The Twelve-Mile Straight

There was one more errand he had to make. It was still the middle of the night—that first July night—when Sheriff drove his motorcycle from the mill out to the crossroads farm, but there was a lamp on in a window of the big house. A colored maid answered Sheriff’s knock, no more than a girl, though at first, with her short hair, Sheriff took her for a boy. It was so dark in the doorway he collided with her as he stepped through it.

“Beg your pardon, child.” Sheriff took off his hat and placed it over his heart.

“Sheriff,” Juke said by way of a greeting, coming in from the breezeway carrying a lamp. He was still in the overalls he’d worn that day. He looked tired or drunk or both. He may have been in deep with George Wilson, he may have brewed the gin that flowed through the county, but up close Sheriff saw he was just a rednecked farmer, his sunburnt face lined with creeks and crags, spotted as a pine snake. He set his kerosene lamp down on the kitchen table. “I told that boy to mind his ire. They weren’t no stopping him. Lord knows I tried.”

Juke pulled out a chair. Sheriff sat while the girl made coffee. The daughter, poor child, was nowhere to be seen. Juke told him about the mill men who’d arrived in their cars, how he stayed indoors to protect his daughter from the mob, how the farmhand was swinging from the gourd tree before he knew what had happened. “Just younguns,” Juke said, shaking his head. “Younguns full of fire.”

“You saying Freddie led the whole thing?”

“Why else would he run? Other than he couldn’t abide being no father?”

Sheriff shrugged. “Spect you put the idea in his head.”

“The idea of stringing the man up, or the idea of running?”

“Both.”

“Freddie ain’t need no help. He got ideas of his own.”

Sheriff knew how these things happened. It might not have happened in Cotton County, but it happened in every county it touched. A hill of men, too many to count, too many to haul in, too many most times for a sheriff to do anything about except throw up his arms. But in all his years he’d never seen a mob finger one of its own.

“You sure you ain’t out there, helping em, after what the nigger done to your child? It was me, I might a done the same.”

Juke stood, walked to the pantry, and returned with a jar of gin, which he poured into Sheriff’s black coffee, then his own.

“I might a done it.” Up close, Sheriff could see that burns braided the man’s right arm from his knuckles to his elbow, his skin a mess of scar tissue, hairless and pink as a pecker. “All us sinners is capable, I reckon.”

Sheriff lifted his hands to the ceiling. “Spect we’ll have to wait till he come back and tell us.”

“If he come back.”

“If?” He thought Jesup was betting, figuring it out as he went. He was counting on those men covering for him, fingering Freddie, and he was probably right. “Where’s he gone go?”

“Where he ain’t a wanted man, I reckon.”

Sheriff laughed. “If you say so. Ain’t the law that wants him back much as his pawpaw.”

Then the house girl put a plate of corn pone on the table, each one cold and hard as a brick. Something was wrong with her. Her eyes were bloodshot, and they stared through the room as though they didn’t see anything in it. Sheriff thought she might be touched, or empty in the head, but then he remembered. “She the one can’t form words?” he asked Juke. All those years he’d allowed him and George Wilson to run their liquor and he’d never set foot in the big house. It was his job to look away.

“Show him,” said Juke, and the girl, still dead in the eyes, rolled her head back and opened her mouth to reveal the pink stub veined with scars, a blind slug in the cave of her mouth. “She’s the one delivered the twins. Her momma learned her good.” And from there he told the story he’d tell the neighbors that visited in the days after, the reporters, the other lawmen bearing the badges of curious county seats. Wilson came first, Juke said, and Winnafred minutes later, their cords braided like streamers on a maypole, sister nearly taking hold of brother’s heel, like Isaac’s children. They were so surprised to know there were two babies in there that they hadn’t noticed, at first, that one was darker than the other. Even Juke hadn’t been sure. Babies looked all kinds of ways when they were born. But there was no denying it. Freddie saw that the baby boy wasn’t his blood, and after that, well, it was a damn shame, all of it.

Before he left, Sheriff asked to look in on the babies. Something was tugging at him. He’d been caught up in George Wilson’s grand aspirations and perhaps too in the deluded ones of his bootlegging tenant. He shared with the two men an affinity for gin and his belief that a workingman should have it if he wanted it. But unlike them he was a veteran and a servant of the law, with a soldier’s eye and a detective’s nose. He’d sniffed out a German spy in the pisser at a whorehouse in Paris, France. He’d identified the Wiregrass Killer in a barbershop, when the man was inside with half his face covered in cream and Sheriff was in the road, twenty yards away, on his horse. Now he smelled a skunk and he wanted to see it with his own eyes.

