Alex Cross’s Trial

Doc Conover spoke up. “I had two colored girls come into the drugstore last week. They said they was up from Ocean Springs visiting some kin of theirs. They wanted to buy tincture of iodine. I explained to ’em, just as nice as I could, that I don’t sell to coloreds. Then one of ’em started to lecturin’ me on the Constitution. When I told her to get the hell out of my store, she said she’d come back with her daddy and her brother, and they’d make me sell ’em iodine.”

“You say they’s from Ocean Springs?” said Jimmy Whitley, the athletic coach at Eudora High.

“That’s sure what they said.”

“Johnny Ray, ain’t you got a cousin in the chapter down in Ocean Springs?”

“I do, that’s Wilbur Earl,” said Johnny Ray.

Byram Chaney said, “Johnny Ray, why don’t you talk to your cousin, find out who those girls might have been. Then we can see about getting ’em educated.”

The crowd murmured in agreement.

Another man spoke. “I only want to report that that old nigger Jackie, you know, the one that used to drive the carriage for Mr. Macy? He come into my store again, looking for work.”

I recognized the speaker as Marshall Farley, owner of the five-and-dime.

Jacob leapt to his feet and spoke with passion. “There you go,” he said. “Niggers looking for jobs that belong to us! That old coon’s had a perfectly good job all this time, driving for one of the richest men in the county. Now he wants more. He wants a job that could go to a fella like me, a good man with a family to feed.”

In place of the polite murmur, a wave of anger now rolled through the crowd. I understood something new about these men. They weren’t filled just with hate; they were filled with at least as much fear. Fear that the black man was going to take everything away from them-their jobs, their women, their homes, all their hopes and dreams.

Then I realized Jacob was talking about me. “So if you ask me, I think it’s high time we teach our guest a thing or two,” he was saying. “He needs to know we aren’t just a bunch of ignorant bigots. I make a motion that we give over the rest of our meeting to the proper education of Ben Corbett.”

I looked around and couldn’t believe what I saw. Half a dozen men, in a rough circle, were coming right at me. Then they were upon me, and they had me trapped for sure.

Chapter 78

FEELING SICK TO my stomach now, my brain reeling, I rode in the back of an open farm wagon with Jacob, Byram Chaney, and Doc Conover. I was the one with hands bound behind his back.

Cicadas made a furious racket in the trees, their droning rhythm rising and falling. We were driving south out of town into the swamp, an all-too-familiar journey by now.

I was almost as terrified as I was angry. When I spoke to Jacob, I could barely keep from screaming.

“How could you do this? The one man I thought I could trust!”

“Stay calm, my friend.”

“I’m not your friend,” I said.

“Ben, you can’t help it if you got some mistaken ideas about us,” he said. “You’ll find out, we’re nobody to be scared of. We’re fair-minded fellows, like you. I just ask you to keep an open mind.”

“By going to the swamp to watch you lynch another black man?”

“I said, stay calm.”

After a time we came into a clearing. I could have sworn this was the place where somebody hanged me. Where I almost died. But it was a different spot altogether.

Two men in white robes stood near a crude wooden platform. Between them they held a man in place, with a rope around his neck.

His face was turned away from me.

“Let’s go closer,” Jacob said.

“This is close enough,” I said.

But it wasn’t my decision to make. Byram Chaney lifted his reins and drove the wagon into the clearing for a better view of the murder.

Slowly the man on the platform turned to face the crowd. He was a small man. Frightened. Pathetic. On his nose he wore gold-rimmed spectacles.

The man was white.

Chapter 79

“HIS NAME IS ELI WEINBERG,” Byram Chaney told me in confidential tones. “He’s a crooked little Jew from New Orleans. He talked three different widow ladies out of a thousand dollars each. He was selling deeds to some nonexistent property he said was down in Metairie.”

“And he would have got away with all that money,” Jacob said, “but the fellows found him yesterday, hiding in the out-house at the McComb depot.”

Eli Weinberg decided to speak up for himself. “Those are valid deeds, gentlemen,” he said in a quavery voice.

“What are you doing?” I said. “You can’t hang him, he might be telling the truth!” I felt my whole body shaking. “Why don’t you look into what he says?”

“We did look into it,” said Doc Conover. “We got word from our brothers that he’s been fast-talking his way into towns all over this part of the country.”

“So have him arrested,” I said.

“This is better,” Conover said. “We get the job done, no waiting, no money wasted on lawyers and trials and such. And we let them other Jews know they better think twice before coming to Eudora to steal from the likes of us.”

“The likes of you?” I said. “Hell, you’re all murderers!”