The Tree of Forgetfulness

by Pam Durban

  She wants to say that she has been a coward too, a lesser coward but still a coward, bound by the same loyalties. There is a family photograph of a Christmas in the 1960s: aunts, uncles, cousins, in front of the festive tree at Libba’s house, and in this picture the curious grandchild stands apart from her relatives with her arms folded, looking smug and pleased with herself because she’s just gotten scolded for saying “Yes, ma’am” to the maid in front of her grandmother. Because she’s proud that she had recently joined the Human Relations Commission, an interracial group that meets to talk justice and equality, and has conveniently forgotten or ignored or deleted the fact that she has even more recently resigned from the group after her father said it would hurt his business if people found out that she belonged. If that picture were taken today, maybe she would step in closer, join her kin, all of them bound to one another by their evasions and the stories they tell in their own defense as surely as they are joined by blood and shared history.

  Eighty years on, and she wants to take a last look at the design.

  A glimpse: As tenants farming cotton on Harley Johnson’s land, the Longs lived one rung up the shaky ladder from sharecropper. Cotton was a brutal crop. Its roots broke down humus and stripped nutrients from the topsoil so quickly and efficiently that after only a few years, a cotton field turned into a wasteland of hard clay gullies. It was also a sickly crop, constantly threatened by the boll weevil and the firebug, by spider mites and thrips, blight and gall and powdery mildew, by stem and root rot and all sorts of leaf collapse. To farm this crop they would have furnished the labor, the work animals and their feed, the tools, seed, and a portion of the fertilizer used to make the crop, and in return they were paid for the crop, minus the house rent, minus the debts at local stores and gins and mills for supplies and services. Minus, minus, minus. Tenant farmers, black and white, often got cheated outright or so tangled in webs of credit and merchant’s liens that they ended the year broke or in debt to the landlord for the next year’s crop before the seed was planted.

  By the standards of the time Herbert Long was a successful tenant farmer. He owned mules and plows, and he had a large family to work the crop. But people make enemies. They are careless and highhanded; they take advantage of people, or they are disliked for being meek when they should be strong or strong when they should be meek, or for no good reason. And in 1925 it could be fatal for a black man in South Carolina to better himself by climbing over a white man. To better himself at all. Just before that Saturday morning in April 1925, their landlord had taken away a mule from a white tenant and given it to the Longs; he’d rented them a few more acres of land as well. One rumor going around after the sheriff was killed was that the white tenant who’d lost his mule to the Longs had told the sheriff they were selling whiskey. Or the preacher from the church closest to their house might have informed on them, for selling to his congregation, though he denied it in a letter to the Palmetto Leader.

  And maybe the Longs did sell whiskey as a side business. Many people did. Maybe the sheriff had been watching them. A few weeks before the fatal raid, Dempsey had been dragged out of the house and whipped by a group of unknown men for unknown reasons.

  “My name is Marie Long,” Dempsey’s sister testified at the coroner’s inquest into Sheriff Earl Glover’s murder.

  I am the daughter of Herbert Long.

  I am eighteen years old.

  I was there last Saturday morning.

  I was nursing the baby.

  I did not know who was the sheriff.

  I don’t know how many guns were in the room.

  I don’t know where Bessie, Albert, or Dempsey were.

  I don’t know whether they came back to the house.

  I don’t know who shot the sheriff.

  I don’t know who got the gun.

  I don’t know where they kept the pistol.

  I have seen a shotgun in the house.

  I haven’t ever seen that knife.

  I didn’t know the sheriff was dead.

  No one hadn’t told me anything.

  I saw the pistols in their pockets, and that’s the reason I ran.

  “My name is Clara Long,” reads her testimony at the inquest into the sheriff’s death. “I am the wife of Son. His real name is Dempsey. Son and I live with Sam. I was at home Saturday morning when the sheriff and officers came over. When they came, I was in the kitchen. I saw the car come up. I did not know who they were. I had started to cook dinner. After while I heard a noise like somebody fussing. I heard someone shoot, and I looked around, and I said death is nothing but death, then I got my baby and jumped over the wire fence. I did not know who the sheriff was. I do not know who shot first or shot last.”

