A Train of Powder (14 page)

Brown’s friends were in the state of bereavement that is the worst to bear. Brown was not dead. He was dying, and they could do nothing to save him. They were in that state of frustration that makes atheists at the deathbed of their loved ones curse God. “They then drug the Negro out of the car,” said Mr. Hurd in his statement. (“Drug” is certainly a better word than “Dragged.”) Nobody speaks of doing anything there beside the slaughter pen; they all speak of hearing things. One heard “the tearing of cloth and flesh”; another heard “some licks like they were pounding him with the butt end of a gun.” Some heard the Negro say, “Lord, you done killed me.” Some saw as well as heard. “I saw,” stated one, “Hurd aim the single shotgun towards the ground in the direction of where I judged the Negro was laying and pulled the trigger; I then heard the shot fired. I then heard Hurd ask someone to give him another shell.” But Mr. Hurd also is among those who heard but did not do. He did not even see. “When I seen they were going to kill the Negro,” he stated, “I just turned around, because I did not want to see it.”

People can become accustomed to committing acts of cruelty; recent Europe proves that. But the first act of cruelty disgusts and shames far past the unimaginative man’s power of prevision. The men who had joined the lynching party in the mood of righteous men fulfilling a duty did not, according to their statements, enjoy the actual lynching. “I only heard one report from a gun because I immediately drove away,” stated one. “I have worked only one night since then,” stated another. Fat Joy, another says, was overcome by terror on the way home and drove up to one of the taxis and said, “Let’s drive side by side; I think the law is coming.” But it was only the “civilian” car that had been with them all night. Of their return to the town another states, “I got out at the Southern depot and went into the Southern Cafe. I got a cup of coffee. The man George, a Greek, behind the counter said, ‘Did you get him?’ I said, ‘Who do you mean?’ He said, ‘You know.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’” It was so little like what they had expected that even Mr. Hurd informed the FBI that he thought it had all been a mistake, and recalled that he had never been in trouble for anything before. That the deed sickened them was proved beyond a shadow of doubt in the court house. When Sam Watt, the assistant but more conspicuous prosecuting attorney, read from the statements the details of what had been done to Willie Earle and described them as the detestable horrors that they were, the defendants were ashamed. They did not like their wives to hear them; and indeed their wives were also sickened. Mr. Hurd’s father himself, whose loyalty to Mr. Hurd will be unshakable in eternity, looked down his long nose; so might an Inquisitor look, suddenly smitten with doubt of the purging flame. That hour passed. There were those at the trial who saw to that. But in that hour the defendants surely hated evil and loved good.

Years ago a poet in New York, babbling the indecencies of early parenthood, told a gathering that his child of two already enjoyed having poetry read to him. Someone asked what poetry he read to it. “Shelley and some of my own work,” he answered. “That,” said the false friend, “gives the kid the whole range.” This trial gave the kid the whole range. The judge, J. Robert Martin, Jr., is very local. He knows all about rhetoric and opera. His speech arouses wonder as to how the best sort of stenographer, who takes down by sounds and not by sense, is not wholly baffled in the South, where “You gentlemen must apportion your time” is converted into “Yo’ ge’men must appo’tion yo’ taiaime,” with a magnificent vibrato on the diphthongs and a strong melodic line to the whole. He is so good that though he is local he expands the local meaning, and recalls that the great Southerners are great men to the whole world. He has humour but hates a clown. He would have given much to have had the court fully decorous; when an important personage of the region took his seat on the dais and threw his raincoat over the law books on the judge’s table, it irked him. His love of handsomeness and fine manners extends to the intellectual world. His charge to the jury was both powerful and beautifully shaped. Throughout the trial he stood on the skyline, proclaiming his hostility to lawlessness and his determination to keep his court uncontaminated, with a solid and unremitting positiveness that must have made him a personal enemy of every reactionary in the state.

