by Lewis Nordan
There came a hunkering down, a defensiveness.
Bumper stickers started to appear around the Delta.
They said, MISSISSIPPI—THE MOST LIED ABOUT STATE IN THE UNION.
They said, BOBO’S BLOOD IS ON THE HANDS OF THE SUPREME COURT.
The Supreme Court became the villain. The Brown v. Board of Education decision.
The local press latched onto this idea.
The Greenwood Commonwealth reporter wrote, “For the Negro vote in such places as Harlem, these Men of Expediency on the Court have been willing to put into serious jeopardy the peace of the Southland.”
This particular reporter seemed to think Supreme Court judges were elected. It didn’t matter. Mississippi was on dee-fence.
Jars with March of Dimes messages on them were taken down from shelves and dusted off and printed with the words DEFENSE FUND and set out on counters of stores to collect money to help pay the New Orleans lawyer.
Not much money was collected, considering Lord Montberclair was one of the richest men in the Delta, but some was, a few quarters and dollar bills showed up in the jars, as a means of protesting all the outside interference, all the agitation.
During jury selection, Uncle and Auntee went into hiding.
The young prosecutor, the boy with a limp, said, “Uncle, put your grief aside and find yourself a hiding place. We need you alive for this trial.”
OUTSIDE, ON the courthouse steps, a child asked his daddy, “How come they let Mr. Runt bring his parrot to the courthouse?”
His daddy said, “You delving into some areas where I ain’t got much expertise, punkin.”
The child said, “How can it be a hunnert percent humidity and it don’t be raining?”
His daddy said, “Well—”
The child said, “Who would win in a fight between Jesus Christ and Superman?”
His daddy said, “Jesus Christ would kick Superman’s steel ass, and don’t you forget it, podner.”
The child said, “Are they gone electrocute these murderers?”
His daddy said, “Naw, honey, they probably ain’t, although they richly deserve it.”
The child said, “How come Charlie McCarthy’s buddy is called Mortimer Snerd?”
His daddy said, “Everybody’s got to be called something.”
The child said, “How come Mr. Runt’s gone change his name?”
His daddy said, “I’m gone start calling you Mortimer Snerd, what I’m own do. Call you Snerd for short.”
The child said, “What’s that expression mean when you say somebody is ugly as hammered shit?”
His daddy said, “Well—”
The child said, “What’s a turd tapper?”
His daddy said, “You the onliest turd tapper I know about, you little turd tapper.”
The child said, “What’s that expression mean when you say somebody’s breath is so bad it can back shit up a hill?”
His daddy said, “I’d say that one’s more or less self-explanatory.”
The child said, “How come Mr. Runt don’t call hisself Digger O’Delve, like on Life of Riley?”
His daddy said, “O’Delve is an Irish name, Runt comes from Scotch-Irish descent, seem like I remember. I think that would be the main reason for not choosing Digger O’Delve.”
The child said, “What would it feel like to murder somebody?”
His daddy said, “Let’s go over to Mr. Shanker’s and get us a cone of cream, hell with this durn trial.”
The child said, “Do you think we’ll ever escape?”
His daddy said, “Not me, punkin, it’s too late for me. Maybe you.”
The child said, “When you die, what happens?”
His daddy said, “I don’t know, sweetnin. Maybe Jesus holds you in his arms and tells you a story about Effie and Peffie.”
The child said, “What would be the meaning of the expression where you say somebody went under the limbo stick?”
His daddy said, “Where did you hear about a limbo stick?”
The child said, “I don’t remember.”
His daddy said, “It mought have something to do with the expression when you say somebody looks like he got beat with an ugly stick, do you reckon?”
The child said, “I own know. Maybe.”
His daddy said, “Yew own know, maybe. Come on, how about a cone of Mr. Shanker’s cream?”
The child said, “When you die and get buried in Miss-sippi, are you still, you know, in Miss-sippi?”
His daddy said, “Naw, honey. That’s the whole point about magic. God is good, it don’t matter how it looks on the surface of things.”
