The Tree of Forgetfulness

by Pam Durban

  Just before sunset Cecile calls the priest. She and Lewis have been raised Catholic, as their Presbyterian mother had promised their father’s church they would be. Cecile knows every Holy Day of Obligation. She recognizes Satan himself, father of lies, in the snake crushed under the cool marble heel of the Virgin Mary’s statue. She knows the meaning of all the vestments and bells and candles. She knows when and why they kneel and stand during Mass, why the bishop slaps your face at Confirmation, and how mortal sin destroys the soul. She needs no book to guide her through her examination of conscience before Confession; she has memorized the list of sins against every commandment. She knows when to call the priest.

  When he hears the priest’s voice, Howard opens his eyes long enough to see the purple stole, but he doesn’t know where to start. A voice scribbles away inside him, but it speaks so quietly he can’t hear what it’s saying. How to confess that you were one man in a swarm of men whose time had handed him easier words than sin or evil to name what he had done or failed to do? How to confess to the silence in which he has wrapped himself for seventeen years? He closes his eyes, moves deeper inside himself, and from that place he sees the room and the bed and himself on the bed. It is strange to feel his body crumble while his mind stays clear and full of light. To feel time move as in a dream, where a day passes in an instant and a whole story flashes by.

  At first he thinks the mockingbird has flown into the room. The light flutters as though disrupted by wings, but there is no bird, only a woman who sits beside the bed and looks at him calmly, her long, light hair scattered over the collar of a deep green coat of an unfamiliar cut. “Lewis?” he almost says. With her long, narrow face and imperial nose, she looks so much like his son. His sadness is in her face too, and also his brightness, the brightness of life. She has Lewis’s eyes and chin, her grandmother’s full mouth, but tugged down at the ends, unlike Libba’s. She has her own way of holding her shoulders, but her hands, with their short, competent fingers and thick palms, are Libba’s. Hello, Granddaddy, she says.

  As though by remembering the autumn of 1926, then wishing it away, he’s invited or conjured her. The curious grandchild, the one he’d feared, the one who might feel the pull of that history and believe she has the right to collect the fragments and scraps he should have burned and make another story from them about how it was, and who he was and what he did. And it won’t do any good to say, Why dwell on the ugliness of the past? A man has the right to some peace. When the future comes to demand an accounting from the past, it will not be denied.

  2

  Curtis N. R. Barrett

  October 1926

  SOUTH OF RICHMOND, when he was sure the train had crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, he closed the door to the Pullman sleeper, uncapped his flask, and drank and watched the light of the setting sun flash through the dark trees beside the track. In his notebook he found the page of details he’d gathered for the last story he’d written for the New York World before leaving for the South. The lines there, written as he watched the police photographers fire their flashbulbs at the couple on the bed, crossed the page at a slant. MR. AND MRS. THOMAS AUSTIN one of them had printed in block letters in the ledger at the Waldorf’s front desk. Then they’d gone up to the room, where he had cut her throat and his own. They were young, and they held hands on the blood-soaked satin bedspread, she in her slip, he in his drawers, the straight razor in his free hand and the look in their eyes that he’d seen in the eyes of corpses in France during the Great War: People always seemed startled to find themselves dead.

  The boy was pigeon-chested, so thin his ribs showed. The girl’s worn leather purse lay open on the nightstand next to a lacquered red Chinese stick, the kind that girls used to anchor twists of long hair. Hers was a rich chestnut brown, worn in the smooth, short bob that was in style now. Where it wasn’t heavy with blood, her slip was still creased, probably just unfolded from the Bergdorf’s box on the floor. “Fancier than either could afford,” he’d written. “Pale cream satin trimmed with lace. ‘Candlelight’ the salesgirl might have called it.”

  “Wedding gift?” he’d scribbled. They’d worn rings, so they were married, not necessarily to each other.