The leader for the prosecution was nominally Robert T. Ashmore, the Greenville County solicitor, a gentle and courteous person. But the leading prosecuting attorney was Sam Watt, who comes from the neighboring town of Spartanburg, a lawyer of high reputation throughout the South, a much more dynamic person. He was assigned to the case by the Attorney General of the State of South Carolina at the suggestion of the Governor, about ten days after the FBI men had gone in. When he arrived the preliminaries of the case were over; and they had been conducted with some imprudence. The taking of statements from accused persons is one of the most delicate processes of police work. All over the world police forces are likely to become corrupt and tyrannous, and are then apt to coerce accused persons into making confessions. This is generally recognized. It is very hard to examine accused persons in places that are not more or less private, and therefore it is very hard to know when they have or have not been coerced. While there was no reason to believe that the FBI men used any illegitimate methods, it is true that they took these statements in circumstances that did not protect them from the charge that the defendants gave them under duress. It is also true that the statements amounted to frank confessions of participation in a capital crime. It is actually not at all uncommon for criminals who have committed acts which touch them deeply to make such confessions. But this is not so generally recognized. So this was very dubious material to bring before a jury, and indeed at least one of the defence attorneys flatly declared that they would be fools to believe that twenty-six men would incriminate themselves unless under compulsion.

But the mishandling went a great deal farther than that. The statements, which were not sworn, might have been supplemented when the defendants applied to be released under bond, for it was perfectly possible to demand that the applicants should again recite their connection with the crime in the form of sworn affidavits prepared by their own attorneys. This had not been done. The defendants had been turned loose unconditionally, and most of them, by the time Sam Watt came into the case, had returned to their duties as taxi drivers. Any stranger visiting the town of Greenville during late February, March, April, or early May of this year was as likely as not to be driven from the station by a person awaiting trial for murder and conspiracy to murder. But it is not necessary to bring the stranger into it. The citizens of Greenville also used these taxis, and it would be interesting to know how they liked the idea.

A prosecutor who introduced these statements in court would be a very lucky man if he could support them by strong corroborative evidence, and a very unlucky one if he could not. Mr. Watt and Mr. Ashmore had at their disposal nothing like the evidence that might convince a jury that these statements had not been obtained by duress, or, rather, prevent the jury from using a suspicion of duress as an excuse for an acquittal. It was true that one of the defendants had handed over to the police a gun that was damaged, and that the gun was of the same make as a gun that several men had described in their statements as being used by one of their number to beat the dying Negro until it broke under the force of his blows. This, however, was not such satisfactory evidence as it appears, because the man who was supposed to have broken the gun on the Negro’s body did not himself admit in his statement that he had used it to beat the Negro, and each of the statements was evidence only against the man who made it and not against the men mentioned in it. This is not mere legal fussiness but a sensible provision, as the statements were not sworn and could not have been subjected to cross-examination by the attorneys of the mentioned persons unless the makers of the statements went into the witness box, which they did not do. There was also the testimony of one Roy Stansell, proprietor of a tourist camp on the Pickens highway, at which some of the taxis had stopped. This merely proved that the expedition had been on the road; it did not connect the men with the jail break or the murder. There was also the unfortunate U. G. Fowler, a taxi driver who gave evidence that he had been asked to join the party and had refused. But even he had heard the purpose of the expedition announced only by a voice to which he could not pin a name. There must have been a great many taxi drivers who could have given much more pointed evidence along these lines. Why they did not do so was revealed before the end of the trial. U. G. Fowler was set upon as he was driving along a country road, beaten, and threatened with death. He appeared before a local judge and made a complaint, but the judge refused to swear out a warrant for the arrest of the men who had beaten him. So Mr. Fowler left town. It cannot be said, therefore, that the prosecution had put together a valid argument for a conviction. Timid muddling by someone or by some people who were not only muddlers but had an eye on the political weather had drawn most of its claws. As the case was handled, the jury cannot be blamed for returning an acquittal. If it had convicted on any of the indictments, even on the least, which related to conspiracy, either the verdict would have been reversed by a superior court or a very dangerous precedent would have been established. The trial had not the pleasing pattern, the agreeable harmony and counterpoint, of good legal process, however much the judge tried to redeem it. But whether the jury returned their verdict of not guilty because they recognized the weakness of the state’s case, it was hard to guess. It was the habit of certain people connected with the case to refer to the jury with deep contempt, as a parcel of boobs who could be seduced into swallowing anything by anybody who knew how to tickle them up by the right mixture of brutish prejudice and corny sentimentality; and it was odd to notice that the people who most despised the jury were those who most despised the Negroes. To a stranger’s eye, the jurymen looked well built and well groomed; and they stayed awake, which is the first and most difficult task of a juror, although they, like the attorneys, kept their coats on when the heat was a damp, embracing fever. What was marvelled at about this jury was its constitution. As Greenville is a town with, it is said, twenty-five millionaires and a large number of prosperous and well-educated people, it may have seemed peculiar that the jury should consist of two salesmen, a farmer, a mechanic, a truck driver, and seven textile workers. Some of the prosperous citizens had indeed appeared on the list of the veniremen from which the jurors were selected, but they had been singularly fortunate in being challenged by the attorneys. The unpopular task of deciding a lynching case therefore fell to an unfavored group who had not the money to hire a bodyguard or to leave the town. They would, let us remember, have been in a most difficult position if they had returned a verdict of guilty. They might not have been murdered, like Willie Earle, or beaten up, like U. G. Fowler, but they would never have been able to take a taxi again with an easy mind, and that would be a considerable inconvenience in Greenville. It is one of the mysteries of this case that the trial was not shifted to another town.