It was something about that maid. Her empty eyes. The way she froze up when they talked about the dead man, and again when they talked about the babies. And where was the daughter? If Sheriff had more than peanuts to bet, he’d put his money on that colored girl being mother to the dead man’s child. Two Negroes doing as Negroes did, carrying on in the woods. Who knew how the Jesups got tangled up in it, but what other explanation was there? Sheriff was a humble man but he’d been through as much school as church and he wasn’t one to believe in miraculous wombs.

The white one was asleep. The colored one was awake. The boy. His eyes skated toward the light of the doorway. Then the daughter emerged from the darkness of the room, crossing from her chair to the cradle, shielding the light with her wrist. Before she did, he got a good look at her pretty, outraged face. “I beg your pardon,” said Sheriff, holding his hat to his heart. He stood between the door and the cradle for close to a minute, the light falling over the boy. What he saw was a colored baby with his white mother’s face. She lifted him and held him to her shoulder, and Sheriff put his hat back on. He shook his head and gave a little laugh. Ain’t a Fritz behind every pisser door, he reminded himself.

Back in the kitchen, to Jesup, he said again, “I beg your pardon.”

“Damn shame, ain’t it,” said Jesup. “Neither one of em’s gone know its daddy.”

That was how it came to be that Juke Jesup went free. Sheriff left him with a handshake and a warning. “I don’t care how friendly Wilson been to you. He ain’t gone let his boy take the fall so easy. You best walk with the sun at your back and keep your shadow in front of you.”

It was the day that belonged to the Lord. If you hung your wash on a Sunday, everyone in church would know it, and you might have your sins prayed for. When the first reporter showed up that afternoon, before Genus’s body was even cold, Juke sent him away, saying, “Let the dead have a day’s rest.”

But Monday morning, the knocks came quick—a reporter from the Florence Messenger, the Albany Herald, the Valdosta Daily Times. They all ran a photograph of the gourd tree, a short length of rope hanging from a beam. They seemed disappointed that there was no picture of Genus hanging. There was no picture of Genus at all. In the front-page article in the Messenger, they spelled his name “Genius.”

FLORENCE, Ga., Jul. 7—At approximately 12:30 A.M., Genius Jackson, a Negro youth of unknown origins, was allegedly killed by George Frederick “Freddie” Wilson III, 19, on the property of his grandfather George Frederick Wilson, known as the crossroads farm, near the intersection of String Wilson and Twelve-Mile Roads. Although the deceased’s body suffered multiple gunshot wounds, an autopsy revealed the cause of death to be a fracture of the cervical spine.

According to witness John “Juke” Jesup, the sharecropper who hired Jackson as a wage hand, Jackson was hanged from a gourd tree in retaliation for the rape of his daughter, Elma Jesup, 18, Wilson’s fiancée. Wilson, who worked as foreman under his grandfather’s supervision at the Florence Cotton Mill, was last seen in his green Chevrolet truck traveling southbound on Valentine Road. He is said to be wearing a pair of shoes made of alligator leather, which belonged to the deceased.

Elma looked for the word “lynch” but didn’t find it. A lynching, she knew, would imply that the man had died at the hands of persons unknown. Somehow all those persons unknown had managed to pin it on Freddie Wilson, and though Elma felt no more love for him and now felt not even pity—he’d had it coming forty ways from Sunday—what she did feel was bewilderment, fury, and finally relief, that her father had managed to get off without a scratch, clean as a newborn. The reporters sat with Juke in the rockers on the porch, on the scattered pine stumps, drinking coffee and eating corn pone with chitlins and talking till the sun went down. He told stories about growing up on the farm as a boy with String Wilson, the story about the skunk they’d caught in a rabbit trap, the story about String carrying a potato in his trouser pocket for a week because Juke told him it would turn into a rock. There were stories of Juke’s heroics—the one about saving String when he’d fallen down that well, and saving the drunk who’d wrecked his tractor in the creek (it had crushed the man’s legs like twigs—that was why you’d never catch Juke Jesup on a tractor). He’d saved a dog too just a few months back, from the burning shell of a car—it was how his arm came to be burned, he said. The bitch of a hound had run oft. Some kind of grateful! When the next reporter came, he told the stories again. He could tell stories, Juke could. He could talk the hind legs off a donkey. And the reporters could listen. They were paid to listen. If they left with their pockets a little heavier, weighed down with jars of gin, it was just to make sure they listened right. None of the stories made it into the paper, and except for a quote here and there—“I reckon God saw that judgment was made”—Juke stayed out of the papers too. It was a tragedy, the papers said, a shame. But what could be done in a case like this?

