The Vain Conversation

by Anthony Grooms

  By the time she finished her story, Bertrand was sitting next to Beah, but looking away into the woods that bordered the side of the yard. The shadows were now long and the woods dark, though the sunlight shone on the slick bark of a grove of beech trees. The trees had been there for as long as he could remember, and as a child he enjoyed climbing them. From the heights, he could see over the canopy and looked down on the patchwork of farm and manor house that was Woodbine Plantation. His life had been tied up with Woodbine Plantation and Mr. Jacks. Both of his parents had worked at Woodbine all their lives, his father in the fields and his mother in the house. The source of what little they had had been dependent on Woodbine, and it was with Mr. Jacks’ tacit approval that he and his brother had been able to go to college. Jacks had given the parents a little raise when he learned that Bertrand had been accepted at the college in Fort Valley. He had joked to Bertrand’s father, “Johnson, I reckon I don’t need another hand as much as the colored school might need a teacher.” Only his mother hadn’t thought it funny. She declared, when her husband recounted the joke, that her boys would go to college regardless of what Jacks needed.

  “Bertrand,” Beah called to him, “what must we do?”

  Bertrand turned to face his cousin. She had a pleasant, round face, typical of his family. She was a sturdy woman, shapely and pretty all together, and far too sensible, he thought, to get mixed up with the likes of Jimmy Lee. “Where’s Jimmy Lee?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

  “He’s hiding. At first he didn’t want to leave. He was saying a lot of foolishness about not caring what they did to him. That he would cut Sheriff Cook, too, if Cook laid a hand on him. But finally I got him in the truck and drove here. But I let him out just yonder in the woods.” She pointed up the driveway toward the road. He’s going to lay low and when night comes, I thought … I don’t know what to think.”

  “Get him out!” Luellen shouted. She moved to stand in front of Bertrand. “Don’t even wait until dark. Get a jump on Cook and go now. Give him the truck—Lord, Bertrand, he should have been half way to Atlanta by now.”

  “But that’s what they might expect,” Beah said. “They would have the roads blocked between here and Atlanta. I was thinking about maybe laying low for a day or so and then driving him to Macon or Savannah—”

  “Macon is just as bad as it is here. No, go right now to Atlanta. I got some money. I’ll give it to him. Tell him to go right now.”

  At the mention of Macon, Bertrand recalled a story he heard from his father about a lynching in Macon. What the colored man had done, he couldn’t remember, but it seemed trivial in the scope of things. Perhaps he had insulted a white woman, perhaps even killed someone. The man had tried to escape by train, but the train was stopped in nearby Tifton, and the man was dragged off. In fact, all the colored men on the train were made to get off and some of them accused of loitering and thrown on the chain gang. The man was taken back to Macon and hanged downtown, just in front of the Bibb County Courthouse. He recalled so well his father’s description of what happened after the hanging, for his father stood, and, as if pointing out directions to him, told how the lynch mob dragged the body behind a car, up Mulberry street, made a left on First Street, and then left on Cherry Street, over the brick paving and down to Third Street, and another left on Mulberry. When they arrived back at the courthouse, the body was merely tatters. He knew this could happen to Jimmy Lee. But another part of him wouldn’t let him believe it. Things like this had happened in the past, but there had been a war, not just any war, but the biggest war there ever had been, and colored men had helped win the war. The war had changed things. Or had it? He wanted to believe it had.

  Milledge stood noisily and went to the screen door. She opened it and turned back to the other women. “What this got to do with Bertrand? What this got to do with us anyway? You, Beah, bringing this trashy mess up into my house. Jimmy Lee a grown man, let him do whatever he want, but leave Bertrand out of this mess.”

  “Cousin Milledge—”

  Milledge raised her hand as if to swat Beah. “Your momma turning in her grave this minute. This minute, she turning in her grave.”

  “Cousin Milledge! What am I going to do?”

  “You go with him for all I care. And what about your poor daddy? This’ll kill him if you ain’t already killed him with your whoring.”

  “Momma,” Lullen said, “that doesn’t help. Bertrand—?”

  “But it’s the truth!” Milledge slammed the door without going through it. “It’s the truth!”

  The women called his name again, and Bertrand considered them without answering. He looked at the trees again and then cleared his throat and turned to his cousin. “Run down and get Jimmy Lee and bring him to the house.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if he stay hidden?”

