by Pam Durban
“Because I had to,” he says. “Because that’s the way the tide was running. If you’ve ever been caught in a riptide, then you know that you can’t swim against it. You’ll wear yourself out and drown trying. I expect your father taught you—because I taught both my children—if you’re caught in a current, you go with it until you can ease yourself around crossways to the current, then you can swim clear of it.
“So I let that current carry me into the lawyer’s office. What does it matter now whose office it was? When no more men could fit inside, someone pulled down the thick yellow shades over the front windows; someone closed and locked the door. And I waited for a chance to work myself crossways to the current that had carried us there. These men were not strangers to me, no. Most of them were men I saw, men who saw me, every day on Laurens Street. Men I knelt beside in church and sat beside at the Rotary Club meetings, who trusted me to sell their homes and insure their lives against catastrophe. But I couldn’t name names now, no. My memory’s not that clear.
“Dr. Hastings was shaking, his face was brick red, and my first concern was to find him a chair and bring him a drink of water. ‘By God,’ the old man kept saying. ‘By God.’ By the time I got him settled, the men in the room were saying that Dempsey had flown the coop, but the sheriff was out looking for him now, to serve him with a warrant for assault and battery that he’d dug up. Before nightfall Dempsey would be back in jail with the rest of his murdering kin, one man said, all three of them locked up safe and sound, and what are we going to do about that? And before I knew what was happening, the men were talking guns.
“ ‘Now hold on just a minute,’ I said when the man next to me finished talking. ‘Let’s think this thing through. Let’s take them out of jail and up to Monetta. We’ll round up the whole sorry family, hustle them out to the county line, and kick them across and tell them that their shack, their plows, their mules, every last one of their possessions, is forfeit, and they’re never to set foot in Aiken County again.’
“A couple of men nodded as I spoke, and when I was done, one or two raised their hands, as though they were voting with me. But the rest folded their arms and studied the carpet like they’d never seen a threadbare Oriental rug before. ‘Count me out,’ I said. That was when Dr. Hastings offered me the .45 that his own father had made good use of at Gettysburg. The one sent home to the family after the Wilderness by another soldier, whose letter is still kept in the gun case, tucked under the velvet lining. The gun that Dr. Hastings himself carried, eleven years after the war, when he rode with the Red Shirts at Hamburg to break up the Reconstruction government and put the white man back on top.
“He offered, but I refused. There was no call or need for guns, I said. And the whole time I talked, I felt Dr. Hastings studying me the way he’d been studying me since I took Libba across the Savannah River to Georgia and brought her back my wife. Is he for us or against us? he was thinking. Is he one of us or not?
“That was the question every man in this town had to answer in those days, the one he must answer now and go on answering until the last breath leaves his body and he rests in peace. Because men stand together here, they speak with one voice and act with one will, and the hand of one is the hand of all. When a choice is presented to you that clearly—are you for us or against us? are you one of us or not?—how would you answer? And don’t be so quick to say you know, because you don’t.
“Which is not to say that some of our own didn’t turn against us. Even some of the South Carolina papers printed letters and editorials about us from people who felt high and mighty enough to place blame. ‘There is a great company of men down in Aiken who know they are murderers,’ one man wrote. ‘And knowing that, they have destroyed their own self-respect. They will live and die knowing full well that they are not worthy to associate with their wives and children and are entitled to no respect from decent people. They have fixed their own penalty.’
“Of course I resented that. We all did. Because they had no right, that’s why. And I say to you now what I said to your grandmother then, and a hundred times since: Thank God I am not one of those men. Not then, not now, not ever. And to prove it, I will walk you through it. I will take you where I went that night and after so that you will know the truth and it will make you free.
“It was after midnight when I went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table and slipped on my brand-new dress shoes.
“Do you think I don’t know I had no business wearing them? Well, because I didn’t want to rummage and wake Libba, and they were the first pair that came to hand when I reached into the bedroom closet.
