This particular go-round the slight woman Hazel Fran, grown more slight since 1931, is unsure if she was actually raped and is now unable to identify the attackers except for Delvin and Carl Crawford who she still thinks might have assaulted her, I’m not absolutely sure, Judge, Your Honor, but I think they were there at the time. The other woman, Lucille Blaine, whom everyone in the courtroom — including such juried-up Kluxers as Clifford Bumper, Carlton Fuchs, Brother Wren and two others who have participated in lynchings plural and attended half a dozen more, all of which they considered justified, necessary, even righteous — know to be a liar, sticks to her story. She is an indissoluble lump of solid rage, in person.
The doctor, Mills, has a shamed look on his face as he once again sets out the medical proof of male violation.
Gammon presents a witness who says he had sex with Miss Blaine the morning before she was supposedly raped in the afternoon.
Miss Blaine sits at the prosecution table, heavy and menacing, her tongue stuck half out of her mouth. She flings curses at the defense witnesses. The judge, a middle-sized man with a homely, unoffending face, has to admonish her. She accuses the judge of being a nigger lover and has to be escorted briefly from the courtroom and taken to a windowless waiting room where a woman bailiff smirkingly tells her she doesn’t want to go to jail herself for something it’s only a nigra’s doing, honey.
Everybody senses the sadness and despair fuming around her like a cloud of bottleflies as she passes by but nobody calls it that.
Every human being, so the story goes, has to find something to believe in, to base his ridiculous hopes on, and she has found this.
Delvin does not account particularly well for himself. Already bearer of an extended sentence (escape fiend), he has lapses during which he forgets the order of things and thinks this is the second trial and then for a sec thinks he is sitting in the cab of the van, debating with the professor the true facts of the slave revolt in Haiti, and then suddenly he is snatched up by a rage that according to the Capital City Observer seems to fill him like a gust of hot wind fills a sail and he lets loose with a gusher of vituperation aimed at the state judicial system and the state itself (“impoverished, derelict agency of numbskullery and perversion”), including every soul in said state, though those accusing him of these crimes, so the paper points out, are all natives of other states, including not only the accused’s home state of Tennessee but such northern states as Ohio and New York. Gammon has allowed him to be put up for cross-examination and he does no better, really, at the hands of the state prosecutor. He does get across to the jury that he believes himself to be falsely accused, but that is pretty much the limit of it.
By this time the state is becoming embarrassed by the whole confabulation. The first two trials were hot topics in the national media. The state, which already considers itself put upon and misused as all get-out, is now presented in an even more unfavorable light. The nativeborn, who think of themselves — white folk, that is — as among the most accommodating and generous human beings on earth, are scalded by the adverse publicity. Dolts, bigots, murderers, incesters, juicers, addled row runners, slew-footed cretins and nutcases, nightcrawlers, dusters, general miscreants and shovel-faced fools, showoffs, clods, shitheads — utter assholes — are some of the terms used against them.
But if they have never grown used to such, they are prepared. Ever since things first began to go badly with the cheap labor business, the locals learned to fling back what was flung at them. They are beginning in this instance to grow tired of the acidic innuendoes and outright slanders. This crazy nigra and all those other crazy nigras have caused them more trouble really than they are worth, or than standing them straight up by way of a profound lesson in how to behave is. Men lying in their beds under window fans sucking in the scents of yellow jasmine, fertilizer, spun cotton and Bull Durham tobacco smoke feel in their deepest recesses the faint but insistent pressure of a misused people rising. The powers of custom and church-sponsored reason are all that hold back a tide of despair that otherwise would swamp these men and drive them to wild futile acts. But they — like everybody — have to find a way to go on without befouling themselves, or at least without making it look as if they did.
Out beyond the tiny zone of actuality, the meaty core of fact from which they receive their instructions to do what is necessary to stay alive on earth (no matter what), pressed and marbled with the sweet fat of love for those children whose lives are being cut down at the root by falseness, beyond this supersaturated mix of divisible realities, they experience, as always, the need to hold to a position that is imperishable. Only such a position will allow them to take a break and start to get some fun out of life. That’s what, goddammit, this routine with these grassy coons is about, they say.
“Everybody down here thinks he is right,” Gammon says, pulling on his cigar. “He is too scared not to think it.
“Movement, that is the sine qua non of this universe,” Gammon says. “Keep it moving.” He has developed motes in his right eye and though the doctor assures him they are harmless, they scare him. “What is wrong with this malefactorous boys of Klaudio, this KO Boys thing, is it has stopped moving. Everything living that can still twitch is bailing out of that ratless grounded ship.” He has haplessly married a game-legged woman from the capital whose family owns a string of peanut mills in four states and who wants him to give up the law and go traveling with her. “The prosecutors want to live happily. The juries, the judges, the defense lawyers, the uncoddled and spiritually mutilated accused — they want to live happily. Even the white boys who got their asses kicked. Even the two violated women. Or even one of them.” He has promised his wife he will retire from the law in the spring. “There is still a woman,” he says, “this adiposal Cypriot from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and points north and south, who holds to her story that Delvin Walker and Carl Crawford and Little Buster Wayfield, among others, committed the crime of rape on her body and must be punished for it.”
He looks heavily at his listeners, a couple of beat reporters plus loafers and afternoon drinkers and ex-preachers — the common habitues of the Constitution Bar on State street. He wishes he was singing Schubert lieder in a choir. He signals the barkeep for another.
“The exasperated gents sitting at their restaurant tables ordering without menu or leaning back in Adirondack chairs under the scuppernong arbor drowsy with the heavy wine of ripe grapes and the soothing hum of honeybees, or jumping from a third-story window to escape the Meredith Hotel fire on Custom street, or sitting on a doughnut cushion to ease their hemorrhoids at the Melody mule and horse auction in Loris, or watching their young daughters dive from the ten-foot board into the clear green waters of Aucilla Springs, or walking or fighting or sleeping or arguing with an associate or straining on the crapper or praying or whining or crying out to God or cursing the day they were born — these men, who by circumstance or personal effort have become embroiled in this calamity, cannot quite get this dear woman, lying snoring on her back, I expect, as we speak, through the balmy hours of a late spring Saturday morning, say — have not been able to prevail, or suggest with enough persuasiveness, or lean against with appropriate gesturing, or outwait or outwit, to retrieve from her a recantation that would set them free.