Intruder in the Dust Page 5

  But tonight the street was empty. The very houses them­selves looked close and watchful and tense as though the people who lived in them, who on this soft May night (those who had not gone to church) would have been sitting on the dark galleries for a little while after supper in rocking chairs or porchswings, talking quietly among themselves or perhaps talking from gallery to gallery when the houses were close enough. But tonight they passed only one man and he was not walking but standing just inside the front gate to a small neat shoebox of a house built last year between two other houses already close enough together to hear one another’s toilets flush (his uncle had explained that: “When you were born and raised and lived all your life where you can’t hear anything but owls at night and roosters at dawn and on damp days when sound carries your nearest neighbor chopping wood two miles away, you like to live where you can hear and smell people on either side of you every time they flush a drain or open a can of salmon or of soup.”), himself darker than shadow and certainly stiller—a country man who had moved to town a year ago and now owned a small shabby side street grocery whose customers were mostly Ne­groes, whom they had not even seen until they were almost on him though he had already recognised them or at least his uncle some distance away and was waiting for them, already speaking to his uncle before they came abreast of him:

  “Little early, ain’t you. Lawyer? Them Beat Four folks have got to milk and then chop wood to cook breakfast tomorrow with before they can eat supper and get in to town.”

  “Maybe they’ll decide to stay at home on a Sunday night,” his uncle said pleasantly, passing on: whereupon the man said almost exactly what the man in the barbershop had said this morning (and he remembered his uncle saying once how little of vocabulary man really needed to get comfortably and even efficiently through his life, how not only in the individual but within his whole type and race and kind a few simple clichés served his few simple passions and needs and lusts):

  “Sho now. It ain’t their fault it’s Sunday. That sonofabitch ought to thought of that before he taken to killing white men on a Saturday afternoon.” Then he called after them as they went on, raising his voice: “My wife ain’t feeling good to­night, and besides I don’t want to stand around up there just looking at the front of that jail. But tell um to holler if they need help.”

  “I expect they know already they can depend on you. Mr. Lilley,” his uncle said. They went on. “You see?” his uncle said. “He has nothing against what he calls niggers. If you ask him, he will probably tell you he likes them even better than some white folks he knows and he will believe it. They are probably constantly beating him out of a few cents here and there in his store and probably even picking up things—packages of chewing gum or bluing or a banana or a can of sardines or a pair of shoelaces or a bottle of hair-straightener—under their coats and aprons and he knows it; he probably even gives them things free of charge—the bones and spoiled meat out of his butcher’s icebox and spoiled candy and lard. All he requires is that they act like niggers. Which is exactly what Lucas is doing: blew his top and murdered a white man—which Mr. Lilley is probably convinced all Negroes want to do—and now the white people will take him out and burn him. all regular and in order and themselves acting exactly as he is convinced Lucas would wish them to act: like white folks; both of them observing implicitly the rules: the nigger acting like a nigger and the white folks acting like white folks and no real hard feelings on either side (since Mr. Lilley is not a Gowrie) once the fury is over; in fact Mr. Lilley would probably be one of the first to contribute cash money toward Lucas’ funeral and the support of his widow and children if he had them. Which proves again how no man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.”

  Now they could see the Square, empty too—the amphitheatric lightless stores, the slender white pencil of the Con­federate monument against the mass of the courthouse looming in columned upsoar to the dim quadruple face of the clock lighted each by a single faint bulb with a quality as intransigent against their four fixed mechanical shouts of adjuration and warning as the glow of a firefly. Then, the jail and at that moment, with a flash and glare and wheel of lights and a roar of engine at once puny against the vast night and the empty town yet insolent too, a car rushed from nowhere and circled the Square; a voice, a young man’s voice squalled from it—no words, not even a shout: a squall signi­ficant and meaningless—and the car rushed on around the Square, completing the circle back to nowhere and died away. They turned in at the jail.