Only one paper, the Macon Testament, printed an editorial. It was also the only paper that used the word “lynch.” It was one of those big-city dailies. On Tuesday morning, after delivering her eggs, Elma was seen reading it at the crossroads store, hiding behind a tower of condensed milk.

For three years, it seemed Reason had come to Georgia. The Klansman had been evicted from the Governor’s mansion, and lynching with him. Then, in January, Irwin County brought Georgia back to that dark era. Now that her record has been broken, why not trample on it? The tragedy in Irwin County will go down in history as truly barbaric, but at least the sheriff had a confession. Here we have nothing, no evidence but a bruised ego and brute justice.

“Miss Elma? You all right, honey?”

Mud Turner peeked around the tower of cans. Elma pressed the paper to her chest. Mud thought she was holding it funny, like her arm was broke.

“Of course. I’ll be taking my flour, if you don’t mind.”

At the checkers table on the porch of the store, Jeb Simmons and his son Jeb Junior sat hunched over the Testament. Elma looked like she was in a hurry, but Jeb got up to help lift her wagon down the step. “Don’t worry, Miss Elma,” he said. “Don’t nobody care for no city rag.”

“Don’t nobody care for no opinionating,” said Jeb Junior. They called him Drink. That was what he liked to do.

“That reporter show up round here, we’ll send him home directly.”

But he’d already shown up. He was the reporter who’d shown up on Sunday. And not just a reporter—Q. L. Boothby, the editor and publisher himself. He was an important man in Macon. Head of the hospital board, the Masons, and a member, it was said, of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. (“Nigger-lover club,” it was said.) He came back to the big house again on Tuesday afternoon, after the editorial was out, and Juke, who’d brought home the paper himself and made Elma read it aloud, was ready, with Jeb and Drink and five or six other men, men who’d been there on Saturday night and men who wished they’d been. Q. L. Boothby didn’t make it to the porch. Elma had watched from the window as he backed down the steps, his hands half-raised in surrender, then got in his car and drove back to Macon.

They hadn’t bought the Testament since Ocilla. If they had a nickel to spend, they spent it on the Messenger, whose editor had money in the mill, whose regular order of gin was as big as any in the county. But the end of January, a thousand folks in the next county had mobbed a colored man for raping and killing a teenage white girl. They said he cut out her eye with a knife and left her on the road to die, and when they found him, they tore him limb from limb, joint by joint, pulling out his teeth with pliers, before they strung him from a tree and burned him. Elma’s father had sent her to the store for all the papers the next day, and he’d had her read him every word. He couldn’t read but a handful of words himself, and never took to his daughter teaching him, or his wife before her. When Elma was done, he said, “To think I was just there on Tuesday. I coulda caught me quite a sight.”

It was said that the chief of police kept the man’s skull on his desk as an ashtray. One of the little girls from Creek Baptist claimed she had visited his office with her friend, the police chief’s granddaughter, and he had let her hold it. She claimed she had a piece of it in her pocket, and all the children gathered round to see it, but it was just a pig knuckle in wax paper, and everyone was disappointed.

It wasn’t a nod, Elma told herself. She had not nodded. She had lowered her head, then lifted it to find her father’s eye, then lowered it again. Lowered, lifted, lowered. A hesitation of the chin, no more. She had not given her permission. Her permission was not required. What was she to do to stop fifty men from carrying out what they were bent on carrying out?

