Let the Circle Be Unbroken

by Mildred D. Taylor

  “Yes, sir,” replied Reverend Gabson. “Mr. R.W. and Mr. Melvin said something ’bout come on, you still want that pearl-handled pistol. They said something ’bout all of ’em going into Strawberry.”

  “What was T.J.’s physical condition at that time? Had he been beaten?”

  “No, sir. He was fine at the church.”

  Reverend Gabson stepped down and Mr. Jamison called R.W. back to the stand. “Mr. Simms,” said Mr. Jamison after taking several long moments to look unhurriedly through his notes on the table, “Reverend Gabson has just testified that he and a number of people at Great Faith church saw you and your brother Melvin with T.J. Avery on the evening of August twenty-fifth. Do you concur in this?”

  R.W. looked sullenly at Mr. Jamison. “We was with him, if that’s what ya mean. We seen him walking on the way to church and we give him a ride. That’s what we done for him . . . had pity on the nigger, and look here see how we gets repaid. See these here filthy lies he been tellin’. You give a nigger an inch and he take a mile, so I guess what could we expect?” He looked past Mr. Jamison, directing the question to the people in the court. Several of the men nodded, showing they agreed.

  “Did you also bring him into town?”

  “Naw, we ain’t done that. Him and a few of the nigra younguns had a falling-out down at the church, so he decided not to stay and we brought him on back toward his house—down far as our own place—and let him off.”

  “While you were at the church, did you or Melvin say anything about going into Strawberry?”

  “We ain’t.”

  “Did you say anything about getting a pearl-handled pistol for him?”

  “We ain’t.”

  “I see. All those people at the church misheard you then.” There was a hint of sarcasm in his tone, but Mr. Jamison gave R.W. no time to reply. “When you left the church, you said you dropped T.J. off in front of your place. Did you then go directly to town?”

  “Naw, we gone into the house first.”

  “How long were you home?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—’bout an hour, I reckon.”

  “And then you went?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Directly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In your truck?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You and your brother Melvin?”

  R.W. sighed. “Yeah, ain’t I said that?”

  Mr. Jamison nodded and walked from R.W., talking to him as he crossed to his table. “And why did you decide to go into Strawberry at that hour—it was quite late, was it not?”

  “Wasn’t so late. Me and Melvin jus’ had an itch to play some pool, that’s all, and Mr. Jones’ is usually open late Saturdays. There ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.”

  “No,” agreed Mr. Jamison, “nothing wrong with that at all.” He turned to face R.W. “Just what time did you get into town?”

  “How’m I s’pose to know that? Ain’t got no watch. I’m just a dirt farmer, not no fancy nigger lawyer.”

  Mr. Jamison ignored the remark. “Well, perhaps I can help you out. Reverend Gabson testified that church services at Great Faith began at seven o’clock and that you arrived with the Avery boy just a few minutes before that and that you left shortly after. So would you say that it was about seven o’clock when you were at the church?”

  R.W. stared somewhat dubiously at Mr. Jamison. “I reckon,” he said.

  “And you said you then went home, dropping T.J. Avery off at that point. Now about how long would that take?”

  R.W. shrugged. “Five minutes or so.”

  “Um,” murmured Mr. Jamison rubbing his chin. “Now you stayed what you say was about an hour at home, then went into town. How long does it take for you to make that trip into Strawberry in your pickup?”

  R.W. looked annoyed by the question. “’Bout forty minutes—forty-five—fifty—somewheres in there.”

  “So that would make it—let me see—starting from seven o’clock with ten minutes to go home, an hour at home, and some forty-five minutes to come into town—about nine o’clock when you got here. Is that correct?”

  R.W. hesitated.

  “Is that correct?” Mr. Jamison’s voice was sharp.

  “Yeah . . . Yeah, I guess so.”

  Mr. Jamison nodded. “Can you describe your truck to us?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Just describe the truck please.”

  “It looks ’bout like any other ’round here.”

  “But if it were parked with fifty others, you’d know it?”

  “Course I’d know it.”

  “How?”

  R.W. fidgeted just a bit in his chair, glanced at the people watching him, and answered. “It’s a old Model T—don’t know the year. It’s black mostly and kinda beat up, with a right blue fender.”

