“It’s more of them Birdsongs than just two or three,” the deputy said. “There’s forty-two active votes in that connection. Me and Mayfield taken the poll-list and counted them up one day. But listen—” The wife turned from the stove, carrying a dish. The deputy snatched his feet rapidly out of the way as she passed him and went on into the dining room. The deputy raised his voice a little. “His wife dies on him. All right. But does he grieve? He’s the biggest man at the funeral. Grabs a shovel before they even got the box into the grave, I heard tell, and starts throwing dirt onto her faster than a slip scraper could. But that’s all right—”
His wife came back. He moved his feet again. “—maybe that’s the way he felt about her. There ain’t any law against that, long as he never officiated at the deceasing too. But here the next day he’s the first man at the mill except the fireman, getting there before the fireman had his fire going; five minutes earlier and he could even helped the fireman wake Birdsong up so he could go home and go back to bed again or even cut Birdsong’s throat then and saved everybody trouble. So he comes to work, the first man on the job, when McAndrews would have give him the day off and paid him his time too, when McAndrews and everybody else expected him to take the day off, when any white man would have took the day off no matter how he felt about his wife, when even a little child would have had sense enough to take a holiday when he could still get paid too. But not him. The first man there, jumping from one truck to another before the whistle quit blowing even, snatching up ten-foot cypress logs by himself and throwing them around like matches. And then, just when everybody has decided that that’s the way to take him, that that’s the way he wants to be took, he walks off the job in the middle of the afternoon without by-your-leave or thank you or good-by to McAndrews or nobody else, gets himself a whole gallon of bust-skull white-mule whiskey, comes straight back to the mill to the same crap game where Birdsong has been running crooked dice on them mill niggers for fifteen years, goes straight to the same game where he has been peacefully losing a probably steady average ninety-nine per cent of his pay ever since he got big enough to read the spots on them miss-outs, and cuts Birdsong’s throat clean to the neckbone five minutes later.
“So me and Mayfield go out there. Not that we expect to do any good, as he had probably passed Jackson, Tennessee, about daylight; and besides, the simplest way to find him would be just to stay close behind them Birdsong boys. So it’s just by the merest pure chance that we go by his house; I don’t even remember why now; and there he is. Sitting behind the door with that razor open on one knee and his shotgun on the other? No. Asleep. A big pot of pease set clean on the stove, and him laying in the back yard asleep in the broad sun with just his head under the edge of the porch and a dog that looked like a cross between a bear and a Polled Angus steer yelling fire and murder from the back door. And he wakes up and says, ‘Awright, white folks. Ah done it. Jest don’t lock me up,’ and Mayfield says, ‘Mr. Birdsong’s kinfolks ain’t going to either. You’ll have plenty of fresh air when they get a hold of you,’ and he says, ‘Ah done it. Jest don’t lock me up’—advising, instructing the sheriff not to lock him up; he done it all right and it’s too bad, but don’t cut him off from the fresh air. So we loaded him into the car, when here come the old woman—his ma or aunt or something—panting up the road at a dog-trot, wanting to come with us, and Mayfield trying to tell her what might happen maybe to her too if them Birdsong kin catches us before we can get him locked up, only she is coming anyway and, like Mayfield says, her being in the car might be a good thing if the Birdsongs did happen to run into us, because interference with the law can’t be condoned even if the Birdsong connection did carry that beat for Mayfield last summer. So we brought her along too and got him to town and into the jail all right and turned him over to Ketcham and Ketcham taken him on upstairs and the old woman coming too, telling Ketcham, ‘Ah tried to raise him right. He was a good boy. He ain’t never been in no trouble till now. He will suffer for what he done. But don’t let the white folks git him,’ and Ketcham says, ‘You and him ought to thought of that before he started barbering white men without using no lather,’ and locked them both up in the cell because he felt like Mayfield did, that her being there might be a good influence on the Birdsong boys if anything started if he should run for sheriff when Mayfield’s term was out. So he come on back downstairs and pretty soon the chain gang come in and he thought things had settled down for a while when all of a sudden he begun to hear the yelling, not howling: yelling, though there wasn’t no words in it, and he grabbed his pistol and run back upstairs and into the room where the chain gang was, where he could see through the door bars into the cell where that nigger had done tore that iron cot clean out of the floor it was bolted to and was standing in the middle of the cell, holding the cot over his head like it was a baby’s cradle, yelling, and the old woman sitting hunched into the corner and the nigger says to her, ‘Ah ain’t going to hurt you,’ and throws the cot against the wall and comes and grabs holt of that steel door and rips it out of the wall—bricks, hinges and all—and walks out into the big room, toting the door over his head as if it were a gauze wire window screen, saying, ‘It’s awright. Ah ain’t tryin’ to git away.’
