Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

Now in the airy courtroom the old man from the Daily Worker ’s legal auxiliary got to his feet. He began to ask the woman, Miss Blaine, questions about the details. What were the men wearing? Did she notice anything special about any of them? If they had pulled her dress over her head, how could she identify who had done what? Why was it she had not gotten blood on her? Walker and the others were cut in the fight and they were wearing clothes splashed with blood. Why was it that none of the white boys had at first mentioned that a rape had occurred? What about her history? Did she not work regularly as a prostitute on the Richmond & Hattiesburg freight lines? Wasn’t prostitution her regular means of employment?

The judge stopped this line of questioning. “We are here,” he said tapping the bench top with his forefinger, “to find out what happened on the afternoon of September eight.”

“Why were you on that train?” Harris asked.

“I heard about jobs in Memphis.”

“What jobs were those, Miss Blaine?”

“Housework, cleaning.”

“Have you done much housework, Miss Blaine?”

“My share.”

“Could you tell us the names of some of your employers?”

Miss Blaine had forgotten their names.

Harris asked about the treatments for gonorrhea, in Chattanooga and Roanoke, Virginia.

The judge stopped him again.

Harris picked away at her story through the warm fall afternoon. The courtroom smelled of sweat and overly saturated perfume. Delvin could smell from somewhere nearby the slightly sour odor of cow manure somebody’d tracked in. It was all he could do not to leap from his chair to argue with the white woman. “Tell me one true thing about me — ME!” he wanted to shout. He knew she wouldn’t be able to say one thing. She was like a locustwood knot, nothing to her but sap and hardheadedness. Mr. Oliver used to call him hardheaded. Well he should come see hardheadedness now. He looked around the courtroom, but there was no Mr. Oliver. He had left after their meeting in the jail and Delvin had not heard from him since. People had written him — Celia’s letters were the ones he cherished — and the Ghost had been in town for two weeks. Delvin had seen him standing outside the jail and waved to him. The Ghost acted like he didn’t know it was him waving. But the next day he showed up again, taking the same spot as the day before, next to the boiled peanuts stand. The steam from the boiler blew over Winston, alternately concealing and revealing him. He was as skinny as ever. Delvin had waved, but again the Ghost hadn’t acknowledged him. He was in the same spot most days of the two weeks and he never indicated that he had seen Delvin. He was in the courtroom too, on the second day, but Delvin had not seen him since.

He put his hands under the table because they had started to shake. He tried with all his will to make them stop, but they kept trembling. His flesh seemed to have come loose from his skin. The thought made him wince so he looked as if he was hearing the unpalatable truth, which the jury noticed. He was so vexed it was all he could do not to leap up and run. He was going to run. If he wasn’t in too many pieces and he found a way. Big hollows inside his body, gaps, cut-through places, like in the hills where one hill fell off and another hadn’t hardly got started. And always these days a chill wind circulating, dipping icy fingers into troughs and low, damp spots. Sometimes he was as still as a thing that had never lived. Sometimes he trembled like a bent motor. Sometimes frozen, sometimes hot as a steam iron. The boys had begun to look to him to speak for them but he didn’t think he could. He could talk, and he could understand what the lawyers were saying, but he could hardly keep from busting into tears — from running. He was going to run.

Mr. Pullen had laid out the case, and though he said it was clear as day that the men hadn’t committed the crime, Delvin couldn’t see one good thing about what was coming. Even Little Buster, a child who didn’t know how to read and had to count on his fingers, saw that the joke was on the africano boys. “Might as well get to training for jail,” he’d said. “That is if they don’t light us up.” “We in that training now, fool,” Carl Crawford told him. But two of the boys were so ignorant they hardly realized they were in jail.

