The Tragedy of Brady Sims

by Ernest J. Gaines

  “I was using you in the plural sense.”

  “I don’t care what sense you was using it in—just don’t go ’round telling people it was just me. I voted like they told me to vote. They all voted the same way. If people had told me jury was go’n be like this, I woulda stayed home.”

  “It’s your civic duty to serve on a jury, Mr. A. Paul.”

  “Y’all can have all the civic duty y’all want. Just let me stay home and sit in my own chair.”

  “It’s going to be all right, Mr. A. Paul,” I said, and patted him on the knee as Miss Greta had done.

  “I’m sitting up there, minding my own business, and trying to pay ’tention to what everybody saying—and here he come, shooting up the place.”

  He wiped his head again.

  “Lucky Miss Greta was there,” he said. “That white lady saved me.”

  “Saved you how?”

  “Soon’s he shot, she hit the floor. She jerked on my pants leg and told me to get down. I landed right on top of her.”

  “What? You got on top of that white lady?”

  “Watch your mouth, boy,” he said quickly, and meant it. “I didn’t say nothing ’bout getting on top of her. I landed on her. Landed on her. Now, you just watch your mouth, now.”

  “You said she got down first, she jerked on your pants leg and you got down on her. With all that floor, you couldn’t find any other place to fall?”

  “I done told you, boy, watch your mouth,” he said, and he was serious. His eyes showed he was deadly serious. “Now, watch your mouth, now.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” I said. I was grinning inside, but wouldn’t dare grin out. “But it must have felt good there for a second. Like falling on a pile of freshly gin cotton.”

  “Boy, I’m tired, I’m scared, I’m weak,” he said, shaking his fist at me. “Now, don’t force me to pop you one.”

  I grinned at him this time. “Okay, Mr. A. Paul, okay. I was just kidding.”

  “No time to be playing,” he said. “My heart ain’t that strong.”

  He relaxed his fist.

  Miss Greta came out of Mapes’s office and told Mr. A. Paul that he was next. He pushed up from his chair and walked slowly and stiffly and knocked timidly on the door. Mapes commanded him to come in. About ten minutes later he came out and nodded to me to go in. Mapes had just finished drinking a cup of water, and he crushed the paper cup and flipped it over into the wastepaper basket by the clothes rack. His cowboy hat hung on the rack.

  “And I suppose you have the same story—you didn’t see anything?”

  “I told you that in the courtroom, Sheriff.”

  “Yes you did,” Mapes said. “And I didn’t believe you then either. Sit down.”

  I sat in the chair across the desk from him.

  “How long had you been there?”

  “Maybe half an hour. I got there late.”

  “You were there half an hour, then what?”

  “They had just come in with the verdict. The foreman read it. Guilty. Judge Reynolds spoke to the prisoner couple of minutes. Then the sentence. The chair. The two deputies took the prisoner by the arms. Made a couple of steps. I heard the word ‘BOY.’ Just, ‘BOY.’ Then, BAM.”

  “After that?”

  “People were screaming, some getting down on the floor, others were running out of the place. Then another, BAM. I don’t want to ever hear that sound again.”

  “He shot at Claude?”

  “I think he shot down into the floor. There was dust and smoke everywhere. I suppose the dust came up from the floor.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “That’s what I saw, Sheriff.”

  Mapes sat back in his chair, looking over his desk at me.

  “Most of them said the same thing. You’re sure that all y’all didn’t get together to cook up this same story?”

  “I didn’t get together with anyone. The only person I talked to was Mr. Abe, and I called him on the phone from the drugstore.”

  “Anyone else out there?” Mapes asked, nodding toward the door.

  “I didn’t leave anybody else out there.”

  Mapes leaned forward and pounded his fist on the desk.

  “Damn! I hate this.”

  “Sir?”

