by Jon Meacham
Shortly after three o’clock, the jury went out to consider their verdict and the Judge left the bench. He had directed that the defendants need not be taken out, and might sit in court and visit with their families and friends. So now the court turned into a not enjoyable party, at which one was able to observe more closely certain personalities of the trial. There was Mrs. Brown, the widow of the murdered taxi-driver, a spare, spectacled woman of the same austere type as the Hurds. She was dressed in heavy but smart mourning, with a veiled hat tipped sharply on one side, and she was chewing gum. So, too, was the professional bondsman who was the animating spirit of the committee that had raised funds for the defense of the defendants, a vast, blond, baldish man with the face of a brooding giant baby; but he was not genteel, as she was—he opened his mouth so wide at every chew that his gum became a matter of public interest. It had been noticeable during the trial that whenever the Judge showed hostility to the introduction of race hatred into the proceedings, this man’s chewing became particularly wide and vulpine. A judge from another local court, and various other Greenville citizens, drifted up to the press table and engaged the strangers in defensive conversation. The Southern inferiority complex took charge. They supposed that an English visitor would be shocked by the lynching, but it was impossible for anybody to understand who had always lived in a peaceable community where there was no race problem. Would I please remember that when colored people were killed in race riots in the North nobody said anything about it, and that it was only when these things happened in the South that people made a fuss about them, because all Northern congressmen were voted for by black men? They added that anyway they were sure that my Northern friends had told me very unkind things about the South. I said what I had been saying constantly since my arrival: that lately Europe had not been really what one could call a peaceable community, and that my standards of violence were quite high and that the lynching party did not seem very important to me as an outbreak of violence but that it was important as an indication of misery; that we English had a very complex and massive race problem in South Africa, where one of the indubitably great men of the British Empire, General Smuts, professed views on the color bar which would strike Greenville as fairly reactionary; and that my Northern friends, on hearing that I was going to the lynching party, had remarked that while Southern lawlessness has a pardonable origin in a tragic past, Northern lawlessness has none and is therefore far more disgraceful. What I said brought no response. We might have been sitting each in a glass case built by history. I laid hold of arguments that had once been clothed in flesh, that still to me were of the heart as well as of the brain; I said that my father had settled in the South, that his first wife had been a Southern lady, that he spoke of her dead goodness and grace as partly her own and partly her local heritage, and that he had brought me up to think of the South as a paradise and of the reconstruction period as hell. Still nothing registered. Here was a curtain cut of the same stuff as hangs between England and Ireland.
I was glad when the common attention was distracted by Mr. Hurd. Everybody was now circulating freely in the court. Fat Joy seemed to be everywhere. Two of the attorneys and a friend had sat in the jury box for some time, but they had gone and two of the defendants had taken their place and were sitting with their feet up on the ledge. David Fredenthal, the Life artist, had been passing about the court making sketches from various points of view, and now he had come to ask Mr. Hurd, who was in his usual place, not far from the press table, if he would sit for him. Mr. Hurd became quite wooden with shyness, but his attorney and his father urged him to have his picture drawn. He came forward and sat stiffly in a chair within the bar of the court. It could be seen that he was really delighted. Mr. Hurd’s father hovered about him, watching the artist with the greatest curiosity but too well mannered to come and look over his shoulder, as the hardier Mr. Culbertson and I were doing. Gradually, people noticed that Mr. Hurd was being drawn, and several of the defendants came and stood beside us. They became quite silent. Mr. Fredenthal is a draftsman of the modern school, with the vagrant, caricaturing line of Feliks Topolski, and they were plain folks who like their art strictly representational. After the drawing was finished, Mr. Hurd’s father very politely asked if he might see it. When he was given it, he stood still and looked down on it for a minute. His son asked for it and he handed it to him without saying a word. This was probably one of the most acutely disappointing moments in their lives. He returned it to his father, who handed it back to the artist with a bow, forcing his features into a courteous smile. Then they rose and went away and sat down in their usual seats, staring in front of them. The defendants who had been watching the artist then took up the drawing, seemingly to make sure that it really was as crazy as they had thought it from a distance, set it down with a murmur of thanks, and drifted away.
