Native Son

  Bigger heard Max’s last words ring out in the court room. When Max sat down he saw that his eyes were tired and sunken. He could hear his breath coming and going heavily. He had not understood the speech, but he had felt the meaning of some of it from the tone of Max’s voice. Suddenly he felt that his life was not worth the effort that Max had made to save it. The judge rapped with the gavel, calling a recess. The court was full of noise as Bigger rose. The policemen marched him to a small room and stood waiting, on guard. Max came and sat beside him, silent, his head bowed. A policeman brought a tray of food and set it on the table.

  “Eat, son,” Max said.

  “I ain’t hungry.”

  “I did the best I could,” Max said.

  “I’m all right,” Bigger said.

  Bigger was not at that moment really bothered about whether Max’s speech had saved his life or not. He was hugging the proud thought that Max had made the speech all for him, to save his life. It was not the meaning of the speech that gave him pride, but the mere act of it. That in itself was something. The food on the tray grew cold. Through a partly opened window Bigger heard the rumbling voice of the mob. Soon he would go back and hear what Buckley would say. Then it would all be over, save for what the judge would say. And when the judge spoke he would know if he was to live or die. He leaned his head on his hands and closed his eyes. He heard Max stand up, strike a match and light a cigarette.

  “Here; take a smoke, Bigger.”

  He took one and Max held the flame; he sucked the smoke deep into his lungs and discovered that he did not want it. He held the cigarette in his fingers and the smoke curled up past his bloodshot eyes. He jerked his head when the door opened; a policeman looked in.

  “Court’s opening in two minutes!”

  “All right,” Max said.

  Flanked again by policemen, Bigger went back to court. He rose when the judge came and then sat again.

  “The Court will hear the State,” the judge said.

  Bigger turned his head and saw Buckley rise. He was dressed in a black suit and there was a tiny pink flower in the lapel of his coat. The man’s very look and bearing, so grimly assured, made Bigger feel that he was already lost. What chance had he against a man like that? Buckley licked his lips and looked out over the crowd; then he turned to the judge.

  “Your Honor, we all dwell in a land of living law. Law embodies the will of the people. As an agent and servant of the law, as a representative of the organized will of the people, I am here to see that the will of the people is executed firmly and without delay. I intend to stand here and see that that is done, and if it is not done, then it will be only over my most solemn and emphatic protest.

  “As a prosecuting officer of the State of Illinois, I come before this honorable Court to urge that the full extent of the law, the death penalty—the only penalty of the law that is feared by murderers!—be allowed to take its course in this most important case.

  “I urge this for the protection of our society, our homes and our loved ones. I urge this in the performance of my sworn duty to see, in so far as I am humanly capable, that the administration of law is just, that the safety and sacredness of human life are maintained, that the social order is kept intact, and that crime is prevented and punished. I have no interest or feeling in this case beyond the performance of this sworn duty.

  “I represent the families of Mary Dalton and Bessie Mears and a hundred million law-abiding men and women of this nation who are laboring in duty or industry. I represent the forces which allow the arts and sciences to flourish in freedom and peace, thereby enriching the lives of us all.

  “I shall not lower the dignity of this Court, nor the righteousness of the People’s cause, by attempting to answer the silly, alien, communistic and dangerous ideas advanced by the defense. And I know of no better way to discourage such thinking than the imposition of the death penalty upon this miserable human fiend, Bigger Thomas!

  “My voice may sound harsh when I say: Impose the death penalty and let the law take its course in spite of the specious call for sympathy! But I am really merciful and sympathetic, because the enforcement of this law in its most drastic form will enable millions of honest men and women to sleep in peace tonight, to know that tomorrow will not bring the black shadow of death over their homes and lives!

  “My voice may sound vindictive when I say: Make the defendant pay the highest penalty for his crimes! But what I am really saying is that the law is sweet when it is enforced and protects a million worthy careers, when it shields the infant, the aged, the helpless, the blind and the sensitive from the ravishing of men who know no law, no self-control, and no sense of reason.