  “Damn, I hate this,” he said. “He’s been in and out of this jail as long back as I can remember. My daddy put him in jail, my granddaddy put him in jail, and Guidry had to put him in jail. Now I have to do the same. But this time he’s going up for good. Only time he’ll come out of Angola again will be in a box. God damn him—why me? Why me?” He pounded his desk again. Then he looked at me as if he was seeing me sitting there for the first time. “What are you doing here?”

  “You told me to come to your office, Sheriff.”

  He continued to look at me as though he was trying to figure me out. We had never spent this much time with each other before. I knew he had watched me, but he never had a reason to question me about anything.

  “You’re that Guerin boy, ain’t you? Samuel and Rachel’s grandson? Went away for a while?”

  “California—after I finished the eighth grade. I couldn’t go to any more school down here and—”

  Mapes waved me off. “Yeah, yeah, I know all about that. What brought you back here?”

  “I majored in journalism. I wanted to get a job on a newspaper.”

  “And old good-hearted Ambrose Cunningham gave you that chance?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did you think of the shooting? Enough for a story?”

  “Mr. Abe is going to write about the shooting. He wants me to do a profile—a human interest story.”

  “I thought all of them were human interest,” Mapes said. “How’s yours going to be different?”

  Before I could answer him he had taken a glass and a half bottle of whisky out of the desk drawer. He first blew into the glass before pouring a couple of ounces of whisky into the glass. He downed the drink in one swallow and put the glass and the bottle back into the drawer. He took out a roll of Life Savers, flipped one of the little white round candies into his mouth, threw the rest of the roll back into the drawer, and looked at me.

  “Well?”

  “He wants to know why you’re giving Mr. Brady two hours.”

  Mapes looked at me. He moved that little piece of candy around in his mouth.

  “And when does he want this human interest story?”

  “On his desk tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Mapes was looking at me like he wanted to choke me. “Both you and Ambrose Cunningham are crazy as hell. Both of you ought to be locked up.”

  “I’m just a reporter, sir. On an assignment.”

  “I know damn well that Cunningham doesn’t know anything about Brady. Do you know anything about him?”

  “A little bit.”

  “A little bit? A little bit?” His hard gray eyes concentrated on me a moment, then he laughed, a short, humorless laugh. “Get out of here. Get out of my office.”

  “I’m only a cub reporter, sir, and I do the best—”

  “Take your cub reporter ass out of my office, and go find that crazy Cunningham and take him to Jackson with you. Get out of here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chapter Three

  I left the courthouse and drove back of town to Stella’s. I asked her for a ham and cheese sandwich. I was still wondering where to go to find that great human interest story. When Stella served me, I asked her. She told me I ought to go to church sometime. I told her that Cunningham wanted the story on his desk tonight, and Sunday would be too late.

  “Always in a hurry, huh?” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Well, I don’t know where to— Wait. You ever thought about Felix’s barbershop? Always a bunch of liars over there.”

  “I didn’t think about that, but that sounds like a good idea.”

  When I finished eating I left her a fifty-cent tip—being
generous today. Any other time I would have left only a quarter.

  Lucas Felix’s barbershop was a small square building. Maybe twenty feet by twenty. Lucas had the first chair as you came in, and Sam Hebert had the second. Both Lucas and Sam were in their seventies, and the chairs seemed just as old. The chairs were covered with dark green vinyl, but now all the worn places on the seats, the backs, and the armrests had been patched with black duct tape. The clients didn’t mind, because they all were as old as Lucas and Sam and the chairs. There were red, green, and black plastic chairs against the wall for the clients to sit in while waiting to be served. There were a television and a radio on a shelf in one corner of the room, and below the shelf was a drinking fountain. There were pictures everywhere, pictures of Sam and Lucas when they were young men and when they had all their hair. There were pictures of famous athletes like Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and Bill Russell. Then there were pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedy brothers Jack and Bobby. And one of Mahalia Jackson singing, and one of Malcolm X preaching, and one of Duke Ellington at the piano. There was also a poster on the wall with the price of haircuts, but the poster had been up there so long that the white paper had turned yellow, and the price of a haircut probably had not changed too much since then.

