The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  The prosecutor opened his hands wide.

  “Your Honor, these facts are neither in dispute, nor relevant.”

  “Will speak to motive, Your Honor.”

  A buzz in the court got rapped short.

  “Proceed.”

  “Miss Handsom.”

  There was no comity in Thurman’s voice.

  “Yes? Yes, sir.”

  “When did you first meet the defendant?”

  “At the train station. Summer before our junior year in high school.”

  “You became involved sexually?”

  I swallowed. “Yes.”

  “A fling? Or was this a sustained romance?”

  “Sustained, I suppose.”

  “You ‘suppose’? Wasn’t Joe Billy very close to you? Intimate with you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Did you love him? Miss Handsom, did you love Joe Billy?”

  “I’m…not sure what you mean by love.”

  A titter arose from the gallery and I knew I’d mis-stepped.

  “He was my first,” I came back firmly. “We were together a lot.”

  “Ever think of marriage?”

  “We never talked about it.”

  “Why not? Would it have interfered with your plans? College, for instance?”

  The judge leaned from his high place.

  “You are leading the witness, counsellor.”

  “Apologies, Your Honor.”

  Mr. Shaw paused before returning to me.

  “Did Joe Billy’s mother support your relationship with her son, Miss Handsom?”

  “I never met her ’til today,” I answered, glad to have firmer ground.

  “In a statement written for this court, Mrs. King insists that her son is incapable of killing anyone. Do you agree with that?”

  “Unless it was self defense,” I qualified. “I mean, no, Joe Billy wouldn’t just go out and kill somebody. But he was threatened. Monk threatened him with a razor.”

  “Objection.”

  “Sustained.”

  Thurman turned toward the jury casually, perfectly at ease.

  “Miss Handsom.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Did you kill Monk Folsom?”

  That’s how the question came, abrupt, unexpected, like a hook to the jaw when coming out of a clinch.

  The gallery gasped in collection.

  Joe Billy about came out of his chair.

  “Sir?” I stalled, which I had not intended to do.

  “It’s pretty simple, Miss Handsom. Did you shoot Monk Folsom on the night of your graduation, below the water tower in Town Park?”

  “OBJECTION!”

  “Overruled. Witness will answer the question.”

  I looked at Joe Billy. I wanted to believe he was begging me with his eyes to lie, imploring me to stay the crooked course we had set.

  “I’ve never killed anybody,” I declared with a conviction I did not feel. “Not Monk Folsom. Not anybody.”

  Thurman consulted his pad of paper.

  “Did you see Joe Billy King the night of your graduation party?”

  Keep it simple.

  “No,” I answered.

  “Isn’t it true that you did see Joe Billy? That in fact you sat on the back porch and drank iced tea with him?”

  “No, it is not.”

  “Your Honor!”

  This time the State was on its feet.

  “I’m challenging the witness’s alibi, Your Honor,” Thurman responded, without waiting for a framed objection. “I surely have the right to do that.”

  “Within reason,” Blackmond allowed, and Thurman set about doing whatever he could to discredit the story that I had rehearsed for months.

  I could tell that Joe Billy was stunned at his lawyer’s tactics. Clearly, Thurman had not cleared this defense with his client. You could see Thurman’s second chair anchoring JayBee to his hard seat as Thurman did his best to make me a likely perpetrator of Monk Folsom’s homicide. I expected most of his questions. I was prepared to keep it simple. To stick it out.

  How long was I at the graduation party?

  Had I danced?

  With whom?

  Did I pass the tower on the way home?

  Those questions were not hard to field. I mostly just told the truth—so far as I was able. But there was one question I did not anticipate and it almost stumped me:

  “Miss Handsom, in your statement to Sheriff Jackson you maintain that you got home fairly early. Very early for a young lady celebrating her graduation, I would say. A little after ten-thirty?”

  I told him that was correct.

  “Do you own a watch?”

  I felt a sudden need to do something with my hands.

  “No.”

  “Any clocks at your home? Timepieces of any sort?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then how can you know when you got home, Miss Handsom? Where did you get the time?”

  Where could I get the time? Where?!

  “Miss Handsom?”

  “The radio!” I blurted it out.

  “Radio?” Thurman looked as though he’d got hold of a sour peach.

  “Mr. Raymond and the men were listening to his radio,” I nodded happily, “and when I walked by I heard it was thirty minutes after the hour and I knew it wasn’t nearly eleven when I left Betty’s so I know I got home just a little after ten-thirty.”

