“Samuel M. Vincent,” he said, reading from what Sam saw was his own wallet. “Attorney-at-law, Blue Eye, Polk County, Arkansas. And what is your business in Thebes, Mr. Vincent?”
“Sheriff, I am a former prosecuting attorney, well versed in the law and the rightful usage of force against suspects. In my state, what your men have done is clearly criminal. I would indict them on counts of assault and battery under flag of authority, sir, and I would send them away for five years, and we would see how they swagger after that. Now I—”
“Mr. Vincent, what is your business, sir? You are not in your state, you are in mine, and I run mine a peculiar way, according to such conditions as I must deal with. I am Sheriff Leon Gattis, and this is my county. I run it, I protect it, I make it work. Down here, sir, it is polite of an attorney to inform the police he be makin’ inquiries. For some reason, sir, you have seen fit not to do so, and so you have suffered some minor inconveniences of no particular import to no Mississippi judge.”
“I did not do so, Sheriff Gattis, because there were no deputies around. I spent most of yesterday looking for them. They prefer to work after midnight! I insist—”
“You hold on there, sir. You are getting on my wrong side right quick. Any nigger could have told you where we are, and if they didn’t it’s ’cause they thought you’s up to no good. God bless ’em, they have the instinct for such judgments. So, Mr. Vincent, you’re going to have to cooperate, and the sooner you do, the better. What are you doing in Thebes County? What is your business, sir?”
“Good Lord. You set up a system that cannot be obeyed, then punish when one does not obey. It is—”
Whap!
The sheriff had not hit him, but he’d smacked his hand hard on the wooden table between them, the room echoing with reverberation from the force of the blow.
“I ain’t here to talk no philosophy with you. Goddamn you, sir, answer my questions or your time here will be hard. That is the way we do things here.”
Sam shook his head.
Finally he explained: he was after a disposition or certificate in re the death of a Negro named Lincoln Tilson named in a will being probated in Cook County—that is, Chicago—Illinois.
“Thought you had a Chicago look to you.”
“Sir, if it’s your business, and it’s not, I have never been in the state of Illinois and know nothing at all of it.”
“What I hear, up there, the Negro is king. Ride ’round in fancy Cadillac cars, have white girls left and right, eat in the restaurants, a kind of jigaboo heaven, if you know what I mean.”
“Sir, I feel certain you exaggerate. I have been to New York, and that town, progressive though it may be, is nothing as you describe.”
“Maybe I do exaggerate. But, by God, that ain’t goin’ happen in Thebes. Down here, we got a natural order as God commands, and that’s how it’s goin’ to be.”
“Sir, I feel that change will come, because change is inevit—”
“So you are one of them?”
“Uh—”
“One of them.”
“I’m not clear—”
“One of them. You talk like one of us, but you be one of them. Northern agitators. Communists, Jews, God knows who, what or why, but up to nothing good. Is that you, Mr. Vincent? Are you a communist or a Jew?”
“I am a Democrat and a Scotch Presbyterian. You have no right to—”
But the sheriff was off.
“Oh, we done heard. We done been warned. We onto y’all. Y’all come down here and stir our niggers all up. You think you doin’ them a favor. Yes sir, you helping them. But what you be doin’ is filling their fool heads full of things that can’t never be, and so you be making them more unhappy rather than less unhappy, while you be gittin’ it ready to tear down what we done built down here, on nothing but sweat and blood and guts and our own dying. Oh, I know your sort, Mister. You are the pure-D devil hisself, only you think you doin’ good.”
“I am a firm believer in the rules, and I—”
“The rules! Mister, I got a county full of piney-woods niggers who all they want to do is fuck or fight, don’t matter much to them.”
“Sir, I didn’t say—”
“Now I’ll tell you what. I will make inquiries. I will git you your certificate, and my deputies will get you out of our county. Don’t you never come back, you hear? That’s the goddamnedest best you’re gonna git down here, and I am cutting you an exclusive deal because you are white, even if I believe you be deluded close to mental instability. Thebes ain’t for outsiders. You want Mississippi hospitality, you go to Biloxi, you square on that, partner?”
