A Train of Powder
Page 9
But worse than that had happened. No wise person will write an unnecessary word about hanging, for fear of straying into the field of pornography. The strain of evil in us, which, given privileges, can take pleasure in the destruction of others by pain and death, takes delight in dreams about hanging, which is the least dignified form of death. That delight emits the strongest of all the stinks that hang about the little bookshops in the backstreets. Yet if there must be capital punishment, it had better take the form of hanging. That murderers should be killed by injections is a fatuous suggestion, for this could not be efficiently done without recourse to the aid of doctors, who could not give it without breaking the Hippocratic oath and losing their sacred characters as the preservers of life. In these days it is vitally important to maintain this traditional concept of medicine in its purity, since a totalitarian government might imitate the Nazi state in asking its doctors to exterminate an unfavoured class or perform lethal experiments on it, and it would be well that both doctors and the public should realize this to be an obscene retrogression. The electric chair has the disadvantage of raising in the vulgar a vision of regal stoicism; the half-witted gangster can feel it is his throne, and the current links him with the scientific cosmos of Superman. The firing squad is the happiest of executions, for it gives the condemned man a chance to gain the good opinion of his executioners; and for that reason it must be forbidden, like suicide, to those whose crimes are vile and must be remembered as vile. There remain decapitation and hanging; and the bloody act of decapitation, with the grace notes of horror that are added when the headsman is failed by his skill, is a huntsman’s call to cruelty.
This long grim argument keeps the hangman in our lives. But this is a horrible necessity. It is not because we have grown too tender that we think it so. The mobs of the past, coarse-pelted as hogs, were distracted by the burden they had laid on another man’s soul by making him a public servant and publicly abhorrent. They acted as simple people do under the consciousness of guilt and pretended that it was their victim who was guilty. The crimes of which so many eighteenth-century hangmen were convicted lie on the records with an oblique air. Either they were the consequences of these outcasts’ frenzied misery or revengeful impostures practised by the community. When Dennis was accused of having joined in the Gordon Riots and stoked fires in the street with wood torn from Catholic houses, the Recorder believed his story that as he made his way through the burning city to his home the rioters had closed in on him, crying, “Here’s bloody Jack Ketch, let’s make him carry some to the fire,” and had threatened to burn him if he refused. But the jury condemned him to death; though it was not to have its will, for the state needed him to do his work, since it was not easy to get another scapegoat.
In the nineteenth century the mob grew milder and intellectuals addressed themselves to the task of self-analysis. But neither the mob nor the intellectuals grew kinder to the hangman and continued to show cruelty to one whose offence was of their own creating. Old Jimmy Bottin, paralysed, got about Brighton by using a chair as a crutch and sitting down on it when he was exhausted; and at the sound of the chair legs scraping the ground the people crossed the street and left him to hobble along alone. They were unjust to hangmen but they were not merciful to those who were hanged. Hangings were public until 1869, and it was a matter of common knowledge that the victims on the scaffold often took a long time to die and suffered horribly. In fact, they died of slow strangulation. In the past that had been accepted as the way that hanged men died. A free end of the noose was passed through a ring on the scaffold pole, and while the victim dangled in the noose the executioner pulled on it and strangled him. The drop system had been introduced in the hope that the fall through the trapdoor would dislocate the victims’ spines and cause instantaneous death; but still they died of strangulation.
No doctor, no lawyer, no professed humanitarian, took the trouble to inquire why this system had failed in its purpose. That was left to an illiterate cobbler from Lincolnshire named William Marwood, who was obsessed by hangings. He thought about them all day long as he worked on his boots and shoes; and he was visited by the idea that hanged men still suffered the pains of strangulation because the usual drop was not long enough to cause a fall of sufficient violence. He perceived also that to get a fall violent enough to dislocate the spine but not so violent that it tore the head from the body, the length of the rope must be in proportion to the weight of the body. Marwood succeeded in being appointed public executioner in 1871, and it was at once seen that his system went far to eliminate the risk of strangulation, but he never worked out any but an approximate formula for the length of the rope. This, however, was perfected by one of his successors, James Berry. These hangmen did a great work of mercy to the most defeated children of men, and they lifted from us all the guilt of torturing as well as killing. Yet we never thank them for it, their names are not written in gold like those of Shaftesbury and Schweitzer, and if we met them face to face few of us would immediately remember that we owe them reverence and gratitude; and it will be hardest for those to remember it who have stood outside a prison at the hour of a hanging. There is nothing to see there before the hanging except a white notice pinned on the great outer door of the prison, which bears an announcement that a man is to be hanged that morning; and after the hanging a warder comes out of a small door which is cut in the great door, and takes down the noticeboard and takes it inside, and brings it out again and hangs it up, with two other notices pinned on to it, one a sheriff’s declaration that the man has been hanged, the other a surgeon’s declaration that he has examined the hanged man and found him to be dead. But people come long distances to see this nearly invisible sight, often bringing their children, who have sometimes clamoured to be brought; and they go away with the satisfaction of those who have had their orgasm. There was never a lawful occasion which smelled so strongly of the unlawful.