  It was of brick, square, proportioned, with four brick columns in shallow basrelief across the front and even a brick cornice under the eaves because it was old, built in a time when people took time to build even jails with grace and care and he remembered how his uncle had said once that not courthouses nor even churches but jails were the true record of a county’s, a community’s history, since not only the cryptic forgotten initials and words and even phrases cries of defiance and indictment scratched into the walls but the very bricks and stones themselves held, not in solution but in suspension, intact and biding and potent and indestructible, the agonies and shames and griefs with which hearts long since unmarked and unremembered dust had strained and per­haps burst. Which was certainly true of this one because it and one of the churches were the oldest buildings in the town, the courthouse and everything else on or in the Square having been burned to rubble by Federal occupation forces after a battle in 1864. Because scratched into one of the panes of the fanlight beside the door was a young girl’s single name, written by her own hand into the glass with a diamond in that same year and sometimes two or three times a year he would go up onto the gallery to look at it, it cryptic now in reverse, not for a sense of the past but to realise again the eternality, the deathlessness and changelessness of youth—the name of one of the daughters of the jailer of that time (and his uncle who had for everything an explanation not in facts but long since beyond dry statistics into something far more moving because it was truth: which moved the heart and had nothing whatever to do with what mere provable information said, had told him this too: how this part of Mississippi was new then, as a town a settlement a com­munity less than fifty years old, and all the men who had come into it less long ago almost than even the oldest’s life­time were working together to secure it, doing the base jobs along with the splendid ones not for pay or politics but to shape a land for their posterity, so that a man could be the jailer then or the innkeeper or farrier or vegetable peddler yet still be what the lawyer and planter and doctor and par­son called a gentleman) who stood at that window that after­noon and watched the battered remnant of a Confederate brigade retreat through the town, meeting suddenly across that space the eyes of the ragged unshaven lieutenant who led one of the broken companies scratching into the glass not his name also, not only because a young girl of that time would never have done that but because she didn’t know his name then, let alone that six months later he would be her husband.

  In fact it still looked like a residence with its balustraded wooden gallery stretching across the front of the lower floor. But above that the brick wall was windowless except for the single tall crossbarred rectangle and he thought again of the Sunday nights which seemed now to belong to a time as dead as Nineveh when from suppertime until the jailer turned the lights out and yelled up the stairs for them to shut up, the dark limber hands would lie in the grimed interstices while the mellow untroubled repentless voices would shout down to the women in the aprons of cooks or nurses and the girls in their flash cheap clothes from the mail order houses or the other young men who had not been caught yet or had been caught and freed yesterday, gathered along the street. But not tonight and even the room behind it was dark though it was not yet eight oclock and he could see, imagine them not huddled perhaps but certainly all together, within elbow’s touch whether they were actually touching or not and cer­tainly quiet, not laughing tonight nor talking either, sitting in the dark
and watching the top of the stairs because this would not be the first time when to mobs of white men not only all black cats were gray but they didn’t always bother to count them either.

  And the front door was open, standing wide to the street which he had never seen before even in summer although the ground floor was the jailer’s living quarters, and tilted in a chair against the back wall so that he faced the door in full sight of the street, was a man who was not the jailer nor even one of the sheriffs deputies either. Because he had recognised him too: Will Legate, who lived on a small farm two miles from town and was one of the best woodsmen, the finest shot and the best deer-hunter in the county, sitting in the tilted chair holding the colored comic section of today’s Memphis paper, with leaning against the wall beside him not the hand-worn rifle with which he had killed more deer (and even running rabbits with it) than even he remembered but a double barrelled shotgun, who apparently without even lowering or moving the paper had already seen and recog­nised them even before they turned in at the gate and was now watching them steadily as they came up the walk and mounted the steps and crossed the gallery and entered: at which moment the jailer himself emerged from a door to the right—a snuffy untidy potbellied man with a harried con­cerned outraged face, wearing a heavy pistol bolstered onto a cartridge belt around his waist which looked as uncomfort­able and out of place as a silk hat or a fifth-century iron slavecollar, who shut the door behind him, already crying at his uncle:

  “He wont even shut and lock the front door! Just setting there with that durn funny paper waiting for anybody that wants to walk right in!”

  “I’m doing what Mr. Hampton told me to,” Legate said in his pleasant equable voice.

  “Does Hampton think that funny paper’s going to stop them folks from Beat Four?” the jailer cried.

  “I dont think he’s worrying about Beat Four yet,” Legate said still pleasantly and equably. “This here’s just for local consumption now.”