  He’d been sent to the Waldorf because he was the World’s crime reporter, but a note had been fished out of the blood, defiant, printed in the same hand as the names in the desk ledger—they’d chosen this way over the plans that others had made for them—so no crime had been committed, unless you called the willing forfeit of two young lives a crime. Looking down at the bodies on the bed, his pencil moving across the page, he’d found that he did not share the dead couple’s surprise at what had happened to them; in fact, he felt nothing but a cold, steady pulse of anger at the fact that they had chosen what so many others had not chosen but what had been done to them anyway.

  Home from the war too late for the big parades, he’d gotten off the ship in New York, walked from the docks to Grand Central Station, and bought a ticket to New Bedford, Massachusetts, holding in his mind, as he’d done throughout the war, the image of his father opening the door of the office that waited for him at the mill. Barrett was one of the smaller mills in New Bedford: five hundred spindles turning out a fine cotton lawn. Every one of his father’s wartime letters had included a report on the mill’s monthly output and an assessment of whether the total yardage met or exceeded or fell short of expectations. He’d closed every letter with the same words: “Son,” he wrote. “You must not worry about where you will go or what you will do to make a living when you come home. Do not allow yourself to be distracted or burdened over there by uneasy thoughts about your future here.” His signature had occupied the bottom third of the page.

  Curtis N. R. Barrett returned to the States on a cool day, but as he walked along the platform looking for an uncrowded car, he started to sweat. Every window teemed with faces and hands pressed to the glass, and images of the mill came to him—flying spindles, steel fingers rising and falling, picking and twisting. He was still in uniform, the red cross of the medical corps on both sleeves, and whenever he looked up at the train, people smiled down at him or nodded solemnly, as though they knew him. In one car a woman held a little boy up to the window and pointed. The boy waved and smiled and saluted, and when he only waved back, the child pouted and hid his face in his mother’s shoulder. No doubt, once the train was moving, and the only way off was to jump, the woman and the boy would walk through the cars until they found him, and then they would stand there and wait for him to return the salute the boy was owed.

  He could not trust himself to be reasonable if that happened, so he cashed in his ticket, rented a room. A few days later, reading the New York World in a coffee shop in Times Square, he’d come across Joseph Pulitzer’s statement on the mission of his newspaper: “An institution that should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.” The hard, clear certainty of it had moved him, and he’d realized it wasn’t just the flying spindles he couldn’t go back to; it was the piety of the Sunday dinner table as well, the prime rib and Potatoes Anna, his father’s interminable prayer for the well-being of his business. A few days later he wired home: “Detained in NY. Don’t wait up.”

  “God bless and keep you, son,” his father had wired back. “Come home when you can.” He hadn’t expected more.

  Carrying the hard black case that held his typewriter, he stepped down from the train in Aiken, South Carolina, walked through the station and out the double doors at the front. He set the case down under the portico. He took a cigarette out of a silver case and tapped it on the case and lit up, blew the smoke straight up into the air. Take
a good look. People would be watching, Leland had said. Count on it. A porter followed, pushing a handcart on which were piled two brown leather suitcases with CNRB stamped in gold just above the handle. He gave the man a dollar bill, went back to smoking. The sun slanted through pines and palmettos at a low, early-morning angle. In a small oak beside the station, blue jays squabbled; a smell of woodsmoke hung in the air.

  Curtis N. R. Barrett, what kind of name was that? people eating lunch at the counter at the Savoy would say to one another, throwing their napkins down in disgust. It suits him right well, they’d say; it matches the vanity of the thick, wavy hair combed back just so, the dark vest and trousers and white shirt, the silver cuff links and collar pin, the dark glasses and that signet ring on the pinkie finger of the hand that brought the cigarette up to his mouth and down again. Another big shot New York reporter come to tar a community of decent people for the actions of the lawless few. He stood in front of the station, smoking, and watched the fountain splash. Take a good damn look. A few people did, slowing their cars. A man in overalls driving a wagon pulled by two dusty mules stared at him as he passed then turned his head to keep looking. The breeze picked up and rustled the fronds of the palmettos in front of the station. He smelled breakfast in the air.

