“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.
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.