A Train of Powder (17 page)

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 defence 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 back to 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 defence 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 round 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 smiling shyly, but in their eyes was a terrible light. They had been confirmed in their knowledge that they were the chosen vessels of the Lord. Later Mr. Hurd, asked for a statement, 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. They must have been enormously strengthened in this persuasion by the approval of Mr. Culbertson, who, as soon as the judge had left court, had leaped like a goat from chair to table and from table to chair, the sooner to wring the hands of his clients. Oddly, Mr. Ashmore, the prosecuting attorney, was also busy shaking hands with some defendants, with the rallying smile of a schoolmaster, and saying, “Now you must behave yourself,” and “See you stay out of trouble.” Clark had now produced his camera and flashbulb and was standing on a chair, taking photographs of the celebrations. The defendants were delighted and jumped up on chairs to pose for him, their friends standing below them and waving and smiling towards the camera, so that they could share in the glory. In these pictorial revels Mr. Culbertson was well to the fore. First he posed with the Hurds. Then he formed part of a group that neither Greenville nor the CIO could greatly enjoy if they should see it in
Life.
On a chair stood Fat Joy, bulging and swelling with pleasure, and on his right stood the bondsman and on his left Mr. Culbertson, baring their teeth in ice-cold geniality, and each laying one hard hand on the boy’s soft bulk and raising the other as if to lead a cheer. It was unlikely that Mr. Culbertson was unaware of the cynical expression on Clark’s face, and he knew perfectly well what other members of the press were thinking of him. But he did not care.
Life
is a national weekly. Mr. Culbertson does not want to be a national figure. He means to be a highly successful local figure. My future, he was plainly saying to himself, is in Greenville, and this is good enough for Greenville, so let’s go. It will be astonishing if he is right. At that, he was a more admirable figure than Mr. Wofford, however, because at least his credo had brought him out into the open, standing alongside the people whose fees he had taken and whose cause he had defended. But on hearing the verdict Mr. Wofford, who possibly has an intention of becoming a national figure, had vanished with the speed of light and was doubtless by this time at some convenient distance, wiping his mouth and saying, “Lord, I did not eat.”

There could be no more pathetic scene than these taxi drivers and their wives, the deprived children of difficult history, who were rejoicing at a salvation that was actually a deliverance to danger. For an hour or two the trial had built up in them that sense of law which is as necessary to man as bread and water and a roof. They had known killing for what it is: a hideousness that begets hideousness. They had seen that the most generous impulse, not subjected to the law, may engender a shameful deed. For indeed they were sick at heart when what had happened at the slaughter pen was described in open court. But they had been saved from the electric chair and from prison by men who had conducted their defence without taking a minute off to state or imply that even if a man is a murderer one must not murder him and that murder is foul. These people had been plunged back into chaos. They had been given by men whom they naïvely trusted the most wildly false ideas of what conduct the community will tolerate. Not only had they, along with everyone else, been encouraged to use the knife and the gun in ways that may get them into trouble—for it is absurd to think Greenville is really a place whose tolerance of disorder is unlimited—but they had been exposed to a greater danger of having the knife and the gun used on them. The kind of assault by which Mr. Brown died was likely to be encouraged by the atmosphere that now hung over Greenville. It seemed that these wretched people had been utterly betrayed.