  Two days earlier his editor, Bayard Swope, had summoned him to his office. “King of the World,” reporters called Swope. It was a joke, but also true. His window offered a king’s vista—the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, with its symphony of cables. Swope was a famous gambler, lucky at horses and cards, and an equally famous reporter. Three years earlier, in a marathon poker game in a private railway car in Palm Beach, he’d relieved two rich men of close to half a million dollars. On one office wall he’d hung framed clippings from the coverage of that triumph, and right alongside them his 1917 Pulitzer Prize citation, for a series of articles called “Inside the German Empire.”

  But Swope was happy to share the wealth. He sat behind the same rough desk where he’d always written, was generous with his Cuban cigars. He knew a story that needed telling when he saw one, like the one Leland Dawson had brought back from South Carolina. The story had begun in April 1925, when Sheriff Earl Glover was shot and killed during a liquor raid on a family of tenant farmers named Long.

  Bessie Long, her brother Dempsey, and their cousin Albert had been arrested, tried, and found guilty of killing the sheriff. The boys were sentenced to the electric chair, the girl to life in prison, and that would have been the end of it if N. R. Latham, one of the few black lawyers in South Carolina, hadn’t filed appeal after appeal with the state supreme court until finally, in October 1926, the Longs were sent back to Aiken for a new trial. N. R. Latham had showed up there too, along with a white lawyer from Spartanburg, to argue their case. On the third day of that second trial the judge directed a not-guilty verdict against Dempsey, but before nightfall he’d been picked up again and charged with assault and battery. Later on that moonless night the electric line to the jail was cut; a mob invaded, seized the Longs, drove them out of town, and shot them to death in front of a crowd of so many witnesses it was hard to believe the whole town hadn’t been there.

  Of the forty lynchings Leland Dawson had investigated, this was the worst he’d seen. Depraved he called what had happened that night in Aiken, and since Leland was careful with language, they’d trusted that the word accurately reflected the fact. Someone had slipped Leland a copy of the report of the coroner’s physician, and Leland had given it to Barrett. He’d read it again in the Pullman car heading south, preparing himself.

  Albert Long. Shot with shotgun under chin to the left. No. 8 shot.

  Dempsey (Son) Long. .38 cal. entered front Breast, came out left of spine in back, four inches left of shoulder blade.

  Bessie Long Cheetam. Powder burns on back (left shoulder blade). Pistol wound on right temple .38 cal. lead bullet, entrance of bullet on left side of head two inches above ear going through brain. Each wound sufficient to cause death.

  They’d been killed sometime after midnight on the eighth of October, and in the morning their bodies had been loaded onto a county truck and buried in a common grave behind a church near Monetta. Later that day the coroner’s jury had questioned Sheriff Aubrey Timmerman about the mob that had taken his prisoners from his jail.

  Did you have your flashlight in your hand?

  Yes, sir, I did, but I dropped it.

  Did you recognize anybody?

  All I saw had something on their faces.

  Did they have on citizens’ clothes?

  I didn’t pay any attention to the clothes.

  They didn’t have a Ku Klux robe on?

  No, sir.

  On October 10 the coroner’s jury ruled that the Longs had died at the hands of persons unknown.

  The other thing that still amazed them in New York was how Leland Dawson, a black man, secretary of the NAACP, had gotten out of South Carolina alive. He’d posed as a reporter for the World, and he was so light-skinned that he’d fooled them. Fooled the white people, anyway; Leland never said if the black people knew he was one of them. Believing they were talking to another white man, two types of people confided in Leland. People with outraged consciences, and thank God for them, he said. There were more of them than he’d let himself hope there would be. And the people who always cluster around a big story like flies around a spill because they want to put themselves in the middle of it, to show how important they are.

