The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter

by Kia Corthron

  “May I speak with you, sir?”

  Winston Douglas’s office may be large compared to his associates’ but there is no indication of executive luxury. His sofa a bit frayed, the file cabinets somewhat dented. Eliot sits forward on the couch to make his case.

  “Sir, when you hired me eight months ago, I felt honored. I knew that your firm had taken on job discrimination suits and housing discrimination suits, that you had defended Negroes in claims of police brutality and black men falsely accused of rape when colored service institutions shied away from such cases. I was thrilled to start a new life in Indianapolis, I felt privileged to have been invited to be a part of such a vigorous, vital organization, and I am eager to start contributing to your esteemed mission. Once I heard Charles Hamilton Houston speak. He said that the Negro students he taught at Howard Law School were to become more than lawyers, they were to become social engineers as his protégé Thurgood Marshall has already proven, and every civil rights case we accept is on that path. Right, sir?”

  Eliot had always found his boss to be fair and understanding. Winston Douglas, born in Indianapolis, a self-named “lifelong Hoosier,” a man who remembers well the heyday of “The Avenue” of J. C. Kane’s barmaid, Indiana Avenue, the historic Negro cultural hub. This respected attorney wanted his birthplace to be more than revived to its former glory but to be better, Eliot is certain Winston had not brought him here just so he could spend his career divvying up the spoils of wrecked marriages. Now the elder gazes at his recruit.

  “Eliot. This establishment could never survive on civil rights cases alone, most of which we do pro bono or nearly so. We are supported by the income of divorce cases, of accident claims. You are still our junior member, you are young and earnest and are learning quickly. When you’re ready, you certainly will be assigned race discrimination cases, there is unfortunately no shortage of that work. But for now, I’m giving the Foster case to Beau. I do have a new assignment I’d like you to look at. A woman almost had a knock-down drag-out with her sister at their mother’s funeral. Contesting the will.”

  Eliot is back in his office, slamming the pages of The Probate Law and Practice (of the State of Indiana). Usually he works till at least seven but today when the clock strikes five he’s out the door. It’s still later than everyone else who left early, three, for the holiday weekend, with the apparent exception of Beau Greene, as Eliot still hears the irritating grinding of his pencil sharpener through the wall. The usual six-minute wait for the ancient elevator is interminable.

  “Hold that for me!” when the bell finally sounds. Beau comes running.

  Riding the lift down, the older attorney asks, “My wife’ll kill me if I forget to pick up the cranberry sauce for tomorrow. You have big plans?”

  Eliot shakes his head, not turning to Beau. Then a momentary fear erupts, that Beau, in the spirit of the holiday, might actually ask Eliot over for dinner with his family. Eliot quickly mutters, “Wanna catch up on some work.”

  “So Winston’s giving you all the crap cases.”

  Eliot’s face flushes warm, keeping his hard eyes trained on the elevator door. It had not occurred to him that his colleagues may have perceived his impatient ambition, and he remembers now the thin walls, wonders how much of his pathetic appeal to Winston was not the closed-door conference he’d assumed. Beau laughs loud and hearty.

  “You can’t become the Negro Clarence Darrow overnight. Patience, boy. Patience!”

  3

  Like a piñata. It is suspended, the vague semblance of a man, a Giacometti. The elbows lifted, fists tight like Popeye flexing his biceps, but only a nub where the right hand was. Both feet gone, nothing below the right knee. The entire body burnt black, hanged. A loincloth, mockery, as if anything beneath it would appear remotely human. And the white men staring into the camera, sneering, smug, a good twenty in the photograph and presumably many more beyond its frame, their little boys with them. Pride, as if a white multitude kidnapping, torturing, and murdering one Negro were some astounding feat of courage. Scrawled on the flip side of the postcard:

  The Giacometti man is a boy. Seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington. He was mentally retarded and a laborer on the farm of Lucy Fryer, a white woman who was murdered in May 1916. Washington confessed to the crime, though the validity of such an admission by a Negro youth with the mind of a child to a bloodthirsty white horde intent on finding him culpable would be dubious at best. The Waco, Texas, jury deliberated four minutes, and despite the guilty verdict that would have meant the harshest state punishment, the mob assumed authority. The boy was beaten, castrated, his ears amputated. Then set on fire. Wailing, he tried to escape and had his fingers slashed off. To prolong the torment he was repeatedly lowered and raised into the fire, out of the fire, into the fire, his agonizing death displayed on the public square for the entertainment of fifteen thousand white men, women, and children.