  “My voice may sound cruel when I say: The defendant merits the death penalty for his self-confessed crimes! But what I am really saying is that the law is strong and gracious enough to allow all of us to sit here in this court room today and try this case with dispassionate interest, and not tremble with fear that at this very moment some half-human black ape may be climbing through the windows of our homes to rape, murder, and burn our daughters!

  “Your Honor, I say that the law is holy; that it is the foundation of all our cherished values. It permits us to take for granted the sense of the worth of our persons and turn our energies to higher and nobler ends.

  “Man stepped forward from the kingdom of the beast the moment he felt that he could think and feel in security, knowing that sacred law had taken the place of his gun and knife.

  “I say that the law is holy because it makes us human! And woe to the men—and the civilization of those men!—who, in misguided sympathy or fear, weaken the stout structure of the law which insures the harmonious working of our lives on this earth.

  “Your Honor, I regret that the defense has raised the viperous issue of race and class hate in this trial. I sympathize with those whose hearts were pained, as mine was pained, when Mr. Max so cynically assailed our sacred customs. I pity this man’s deluded and diseased mind. It is a sad day for American civilization when a white man will try to stay the hand of justice from a bestial monstrosity who has ravished and struck down one of the finest and most delicate flowers of our womanhood.

  “Every decent white man in America ought to swoon with joy for the opportunity to crush with his heel the woolly head of this black lizard, to keep him from scuttling on his belly farther over the earth and spitting forth his venom of death!

  “Your Honor, literally I shrink from the mere recital of this dastardly crime. I cannot speak of it without feeling somehow contaminated by the mere telling of it. A bloody crime has that power! It is that steeped and dyed with repellent contagion!

  “A wealthy, kindly disposed white man, a resident of Chicago for more than forty years, sends to the relief agency for a Negro boy to act as chauffeur to his family. The man specifies in his request that he wants a boy who is handicapped either by race, poverty, or family responsibility. The relief authorities search through their records and select the Negro family which they think merits such aid: that family was the Thomas family, living then as now at 3721 Indiana Avenue. A social worker visits the family and informs the mother that the family is to be taken off the relief rolls and her son placed in private employment. The mother, a hard-working Christian woman, consents. In due time the relief authorities send a notification to the oldest son of the family, Bigger Thomas, this black mad dog who sits here today, telling him that he must report for work.

  “What was the reaction of this sly thug when he learned that he had an opportunity to support himself, his mother, his little sister and his little brother? Was he grateful? Was he glad that he was having something offered to him that ten million men in America would have fallen on their knees and thanked God for?

  “No! He cursed his mother! He said that he did not want to work! He wanted to loaf about the streets, steal from newsstands, rob stores, meddle with women, frequent dives, attend cheap movies, and chase prostitutes! That was the reaction of this
subhuman killer when he was confronted with the Christian kindness of a man he had never seen!

  “His mother prevailed upon him, pled with him; but the plight of his mother, worn out from a life of toil, had no effect upon this hardened black thing. The future of his sister, an adolescent school girl, meant nothing to him. The fact that the job would have enabled his brother to return to school was not enticing to Bigger Thomas.

  “But, suddenly, after three days of persuasion by his mother, he consented. Had any of her arguments reached him at long last? Had he begun to feel his duty toward himself and his family? No! Those were not the considerations that drove this rapacious beast from his den into the open! He consented only when his mother informed him that the relief would cut off their supply of food if he did not accept. He agreed to go to work, but forbade his mother to speak to him within the confines of the home, so outraged was he that he had to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. It was hunger that drove him out, sullen, angry, still longing to stay upon the streets and steal as he had done before, and for which he had once landed in a reform school.

  “The counsel for the defendant, with characteristic Communistic cunning, boasted that I could not supply a motive for the crimes of this beast. Well, Your Honor, I shall disappoint him, for I shall divulge the motive.