  His uncle glanced at Legate. “It seems to have worked. We saw the car—or one of them—make one trip around the Square as we came up. I suppose it’s been by here too.”

  “Oh, once or twice,” Legate said. “Maybe three times. I really aint paid much mind.”

  “And I hope to hell it keeps on working,” the jailer said. “Because you sure aint going to stop anybody with just that one britch-loader.”

  “Sure,” Legate said. “I dont expect to stop them. If enough folks get their minds made up and keep them made up, aint anything likely to stop them from what they think they want to do. But then, I got you and that pistol to help me.”

  “Me?” the jailer cried. “Me get in the way of them Gowries and Ingrums for seventy-five dollars a month? Just for one nigger? And if you aint a fool, you wont neither.”

  “Oh I got to,” Legate said in his easy pleasant voice. “I got to resist. Mr. Hampton’s paying me five dollars for it.” Then to his uncle: “I reckon you want to see him.”

  “Yes,” his uncle said. “If it’s all right with Mr. Tubbs.”

  The jailer stared at his uncle, irate and harried. “So you got to get mixed up in it too. You can’t let well enough alone neither.” He turned abruptly. “Come on:” and led the way through the door beside which Legate’s chair was tilted, into the back hall where the stairway rose to the upper floor, snapping on the light switch at the foot of the stairs and began to mount them, his uncle then he following while he watched the hunch and sag of the holster at the jailer’s hip. Suddenly the jailer seemed about to stop; even his uncle thought so, stopping too but the jailer went on, speaking over his shoulder: “Dont mind me. I’m going to do the best I can; I taken an oath of office too.” His voice rose a little, still calm, just louder: “But dont think nobody’s going to make me admit I like it. I got a wife and two children; what good am I going to be to them if I get myself killed protecting a goddamn stinking nigger?” His voice rose again; it was not calm now: “And how am I going to live with myself if I let a passel of nogood sonabitches take a prisoner away from me?” Now he stopped and turned on the step above them, higher than both, his face once more harried and frantic, his voice frantic and outraged: “Better for everybody if them folks had took him as soon as they laid hands on him yes­terday—”

  “But they didn’t,” his uncle said. “I dont think they will. And if they do, it wont really matter. They either will or they wont and if they dont it will be all right and if they do we will do the best we can, you and Mr. Hampton and Legate and the rest of us, what we have to do, what we can do. So we dont need to worry about it. You see?”

  “Yes,” the jailer said. Then he turned and went on, unsnapping his keyring from his belt under the pistol belt, to the heavy oak door which closed off the top of the stairs (It was one solid handhewn piece over two inches thick, locked with a heavy modern padlock in a handwrought iron bar through two iron slots which like the heavy risette-shaped hinges were handwrought too, hammered out over a hundred years ago in the blacksmith shop across the street where he had stood yesterday; one day last summer a stranger, a city man, an architect who reminded him somehow of his uncle, hatless and tieless, in tennis shoes and a pair of worn flannel trousers and what was left of a case of champagne in a convertible-top car which must have cost three thousand dol­lars, driving not through town but into it, not hurting anyone but just driving the car up onto the pavement and across it through a plate glass window, quite drunk, quite cheerful, with less than fifty cents in cash in his pocket but all sorts of identification cards and a check folder whose stubs showed a balance in a New York bank of over six thousand dollars, who insisted on being put in jail even though the marshal and the owner of the window both were just trying to per­suade him to go to the hotel and sleep it off so he could write a check for the window and the wall: until the marshal finally put him in jail where he went to sleep at once like a baby and the garage sent for the car and the next morning the jailer telephoned the marshal at five oclock to come and get the man out because he had waked the whole household up talking from his cell across to the niggers in the bullpen. So the marshal came and made him leave and then he wanted to go out with the street gang to work and they wouldn’t let him do that and his car was ready too but he still wouldn’t leave, at the hotel that night and two nights later his uncle even brought him to supper, where he and his uncle talked for three hours about Europe and Paris and Vienna and he and his mother listening too though his father had excused himself: and still there two days after that, still trying from his uncle and the mayor and the board of aldermen and at last the board of supervisors themselves to buy the whole door or if they wouldn’t sell that, at least the bar and slots and the hinges.) and unlocked it and swung it back.