Of the prosecuting attorneys, Mr. Ashmore made a speech that was not very spirited but was conscientious and accepted the moral values common to civilized people without making any compromise. Sam Watt, who has a deep and passionate loathing of violence and disorder, and who is such a good attorney that the imperfections of the case must have vexed him to his soul, handled the situation in his own way by using the statements to build up a picture of the lynching in all its vileness. It was while the defendants were listening to this speech that they hated evil and that they desired to renounce it. It was a great, if highly local, speech, and it made a mark on the public mind that was to last, though the close of the case cancelled it for the moment. That cancellation was due to the remarkable freedom of two of the defence attorneys from the moral values accepted by Mr. Ashmore and Mr. Watt. The two other defence attorneys accepted them; one wholly, the other partly. Mr. Bradley Morrah, Jr., accepted them wholly, Mr. Ben Bolt partly.

Mr. Bradley Morrah, Jr., was a young man who was a member of the state legislature. He was representing a strange defendant, his cousin, Mr. John B. Marchant, who was twenty-eight and the son of a widow of good family greatly loved in the town. Mr. Marchant was the driver of the “civilian car” that accompanied the string of taxicabs to the lynching. According to his story, he was leading the contemplative life in a café opposite the Yellow Cab office in the early hours of February 17 when he saw the expedition forming and joined it out of sheer curiosity. He was extremely disconcerted when he discovered its object, and though he did not dare leave the party, he did not approach the scene of action but waited some distance away. Mr. Marchant apparently spent much of his time accompanying the sheriff’s men on their night work just as a hobby, and he certainly visited the sheriff’s office next day and volunteered a statement before there was any need. There is no reason to disbelieve his account.

Both Mr. Marchant and Mr. Morrah gave the impression that they were stranded in the wrong century, like people locked in a train that has been shunted onto a siding. Mr. Morrah was as old-fashioned in appearance as Governor Dewey; he looked like a dandy of 1890. He was very likeable, being small and delicately made, yet obviously courageous; and there was nothing unlikeable in his oratory. He told the court that he had known his cousin for twenty-five years and knew that he had never had a vicious thought, and he wished that it was possible for him to take John Marchant’s heart out of his breast and turn it over in his hand so that the jury could see that there was not an evil impulse in it. He was going on to say that he could picture John Marchant “with his mother, my aunt,” when Sam Watt rose and said, “I object. There is no evidence about the Marchant family.” The judge allowed the objection. Mr. Morrah altered the phrase to “I can picture him surrounded by his loved ones,” and said that he “stood firmly bottomed, like a ship,” and warned the jury that if they convicted him, the facts “would rankle in the hearts of men throughout the state, from the rock-ribbed brow of Caesar’s Head to the marshes of Fort Sumter” and someplace else on the sea, and that “the ghosts of Hampton’s men would rise to haunt you.” But there was nothing barbarous in his speech. He was a transparently honest and kindly and dutiful person, and he depreciated no civilized standard, though it was startling when he ended his speech with the statement that the prosecution of Marchant reminded him of words spoken two thousand years ago, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” The comparison did not seem apt.