  “A right blue fender!” questioned Mr. Jamison.

  R.W. smiled. “Yeah, me and Melvin started to paint it one time and we run outa paint.”

  The spectators laughed. Mr. Jamison smiled as well. “A very distinctive truck then,” he said. “One most likely not to be confused with any other, wouldn’t you say?”

  The grin left R.W.’s face. “Reckon not.”

  Mr. Jamison again turned his back to R.W. and lowered his head as if in deep thought, then faced him again. “What would you say if I told you that I have a man here who says he saw that distinctive truck of yours with its blue fender parked near the Barnett Mercantile on the night of August twenty-fifth, a few minutes after eight o’clock, an hour before you said you and your brother were in town. Just what would you say to that?”

  Talking swelled in the courtroom as people discussed this new possibility. Judge Havershack’s gavel brought silence once more. The judge looked down at R.W., who had lost all coloring, then pointed an accusing finger at Mr. Jamison. “There you go with that suppositioning again, Wade. Now you got such a witness?”

  There was a pause before Mr. Jamison answered.

  “I have,” he said.

  “Some lying nigger, no doubt,” accused R.W., his eyes flashing angrily.

  “No,” said Mr. Jamison calmly, then nodded to the center of the courtroom. “Mr. Justice Overton.”

  All eyes in the courtroom turned to a slight, bald man dressed in a dark suit and looking quite respectable amidst his peers.

  For a moment all was quiet.

  Then R.W. stood up, hat in hand, the color returning to his face in an angry red, and pointed accusingly at Mr. Jamison. “I knows what you tryin’ to do, Wade Jamison! I knows it and everybody else here knows it! You’re a nigger in white skin, that’s what you are. Fact, you worse than a nigger—”

  Judge Havershack beat his gavel against the table, but R.W. paid no attention.

  “You went ’gainst your own kind supportin’ them niggers in their wagoning up to Vicksburg last spring, and here you supportin’ ’em now. All you wants is to get your niggers off! You don’t care what lies you spread ’bout decent white folks—”

  “Now, R.W., I’m not going to have this,” threatened Judge Havershack. “You remember where you are.”

  “I remembers all right and I jus’ wanna say this.” He turned to the jury. “What kinda country is this when a white man’s gotta defend hisself ’gainst a nigger? Huh? I jus’ wants to know that? Well, I ain’t sayin’ no more. I done said the truth, and if a white man can’t believe that over what that lyin’ nigger said, then . . .” Once again his eyes fell upon Mr. Jamison. “He jus’ might as well be a nigger his own self.”

  * * *

  Mr. Justice Overton was called, and Melvin Simms recalled. Then Mr. Jamison made his summation, pleading to the jury to be merciful and reminding them that a verdict of guilty with no recommendation for clemency would result in the death penalty. “You have heard the testimonies of all the witnesses involved,” he said. “You have heard Mrs. Barnett admit her doubt that T.J. was the one person who struck her husban
d, thereby killing him. You have heard T.J.’s account of what happened. You have heard him tell you that his accomplices that night were not black, as Mr. Macabee contends, but R.W. and Melvin Simms. You have heard as well, from both R.W. and Melvin Simms, that they had spent considerable time with T.J. and that they were with him that night. You have heard from Reverend Gabson that he heard the Simmses tell T.J. to come into Strawberry with them the night of the murder to get the pearl-handled gun. And you have heard the testimony of Mr. Justice Overton that he saw the Simmses’ truck parked in back of the Mercantile an hour before R.W. and Melvin Simms said they were in town.”

  Mr. Jamison walked the length of the jury box looking at each juror in turn.

  “T.J. Avery has confessed to what he has done. But I ask each of you, what really is his crime? He followed two white men blindly. They told him to break into the Mercantile and he did as he was told. Now whose fault is that? Haven’t we always demanded that Negroes do as they are told? Haven’t we always demanded their obedience?” He waited as if for an answer before going on. “If we teach them to follow us in what we deem is good, isn’t it logical that they should follow our lead into what is not good? We demand they follow us docilely, and if they should dare to disobey, we punish them for their disobedience, as Melvin and R.W. punished T.J. by beating him. T.J. murdered no one. His guilt lies more in his gullibility, in his belief that two white men cared about him, than in anything else.

