Strange Fruit, page 30
“Almos persuaded, Christ to receive, almos persuaded now to believe—”
And Tom Harris believed. He knew as he looked in that brown candid face that Dessie was telling the truth. He said briskly, “Well, run along now and finish up your dishes. You’re not to leave the house tonight. Make up a pallet in Mrs. Harris’s room and sleep there. Tell her I said for you to.”
He telephoned Miss Sadie. “Miss Sadie—you tried to locate me this afternoon?”
“Yes, about the pallbearers.”
“I have that. Anything else?”
Briefly she told him about Crazy Carl.
“Nobody with a grain of sense would listen to Carl … Who’ve you seen around?”
“The usual crowd—Tracy’s friends—”
“Anybody else?”
“Bill Talley, some of the Shaky Pond folks.”
“Still in town?”
“Were when I went out to supper.”
“I see. Well, much obliged. Miss Sadie.”
Laura had got it right. Something was up—more than the hotheads.
It was about dark when he had left the office for the mile-and-a-half walk to his house. And as he crossed the railroad and passed through the narrow stretch of cypress and palmetto, a light had flashed in his face. “It’s Harris,” a voice had called. Another one muttered, “All right.”
“What you up to, boys?”
“Checking up on the niggers.”
“Mind you check on yourselves too,” he laughed, walked on, stopped. “Don’t go stirring up trouble in my quarters. My boys got to be on the job in the morning.”
On the short-cut through the live-oak grove he had been stopped twice. In the dark of the big oak in front of his own corner gate he was stopped again. A light flashed full in his face, was lowered. Someone walked away.
”Watch your step, boys,” he had called out to the darkness. If these irresponsible whippersnappers didn’t watch out, there would be trouble. Bad trouble, and they didn’t have the sense to see it.
Tom stood at the telephone, his hand still on the receiver. Across the room his son Charles sat reading. No one else was in the wide hall, though he could hear Mrs. Harris moving about in her room, dressing for the service. He looked at his watch. Half-past eight. Time, after time, for church.
“Going to the meeting, Son?”
“Thought I wouldn’t tonight, Dad.” Charles looked up at his father, smiled, “Kind of fed up.”
“Your mother’s going, and the girls. Things not so quiet around. Hate for them to be out tonight by themselves. Wish you’d go, if you don’t mind.”
Charles laid down his book. “What’s the matter with this town? Have you heard the talk?”
“Yeah. I’ve heard.”
“Thing I don’t see is why the niggers and God take it lying down.”
“Son! Talk easy—your mother’ll hear you.” Tom rubbed his pink bald head. “It’s not so simple as all that, Charlie. Not so simple.” Tom sighed and stretched his legs as he sat down in his armchair. “Keep your mouth shut, keep out of it, whatever it is, and look after your mother and the girls.”
“And what are you up to?” Charles laughed suddenly, went over, picked up the car keys.
Tom chuckled. “Well, I reckon I’ve got to put a few ducks in a row. I’ll drop in to the meeting later, if I get through.”
Tom stretched his legs and sighed. The house was quiet. They’d gone now to the meeting, and he could hear Dessie fixing up Mrs. Harris’s room and making a pallet. It’d be easy to go to sleep right here in this chair … not move until morning. Tired … day had been hot!
As soon as he had been able to leave the Deens’ after dinner he had gone out to his logging camp and stayed there all afternoon. Had suddenly jumped into the cab as Old Mary was pulling out after dinner, sat there with C.B. as he guided her over the narrow-gauge track down the tricky curve, on out beyond the Rushton turpentine still, on to the new stretch of timber he’d just bought the rights to.
C.B. said, “Old Mary needs a new boiler mighty bad. Some day she’s going to blow me and her to kingdom come.”
“Fine old lady, but tell her to hold herself in a little longer. Money’s scarce now.”
“Always scarce,” said C.B., “and nobody gits used to it.”
