A Train of Powder

by West, Rebecca

  Mr. Ben Bolt is a slow-moving, soft-voiced, grey-haired person of noble appearance, who is said to make many speeches about the common man. The industrial development of the South is evidently producing the same crop of liberal attorneys that were produced in England and the Northern states in the similar stage of their development. Mr. Bolt began his speech by a plea for racial tolerance, celebrating the life of dear old Aunt Hester, who aided his dear mother to guide his footsteps and who now lies in a grave that he often visits, always with the feeling that he ought to take his shoes off, since it is hallowed ground. Laying hold of the exhausted Bible, he changed the subject and recalled that the Supreme Court has ruled the Bible to be part of the common law of the State of South Carolina, and he pointed out that the Bible condemns conviction without several witnesses. It was not necessary to bring in the Bible to explain that, but Mr. Bolt was certainly performing his proper function when he proceeded to demonstrate the insufficiency of the evidence against the defendants. He passed on, however, to make an attack on the credibility of the witness U. G. Fowler that was embarrassing in its fatuity and seeming insincerity. This witness had been asked what his initials stood for, and had amazed the court by saying that he did not know, that they did not stand for anything but themselves. To people who questioned him outside court, he said that his mother had called him after a brother of hers and had never explained to him what his full name was. It was said by local experts that the uncle was probably called Huger, like many people in parts of South Carolina nearer the sea; it is the name of a Southern family of Huguenot origin, and it is pronounced “U.G.” by the simple folk who have borrowed it. Mr. Bolt tried to disseminate another explanation. “That don’t sound exactly Southern to me,” he said. “Those initials certainly don’t stand for Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson.” He was attempting to engender prejudice against this person by suggesting that his parents had christened him Ulysses Grant. This eminently sensible person was talking what he obviously knew to be humbug, out of his fathomless contempt for the jury. How little that school of thought realizes the dangers of contempt was demonstrated by a remark he made when he was representing the lynching as an episode that nobody but the meddlesome federal authorities would ever have thought of making a fuss over. When he was speaking of the FBI agents he said, “Why, you would have thought someone had found a new atomic bomb,” but “all it was was a dead nigger boy.” This is not a specifically Southern attitude. All over the world there are people who may use the atomic bomb because they have forgotten that it is our duty to regard all lives, however alien and even repellent, as equally sacred.

  Mr. John Bolt Culbertson’s speeches were untainted by any regard for the values of civilization. He went all the way over to the dead-nigger-boy school of thought. Mr. Culbertson is a slender, narrow-chested man with a narrow head. His sparse hair is prematurely white, his nose is sharp, and his face is colorless except for his very pink lips. He wears rimless spectacles, and his lashes are white. The backs of his hands are thickly covered with fine white hairs. In certain lights he gives the impression of being covered with frost. He has a great reputation in the South as a liberal. He is the local attorney for the CIO and has worked actively for it. He has also been a friend to the emancipation of the Negroes and has supported their demands for better education and the extension of civil rights. He recently made an address to Negro veterans, which took courage on his part and gave them great happiness. He is one of the very few white men in these parts who shake hands with Negroes and give them the prefix of Mr. or Mrs. or Miss. Not long ago an article in the New Republic hailed him as one of the true liberal leaders of the South. Many young people in Greenville who wish to play a part in the development of the New South look to him as an inspiring teacher, and many Negroes feel a peculiar devotion to him. Mr. Culbertson belongs to the school of oratory that walks up and down in front of the jury box. At the climactic points of his speeches he adopts a crouching stance, puts his hands out in front of him, parallel to each other, and moves them in a rapid spin, as if he were a juggler and they were plates. Finally he shoots one hand forward and propels his argument with it. His choreography was especially vigorous when he was putting in a little work on the jury’s possible prejudice against alcohol. He was attempting to discredit the evidence of the tourist-camp proprietor who had identified the alleged lynchers. His knees went down. “Doesn’t this man”—his hands went forward—“own a honky-tonk … a camp”—his knees went lower; his hands came further forward—“where they sell”—his right hand shot out; his voice caught in his throat with horror and then cracked across space like a whip—“BEER?” It is not illegal to sell beer in South Carolina. Nor is there any reason to think that Mr. Culbertson, though a man of most sober habits, is a teetotaller. Had the outburst been simply an unlovely piece of hypocrisy, based on a profound contempt for his fellow men, it would have sounded much the same; and it would have sounded equally irreconcilable with liberalism as that word is generally understood.