12
THE COURTROOM was jam-pack full of people, and the temperature was up in the nineties, maybe more, so it was plenty hot, too, hot as blue blazes, if you asked Alice Conroy, and the humidity! The courtroom looked like a can of sour-deens, that’s what Alice thought about it, and didn’t smell no better, if Alice was any judge.
Alice Conroy had never in her life seen so many people jammed up in one place, up underneath one roof.
When Uncle and Auntee were brought into the courtroom they were walking behind Hopalong Cassidy, the prosecutor, his funny little skip-step. Step-and-a-hitch-step, step-and-a-hitch-step. That’s the way Hopalong Cassidy, the prosecutor, walked.
Alice could see the two of them, Uncle and Auntee, right down on top of their old heads, from where she sat, up in the balcony, along with the fourth grade and the colored people. The two old folks walked in behind the prosecutor Hopalong Cassidy, stepping and hitch-stepping right along with him, trying to keep up.
Alice’s field trip, the fourth-graders, who now had visited every conceivable point of interest in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, including the sewage treatment pond where they rode around in a motor launch on a sea of human waste, and the Indian mound where they dug up stone-age pots and arrowheads, and the Prince of Darkness Funeral Parlor where they looked at a body, had been assigned the front row of the courtroom balcony. Everybody else up in the balcony, besides themselves, was colored.
Well, Alice couldn’t help that. She was sorry if the coloreds were offended by their presence, honest to goodness she was, and she understood well enough what kind of boundary was being crossed here, and she was also just as sorry as she could be if she was taking up seats that other colored people might have sat in, since the courtroom was segregated and there might well be a ton of black folks with just as much right as a bunch of lily-white, thumb-sucking, hair-twisting, pants-peeing fourth graders to be watching the turning of the wheels of justice, such as they were in the sorriest state in the nation, but that was just too bad, too, because she wasn’t giving up the seats she had fought so hard to get for her fourth graders, not a chance, even if a field trip to a murder trial might be hard for some educators more experienced and knowledgeable than herself to justify.
Alice had warned her fourth graders before they ever left the schoolhouse not to be laughing at Mr. Hopalong’s way of walking, it was a handicap, an affliction, and not a blessed thing he could do about it or don’t you think he would, and everybody ought to be grateful they didn’t have polio, so take their polio naps and don’t swim in Roebuck Lake until they find a cure, was Alice Conroy’s best advice.
Alice watched Uncle look around him and see only whitefolks. White, Lord, Lord, all that white. Alice could tell that Uncle thought that only white people had been allowed to come to the court. That’s got to be a lonely feeling, it seemed like to Alice—especially if you figure most of the whitefolks in question would just love to see Uncle dead for coming here to testify against a white man in the first place, and probably carrying guns to prove it, if anybody in charge of this circus had brain one or thought to check anybody’s pants pocket.
All those white people down there! White! Even to Alice it looked like an abomination of some kind. White, white, bird dooky, white, it was sickening, a pestilence!
Alice thought about the Ancient Mariner, water wat
er everywhere, and none of it doing him one bit of good. She thought that’s what Uncle must be feeling right about now, because she was feeling it, too, whitefolks whitefolks everywhere, and every durn one of them bitter as bile as the day is long.
She thought about Ahab and the whiteness of the Great Whale, the eternal evil verity of its metaphorical and blubbery self, as Dr. Dust would say, just like old lardass Hot McGee, sitting down there with his big fat lazy butt draping off all sides of the straight-back chair he’d pulled out in the aisle to sit in because his rear end was too big to sit on one of the regular benches. Hot McGee always carried his own chair with him, and a bull whip, too, wherever he went, and looked a little bit like a lion tamer except he was so fat.
Alice thought Uncle was Captain Ahab, even though Uncle never asked for his troubles or went looking for them either one, like Ahab did, and Hot McGee, with his forearms like hamburger meat, was the great white whale itself, and the whale in its ancient stupidity and carelessness had made its turn back towards the Pequod, coming after you, Ahab, watch out. Every seat, every bench in the courtroom was full.
