Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [148]
Prison staff inside pushed a firehose through the door’s speaking hatch and shot out a high-pressure blast. This momentarily delayed progress, but the marksmen fired bullets down the hose until its handlers withdrew. Soon the door was open. Tunnel-like passages receded in several directions. The mob explored them and reported back to the man in the red sweater. Attention focused on a third door of solid steel. The boilermakers crouched down again.
By then the rumble of thousands of voices, and the steady rasp of sawing, must have penetrated to the inmates, who had not heard the initial tumult in the yard. Most were Negroes. By the time the third door fell, and the mob entered the prison chamber, they were hysterical with fear. “He’s in cell thirteen!” one man screamed. “On the second gallery!”
That meant two more barriers of steel. Afterward, when experts came to assess the damage, they had nothing but praise for the skill of the boilermakers. Every plate, bar, and bolt was sliced as smoothly as cheddar. The last filament snapped at 11:00 P.M., and cell thirteen revealed itself. It was empty.
There was a moment’s hesitation, then: “Shove back the panel!” Hard as it was to believe that a six-foot Negro could squeeze himself into a shallow closet measuring four feet by two and a half feet, when the door slid open White burst out like a bull. Viselike hands secured him. Then, as joyful shouts echoed through the passages into the yard, the prisoner was escorted outside.
“I did it!” White jabbered in half-praying, half-confessional tones. “O Christ save my soul! I did it!” His mantra continued nonstop, even when the man in the red sweater calmed the waiting crowd: “Let nobody strike or hurt him. We are going to take him to the place where he committed the crime, and we are going to burn him alive.”
An oddly ecclesiastical procession began. A man on a white horse rode his mount in slow circles to clear the way. Next came an old farmer in blue overalls, carrying a lantern on a long forked stick. Then came White, weaving as if drunk between his two escorts. Six other horsemen flanked him, and the crowd fell into place behind.
As the procession moved out into open country, along a mud road pleached with maple trees, its joy increased. Someone struck up “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” to roars of laughter. Then massed voices joined in “Marching Through Georgia.” Young men jumped through the trees and fanned out across the fields. But they stayed abreast of the swaying lantern and the white horse.
Around midnight, the scene of White’s crime came into view: a notched hedge by a plowed field. He stood talking to himself as carpenters cut fence rails into faggots. A youth in a Panama hat chopped slats into kindling. Soon a neat pyre arose, its interstices stuffed with straw. Ceaselessly moving, the man on the white horse shaped the crowd into a circle, and ordered the inner ring to hold hands. Centripetal pressure made the ring wreathe and sway. Oddly, those nearest the pyre seemed disposed to kick it down. “For God’s sake,” a voice called, “don’t do this! Shoot the man! Hang him … don’t burn him!”
The man in the red sweater shouted, “We’re going to burn the nigger alive, and we’re going to do it right here and now.” He produced a rope. White was brought inside the ring and bound from the ankles up, like a papoose. His confession moaned on—“Then I gave her a hack in the throat with my knife and asked her again.…” The rope began to cramp his chest. “You would not do this to me if I was a white man.…” A few more coils silenced him. It was 1:30 in the morning.
Suddenly, White was seized at head