Virgil tugged at his groin and shifted uncomfortably from his right foot to his left, then back again. He didn’t want to go back inside, but if Little Tom caught him pissing on his lot then Virgil would be going home with Little Tom’s boot stuck up his ass and Virgil had enough troubles down there without adding a damn leather enema to his burdens. He could take a leak by the side of the road farther on down the way; but the more he thought about it the more he wanted to go now. He could feel it burning inside of him: if he waited any longer…
Well, hell, he wasn’t going to wait. He pulled down his zipper, reached inside his pants, and waddled over to the side wall of Little Tom’s Tavern just in time to sign his name, which was about as far as Virgil’s education extended. He breathed out deeply as the pressure eased and his eyes fluttered closed in a brief ecstasy.
Something cold touched him behind his left ear and his eyes quickly opened wide again. He didn’t move. His attention was focused on the feel of the metal on his skin, the sound of liquid on wood and stone, and the presence of a large figure behind his back. Then the voice spoke:
“I’m warnin’ you, cracker: you get one drop of your sorry-ass piss on my shoes and they gonna be fittin’ you up for a new skull before they put you in that box.”
Virgil gulped.
“I can’t stop it.”
“I ain’t askin’ you to stop. I’m ain’t askin’ you nothin’. I am tellin’ you: do not get one drop of your rotgut urine on my shoes.”
Virgil let out a little sob and tried to move the flow to the right. He’d only had three beers but it seemed like he was peeing out the Mississippi. Please stop, he thought. He glanced a little to his left and saw a black gun held in a black hand. The hand emerged from a black coat sleeve. At the end of the black coat sleeve was a black shoulder, a black lapel, a black shirt, and the edge of a black face.
The gun nudged his skull hard, warning him to keep his eyes straight ahead, but Virgil still felt a sudden rush of indignation. It was a nigger with a gun, in the parking lot of Little Tom’s Tavern. There weren’t too many subjects upon which Virgil Gossard had strong, fully formed opinions, but one of them was niggers with guns. The whole trouble with this country wasn’t that there were too many guns, it was that too many of those guns were in the hands of the wrong people, and absolutely and positively the wrong people to be carrying guns were niggers. The way Virgil figured it, white people needed guns to protect themselves from all the niggers with guns while all the niggers had guns to shoot other niggers with and, when the mood took them, white folks too. So the solution was to take away the guns from the niggers and then you’d have fewer white folks with guns because they wouldn’t have so much to be scared about, plus there’d be fewer niggers shooting other niggers so there’d be less crime too. It was that simple: niggers were the wrong people to be handing out guns to. Now, near as Virgil could figure it, one of those selfsame wrong people was currently pressing one of those misplaced guns into Virgil’s skull, and Virgil didn’t like it one little bit. It just proved his point. Niggers shouldn’t have guns and-
The gun in question tapped Virgil hard behind the ear and the voice said:
“Hey, you know you talkin’ out loud, right?”
“Shit,” said Virgil, and this time he heard himself.
The first of the cars turns into the field and pulls up, its headlights shining on the old oak so that its shadow grows and creeps up the slope behind it like dark blood spilling and spreading itself across the land. A man climbs out on the driver’s side then walks around the front of the car and opens the door for the woman. They are both in their forties, hard-faced people wearing cheap clothes and shoes that have been mended so often that the original leather is little more than a faded memory glimpsed through patches and stitching. The man takes a straw basket from the trunk, a faded red check napkin carefully tucked in to cover its contents. He hands the basket to the woman, then retrieves a tattered bedsheet from behind the spare tire and spreads it on the ground. The woman sits, tucking her legs in beneath her, and whips away the napkin. Lying in the basket are four pieces of fried chicken, four buttermilk rolls, a tub of coleslaw, and two glass bottles of homemade lemonade, with two plates and two forks tucked in beside them. She removes the plates, dusts them carefully with the napkin, then lays them on the bedsheet. The man eases himself down beside her and removes his hat. It is a warm evening and already the mosquitoes have begun to bite. He slaps at one and examines its remains upon his hand.
“Sum’bitch,” he says.
“You watch your mouth, Esau,” says the woman primly, carefully dividing up the food, making sure that her husband gets the breast piece because he is a good, hardworking man despite his language and he needs his food.
“Beg pardon,” says Esau as she hands him a plate of chicken and coleslaw, shaking her head at the ways of the man she has married.
Behind and beside them, more vehicles are pulling up. There are couples, and old folks, and young boys of fifteen and sixteen. Some are driving trucks, their neighbors sitting in back fanning themselves with their hats. Others arrive in big Buick Roadmasters, Dodge Royal hardtops, Ford Mainlines, even a big old Kaiser Manhattan, no car younger than seven or eight years old. They share food, or lean against the hoods of their cars and drink beer from bottles. Handshakes are exchanged and backs are slapped. Soon there are forty cars and trucks, maybe more, in and around Ada ’s Field, their lights shining on the black oak. There are easily one hundred people gathered, waiting, and more arriving every minute.
The opportunities to meet up in this way don’t come along so often now. The great years of the Negro barbecue have been and gone, and the old laws are buckling under the pressures imposed from without. There are some folks here who can remember the lynching of Sam Hose down in Newman in 1899, when special excursion trains were laid on so that more than two thousand people from far and wide could come see how the people of Georgia dealt with nigger rapists and killers. It didn’t matter none that Sam Hose hadn’t raped anyone and that he’d only killed the planter Cranford in self-defense. His death would serve as an object lesson to the others, and so they castrated him, cut off his fingers and his ears, then skinned his face before applying the oil and the torch. The crowd fought for fragments of his bones and kept them as tokens. Sam Hose, one of five thousand victims of mob lynchings in less than a century: rapists some, or so they said; killers others. And then there were those who just talked big, or made idle threats when they should have known better than to shoot their mouths off. Talk like that risked getting all sorts of folks riled up and causing no end of trouble. That kind of talk had to be stifled before it became a shout, and there was no surer way of quieting a man or a woman than a noose and a torch.
Great days, great days.
It is about 9:30 P.M. when they hear the sound of the three trucks approaching, and an excited buzz spreads through the crowd. Their heads turn as the headlights scour the field. There are at least six men in each vehicle. The middle truck is a red Ford, and in the bed a black man sits hunched, his hands tied behind his back. He is big, six seven or more, and the muscles in his shoulders and back are hard and bunched like melons in a sack. There is blood on his head and face, and one eye is swollen closed.
He is here.
The burning man is here.
Virgil was certain that he was about to die. His big mouth had just helped him into a heap of trouble, maybe the last trouble he’d ever have to endure. But the good Lord was smiling upon Virgil, even if He wasn’t smiling so hard as to make the-beg pardon, the gunman, go away. Instead, he could feel his breath on his cheek and could smell his aftershave as he spoke. It smelled expensive.