Rhodes and Minsk walked down a tree-lined path toward the guest cottage. The campus was quiet except for the chirping of crickets and the incessant warbling of night birds. It was cool. Minsk was glad to get out of New York, which was hot and muggy. Finally Rhodes, the man waddling alongside him, who probably took out after the carbohydrates between breakfast and lunch and dinner, said: “What’s Ball’s play all about?”
“It’s about the lynching of a black lad down here for staring at a white woman. Only Ball has introduced a twist. He has the woman the kid allegedly stared at demand that his body be exhumed so that the corpse can be tried. She wants to erase any doubts in the public’s mind that she was not the cause of the eyeballing she got.” Both men laughed.
“That Ball is hilarious. He has a fantastic range.”
“We thought that it was a fantasy at first, and then Ball produced an article that appeared in Ebony magazine regarding a Mississippi man who was actually arrested for what was called ‘reckless eyeballing.’”
“We’ve changed since those times, Mr. Minsk. This is ‘the New South.’ The races get along fine down here. We don’t lynch Negroes anymore.” Minsk thought that the stress Rhodes placed on Negroes was peculiar. He glanced at the man’s flat, vacuous face and decided that there was no malicious intent. He read everything but the man’s goat eyes, which were difficult to examine; one couldn’t determine whether they were staring at you or away from you. Rhodes left Minsk at the door of the small guest cottage. He told Minsk to call him at home if he had any difficulty. Minsk walked to the inside of the cottage. It was cozy. There was a fireplace and a couple of straight-back chairs with cane seats and a rocking chair. In the bedroom was a brass bed covered with an ancient quilt. Hanging over the bed was a picture of Jesus of Nazareth. He remembered what his crotchety father had said about Jesus when he was growing up. He called the rabbi from Galilee a magician and sorcerer.
9
When the three men entered the small stadium, the students were already there. This surprised Minsk because, though he had seen many cars parked in the parking lots, he hadn’t seen any people, nor had he heard anybody while entering the stadium. The five hundred or so spectators sat in one section of the small stadium. The other sections were dark. The men wore suits and ties and the women wore white dresses. He looked around and all he could think about were the models on the boxes of soap, with their confident grins. He felt the energy of their eyes upon him so intensely that he nearly stumbled and had to be aided by Watson and Rhodes as they started down one of the aisles and toward the front row. In front of their seats a red, white, and blue banner had been hung, and at the far end of the stadium there stood a large white cross that was blinking yellow from the lightbulbs. Rhodes and Watson sat next to him. He looked about at the crowd, and they were all looking at him. He could see their faces behind the candles that each had lit. He asked for a program and was told that there was none.
“In keeping with tradition, nothing about the ceremony should be written down,” Watson said.
“Ceremony? I thought you said it was a play.”
“Semantics,” Rhodes said and glanced at Minsk. Minsk didn’t like the look.
The performance space was shaped like a ring. A man dressed like Count Dracula with his caped arm in front of his face stood at the center. This had to be some kind of joke, but nobody laughed. Dracula said, in a thick Romanian accent, “Blood. I’ve been vagabonding all over Europe pursuing my tastes. I’m tired of the blood of infidels. It doesn’t have that tartness, that sizzle you have in Christian blood. Christian blood tastes carbonated, like cherry cola. I think that I’m going to shrivel up into dust if I don’t get some soon.” Another spotlight is cast upon a woman in a negligee lying on top of an oversized bed. Her arm dangles over the side. One hand holds a long-stemmed rose. A canopy hangs over the bed. “Ah, there,” the actor playing Dracula says. “At last. I’ll get a good day’s sleep tomorrow.” The count begins to creep toward the bed where the sleeping maiden is lying, her blond hair spread to each side of her head. As he bends down and is about to sink his fangs into the maiden’s throat, she bolts.
“Get thee back, Jew, in the name of him whose precious blood was shed on Calvary.” The students in the stadium affirmed her pleas with hallelujahs and a-mens. Minsk saw some of them, behind the candles, their eyes rolling about. Others raised their hands. It was at that point in “the play” that he began to examine his options for escape. The actress playing the Christian maiden was still carrying on, spilling out her words of Jew-loathing curses as the vampire began to sink, his eyes protuberant. The audience applauded as the performance area began to turn dark again, with only the outlines of the prop people setting up the next scene to be seen.
“What was the point of all of that — why did you bring me down here to see this anti-Semitic filth?” Minsk protested, only to be silenced by Watson, sitting next to him. In the next scene a caricature of a medieval Jew in a long, black robe and cap creeps onto the set, whose only prop is a wall from which hangs a picture of Madonna and child. The Jew looks both ways, plucks the painting from the wall with his long, sinister-looking fingers, and then hides it under his robe. At that point, a couple of bearded guys in urban cowboy clothes and good old boy caps come running into the area. They snatch the painting, and one of the good old boys twists the Jew’s wrist, forcing him onto his knees. He slaps him.
“Don’t put that evil eye on me, Jew,” he says as he beats the actor playing the Jew. This delights the crowd. One of the good old boys begins to push a ham sandwich down the Jew’s mouth and laughs as he gags. Another one hoses down the Jew. “How’d you like a little baptism, you kike?” he says, laughing.
“Look, I don’t want to stay here and watch this shit. Take me back to the airport.” But when Jim rose he felt something hard poking at his ribs. Rhodes had a pistol.
“Sit back down, you son of a bitch. You’ll miss the best part.” From the look in his eyes Minsk knew that there would be trouble ahead. There was something hurt, hateful, and wounded in Rhodes’ eyes. There was fascination. The hatred had twisted his swinish face.
The only thoughts that Minsk had at that moment were about how to get out of the stadium. It had four exits that could be reached by walking up the aisle, but he didn’t want to take the chance of having to run through a gauntlet of these clean Christians, who now seemed out for blood. He would have to leap over the railing in front of the seats and try to reach one of the tunnels located below the stands.
The stadium was lit again from the candles. The lights in the performance area came up. A black man in a dirty shirt and overalls stood in the spotlight. Some of the people in the audience began to weep. This must be the main part of the play, Minsk thought. He could hear his heart beat.
The character, Jim Conley, a janitor in Leo Frank’s pencil factory, was being played by Michael Steepes, who’d been done up with black greasepaint and red lips. More people in the audience began to weep; as he began to speak his lines, a hush fell over the audience.
“I reckon I worked for Mr. Frank for a long time. Mr. Frank was a nice, honorable man.” (Some members of the audience hiss.) “Treated us nigras well, and wasn’t as hard on us as some of the other white people I worked for, I reckon. He’d built his pencil factory into quite a business. Married high class.