  Thurman took a pencil to the yellow pages of his outsized pad. He hadn’t counted on Raymond’s radio, a source impossible to either validate or refute.

  Judge Blackmond leaned forward in that interval.

  “Are we ever going to get back to the birthday, counselor?”

  “Yes, your Honor. But I will need to cross examine Mrs. Fanny Meadows King for that purpose.”

  “No objection, Your Honor,” the prosecutor seemed content to let Thurman wander. “She’s next on the list.”

  “Fine.” Judge Blackmond turned to me. “Miss Handsom, you may step down.”

  The moment I had rehearsed and dreaded had come and gone with a banality I could never have imagined. I stepped off the witness stand relieved to have survived Thurman Shaw’s unexpected attack. I expected Joe Billy to be relieved, too, but when I looked over he would not look at me. No smile, no indication of closure or encouragement. Instead, as I passed, Joe Billy cradled his head in his hands, his gaze fixed, apparently, on the laces of his shoes.

  But I had done well, hadn’t I?

  I had done what he told me to do.

  Fanny King entered the courtroom as I groped toward the pew where waited my attorney and Miss Chandler. I brushed past Joe Billy’s mama on the way to my seat, she swaying down that long aisle, a heavy waft of ode de cologne following, hips rolling with invitation. Smiling broadly, like a singer at a nightclub to a gathered lounge of favorites, or some sidewalk harridan.

  Passed right by me as though we’d never met.

  “You did fine,” Miss Chandler whispered as Fanny raised her right hand. “Just fine.”

  The prosecutor treated Joe Billy’s mother with sympathy bordering on the obsequious, managing in that time to point out that her son was a dropout from his Tallahassee school, never steadily employed, and dependent for income on the sale of guitars which even Fanny allowed were “pretty kinky.”

  Having used the mother to discredit her son, the State stood aside for Thurman’s cross.

  “Are you close to your son, Mrs. King?”

  “Oh, yes, very close.”

  “How many times have you visited your son since his incarceration for this homicide?”

  “Well, I live in Tallahassee, it’s hard to get down.”

  “Hard to get down, I see. Then how many letters have you written your son? Or is the Post Office similarly impaired?”

  “Objection.”

  “Overruled. Witness will respond.”

  Thurman looked up from his legal pad. “How many letters, Miss King?”

  �
��You cain’t tell how much a mama love her children by no letters.”

  “You can’t?”

  “I love Joe Billy. He’s my child. My only child.”

  “Your only child?”

  “God only give me one.”

  “But that’s not true. Is it, Mrs. King?”

  The court stilled with Thurman’s calm contradiction.

  “Whatchu mean?” Fanny’s smile wavered. “I don’ know whatchu sayin’.”

  Then Thurman paused, and it was like a thunderstorm, how it goes calm. Right before it breaks.

  “Mrs. King, when was your son born?”

  “You know when. Seventh of November. 1945.”

  “Born according to your affidavit in Valdosta, Georgia, is that right?”

  She squirmed in her seat. “That’s what I tole’ the man in Tallahassee.”

  “Sworn to that effect, yes. But there is no birth certificate, is there, Mrs. King?”

  “Not ever’body born in a hospital. I’m a midwife. Was, anyhow. I should know.”

  “Yes, you should.”

  Thurman made no pretense, now, of consulting his yellow pad.

  “Mrs. King, where were you employed from, say, June of 1944 through October of the following year?”

  “I was at Dowling Park, ever’body know that.”

  “You were a midwife.”

  “I worked in the orphanage.”

  “And you also were a midwife, were you not? Delivered according to Park records some eleven children during your tenure there?”

  “Eleven sound about right.”

  “You delivered Priscilla Handsom, didn’t you? Her mother, Corrie Jean, had been in your care nearly six months.”

  “She was simple. She couldn’t have no baby by herself.”

  “Lucky to have you, then, wasn’t she? Eleven children brought into this world? Heavens to Betsy. And all healthy?”

  “Ever’ one.”

  “But you and your husband had at the time no children of your own, isn’t that correct, Miss King?”

  “I was pregnant with Joe Billy. Our first pregnancy. Not that we hadn’t tried. Oh, Lordie!”

  That got a chuckle from the gallery. Fanny primped and smiled. Hamming it up.

  “My husband wanted a boy,” she was pleased to amplify. “’Course we would have taken a girl. Anything, really. Anything healthy. We were just excited to finally be pregnant.”

  “Is it accurate to say that you would have hated to lose that child? That after trying so hard, for so long, having a husband desperate for a son, that there was a lot riding on this pregnancy? Would that be accurate, Mrs. King?”

