The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [120]
“We’re grateful, I’m sure.”
“And one of these days soon we’re going to submit to the voters a women’s-suffrage amendment and see if we can’t get you ladies a bigger voice, at least in the local polls.”
“The fair sex will be your slaves.”
“I’m only acting on my sense of what I think the people want. I very strongly believe, Miss Monday, that the State is the sum total of the will of the people. And now, that is why I must give my full support to capital punishment, however barbarous it may seem. Personally, I do not condone capital punishment. No, I do not. At best, it is a relic of mankind’s slow, painful rise out of the Dark Ages. But if the State did not take upon itself the awesome responsibility for executing murderers and rapists, the people themselves would resort to mob violence and lynching.”
“Did you know, Governor, that Arkansas is one of the very few states that still punish rape with the death penalty?”
“Of course I know it! You mean, still punishes white men with death. Every state still executes nigras for rape. Young lady, don’t try to tell me about Arkansas in relation to the other states. That’s the main reason I wanted to see you. This past week the state of Arkansas has become the butt of national derision and even contempt because of this Chism business. Just at a time in our history when we’re making some progress toward correcting the country’s notion that Arkansas is nothing but a barnyard full of rustic buffoons, along comes this moonshining rapist out of the Ozarks and sets us all back into ridicule!”
“Pardon me, sir, but I don’t believe it’s Nail Chism they’re ridiculing. They have focused their scorn on a chief executive who refuses to listen to overwhelming evidence that Nail Chism is innocent.”
The governor slammed his palm down on the table so forcefully that both their glasses of brandy toppled over. A black waiter hastened to handle the problem, which the governor ignored. “WHAT EVIDENCE?” he thundered, “The babble of the victim? The poor, frightened, illiterate backwoods child, driven out of her senses by a vicious assault and the most despicable rape and sexual perversion I’ve ever heard about in my long legal career, trying pathetically to undo this hideous act simply by recanting her testimony? Please, Miss Monday! It’s perfectly obvious that that pathetic waif you went to such pains to recruit to your cause is not of sound mind and not capable of testifying for or against anybody.”
“Governor, if you would let her talk to you for five minutes, you wouldn’t say that.”
The governor softened his voice. “Let me tell you a little story, Miss Monday. Not so very long ago my wife Ida and I received here at our house late one afternoon a Mrs. Ramsey, who had her little boy with her. It was not long until sundown, when the woman’s husband was scheduled to die in the electric chair at the state penitentiary. The woman wanted me to listen to her little boy, and wanted my wife to listen too. The boy gave the most touching speech about how he loved his daddy and what a good man his daddy was. Ida, who gave him a piece of bread and butter and a glass of milk, had tears running down her face, and she looked at me with such reproach as I had never seen from her before, and she asked, ‘George, doesn’t this little boy move you at all?’ and I said, ‘Yes, Ida, but his father moves me much more, because the man committed such a cold-blooded, brutal murder, with no extenuating circumstances whatsoever, that I still seethe to think of it.’ And at sundown they electrocuted Ramsey, the first white man I have refused to save from the electric chair. Nail Chism is the second. Let me finish. You think that I am deaf to the entreaties of good people, as my wife thought I