• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 5717 0

up, like they were hollering for one another to the dead woman and not to the sheriffs. But the sheriff kept on talking quiet to them, about how it was his sworn word given to them on the day they elected him that he was trying to keep. ‘I have no more sympathy with nigger murderers than any other white man here,’ he says. ‘But it is my sworn oath, and by God I aim to keep it. I don’t want no trouble, but I ain’t going to dodge it. You better smoke that for awhile.’ And Halliday was there too, with the sheriffs. He was the foremost one about reason and not making trouble. ‘Yaaah,’ somebody hollers; ‘we reckon you don’t want him lynched. But he ain’t worth any thousand dollars to us. He ain’t worth a thousand dead matches to us.’ And then the sheriff says quick: ‘What if Halliday don’t want him killed? Don’t we all want the same thing? Here it’s a local citizen that will get the reward: the money will be spent right here in Mottstown. Just suppose it was a Jefferson man was going to get it. Ain’t that right, men? Ain’t that sensible?’ His voice sounded little, like a doll’s voice, like even a big man’s voice will sound when he is talking not against folks’ listening but against their already half-made-up minds.

“Anyway, that seemed to convince them, even if folks did know that Mottstown or nowhere else was going to see enough of that thousand dollars to fat a calf, if Halliday was the one that had the spending of it. But that did it. Folks are funny. They can’t stick to one way of thinking or doing anything unless they get a new reason for doing it ever so often. And then when they do get a new reason, they are liable to change anyhow. So they didn’t give back exactly; it was like when before that the crowd had kind of milled from the inside out, now it begun to mill from the outside in. And the sheriffs knew it, the same as they knew that it might not last very long, because they went back into the jail quick and then came out again, almost before they had time to turn around, with the nigger between them and five or six deputies following. They must have had him ready just inside the jail door all the time, because they come out almost at once, with the nigger between them with his face sulled up and his wrists handcuffed to the Jefferson sheriff; and the crowd kind of says, ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.’

“They made a kind of lane down to the street, where the first Jefferson car was waiting with the engine running and a man behind the wheel, and the sheriffs were coming along without wasting any time, when she come up again, the woman, Mrs. Hines. She was shoving up through the crowd. She was so lowbuilt that all the folks could see was that plume kind of bumping along slow, like something that could not have moved very fast even if there wasn’t anything in the way, and that couldn’t anything stop, like a tractor. She shoved right on through and out into the lane the folks had made, right out in front of the two sheriffs with the nigger between them, so that they had to stop to keep from running over her. Her face looked like a big hunk of putty and her hat had got knocked sideways so the plume hung down in front of her face and she had to push it back to see. But she didn’t do anything. She just stopped them dead for a minute while she stood there and looked at the nigger. She never said a word, like that was all she had wanted and had been worrying folks for, like that was the reason she had dressed up and come to town: just to look that nigger in the face once. Because she turned and begun to burrow back into the crowd again, and when the cars drove off with the nigger and the Jefferson law and the folks looked around, she was gone. And they went back to the square then, and Uncle Doc was gone too from the chair where she had set him and told him to wait. But all of the folks didn’t go straight back to the square. A lot of them stayed there, looking at the jail like it might have been just the nigger’s shadow that had come out.

“They thought that she had taken Uncle Doc home. It was in front of Dollar’s store and Dollar told