Maxwell Lewis put on an uncomfortable smile. “All right, they showed you the warrant,” he said. “And then what happened next?”
Suddenly I knew where Moody was going with this, why she was lying. What she was hoping to demonstrate with her lie.
Damn! It was brilliant! Why hadn’t I thought of it?
But of course, if I had thought of it – if I’d even asked her to do such a thing – I could have been disbarred.
As it was, she was on her own.
“Well, sir,” she said to Lewis, “I was looking over the warrant, you know, and I said, ‘I still don’t think y’all have the right to do this. But if that’s what the paper says, I reckon we’ve got no choice but to let you come on in.’”
“You said that?” Lewis turned to the jury, hoping they would share his skepticism.
None of them even noticed. Their eyes were on Moody. She had them under her spell, and they were finally listening.
“Yes, sir, I did, and I no sooner got the words out of my mouth than a bunch of ’em rode up on their horses and started shootin’ and yellin’ and everything. Just like Papaw said.”
“If we can,” Lewis said, “let’s return to the issue of the search warrant.”
“Yes, sir,” said Moody, as proper and polite as I had ever heard her.
“Now, who showed it to you?”
“Mr. North was the one holding the paper,” she said. “And Mr. Stephens was with him.”
“You are absolutely certain they presented that warrant to you?”
“Well, yes, sir, I mean – that’s what happened. Just like y’all said. Don’t you believe me?”
She looked the very picture of confounded innocence.
Maxwell Lewis turned to my father and shrugged.
My father spoke from the bench in a dangerous growl: “Moody Cross. You have sworn to tell the truth in this court. Do you understand that?”
“Oh, I certainly do, Your Honor, that’s just what I’m doing,” she said. “For the life of me, I can’t figure out why me telling the truth has got y’all so confused. It’s almost like you’re angry at me.”
She even had the nerve to smile. I thought, Don’t get carried away now, don’t go too far. You’ve got them right where you want them.
Before she took the stand, Moody and her grandfather had been uncooperative liars, uppity Negroes, troublemakers. Agitators defying a legal search warrant. Now they were innocent citizens who had agreed to a search of their premises and then, without warning, were unfairly and savagely attacked. For no reason at all.
Chapter 115
THE MOMENT MOODY stepped off the witness stand, my father declared a recess until Monday.
I followed Moody, L.J., and Jonah down the steps of the courthouse into a barrage of questions accompanied by that acrid gunpowdery smell of flash powder exploding. Moody moved through that crowd of newsmen like a ship slicing through a wave, holding her head up, walking straight ahead.
We brushed off the last pesky reporters and walked three blocks to the Stringer house. We waited until we had Moody in the War Room before anyone spoke.
“What did you think you were doing?” I asked. “You got up under oath and told the biggest, fattest lie in the history of Mississippi. And all the time grinning like a fool!”
She was grinning like that now. “I tried to keep the smile off my face,” she said.
“Why didn’t you tell us you were going to do that?”
“’Cause if I had, you’d have told me not to do it. This way I could scare the devil out of that Loophole Lewis, and your daddy the judge, and Phineas Eversman, and everybody else who was in on the lie.”
“But you lied in order to counter their lie,” I shouted. “That’s perjury!”
“So what?” she said. “You fight fire with fire. Lewis can’t contradict me. If he does, he’ll have to admit they made up that warrant out of thin air, a long time after the raid.”
“Oh, I understand what you were doing, all right,” I said. “I just want to know what gives you the right to–”
“Ben,” said L.J. “I don’t see how this hurts us. I think it can only help.”
I sank onto a chair. “I think so too, as bad as that is. What do you think, Jonah?”
Jonah was looking out the narrow second-floor window.
“It must be six-thirty. The usual mob is beginning to form,” he said.
Then he turned from the window and faced the three of us.
“So, what do you think?” I repeated.