Harris had gone out to the camp, feeling restless, finding it difficult to fit Tracy Deen’s murder into the peaceful pattern of Maxwell. Maxwell’s a good town, a quiet town, good place to bring your children up in—and he had brought up nine. Except for Saturday nights, a few razor fights, a dead nigger now and then, nothing violent ever happened in Maxwell. Things still went on in the southwest of the county that had no business going on. Niggers disappeared out on Bill Talley’s place too often—dropped plumb out of sight—but you didn’t have proof, and there was seldom much talk about it. What was happening to the College Street young people that made them get into such bad trouble? Four years ago Clem Massey killed a man—not here in Maxwell, thank God, in Americus—but Clem had been born on College Street and mothered by one of the finest women Maxwell ever claimed as a citizen—and Clem now in the State Farm for it and his mother in her grave, and his sister Julia with a broken heart. Now here today, in the middle of the revival, they come with news of Tracy Deen. Many a man in Maxwell knew why Tracy was killed on the Old Town road, though course the women didn’t Yes, she must have done it. That Anderson girl. Everything pointed that way. Where he was. Fact that he’d given Dorothy Pusey a ring. Quietest nigger girl in Maxwell. Too quiet. Dangerous when they’re so quiet. Jealousy eats them like a disease. Best thing folks can do now is to hush it up. Get the boy buried, hush the talk. Bring that mulatto girl to trial, pretty as she is, and you’d spread a scandal from end to end of the United States—ruin the little Pusey girl, finish breaking Mrs. Deen’s heart. They’d have to watch Tracy’s friends. Boys like Gus, who never thought beyond their nose, likely to start something. Talking about running those Anderson girls out the county. Not so easy to run out the best Negro family the town ever had. Bound to be scandal if you tried. No, better hush it up, get folks minds on something else. Sug Rushton said he’d fix it. Hope he could. Best thing would be to get folks’ minds back on the meeting, if that could be done. Looked now as if Dunwoodie might as well fold up his gospel tent and call it a bad time for the Lord. Yes sir! Looked as if the devil had straddled the town.
Tom sighed, it made you wonder about your own boys. Wonder if you had done as well by them as you might. Anne so sure her boys would never get into trouble, her boys would never—Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they hadn’t. But it was something to thank God for—not to take the credit for yourself. And there’s plenty of trouble to get into, besides in Colored Town.
Well … he’d stepped in trouble today everywhere he turned, it’d seemed—everywhere.
Things not going well out at the camp. Not so bad maybe, but bad enough. Chain-gang crew quarrelsome, fussing about the food, one after another having run-ins with the foreman. Didn’t much like the man, himself. Folks saying, half saying anyway, that he was using the sweatbox on the chain-gang niggers. Well … it’s no good! No sense to it! If you’ve got any guts, if you’re more than a two-by-four yourself, you don’t need stocks and sweatboxes to make folks do as you want em to do. Look a nigger or white straight in the eye and give him a tongue-lashing—and mind you hand his manhood back to him when you’re through, finish up with something he can laugh with you about and feel good as you. Yeah. That’s the trouble. Good-for-nothing trash trying to boss other good-for-nothing trash. No wonder the timers make a foreman like that yellow cracker fool fall back on sweatboxes. Nothing in himself to fall back on—that’s the trouble! Well, he wouldn’t have the sweatbox used in his logging camp—not when he knew it. Trouble is, you don’t have time to keep up with everything. Too much to see after! Too much! There’s that gang, now—forty big black bucks, a third of them lifers, and not a nigger woman within twenty miles … No wonder they’re mean! And what can a man do about it—who’s a steward in the Methodist Church with a big family of girls and boys and a wife like Anne! What ought to be done: bring a drove of black women in there once a week. Yeah. Anne would quit him tomorrow if she knew he thought such a thing. And reckon he had enough already to face his Maker with, without adding more to the list—right now.
Tom sighed.
He had come back on Old Mary’s last daily trip and, sitting there in the cab with C.B., had looked out across acres of pine land, acres of stumps, once the prettiest virgin pine he’d ever bought the timber rights to.
C.B. said, “Bad about the Deen boy.”
“Mighty bad.”
“Don’t reckon he was much count.”
“Not much. Never seemed to catch on to—way things have to be somehow.” Pretty no-count and all his life worrying his mother and Tut, never doing a thing that they had hoped he would do. Always a disappointment. A boy like that ought to have been whipped good when he was young, or made to get out and earn his own living—or something—You wonder sometimes what would have made him turn out different …
“Hard to see why a boy turns out like that—with a fine Christian mother like Mrs. Deen.”