  It wasn’t clear then; it isn’t clear now; it will never be clear what happened on the day the sheriff was shot or on the night the Longs were taken from the county jail and killed. The names of the dead are the only certainties: Sheriff Earl Glover. Dempsey and Bessie and Albert Long. Mamie Long, mother to Dempsey and Bessie, aunt to Albert. The rest is all darkness and mayhem, rancor, mystery and silence. Albert testified that when the two cars of white men pulled up in front, he and Dempsey were walking back toward the house from the field across the road. He said that Mamie Long killed the sheriff. At first Dempsey agreed, but at the trial he testified that Albert had fired the shotgun. There were rumors that Aubrey Timmerman had shot his boss because he was about to be fired, but they were squelched when Libba’s father, Dr. Henderson Hastings, examined the sheriff’s body and testified that the ninety-three wounds in the man’s back and side had been made by a shotgun blast, and the deputies all carried pistols.

  An imagined fragment: Curtis N. R. Barrett might have written down the words he’d heard the white people use to sort and rank the black people they lived among and around and, to their way of thinking, above. That sort of thing would have been interesting to him. Negro, colored, nigra, coon, nigger, it went, in descending order of dignity. Dr. M. M. Hampton, who ran his own private hospital, was a Negro, as were the building contractors William and Wesley Ford. The meat market proprietor John Bush was a Negro, and so was Ezra Jones, the tailor who specialized in making riding habits for the rich. There were other Negroes too: shoe repairmen and barbers, blacksmiths and wheelwrights and real estate agents.

  Colored was practically synonymous with Negro, but nigra was a tricky word, balanced between the respectability of Negro and nigger, the lowest of the low. Ladies usually said Negro or colored or nigra. Nigger was the word that the hard little men in overalls spat onto the street, and so did the doffers and spinners and the foremen in the mills down in Horse Creek Valley, which did not hire blacks. Lawmen used it regularly, though Barrett had heard it slip out of many a white man’s mouth when he was provoked or affronted. Howard Aimar and the governor had both used the word with him, one white man to another.

  Within each category there was room for further nuance. Niggers could be good or bad, depending on the trouble they caused. On Saturday nights bad niggers got drunk and cut one another with knives and broken bottles in the juke joints that lined the alley behind Laurens Street. They carried themselves with belligerent dignity and wouldn’t doff their hats. And once you were a nigger, Barrett would surely have noted, you’d best beware. But what he never got used to was how easy it was to be consigned to that category, even if you’d been colored or nigra or Negro before. Albert, Dempsey, and Bessie Long had each fallen from Negro to bad nigger to the clearing in the pines where they died.

  More fragments: Soon after the Long murders, a photograph of a woman appeared in the New York News under the caption “Bessie Long, Martyr of Aiken Mob.” It shows a matronly woman with a broad mild face. A schoolteacher, you might guess. It’s hard to imagine that the woman in the photograph could have wrenched a deputy’s gun from his hand or torn a chunk of flesh out of Aubrey Timmerman’s arm with her teeth.

  In November 1926 Clara Long wrote a letter to Leland Dawson from 1537 P
ark Ave., in Philadelphia. “Lawyer N. R. Latham asked me to send you my peoples picture who were murdered at Aiken on the 8th of October, but I am sorry to say that I am unable to find any. My husband Dempsey Long, his sister Bessie Long and his first cousin Albert Long, all three were murdered and I would like to hear from you please.”

  The 1930 census lists no Longs in Aiken County, but eighty years on, the house is still there, a small, dark-red, wooden house near the Coleman Thankful Baptist Church on the east side of SC Highway 39 outside Monetta. The unmarked common grave where Bessie, Albert, and Dempsey Long are buried is somewhere nearby. The memory is still there in the mind of a distant relative whose grandmother told him the story of the Long killings. She talked about it all the time, he said. How they dragged them out of jail like dead mules. When he drives past the house, he remembers that story, and remembering it sometimes keeps him quiet when a man insults him.