“I see the point,” said Sam.
“Yes, sir, I bet you do. Boys, move Mr. Vincent to holding, where he’ll be more comfortable. He’s ’bout to leave us.”
SAM was no longer locked up, nor did he remain handcuffed. He was free to move about the general area, but had, under orders and strict observation, to stay close to the station, as it was called, and not to go near to or rile any Negro people.
They let him take a nice shower indoors, where they themselves kept clean, and he got himself back into some kind of civilized order. He was fed, and the food was better than anything he had eaten since leaving Pascagoula, beans and ham, fried potatoes, heavy chicory coffee, fresh bread. These boys here, they lived pretty good, in what was a kind of barracks in the woods, a good mile out of town, which, he now saw, was protected against attack by a stout barbed-wire fence. There was a stable here, for the deputy force seemed more like some kind of light cavalry than any law enforcement unit. The men lounged about like soldiers, keeping their uniforms sharp, riding off on patrol now and then in twos. There was a duty room with assignments and rotation, a roster board; in all, it seemed far more military than police.
Finally, a rider came, and after conferring with some of the deputies, he came and got Sam, who was put back into the wagon, though this time not bound or beaten. He sat up front with the driver, who drove the team through the piney woods—Lord, they were dense, seeming to stretch out forever into the looming darkness—and then through the town, dead now as it was then.
They approached the river, the big wagon and the thundering horses driving back what Negroes remained in the street. As they passed the public house, Sam felt the eyes of the two old men he’d spoken to watching him glumly.
Down at the dock, a happy sight greeted Sam. It was Lazear, back from wherever, standing by his boat, whose old motor churned a steady tune. The sheriff stood there also.
Sam climbed down from the wagon, on unsure legs, then caught himself.
“All right, Mr. Arkansas Traveler, here is your official document. You’ll see that it’s right and proper.”
It appeared to be. Under the seal of the state of Mississippi and the state motto it was an official CERTIFICATE OF DEATH for one LINCOLN TILSON, Negro, age unknown but elderly, of Thebes, Thebes County, Mississippi, October 10th, 1950, by drowning, namely in the river Yaxahatchee. It was signed by a coroner in an illegible scrawl.
“There, sir. The end of that poor man. The river can be treacherous. It takes you down and it does things to you, and out you come three days later. Poor Negro Tilson was such a victim. It’s a miracle that after that time in the water, he was still identifiable.”
“Sheriff, who identified him?”
“Now, Mr. Arkansas Traveler, we don’t keep records on every dead Negro in the county. I don’t recollect, nor do I recollect the exact circumstances. Nor, sir, do I fancy a chat with you on the subject, while you interrogate me and try to prove your Northern cleverness over my simplicity.”
“I see.”
“You have been given fair warning. Now you get out of our town, and don’t you come back nohow. There is nothing here for you and you have done your task.”
Sam looked at the document; there was nothing to it to convince him that it couldn’t have been fabricated in the last hour or so.
But here it was: the out.
The end. The finish. He had earned his retainer, and would file a complete report to his client, and what would happen next would be up to the client.
“Well, Sheriff, this is not the way I do things, but I see things down here are slow to change, and it is not my charge to do that. I fear when change comes, it will be a terror for you.”
“It ain’t never coming, not this far south. We have the guns and the will to make that prediction stick, I guarantee you. Now, sir, every second you stand there is a second you try my hospitality to an even more severe degree.”
Sam stepped down into Lazear’s boat and didn’t look back as it pulled from the shore and headed out to the center of the dark river.
6
SAM sat in the prow of the boat, too angry to talk to Lazear, uninterested in the feeble excuses the man had thrown his way on the whys and wherefores of his seeming abandonment.
He felt two powerful, conflicting emotions. The first was relief. Thebes was enchanted, somehow, by evil. Who knew what secrets lurked there, what horrors had been perpetuated under its name, who was buried where and how they had perished? It was frightening, and escaping its pressures brought a sense of complete liberation.