  “On the very day that Bigger Thomas was to report to the Dalton home for work, he saw a newsreel in a movie. This newsreel showed Mary Dalton in a bathing suit upon a Florida beach. Jack Harding, a friend of Bigger Thomas, under persistent questioning, admitted that Bigger Thomas was enthralled by the idea of driving such a girl around the city. Let us be frank and not gloss over words. This Court has already heard of the obnoxious sexual perversions practiced by these boys in darkened theatres. Though Jack Harding would not admit it outright, we got enough information out of him to know that when the shadow of Mary Dalton was moving upon that screen those boys indulged in such an act! It was then that the idea of rape, murder, and ransom entered the mind of this moron! There is your motive and the vile circumstances under which it was conceived!

  “After seeing that movie, he went to the Dalton home. He was welcomed there with lavish kindness. He was given a room; he was told that he would receive extra money for himself, over and above his weekly wages. He was fed. He was asked if he wanted to go back to school and learn a trade. But he refused. His mind and heart—if this beast can be said to have a mind and a heart!—were not set upon any such goals.

  “Less than an hour after he had been in that house, he met Mary Dalton, who asked him if he wanted to join a union. Mr. Max, whose heart bleeds for labor, did not tell us why his client should have resented that.

  “What black thoughts passed through that Negro’s scheming brain the first few moments after he saw that trusting white girl standing before him? We have no way of knowing, and perhaps this piece of human scum, who sits here today begging for mercy, is wise in not telling us. But we can use our imagination; we can look upon what he subsequently did and surmise.

  “Two hours later he was driving Miss Dalton to the Loop. Here occurs the first misunderstanding in this case. The general notion is that Miss Dalton, by having this Negro drive her to the Loop instead of to school, was committing an act of disobedience against her family. But that is not for us to judge. That is for Mary Dalton and her God to settle. It was admitted by her family that she went contrary to a wish of theirs; but Mary Dalton was of age and went where she pleased.

  “This Negro drove Miss Dalton to the Loop where she was joined by a young white man, a friend of hers. From there they went to a South Side café and ate and drank. Being in a Negro neighborhood, they invited this Negro to eat with them. When they talked, they included him in their conversation. When liquor was ordered, enough was bought so that he, too, could drink.

  “Afterwards he drove the couple through Washington Park for some two hours. Around two o’clock in the morning this friend of Miss Dalton’s left the car and went to visit some friends of his. Mary Dalton was left alone in that car with this Negro, who had received nothing from her but kindness. From that point onward, we have no exact knowledge of what really happened, for we have only this black cur’s bare word for it, and I am convinced that he is not telling us all.

  “We don’t know just when Mary Dalton was killed. But we do know this: her head was completely severed from her body! We know that both the head and the body were stuffed into the furnace and burned!

  “My God, what bloody scenes must have taken place! How swift and unexpected must have been that lustful and murderous attack! How that poor child must have struggled to escape that maddened ape! How she must have pled on bended knee, with tears in her eyes, to be spared the vile touch of his horrible person! Your Honor, must not this infernal monster have burned her body to destroy evidence of offenses worse than rape? That treacherous beast must have known that if the marks of his teeth were ever seen on the innocent white flesh of her breasts, he would not have been accorded the high honor of sitting here in this court of law! O suffering Christ, there are no words to tell of a deed so black and awful!

  “And the defense would have us believe that this was an act of creation! It is a wonder that God in heaven did not drown out his lying voice with a thunderous ‘NO!’ It is enough to make the blood stop flowing in one’s veins to hear a man excuse this cowardly and beastly crime on the ground that it was ‘instinctive’!

  “The next morning Bigger Thomas took Miss Dalton’s trunk, half-packed, to the La Salle Street Station and prepared to send it off as though nothing had happened, as though Miss Dalton were still alive. But the bones of Miss Dalton’s body were found in the furnace that evening.