  But already they had passed out of the world of man, men: people who worked and had homes and raised families and tried to make a little more money than they perhaps deserved by fair means of course or at least by legal, to spend a little on fun and still save something against old age. Because even as the oak door swung back there seemed to rush out and down at him the stale breath of all human degradation and shame—a smell of creosote and excrement and stale vomit and incorrigibility and defiance and repudiation like some­thing palpable against the thrust and lift of their bodies as they mounted the last steps and into a passage which was actually a part of the main room, the bullpen, cut off from the rest of the room by a wall of wire mesh like a chicken run or a dog-kennel, inside which in tiered bunks against the farther wall lay five Negroes, motionless, their eyes closed but no sound of snoring, no sound of any sort, lying there immobile orderly and composed under the dusty glare of the single shadeless bulb as if they had been embalmed, the jailer stopping again, his own hands gripped into the mesh while he glared at the motionless shapes. “Look at them,” the jailer said in that voice too loud, too thin, just under hysteria: “Peaceful as lambs but aint a damned one of them asleep. And I dont blame them, with a mob of white men boiling in here at midnight with pis
tols and cans of gasoline.—Come on,” he said and turned and went on. Just beyond there was a door in the mesh, not padlocked but just hooked with a hasp and staple such as you might see on a dog-kennel or a corn crib but the jailer passed it.

  “You put him in the cell, did you?” his uncle said.

  “Hampton’s orders,” the jailer said over his shoulder. “I dont know what the next white man that figgers he can rest good until he kills somebody is going to think about it. I taken all the blankets off the cot though.”

  “Maybe because he wont be here long enough to have to go to sleep?” his uncle said.

  “Ha ha,” the jailer said in that strained high harsh voice without mirth: “Ha ha ha ha:” and following behind his uncle he thought how of all human pursuits murder has the most deadly need of privacy; how man will go to almost any lengths to preserve the solitude in which he evacuates or makes love but he will go to any length for that in which he takes life, even to homicide, yet by no act can he more completely and irrevocably destroy it: a modern steel barred door this time with a built-in lock as large as a woman’s handbag which the jailer unlocked with another key on the ring and then turned, the sound of his feet almost as rapid as running back down the corridor until the sound of the oak door at the head of the stairs cut them off, and beyond it the cell lighted by another single dim dusty flyspecked bulb be­hind a wire screen cupped to the ceiling, not much larger than a broom closet and in fact just wide enough for the double bunk against the wall, from both beds of which not just the blankets but the mattresses too had been stripped, he and his uncle entering and still all he saw yet was the first thing he had seen: the hat and the black coat hanging neatly from a nail in the wall: and he would remember after­ward how he thought in a gasp, a surge of relief: They’ve already got him. He’s gone. It’s too late. It’s already over now. Because he didn’t know what he had expected, except that it was not this: a careful spread of newspaper covering neatly the naked springs of the lower cot and another section as carefully placed on the upper one so it would shield his eyes from the light and Lucas himself lying on the spread papers, asleep, on his back, his head pillowed on one of his shoes and his hands folded on his breast, quite peacefully or as peacefully as old people sleep, his mouth open and breath­ing in faint shallow jerky gasps; and he stood in an almost unbearable surge not merely of outrage but of rage, looking down at the face which for the first time, defenceless at last for a moment, revealed its age, and the lax gnarled old man’s hands which only yesterday had sent a bullet into the back of another human being, lying still and peaceful on the bosom of the old-fashioned collarless boiled white shirt closed at the neck with the oxidising brass button shaped like an ‘ arrow and almost as large as the head of a small snake, thinking: He’s just a nigger after all for all his high nose and his stiff neck and his gold watch-chain and refusing to mean mister to anybody even when he says it. Only a nigger could kill a man, let alone shoot him in the back, and then sleep like a baby as soon as he found something flat enough to lie down on; still looking at him when without moving otherwise Lucas closed his mouth and his eyelids opened, the eyes staring up for another second, then still without the head moving at all the eyeballs turned until Lucas was looking straight at his uncle but still not moving: just lying there looking at him.