So a part of Sam was happy. He was done, and now it was a mere progression of travel and he could return to his life, chastened, as it were, by exposure to the lurid and the raw, aware that the world in general was uninterested in his experiences and it would best be forgotten or filed away for distant future usage.
But there was also a powerful, seething anger. His mind was orderly yet not overly rigid. He understood that order was a value and from order all good, great things stemmed. Yet order was only a value when it guaranteed and sustained those good, great things. When it actively opposed them, where it destroyed them, where its rigidness was so powerful and its administration so violent that it was only concerned with its own ideas, something evil happened, and it filled Sam with rage.
He felt the thwack when the deputy’s two expert blows had smashed his arms, and the fear when under the influence of pain all will to resist had fled him. He remembered the helplessness of being bound and forced into the wagon, the wait for the sheriff as that man took his own sweet time, the fear on the faces of the Negroes whom he ruled so absolutely, the brazenness of the phony document that had guaranteed the end of his days in Thebes.
And Sam finally wondered this one last thing: Did he have the strength, the guts, the steel, to stand up to it, to oppose the ways of Thebes?
He knew the answer.
The answer was, No.
It wasn’t in him. It wasn’t in anybody. You just got out and didn’t look back and you went back to a better life, and soon enough the memories eroded and you won your election and you fathered your children and you won the approval of powerful men and you had a career, a set of memories, a fine tombstone, the respect of those who stayed behind when you had passed. That was enough.
He sat back, having at last faced and come to terms with his own weakness. On either side of the river, the piney woods fled by, diminished by the steady chugging of Lazear’s old motor, the day a bit cooler than before. Before him the river wove and bobbed, dark, calm and smooth. It was growing toward late afternoon; he assumed that in a few hours or so, when they had penetrated the great bayou, they would lay up as before, then continue in the morning.
He began to calculate. They’d be in Pascagoula then by late afternoon; he’d call his wife and alert her that everything was fine. He could spend a night in a fine hotel—if there was such in Pascagoula…wait, then, no, a better idea. He could hire a car and zip down the coast a bit, possibly to lush Biloxi, and take a room there, where surely there’d be fine hotels. Maybe he’d take a day or so; the stipend he’d earned would certainly cover it, and possibly he could even expense it, as the recovery time from his ordeal was a fair charge, was it not? He saw himself having an elegant meal under a slowly rotating fan, amid ferns and palms; outside there’d be a sparkling beach. The meal would commence with oysters fresh from Mother Gulf, move on to fresh sea bass or trout grilled or poached in butter, all served by an elegant black gentleman in a white cotton jacket. The room would be full of beautiful people, happy people, the best kind of people that our great country could produce.
What a riposte. What a recovery. Then, the next morning, on to New Orleans, refreshed and restored; from there by rail up to Memphis, the drive over to Blue Eye and home, home, home, home.
Home, he thought.
Home, home, home. Then he saw the body.
He happened to be looking down, in the black water, and the shock was such that perhaps it was an apparition, something that his momentarily deranged mind had conjured. But he knew in the next second that no, this was reality, no haunt, no ghost, nothing from the subconscious. It was a Negro boy, a few inches under the surface, bled white by immersion, his features puffy, his body in the cruciform as if inflated, his fingers abulge, his eyes wide and empty, his mouth open black and empty, his clothes in tatters, gliding by. Then he was gone.
Sam blinked, stunned.
He saw something just ahead, floating, its low silhouette just breaking the surface, and as Lazear’s old craft fled by, he made this victim out to be a girl child, also Negro, but facedown to spare him those open eyes staring into nothingness.
He looked: on the surface of the water appeared to be the remnants of a massacre by drowning; bodies floated everywhere, as if a vessel had capsized and all perished. There had to be at least ten, drifting, riding the currents, bobbing this way and that.
“Stop the boat! Goddamn you, stop the boat!” he screamed, over the beating of the engine.