When the Nuremberg tribunal came to deal with these delicate matters it proved to be as zanyish as we had feared it might be. It undertook the task of hanging eleven men with a dreadful innocence which made the reports of the journalists who witnessed the executions not nearly so unlike the testimony concerning Nazi atrocities which had brought these men to the gallows as one might have hoped. The hangman was an American sergeant who meant no harm but had not fully benefited by the researches of Marwood and Berry. The ten men slowly choked to death. Ribbentrop struggled in the air for twenty minutes. Yet it would be treachery against truth not to concede that justice had been done. Each one of these men who had been hanged had committed crimes for which he would have had to give his life under German law; and it would have then been an axe that killed him. But there are stenches which not the name of justice or reason or the public good, or any other fair word, can turn to sweetness.
Opera in Greenville
The note of Greenville, South Carolina, is rhetorical. Among the stores and offices on Main Street there is a vacant lot that suddenly pretends to be a mountain glade, with a stream purling over a neatly assembled rockfall; and in the foreground there is staked a plaque bearing the words:
GREENVILLE CITY WATER WORKS 1939.
The water supply of Greenville, South Carolina, pure, sparkling, life’s most vital element, flows by gravity from an uncontaminated mountain watershed of nine thousand acres, delivered through duplicated pipe lines, fourteen million gallons capacity, a perfect water for domestic and industrial uses.
Not in such exuberant terms would the existence of a town water supply be celebrated in the North or in my native England, and no deduction can be drawn from this that is damaging to the South. The exuberance of the inscription is actually a sober allusion to reality. Here one remembers that water is a vital element, as it is not in the North or in England. One is always thinking about water, for one is always wanting to have a drink or take a shower or get some clothes washed. The heat of the South is an astonishment to the stranger. When the lynching trial in Greenville cam
e to its end, late in May, it was full summer there, and the huge, pale bush roses that grow around the porches were a little dusty. Greenville was as hot as the cities that he on the Spanish plains, as Seville and Cordoba. But in those cities the people do not live a modern life, they do not work too grimly, and they sleep in the afternoons; here they keep the same commercial hours as in New York, and practice the hard efficiency that is the price this age asks for money. On this point they fool the stranger. It is the habit of the mills and other factories to build themselves outside the city limits to dodge taxation. So Greenville has a naïve-looking Main Street, with cross streets running, after a block or two, into residential sections, where the white houses stand among gardens that look as if they were presently going to pass into woods and fields and the clear countryside; and it has a population of 35,000. But outside Greenville city, in Greenville County, there are 137,000 people, 123,000 of whom live within ten miles of the city. In fact, the lynching for which thirty-one men were being tried in the court house was committed not, as might be imagined by an interested person who was trying to size the matter up by looking at a map and gazetteer, in a backward small town, but in a large modern city.
To sustain the life of a large modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end. These people would deny that it is the climate that has challenged them. They speak of the coolness of the nights almost before the stranger has mentioned the heat of the day. When they name the antagonist against whom they have to pit themselves, they simply and passionately and frequently name the North, with the same hatred, the profounder because it is insolently unrequited, that the Irish feel for the English. But the stranger will obstinately continue to admire them for living and working in this land over which the sun seems to be bending low, and for doing more than that: for luxuriating in rhetoric, and topping rhetoric with opera.
Near the center of Greenville there stands an old white church, with a delicate spire and handsome steps leading down from a colonnade—the kind of building that makes an illusion of space around itself. This is the First Baptist Church. In there, on Sunday evenings, there is opera. The lovely girls, with their rich hair curling around their shoulders and their flowered dresses showing their finely molded throats and arms, sit beside the tall young men, whose pale shirts show the squareness of their shoulders and the slimness of their waists, and they join in coloratura hymns with their parents and their grandparents, who sing, like their children, with hope and vehemence, having learned to take things calmly no more than the older characters in opera. As they sing, the women’s dresses become crumpled wraps, the men’s shirts cling to them, although the service does not begin till eight o’clock at night. But, undistracted by the heat, they listen, still and yet soaring, to the anthems sung by an ecstatic choir and to a sermon that is like a bass recitative, ending in an aria of faith, mounting to cadenzas of adoration. In no other place are Baptists likely to remind a stranger of Verdi.
In the court house, also, there was opera. This is a singularly hideous building, faced with yellow washroom tiles, standing in Main Street, next the principal hotel, which, it should be noted for those who want to understand the character of Greenville, is cleaner and more comfortable and kinder to the appetite than most of the great New York hotels since the war. The courtroom is about the size of the famous Number One Court of the Old Bailey, in London.