“I think what Moody did was… interesting. I must say, I did enjoy watching Loophole Lewis and Judge Corbett squirming like worms on a hook…”
I smiled. We had all enjoyed that sight.
“… but it won’t make any difference,” Jonah finished. “I’m afraid it won’t.”
“Yes, it will,” Moody protested. “It’ll cast doubt in their minds. It’ll make it seem like we tried to cooperate, and they attacked us anyway.”
Jonah shook his head. “Oh, Moody. Those jurors have lived here their whole lives. They don’t care who’s telling the truth and who’s lying! The phony warrant? Some of the jurors were probably down at the town hall when Eversman was writing it up.”
There was silence then. A long minute of it.
The chanting outside began again.
Free the Raiders!
Let ’em go!
Moody stood and smoothed her blue skirt. She adjusted her straw hat and slipped on her white gloves.
“I got to go. Papaw is in bad shape. Coming to the court, he didn’t hardly know who he was,” she said.
Without thinking about it I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Tell Abraham I’m coming out tomorrow to see about him.”
Jonah said, “Thank you for trying to help, Moody. From the bottom of my heart.”
Chapter 116
IT WAS TIME TO TRY OUT the plan I had concocted. Maybe it was even past time, too late. Moody and L.J. had come with me. Jonah wanted to but knew he couldn’t. After all, he was representing the great state of Mississippi, and we were about to break the law in too many ways to count.
“Stinks bad in here,” Moody said.
The awful smell was everywhere, a sharp, nauseating odor, like a cross between bad patent medicine and rancid moonshine. It was the foul scent of the chemicals Scooter Willems used to develop his photographs.
I had just climbed through an unlocked window, with Moody and L.J. behind me, into Scooter’s old cabin off the East Point Road. Now we were in his studio, one large room with black curtains dividing it into three. The front part was a portrait studio, with a backdrop and a stool for the subject to pose on. In the middle section two large wooden tables held trays of foul-smelling chemicals. But it was in the last section that we found what we’d come for: boxes and boxes of Willems’s photographs, with dozens more pinned to the walls.
There was one box full of nothing but photographs of lynchings. Scooter Willems had been busy these past months. Beside that box sat a stack of postcards manufactured from the photos, souvenir pictures of hanged corpses, burned bodies, twisted victims, like the one I’d received in the mail.
“God Almighty,” Moody said. “The man has taken pictures of everybody who ever got hanged.”
“Look here,” said L.J., working his way along the wall. “These are all from the Bobby Burnett lynching.”
I held up the lantern to see.
“First, take a look at poor old Bobby hanging there,” L.J. said. “Now look who’s standing next to him. There. By his feet.”
There they were, plain as day in the flickering lamplight: Chester Madden and Lincoln Alexander Stephens, two of the three White Raiders on trial. They grinned up at the bloated, bloody, bursting head of Bobby Burnett.
One by one I pulled the photographs down from the wall, gathering them in a manila folder I found on Scooter’s desk.
“Look at this!” Moody exclaimed, holding a photo up to the light.
I came up beside h
er. There was her brother Hiram, dead on the ground, with a rope around his neck. His grinning killers each had a foot on his body, as if he were a prize lion they’d slain on safari.
L.J. pointed to the man on the end. “I’ll be damned if that ain’t Lester Johnson.”
I almost stopped breathing. “And now he sits on our jury.”
Then I recognized the man beside him. It was Jacob, Jacob Gill, with his foot resting on Moody’s dead brother. I felt my eyes filling.
Scooter Willems was nothing if not thorough. Everyone who’d ever had a hand in a lynching in this part of Mississippi had been assiduously recorded, their faces plainly recognizable. Some of the lynchings were of victims I’d heard about, others were news to us.
The horror increased with just about every picture. Before we were through, we’d seen the faces of many prominent Eudora citizens enjoying a night out, a night of murder and mayhem.
What a record of guilt! What amazing evidence! I couldn’t take the pictures down fast enough.