  “If you are asking yourselves, did the Simmses actually play a part in all of this, ask yourselves, Why would T.J. lie about it? He is a black boy. The men of this jury are white. The man who was killed was white. Why would T.J. accuse white men of being part of the break-in that night, of being the actual murderers, when this very accusation could turn you against him? Why? Because, gentlemen, it is the truth.” He searched their faces and repeated, “It is the truth. . . .”

  Mr. Macabee’s plea to the jury demanded that they remember that the murder of a fine, upstanding citizen had been committed and that that, above all else, had to be the deciding factor, not the age of the defendant, the color of his skin, or the color of the man murdered. He said all that and the jury heard all that, but I didn’t believe for one minute that he believed it or the jury did. But they nodded and left to cast their votes.

  The spectators stood and stretched. Some left the courtroom and came outside; most stayed, waiting. The boys and I joined the people on the ground and stood near the old man still sitting at the foot of the tree. None of us said anything as we avoided looking at each other, afraid our fear would be seen, until Christopher-John adamantly declared: “But T.J. ain’t killed nobody! He ain’t!” Stacey put his hand on Christopher-John’s neck and brought him near, but said nothing. There was nothing to say now.

  “Well, what you think of that nigger’s story in there?”

  We looked around. A group of white farmers stood nearby dividing a chaw of tobacco.

  “Aw, it’s just nigger talk,” scoffed one of them. “Like R.W. said, the nigger was lyin’.”

  “Yeah . . . well, most likely,” said another. “But I knows Justice Overton to be a fine and upright man, and he wouldn’t be lyin’ on nobody deliberate.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, know that. But he was mos’ likely jus’ mistaken this time . . . jus’ thought he seen that truck.”

  “Yeah . . . mos’ likely . . . I reckon. . . .”

  Stacey moved us away.

  “Stacey, what you think, huh?” I whispered. “What you think?”

  Stacey looked up at the courthouse. “It’s bad, Cassie. That’s all I know.”

  “Stacey Logan! Is that you?”

  We turned and found Mrs. Wade Jamison standing before us. She was a plump woman in her fifties and was dressed soberly in a dark-blue suit and hat. Although we saw her seldom, we had no trouble recognizing her, for she had one gray eye and one brown one, and a smile that seemed always to be tugging at her lips.

  “Wade told me your papa said he wasn’t coming in for the trial. Where is he?”

  Christopher-John, Little Man, and I looked to Stacey to answer, but he didn’t. He was staring at Mrs. Jamison, resentment in his face. Moe, Clarence, and Little Willie stood to the side saying nothing; Mrs. Jamison had not addressed them.

  “I said where is he?” she repeated. When she still received no answer, she gazed down at us, suspicion in her double-colored eyes. “Don’t tell me he’s not here?”

  We neither confirmed nor denied this.

  Her expression hardened. “Stacey, how’d you come?”

  Stacey waited, the resentment still there, then said: “Wagon.”

  “Whose wagon?”

  “Friend’s.”

  “Your folks know you here?”

  Stacey glared at her, showing her he felt it was no business of hers. “We had to see T.J. was all.”

  “And your folks think y’all at school? Lord, Lord! They must be plumb out of their minds with worry ’bout you all . . . or leastways they will be before long. How you getting home?”

  “Same way we come.”

  “By wagon? It’ll be way past this little one’s bedtime by then.” She put out her hand to touch Little Man’s face. He stepped back, away from her. Mrs. Jamison sighed deeply, looking at all of us, and went back into the courthouse. A few seconds later Mr. Jamison appeared in a courtroom window and stuck out his head.

  “Stacey!” he summoned.

  Stacey looked up and walked over.

  “After the verdict’s in, all of you wait for me. I’ll take you home.”

  “We got a way home.”

  “Not a way that’ll get you there before your folks start getting worried.”

  “There’s seven of us and we got a ride with folks waiting on us.”