  Mr. Culbertson pandered to every folly that the jurors might be nursing in their bosoms. He spoke of the defendants as “these So’th’n boys.” Only two or three could be considered boys. The ages of the others ranged from the late twenties to the fifties. It was interesting, by the way, to note how all the attorneys spoke with a much thicker Southern accent when they addressed the jury than when they were talking with their friends. Mr. Culbertson attacked the FBI agents in terms that either meant nothing or meant that it was far less important to punish a murder than to keep out the federal authorities. He made the remark, strange to hear in a court of law, “If a Democratic administration could do that to us, what would a Republican administration do to us down here?” He appeared later to be declaring that the FBI had been sent in by the administration to provide an anti-lynching case to win the Northern vote, in a Democratic seat that was not likely to go Republican even after a lynching prosecution. He himself, it may be noted, was a former FBI agent, and was, it is said, famous for his zeal. He used his hope that the jury were xenophobes to make an attack on the freedom of the press. He pointed to the press table and declared that because of this fussy insistence on the investigation of a murder there was now a trial to which Northern papers had sent representatives; and the implication was that they had come for the purpose of mocking and insulting the South. “Lai-ai-aife and Tai-ai-aime,” he chanted with the accent that was so much stronger in the courtroom than it sounded in the hotel lobby or the drugstore, “have sent representatives.” The judge pointed out that Mr. Culbertson had no evidence of the existence of these people and that they therefore could not be discussed.

  The thread on which these pearls were strung appeared to be the argument that the murder of Willie Earle was of very slight importance except for its remote political consequences. Mr. Culbertson was to prove that he did not give this impression inadvertently. He went into his crouching stance, his hands were spinning, he shone with frosty glee, exultantly he cried, “Willie Earle is dead, and I wish more like him was dead.” There was a delighted, giggling, almost coquettish response from the defendants and some of the spectators. Mr. Hurd and his father looked fortified. There was a gasp from others of different mind. Thunderously the judge called him to order: “You confine yourself to my ruling or I’ll stop you from arguing to the jury.” Culbertson, smiling at the defendants, almost winking at them, said, “I didn’t refer to Willie Earle as a Negro.” When the judge bade him be careful, he continued, still flirting with his audience, “There’s a law against shooting a dog, but if a mad dog were loose in my community, I would shoot the dog and let them prosecute me.” A more disgusting incident cannot have happened in any court of law in any time.

  The attitude of Greenville towards this speech was disconcerting. Prosperous Greenville did not like it, but it likes very little that Mr. Culbertson does, and it explained that one could expect nothing better from him, because he was a liberal. If it was objected that this was precisely not t
he kind of speech that could be expected from a liberal, this Greenville answered that it was a horrid speech, and that liberals were horrid, an argument that cannot be pursued very far. The response of the liberal section of Greenville was not any easier to take. The liberals made no attempt to conceal the important fact that two of the defendants were close connections of a CIO official. But they insisted that Mr. Culbertson was sincerely liberal, and apparently, if they rejected him, there was no local liberal of anything like his energy to take his place. To rationalize their continued acceptance of him, they had to adopt a theory that would do them no moral good at all. They admitted that it would have been awkward for his relations with the local CIO if he had refused to appear for the defendants; and they claimed that he was right not to refuse, because nothing is of equal importance to the necessity of introducing the CIO into the South. When they were asked why he used such squalid arguments in court, they replied that it is a lawyer’s duty to do everything he can to win his case for his clients, and that as he believed these arguments would appeal to the jury he was obliged to use them. That is, of course, pure moonshine. In no system of jurisprudence is there a moral obligation on a lawyer who accepts the task of defending an accused murderer to go so near justifying murder as John Bolt Culbertson did in his passage about Willie Earle and the mad dog. This recalls many like accommodations that were made by lawyers in Italy and Germany during the early days of the Fascist and Nazi parties. They relaxed their traditional principles and practice because the establishment of the party seemed a necessity that had precedence over all others. But it is not generally understood that the CIO is the kind of party that demands such sacrifices.