Freddie would have done it anyway, with or without Juke’s help, with or without Elma’s blessing—that was the way her daddy put it. Weren’t no stopping him, he said again and again, weren’t no stopping him, until she came to believe it as he seemed to. “You ain’t done no wrong,” he said, and that was all—they were not to speak of it. He didn’t mean that he, her father, was to blame. He meant to absolve both of them. There was no one to blame, because there had been no wrong. All the blame there was, and there wasn’t much, he tagged on Freddie. Elma didn’t know whether that had been his aim all along or whether he’d been lucky enough for Freddie to accept the blame before Juke could offer it. She didn’t know if, in private, her father saved any blame for himself, if he prayed to God outside of a church pew, if the body that swung in her nightmares swung in his too. She supposed she wouldn’t ever know. Genus was buried in the ground and her father was out in the field like it was any day of the week, for though it was July and laying-by time, there was ragweed to cuss at.

Elma moved from room to room, sweeping the floors clean, across the breezeway, her elbows tucked to her sides. If she kept her head down, her chin lowered, if she didn’t look out the kitchen window, her eyes would not catch on the gourd tree. The gourd tree would not be there. And if she didn’t sing, no one could hear her. No one could say, What are you doing, Elma Jesup, singing like you don’t have a care in the world?

In the first days, there was only brief mention of the babies, and usually the press got it wrong. One paper left out Winna; another said they were mulatto twins. It was only after one paper reported that the two babies born to Elma Jesup were of decidedly different complexions that the other papers sent their reporters back, and Juke came in from the fields to invite them inside. Now that their attention was off Genus Jackson, he didn’t mind being in the papers. The babies he almost seemed to be proud of. “Ain’t no use hiding them,” he said to Elma. “Might as well grab us ahold a some fame.” Besides, it was good for business. The reporters came thick as field mice, with their folding cameras and notepads, standing shoulder to shoulder on the porch steps, wanting to take a look at the twins. They aimed their cameras over the edge of the cradle. They left with more gin, paying Juke directly now, having gotten a taste for it. This would piss George Wilson off something good, but what did it matter now? Juke had already pissed George Wilson’s pants off.

In the weeklies Juke brought home from the crossroads store, Wilson and Winnafred were the same inky gray, bound in blankets, sleeping. But the headlines spelled it out. The one in the Atlanta paper said, GEMINI TWINS BORN TO COTTON CO. WOMAN. Elma read the articles to Juke. After a while she got tired of the papers and made up stories. “There ain’t nothing about us in this one. It’s just about the price of corn.” Then Juke wanted to know more—what was it about the price of corn? “It’s fine,” Elma said. “It’s holding steady.”

She swore off the papers, but in a few days she was dashing down to the crossroads store to read them again, searching for some mention of the children. She couldn’t tolerate the thought of them being talked about behind her back. It was like hearing her name whispered in church and not being able to tell who’d said it.

First of August, Elma flinched at the word “lynch” in a headline in the Testament. She hadn’t been expecting it. It was the babies she was looking for. But it wasn’t about Genus Jackson. She looked closer. An elderly Negro politician who owned forty acres in Montgomery County, sixty miles from Florence, had been flogged over the head by a mob of masked men. The men had come to his door late at night and roused him from his bed, where he had been asleep with his grandson. They put him, barely conscious, in the back of a truck, drove him to Toombs County, and left him by the side of the road. At dawn a white farmer on his way to Vidalia with a load of tobacco found the Negro in his bloody pajamas, and the Negro offered him seven dollars to be driven home, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

There was outrage in Montgomery County. The Negro was an important man. A delegate to the National Republican Convention. Secretary and treasurer of the Widows and Orphans Department of the Negro Masonic Lodge, with an office and a secretary. Recently he had run for chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Committee, and before he was elected he accused his lily-white opponents of fraud. He implied, some said, that they were poor white trash. “That’s all right,” one observer reported them saying at the convention. “We’ll see you later about that.”

It was the second official lynching of the year, the article stated, though a July incident in Cotton County was still under scrutiny.

Elma did not read the article to her father. She didn’t even bring home the paper, just read it standing next to the tower of cans, folded it up, and buried it back in its pile. Maybe now, she thought, the reporters would be busy in Montgomery County. She stepped out onto the porch of the store. The Coca-Cola thermometer read 96 degrees, and Elma’s collar was damp with sweat, but now her neck went cold and she shivered. She had not seen Genus’s body but now in her mind she saw the old man in Montgomery County, on the side of the road in his nightclothes, saw him there on the Twelve-Mile Straight in front of the crossroads store like a dog dead in a ditch.