It was impossible to watch this scene of delirium, which had been conjured up by a mixture of clownishness, ambition, and sullen malice, without feeling a desire for action. Supposing that one lived in a town, decent but tragic, which had been trodden into the dust and had risen again, and that there were men in that town who threatened every force in that town which raised it up and encouraged every force which dragged it back into the dust; then lynching would be a joy. It would be, indeed, a very great delight to go through the night to the home of such a man, with a few loyal friends, and walk in so softly that he was surprised and say to him, “You meant to have your secret bands to steal in on your friends and take them out into the darkness, but it is not right that you should murder what we love without paying the price, and the law is not punishing you as it should.” And when we had driven him to some place where we would not be disturbed, we would make him confess his treacheries and the ruses by which he had turned the people’s misfortunes to his profit. It would be only right that he should purge himself of his sins. Then we would kill him, but not quickly, for there would be no reason that a man who had caused such pain should himself be allowed to flee quickly to the shelter of death. The program would have seemed superb had it not been for two decent Greenville people, a man and a woman, who stopped by the press desk as they went out of the courtroom and spoke, because they were so miserable that they had to speak to someone. “This is only the beginning,” the man said. “It is like a fever,” said the woman, tears standing in her eyes behind her glasses. “It spreads, it’s an infection, it’s just like a fever.” They were in a sense right. For several odd things happened during the next few days. Irrational events breed irrational events. The next day a Negro porter at the parking place of a resort hotel near Greenville was seen to insult white guests as no white hotel employee would have dared. The news of the acquittal created a nervous tension which made the more sensitive Negroes not know what they were doing. For some weeks, all over the South, hysterical people, white and coloured, made trouble for themselves and each other by bizarre behaviour, showing abandonment to panic before imaginary provocation, by hallucinated aggression.

But that man and woman were wrong. The lynching trial in South Carolina and its sequels were a symptom of an abating disease. The history of the acquitted men during the following year shows how the germ was failing. Some of them were happy, and had no history; and Mr. John Marchant appears in the records only as serving the graces of life as an usher at two weddings. Six saw trouble. But it is worth while noting the kind of trouble it was. One was charged with transporting moonshine whisky. Two more were sent to a federal penitentiary for violating terms of probation. Another attacked a female friend and tried to cut his throat when he was arrested. Another was obliged to ask the police for permission to carry a gun because his life had been threatened. But only one was accused of an offence against coloured people. He had fired a gun into an automobile filled with Negroes. Nobody was hit, and it is possible that it was only a boorish joke, though the Negroes must have seen it in a different light. He was fined a hundred dollars, which in view of his particular circumstances was severe enough and probably less to his taste than a sentence of imprisonment. But he was cultivating an obsolescent interest. There was a strange and dramatic tempo to be felt at the Greenville trial; wickedness itself had been aware of the slowing of its pulse. The will of the South had made its decision, and by 1954 three years had gone by without a lynching in the United States.

Greenhouse with Cyclamens II (1949)

1

Often people said, “You must have met some very interesting people when you went to the Nuremberg trial.” Yes indeed. There had been a man with one leg and a child of twelve, growing enormous cyclamens in a greenhouse, and miraculously selling them in a country where there was no trade save a dreary public victualage and barter of the soiled and worn. Since then they had taken over the whole of Western Germany. Even here in Hamburg, a city which had seemed dead as a gutted animal after the war, trade of a dogged kind was achieving a prodigious growth.

This was partly the work of the Allies: of the unacknowledged great, such as a mining engineer from Doncaster named Harry Collins, now Production Director on the Durham Division of the National Coal Board, who performed one of the great administrative feats in history by going into the ruined Ruhr and feeding the starving miners and improvising housing and putting the heart into them to get the coal out of the ground; of the officials who pushed through the currency reform of 1948, which was launched by the British and the Americans and the French with a true regard for German interests, in opposition to the Soviet Union. But the essential factor was the itch to industry, the lech for work, that forced the Germans to make things and sell them, that kept the one-legged man hobbling and twisting between his wood furnace and his greenhouse.

To visitors from abroad the spectacle of this renaissance was sometimes quite repellent. Their repulsion was almost entirely unjust, yet it was inevitable. Hamburg presented a deplorable spectacle from the altruistic point of view to which Great Britain was by then deeply committed. Except for the fringe of houses round the harbour and the great lake of the Alster, the city was waste land. All round it was scar tissue, more repellent than similar damage in the City of London or Plymouth or Hull or Bristol, not only because the damage was greater here but because the area was desolate but not depopulated. It was teeming with tired and dusty people, raffish from lack of privacy, who were still living in cellars and air-raid shelters four years after the end of the war, and had plainly not yet got out of the war. They looked as if they had not heard that there yet is peace, because there was so much bad news round them that they had no time to listen to good news. Many of them looked hungry and were hungry. The meals that were eaten off old doors and packing cases in the air-raid shelters were pitiable. A number of them had not the money to buy even the rationed foods.