  “He should run,” Luellen said.

  “He broke the law. He has to face the law.”

  Luellen gasped, was still a second, and threw up her hands in a quick motion. “You’ve gone crazy! What law? What law in Talmaedge County? They will kill him.”

  Bertrand answered slowly, rising from the chair. “That might be, but I don’t think so. I think it’s time we put some trust in the system.”

  Luellen stepped away from Bertrand when he stood, paced to the far railing of the porch, turned and threw up her hands again. “Trust the system! Like that Baker woman put her trust in the system?” Lena Baker, a colored woman, had been executed the year before for murdering her white lover.

  Bertrand ignored Luellen and put his hand on Beah’s shoulder. “I think what is best,” he said, “is to face down this trouble. Now, Jimmy Lee works for Jacks, and I hear he’s a good worker. Jacks depends on him. And Momma works for Jacks—”

  “Leave me out of it.” Milledge went inside and slammed the door again.

  “Jacks has a lot of influence. He won’t let anything happen to Jimmy Lee.”

  “You’re crazy! You’re gone completely crazy—”

  “Luellen,” Bertrand started calmly, and then he raised his voice. “If he runs, he’ll be running for the rest of his life. And what if they catch him running, he’s sure enough dead then. If he stays and fights this thing—after all, Venable did insult Beah—if he fights this thing, he might get off or maybe only spend a few months in jail. Then this baby,” he pointed to Beah’s stomach, “will at least have a father.”

  Luellen came to Bertrand, rushing across the porch and stopping just short of him with her hands before her, pleading. “What don’t you understand, Bertrand? You think a mob is going to care that white man insulted a colored woman?” She pointed to Beah. “She is a colored woman. To them she is a black nigger woman. And she might as well be a whore too, being pregnant with a married man.” She put her finger to her head, pointing with her index finger. “Think, Bertrand. Don’t forget where you are, husband. You are not in Paris, France, or even New York City.”

  “I know where the hell we are.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “I know what the hell I am.”

  “Then act like it, Bertrand. Act like it.”

  “Goddamn it, Luellen, I am acting like it. I am acting like a grown man in America. That’s what I am and that’s what I’ll act like.”

  Luellen drew in a big breath. “You are a grown man, all right. But you are a nigger, a black, shitty nigger, to them. And you will be until the day your skin turns white.”

  “Please,” Beah said. “This isn’t about you, Bertrand. I came for you to help Jimmy Lee.”

  “It’s about all of us,” Bertrand said. An image of the camp swelled in his mind, the men looking like a giant insect. “But … but.…” He breathed deeply, focusing on Beah’s round face. “You are right. You came to me for help. The truth is, I don’t know any more than you what to do. If he runs, they’ll catch him. If he hides, they’ll find him. I say, he might as well face it and fight and trust that we can get justice.”

  “Justice!
” Luellen screwed up her face mockingly. “What is that, Bertrand?”

  “It’s what I fought that goddamn war for.”

  “You fought for nothing, husband.”

  Bertrand turned to Beah. “Jacks might help us. But you and Jimmy Lee will have to decide what you want to do. I’ll help where I can, but I don’t know any more what to do than you.”

  “Run,” Luellen said to Beah. “If you don’t run, at least hide. Every minute you stay here listening to this foolishness, he one minute closer to dying.”

  They were quiet for a moment, watching Beah fidget and rock, her face contorting, but without tears. “Do you think Jacks might help?” she asked presently.

  “No.” It was Milledge, standing inside the screen door. “No. Let me tell you. I know more about Jacks than any of you. I worked for him since I was a girl. Long before nary one of you were born. And I tell you, you can’t trust Jacks any more than you can any white man. Any of them. Jacks care just about one thing, and that’s Jacks. Same with Venable, only Venable is as low and as trashy as a man can get. If a man could be a whore, it would be Venable. So your question got to be this, Bertrand. Is Jimmy Lee worth so much to Jacks that he can do without him? Worse than that, is Jimmy Lee worth so much to Jacks that Jacks will go up against his friend, Venable, and the God almighty Venable family, and Cook and every other white man, woman, and child in Talmaedge County to save him? You think about that, then you tell me something about Jacks.” She walked away from the door before Bertrand could answer.