  Douglas Winston and Associates is defending Otis Hill, a farmer from Harnsgrove, Indiana, who shot a man to death. Mr. Hill claims it was self-defense. Seymour Tillman is Mr. Hill’s white neighbor, another farmer. According to Mr. Hill, Tillman envied the Negro’s successful crop and became infuriated by Hill’s refusal to sell his land to him. Tillman had allegedly threatened Hill’s family, and when Tillman came with three other armed white men to “talk” one midnight, bullets were exchanged. Mr. Hill’s family was miraculously unharmed but Tillman was wounded and his acquaintance Augustus Peabody lay dead. Mr. Hill, in jail, claims he feared he and his family would have been lynched if they hadn’t defended themselves. Winston Douglas is taking on the case himself, and has asked Eliot to spend the morning at the public library, collecting photos and taking notes on lynchings as a way to bring this reality home to the jury.

  Another picture, dated 1911, is of a newly built bridge over the Canadian River in Oklahoma. About fifty white people span its length, mostly men but also women and children, all facing the photographer who is apparently on a boat in the water. Hanging from the bridge, spaced perhaps twenty feet apart, are two Negro bodies: fourteen-year-old L. W. Nelson, who had been accused (and obviously convicted without trial) of shooting and killing a deputy whose posse came to search their cabin for stolen meat, and his petite mother Laura. The boy’s pants have been ripped off, dangling from his ankles. His mother in her long print dress seems intact. The lynchers deliberately chose a Negro settlement as the execution site: an example. Eliot stares at the small woman, remembering that Memorial Day when he and Dwight were children and Uncle Sam came to them in the night to speak about the lynching of his mother Tiny back in Humble. “Lookin like she asleep, so peaceful,” Uncle Sam had said.

  Eliot reads about another fourteen-year-old boy whose hands were slowly burned off in a stove, the whites demanding that he accuse his father of derailing a train. In agony the overwhelmed child finally gave in, telling his torturers what they wanted to hear whether or not it was true, at which point the white men promptly riddled the boy’s father with bullets.

  In 1918, Mary Turner, eight months’ pregnant, spoke openly in her town of Valdosta, Georgia, about her determination to have justice served regarding the lynching of her husband. For such an insolent challenge to white authority, she was abducted by a mob who tied her ankles together and hung her upside down from a tree. They poured gasoline on her clothes to burn them from her body and, while she was still alive, cut her child from her abdomen. The baby fell to the ground and gave a cry before being crushed by the heel of one of the crowd, immediately inciting the bunch to fire, hundreds of bullets honeycombing the body of the suspended woman.

  The North and West, albeit with less frequency than the South, are also well represented in the pictures. The 1920 hangings of nineteen-year-old Elias Clayton, nineteen-year-old Elmer Jackson, and twenty-year-old Isaac McGhie, three Negro circus workers in Duluth, Minnesota, accused of raping a nineteen-year-old white girl. The morning of the allegatio
ns, the young woman was examined by a local white physician who found no evidence of assault or rape. Nevertheless that evening the city jail, where the Negroes were being held, was surrounded by a frenzied mob of thousands.

  And here in Indiana, the infamous photo of eighteen-year-old Thomas Shipp and nineteen-year-old Abram Smith, both hanged for the shooting death of a white man in 1930. Unique to this lynching is the fact that evidence implies the young men actually may have been guilty of some of their charges (robbing and killing a white man during an attempted robbery but not raping his girlfriend). The picture became notorious because of the smiles and smirks at the camera, the festive picnic atmosphere of the onlookers numbering in the thousands. (Many who have viewed the image are surprised to know of the locale, having assumed a Dixie setting.) The two young men had been so brutalized, with everyone in the mob trying to get in a blow, that at least one was quite dead before ever seeing the rope. A third victim, sixteen-year-old James Cameron—guilty only of association as he was traveling with the older boys but who, frightened, ran away before any crime occurred—was also viciously beaten and had a noose placed around his neck when, astonishingly, a single woman’s cry for mercy silenced the horde, allowing for the boy’s deliverance from death. (No one but Cameron seems to remember the voice; only that, inexplicably, at the last possible moment the rabble had a change of heart.) The boy had recognized many of his would-be killers, including his white schoolmates.