“Ketcham could have shot him right there, but like he figured, if it wasn’t going to be the law, then the Birdsong boys ought to have first lick at him. So Ketcham don’t shoot. Instead he jumps in behind where the chain-gang niggers were kind of backed off from that steel door, hollering, ‘Grab him! Throw him down!’ except they hang back at first until Ketcham gets up to where he can kick the ones he can reach, batting at the others with the flat of the pistol until they rush him. And Ketcham says for a good minute he would grab them up as they come in and fling them clean across the room like they was rag dolls, still saying, ‘Ah ain’t tryin’ to git out, Ah ain’t tryin’ to git out,’ until at last they pulled him down, a big mass of nigger arms and heads and legs boiling around on the floor and even then Ketcham says every now and then a nigger would come flying out and go sailing through the air across the room, spraddled like a flying squirrel and his eyes sticking out in front of him like the headlights on a car, until at last they had him down and Ketcham went in and begun peeling away niggers until he could see him laying there under the pile of niggers, laughing, with tears big as glass marbles popping out of his eyes and running across his face and down past his ears and making a kind of popping sound on the floor like somebody dropping bird eggs, laughing and laughing and saying, ‘Hit look lack Ah just can’t quit thinking. Look lack Ah just can’t quit.’ And what do you think of that?”
“I think if you eat any supper in this house you’ll do it in the next five minutes,” his wife said from the dining room. “I’m going to clear this table then and I’m going to the picture show.”
Go Down, Moses
The face was black, smooth, impenetrable; the eyes had seen too much. The Negroid hair had been treated so that it covered the skull like a cap, in a single neat-ridged sweep that had the appearance of having been lacquered, the part trimmed out with a razor, so that the head resembled a bronze head, permanent, imperishable. He wore one of those sports costumes called ensembles in the newspaper advertisements, shirt and trousers matching and cut from the same fawn-colored flannel, and they had cost too much and were draped too much, with too many pleats. He half lay on the steel cot in the steel cubicle just outside which an armed guard had stood for twenty hours now, smoking cigarettes and answering in a voice deliberately and consistently not a Southern voice the questions of the spectacled young white man sitting with a broad census taker’s portfolio on the steel stool opposite.
“Samuel Worsham Beauchamp. Twenty-six. Born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi. No family. No—”
“Wait.” The census taker wrote rapidly. “That isn’t the name you were sen—lived under in Chicago?”
The other snapped the ash from the cigarette. “No. It was another guy killed the
cop.”
“All right. Occupation—”
“Getting rich too fast.”
“—none.” The census taker wrote rapidly. “Parents?”
“Sure. Two. I don’t remember them. My grandmother raised me.”
“What’s her name? Is she still living?”
“I don’t know. Mollie Worsham Beauchamp. If she is, she’s on Carothers Edmonds’ farm. Near Jefferson, Mississippi. That all?”
The census taker closed the portfolio and rose. He was a year or two younger than the other. “If they don’t know who you are here, how will they know—how do you expect to get home?”
The other snapped the ash from the cigarette, lying on the steel cot in the fine Hollywood clothes and a pair of shoes better than the census taker had ever owned. “What will that be to me?” he said.
