Dark Don't Catch Me

by Packer, Vin

  “Wonder who it is. Oh, Gawd, Dix, I hope it’s not — ”

  “Not who?” he says, turning the ignition on; lights, throwing the gear in reverse.

  “Not my dad.”

  “Who’d be with him?”

  “I don’t know. No, it isn’t.”

  “You sure? Couldn’t you tell the car if it was.”

  “I can’t be positive.”

  “Well, duck down. I’ll go as fast as I can by them, honey. Hold on.”

  After he has turned the automobile around, Dix steps on the gas pedal, and the car tears down the winding dirt road, its headlights glaring ahead, momentarily illuminating the three figures trudging up the hill they’re rushing down.

  “Wonder what the hell all that is?” Dix murmurs. “Okay, baby.”

  She draws herself back up; glances over her shoulder. “Did you see who it was, Dixon?” “Yeah. It was Thad Hooper and Doc Sell with some colored boy.”

  “Huh? You kidding?”

  “No. Hooper and Sell, and some Negro.”

  “What Negro?”

  “I couldn’t make out. He had his head down. They had him by the arms.”

  “Dixon, that don’t sound good at all.”

  “Oh, hell, they didn’t see us. They might have made me out, but they didn’t see you. You were out of sight.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean — what would they be doing with a colored boy? You know Doc Sell.”

  “Yeah, yeah — but Hooper’s not like him.”

  “It don’t sound good at all, Dixon. Not at all.”

  “Naw, I don’t think they’re up to much.”

  “Much?”

  “Or anything.”

  “Aw, baby, look — you know something’s in the air.” Dixon stares at the road ahead of him, as he swings off the dirt and onto the pavement. “I’m worried, Dixon.”

  “Barbara, for Christ’s sake, what can we do!” “We could go to the sheriff! Something!” “You and me go?” “You could go, Dixon.”

  “We don’t know what it’s all about. Hell, honey, we got our own troubles. What do we know about it?”

  “It’s trouble, Dixon. Don’t need to know much to know that.”

  “You’re building it up, honey. I’m not even sure they had him by the arms.” He glances over at her. “We just had a narrow escape, is all, honey. It’s made us tense.”

  “I hope so, baby — but still, we ought to — ”

  “Aw, look, darling.” Dixon smiles at her, taking his eyes from the road momentarily, putting a hand in her lap. “We haven’t had any trouble like that in years around here. We’re just tense.”

  “Maybe you’re right, Dixon.”

  “Sure. Sure, I am.”

  “Pray God,” Barbara James says, placing her hand over his.

  24

  INSIDE the Naked Hag they tie him to the chair, the big man and the runty one.

  “Know where you are, nigger?” the runty one asks him.

  “Please, mister, let me go. Please!”

  “You’re in a school, nigger. You’re gonna git educated, nigger. Ain’t that what you city niggers like?”

  “I’ll do anything, mister. Please!”

  The big man says, “You done enough already, you black ape! What’d you do to her?” He kicks his shins Jesus-hard! “I want to know all you did to her.”

  “Nothing, sir. Please. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t!”

  “You tell me!” the big man says. “You put your black hands on her, didn’t you?”

  “Naw, aw, naw. I told you! Naw.”

  ‘Tell me again!”

  “Mister, sir, I just — just clucked my tongue. I didn’t even say anything, I — ” He gets a knee in his belly. “Ow!”

  “You felt her, you nigger! Say it! Say it!” The big man grabs his collar. “Say what I say to say! Say it!”

  “I — I — f-felt her.”

  Hands slap his jaw like a rock crushing it. “You black bastard! You feel up a white woman, you black ugly-skinned ape!”

  “Naw, aw — please! I didn’t!”

  “You heard him say he did,” the big man says to the runty one.

  “You’re goddam right,” says the runty one. “We’ll learn you a lesson, nigger. You’re in school, nigger! We’ll learn your nigger brain to think like a nigger.”

  “You heard him say he did!”

  “You’re goddam right.” “Felt her body!”

  “Filthy nigger with your goddam dirty black brain,” yells the runty one.