  Most of Lucas Felix’s clients were old men, hardly ever any women, and no one younger than I, and I’m twenty-eight. I come there mostly to listen to the old men talk, but I feel that it would be unfair to just sit there and listen and not get a haircut sometimes, so I let Lucas give me an edge ’round the neck every now and then. Other times I go to Jack Bouie a couple blocks farther down the street, who is about my age and gives more modern cuts. At Lucas’s barbershop, the old men in there called me youngster. There are always five or six of them in the place from the time Lucas opens at nine o’clock in the morning until he closes at nine at night. Sometimes they are there to get a haircut, but most times just to have a place to come and talk.

  I should mention another person who was always there, and that was Sweet Sidney, the shoeshine man. He’s in his seventies, maybe eighties. His name was Sidney Green, but everybody called him Sweet Sidney. People my age called him Mr. Sweet. Sweet Sidney was a reader of the Bayonne Journal. The Journal was only a weekly, but Sweet Sidney read it over and over daily. Whenever you came into the barbershop and he was not shining shoes, you would find him in the client’s chair reading the Journal. He read the supermarket ads, he read the obituary column, he read the ads on bass and trout fishing. Whenever the other old men couldn’t remember a piece of the story, they called on Sweet Sidney. Though he knew the answer, sometimes he would let them wait awhile before giving it. He knew that he was the intellectual of the barbershop, and they could not get their information faster anywhere else.

  There must have been a half dozen of them sitting in chairs against the wall. Sweet Sidney as usual was reading the Journal. Lucas Felix had a client in his chair, and Sam Hebert was just finishing up with one.

  “Well, youngster, I heard that Brady shot up the courthouse,” Sam Hebert said to me and grinned.

  Sam Hebert was a small, thin-faced man with big teeth. He always had a smile on his face. Always.

  “He didn’t shoot up the place,” I said.

  “Not what man on radio said. Man on radio he said he shot up the place.”

  Some of the other men looked at me. I was a news reporter, and maybe I knew things they did not know. Sweet Sidney went on reading his paper without looking up.

  “He shot twice,” I said. “He shot his son, and he shot down in the floor when one of the deputies threatened him.”

  “ ’Cording to man on radio, Mapes’s giving him couple hours to get his business straight.”

  “What business Brady got to get straight?” one of the men sitting against the wall asked.

  “Maybe he got to finish that grave?” Jack Shine said. Jack Shine was a tall, dark-skinned man in his late sixties. He made his living by hunting and fishing and selling his game to a store in Bayonne.

  “It was finished,” Joe Butler said. “I went back the next day.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” Jack Shine said.

  “Wait, hold it,” Lucas Felix said. “What’s this stuff about a grave?”

  “Coming back from hunting the other night,” Joe Butler said, “we passed by the graveyard. Saw a light. We stopped and looked. We had Clay with us. Scary as he could be. First thing he said: ‘Ghost.’ Jack said, ‘What a ghost doing with a lantern?’ Clay took off. Me and Jack got in the cane field to watch. We didn’t see Brady ’til he climbed out of the grave. We could hear him knocking the dirt off the shovel. He blew out the lantern. He passed right by us. Lantern in one hand, shovel ’cross his shoulder. Passed right by us. That was the day the trial started for that boy.”

  “He knowed all the time he was go’n kill him,” Frank Jamison said. “He wasn’t go’n let his son go to Angola—not as terrible as that place is.”

  Frank Jamison was a short, dark-skinned man, with a big head, broad shoulders, high butt, and short back. He had just gotten a haircut, and I could see the neat razor edge around the sideburns and on the back of his neck. He had been a salesman for an insurance company, but like all the rest of the men his age he lived on Social Security and a small pension. He sat back in Sam Hebert’s barber chair.

  “Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later,” Jamison said. “The man who whipped children to keep them out of Angola. Some of the old people would rather see their children dead than to go to Angola. ’Cause if they ever came out, they would be dead inside—just broken.”

  “Educate that youngster, Frank,” Lucas said.

