They had to put all of them on the stand, there was no way around it. Every dogged man has to have his day. Even Coover Broadfoot who offended everybody with his uppity manner and his buckteeth and his twitchy way and question asking. What was that and what do you mean by that and I wish you could tell me, he said to the judge, exactly what they mean by that. The judge looked at him like somehow a big black creepycrawler had gotten into his witness chair and he wanted to reach over the high desk of righteousness and swat this idiotic fool right back to Africa, but all he said was Take your time there, boy, and get it just as right as you can. The judge was free to ask questions and he did, questions that generally made it hard for anybody to wonder which side he was on, but he didn’t really care, he knew what had to be done here and the truth was just whatever got dug deepest into, it didn’t matter what the lawyers or the witnesses or even the parties concerned thought. Dig deep enough and everybody was guilty. Only the law kept them all out of jail.
Well, boy, he said, you just let yourself settle down. Have a drink of water (from the glass with a little piece of paper gummed to it with the word COLORED printed in ink on it) and then sit back in that chair and take a deep breath, take two, and go on with your story.
That was what Broadfoot did, stuttering and biting his words, hurling the undeniable — so he appeared to think — facts around the room, into the faces of the jury made up of white men who wouldn’t have allowed him to set foot in their yards even if he offered to rake up all the pine straw for nothing. It was em white boys, he said, who jumped on em girls. If any colored boy got on em they’s way back in the line and it be purely because those women called em to do it. I wadn’t even close to any of that. I got a gal back in Eubanks, Tennessee, that I plan to marry as soon as I can get back to her. I wouldn’t have no other woman and I certainly wouldn’t want no white woman.
He went on and on placing himself and several others outside the range of these occurrences, sorting through the names and the events with the skill of one whose intelligence pressed him from all sides, sneering as he did so and panting and staring the jury in the face like he dared them not to believe him, dared them even to think he was guilty. By the time he got off the stand the jury, all twelve of the men who had never seen this young man before the trial, were happy they were not going to see him again after it was over.
And so it went.
Delvin, his turn come upon him, rose from his seat with his coarse white and blue jail trousers (he’d gone back to wearing the issue) sweat-sticking to his butt and the backs of his legs, swaying nearly to a faint, but able still, rising as man or creature swum continually for miles might rise from the depths of the swamp of being, gasping and looking wild-eyed around the place that was filled with townsfolk and reporters and maybe one or two people who had known him before this calamity flew upon him, or were drawn to him by his own behavior (he pondered this daily and hadn’t yet decided; some blamed him outright, Rollie Gregory among them). Was that the Ghost up in the balcony? The professor? Was that Celia? He stopped in his tracks, experiencing for only the second or third time in his life the sensation of his heart catching fire. His mind went blank. The four tall windows looked like paintings filled with blue. No black man with blue eyes. No Celia either. For a second he didn’t know where he was. He came to himself walking to the big wooden witness chair, a copy a guard had told him of the electric chair at Markusville. The judge was looking at him as if he knew him well and was sick and tired of his face. He could hear breathing behind him. It sounded like the bellows in the blacksmith shop over on Florida street in Chattanooga. He would never see that place again. His body felt brittle, waffled through by termites and other hurtbugs until he was eaten with holes and corridors and little bug byways and all dried up. He could hear himself creak as he sat down, or was that the chair about to collapse under him?
Pullen with an insubstantial flourish introduced him to the assembled and left him to himself. If Pullen didn’t ask questions or direct him, then the prosecution couldn’t either. He was alone with what he knew to be so.