  “You heard him say he did!”

  “Aw, naw, mis — ” He gets a kick in the stomach.

  “I heard him plain as anything,” says the runty one.

  “Trash. Black trash!” the big man mutters.

  “Ought to burn him like trash,” the runty one says.

  “Please, please, please, please — ”

  “Shut up!” The runty man puts his fist in his groin.

  “Yeah, burn him for it! Nervy black ape! Doing his dirty things to a pure, pure white woman.”

  “Burn him and all the schools that give him and his black monkey brothers thoughts. Monkeys ought to stay in trees and outa schools.”

  The big man says, “What’d you do to her? Felt her, didn’t you?” He pulls him up by the collar, still tied to the chair; pulling him up and the chair under him. “Put your black ape hands on her till she said uncle, huh? Vile, vile!” He socks him back down. “Vile!”

  “Burn him and burn this nigger school,” the runty one says.

  “That’s right,” says the big one. “Get the matches out.”

  “Burn everything nigger in sight. Smelly nigger books smell from niggers reading them!”

  The big one grabs him, his big hands on his neck, blood oozing from his nose onto the big man’s hands. The big one says, “You felt her up, didn’t you, nigger? Nigger felt up a white woman. Vile black ape put his hands on a pure white body. Didn’t you? You felt her?”

  “I got matches. I got them,” says the runty one.

  “Say it. You felt her,” the big man says. “Say it.”

  “Pl-pl — please, God — n-naw — ” He gets a punch in the groin.

  “Say it! You felt her.”

  “N-naw, n — ” He gets a second punch there. “Say it! Say it!”

  “I — f-felt — ” He slumps limply, held by the rope around his boy’s body.

  “You heard him say he did,” the big man says.

  “You’re goddam right,” says the runty one, scratching a match.

  THE NEW YORK BULLETIN

  CLUCK-TONGUE CASE GOES TO JURY

  Paradise, Georgia: Emotions are running high in this little county seat town in the heart of the red hill region of Georgia, as an all-white jury sits down to deliberate the fate of Thad Hooper, 38, whose wife was involved in the cluck-tongue case, and Doctor Warren Sell, county coroner — both on trial for the lynching of Millard Post, 15.

  The New York schoolboy, who was spending a three-day vacation at the home of an uncle, was “taken for a ride” by the two white men, after he clucked his tongue at Hooper’s wife. Hooper and Sell claim they drove him only as far as Hooper’s Place, a gas and pop stand on Route 109, just to scare him, then let him out of the car to go on back to his uncle’s home by himself.

  That same evening the Negro school was burned to the ground, and a charred body, discovered amid the debris, was identified as that of young Post.

  Witness for the defense, Tink Twiddy, 17, testified that shortly after midnight that evening, as he was hunting bait for fishing, he saw a boy answering Millard Post’s description, walking up the hill toward the school, unaccompanied. The defense maintained that Millard Post, too ashamed to return to his uncle’s after his impudence to Vivian Hooper, 28, went up to the school to stay there overnight and ran into foul play. It was suggested further that many of the local colored boys were displeased with the Naked Hag because it was old and run down, and had perhaps planned to bu
rn it to the ground on the same night young Post had supposedly gone up there to spend the night.

  The most dramatic witness for the prosecution was a light-skinned Negro teacher, Barbara James, 28, daughter of Doctor Edward James, who claimed she had seen two men and a boy approach the Negro school shortly after midnight. Miss James testified that she was on top of the hill, in the company of Dixon Pirkle, 19, son of Paradise’s newspaper editor, when

  both of them saw a car without headlights stop at the bottom of the hill. She testified they saw two men and a boy emerge from the car, and as they hurriedly drove down the hill past them, Dixon Pirkle identified the men as Hooper and Sell.

  Young Pirkle subsequently declared under oath that he was not with Miss James, nor anywhere near the Negro school that evening. While he was on the stand, an uproar broke out in the courtroom when Hollis Jordan, a citizen of Paradise, began shouting “Liar!” Jordan was rushed out of the courtroom and order was restored while Pirkle continued. Pirkle stated that he was at home mourning the death of his mother, Mrs. Ada Pirkle, who had died only that day.