  The outrage is still there too; it smolders in the dozens of letters that Leland Dawson wrote to judges and lawyers, senators and ministers. It blazes in his letter to the editor of the DeLand, Florida News. “You ask, ‘Who is to blame?’ for the brutal murder of a woman and two men, one of whom had been found not guilty by the presiding judge. You further insinuate that the mob and the local sheriff were better judges of the issue of guilt or innocence than the Supreme Court of the State. You directly pose the question whether sheriffs ought to be asked to risk their lives ‘in the interest of a man they know to be a criminal,’ although the State declares him innocent of any crime. Your editorial is a perfect example of the state of mind which moves us to keep up the pressure for a federal law to deal with these outrages which continue to be defended and justified by editors such as yourself who pay lip service to law enforcement.”

  A silence, a gap, an imagined glimpse: Minnie Settles would have had her own opinion about what had happened at the Long place on that April morning. It wasn’t right to kill the sheriff; killing was an abomination, a foul sin. But what was to be done, she asked herself, when two cars full of white men pull up in front of your house and the men jump out and come running, and you see the pistols in their pockets but not one of them is wearing a uniform?

  She might have snatched up an ax like Mamie Long did and taken a swing at one of them, might then have ended up shot dead and sprawled across the woodpile like Mamie Long. She might have gone crazy like Bessie and lunged at a man, tried to knock him down, take his gun, bite a chunk out of his arm, fight for her life. Fight back, and you’re already dead; you might as well go out fighting.

  On the October Sunday after the Longs were killed, she fastened her large black hat in front of the mirror beside her front door, while Zeke paced the floor and told her what was happening all over town. White men were going door to door, telling the white people that the colored people had guns and knives hidden in their houses. Sheriff’s deputies were stopping colored people on the street, asking where they’d been and where they were going. Zeke had been stopped himself a few times. It was best to stay inside.

  “No ignorant cracker is going to keep me from going to church,” she said. “You’d do well to come with me.”

  While she pinned her hat, he went on talking. He’d be damned if he was going to worship any God who’d turned his face away from them the way this God had done. “You don’t know anything, Mama, if you think God’s going to protect you,” he said.

  “I know you’d better stop blaspheming,” she said, but there was no way to stop him once he got wound up. The way it looked to him, he said, the Almighty had turned his back on the colored people of South Carolina a long time ago. Hell, he might even have given the whole state to the devil. “Go on, Satan, take it,” God said, and the devil answered, “Sure thing, Boss, much obliged.”

  It always grieved her when he talked like that. She took down her black patent leather purse from a nail on the wall and checked the folded dollars there. “You better hush about the devil,” she said.

  She didn’t believe in the actual devil any longer; Dr. Scott, the pastor at Mt. Hebron Baptist Church, wasn’t big on the devil either, though he sometimes preached on his many names and disguises. Accuser of the Brethren. Ruler of Darkness. Tempter. Thief. Father of Lies. At church on the terrible Sunday after the killings, some of the old people swore that during the night they’d felt the devil’s heavy cloak dragged over the town, but Dr. Scott admonished them not to give in to fear and superstition. He led them in singing: “Father, I stretch my hand to thee, no other help I know.”

  “Have salt in yourselves,” he said in his lordly voice, “and be at peace with one another.”

  Then they took up a special offering for Mr. N. R. Latham, an offering that Dr. Scott allowed but would not personally contribute to. Others blamed N. R. Latham as well and gave nothing, but she dropped a dollar in the basket for the man who’d torn such a big hole in the case against the three Longs that Dempsey stepped through it and went free. He was halfway to Monetta, so they’d heard, when the sheriff got him.

  One last silence filled: Dempsey Long’s hour of freedom on the day the judge dismissed the verdict against him.