Alice saw Uncle look at his unfriendly surroundings. All white people. Everywhere. White. Uncle looked right and he looked left. White, white, all white, nothing but white, so help me God. Alice wanted to call out to him: Up here! The colored people are up here, we’re up here, above you! Of course Alice was white herself, and not colored—nothing’s simple.
Uncle hadn’t heard anything, of course.
Then all those white faces looked at Uncle.
All that anger, all that white hatred, rage, a still, sweating, stinking, brooding, engorged buildingful of it, absences large enough, solid enough, to build furniture upon. Uncle could feel it. Uncle thought he was dead meat. He thought he was about to join his nephew in the Promised Land on The Other Side. Alice knew this, because she could feel it, too. All that white and miserable hatred, as ancient and impersonal as geology and fear.
Alice hated the whiteness of her own skin, she ached in her heart for the white children sitting along the balcony rail with her, with their dear name tags fastened to a washed-out shirt or a limp cotton print dress, the whiteness whose history they had never asked to participate in, to be infected by, whose racial genes they shared with Shakespeare, and with men in sheets holding crosses engulfed in flames. The whiteness hit Uncle the same way it hit Alice, like a deafening noise, as elemental as oceanic geography, glacial, straight in the face.
Uncle turned to Auntee, as they moved slowly down the aisle, hippity-hop, hitch-stepping in rhythm with the prosecutor, among the great, ancient watery walls of the Redneck Sea of scowling whites held back on either side by Moses’ staff, or God’s love, or some magic in the hitch-step-hip-hop of the local boy with polio, Hopalong Cassidy of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi.
Uncle leaned towards her, said something to her, to his wife, Alice could not hear what, of course, but she could imagine. She imagined that the old man said, “Auntee, honey, I’se a dead man.”
Auntee held onto his arm. They were Columbus’s ship, tempest-tossed and steady as she goes on a stormy sea.
It had not been easy for Alice to get these good spectator seats, along the balcony rail, or any seat in this courthouse at all, let alone sixteen seats together for as many days as she wanted them. Or to get permission to bring fifteen nine-year-olds to a murder trial, though she had broken the ground with the field trip into Balance Due, and another to have the children motored through liquid shit at the sewage reservoir in the farming community of Good Dog Bad Dog, and another to watch an embalming at the Prince of Darkness funeral parlor, though that excursion had been cancelled at the last minute and the class had had to settle for seeing a couple of already-prepared corpses and a lecture on modern embalming techniques and ethical guidelines, one of which was not to allow civilians to watch the process, no matter the educational value, though there was nothing illegal about inviting guests.
Alice was not certain, in fact, how their being here in this courtroom had been accomplished, though she knew that without Mr. Archer’s intercession with Judge Swinger, nothing would have been possible. It embarrassed Alice to remember the clear evidence of heartache in the vice principal when she asked Mr. Archer for his permission to take the class to the trial, the pain of his longing and love (it must have been love, mustn’t it, to drive him so far beyond job safety for himself and conventional educational practice and even common sense, for there was no telling how much emotional damage Alice was actually doing to these innocent children) and hopeless certainty that he, Mr. Archer, had been placed upon earth to serve and adore this woman who did not love him, and him already married and got four children anyhow, adorable children.
It made Alice wish that it was in her power to love him, to give over in sacrifice to him her body and soul, as she had done to Dr. Dust, though she was aware that because she could not, Mrs. Archer ended up with a better deal than Mrs. Dust, and so that was something to be grateful for, Alice supposed, and she couldn’t have done it in any case. She had already loved one married man too many.
Alice kept looking down into the courtroom. The press table for white people was up in the front of the courtroom, under the bench. The colored press table was smaller, a card table, squeezed over to one side of the room, almost out of sight of the bench. At last Uncle looked in the direction of the colored press table. Alice saw Uncle see a few colored faces. She saw the sight of blackness change him for the better. The old man’s body seemed to grow stronger, just in that second.
