That was a kind of open railroad car, Harris knew, a barrel cut lengthwise and soldered open side up onto a frame, called a gondola. He had represented tramps and itinerants, connivers and confidence men, the beat down and humbled — and the beat and unhumbled — the working men whose particular plight he was touched by and whose coming rise he believed in or at least hoped for as most favorable to his own needs, a sometime house lawyer for the WOW and the
“I caught up with him in the fight that ensued,” Delvin said evenly.
“Okay, fellows,” Harris said. Three of the men or boys had started picking at each other. “Walker. All right, son.”
He began to ask the necessary useless questions about the fight.
“It was like a gladiatorial combat,” Delvin said. “Us in a ring with those white boys snarling at us.”
“A ring?”
“The boxcar. It was right next door.”
“So you fought — how many was it?”
“A dozen, fifteen.”
“And you held your own.”
“Held it and pushed back with it.”
He had teeth so white they seemed made of some substance other than enamel. Made from whiteness itself, Harris thought. “The fight was quite like a contest,” he said.
“Yessuh. Except it was just more of the same from those white boys.”
“In what way?”
“They always been throwing colored folks off the trains,” Butter Beecham piped up. “Can you use that against em?”
“They have thrown you off the trains before?”
“They always do that.”
“Yeah, yessir, you bet,” someone else cried, and for a few minutes there was a clamor as the boys expressed their outrage at the treatment from the whites, something scared and wheedling, something like a stark rage, underneath, just a rumor of it, unexpressed. Delvin remained silent.
When they got the boys quieted down Davis Pullen asked Delvin, “Did you know any of those white boys?”
“No. But they all got a tendency — or most of them do.”
“What is that?” Davis asked, but he knew the answer. Some darky complaint. They were always fussing.
This question would not be settled here, Harris thought. Might as well not bring it up. “What we need to stick close to here,” he said, “is the facts of the situation.”
“We held our own against them,” another boy said. A man actually, Coover Broadfoot also a partly educated man, the other negro who knew what was going on here.
“And then some,” somebody else said.
Harris’s assistant Sid Krim sat in a chair a few paces back from the table, taking notes. So silent, so perfect, no one even noticed him. Before bedtime tonight he would have a record typed up by one of the stenographers Gammon had hired from the capital. He would not get the slang right, or even what some of the boys considered proper english.
“They are saying you raped these women,” Billy Gammon said.
Several of the black boys laughed. Bony Bates began to cry. Delvin Walker looked scared and angry.
“They always
“Were any of you close enough to those women to cause a problem?” In front of Harris, Billy didn’t quite know how to phrase it.
“Problem?” Rollie Gregory said. He was older, a slow-moving, hefty man from an apple farm outside Chattanooga, he’d said. Orchard, wasn’t it — not farm? “Problem?”
“Did any of you have sexual knowledge of this. . of these two women?” and he gave their names.
“I don’t under—”
“Did you jelly em, boy?” Pullen said.
Gregory looked abashed, sick even.
“Lord, no.”
But some of the other boys had, or they might have, it wasn’t clear — might have taken a roll, paid for or offered free. They all denied it, though that young boy Arthur Bates, Bony, fourteen or fifteen, he looked sick about something. Probably he had gone with one of the women. But raped them?
“These women say you forced them.”
“You mean like tied em up?”
Rollie Gregory giggled. “They too hincty for that,” he said.
Gammon ignored him.
“Force can be that, yes,” Pullen said, “but it can also be threats. Menacing looks. Expectation of harm on the woman’s part.”