“When I had my shoes on and laced up tight, I made my way across the kitchen, taking care to miss the squeaky spots. With one hand I squelched the small bell that hung at the top of the kitchen door, opened the door with the other, stepped out onto the screened porch there, and closed the door behind me. God, it was dark that night, moon no bigger than a paring, but I knew where I was and what was all around me. A set of unpainted wooden shelves stood against the far wall, lined with Libba’s canning jars and flowerpots, all neatly stacked, the way Libba likes things kept. Next to the shelves was a wooden crate full of kindling and small sticks, ranked by length and thickness. The air on that porch smelled richly of pine, and I stood for a while, breathing it in, until I remembered why I was going out that night. I was going for your grandmother and for your father. I was going for Dr. Hastings too, who was no longer young enough to ride around the county late at night, keeping the peace and righting wrongs like the one that had been done us that very afternoon when the colored lawyer stood in that courtroom, bold as brass, and told us there was not one scintilla of evidence against those three murderers and convinced the judge to set one of them free.
“I went to the jail that night—I’m not ashamed to say it—but that’s as far as I went. I had to park at my office and walk three blocks to the courthouse, that’s how many cars were parked along the streets that night. But when I saw those people brought down, it turned my stomach, and so I did not go where everyone else was going; I went back to my office, and I stayed there.”
“What did I do? What does it matter what I did while I was there?” he says. “Call it what you like. Say: ‘For the rest of the night he worked his way through the pile of paperwork in the wire basket on his desk. He wrote checks and signed letters and initialed contracts. From time to time he went out and stood on the stoop and watched Orion climb one side of the sky while the new moon fell down the other.’
“I worked all night, and at first light I went home. Libba was waiting for me in the front room. She was wearing her old green flannel bathrobe, and her hair was down around her shoulders, and when she saw me, she jumped up and ran to me. She wrapped her arms around me and held me tight. ‘Oh, thank God,’ she said, when I told her what I’ve told you. ‘Thank God.’ She must have said it half a dozen times.
“Because I didn’t go—what else would she have to thank God about?
“ ‘The many innocent cannot be held responsible for the irresponsible actions of the guilty few.’ Austin Eubanks, editor of the Aiken paper, wrote in an editorial the week after that night. Libba cut the story out of the paper and put it next to my plate at breakfast time. That’s the kind of wife she has always been to me.”
“That’s all I have to say, for now,” he says, and then he stops, while for now, for now tolls in his mind, frightening him. Now promises a later, when more words will come, and yet it feels as if the words he’s just spoken are the last in line; what’s left is a fog of silence spreading and deepening inside him the way dusk moves across a field.
4
Curtis N. R. Barrett
November 1926
“AN AMBULANCE DRIVER?” some people asked when they learned he’d served in the medical corps, and every time he had to calm himself before he could explain that he had not been a college boy, doing his bit at the rear. He’d been a boy, that much was true—nineteen when he
shipped out for France—but he was a medic. He’d carried a bag of tourniquets, needles, and powders as he’d charged, unarmed, toward the German lines, along with his armed comrades, who begged and screamed for him to piece them back together after the machine guns ripped them apart. He did not even attempt to tell the bystanders who gawked at his service that every time he climbed out of the trenches with the other men and lined up for the charge, he watched the muzzles of the German 8’s swing around to point at the red cross on his uniform. This morning in his room at the Hotel Aiken, he’d felt amazed and ashamed to see his reflection in the mirror above the small sink where he was shaving.
Now, as he did every morning, he stood at the window and looked across Park Avenue to the Southern Railway depot, where a varying group of men from Leland Dawson’s list of perpetrators waited to collect newspapers out of the bundles unloaded from the Columbia train. The “Famous Seventeen,” Leland had called the men who planned and carried out the Long killings, and Howard Aimar had not been one of them, but every morning there he was, standing a little way down the platform from the rest, taking no part in the backslapping, the quick, urgent conversations they held with one another.