Maybe it was Alice’s will, her great need to protect him, if only by magic, that caused Uncle then, for no good reason, to turn suddenly, and to look back up behind him into the balcony.
“Yes!” Alice called out suddenly, without knowing that she was about to speak at all. “We are here! We colored people are behind you!”
Every white face on the main floor of the courtroom turned to stare at Alice. Every dark face as well, from down below, those few, and the hundred or so in the seats around her and behind her. They looked at Alice as if she had just escaped from the lunatic asylum at Whitfield. She might as well have been a witch in Salem.
None of this bothered Alice at all. She waved her arm broadly so that Uncle might see her, the one person on earth she cared whether saw her. She waved her arms, back and forth like a semaphore, as if from a desert island to a ship at sea, Robinson Crusoe, the Swiss Family Robinson, Long John Silver, to their rescuers, or from ship to shore, or to other ships, the Ancient Mariner in still seas beckoning the flagship of the dead, or some doomed sailor waving from the crow’s nest of the Pequod. Land Ho!—or Thar she blows!—or some other relevance so large, to Alice anyway, that its significant hold upon her heart could only be contained in metaphors as large as oceans, in loss and isolation as great as creaking sea-borne vessels and windless rigging, canvas and line, buoyed upon salt seas, narrow coffins, watery graves.
Alice’s fourth graders waved, too. Hello, hello, old colored man in pain, old pained colored woman by his side, little polio dancer in front like Jack in the Beanstalk saying to the Giant, I hitch my hatchet and down I go, I hitch my hatchet and down I go, hello all you spectators at the circus, we are here, we are waving our arms as our teacher waves hers, we are saying in loud voices that we are colored people when we know we are not, we are wearing our name tags though we have forgotten our names or any innocence out of which name tags are originally born, denied our heritage for reasons unclear, we are suffering damage from this field trip into the heart of darkness and from our teacher that we may never recover from and we don’t care because we love her and become visible to ourselves in her presence, and for reasons obscure we love you, too, old colored man, old colored woman, grieving souls, we suffer your loss, we fear for your life, we don’t know what is going on at all.
Well, that was all right. Didn’t make no difference to Uncle where they sat, the other colored people. Didn’t make no difference to Uncle if some
of them was white, and only children. Uncle was relieved to see them at all. Uncle never had realized just how important it was to have a few colored people around. You’d think that sort of thing would be obvious, wouldn’t you, and not just to a colored man, because Alice was thinking the same thing, just as Uncle entertained the thought, and the spiritual relief and redemption that suddenly the thought afforded all who cared or dared to think it.
A white man in the audience said, “Look! Look at the old man! He’s checking the house for niggers.”
The white man’s wife looked up at Alice, waving from the balcony, buttressed by a bank of dark faces who looked ready to blame Alice if anybody else got killed.
Timid, the white man’s wife raised her little white hand, not much, just above her waist, halfway to her chest, no more than that, and she waved a shy wave, using only the tips of her fingers, up in the direction of Alice, who seemed even to this white woman, who lived with a greater fear of metaphor than of colored people, to be standing upon, signaling from, the deck of a ship surging on high and northern seas. No one saw her wave, of course, not her husband, and least of all Alice.
The white man said to his wife, “Ninety-five percent of them’s not even ours. Our niggers is out picking cotton and tending to they own bidness.”
Hey, Alice, the white woman said, or breathed, or imagined, or prayed, since there were no words, no sound, but only a rare and magical identification with the universe and all its suns and foreign stars whose galaxies were visible only from some warm spot near her heart. I see you, Alice, I see the children with you. Nothing more, nothing from which meaning might have been extrapolated, but it was enough. I see you, Alice.
The man said, “All the dressed-up niggers is strangers. See that?”
The man’s wife said, “I see.”
Alice watched Hopalong Cassidy whisper to Uncle. She imagined that he told Uncle of the guns hidden in boots and pockets and shoulder holsters in this audience. She imagined that he told Uncle what was obvious, that he could be murdered today, himself, for his testimony.