  It seemed the moonless night came suddenly, without twilight. The sky was thick with stars. Milledge and Luellen and gone inside, and in spite of the anxiety had begun to cook. Beah went into the woods to find Jimmy Lee and he soon came to the porch, looking sheepishly at Bertrand. “Well, I guess you right, Bertand,” he said. “Mr. Jacks, he ain’t got nothing against me that I know of, and neither did Mr. Venable. That is, up until now. I take my chances.”

  Bertrand cleared his throat. As he looked at Jimmy Lee, he saw something in the man he hadn’t seen before. In the dim yellow of the kerosene lamp, the man’s lean, handsome face seemed gilded. He was about to admonish Jimmy Lee and remind him that he would have to pay for his crime with some jail time, at the least, but he also wanted to make clear that things could go very badly for him. Venable or Cook could stir up a lynch mob, or they might even go to court and he could get a long time on the work gang. But he saw, too, that Jimmy Lee carried himself straight, his broad lean shoulders held back in spite of an occasional dipping of his head in deference to his elders. At that point, Bertrand wanted to tell him to run, but Milledge brought out plates of food for the men, and offered one to Beah, who turned it down. Bertrand set his food aside, but Jimmy Lee sat on the porch step and ate the cold fried chicken and green beans. “Jimmy Lee,” Bertrand said, solemnly, “you are a man.”

  “Yes, I reckon.”

  “You made a mistake, but you are not a coward. You are not a criminal. You are a good man.”

  “Yes, suh.”

  Bertrand swallowed hard. He felt as if he might cry. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to tell you. I know that ‘man can be a wolf to man.’” Suddenly, he remembered a phrase from his schooling, “Homo homini lupus. I have seen it. But, what good does it do a man to run? What kind of life is that?” His voice became a whisper. Jimmy Lee looked up at him and he tried to look Jimmy Lee in the eyes. “You know, they might kill you for what you have done.”

  Jimmy Lee’s eyes widened and his mouth twitched, but he did not look away from Bertrand. “I know that,” he said.

  “Do you want to run? If you do, I will help you.”

  “I do want to run, and I don’t.”

  “If you run,” Beah said, “you might get away. Go up North, maybe to Chicago, and I will come and meet you there. Then we can have the baby.…”

  “I could run, baby. But I don’t know nothing about Chicago. And the way I figure it, I would have run all the way to the moon, anyway. Wherever I go, there’s gonna be white people—”

  “But they won’t be Venable,” Beah said.

  “But they will still be white,” said Luellen, standing at the screen door. She came through and held out a roll of bills to Jimmy Lee. “Here. Take this. It’s about two hundred dollars. Take it and go as far as you can go. I say make your way to Atlanta, somehow, then get a train to Detroit and then sneak over to Canada. Don’t listen to Bertrand. He’s my husband, but he’s a fool, too. If you sit here a minute longer, you are a dead man.”

  “Take it!” Beah screamed. They all looked up to see headlights coming down the driveway toward the house.

  Bertrand’s heart thumped rapidly and his breath went shallow. He sprung up from his chair. In his mind he saw the camp of Jews, the skeleton men coming toward him. “Okay then. Be calm. Go ahead, Jimmy Lee. Take the money. Run around through the woods. Get a car somehow, even if you have to steal one.”

  Jimmy looked back and forth between Bertrand and the woods. Then he took a deep breath. He took Beah’s hand and squeezed it. Then he started walking down the drive, his hands raised above his head like a stickup in a Western movie.

  ELEVEN

  It was late when Bertrand went up to his bedroom. Luellen sat in the upholstered chair at the foot of the bed. She had her scrapbook unfolded on her lap. Bertrand sighed deeply, feeling a knot come into his stomach when he saw the book. “Oh, dear Luellen,” he said, rubbing her shoulder with his palm. He felt her stiffen at his touch and withdrew without saying more. He sat on the bed, his back to her, and took off his shoes and socks, rolled the socks and placed them inside the shoes and pushed the shoes under the bed. Then he pulled off his pants and shirt and draped them over the back of the chair that stood on his side of the bed. Now in his underwear, he knelt beside the bed and quickly mumbled a prayer. This ritual of prayer, he had long thought, was useless. It was what children did and it did not carry favor with God for adults. “If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” It was all more complicated than that. For one thing, the Lord, for better or for worse, already had his soul. Still he knelt, asked for God’s strength, and rose. Having had his knees against the wooden planks made him feel a bit more secure, but real prayer, he thought, was a continuous stream of meditation, coming out with each breath, coming in with breath, with sight, with sound. He propped his head on his pillow, put his feet up on top of the covers and looked across to Luellen, who sat in a pool of lamplight, slowly turning the pages of the large scrapbook that lay unfolded on her lap.