Thanks to Zeke, those men’s names were attached to faces now. For five days after Barrett arrived in town, whenever Zeke drove him somewhere in his wagon, he wore a top hat and frock coat, as though driving Barrett were an honor and a celebration. “Morning, Mr. Manning. Hope you’re keeping well, boss,” he’d called out loudly, tipping his brim to the man in the tweed hat walking the white collie. The man nodded, fuming, and walked faster, and Barrett understood that he’d just met James Lee Manning, reporter for the Augusta Chronicle, author of the letter in the Aiken Standard that blamed the lawyer Wise for riling up Aiken’s citizens by strutting and bragging in front of Sheriff Glover’s widow and orphaned children. “Close around,” Leland had written next to Manning’s name.
“Evening, Mr. Owen, sir,” Zeke said to the rotund man with the heavy-lidded eyes standing on the courthouse steps.
“On your way to the ball, are you, Zeke?” the man said. Deputy Arthur Owen, Barrett thought.
Surely, Barrett thought, Zeke wasn’t deliberately pointing out the men on Leland’s list; he couldn’t know who was on it, and he yelled out to almost everyone they passed, black or white. After a week on Zeke’s wagon, Barrett could recognize the black meat merchant John Bush and the builder Wesley Ford, and he knew their stories too; he knew that Ezra Jones tailored riding habits for the rich and that the black druggist, Dr. M. M. Hampton, had sold quinine to the government during the war. Still, he remembered Leland’s warning, and he was sure that Leland would say that just by pointing out these men, Zeke had put himself in danger. So one day he said, “No need to name names, Zeke. I can’t keep track of them all.”
“Can’t?” Zeke shouted, amazed. “Well, what’s that notebook for?” After that he wore his overalls and a faded blue shirt, shouted mostly at his horse.
Every day for two weeks Barrett made his rounds, in Zeke’s wagon or alone, on foot. He went to Finley’s Lumberyard, where the air was full of flying sawdust. He stood next to a tall stack of yellow pine boards beaded with resin and shouted questions to Jesse Finley over the high, ringing whine of the saws. “I understand you were tending the drying kiln that night,” he said, pointing to the tin shed leaking smoke from every crack and seam. “And you didn’t see or hear anything unusual?” Finley cupped his hand to one ear, shook his head.
He went out to Gregorie’s cotton gin and shouted his questions over the clanking roar of the machinery, imagined his words smothered in the lint that clung to every surface there. Then back to Hahn’s for a conversation about English biscuits and on to Holley Hardware, where nobody would wait on him, no matter how long he stood at the front counter, holding a paper bag of tenpenny nails or a peppermint stick taken from the big clear jar beside the register.
Round and round and round he went, learning nothing that Leland Dawson hadn’t already discovered. People talked to Leland, he told himself, because Leland had arrived while the shock was new and people were still trying out different versions of the story. But that time had passed; the story had hardened into the official line: The dead sheriff and justice served, then betrayed, and finally, rightfully, carried out by a faceless group of outraged citizens. Deeply regrettable but unavoidable. A necessary evil. A dozen times a day he heard those opinions.
Round and round. There were good people here, Leland said, and Barrett found them too. One morning he sat in a lawyer’s office near the courthouse as the man peered out the window and motioned him to stay out of sight while a few men from the depot strolled by outside. “I’d be shot through the window,” he said, “if any of them saw me talking to you.”
That afternoon on Laurens Street a woman beckoned him into a dark, stifling shop crammed with chairs and couches in every stage of breakdown and repair. Her advice was delivered around a mouthful of straight pins as she tucked and pinned heavy gold brocade onto a divan: “Don’t go meddling in it. I’m telling you if they keep stirring it up, there will be more. And there isn’t any use trying to get the straight of it. It’s so crooked nobody will ever get it straight.”
