by Pam Durban
“ ‘Well, that’s that,’ I said. ‘If Mr. Aimar asks after them, you send him to me.’ All wrong will end, I heard you say, and I felt like a flock of birds had taken off inside me and flown up into the sun.”
10
Minnie Settles
November 1926
LIKE MOST LIES, the one she’d told Libba was a mix of truth and silence. It was true that she’d taken care of the shoes. What she hadn’t said was that Zeke had found the croker sack on her back porch, and after she’d told him what she knew, the sack had disappeared. Now she was worried sick. What was also unsaid was how dismayed she’d felt to see the relief on Libba’s face when she’d learned that the shoes were gone.
By the end of any other household inventory she would have collected her own pile of cast-off hats and coats, blouses and trousers, blankets and napkins and glasses. In another year she would have kept some things for herself and some for Zeke, set aside others for the annual rummage sale at Mt. Hebron Baptist Church or to be given to the down-and-out, the helpless, the shiftless. But this year, for the first time since she’d come to work for them, she’d taken no castoffs from their house. All stains were suspect now; this year she was taking nothing home but two plates of the chicken and rice and lima beans she’d cooked for their supper and the dollar bill that Mr. Aimar had slipped into her hand in the kitchen that morning.
“Minnie,” he’d said in the same confiding whisper with which he asked for her help on every household inventory day, “if you can keep my sweet wife from spending us into the poorhouse, I will be forever in your debt.” She’d taken the bill—there had been no way to refuse—and slipped it into the pocket of her skirt. But she wouldn’t be his ally, and so all day, whenever Libba had asked, she’d voted no. No to any napkin with the faintest stain, to a juice glass with the slightest wear on the gilt rim. No to Little Mister’s winter coat with the snot-stiffened sleeves and pockets that sagged from the sticks and rocks and string he stuffed into them. Let Mr. Aimar go broke, replacing every stained and shabby thing.
She buttoned her sweater and felt Libba watching her. What has gotten into our Minnie? she could almost hear her thinking. She imagined herself turning on Libba, telling the truth: The killings, what else? Then she would press on. You go along and you go along, she would say, while one day folds into the next, believing that you know the white people you work for as well as you know the contents of every drawer and cabinet in their house. You know other things too, of course; you aren’t deaf, dumb, and blind; you aren’t simple-minded. You know that Zeke’s father fled after he shot off his mouth to a deputy sheriff and the Klan came to call. You’ve heard about the rich colored farmer from Abbeville, Anthony Crawford, who traded testy words with a white clerk over the price of cotton one morning back in 1916 and by the next night was hanging, mutilated, from a tree out near the county fairgrounds. All your life you’ve heard the old people’s stories about worse times and places.
Those things had happened, and you knew they’d happened, but you’d lulled yourself into believing that they happened in another world, where a lower class of white people lived than the ones you thought of as your white people. But then the Longs were killed, and Mr. Aimar came home early and tried to clean his shoes, and ever since the night when you saw him trying to wash off what would not go away, you couldn’t crawl out from under the feeling that you lived in that other world now, among the people you’d only seen from a distance, and you knew what a fool you’d been to tell yourself you’d ever lived anywhere but there. And all you were trying to do now was to live like you knew where you were. Right now that meant walking down the back steps with a plate of warm food in each hand and pretending not to see Libba waving a sad little toodle-oo from the kitchen window.
Outside the air was close and still. Zeke’s horse and wagon were tied to a post in front of her house. She saw light behind the front window shade, and she walked toward it, telling herself that tomorrow might be the day she’d march into the Aimar’s house and quit. Every evening now, walking from their house to her own, she occupied herself with these plans. She imagined how she’d pack all her things in the one suitcase she’d brought with her. How she’d leave behind every blouse Libba had ever given her, every faded, curled photograph of Zeke and Lewis, of herself with Lewis and Cecile at the beach. She’d take special pleasure in abandoning the wren’s nest that had strands of her hair woven in among the twigs and fluff. Libba had picked it up in the yard one day and given it to her: proof, she’d said, of how firmly Minnie was woven into their family.