Edward Clark, the Life photographer, should have been a novelist; he detects the significant characters and episodes in the welter of experience as an Indian guide sees game in the forest. He said to me, “I want you to come and talk to one of the defendants and look at his hands.” He took me over to a fair man in his early thirties, a plump and smiling person in his shirtsleeves, who looked rather like Leon Errol. It was his wife who came daily to the court with five children. Clark introduced us and said, “Now show us what you have got on your hands.” The man held them out proudly. On the four fingers of his left hand he had tattooed, just above the knuckles, the letters “L-O-V-E.” And on the four fingers of his right hand he had the letters “H-A-T-E.” Then he flipped up the thumbs. “T” was on the left thumb, “O” was on the right. “Love to hate,” he read. He had done it himself, he said; he had a tattooing outfit. The more you washed the letters, the brighter they got. He had done it when he was seventeen, he said, and when I asked him why, he broke into laughter and said, “Lack of sense, I reckon, lack of sense. Leastways, that’s what a lot of folks round here would tell you.” This man had married a girl of thirteen ten years before. She had had a child every year, of which six were living. They lived in a street on the outskirts of Greenville which is counted one of its worst sections, though to the stranger’s eye it looks pleasant enough, since the houses are set far apart in a pretty countryside. But the houses are old and poorly built and unsanitary, and the psychological climate is at once depressed and ferocious. The poor white population lived there, but as prosperity waxed in the twenties they moved out to better quarters and the Negroes moved in. Then came the depression, and the whites lost their jobs or their pay was cut, and they were glad to get back to their old quarters whenever they could, even though it meant living beside the Negroes, whom they hated more than ever, because they now were anxious to do the menial jobs that till then had been left to the Negroes. This man had grown up during this horrible period when blacks and whites snarled at each other like starved dogs fighting over a garbage can. There was no necessity to darken his world. But people who talked like Mr. Culbertson and Mr. Wofford had given him fears he need never have felt. “Don’t take my picture,” he said to Clark. “These days I drive a truck up North and I know what they would do to me if they knew I’d been in this.”
A red-headed defendant was telling us that his old schoolteacher had sent him twenty dollars to help pay for his defense, when it was announced that the Judge was going out to dinner and would not be back until half past nine. The defendants were taken to the jail to have their dinner; it was there discovered that during the courtroom party they had acquired several quarts of rye. The press went out after them, because it was obvious that the jury, even if they came to a decision, could not announce their verdict till the Judge returned. At a little after half past eight, it was known that the jury had sounded its buzzer, which meant that they had made up their minds. This certainly meant that the accused persons had been acquitted of all charges. The jurymen had been out only five hours and a quarter, and they would have had to stay out much longer than that before all of them would hav
e consented to a conviction; and they would have had to stay out much longer before they could have announced that they had failed to agree. This last, which would have led to the declaration of a mistrial, was what many people hoped for, since it would have meant that the defendants were not flattered by a proclamation of innocence, while at the same time there was no conviction, no risk of race riots, and no breach of tradition. But it was hardly any use hoping for this, since no juror who stood against an acquittal could be certain that some other juror would not betray him; and, as the fate of Mr. U. G. Fowler had shown, a juror would not be unduly pusillanimous if he let that consideration weigh with him. The press knew what the verdict was and knew there was still an hour till the Judge would return. Yet we knew too that it is not what happens that matters so much as how it happens. Every event of any magnitude changes life unpredictably. There would by now be something happening in the Court House that we could not have guessed would happen. So we got up from the table in the hotel dining room, where they were serving a beautiful meal that never was eaten, and ran into the street and through a heavy rain and up the Court House steps and along the corridor and up the staircase into the courtroom, and there it was, the thing we could not have guessed.
The place was given up to gloom. All the spectators who were not connected with the case had long since gone home to supper, and so had most of the defendants’ friends, and those members of the defendants’ families who had duties at their homes. The defendants had not yet been brought back from jail. So their wives and fathers and mothers had been sitting in the hall, now empty and full of shadows, looking at the press table, where there were no journalists; at the bench, where there was no judge; at the jury box, where there was no jury; and a fear of nothingness had come upon them. The wives were huddled in twos and threes, and most of these child-bearing children were weeping bitterly. The girl in green was sitting in the universal attitude of anguish, her head bent, the fingers of one hand spread along the hairline on her brow, the wrist brought down on the bridge of her nose. Mr. Hurd’s father sat slowly turning his straw hat around and around on his knee, looking down his long nose at the floor. The windows showed us the sluices of the rain pouring between us and a night palpitating and dyed scarlet by an electric sign on the hotel. Up in the gallery, thirteen Negroes were sitting in attitudes of fatigue and despair. Behind them, three windows looked on a night whitened by the lights of Main Street.