In his bed at night Delvin lay on his belly pushing his face into the cotton pallet, coughing up tears until his stomach cramped. My everyday path a road of fire. He jammed his fist into his mouth and bit down so hard the pain made him shiver and cry out. “That you, Delvin?” Bonette Collins called out. Delvin didn’t answer, but then when he saw in the dark that Bonette was getting out of his bunk he told him to stay where he was. “I’s all right,” he said. He tried not to let them see him crying, but they could each see the dismals in the others’ faces, the torment. They looked like their best friend had died. Or more, as if something promised — so ordinary and inevitable and such a sure thing they didn’t have to give it a thought — had suddenly been taken away. Something — slide of blood in the veins, the world’s itinerant sweetness — that you didn’t even know could be taken away, something you hardly even knew you had. But, gone . . you were broken and scattered. The white folks made you feel small, sure. They made you feel you were wrong to be. . yeah, to be. But this that was snatched away now was none of that. This was something else. “It’s like we was walking along,” Coover Broadfoot said, “and a mule fell out of the sky and hit us.” “I know which mule it was, too,” Bonette Collins said and the others laughed; they all knew. When you thought about what was happening — what was going to happen — you got so scared you couldn’t think straight.

This is grief, Delvin thought. We’re in mourning.

He wrote some of this down in the little notebook Gammon had told the jailer he needed for the case — not really a notebook but one somebody’d torn crossways in half; enough to write on. It had a mud stain on it and the pages were hooped where they’d gotten wet and dried out. You want to run right through the walls. Sometimes you can hardly draw breath; sometimes you can’t get any air in your breath. Carl said he thought he was drowning. We all think we are drowning. But we aren’t drowning and we have to breathe and we can’t. . He tried to stick to what was going on right this minute. I am chewing a piece of hard yellow cornbread, he wrote, one chew, two, three. . my fingernails are turning brown. . and on he went, but his mind wouldn’t stay on bread chewing or his nails — or walking up and down or staring at the tin-sheathed wall where a window ought to be.

The town was full of spectators. Sports and the bedeviled, thrillseekers, the estranged and crippled, common people, farmers drifted in on market days, old men riding in weathered wagons and children walking along beside, women in poke bonnets carrying tied-up packages by the string, aficionados of death row, reporters, profiteers, the falsely cunning and bereft. Some few of the africano women tried to bring them gifts. Food in wicker hampers or stacked in plates tied with a cotton cloth. Men wanted to look at them and the deputies brought a few of them back to the cell, white men, most of whom tried to look casual or tough — or maybe they were tough — leaning against one of the stone posts thumbing their galluses and leering. Some were calm, others stiff. Some had been walking around for weeks with a numbness on their skin, with a burning in closed places, with a sorrow so old and ugly they took a doctor’s pills to make it subside and stood on the back porch tossing bits of skillet bread to the dog or waked after midnight and went out in the dewy grass and called a name they hadn’t spoken since they were youngsters, parents of children who shuddered at their prayers and were losing weight and husbands of women who locked themselves in their rooms and sat on the bed fiddling with their rings — they had come here to see the living dead. More than one with his face like it was shellacked. Most sweating, some angry, some laughing. Most able to go on with their lives, even the man on a crutch the varnish was worn off of, or the fat man in a striped shirt eating a tamale from a piece of waxed paper. The fat man wiped his mouth with his bare wrist, leaving a streak of red juice on his cheek. A bouncy little man couldn’t stop grinning. A preacher dwelt in pentecostal gloom. Most — even those troubled in their spirit — were appreciative, relieved of the burden of chasing down these miscreants, of handling their black flesh or staring into their eyes in the last moments of their freedom, of being the ones sweating and running to catch up; they enjoyed now the blood surge that grew in strength as they walked the crooked jailhouse corridors toward the cell. Some experienced this episode as nothing more than a rectifying revenge — and Delvin thought, That is what it is: revenge by murder , and he had turned away and gotten sick in the slop bucket. They don’t know me, he thought. And behind him, outside the bars, hearts ticking, breath entering lungs and blood circulating through bodies, deep into the indwellings of the brain, clattering and banging out the news: Not me, not this time — not me.