Every night she packed her possessions, left everything they’d given her, climbed up into Zeke’s wagon. But that was as far as she ever got. She couldn’t imagine where he’d take her or what she would do next. Schofield School would keep her name on the list of graduates that people consulted when they wanted to hire some help, but once word got around that she’d walked out on a family like the Aimars, it would be hard to find work with another that would give her a house and meals and two dollars a week and pay to have her teeth worked on or fix it with the sheriff if Zeke got liquored up on a Saturday night and got thrown in jail.
Then she was home, and Zeke was there, as familiar a part of the one big room where she lived as the whitewashed fireplace, the iron bedstead, chifforobe and rocking chair, the table under the window that looked out over the washpots and the garden. He’d lit the kerosene lamp on the table, laid out knives and forks. He’d brought in water from the cistern and tidied himself up, the way he knew she liked for him to do before supper: washed his hands and face, brushed off his overalls, and buttoned his blue shirt all the way up under his chin. “It’s fixing to storm,” she said, handing him the plates. She closed the door, pulled the padlock through the new hasp he’d mounted there, chased the thought of quitting from her mind.
“Sit down, Mama,” he said. “Take a load off.” Sitting across from her at the table in the lantern light, he looked like his father.
He was talking when the downpour started; it made such a racket on the tin roof that she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. The lantern flame fluttered at eye level, and she ducked and dodged, trying to see around it. “Come again?” she said, and when he did, she shoved back her chair and came around the table at him, one fist cocked, the fork gripped in her other hand.
He stood to meet her and looked back and forth from the fork to her fist, as though trying to gauge which one to fear. “Whoa, Mama, easy,” he said, and he grinned at her like it was funny that she was coming to knock him down, the way she’d done once or twice, just to give him a taste of what the world had in store for an ignorant colored boy with a big mouth. But his grin waxed and waned now, the way it did when he got flustered.
“You did what?” she said, but she’d heard him right. “How much did that man pay you?” she asked. Her heart surged up her throat. She unclenched her fist, and the fork clattered onto her plate.
The sound made Zeke startle. “He gave me his word,” he said, and he wiped his whole face with one big hand.
“Better spend it while you still can,” she said. She had to sit down then; she braced her hands on her knees. Her heart still pounded, but now her blood felt sluggish and thick in her veins, and she was short of breath, as if she were running up the endless flight of marble steps that sometimes appeared in her dreams. He put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. “You’re boasting, aren’t you?” she said. “Proud of yourself. I hear Albert Long liked to boast a bit himself.” Now Zeke wasn’t smiling anymore. “I wish to God I’d dragged you with me to Jackson’s and made you take a good long look at the pine needles and dirt and broken teeth and bone stuck in the mess of dried blood on what was left of that boy’s face.”
His face went slack, ashy. “Mama,” he said. Then, feebly: “He gave me his word.”
“Shit,” she said. “You always were a prideful, stupid boy.” Trusting too, she didn’t say. Way too trusting. Her fault, for raising him that way. But how do you sc
hool your child in mistrust without mangling his whole character? She pushed through the screen door and sat in her chair on the back porch and watched the rain pour off the roof and into the barrel. She should have known better than to leave those shoes where Zeke could find them. He was always poking around in her business, looking for something he could use or sell and bring her a share of the profits. But where could she have hidden them in her house? Under the bed, to trouble her sleep? Next to her black church shoes on the floor of the chifforobe?
Why hadn’t she burned them or dropped them in a pond or made them vanish in some other way? Was it because the sight of the croker sack and the weight of the shoes were proof that those killings were real? Without some tangible reminder, what had happened might settle into what the Aiken paper kept trying to make it: the scene of an inhuman horror, a crime committed by phantoms. A bucket of dirty wash water poured onto this hungry, sandy ground that soaked it up so quickly you couldn’t say it had ever been anything but dry, clean sand. So she’d kept the shoes, and now look.