In the body of the courtroom there were chairs for about three hundred white persons. The front rows were occupied by the thirty-one defendants who were being tried for lynching a Negro early on the morning of February 17, 1947. With the exception of three young men, one a member of a wealthy mill-owning family, one a salesman, and one a restaurant proprietor, these defendants were all Greenville taxi drivers. Many people, including a number of Greenville residents, some of whom desired them to be acquitted of all charges on the ground that lynching is a social prophylactic, talked of them as if they were patently and intensely degraded. As a matter of fact, they covered a wide range of types, most of them very far from repulsive. Some were quite good-looking and alert young men; most were carefully and cleanly dressed; some were manifest eccentrics. The most curious in aspect was a young man of twenty-five who must have weighed about three hundred pounds. The contours of his buttocks and stomach suggested that they were molded in some ductile substance like butter, and his face, which was smiling and playful, was pressed upward, till it turned toward the ceiling, by an enormous accumulation of fat under the chin and jaws. His name was Joy, and he was known as Fat Joy. The most conspicuous by reason of character was Roosevelt Carlos Hurd, Sr., who was a taxi driver also working as a taxi dispatcher, a man of forty-five with hair that stood up like a badger’s coat, eyes set close together and staring out under glum brows through strong glasses, and a mouth that was unremitting in its compression. He looked like an itinerant preacher devoted to the worship of a tetchy and uncooperative God. In his statement he had declared that his education had stopped in the second grade. This did not necessarily imply that he was of weak intelligence. When he was a boy there were no laws against child labor in the State of South Carolina, and it is probable that he went to work. Several of the statements made by other defendants alleged that Mr. Hurd was the actual trigger man of the lynching, the man who fired the shot that killed the Negro.
Nearly all these defendants were exercising a right their state permits to all persons accused of a capital offence. They had brought their families to sit with them in court. Many had their wives beside them, young women, for the most part very young women, in bright cotton and rayon dresses, their curled hair wild about them. A number of these women had brought their children with them; one had five scrambling over her. All the children were plump and comely, and, though some were grimy, all of them were silent and miraculously court-broken. Mr. Hurd, though married and a father, was accompanied only by his own father, a thin and sharp-nosed man, his eyes censorious behind gold-rimmed spectacles, the whole of him blanched and shrivelled by austerity as by immersion in a caustic fluid. It was altogether plain that at any moment he and his son might become possessed by the idea that they were appointed God’s arm and instrument, and that their conception of God would render the consequence of this conviction far from reasonably bland.
It was said by the anti-lynching element in the town that the families had been brought into court to sit with the defendants in order to soften the hearts of the jurors. But certainly they liked to be there, and the defendants liked to have them there. It is quite untrue to imagine, as was often said, that the defendants were sure of being acquitted. They were extremely afraid of what might be coming to them, and so were their families. Several of the wives sat in close embrace with their husbands, shaken from time to time by the inimitable convulsions of distress. One pregnant girl in a green dress sat throughout the trial with an arm thrown about her young husband’s shoulder, rubbing her pudgy and honest and tear-stained face against his arm. Many of the men, including some who seemed to take no particular interest in their wives, obviously enjoyed playing with their children. One tall and dark young man with an intelligent face sat with his wife, who was dressed with noticeable good taste, and two pretty little daughters. During the recesses he spread his legs wide apart, picked up one or the other of the little girls under her armpits, and swung her back and forth between his knees. He would look down on her with adoration as she gurgled with joy, but if she became too noisy he would stop and set her down with a slight frown and a finger to his lips. It was the oddest gesture to see in this trial, in this place. Mr. Hurd’s father was also there out of profound concern for the person whom he loved, though he made no physical manifestation except for occasionally biting his lips and lowering his head. His part was to confirm his son’s title to rectitude, his inheritance of grace. It was so hot in the court th
at the women at the press table all wore fresh dresses every day and almost every man except the attorneys and officers of the court sat in their shirts. But Mr. Hurd’s father, from the beginning to the end of the case, wore a neat blue coat and a conservative tie. Most of the defendants and their relatives, but never Mr. Hurd or his father, chewed gum throughout the proceedings, and some chewed bubble gum. So, until the press made unfriendly comment, did two of the attorneys.
Behind the defendants and their families sat something under two hundred of such white citizens of Greenville as could find the time to attend the trial, which was held during working hours. Some were drawn from the men of the town who are too old or too sick to work, or who do not enjoy work and use the court house as a club, sitting on the steps, chewing and smoking and looking down on Main Street through the hot, dancing air, when the weather is right for that, and going inside when it is better there. They were joined by a certain number of men and women who did not like the idea of people being taken out of jail and murdered, and by others who liked the idea quite well. None of these expressed their opinions very loudly. There were also a number of the defendants’ friends.