  The 1899 lynching of Sam Hose in Newnan, Georgia, was promoted so widely as to bring in two thousand spectators, some by chartered train. Hose had asked his planter employer Alfred Cranford for a pay advance, which some claimed were actually wages Cranford already owed Hose and had not remitted. The white man refused, and the next day Cranford, peeved that Hose would have the audacity to even ask for such a thing, drew his pistol as Hose was chopping wood. In self-defense, Hose struck Cranford with his ax, killing him. This was Sam Hose’s story, and was confirmed by Cranford’s widow. But apparently no one cared to ask her until after the fact, the press having promulgated an altogether different narrative, including Hose’s rape of Mrs. Cranford while her dying husband looked on. Hose’s ears, fingers, and genitals were severed, his face skinned. He was still alive crying to God as the flames gradually consumed him, the crowd delighted by the slow process of his body’s disfigurement, his eyes bulging out of their sockets. Pieces of his corpse were sold at exorbitant rates as souvenirs.

  After two hours, Eliot has had enough. He checks out his items, putting them into his briefcase and shutting it, relieved to no longer look at the pictures and yet being acutely aware of their weight in his attaché. Outside in the crisp air there are lights and wreaths, the distant sound of carol recordings. He crosses the street and into a patch of frozen grass crunching beneath his soles, then along the east sidewalk of the American Legion Mall, on his way back to the office.

  Because the pictures are all decades old, he isn’t sure how useful they will be to the case, whether or not the jurors would regard them as relevant. Lynchings are certainly not all a thing of the distant past, but thank God are exponentially less commonplace than at the top of the century when incidents were reported literally every other day. (And who knows how many went unreported?) They also are no longer so universally celebrated in white America, and thus photos of more recent episodes are scarce, other than after-the-fact journalists’ shots meant to document the horrors of the phenomenon. Horror was clearly not the intention of the photographers behind the specimens he had viewed this morning, but rather a sinister comradeship with the smiling, sadistic bunch.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  He looks up. Andi the receptionist on a bench with her packed lunch facing the Scottish Rite Cathedral across the mall. It’s in the forties, too chilly to be eating outside, but it doesn’t occur to him to question her about it. He sits, allowing a good two feet of space between them.

  “I was doing lynching research. For the Hill case.”

  “Hm.” Whatever vague hint of a civil smile that might have been on her face now vanishes. They are silent for several moments, gazing absently at the holiday shoppers toting their packages.

  “It happened to someone I knew,” she murmurs. “His father.” The grassy area of the mall dips several feet from its sidewalk borders, like a casserole dish. A pigeon alights just below them on the slushy green, and Andi hurls a breadcrumb from her sandwich yards beyond it, causing a flock to descend. “I grew up in Des Moines, but this was a couple hours away, out in the boondocks. My cousins. He was a neighbor kid, I’d see him every summer when my siblings and I visited. I kind of remember some altercation with a white man: hunting dispute, or border dispute—whose land ended where. So one night they came. Beat him, tied him to a railroad track, burned him to cinders. I was eleven. My parents debated letting us go the summer after, but I begged till they gave in, and I guess it would have looked funny to my aunt if all of us just stopped coming. Everything seemed normal except. That kid. Quieter than he used to be, and everybody quieter around him. Still, he played with us, he played hard. And white kids played with us, and one day some white boys we regularly played with came over, I could tell by their faces something was up, and they put a little black square in that boy’s hand and said, ‘That’s a piece a your dad.’ And that boy. Stared at it, like his eyes went blank. And then he was on his knees, he fell to his knees, his eyes still blank, and those white boys laughed and walked away. All of us fell silent, and then all the sudden he snapped out of it. Like he had passed out just halfway, to his knees. He looked up at us, and then he looked up at the sun, and he said, ‘Who turned the lights out?’ And then he looked at us again and at the sun again and then he got up and walked home. He never came out to play after that, and a week later his family moved. Omaha, we heard.” A group of carolers who’d gathered near the North and Meridian corner, half a football field away, all white except one colored woman, begin “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” “Maybe it was a piece of his father and maybe it wasn’t. It looked like it could have just been a chip of tree bark to me.”