She sat and listened to the rain until her heart slowed. When she went back inside, Zeke was sitting at the table with his hands folded between his knees, looking sick and miserable. Well, he should be sick. She sat down across from him, picked up her fork. “Eat,” she said. “Don’t let this food go to waste.” He did what he was told, one hand over his eyes. She looked at the top of his head, at the two small spirals of hair on the crown. It was the first thing she’d noticed when the midwife had handed him to her. A double swirl, for good luck, the woman had said. Maybe that luck would hold now.
She put her hand into the pocket of her skirt, found Mr. Aimar’s money. He’d be forever in her debt, he’d said when he gave it to her. But that wouldn’t matter once Curtis N. R. Barrett wrote about what Zeke had showed him. Howard Aimar’s debt to her would be forfeit then. She took the dollar out of her pocket, slid it across the table. Zeke tried to push it back, but she said, “Take it, son. Go on. Spend it like there’s no tomorrow. Don’t bring me any change.”
11
Curtis N. R. Barrett
November 1926
AMONG THE MIDDAY dinner crowd at the Hotel Aiken, he stood out like an unwelcome guest at a family gathering. In contrast to the businessmen dressed in flannel trousers and shirts with rolled-up sleeves or the farmers in khaki work clothes and boots, he wore a suit to meals, a crisp white shirt and tie, cuff links, signet ring, and polished shoes. Whenever he entered the dining room, conversation stopped, silverware slowed; ill will flowed toward him from every corner. Not that he minded the notoriety; he welcomed it, invited it. Today, as usual, he paused in the doorway then claimed the table at the front window where he sat at every meal, hoping that the sight of him might provoke a passerby into rushing inside and saying something reckless. He propped the Aiken Standard against the sugar bowl and ordered the dinner special: a pan-fried pork chop, bone-in, girdled with pearly fat and topped with a thin slice of onion. In his time in South Carolina he’d developed a taste for warm pig fat; he relished the last strands of pork, gnawed, nibbled, and sucked from the bone.
He did not know about the letter that had just arrived at the governor’s office or how, after reading it, Arthur McCormick had walked around for ten minutes, belching quietly into one of the large white handkerchiefs his wife tucked into his pocket every morning. The letter was typed on stationery from the Hotel Courtland in Canton, Ohio, but its author was clearly a South Carolina man.
Dear Governor McCormick,
If I was governor of South Carolina, I would plant my official shoe with such vehemence on the posterior of a certain Mr. Barrett, the charlatan would taste shoe leather for a week. Not that the New York World gives a tinker’s dam for law and order; if so, they would look to that quagmire of filth and licentiousness, robbery, blood, and murder, where they were spawned. But in their contempt for the South, and especially South Carolina, they will send their sewer rat reporter to Aiken to attempt to convince others that our homeland is the very seat of corruption and lawlessness. At dinner the other night a prominent judge said to me, “Well, the New York World boys are going after you people of South Carolina.”
“Yes,” I replied. “And we feel like a dove that a buzzard has puked on.”
If I was to fully vent my feelings, the newspapers would have to publish a fireproof edition, but I do feel that I ought at least to sketch a faint adumbration of my conception of that blatherskite representative of a slanderous rag. If the devil were Barrett’s daddy, old Jezebel his mother, he would disgrace both sire and dame.
As God is my witness, I would rather be a one-eyed yellow cur dog and belong to a sorry negro than give succor to this blackhearted hypocrite.
Respectfully yours,
Haywood R. Brodie
Barrett would have found the letter rich. He loved a good fight, a story he could run with, one that might get Swope’s attention by giving the editor what he called the human element—pathos and tragic irony, the stuff of life. Barrett’s version might have sketched a small-bore salesman attacking his typewriter in an alcoholic rage in a grim little room in Canton then gone on to probe Haywood Brodie’s motives and expose his illusions. Barrett had shed his own self-serving fantasies in France and felt it was his right and duty to help others shed their own. “When she comes forward this week to tell the story of her friendship with Baring,” he wrote in a story about a young woman betrayed by a married man, “she will be gathering for the last time the tattered ends of a childish illusion. The man she believed to be a charming, honorable friend—apparently the only friendship with a man in all her young life—she may face with manacles on his hands charged as a wife poisoner. Whether he is acquitted of that charge or not, he is already convicted of killing a child’s dreams.”