“Never knowed her,” C.B. said, chewing slow as he eased Old Mary around the worst curve in the roadbed.
“Fine woman.”
The logging train paused at the crossing, blew twice, turned toward the mill.
“There’s a lot of fine Christian women in the world, C.B.,” Tom said slowly.
“Reckon so.” C.B. leaned out the cab and spat. “Never knowed any.” He slid Old Mary slowly into the mill yard.
When he got to the office a little before dark, Tom had found Willie Echols waiting. Willie’d come to talk wages again—a living wage, he said. It was nothing new for Willie to come in to talk wages. But Tom was tired and worried. Didn’t know when he’d felt so tired. Couldn’t keep his mind off the Deen family. Bad time, they were having a bad time! You’d keep thinking of your own four boys. No sense to it! All right boys, the four of them. And Anne had been a good mother to them. Whatever complaint he had it wasn’t that.
Willie was talking, coughing between his words. He would cough, pause, look around for a spittoon, never seem to see the one near Tom’s desk, turn, spit through the window, begin talking again. Tom watched the thin face, muscles moving up and down along the jaw, eyes moving around the room, shifting from object to object, coming back to his employer’s face, a little angrily.
Willie was saying, “Nobody can live on what we get, Mr. Harris, down here. Up North they get two, three times more and shorter hours. Nobody can live—”
Yes, but that’s what the fool don’t seem to see! Folks do live on it—and less.
“Men can’t go on year after year working for nothing. You work all week and what you have, come Saturday? About enough to sop up on your plate a Sunday. Labor does the work—labor has a right to share in the profits. If capital won’t give them, we’ll—”
“Here, wait a minute! What you mean, labor and capital? You mean you and me?”
“I mean me and you—and more,” Echols said, and coughed, looked around, spat out the window. “I mean labor and capital—that’s bigger than me and you. I don’t know how—” He paused, and his brown eyes rested on Tom’s face. “I don’t know exactly how, but it’s bigger—Things—unions—things is goin to make it bigger, some day. Different.”
And Tom had said, “It ought to be different. I don’t know how it’s going to, though. When you can’t half the time meet your payroll, how under heaven you going to raise wages? You see, Echols,” he went on, “I’m your boss; that’s right. But the bank’s my boss. Maybe the bank has its boss, reckon it has. None of it’s easy! Hard times come, like they are now—Who starts the hard times? War in Europe this time, yes—but before this, who started it? Tell you what I want you to do. Want you to go see Dr. Deen. Have him look you over, give you a little something. You’re run down. Maybe that’s what makes things seem so—Here—” And Tom wrote an order to Deen and handed it to Echols.
Willie talked on and on as if it were a speech he’d learned. “Time was, labor hadn’t no power. Well, labor’s gittin power now. Unions is coming South. But some of us cain’t wait on unions to come when we got eight children to feed. How you expect us to live? How you expect me and my nine to live?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes, Willie”—Tom Harris rubbed his pink bald head and half smiled at the thin, sallow, angry face opposite him—”I don’t know.”
Well … he’d been pretty good to Willie. And it only seemed to make the man worse. Talking wild half the time now. Wages, wages, wages! Rank socialist! Fool’d keep on until he’d have to get rid of him yet. Turn into a plumb Bolshevik if he kept on. Couldn’t see! No sense! Didn’t he know if they started trouble he could turn the whole passel of em off and fill the mills tomorrow with more—white or black? With half the country starving out on the patches and farms, didn’t he know that?
And then as they sat there, the telephone had rung. And Laura was talking to him, while across from him Willie talked on. Laura, in a faraway voice, was telling him about the pallbearers—would he see about them please for her father? Laura saying something about Henry—something about people, somebody being after him.
“I’ll be home in half an hour, Laura. I’ll come right over,” he’d told her. No, she would come to his home and wait for him, if he didn’t mind. They hadn’t told Mother and did not want her worried. Harris agreed, hung up the receiver, turned back to Echols.