  “The burning of the body and the taking of the half-packed trunk to the station mean just one thing, Your Honor. It shows that the rape and murder were planned, that an attempt was made to destroy evidence so that the crime could be carried on to the point of ransom. If Miss Dalton were accidentally killed, as this Negro so pathetically tried to make us believe when he first ‘confessed,’ then why did he burn her body? Why did he take her trunk to the station when he knew that she was dead?

  “There is but one answer! He planned to rape, to kill, to collect! He burned the body to get rid of evidences of rape! He took the trunk to the station to gain time in which to burn the body and prepare the kidnap note. He killed her because he raped her! Mind you, Your Honor, the central crime here is rape! Every action points toward that!

  “Knowing that the family had called in private investigators, the Negro tried to throw the suspicion elsewhere. In other words, he was not above seeing an innocent man die for his crime. When he could not kill any more, he did the next best thing. He lied! He sought to blame the crime upon one of Miss Dalton’s friends, whose political beliefs, he thought, would damn him. He told wild lies of taking the two of them, Miss Dalton and her friend, to her room. He said that he had been told to go home and leave the car out in the snow in the driveway all night. Knowing that his lies were being found out, he tried yet another scheme. He tried to collect money!

  “Did he flee the scene when the investigators were at work? No! Coldly, without feeling, he stayed on in the Dalton home, ate, slept, basking in the misguided kindness of Mr. Dalton, who refused to allow him to be questioned upon the theory that he was a poor boy who needed protection!

  “He needed as much protection as you would give a coiled rattler!

  “While the family was searching heaven and earth for their daughter, this ghoul writes a kidnap note demanding ten thousand dollars for the safe return of Miss Dalton! But the discovery of the bones in the furnace put that foul dream to an end!

  “And the defense would have us believe that this man acted in fear! Has fear, since the beginning of time, driven men to such lengths of calculation?

  “Again, we have but the bare word of this worthless ape to go on. He fled the scene and went to the home of a girl, Bessie Mears, with whom he had long been intimate. There
something occurred that only a cunning beast could have done. This girl had been frightened into helping him collect the ransom money, and he had placed in her keeping the money he had stolen from the corpse of Mary Dalton. He killed that poor girl, and even yet it staggers my mind to think that such a plan for murder could have been hatched in a human brain. He persuaded this girl, who loved him deeply—despite the assertions of Mr. Max, that Godless Communist who tried to make you believe otherwise!—as I said, he persuaded this girl who loved him deeply to run away with him. They hid in an abandoned building. And there, with a blizzard raging outside, in the sub-zero cold and darkness, he committed rape and murder again, twice in twenty-four hours!

  “I repeat, Your Honor, I cannot understand it! I have dealt with many a murderer in my long service to the state, but never have I encountered the equal of this. So eager was this demented savage to rape and kill that he forgot the only thing that might have helped him to escape; that is, the money he had stolen from the dead body of Mary Dalton, which was in the pocket of Bessie Mears’ dress. He took the ravished body of that poor working girl—the money was in her dress, I say—and dumped it four floors down an air-shaft. The doctors told us that that girl was not dead when she hit the bottom of that shaft; she froze to death later, trying to climb out!

  “Your Honor, I spare you the ghastly details of these murders. The witnesses have told all.

  “But I demand, in the name of the people of this state, that this man die for these crimes!

  “I demand this so that others may be deterred from similar crimes, so that peaceful and industrious people may be safe. Your Honor, millions are waiting for your word! They are waiting for you to tell them that jungle law does not prevail in this city! They want you to tell them that they need not sharpen their knives and load their guns to protect themselves. They are waiting, Your Honor, beyond that window! Give them your word so that they can, with calm hearts, plan for the future! Slay the dragon of doubt that causes a million hearts to pause tonight, a million hands to tremble as they lock their doors!