish brandy from a tiny snifter—“misused and punished for things she didn’t do and lied to probably by every man she met. And now she has her chance to correct all that. These boys are the ones elected to pay the price for all those other boys who got away.”

“What can we do?” Billy had asked, as if he didn’t already know what the old man told him, or what was coming.

“Well, we will see,” Harris had said, tipping the snifter in his short pudgy fingers so the brandy almost but not quite spilled.