  If Mr. Culbertson’s conduct of the case confused and depraved the standards of young liberal Greenville, it did something just as unpleasant to the Negroes. The connection that linked the defendants and the CIO was known to every Negro in town. The uneducated Negroes invented their own legend on the subject. Mr. Culbertson’s home, they believed, done belong to CIO, and CIO done say it put Mr. Culbertson’s furniture right out on the sidewalk if Mr. Culbertson don’t save their folks’ good name. Then they laughed, with a roaring, jeering cynicism that was a humiliation to every white man and woman in the land.

  It was for the speech made by the fourth defence attorney, Mr. Thomas Wofford, that Greenville apologized most unhappily, though most laconically. Mr. Wofford was a person whom the town liked, or, to put it more accurately, for whom it felt an uneasy emotional concern. He was a man in his late thirties, red-haired, lightly built and quick on his feet, intelligent, nerve-ridden, well mannered, with a look in his eyes like a kicking horse. He must have been a very attractive and hopeful boy. He had always been fortunate. His uncle and his father-in-law were famous lawyers, and he has had the brains to make the best of the opportunities these relationships have given him. He is said to have political ambitions. In the preliminary stages of the case, when the judge was compiling a list of questions to be put to the veniremen to determine their suitability as jurors in this case, Sam Watt desired that they should be asked if they were members of any “secret organization, lodge, or association.” Mr. Wofford objected, on the ground that such a question might be “embarrassing.”

  All the defence attorneys exaggerated their Southern accents and assumed a false ingenuousness when they addressed the jury, but none more so than Mr. Wofford, This elegantly attired and accomplished person talked as if he had but the moment before taken his hands off the plough; and he was careful to mop the sweat from his brow, because it is well known that the simple admire an orator who gives out even from the pores. He excelled his colleagues not only in this play acting but in his contempt for the jury. He assumed that they hated strangers, as the stupid do. He assumed that they would be stingy about money, as the poor often are. So he referred to the FBI investigation as a “case of what I call ‘meddler’s itch,’” pointed out the FBI agents who were sitting in court, and cried out in indignation because the state had closed its case four days before, “and here they are, staying at government expense.” He must have known quite well that the FBI would only be performing its duty if it ordered its agents to stay till the end of the case, so that they could hear the attorneys’ comments on their activities. He was against the FBI; he was also against the local representatives of the law. “If you’re going to enforce all the laws, why don’t you prosecute the jailer?” he asked. “It took,” he cried scornfully, “a nigger undertaker to find out there had been a lynching.” Everybody and everything was wrong, it seemed, except murderers and the idea of murder. Like Mr. Culbertson, he disregarded the judge’s ruling that no alleged action of Willie Earle was to be mentioned as affording “justification, mitigation, or excuse” for the lynching. It was rumoured in the recess preceding Mr. Wofford’s speech that he meant to flout this ruling, and he did so with evident deliberation. He said, “Mr. Watt argues, Thou shalt not kill.’ I wonder if Willie Earle had ever read that statement.” This was as flagrant a defence of the lynching as Mr. Culbertson’s remark “Willie Earle is dead, and I wish more like him was dead” and the allusion to the mad dog. But it was much more dangerous, because it was not obviously disgusting. Mr. Culbertson was plainly seeking to please and enroll as allies people in court and outside who could not for one moment be thought of as representing the highest tradition of Greenville or the South. Mr. Wofford was careful to look and speak in such a manner that people who did not fully understand the implications of his defence might think he was upholding those traditions. When the judge checked him and ordered the remark stricken off the records, Mr. Wofford showed a remarkable lack of deference to the court, but again in such a way that many people might have thought that he was defending the cause of justice and democracy. And it would be interesting to know what he was really defending. “We people get along pretty well,” he said, “until they start interfering with us in Washington and points North,” and he spoke of the Northern armies that had laid waste the South in the Civil War. He abused the “Northern agitators, radio commentators, and certain publications” for interfering in this case. He said that “they refer to us as ‘a sleepy little town.’ They say we are a backward state and poor—and we are. But this state is ours. To the historian, the South is the Old South. To the poet, it is the Sunny South. To the prophet, it is the New South. But to us, it is our South. I wish to God they’d leave us alone.” This would be an attitude that one would respect in the case of the ordinary citizen of Greenville.