This had been a miserable case for these Negroes. They had not even been able to have the same emotional release that would have been granted them if Willie Earle had been an innocent victim, a sainted martyr. It happened that the night Willie Earle had hired Brown to take him into Pickens County, he went into a store in the Negro quarter, carrying a cheap cardboard suitcase. He accidentally dropped it on the floor at the feet of an older man, a university graduate who is one of the most influential figures in the Negro community of Greenville. The suitcase burst open and the contents were scattered all over the floor. The older man was surprised when Willie made no move to bend down and repack his suitcase, looked at him, saw that he was very drunk, so himself knelt down and did it for him. Hence the higher grades of colored people, though referring to Earle with admirable charity and understanding as a maimed soul who acted without knowledge, made no issue of the case, as they would have done if the victim had been normal and blameless. It happened that the only constructive proposal concerning this morass of misery stretching out to infinity round this case that I heard during my stay at Greenville came from a Negro. That, oddly enough, was a plea for the extension of the Jim Crow system. “There is nothing I wish for more,” he said, “than a law that would prohibit Negroes from riding in taxicabs driven by white men. They love to do it. We all love to do it. Can’t you guess why? Because it is the only time we can pay a white man to act as a servant to us. And that does something to me, even though I can check up on myself and see what’s happening. I say to myself, ‘This is fine! I’m hiring this white man! He’s doing a chore for me!’ ” He threw his head back and breathed deeply and patted his chest, to show how he felt. “If riding in a white taxicab does that to me, what do you think it does to Negroes who haven’t been raised right or are full of liquor? Then queer things happen, mighty queer things. Killing is only one of them.” It is apparently the practice in many other Southern towns, such as Savannah, that whites use only taxis with white drivers and Negroes use only taxis with Negro drivers.
No more Negroes went into the gallery. There were still only thirteen when the verdict was given. But the courtroom slowly filled up during the hour and a half that elapsed before the Judge’s return. The bondsman who had organized the defense fund came in and sat with a friend, who also resembled a giant baby; they whispered secrets in each other’s ears, each screening his mouth with a huge hand while the other hand held, at arm’s length, a tiny cigarette, as if a wreath of smoke could trouble their massiveness. The widow Brown ranged the aisles hungrily, evidently believing that an acquittal would ease her much more than it possibly could. The attorneys came in one by one and sat at their tables. Mr. Wofford was, as they say down there, happy as a skunk, flushed and gay and anecdotal. He and his group made a cheerful foreground to the benches where the wives of the defendants, fortified by their returning friends, wept less than before but still were weeping. As one of the Southern newspapermen looked about him at the scene, his face began to throb with a nervous twitch. At length, the Judge was seen standing at the open door of his chambers, and the defendants were brought into court. They were all very frightened. They bore themselves creditably, but their faces were pinched with fear. Mr. Hurd, though he was still confused, seemed to be asking himself if he had not been greatly deceived. Fat Joy was shifting along, wearing sadness as incongruously as fat men do. As they sat down, their wives clasped them in their arms, and they clung together, melting in the weakness of their common fear. The Judge came onto the bench and took some measures for the preservation of order in the court. He directed that all people should be cleared from the seats within the bar of the court unless they had a direct interest in the case or were of the press. The bondsman who had organized the defense committee was in such a seat and did not at first rise to go, but the court officials made him go. The people thus ejected stood around the walls of the room. Those by the windows turned to look at the downpour of the rain, which was now torrential. The Judge ordered all the officers of the court to take up positions in the aisles and to be ready for anyone who started a demonstration. They stood there stiffly, and the defendants’ wives, as if this were the first sign of a triumph for severity, trembled and hid their faces. The jury entered. One juror was smiling; one was looking desperately ashamed; the others looked stolid and secretive, as they had done all through the trial. They handed the slips on which they had recorded their verdicts to the clerk of the court, who handed them to the Judge. He read them through to himself, and a flush spread over his face.
As soon as the clerk had read the verdicts aloud and the Judge had left the bench and the courtroom, which he did without thanking the jury, the courtroom became, in a flash, something else. It might have been a honky-tonk, a tourist camp where they sold beer, to use Mr. Culbertson’s comminatory phrase. The Greenville citizens who had come as spectators were filing out quietly and thoughtfully. Whatever their opinions were, they were not to recover their usual spirits for some days. As they went, they looked over their shoulders at the knot of orgiastic joy that had instantly been formed by the defendants and their supporters. Mr. Hurd and his father did not give such spectacular signs of relief as the others. They gripped each other tightly for a moment, then shook hands stiffly, but in wide, benedictory movements, with the friends who gathered around them with the ardent feeling that among the defendants Mr. Hurd especially was to be congratulated. The father and son were grinning shyly, but in their eyes was a terrible light. They knew again that they were the chosen vessels of the Lord. Later, Mr. Hurd, asked for a statemen
t, was to say, “Justice has been done . . . both ways.” Meanwhile, the other defendants were kissing and clasping their wives, their wives were laying their heads on their husbands’ chests and nuzzling in an ecstasy of animal affection, while the laughing men stretched out their hands to their friends, who sawed them up and down. They shouted, they whistled, they laughed, they cried; above all, they shone with self-satisfaction. In fact, make no mistake, these people interpreted the verdict as a vote of confidence passed by the community. They interpreted it as a kind of election to authority.