Lazear looked up, surprised, yanked from whatever crude reverie had occupied him.
“Stop the boat, you idiot!” Sam cried, and rushed back. Lazear didn’t stop it, but reined in the throttle so that the boat merely idled, drifting.
“What you say?”
“There’re people in the water! Look, look around, people. A Negro family, all gone, all lost, stop the boat.”
Lazear just shook his head.
“Sir, I done tol’ you. In de river, de currents is ugly and mean. Suck people down all de time. Send ’em back bloated and dead. Nothing we can do but press on. Can’t do them no good. Make a report when you gets back to civilization if it makes you feel good. I can’t be wastin’ no time on this.”
And with that he bent forward and readjusted the throttle to a steady roar and the boat lurched back into—
But Sam took him in two strong hands, shook him once malevolently, then almost quite literally threw him into the rear of the boat.
The old man raised a hand in fear as Sam advanced upon him.
“Don’t hit me, sir! I didn’t do nothing to them people, I swear. They’s fleeing the Store, they got in trouble, and the river done et ’em up, is all.”
Sam declared, in the full stentorian powers of his voice, “You slimy little maggot, you turn this boat around and we will recover those that we can. Then we will head back to Thebes and we will get that good-for-nothing sheriff off his fat ass and all his deputies and we will come back here with full lights running. There may be a child out here, clinging to a branch or ashore in the weeds. We will save that child, or by God, we will die trying, and that is the way it’ll be.”
Now he bent, and with one hand pulled Lazear up, and propelled him toward the boat’s cockpit, and the old man hit it, and sank to the deck.
“Get your ass up, and get going, sir, or I will make you wish you had never ever been born.”
“Yes sir, yes sir,” said Lazear, pale with terror.
AS it turned out, Sam quickly realized there was no point in recovering any bodies. It would take too much time, and it was a job for professionals with the right equipment. He realized those bodies therefore might never be recovered.
Thus, as newly proclaimed captain of Lazear’s vessel by right of mutiny, he determined that the correct course of action was to return to the
Thebes dock as swiftly as possible. He gave these directions to Lazear.
“And if de motor burn out, what then?”
“Then I will whip your scrawny ass until it bleeds. You just get us there faster than you got us here, you wretched old fool.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did you mean when you said ‘fleeing the Store.’ What was the meaning of that comment?”
“Sir, I don’t recollect saying nothing ’bout dat.”
“Listen here, you brainless idiot, you said it flat out in plain English just minutes ago. Now explain it, or once again I will shake you ’til your teeth, all three of them, rattle like dice in a cup.”
Glumly Lazear looked ahead. A bitterness settled over him. He acted as though God had selected him alone to bear this monstrous cross. He sighed.
Sam kicked his scrawny ass.
“Does that help? Clear the memory, does it?”
“You din’t hear nothing from me. Dey kills me dey know I talkin’ their business. Okay? Kill me dead. Kill you dead as well.”
“Talk, damn your soul.”
“The Store own everything the nigs got. Nigs take credit from the Store, fall behind, they don’t get this interest thing, the Store forecloses, and then they owned by the Store. Heard the nigs talking ’bout it once.”
“Yes. And so?”
“And so, dey gots to work it off. Dey works for de man. Never can leave, never can go nowhere, tell nobody, no nothing. Stay and work for food is all.
“Every once a while, nigs git fed up and sneak off at night. Some make it, some don’t. Dat family, dey no got no luck. The river et ’em. Maybe dey’s better off, though.”
“Good Lord,” said Sam, disgusted.
7
HOW did they know?
But they did. Somehow, in Thebes, they always knew.
The old boat maneuvered its way in and Lazear lined it up just fine and laid it up next to the dock. There, Sheriff Leon Gattis and no less than four deputies, all uniformed and heavily armed, awaited. Their horses, lathered and nervous, milled behind them. Together, men and horses, they looked like some apocalyptic drawing out of Doré, along the four-horsemen-of-death motif.