  Joe Billy turned in his seat. Our eyes met through a lane plied between rows of skulls.

  “I’ll withdraw that question for the time being. Your Honor, I would draw the court’s attention at this time to Defense Exhibit 11b, previously introduced, a record of treatment for the witness signed by a Dr. Leon Purcell on October the 19th, 1945 at Dowling Park. Note especially the prescription of antibiotics. It had to do with a miscarriage, didn’t it, Mrs. King?”

  “Don’ know whatchu talking about.”

  A murmur rippled through the court like wind over a pond.

  “Mrs. King, is it not the case that less than two weeks before your last paying day at Dowling Park you lost your baby? That you lost, in fact, a little boy? Isn’t that true?”

  Fanny just smiled to the jury, as if the question had been addressed to someone else. As if she were not involved in this discussion at all.

  Judge Blackmond leaned over the stand.

  “Mrs. King?”

  “Why, yes, yo’ Honor.”

  “If you refuse to answer questions put to you by counsel I will find you in contempt and will put you in jail.”

  “Jail?!”

  Fanny seemed astounded at the prospect.

  “I’m glad to have your attention. Now allow me to rephrase counsel’s question. Did you miscarry at any time during the fall or winter of 1945? Did you lose your child?”

  “It watn’t my fault I lost him. I was holdin’ two jobs. Plus taking care of a retard!”

  “A retard, yes,” Thurman mused. “That must have galled.”

  Fanny extended a trembling hand toward Joe Billy, as if she could touch him from her hard chair.

  “I wasn’t looking for no baby. But when I got him I raised him. Raised him good as anything.”

  “But where did you get him, Mrs. King?”

  Thurman swatted the stand with his legal pad.

  “Who is Joe Billy’s mother? Where was he born? When ?”

  “I ain’t gonna say nuthin’ more. I don’ have to!”

  “Yes, you do, Mrs. King.”

  This from the judge.

  “You are under oath. You will answer truthfully before this court or find a cell with the County.”

  Thurman tucked his pad beneath his arm. “You have claimed a mother’s love, Mrs. King. Well, now show it. Joe Billy’s life may depend on it.”

  Fanny clutched her cheap purse, her lipstick wet and smearing. “It was Clifford’s idea, all of it. I weren’t lookin’ for no kind of baby in the first place. And then I liked to of died with ours, but Clifford, he kept after me, ‘The Lord takes away, Fanny. But He gives, too.’”

  The gathered court seemed to inhale in unison, heads turning to find me, back to Joe Billy. I felt sick to my stomach. Miss Chandler took my hand.

  “The Lord gives,” Thurman acknowledged gentle as a lamb. “Yes, he does. And sometimes, when we want something badly enough, we help Him along.”

  “Objection!”

  “Withdrawn.”

  Thurman returned to Fanny, but smiling, now, approaching her like a preacher eager to absolve every sin, remove every stain.

  “Joe Billy was not born in Valdosta, was he, Fanny?”

  “No.”

  “He was born in Dowling Park, wasn’t he?”

  She nodded dropping her eyes like stones to her lap.

  “And his birthday—it wasn’t in November, was it?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t it true that Joe Billy was born in October of 1945?”

  “Yes.”

  “When in October? We’re almost there, Fanny. Now, tell this court the day in October when the defendant was born.”

  Her eyes dragged up to find mine.

  “It was Halloween,” she admitted finally. “Last day of October, the thirty-first. Joe Billy came around six in the morning—right after his sister.”

  Chapter twenty-three

  “Trial Brings Shocking Revelation”

  — The Clarion

  I left the courtroom unable to feel the floor beneath my feet. Miss Chandler guided me past the salacious gaze of onlookers as my attorney answered the puerile inquiry of reporters. I was now the Hester of my community. Worse than Hester—incest registered with far more repugnance among my people than adultery. And thanks to Mr. Shaw, I was doubly lettered, people on both sides of the tracks now pondering whether a nigger sorry enough to sleep with her brother might also have killed Monk Folsom.

  “You were ambushed,” Professor Statler was furious. “I should have known there was something behind that subpoena. I should have seen it.”

  Miss Chandler was terribly upset, made no attempt to disguise that. Kept shaking that hound’s head, back and forth.

  “How could Thurman imagine you a killer? And what made him tie you to Joe Billy? What on earth?!”

  Professor Statler said not to worry on that count, that once things settled everyone would know that the only reason Mr. Shaw pointed his finger at me was to keep Joe Billy out of jail.