  “Aren’t you tired?” he asked, but she did not respond, and he knew there would be difficulty. As he watched her, his mind drifted. He thought about Jimmy Lee walking towards the police car, his silhouette, arms raised, black and ghostly in the headlights. Then he had to wrestle with Beah, trying not to hold onto her belly, lest he hurt her baby, as she struggled to get to Jimmy Lee when Cook and his deputies pushed Jimmy Lee against the sheriff’s car, handcuffing him and beating him with their fists and clubs. When the deputies had gone, Beah threw herself on the ground and tore at the grass. When he tried to help her up, she screamed for him to go take care of his damn white woman. The comment stung him, not so much for what she said, but the contempt in her voice. He stood and looked at her, his hands by his side, as she kicked and clawed at the ground. After nearly twenty minutes, Milledge managed to get her up and back to the porch. Bertrand had driven her home and had tried to explain to Deacon, her elderly father, what had happened. When he left, he was still uncertain that Deacon understood fully.

  Slowly Luellen turned a page of her scrapbook. The sound of the page turning indicated that the paper was heavy and soft. He had seen the book many times. She called it her true book of American history. She had been a history major when he met her, and she said she was collecting information for her own history of the United States. No happy slaves doing master’s bidding would be in her book. No mammies wet-nursing the mistress’ children. E
nough of that. She said this would be a book of the naked nature of America, as beastly as it was foul.

  “But Luellen,” he occasionally argued, “all white people aren’t bad. And even if they were, you can’t think that way. For one thing, it is not Christian, and for another it will eat you up. Hating eats you up just as badly as being hated.” She often dismissed him with a wave of her hand or countered that hate hadn’t eaten up the whites. They seemed to be doing mighty well hating.

  He glimpsed a page, a picture of men hanging from a tree branch. She was studying the picture, it seemed, rereading the caption for how many times, he couldn’t imagine. The article was from the The Chicago Defender about a lynching in Southern Indiana, nearly twenty years before. Two boys, just teenagers, had been accused of raping a white woman, and murdering her boyfriend. Without trial, they were taken from their cells by a crowd, were beaten and hanged. Bertrand knew that reading the scrapbook just before bedtime, Luellen wouldn’t sleep. The more she read, the more upset she would become, but he could do nothing about it.

  “Luellen, honey. Come on to bed now. Let it go for now.”

  She looked more closely at the photograph, as if counting the details. Bertrand knew she was going inside of it, removing herself from the bedroom and drawing herself into the frame of the picture with all of its anxiety and tension. She would be one in the crowd, perhaps even the photographer, examining the bodies of the boys that swung from the tree like scarecrows, limp and tattered. In her mind she ran her hands over their bloodied heads, their necks cocked at odd angles. She looked into their dull eyes, oddly peaceful and already drying out. She was already becoming an unseen guest among the onlookers, a part of the crowd of whites—men, women, children. There was a couple holding lovingly to each other as if they were on a date at the fair. The people wore ordinary clothes, casual suits, open collared shirts, straw hats and calico dresses. She saw no hoods or sheets, no monstrous costumes with flaming crosses. These were the typical townspeople of a typical town. She might have seen some of them just last night at the county fair, or she might see them tomorrow strolling along Bethany’s main street. They were townspeople in typical postures who could have been at any typical gathering of such people. They had not turned into monsters, neither had their veins emptied of blood and filled with gasoline. They could have been witnessing anything, a freak show, a wedding or a pig roast. That it was a lynching wasn’t so uncommon, she would have thought. She had told him that the Romans flocked to see men chop each other to pieces with swords; in England, people jostled one another to watch beheadings and drawing-and-quarterings. Spectacles. To watch someone’s intestines being drawn from his body and his body being sawn into quarters. What must go through people’s minds who watch such things? She couldn’t do it, she said. She could never do it. And yet, something in her said she could kill those whites in the picture if she had to. But that would be different. She could kill them but it would be no spectacle.