  Mr. Jamison glanced past Stacey to Moe, Little Willie, and Clarence. He had been around their families enough to know who they were. He nodded. “You can all squeeze in. Tell your friends in the wagon to go on.”

  “What ’bout the Averys? Won’t they need a ride back?”

  “They’re staying in town tonight. They want to be near T.J.” He started to turn away from the window. Stacey stopped him.

  “Mr. Jamison, how much longer?”

  Mr. Jamison looked out at the sun, low on the horizon. “The longer it takes, the better. Let’s hope . . .” He did not finish. “Now, you all wait,” he said, and left the window.

  * * *

  We did not have to wait long. In less than thirty minutes the jury returned. The vote poll was taken. Twelve men on the jury. Twelve votes of guilty. There was to be no mercy. T.J. received the death penalty.

  * * *

  Mrs. Avery screamed. The courtroom erupted in sporadic clapping. Judge Havershack ordered immediate silence, then thanked the jury members for their fine service and dismissed them. T.J. he remanded to the hands of Sheriff Dobbs to be taken at the first opportunity to the state penitentiary at Parchman. Then he stood, adjourning the court, and left. The white courtgoers spilled from the building. Mr. and Mrs. Avery, Reverend Gabson, Mr. Silas Lanier, and the others stayed seated in their tiny corner until beckoned by Mr. Jamison to come forward.

  T.J. still sat in the courtroom. He showed no emotion at all, not crying, not talking. When he had stood for the verdict, he had looked as if he had not heard it and, since he had sat again, had not moved. Now as his mother reached him, throwing her arms around him and crying as she had done the night he had been almost lynched, it must have hit him that he had been found guilty, for he let out a mournful yelp like a wounded animal, hunted, captured, and now about to die.

  We couldn’t watch anymore.

  “Little Man, Christopher-John, Cassie, go on down,” Stacey said. We obeyed him and he followed with Moe, Little Willie, and Clarence.

  “Yeah, jus’ like I figured,” said the old man who had sat under the tree throughout the ordeal. “Trial or lynching, it always be’s the same. Sho’ is. Always the same. . . .”

  Mr.
Jamison came out from the courthouse and over to where we were. His face was drawn and his eyes bloodshot. “We can go now,” he said.

  “Mr. Jamison,” said Stacey, his voice sounding hoarse, “we—we wanna see T.J. ’fore we go.” He paused as Mr. Jamison studied him. “We gotta do that.”

  Mr. Jamison nodded toward the corner of the courthouse. “They’ll be bringing him out that side door to take him back to jail.”

  We went—Stacey, Christopher-John, Little Man, Moe Turner, Clarence Hopkins, Little Willie Wiggins, and I—to the door to wait. Others waited there too, curious to see the prisoner. Shortly the door opened and Sheriff Dobbs and Deputy Sheriff Haynes came out. T.J. was between them. There were irons on his ankles now, making him shuffle when he walked, and his hands had been cuffed behind him, making him look even more like the prisoner he was.

  Stacey cleared his throat. “Hey, T.J.,” he said.

  At first there was no response from T.J. His head was lowered; his eyes saw no one.

  “T.J. It’s Stacey. We all come. . . .”

  Slowly, T.J. raised his head. The dark eyes brightened in recognition, and for a moment the smile that had once come so easily flashed across his face, making me forget how much I had disliked this frail, frightened boy. Before any more could be said, Deputy Sheriff Haynes shoved his way through the crowd, taking T.J. with him. Looking back over his shoulder at us, T.J. smiled one last time, then the smile and he were gone as he bowed his head and walked on. Tears stung my eyes and he blurred before me.

  We were never to see T.J. again.

  4

  Winter came in days that were gray and still. They were the kind of days in which people locked in their animals and then themselves and nothing seemed to stir but the smoke curling upward from clay chimneys and an occasional red-winged blackbird which refused to be grounded. And it was cold. Not the windy cold like Uncle Hammer said swept the northern winter, but a frosty, idle cold that seeped across a hot land ever looking toward the days of green and ripening fields, a cold that lay uneasy during its short stay as it crept through the cracks of poorly constructed wooden houses and forced the people inside huddled around ever-burning fires to wish it gone.