  Whatever their reasons, people talked to Leland; they named the men who’d dragged the Longs out and driven them up the Columbia Highway and shot them dead, and Leland had sent those names to Governor Arthur McCormick. Then he’d hightailed it back to New York and waited for the South Carolina papers—the State and the Columbia Record and the Aiken Standard—to report that the governor had opened an investigation.

  “The eyes of the civilized world are upon Aiken, and her people, innocent as well as guilty, are upon trial,” Judge Marvin Mann said in his charge to the grand jurors called into special session on October 18 to investigate the murders.

  That had seemed promising, but then the state fair opened in Columbia, and the front page of the State filled up with stories about lancing tournaments, and horse races, and the “Hail, South Carolina” pageant that promised to dramatize South Carolina history in its entirety, accompanied by an orchestra and a chorus of eight hundred and fifty voices.

  A letter arrived for Leland Dawson, and for a few days they distracted themselves in the newsroom with dramatic readings by anyone who could do a passable southern accent.

  Dear Sir:

  Mr. Austin Eubanks said in his caustic article in the Aiken Standard that “Leland Dawson, a Negro, came down here and passed himself off as a white man.” Is that true? At the time, I had on amber colored glasses and did not study your color, but I took you for a white man and according wto South Carolina law, you may well be.

  As you may know, we have a miscegenation law on the books in this State. The Courts had to construe that law and they held that a child born to a black person and a white person is a mulatto. The offspring of a quadroon and a white person is an octoroon, but the child of an octoroon and a white person is WHITE. That’s the law of South Carolina, though sometimes the lines get so crossed and re-crossed it is hard to determine exactly what a person is.

  But had you been as black as the hinges of hell, I would have treated you exactly as I did. We attend to business for black people, meet with them in our offices, and sometimes when necessary take them into our houses, ride with them in automobiles, and so forth, and never think anything about it.

  As a youngster, I heard an amusing story about an argument between two men, one of whom was very dark. An old South Carolina law held that you could not slander someone by calling him a Negro, because everybody could see that he was NOT; but it was slanderous to call him a mulatto. The man quarreling with the dark complexioned man said:

  “You are a damned ’latter
—NO nigger, nigger, nigger!!!!”

  Well, this long letter simply because I want to hear the truth about what you did or said to persuade people you were white. And then do the figuring and see what you really are in South Carolina.

  I am, yours very truly for justice to all,

  Earl P. Henderson

  At the end of every reading they’d laugh about the pompous old cracker, and Leland would remind them that this was the same man who’d tried to warn the judge that lynching was in the air on the day the charges against Dempsey Long were dismissed and he walked out of that courtroom, a free man. But that didn’t stop them from laughing the next time the letter was read. “Go on and laugh,” Leland always said. He was tempted to join in himself, but he wanted them to understand that it was easier to parse these things from New York than it had been when he was down there in the thick of it, where friend and enemy switched places daily.

  On October 28 the grand jury reported to the judge that it was unable to secure sufficient evidence on which to bring indictments and asked to be excused. The State reported the story on the third page. That was the day that Swope called Barrett into his office. When he saw the State newspaper on Swope’s desk, Barrett said, “I’m on my way, boss.”

  “Can you believe these people?” Swope said, tapping the newspaper.

  “No,” he said, but that wasn’t exactly true. It was what Swope wanted to hear, but he could believe anything now. He believed, for instance, that there was no limit to the harm people could inflict on one another. On any given day during the war, he thought he’d seen the worst. The day when the two men on either side of him had simply dissolved was the nadir, and then the day at Chemin de Fer, when the Germans came over the hill with flamethrowers. Nightfall had brought a kind of relief; surely nothing more awful could come than what had happened that day. But gradually, grindingly, he came to see that what he’d believed were discrete and finite events were parts of an endless series, and every day began from a benchmark slightly more horrific than the one he’d passed the day before.