  He might have stood up from his seat at the front of the courtroom, but N. R. Latham grabbed his wrist and pulled him back down onto the hard bench beside him and held on to keep him there. He would have known why Dempsey shouldn’t stand up, why he must stop smiling. But Dempsey couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to leave Bessie and Albert in jail, but he was free. It wouldn’t do any good to wait around until tomorrow when they might be, and it could do harm.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said to N. R. Latham. He shook the man’s hand, shook it again. Latham took him by the elbow, turned him away from the courtroom, where groups of white men had gathered in corners to talk and glance over their shoulders at the two of them. “If you don’t have any more business in town, Dempsey,” he said, “why don’t you go home? Go cross-country if you can. Head on back to your people.”

  What people? he wanted to ask. What home? The lawyer knew that his family was dead or scattered like a fire when you kick the last embers to make sure it’s out. He’d seen his mother sprawled across the woodpile, dead, his wife Clara running across a field with the baby in her arms. He would have known that no Long lived there any longer, but he might have hoped he was wrong and started for home. Where else would he go? Where do any of us go after we’ve lost everything? The sun was low in the sky, the light fading fast, but he would walk all night if he had to; the dark didn’t scare him like it had scared his mother. She wouldn’t go into a lightless house, so she’d always quit work in plenty of time to get home and light the lamps and rouse the fire. But he wasn’t afraid. He should have been dead for over a year, and instead he was free, walking north toward Monetta and home, enjoying the way the setting sun left a band of cold peach light along the horizon. In the stands of scrub oak and pine beyond the fields it was already night, the last light fading over the open ground. It was the time of day when his father had always come into the shed where he was putting up the mule, hanging up the harness; he’d turn and squint at the sun then look back at Dempsey, measuring one against the other. If he spat on the ground after looking, Dempsey had quit too early. If his father nodded or patted the mule’s dusty neck, it meant that the day’s work was done to the old man’s satisfaction and they could both go home and rest.

  18

  Ezekial Settles

  1980

  FROM HIS SEAT at the head of his mother’s casket, he can see the whole of Mt. Hebron Baptist Church. The tall windows he washed this morning; the worn oak pews; the deep-red carpet that runs along the center aisle from the pulpit through the open doors at the back and down the steps into the bright sunlight beyond. People move into the church out of the brightness and must stop to let their eyes adjust to the dim interior; the change is that drastic. The old people, especially, have to stand there for a while to get their bearings, and it’s mostly the old who have come to his mother’s home-g
oing, so there’s considerable delay and confusion at the back of the church. Then more confusion as the elders totter up the aisle and are met with the sight of Zeke Settles keeping watch beside a closed casket, and they have to stop again and shake their heads, to adjust their thinking. Behind him the choir rustles, a flock of satin birds.

  What they think doesn’t matter. What matters is that he promised his mother he’d go with her as far as he could go, and sitting beside her casket with his hand up under the spray of red roses, her favorite flower, is one way he’s keeping that promise. The closed casket is another; she hadn’t wanted to be stared at. He chose the pecan wood casket, the most expensive in Jackson’s salesroom, in honor of his mother’s love of pecans, the way she could crack two Gloria Grandes in one hand and slip the whole meat from the shell. From where he sits, he can see his wife Denise and their two girls, married women now with children of their own, looking back at him from the front pew. He watches Denise bring her thirty years of experience as a junior high school mathematics teacher to totaling the cost of casket and roses, and when she looks at him again, he sees she’s already at work on how they will pay for it, and he smiles at her gratefully.

  In the pew behind his family the Daughters of Zion fan themselves with square cardboard fans printed with a picture of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, beseeching his father to take the cup of suffering from him. They are dressed all in white, with red sashes across their chests, like the one his mother will wear into eternity, as she wanted. Some white people have come too, and they sit together halfway back on the left-hand side of the church. He checks the roses on the casket to make sure that none have wilted, and he looks up again to see the Aimars step in out of the light: Lewis, Libba, and a younger woman, Lewis’s daughter no doubt; she looks just like him. Of course they’re here, he thinks. They’d better be.