Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

A crumpling in Delvin’s chest is weighted with a sudden heavy-heartedness. Heavy-bodiedness. He shifts his leg, his aching hip, but his hand doesn’t leave the tree.

The first two suddenly free men run hard across the short space of open ground between the fence and the fields. They reach the sprawling, knee-high cotton and drop down into it. The others follow and Delvin can see their shapes moving like shadows through the cotton. Shouts break out from the camp. From the nearest tower shots are fired. The mixed reports of several guns. The siren begins to roll out its call, stretching and building up speed, louder and louder like it is climbing right up the side of the world.

Delvin throws himself down and presses his hands against his ears. His heart beats into his cupped palms. He pants. It is as if the rope still dangling from the mashed wire is attached to his body. It tugs at him, not in a steady surge but in looping fits, jerking him. He presses himself hopelessly into the damp ground and he knows this feeling as he knows the hard lifeless ground you try to become part of and make a life on in the lightless shacks and Bake Houses and reform sheds.

Armed men are out in the yard, each with something special to do. The guards shout orders at the prisoners who want to come out too. Cries rise from the barracks, yells, hoorahs and yips. The guards shout instructions at each other. Their precious stock is getting away. Some scurry about in undershirts and partly buttoned trousers, rifles or scatterguns or crankers in hand. Frank Miles runs from the guard shed in the red longhandles he wears in all seasons and Lonnie Batts skips as he runs, slapping at his chest.

Delvin can’t figure why so many are on duty and then he thinks he can and worries crazily about it. In a few minutes they will have the dogs working. Delvin can hear them baying over in their compound near the mule barn. He tries to get up but he can’t. He wants now to run for the rope but he knows he won’t do that. He turns on his side, grasps the trunk and pulls himself up, sitting, half lying with his back to the tree. Arnold Anderson, a short, round-faced guard from Tennessee, comes around the side of the big gum.

“Whoa,” he cries and raises his shotgun at him. “Here’s one of em got too scared to go,” he yells. He is laughing and sweating and jumpy with juice. Escapes scare most of the guards half to death. Going after these villains isn’t like hunting quail or rabbits. It is dangerous. Anderson waves the gun at Delvin.

“Get down on the ground, pancake.”

He knows Delvin by name but Delvin can see he isn’t going to know him right now. He slides to the ground and presses his face into the dirt. My home. He smells something sweet and his mind flies to a field of grain he and the professor’d passed one late afternoon in Arkansas when the sun looked like it was sinking right down into the yellow wheat. He is sleepy. He wishes he could lie with his face in the dirt and sleep his life away.

They had to put them on the stand because there was nothing else to do. The two doctors said the women had been raped (at least they’d had sexual relations, Your Honor) and four of the white boys who’d been in the fight said they’d seen the negroes with the women and the women said they’d been held down and raped and nobody, white or colored, stood up and said the boys didn’t do it and God wasn’t up to testifying on this one so of course they had to put them on the stand.

Two of them couldn’t follow the simplest question.

They don’t even goddamn know they’re being tried for anything, Pullen said. He had just gotten a haircut and his hair gleamed like the procedure included a fresh shellacking and he smelled of a musky scalp rub. He laughed when he said this. They were sitting in the front room of their hotel office with the supper dishes stacked around them on the big cypresswood table covered with a stained white tablecloth.

You’re correct there, Davis, Gammon said. He had taken to calling Pullen by his first name though he knew he didn’t like it.

Four of the boys wouldn’t have much to say except they didn’t do it.

Hell, Pullen said picking with his fingernail at the rind of beef fat that still had the blue slaughterhouse stamp on it, half of em can’t even remember what it is they are charged with.

Well, long as you can remember, Davis, Billy Gammon said.

Har, har, Pullen gusted, a look of malevolence in his large narrowed gray eyes.

They had to put all of them on the stand, there was no way around it. Every dogged man has to have his day. Even Coover Broadfoot who offended everybody with his uppity manner and his buckteeth and his twitchy way and question asking. What was that and what do you mean by that and I wish you could tell me, he said to the judge, exactly what they mean by that. The judge looked at him like somehow a big black creepycrawler had gotten into his witness chair and he wanted to reach over the high desk of righteousness and swat this idiotic fool right back to Africa, but all he said was Take your time there, boy, and get it just as right as you can. The judge was free to ask questions and he did, questions that generally made it hard for anybody to wonder which side he was on, but he didn’t really care, he knew what had to be done here and the truth was just whatever got dug deepest into, it didn’t matter what the lawyers or the witnesses or even the parties concerned thought. Dig deep enough and everybody was guilty. Only the law kept them all out of jail.

Well, boy, he said, you just let yourself settle down. Have a drink of water (from the glass with a little piece of paper gummed to it with the word COLORED printed in ink on it) and then sit back in that chair and take a deep breath, take two, and go on with your story.

That was what Broadfoot did, stuttering and biting his words, hurling the undeniable — so he appeared to think — facts around the room, into the faces of the jury made up of white men who wouldn’t have allowed him to set foot in their yards even if he offered to rake up all the pine straw for nothing. It was em white boys, he said, who jumped on em girls. If any colored boy got on em they’s way back in the line and it be purely because those women called em to do it. I wadn’t even close to any of that. I got a gal back in Eubanks, Tennessee, that I plan to marry as soon as I can get back to her. I wouldn’t have no other woman and I certainly wouldn’t want no white woman.

He went on and on placing himself and several others outside the range of these occurrences, sorting through the names and the events with the skill of one whose intelligence pressed him from all sides, sneering as he did so and panting and staring the jury in the face like he dared them not to believe him, dared them even to think he was guilty. By the time he got off the stand the jury, all twelve of the men who had never seen this young man before the trial, were happy they were not going to see him again after it was over.

And so it went.

Delvin, his turn come upon him, rose from his seat with his coarse white and blue jail trousers (he’d gone back to wearing the issue) sweat-sticking to his butt and the backs of his legs, swaying nearly to a faint, but able still, rising as man or creature swum continually for miles might rise from the depths of the swamp of being, gasping and looking wild-eyed around the place that was filled with townsfolk and reporters and maybe one or two people who had known him before this calamity flew upon him, or were drawn to him by his own behavior (he pondered this daily and hadn’t yet decided; some blamed him outright, Rollie Gregory among them). Was that the Ghost up in the balcony? The professor? Was that Celia? He stopped in his tracks, experiencing for only the second or third time in his life the sensation of his heart catching fire. His mind went blank. The four tall windows looked like paintings filled with blue. No black man with blue eyes. No Celia either. For a second he didn’t know where he was. He came to himself walking to the big wooden witness chair, a copy a guard had told him of the electric chair at Markusville. The judge was looking at him as if he knew him well and was sick and tired of his face. He could hear breathing behind him. It sounded like the bellows in the blacksmith shop over on Florida street in Chattanooga. He would never see that place again. His body felt brittle, waffled through by termites and other hurtbugs until he was eaten with holes and corridors and little bug byways and all dried up. He could hear himself creak as he sat down, or was that the chair about to collapse under him?