  Frank Jamison looked at me. He had known me since I was a child. Still he was skeptical of anyone younger than he or better educated than he was.

  “Doing something for the paper?” he asked.

  “Cunningham wants me to do a human interest story on Mr. Brady.”

  “What does that entail?”

  I could tell that he didn’t know what a human interest story was all about, so he had to throw in a word like “entail” that the rest of the people may not have understood.

  “Something about his life: the way he lived, his friends, his church—something like that.”

  “Well, he didn’t have too many friends, and he didn’t go to church either in his later years. Don’t suppose Cunningham wants things like that?”

  “If y’all just talk about him, I figure I can find something to write about,” I said.

  Frank Jamison looked at me suspiciously.

  “You think this youngster is all right, Lucas?”

  “Sure,” Lucas said. “He comes from good stock.”

  “I know the stock. Been knowing the stock all my life. Him? You think he knows how to listen, and choose, and don’t write what he ain’t suppose to write?”

  “You got my word on it,” Lucas said.

  “Mine too,” Sam Hebert said. “You been to college, been everywhere. You still a Dodger fan, my man?”

  “ ’Til the day I die.”

  “Anybody a Dodger fan ’til the day he die is all right with me,” Sam Hebert said.

  “If y’all say so,” Jamison said, still looking at me.

  Chapter Four

  Nobody said anything for a while. I wanted to ask more questions, but I thought better of it and kept my mouth shut and just listened.

  Sweet Sidney turned a sheet of his paper and folded it into fourths; Lucas Felix sitting in his barber chair uncrossed his legs and crossed them again; the client with the new haircut scratched his chin and mumbled something to himself; Jean Lebouef took off his baseball cap and passed the palm of his hand over his bald spot and put the cap back on. Joe Celestin, possibly the oldest person in the barbershop, said, “Yes, yes, yes,” to no one but to himself; and nothing else was said until another man came in.

  “Gentamans, gentamans,” he said.

  “Wha’s
happening there, Tato?” Sam Hebert said.

  The rest of the men either mumbled something or made slight gestures with their hands.

  His name was Oscar Gray, but everybody called him Tato. He grew watermelons and sweet potatoes on his little farm just outside of Bayonne, and he sold them from the back of his pickup truck on weekends. Since I was a small child I could remember my grandmother sending me to buy sweet potatoes where he had parked by the American Legion hall.

  “I s’pose all y’all done heard the news?” Tato said.

  “People talking ’bout nothing else,” Lucas Felix said.

  Tato sat in one of the chairs against the wall. He took off his hat and placed it on his knee.

  “Down there at Stella, gittin’ me a hot sausage po’boy, when Mapes got the call. He was settin’ on a stool down from me, his big butt hanging off both sides of the stool, and he justa watching Stella every move she made.”

  “Love that brown meat, hanh?” Jean Lebouef said.

  “Crazy ’bout it.”

  “Why don’t he just go on and marry her—have her all for himself—hanh?”

  “He might be crazy, but he ain’t that crazy,” Jamison said. “How long you think he’ll stay sheriff?”

  “ ’Bout two minutes after them white folks hear ’bout it.”

  Couple of the old men made a laugh-grunting sound—something like, “hune, huen, ha, uh huh.”

  “Phone ringed,” Tato said. “Stella answered and brought it to Mapes. Old Mapes wouldn’t take it right away; he wanted her to hold it ’til he eyed her some more. She smiled at him like she do everybody else—you know that li’l slow, lazy, sexy smile—but old Mapes thinks she do it just for him. He took the phone and said in a quick tough voice, ‘YEAH?’ And just like that, not even a half a second, his face turned dark, dark red—almost purple. Looked like he had a stroke or a heart attack. One second he was the big lover boy, half a second later he looked like he was dying. Then he started hollering on the phone—‘What the…? How the…? Where the…? GODDAMMIT.’ He slammed the phone down on the counter and shot out of there. Big’s he is, I didn’t know he could move that fast.