  Sobbing as she spoke to reporters, Miss James refused to comment on her relationship with Pirkle, but insisted that: “I have told the truth. It was the only thing I could do and still live with myself.”

  Miss James said that since giving her testimony before the grand jury, she has been threatened numerous times by anonymous people, as has her father been. A job has been offered her in Cincinnati, but she declined to say whether or not she would accept this teaching position.

  While ostensibly the citizens of Paradise are carrying on as calmly as can be expected under the circumstances, there is a considerable undercurrent of violent feeling. Rumors have gone so far as to suggest that Mrs. Hooper was actually molested by the Post boy, and an unidentified woman, wife of a professor, told this reporter there nas “no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was rape.”

  Mr. Hollis Jordan has been accused by many as “being linked to the N.A.A.C.P. and Russia,” and the evening of the day of his outburst in the courtroom, his house was stones. Jordan has left Paradise for an undisclosed place.

  The following is a reprint, in part, from an editorial appearing in the Paradise Herald, yesterday’s edition, written by Dixon Pirkle’s father, the editor:

  … The fact remains that Thad Hooper and Doc Sell have been two of our leading citizens, family men who have broken bread at our family tables, men who have knelt with us to pray, fought for us and with us in war and in peace for the ideals we hold to be godly; men whose children play and laugh and learn and grow along-side our own children, men whose hands we have gripped countless times in the clasp of brotherhood, and men wtih whom we have become men under one sky and upon a common ground. They are our own. They have stood before us, and before God, and given us their testimony, and we will, under God, humbly judge them with all the wisdom human beings possess …”

  25

  NOW THAT it is over, dark comes gently again in Paradise. Dark comes without strangers. The streets are quiet and sleepy at nine o’clock near Thanksgiving time. The courthouse under the harvest moon is stately and still; its green laws cleared of the debris of camera wires and the big gleaming machinery of television mobile units. Faces along Main are familiar ones; and talk at the drugstore centers once more about the new moonshine drive; crops, and the livestock show over in Manteo.

  The early night freight chuffs south toward Galverton, clanking its short-lived signal of commerce as it passes; and in the East the line of pinelands casts its shadows on the spent fields, picked clean of cotton. North on the hill red lanterns warn that the hole is dug for the basement of the new Negro school, now under construction. West in The Toe, blue supper smoke curls up from the shacks of the colored.

  At the Ficklin’s, Marianne glances across the living room as her husband drops the evening paper on the pile beside his chair and yawns, stretching. “Want to watch T.V. honey?” he says.

  “Ummm. Guess so.” She balances a small white pad on her lap, licking the tip of a pencil. “Fick, just don’t let the papers stack up like that. We’ve got enough to start a dump already.”

  “I told you, honey. Get a boy in.” He walks across to snap on the TV. “How about getting Cindy Bennett’s brother?” “I just can’t imagine it,” she says.

  “Why not? Cindy’s been with the Pirkles for years. Colonel says she’s right reliable, and the boy is too.”

  “Naw, I mean — Major Post going up North like that with his Northern uncle.”

  “Oh, that again … Well, I suppose he’ll sort of be like a son to the fellow, now that he lost his own … Picture’s kind of blurry tonight,” he says, fooling with the set’s knobs, frowning. “Major deserves the chance he’ll get up North. He’s a smart boy.”

  “Too smart. If he’d hung around long, I’d probably get the same thing Vivian Hooper got.”

  “Look, Marianne,” her husband says emphatically, “I don’t know what you and some of the others think Vivian Hooper got; it doesn’t excuse murder!”

  “Rape doesn’t?”

  “Oh, cut it out! It makes me sick!”

  “A lot you know! I can tell you, Fick, I had to watch myself every minute even with Major. The way he’d look at me sometimes — ”

  “It’s the first I’ve heard of it … If you’re still trying to get me to change my mind about Saturday, you may as well forget it. They’re not coming!”

  She slaps the pad down on the table beside her. “We can’t just ostracize them! We can’t! Besides, we owe them for the barbecue.”