“Up North labor’s gittin things. Hit’ll git it down here, bound to—”
Hookworm eats up brains fast as it eats bodies.
“Well,” Tom had suddenly stood, “it’s late and lot to do. Reckon we both better be getting on home. Hope your wife’s well, Willie. And the children.”
And Echols had just looked at him, stood up, still looking, coughed, looked around, spat out the window.
They had parted at the door—Echols to cross the track over to the white mill settlement; Harris turning toward town and home.
Tom stretched his legs. Sometimes you—Well, better get his mind on this thing now. Bill back of it. Yeah. Up to his old tricks. Looked as if it took one dead nigger a year to keep Bill’s liver regulated. Time he found some other way to keep his health up. Tom picked at the rough spot near his nose, thick finger working softly over the roughness as his blue eyes grew hard with thought. There were the pallbearers … Pug … his own son Charles … Gus Rainey … all the others … Tracy’s friends or his father’s—not likely any of them in this. More likely the men sitting up with the corpse, who’d do the business for Bill, or help him do it. He studied the list Laura had given him. Yeah. Town folks, but Bill’s friends. Most of them. More like it now! He traced the plan Bill had worked out as easily as if it had been his own. The family would go to bed. Men would sit up with the corpse and Henry would vanish in the night. That would be all. Just another black gone. Folks, womenfolks anyway, would say that Henry must have done it and run away in the night. Strange about darkies, they’d say—you never can trust some of them, no matter how long they’ve worked for you. And they’d be nervous about raping for a year afterward … But the niggers would know, and picking time was near … These lights flashing, men prowling around … Goings-on of Tracy’s friends, the hot heads … Not amount to more than a few shots fired, or a whipped nigger. Real work was being done by Bill.
Tom sat on for a while in thought, suddenly smiled, got up, went to Jane Hardy’s door, knocked softly.
TWENTY-THREE
In the bright light from the electric bulbs strung up and down the aisles and around the altar rail, the thick sawdust took on a soft golden glow.
Brother Dunwoodie sat quietly watching the crowd assemble. It was an elusive and slow-settling congregation. Some would come in, take their seats, go out again. You could feel the uncertainty. At the tent openings there were more outside than in, and in the aisles they stood, loath to make the decision to stay, as loath to leave.
He looked at his watch, let it slide back into his vest pocket.
There would be no singing service tonight. Brother Dunwoodie stood, walked to the altar rail, laid his Bible upon it. His eyes moved up one aisle, down another, as if counting his congregation. In a quiet matter-of-fact voice he talked.
He began by saying that the devil had determined to break up this meeting. Things had moved too smoothly, too successfully. In all his experience he had not seen a smoother, easier revival meeting. The devil didn’t sit on the sideline idly and let the Lord have everything His way. Oh no! Devil too smart for that. So Satan had been putting his wits to work. What could he do that would take the people’s minds off of God? Yes, Satan schemed, and sweated as he schemed, to find a way. And he thought of a sure thing … Yet God had a hand in this too. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, the terrible, heartbreaking murder of our brother who had been a lost sinner until a few evenings before was a warning, a portent. There were others in this tent tonight whose days were numbered. Tomorrow, next day, the next … Who could tell? Who could read the writing on the wall? For someone the Grim Reaper would come.
“Are you going to be ready?” he shouted. “Are you?” He turned suddenly to those on the back bench. The back bench was almost empty. “Are those who are not here going to be ready? Where are they tonight? How about you, Brother?” He pointed his finger at Brother Pug Pusey. “Are you going to be ready?
“Are you, Sister?” Swiftly he was pointing here, there, eyes blazing, dark mop of hair tossing as he shook his arm at the crowd. “What are you waiting for? Tonight you are sitting here, well, healthy. You think, ‘He’s not talking to me, he’s not meaning me.’ And tomorrow you may be dead. Dead! A still cold lump your body will be down here on the earth. But your soul will be in Eternity, facing your God, facing Him with all your sins, your evil thoughts, your black desires. What will you have to say to Him? You can’t say, ‘Lord, Lord, I had no chance.’ You can’t cry in your terror, ‘If I had only known!’ For you have heard His Word.”