  Eliot wants to kill the carolers. He wants to take a shotgun and bang! Reload, bang! He likes the snap of the barrel, the smooth feel of the stock. No, wait. With a machine gun he could quickly wipe out the entire choir before he is inevitably shot down himself. He would try to miss the Negro woman. On the other hand, what the hell is she doing with all those white people anyway?

  Andi takes off her gloves, as if her hands had suddenly become hot. “Well, that was back in. I guess, ’29 or so.”

  Eliot frowns. The math doesn’t seem to add up. Andi laughs.

  “I’m older than I look.”

  He is taken aback and trying not to show it. That would make her nearer his mother’s age than his own. Has he been treating her with proper elder respect?

  “Well! The good ole days. Now I worry a hell of a lot more about legal lynchings. Remember all the sensation about Willie McGee? Well, no. You were just a kid then.”

  “I know about Willie McGee.” Does she think he lives under a rock?

  “Okay then. Have you heard of Sherman Street?” He reluctantly shakes his head. “No one has. Negro prisoner in the same jail as McGee, labor organizer, and all so conveniently he’s suddenly charged with raping a thirteen-year-old white girl. Rushed to the chair in about three seconds flat.” She is quiet a moment, then laughs harshly. “Nineteen fifty-nine and they can’t even enact the anti-lynching bill! Refuse to offer us even the pretense of humanity.” She hurls several crumbs quite far, causing an excited rush of birds wondering which way to turn.

  Eliot glares at his target, the unsuspecting chorus which has now attracted a small audience. No, not this arbitrary slaughter: he must be accurate. He would bring his shooting spree to Newnan, Georgia. And since it would essentially be suicide, he would pin a note to his shirt: “Remember Sam Hose.” Some of his victims would
remember, and some of his victims would be descendents of Sam Hose’s murderers, and if he’s lucky some of his elderly victims would be Sam Hose’s murderers which, as far as he’s concerned, would be anyone who witnessed Sam Hose’s murder: Black’s Law Dictionary be damned.

  Andi turns to Eliot with a half-smile. “Thanks for ruining my appetite. Would you like the other half? Chicken salad.”

  “Those pictures.” The steam from Eliot’s mouth puffing larger. “I wanted to kill em. I wanted to be there, I wanted to riddle their bodies with bullets, I wanted to give them a slow torturous death.” He feels childish, a temper tantrum, and doesn’t care. He imagines her contempt, waits for her to laugh at his infantile fantasies. He shrugs as if she already has. Her prerogative.

  But she surprises him. “When they build that time machine, let me know. I’ll be riding with you.”

  The choir seems to have put some rehearsal effort into “We Three Kings,” with solos assigned for certain verses. All the wise men are white, which, according to the tradition handed down in American Christendom, is technically miscasting. Still, the Balthazar tenor is pretty good.

  Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume

  Breathes a life of gathering gloom.

  Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,

  Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.

  4

  Barely 10 a.m. and already the young mother is in the kitchen fussing over dinner. The two little girls in their pajamas sit and chatter at the table, holding dolls and eating Christmas cookies. A man walks in to say something to his wife and one of the little girls impulsively jumps up to hug her daddy. Her sister, not to be left out, runs to the man and he stoops down for a three-way embrace.

  Eliot stands on his family’s back porch in his trench coat, hands in pockets, leaning against a pillar, gazing right into his parents’ new neighbors’ home. Everything is altered—there is no more Miss Onnie—yet he racks his brain for something very specific that’s amiss. She had lived to a ripe old ninety-one. When she passed on three years ago, his mother had called to tell him. She had not seen her neighbor for a few days, and with trepidation went to knock on Miss Onnie’s door, careful not to step on the thousand cats roaming the yard and porch. As Claris raised her knuckles to rap on the screen, an odor from inside overwhelmed and horrified her. The police arrived, finding the corpse mostly whole, though a bit of her face and hands had been eaten away by felines ravenous since their mistress’s demise. At the time Eliot was a law student on a meager budget and couldn’t get away from his classes for the funeral, but had asked his mother to send a very large arrangement of roses, promising to pay her back with his first paycheck after finishing school, which, over her objections, he did. She and his father had gone to the service which she had described as intimate but sincere. And suddenly Eliot realizes what’s missing. The aroma forever linked with the memory of his childhood friend: cat smell.