  “Just forget it!”

  “You’re the only one around here feels Thad and Doc Sell didn’t do right.”

  “No, I’m not the only one. Not by a damn sight!” “Oh, if you mean Hollis Jordan …”

  “I don’t mean Hollis. I mean men and women in this county who abhor the killing of that child! Men and women who live here, and are going to continue to live here — not just blow up at what happened and skip town. Men and women who are going to wear this murder like an albatross around their necks.”

  “Fick, don’t be so dramatic. Honestly.”

  “And Thad himself isn’t going to find it easy. We respected Thad, thought a lot of him, had him to our homes. Well, we never respected Doc Sell one whit, and he never got asked around either. Now Thad’s in the same category.”

  “As far as we’re concerned — not as far as others are. Not as far as I am, Fick, we got to forgive and forget. I saw him today on Main. Looked pale as a ghost.”

  “Oh, he knows how we feel. Town stood by him, but he knows what we think of him.”

  “You keep saying we. Who’s we?”

  “Time’ll tell that … One thing’s sure, he’s not coming to this house. No more.”

  “I’m not going to be able to face Vivie.”

  “Yes, well, I admit. It’s too bad for Vivie and the kids. Best thing they could do would be to move on out of Paradise.” Ficklin walks away from the set. “Thad ought to move away … There, picture’s fine now.”

  His wife reaches for the lamp chain and pulls it, darkening the room. “Law,” Marianne Ficklin murmurs, “Poor Vivie …

  • • •

  At the Bailey’s, Kate looks up from the checker board set out on the card table in the sun parlor, and says, “It’s your move.”

  “Hmmm? Oh, sure.”

  “You’re not concentrating, dear. I jumped you three times in a row.”

  “I just can’t seem to get my mind fixed on the game, Kate.”

  “Storey, you’re not still thinking about Thad?”

  Storey Bailey sighs, rubbing his forehead. “I don’t know. I saw him today, stopped out for gas. Some folks around here aren’t even buying their gas from him now. It’s awful. I don’t know. And Thad was kinda different acting with me. Sorta snappy.”

  “Oh, he’d have liked to have had you mixed up in it all.”

  “I keep thinking if I’d gone along, Kate, it
never would have happened. But there was just Thad and Doc Sell — Thad, all worked up in a rage, and Doc Sell heaping coals on the fire. If I’da been along — ”

  “Thank God you weren’t!”

  “Then I keep thinking about what you said about Vivs walking into band rehearsal today … I don’t know.”

  “Storey, everyone was very nice to her.”

  “Well, why shouldn’t they be! She didn’t have anything to do with it!” he snaps.

  She looks across the table at him with a fixed stare.

  “Aw, heck.” He pushes the checker board back, getting up, beginning to pace. “I feel sorry for her. I can’t help it. I don’t know, it’s crazy. I just feel — well, like I’d done something.”

  Kate Bailey begins to place the checkers back in the box. He says, “I wish I’d never told you anything about that night.”

  “You owed me some explanation, Storey,” she answered quietly.

  “Well, maybe I exaggerated … I did exaggerate.” He digs his hands down into his trousers. “And now people are saying she went and enticed that nigger. Do you know people are actually saying that? I wonder how come. Wonder who’s been telling things.”

  Kate puts the top of the box on and folds the checker board over. “If you’re trying to say that I am, Storey, you’re mistaken.”

  “Then who is?”

  “I heard it from Marianne Ficklin.” “And you believe it, I suppose?”

  “I don’t have any opinion; just that I don’t condone what Thad did with Doc Sell … I’ll never feel the same about Thad.”

  “I think the world and all of Thad,” Storey says. “We were best friends. I think if I’d been with them — hell! Hell!”

  “Please, Storey, there’s no need to shout!”

  “Well, hell — heck, I just can’t help thinking of Vivs walking into band rehearsal and starting to play the saxophone.”

  “She didn’t just walk in and play the saxophone. She’ll have to learn it first. A musical instrument isn’t an easy accomplishment. Not as easy as other things.”

  “Kate, I wish you’d stop talking like that.”