“Just put ’em all in the box,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”
“No, y’all can stay,” I heard.
Chapter 117
THE BLACK CURTAIN was yanked aside, and the studio flooded with light. At first I couldn’t make out who they were, but there were five of them. Their torches were much brighter than our lantern, and they dazzled us.
“I don’t recall inviting any of you folks here,” a voice said. That high nasal whine had to be Scooter Willems’s.
As he moved his torch I saw them all.
Two men with guns whom I didn’t recognize.
Phineas Eversman, chief of police.
And Senator Richard Nottingham, Elizabeth’s husband.
“Go ahead and finish packing up,” said Nottingham, waving his pistol. “Saves us having to do it.”
Another man stepped into the cabin. “Yeah, y’all get to work, would you?” I knew that voice. And that face. It was Jacob Gill.
“’Preciate you gathering ’em up for us, Ben,” he said. “We were just gonna have ourselves a little evidence – burnin’ party.”
“We knew we’d find you here,” Phineas said with a smirk on his face.
L.J. growled, “How did you know? Who the hell told you we were comin’ here?”
There was a silence, then the others looked at Richard Nottingham. Finally he said, “My wife.”
The words stabbed me in the heart. I felt my throat closing and thought I might be sick.
“Elizabeth was spying for me. She told us every word you ever said, Corbett. She’s a good girl. Thanks for keeping us up to date. It was damn useful to Maxwell Lewis.”
Phineas took the box of photographs from Moody. One of the pictures caught his eye. “We don’t need this one,” he said.
He handed it over to me. “In case you want a souvenir.”
It was a picture of me – half naked, hanging from a lynching tree.
Scooter did a fine job with the picture. The detail was crisp; you could see every leaf on the tree. The dog licking my bloody foot, the flies swarming over my face.
“You always took a nice picture, Ben,” said Jacob Gill.
Chapter 118
“ALL RIGHT NOW, Ben, we tried your plan, and you might say it didn’t work out so well. So now we’re going to try my plan.”
Jonah was not in the mood to butter me up.
“You know those photographs would have worked,” I said bitterly. “All right, all right, tell me your plan.”
“Well, it’s not quite as audacious as yours. Matter of fact, it’s very logical, very well thought out.”
“Damn it, just tell us,” L.J. said.
“Tomorrow,” Jonah said, “I want Ben to give the summation to the jury.”
L.J. didn’t hesitate a beat before answering, “That is a fine idea.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “I was there on the night of the murders. I’m a witness but you’ve chosen not to put me on the stand. You’re the one who’s been telling them the story of these crimes all along. Why change now?”
“You know why,” said L.J.
“Because I’m white?” I said. “That’s no reason!”
“It never hurts,” Jonah said with a faint smile. “Look, you come from here,” he explained. “You know these people. The judge is your father. These jurors will trust you more than they will me. And not because you’re white – because you were there. You can give a summation that comes from your heart. For God’s sake, you’ve been lynched yourself. You have to tell them a story, Ben. They need to hear it from you.”
I dreaded the truth in what he was saying. The next thing he said cinched it for me:
“I tried the case. I fought the case. I pled the case. But all along, even before I got here, it was always your case, Ben.”
Chapter 119
IT LOOKED AS IF half of America had come to tiny Eudora for the conclusion of the White Raiders Trial.
Outside the courthouse that morning, hundreds and hundreds of spectators jammed the town square. Little boys had climbed trees for a better view of the action. Photographers muscled their tripods through the crowds, jostling for the best angles. A few of the more enterprising had bought out Russell Hardware’s entire stock of ladders to get an over-the-heads-of-the-crowd view.
Judge Everett Corbett had petitioned Governor Vardaman for state militiamen from Jackson to keep order. The soldiers had set up temporary wooden fences along the sidewalk in front of the courthouse to control the spectators who’d been flooding into Eudora by train, carriage, horseback, and on foot.