“Can I help you with that wagon?” asked Drink Simmons, half standing up from his table.

“No, thank you.”

“You look right peaked, Miss Elma.”

“I’m all right, thank you kindly.”

“You hear any word from that fiancé of yours?”

“What are you asking after?”

“I never took Freddie for yellow.” Drink shrugged. “I wouldn’t up and leave my woman nor my younguns, even if the law was hot on my behind.”

Elma bumped her wagon down the steps and into the sun, and now her body flashed hot. She would not think about the man in Montgomery. It was easier to be mad. “Don’t you and your daddy have some squirrels to shoot, Drink?”

The people of Cotton County were distracted from Genus Jackson, and it was the twins who seized their attention. Through August, as the corn grew high in the fields and the next truckload of pickers showed up, people came to see the babies. They came from church and town and neighboring farms, bearing booties and blankets, biscuits and pies. Mary Minrath, the home supervisor who last fall had been sent from town to help with the canning, brought the peach cobbler that had taken honorable mention at the Cotton County fair. Bette Hazelton, the bank manager’s wife, brought a box of secondhand clothes she’d collected from the congregation at Florence Baptist. Camilla Rawls, the doctor’s wife and the president of the local chapter of the WCTU, brought two golden-edged, pocket-size Bibles. “Every child of God needs his own.” Even the chain gang that made its way down the road left a gift stuffed in the mailbox, a bouquet of blue hound’s tongue picked from the shoulder of the Straight. They came by cart and by foot and by automobile, Hoover wagons and two-wheeled jigs, feigning errands to the crossroads store, delivering news. Some clucked and cooed; some shook their heads. All of them prayed over the cradle. “Haven’t seen you in church, Elma,” said Josie Byrd, whose daddy owned the biggest peanut farm in the county. She was leaving for Emory, for nursing school, and she wore a new pair of leather shoes, white with white laces, so clean they hurt Elma’s eyes. “They got Mary Collier in your place in the choir, and pretty as she is, she sings like a gopher frog.”

Elma said she’d be back in church when she was ready, when the twins were old enough to travel. And the women left with a knowing nod, sometimes a hand on Elma’s shoulder. “If I didn’t see them with my own eyes,” Josie’s mother whispered to Josie on their way out the door, “I’d say those babies came from two different wombs.”

A week after delivering the cobbler, Mrs. Minrath returned in her starched apron, her leather ledger at her side, saying, “Those tomatoes in your garden aren’t going to can themselves.”

Elma said she wouldn’t be needing any help this year, thank you kindly. “We got our hands full with the babies.”

Mrs. Minrath pursed her flat lips. “Then it would seem you could use all the extra hands you could get. Especially in times like these. And without any womankind around.”

“I got my Nan. She’s a plumb miraculous canner. We been canning since we was tall as the hem on your dress, Mrs. Minrath. Even without a book to write it all down in.”

Mrs. Minrath looked around Elma and into the house, where Nan was holding Wilson. She shook her head. “Poor children,” she said, and turned and walked down the steps.

People came to help, and Elma sent them away. It was true that she lost some tomatoes—her father let her tend the garden, but alone she couldn’t pick them fast enough. She canned what she could, and the peaches and berries too, and pickled the peppers and carrots, sweating over the stove. She ate the cobblers and biscuits and pies, hating every bite, but she was hungry, and so were the babies, and they were delicious, those wicked, wicked pies. She fed the chickens and the guineas and the hogs and the mules, trapping a high-pitched hum in her mouth, and milked the cows, April and June, Anna and Margaret, and separated the cream from their milk, saving the skim for the hogs. “It’s all they want us for, ain’t it, girls,” she said to the cows, tugging the full, furred mounds of their teats. “Milk, milk, and more milk.” When she was held up feeding the babies and couldn’t get out to the barn until dawn, their udders were engorged as globes, veined with rivers of ducts. “Ain’t it the worst, girls,” she said. When she was held up with her chores and forgot to feed the babies, her own milk would mess the front of her dress, and then there was no ignoring it. And then she’d pull the shutters and sit back in the rocker and settle a baby into her lap, or two if she could manage, closing her eyes and letting the ache ease, and then there was nothing in the world but the babies, no visitors, no reporters, only their billy goat mews and the buttermilk smell of their warm heads.