  But in view of Mr. Wofford’s desire not to embarrass secret organizations, his hostility to all law-enforcement agencies, and his attitude towards murder, it would be interesting to know what he wanted to be left alone to do.

  It would not be fair to chronicle the speeches of the last two defence attorneys without emphasizing that they were in no way representative of Greenville. Some hours after Mr. Wofford had spoken, a man that Greenville looks up to paused in the lobby of the principal hotel to say to me, “I would like you to know that we were very disappointed in Tom’s speech. We hoped he would do better.” A nice man was putting something nicely. Greenville was more at ease the next day, the tenth day of the trial, when Judge Martin made his charge to the jury. The courtroom was fuller than ever before. There were now heavy showers, but the heat had not broken, so the women were still in summer dresses and the men in their shirts, while the rain fell in rods past the windows. In the front row of the seats, within the bar of the court, were the judge’s wife and three daughters, all spectacular beauties, with magnificent black eyes and silky black curls. The youngest child, who is not yet in her teens, was dressed in a pink-checked muslin frock and had a special charm. The judge’s charge to the jury struck oddly on the ears of strangers, for by the law of South Carolina the judge cannot comment on the evidence; he must do no more than analyze the law applying to the evidence and define the verdicts that it is possible to return against the accused persons. It is not easy to see the purpose of the law. If the in
tention is to prevent the common man from being hoodwinked by his superiors, there is equal reason for forbidding the prosecuting and defending attorneys from making closing speeches. For what it was, Judge Martin’s charge was masterly, but it represented a legal position very favorable to the defendants. They were charged with murder and conspiracy, and there was very little evidence except their own statements. No man had in his statement confessed to murder. Nearly all had confessed to conspiracy. But, as the judge put it, “the state cannot establish a conspiracy by the alleged statements of the individual defendants alone.” However, the judge also seemed at some pains to make the jury understand that if they acquitted the defendants on the charges relating to murder and found them guilty of conspiracy, the sentences passed on them could not exceed ten years.

  Shortly after three o’clock the jury went out to consider their verdict and the judge left the bench. He had directed that the defendants need not be taken out, and might sit in court and visit with their families and friends. So now the court turned into a not enjoyable party, at which one was able to observe more closely certain personalities of the trial. There was Mrs. Brown, the widow of the murdered taxi driver, a spare, spectacled woman of the same austere type as the Hurds. She was dressed in heavy but smart mourning, with a veiled hat tipped sharply on one side, and she was chewing gum. So, too, was the professional bondsman who was the animating spirit of the committee that had raised funds for the defence of the defendants, a vast, blond, baldish man with the face of a brooding giant baby; but he was not genteel, as she was—he opened his mouth so wide at every chew that his gum became a matter of public interest. It had been noticeable during the trial that whenever the judge showed hostility to the introduction of race hatred into the proceedings, this man’s chewing became particularly wide and vulpine. A judge from another local court, and various other Greenville citizens, drifted up to the press table and engaged the strangers in defensive conversation. The Southern inferiority complex took charge. They supposed that an English visitor would be shocked by the lynching, but it was impossible for anybody to understand who had always lived in a peaceable community where there was no race problem. They hoped it would be remembered that when coloured people were killed in race riots in the North nobody said anything about it, and that it was only when these things happened in the South that people made a fuss about them, because all Northern congressmen were voted for by black men. They added that anyway they were sure that our Northern friends had said very unkind things about the South. It was no use saying what was true: that lately Europe had not been really what any of us could call a peaceable community, and that its standards of violence were quite high, and that the lynching party did not seem very important as an outbreak of violence but that it was important as an indication of misery; that the English had a very complex and massive race problem in South Africa, where one of the indubitably great men of the British Empire, General Smuts, professed views on the colour bar which would strike Greenville as fairly reactionary; and that our Northern friends, on hearing that we were going to the lynching trial, had remarked that while Southern lawlessness has a pardonable origin in a tragic past, Northern lawlessness has none and is therefore far more disgraceful. All this, however, brought no response. We might have been sitting each in a glass case built by history. Here was such a breach as divides England and Ireland.