The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

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СКАЧАТЬ came to be burned, he said. The bitch of a hound had run oft. Some kind of grateful! When the next reporter came, he told the stories again. He could tell stories, Juke could. He could talk the hind legs off a donkey. And the reporters could listen. They were paid to listen. If they left with their pockets a little heavier, weighed down with jars of gin, it was just to make sure they listened right. None of the stories made it into the paper, and except for a quote here and there—“I reckon God saw that judgment was made”—Juke stayed out of the papers too. It was a tragedy, the papers said, a shame. But what could be done in a case like this?

      Only one paper, the Macon Testament, printed an editorial. It was also the only paper that used the word “lynch.” It was one of those big-city dailies. On Tuesday morning, after delivering her eggs, Elma was seen reading it at the crossroads store, hiding behind a tower of condensed milk.

      For three years, it seemed Reason had come to Georgia. The Klansman had been evicted from the Governor’s mansion, and lynching with him. Then, in January, Irwin County brought Georgia back to that dark era. Now that her record has been broken, why not trample on it? The tragedy in Irwin County will go down in history as truly barbaric, but at least the sheriff had a confession. Here we have nothing, no evidence but a bruised ego and brute justice.

      “Miss Elma? You all right, honey?”

      Mud Turner peeked around the tower of cans. Elma pressed the paper to her chest. Mud thought she was holding it funny, like her arm was broke.

      “Of course. I’ll be taking my flour, if you don’t mind.”

      At the checkers table on the porch of the store, Jeb Simmons and his son Jeb Junior sat hunched over the Testament. Elma looked like she was in a hurry, but Jeb got up to help lift her wagon down the step. “Don’t worry, Miss Elma,” he said. “Don’t nobody care for no city rag.”

      “Don’t nobody care for no opinionating,” said Jeb Junior. They called him Drink. That was what he liked to do.

      “That reporter show up round here, we’ll send him home directly.”

      But he’d already shown up. He was the reporter who’d shown up on Sunday. And not just a reporter—Q. L. Boothby, the editor and publisher himself. He was an important man in Macon. Head of the hospital board, the Masons, and a member, it was said, of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. (“Nigger-lover club,” it was said.) He came back to the big house again on Tuesday afternoon, after the editorial was out, and Juke, who’d brought home the paper himself and made Elma read it aloud, was ready, with Jeb and Drink and five or six other men, men who’d been there on Saturday night and men who wished they’d been. Q. L. Boothby didn’t make it to the porch. Elma had watched from the window as he backed down the steps, his hands half-raised in surrender, then got in his car and drove back to Macon.

      They hadn’t bought the Testament since Ocilla. If they had a nickel to spend, they spent it on the Messenger, whose editor had money in the mill, whose regular order of gin was as big as any in the county. But the end of January, a thousand folks in the next county had mobbed a colored man for raping and killing a teenage white girl. They said he cut out her eye with a knife and left her on the road to die, and when they found him, they tore him limb from limb, joint by joint, pulling out his teeth with pliers, before they strung him from a tree and burned him. Elma’s father had sent her to the store for all the papers the next day, and he’d had her read him every word. He couldn’t read but a handful of words himself, and never took to his daughter teaching him, or his wife before her. When Elma was done, he said, “To think I was just there on Tuesday. I coulda caught me quite a sight.”

      It was said that the chief of police kept the man’s skull on his desk as an ashtray. One of the little girls from Creek Baptist claimed she had visited his office with her friend, the police chief’s granddaughter, and he had let her hold it. She claimed she had a piece of it in her pocket, and all the children gathered round to see it, but it was just a pig knuckle in wax paper, and everyone was disappointed.

      It wasn’t a nod, Elma told herself. She had not nodded. She had lowered her head, then lifted it to find her father’s eye, then lowered it again. Lowered, lifted, lowered. A hesitation of the chin, no more. She had not given her permission. Her permission was not required. What was she to do to stop fifty men from carrying out what they were bent on carrying out?

      Freddie would have done it anyway, with or without Juke’s help, with or without Elma’s blessing—that was the way her daddy put it. Weren’t no stopping him, he said again and again, weren’t no stopping him, until she came to believe it as he seemed to. “You ain’t done no wrong,” he said, and that was all—they were not to speak of it. He didn’t mean that he, her father, was to blame. He meant to absolve both of them. There was no one to blame, because there had been no wrong. All the blame there was, and there wasn’t much, he tagged on Freddie. Elma didn’t know whether that had been his aim all along or whether he’d been lucky enough for Freddie to accept the blame before Juke could offer it. She didn’t know if, in private, her father saved any blame for himself, if he prayed to God outside of a church pew, if the body that swung in her nightmares swung in his too. She supposed she wouldn’t ever know. Genus was buried in the ground and her father was out in the field like it was any day of the week, for though it was July and laying-by time, there was ragweed to cuss at.

      Elma moved from room to room, sweeping the floors clean, across the breezeway, her elbows tucked to her sides. If she kept her head down, her chin lowered, if she didn’t look out the kitchen window, her eyes would not catch on the gourd tree. The gourd tree would not be there. And if she didn’t sing, no one could hear her. No one could say, What are you doing, Elma Jesup, singing like you don’t have a care in the world?

      In the first days, there was only brief mention of the babies, and usually the press got it wrong. One paper left out Winna; another said they were mulatto twins. It was only after one paper reported that the two babies born to Elma Jesup were of decidedly different complexions that the other papers sent their reporters back, and Juke came in from the fields to invite them inside. Now that their attention was off Genus Jackson, he didn’t mind being in the papers. The babies he almost seemed to be proud of. “Ain’t no use hiding them,” he said to Elma. “Might as well grab us ahold a some fame.” Besides, it was good for business. The reporters came thick as field mice, with their folding cameras and notepads, standing shoulder to shoulder on the porch steps, wanting to take a look at the twins. They aimed their cameras over the edge of the cradle. They left with more gin, paying Juke directly now, having gotten a taste for it. This would piss George Wilson off something good, but what did it matter now? Juke had already pissed George Wilson’s pants off.

      In the weeklies Juke brought home from the crossroads store, Wilson and Winnafred were the same inky gray, bound in blankets, sleeping. But the headlines spelled it out. The one in the Atlanta paper said, GEMINI TWINS BORN TO COTTON CO. WOMAN. Elma read the articles to Juke. After a while she got tired of the papers and made up stories. “There ain’t nothing about us in this one. It’s just about the price of corn.” Then Juke wanted to know more—what was it about the price of corn? “It’s fine,” Elma said. “It’s holding steady.”

      She swore off the papers, but in a few days she was dashing down to the crossroads store to read them again, searching for some mention of the children. She couldn’t tolerate the thought of them being talked about behind her back. It was like hearing her name whispered in church and not being able to tell who’d said it.

      First of August, Elma flinched at the word “lynch” СКАЧАТЬ