“In what way crooked?” he asked, and for an answer got more tugging and tucking and pinning. He felt foolish now, remembering how he’d stepped down from the train like an avenging angel come to bring justice to the dead. Now he felt more kinship with the dull yellow mule that turned the sorghum press in the vacant lot behind the lumberyard. On his way back to the hotel at the end of every day, he stopped to pat the animal on its thick plank of a nose. “Keep up the good work, pal,” he said. At least the mule had syrup to show for its endless circling. At the end of most days he returned to his room with blank pages in his notebook and a telegram from his editor, Bayard Swope, waiting at the desk. “What news?” the latest read, an ominous brevity.
The Aiken County courthouse was brick, two stories tall, with a palmetto tree on either side of the entrance and a second-story balcony with a wide railing just made for a demagogue to pound, the way Pitchfork Ben Tillman had done while he proclaimed the white man’s right to lynch the black man, the black woman too, if it came to that, to kill every last one of them if that’s what it took to keep the white man in his rightful place on top of the heap.
Lying on his hotel bed one night with a drink balanced on his chest, letting the fan move warm air around the room—even in November the days were sometimes warm and humid, and his room stayed stuffy—he remembered the cool of the reading room at the New York Public Library, the long polished tables, the shaded lamps. He’d gone there to look up Ben Tillman’s 1900 speech before the U.S. Senate in the Congressional Record. Tillman’s logic was ferocious: He blamed the violence used to bring down South Carolina’s Reconstruction government on the hotheadedness of blacks and the efforts of Republicans to put white necks under black heels. “We were sorry we had the necessity forced upon us,” Tillman testified, “but we could not help it, and as white men we are not sorry for it, and we do not propose to apologize for anything we have done in connection with it.” Why, he wondered now, were the evils here always necessary evils?
He remembered the shock of looking up from Tillman’s words and finding creamy clouds and blue sky on the vaulted ceiling. The sky there had a heavenly cast, as though the pursuit of knowledge going on below was something holy, as though knowledge really were the greatest power. He’d believed that once, but now he understood that the idea was an illusion, a trompe l’oeil, like painted clouds and sky on a ceiling. Now he leaned more toward Tillman’s logic: Power is power, and power is gained and kept by force and intimidation, by deceit and brutality. Power rests, always, with the man or men whose boots are most firmly planted on the necks of others.
Then one night as he brooded in his room, someone knocked. He opened the door to find Zeke in the hall, holding a cardboard box of laundry and smiling, as usual, at some private joke. “Come
in, Zeke,” he said, as usual, and as usual Zeke shook his head.
“No, sir, Mr. Barrett,” he said. He set the box down on the threshold and nudged it into the room with his foot. “Mind those shirts, captain,” he said over his shoulder as he clattered away down the stairs.
Under the stack of starched and ironed shirts, Barrett found a jar of whiskey. He held it up to the light, and for the first time since he’d gotten to town, he felt hopeful.
The next day more hope arrived. Just after noon a blue touring car appeared on Laurens, drove up one side of the street as slowly as a hearse, and turned onto Park Avenue, where it traveled three blocks at the same contemplative pace until it reached the courthouse and angled into a parking place out front. All along the route people stopped and turned and watched the car and its driver, a little man with a patch over one eye, sitting low behind the wheel.
Barrett was standing outside Holley Hardware when the car went by, and he cut through two vacant lots and sprinted across Park Avenue to beat the car to the courthouse so that he could be the first to shake hands with the man in the tweed suit who slid out from behind the wheel. “J. P. Gibson?” he said. He’d heard that Governor Arthur McCormick’s investigator was en route at last, now that Barrett’s badgering presence and the stories that appeared in almost every edition of the State and the Charleston News and Courier had made it too embarrassing for the governor to ignore what he called “the situation” down in Aiken.
The man’s uncovered eye looked back, a feral shade of golden amber. His hand was pudgy and soft, but his grip was strong, and he held on as he leaned toward Barrett as though he had a secret to tell. “Correct,” he said. The word seemed fired from him, and the force of it lifted him onto the balls of his feet then set him down again.