Inside the courtroom there was no question who was in control: Judge Everett Corbett.
During the course of the trial, he had expelled four colored women from the gallery for reacting too loudly. He had found three reporters in contempt of court for referring in unflattering terms to his dictatorial ways. And he had sent an old colored man to jail for shouting, “The Lord hates a liar!” during one defendant’s testimony.
The first thing my father did on the trial’s last morning reaffirmed his imperial status.
“Now we are ready to deliver this case to the jury,” he said. “The testimony has been passionate on both sides. Tempers have run high. Outside interest has been remarkable by any standard. And thus, gentlemen of the jury, we have come to the crux of the matter. You have to let the facts speak for themselves. You will now hear from the prosecutor, Mr. Curtis, his last and best argument about how you’ll decide. Then you’ll hear the same from Mr. Lewis. And finally, it will be entirely up to you, the jury, to make your decision, as the framers of the Constitution intended. Mr. Curtis?”
Jonah rose with an impassive face. “Your Honor, the jury has heard quite a lot from me in this trial. More than enough, I think. So I’m going to let my colleague Mr. Benjamin Corbett deliver the summation for the state.”
Chapter 120
I GOT TO MY FEET, a little wobbly in the legs. The dumb-founded faces of my father, Loophole Lewis, and his three murdering clients gave me at least some pleasure.
It took my father only a moment to make the calculation: I had the right to speak, and there was nothing he could do about it. He smiled, crossed his arms, and sat back in his chair.
“I wondered if we were ever going to hear from Counselor Corbett,” he said. “Of course, as his father, I have heard a great deal from him over the years, and I look forward to sharing that pleasure with the rest of you.”
Appreciative laughter rolled through the room. I had no choice but to smile and try for a little joke of my own. “And, of course, as the proud son of my father, I can only say I have done at least as much listening over the years as talking,” I said. “I have learned a great deal that way.”
“Please proceed, Mr. Corbett,” my father said, “and let us decide for ourselves if that is true.”
The audience laughed again. My old dad had definitely won the first round.
I wondered what he saw, peering do
wn at me from his bench. Did he see a Harvard Law graduate, a well-known Washington defense lawyer? Did he see a man of passion, righteousness, ambition?
No. He saw a boy crying when he fell off his rocking horse, a child furiously resisting a spoonful of the hated mashed carrots. He didn’t see me. He saw a powerless boy.
So I was determined that when I finished speaking, he would see a man; he might even see the real Ben Corbett.
“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said. “I will try not to disappoint you.”
Chapter 121
BENJAMIN E. CORBETT’S SUMMATION to the jury:
“Judge Corbett just told you that you have to let the facts speak for themselves. The only problem with that is, facts do not have voices of their own; they can’t actually speak. So I’m the one who is standing here to give voice to the facts. That is my job today, and I appreciate your willingness to give me an ear.
“It’s the middle of the night in the Eudora Quarters. Three men ride up to execute a search warrant. It’s two o’clock in the morning – hardly the most traditional time to conduct a search of private premises – but that is what these men have decided to do.
“Ah, but wait. There’s a girl in the house, granddaughter of the old dying man. She reads the warrant and accepts it. She doesn’t like it, she says, but it’s the word of the law, so she will not resist. Come on in, she says. Search our house. Torment us. Question us. Rifle through our belongings. We have committed no crime, there is no actual legal reason for you to want to search here. But she allows it. She opens the door. She lets them in.
“And yet even her total submission, her complete and immediate cooperation, are not enough for these men. The search warrant was simply a ruse to get in the door. They have not come here to do anything legal.
“They are here to torture and torment, and to kill, because they think it’s their right to kill anyone who gets in their way. To skirt around the law and execute anyone they decide is guilty. To evade juries like the one you gentlemen are sitting on today. They are there to kill the idea of fair trial, a jury of a man’s peers. They have come to get their way by using the gun, the knife, the rope. And the terrible rule of the mob.”
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