So the census taker went away; the guard locked the steel door again. And the other lay on the steel cot smoking until they came and slit the expensive trousers and shaved the expensive coiffure and led him out of the cell.
On that same hot, bright July morning, the same hot, bright wind that shook the mulberry leaves just outside Gavin Stevens’ window blew into the office too, contriving a semblance of coolness in what was merely motion. It fluttered among the county-attorney business on his desk and blew in the wild shock of his prematurely white hair above the thin, intelligent, unstable face, above the rumpled linen suit from whose lapel his Phi Beta Kappa key dangled from the watch chain—Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard; Ph.D., Heidelberg—Stevens, whose office was his hobby, although it made his living for him, and whose serious vocation was a twenty-two-year-old unfinished translation of the Old Testament back into classic Greek. Only his caller seemed impervious to it although by appearance she should have owned in that breeze no more of weight and solidity than the intact ash of a scrap of paper—a little old Negro woman with a shrunken, incredibly old face beneath a white headcloth and a black straw hat which would have fitted a child.
“Beauchamp?” Stevens said. “You live on Mr. Carothers Edmonds’ place.”
“I done left,” she said. “I come to find my boy.” Then, sitting opposite him on the hard chair and without moving, she began to chant: “Roth Edmonds done sold my Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt. Pharaoh got him—”
“Wait,” Stevens said. “Wait, Aunty.” Because memory, recollection, was about to click and mesh. “If you don’t know where your grandson is, how do you know he’s in trouble? Do you mean that Mr. Edmonds refused to help you find him?”
“It was Roth Edmonds sold him,” she said. “Sold him into Egypt. I don’t know whar he is. I just knows Pharaoh got him. And you the Law. I wants to find my boy.”
“All right,” Stevens said. “I’ll try to find him. If you’re not going back home, where are you going to stay in town? It may take some time, if you don’t know where he went and you haven’t heard from him in five years.”
“I be staying with Hamp Worsham. He my brother.”
“All right,” Stevens said. He was not surprised. He knew Hamp Worsham, but he would not have been surprised even if he had never seen the old Negress before. They were like that. You knew them all your life, they might even have worked for you for years; they might have different names, then suddenly you learned that they were brothers or sisters, or claimed to be, and you were not surprised.
He sat in the hot motion which was not breeze and heard her toiling slowly down the outside stairs, remembering the grandson. The papers had passed across his desk before going to the district attorney five or six years ago—Butch Beauchamp, as the youth had been known during the single year he had spent in and out of the city jail, the old Negress’ daughter’s child, orphaned of his mother at birth and deserted by his father, whom the grandmother had taken and raised, or tried to. Because at nineteen he had quit the country and come to town, in and out of jail for gambling and fighting, and at last under serious indictment for breaking and entering a store.
Caught red-handed, whereupon he struck with a piece of iron pipe at the officer who caught him, then lay on the ground where the officer had felled him with his pistol butt, cursing through his broken mouth, his teeth fixed into something like grinning through the blood, then two nights later he had broken out of jail and was seen no more—a youth, not yet twenty-one, yet with something in him from the father who had begot and deserted him and who was now in the state penitentiary for manslaughter—some seed not only violent but bad.
“And that’s who I am to find, save,” Stevens thought. Because he did not for one moment doubt the old Negress’ instinct. If she had also been able to divine where the boy was and what his trouble was, he would not have been surprised, and it was only later that he thought to be surprised at how quickly he did find where the boy was and what was wrong.
Edmonds’ farm was seventeen miles away. But then, according to the old Negress, Edmonds had already refused to have anything to do with the business. And now Stevens comprehended what the old Negress had meant. He remembered that it was Edmonds who had sent the boy into Jefferson; he had caught the boy breaking into his commissary store and had ordered him off the place and had forbidden him ever to return. “And not the sheriff,” Stevens thought. “Something broader, quicker in scope, than his would be.…” He rose, descended the outside stairs and crossed the empty square in the hot suspension of noon’s beginning to the office of the county weekly newspaper. The editor was in—an older man, though with hair less white than Stevens’, in a black string tie and an old-fashioned boiled shirt and tremendously fat.
