Ginny Gall полностью

“They was whores,” Bonette Collins said. He was a short, nearly square man, Little Wall by Wall he was called, a carpenter, he said, not even part of the group — if you could call them that — traveling out of Chattanooga. Billy thought of the families of these boys, the eight boys, how back home the word would go around the community — rape — of white women. The awfulest crime. Lengths of knotted manila rope rolled out from such accusations. We sit here among the dead. Two boys leaned on their hands, others had their hands on the table turned up like offerings, a couple clutched themselves in their arms; Walker patted one fist on top of the other. Everything for them was changed for good. They might as well have not gotten up, not drawn breath that morning. Back at home everybody would downface it. You couldn’t tell what the truth was. But he had found that juries seemed often able to choose between truth and falsehood. At least in the little trials for theft and robbery or threats or fraud. Except with negroes. Rarely did a negro get off. No matter how innocent he was. And now we have rape and murder — no, just rape. We’ll handle the murder.

He smiled at Davis Pullen, who was busily questioning Bonette as to where he was exactly at the time of the rapes.

“They have to establish a time for these occurrences,” Davis said. “We can refute em on that point. Anybody own a watch?” he said, and chuckled. Nobody did.

Harris listened without seeming to. He gazed around the room. These bleak, sullied rooms never bothered him. The facts in these cases were where the power was. The facts like stones set into a wall. The power in the wall and what was behind it, in the lives lived in the grease and stink of poverty pressing forward through time. The power was in the weight of these lives laid against the wall, and for him the subtraction of life breath by breath leading all the way back to the beginning of time, something more powerful than anything else he knew, a weight of reason and choices, a strength right now implacable from some toothless oldtimer long ago reaching out his hand for the piece of pre-masticated meat a child put into it, the look in the old man’s eyes meeting the look in the child’s eyes, and over there the breeze touching an old woman’s face, engendering an irresistible thought, and that man over there listening for the cry of a baby in the other room where his wife lay sick on a pallet on the floor, something hard and inescapable coming for him. He dismissed none of what he loved about these scenes, the million-year history of people roughed up and knocked down by the ones slightly stronger. He never talked about this, hardly brought it into his own mind, but he felt the weight of a righteousness laid against him, pressing into his days and into his sleep.

And, too, he was a man, wearing a suit snagged with a hook from a sidewalk wire outside a haberdasher’s on Orchard street, who wanted people to know who he was. And as the people he was hired to help wished they could do, he gathered influence like a golden grain.

The facts of the case, so these lawyers thought, were chits on a string, gaps here and there, adding up to not much. Delvin looked into their self-regarding, lurid faces, at the ructating misery that had not settled, sensing the complex lies they told themselves so they would not — so they thought — bring trouble down on their children, the way each was an official of this great empiric power they thought they were the checkers and refusers of, these freightless carriers and silly boys, these men with tickets, who would never suffer, or if they did, the suffering would be in passing, some condition or reversal that would consume a few days or years of their lives and then drop them and wander off in another direction. None of them lived in a state of fear or tyranny. He saw this, and as he saw he heard inside his head the voices saying that for these people Delvin and his compadres were only troublesome beasts caught momentarily in the chute. We are good-hearted and for fame and money we will get you cattle turned around the right way. Thank you, suh. But he was not cut off from his own heart by, or even from, his interceders, he was not yet disattached — that wasn’t the word — nor was he threaded through or aligned with them, none of that, he was only inseparable from the curiosity he felt looking at them, that was where the life was, his curiosity, and he knew this. What was it they were up to? Besides rattling along in their own peculiar version of a train ride?

It just wont right, was what they said in Red Row back in Chattanooga. That was closer to the truth of things than anything he could come up with.

Suddenly he was scared to death. His bowels loosened and he bent over, gripping himself.

“You all right, boy?” Pullen said.

“I got to go to the little house.”

“You can do that in a minute.”