But he didn’t know about Haywood Brodie’s letter. What he did know was that all hell had broken loose on the front page of the latest issue of the Aiken Standard. “Lynching of Longs Condemned by Ku Klux. Gov. McCormick Won’t ‘Pass Buck’ in Lynching Probe,” one headline read. “Lynching Probe Is Pure Bunk,” declared another that ran above a letter to the editor from Col. Edward A. Wyman. “All this investigation and hullabaloo about who did the lynching and whys and wherefores is pure, unadulterated bunk,” the colonel sneered. “The New York World, the Governor, the so-called ‘law and order’ citizens, and many others know, or could easily know, at least some of those who participated in the killing of the Longs, and know, as well as the balance of the world knows, that nobody is going to be punished and nobody wants anybody punished.”
“The World’s ‘Investigation’ Resented in South Carolina,” read the largest headline. Barrett appreciated the mockery of the quotation marks, the way the whole article was larded with derision. He would have the public regard him as a heroic journalistic investigator, the story said, when his only apparent purpose in writing was to ridicule Aiken citizens. Actually, the article continued, he was the ridiculous one, for reporting that he had been warned by J. P. Gibson, the governor’s investigator, that the Klan might try to usher him out of town. “About the only danger that Mr. Barrett need apprehend,” the newspaper scoffed, was on the streets of Columbia, where he was in danger of “being accidentally run down by a jitney or a truck or a wild automobile driver if he attempts to cross the streets with any great degree of dependence upon the observance of the traffic signals.”
And who were the “Famous Seventeen,” the supposed perpetrators of the crime that Barrett referred to in every article? Did he mean to suggest that the whole mob consisted of seventeen members or that there were seventeen leaders? Was it possible, the paper suggested, “that he might have been confused by oft-repeated references to the famous ‘committee of seventeen’ that was going to revise the tax laws of the State?”
“Fair enough,” he thought, and he laughed out loud, causing several men at nearby tables to frown at him. He could take a punch, and the madder people got, the greater the chance they’d s
lip up and say more than they meant to. He knew what happened to people under duress, what fell away or was stripped from them, what they might say or do. When he’d cut most of the meat off the chop, he picked up the bone and nibbled at the rest, working up the list of whom he’d visit today. Why not Colonel Wyman himself? Or maybe he’d drop in on Howard Aimar. Provoking them was his job; he did it well, and he wasn’t afraid, or if he was, he knew how to control the fear so it didn’t show.
But something on that page should have made him put down the chop bone and study the biggest headline again—“The World’s ‘Investigation’ Resented in South Carolina.” It was the word resented that should have focused and cleared his mind. Southern crimes and conditions—the more lurid the better—had been one of the World’s favorite subjects. Educating himself on the state’s history before he came down to South Carolina, he would have read his paper’s 1907 series on the Klan. He would have found the stories about the 1903 murder of Narciso Gonzales, editor of the State, shot down on the street two blocks from the capitol by Lieutenant Governor James Tillman, nephew of Pitchfork Ben, who “resented” the newspaperman’s articles, which Tillman believed had cost him the governorship. He would have read how, during Tillman’s trial, his allies and kin had smuggled shotguns into the courtroom under their coats, in case the law failed them.
Granted, those were more primitive times in South Carolina, but not by much, and if Barrett had been raised in the state, he would have known what he was up against. He would have been schooled in resentment as thoroughly as South Carolina’s children were taught the real causes of the Civil War. He would have eaten and breathed and drunk those lessons until an instinctive understanding of resentment and where it inevitably led would have been mixed with his blood and rooted in the marrow of his bones. He would have grasped that nothing was more profoundly resented here than an attack on a man’s honor and standing in the community. He would have known that a man’s good name was sacred; to damage it was a violent act and that, once damaged, a man’s standing could only be restored by retribution, a righteous, Old Testament exchange of violence. And Barrett hadn’t sullied one person; he’d attacked an entire community.