“An old nigger woman named Mollie Beauchamp,” Stevens said. “She and her husband live on the Edmonds’ place. It’s her grandson. You remember him—Butch Beauchamp, about five or six years ago, who spent a year in town, mostly in jail, until they finally caught him breaking into Rouncewell’s store one night? Well, he’s in worse trouble than that now. I don’t doubt her at all. I just hope, for her sake as well as that of the great public whom I represent, that his present trouble is bad and maybe final too—”
“Wait,” the editor said. He didn’t even need to leave his desk. He took the press association flimsy from its spike and handed it to Stevens. “It just came in,” the editor said. It was datelined from Joliet, Illinois, this morning: “Mississippi Negro, on eve of execution for murder of Chicago policeman, exposes alias by completing census questionnaire. Samuel Worsham Beauchamp.…”
Stevens was crossing the empty square again in the hot suspension in which noon was now several minutes nearer. He had thought he was going home to his boardinghouse for the noon meal, but he found that he was not. “Besides, I didn’t lock my office door,” he thought. “So it seems I didn’t mean what I said I hoped.” So he mounted the outside stairs again, out of the hazy and now windless sun glare, and entered his office. He stopped. Then he said, “Good morning, Miss Worsham.”
She was quite old too—thin, erect, with a neat, old-time piling of white hair beneath a faded hat of thirty years ago, in rusty black, with a frayed and faded black umbrella. She lived alone in the decaying house her father had left her, where she gave lessons in china painting and, with the help of Hamp Worsham and his wife, raised chickens and vegetables for market.
“I came about Mollie,” she said. “Mollie Beauchamp. She said that you—”
He told her while she watched him, erect on the hard chair where the old Negress had sat, the rusty umbrella leaning against her knee. On her lap, beneath her folded hands, lay an immense old-fashioned beaded reticule. “He is to be executed tonight.”
“Can nothing be done? Mollie’s and Hamp’s parents belonged to my grandfather. Mollie and I grew up together. Our birthdays are in the very same month.”
“I telephoned,” Stevens said. “I talked to the warden at Joliet, and to the district attorney in Chicago. He had a fair trial, a good lawyer. He had money. He was in a business called numbers, that people like him make money in.” She watched him, erect, not moving. “He is a murder
er, Miss Worsham. He shot that policeman in the back. A bad son of a bad father. He confessed it afterward.”
“I know,” she said. Then he realized that she was not looking at him, not seeing him at least. “It’s terrible.”
“So is murder terrible,” Stevens said. “It’s better this way.” Then she was looking at him again.
“I wasn’t thinking of him. I was thinking of Mollie. She mustn’t know.”
“Yes,” Stevens said. “I have already talked to Mr. Wilmoth at the paper. He has agreed not to print anything. I will telephone the Memphis paper, but it’s probably too late for that, even if they would.… If we could just persuade her to go on back home this afternoon, before the Memphis paper.… Out there, where the only white person she ever sees is Mr. Edmonds, and I can see him and warn him not to tell her, and even if the niggers would hear about it, they wouldn’t—. And then maybe in about two or three months I could go out and tell her he is dead and buried somewhere in the North.…” This time she was watching him with such an expression that he ceased talking; she sat there, erect on the hard chair, watching him until he had ceased.
“She will want to take the body back home with her,” she said.
“The body?” Stevens said. The expression was neither shocked nor disapproving. It merely embodied some old, timeless, female affinity for blood and grief. Looking at her, Stevens thought: “She has walked into town in this heat. Unless Hamp brought her in in the buggy he peddles eggs and vegetables from.”
“He is the only child of her oldest daughter, her own dead first child. He must come home.”
“He must come home,” Stevens said. “I’ll attend to it at once. I’ll telephone at once.”
“You are kind.” For the first time she stirred, moved. He watched her hands draw the reticule toward her, clasping it. “I will defray the expenses. Can you give me some idea—?”