The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (34 page)

Though a few workers remained in place to funnel liquid, churn syrup, and waft steam, the bulk of the Negro Militia had drifted close to watch, no doubt with their pink palms to the butts of silver guns.

“Is it your claim that you don't remember?” demanded I. “That onslaught upon our jail?”

“Boss Man been in lots of jails,” crowed Harold.

“Well, I am not surprised to see that he's resumed his life of crime.”

“You can't talk to the Boss Man like that!” Harold tipped his hat back so I could see his thrust bottom lip. “Ain't you never heard of Booker T. Washington? Marcus Garvey?”

“If these are playmates of yours, rude child, I hope never to meet them.”

“Ain't you never heard of black pride?”

“
Pride?
Oh, Alice, I have joined you, my dear, through the looking glass, into a land where two-bit bandits expect praise for their contemptible thievery.”

“Yeah, my poppa stole. So? He good at it, mister!”

“Your poppa? I might have guessed.”

“Boss Man can steal a hundred dollars worth a' potatoes while you stand there talking school talk. By the way, mister, I don't want to meet your friend Alice no more than you want to meet my friend Marcus Garvey.”

“Seeing how your father is dumb, if not deaf as well, I shall direct my final query to you before taking my leave. What does your group do, then, Boss Boy, with your old man's stealings?”

“What do you think? Boss Man seen them Prohibition fools coming a mile off. Pretty soon we be making a hundred gallons a day easy. Look at our alky-cookers. We got the best still in the South. Can't you see good out them eyes?”

The quip elicited a scattering of chuckles and I looked over my shoulder. What I saw were endless brown faces beaming with pride at their quick-lipped upstart. Banjo plucking continued undaunted, and the women at the tubs swayed their hips with a wantonness rarely seen beyond bordello walls. I could not help but admire the gyrations.

The entire still, in fact, was testament to these women's tart humor. Nailed to the posts were handbills deriding the evils of alcohol (“Progenitor of Folly, Misery, Madness, and Crime!”); medical charts associating each type of spirit with expected Vices, Diseases, and Punishments (“Egg Rums” led to “Gaming, Peevishness,” which led to “Puking, Bloatedness,” which led to “Jail”); and magazine adverts based on doubtable claims (an infant in a high chair paired with the rhyme, “The youngster, ruddy with good cheer, / Serenely sips his Lager Beer”).

I studied John Quincy.

“Is this why you stole that corn all those years ago?”

Harold smacked his forehead.

“How else you think corn whiskey get made?” He counted off on his fingers. “You has to soak it, sprout it, dry it, grind it, ferment it, distill it. You want to add juniper juice, that up to you. Boss Man got his own recipe. You want a swaller? Naw, you said you don't drink. Too bad. It's the best mash since the Plymouth Rock Pilgrims brought theirs over, isn't that right, Poppa?”

John Quincy at last showed a tinge of emotion, a slight uplift of lip, before apportioning to me that rarest of his products, his voice.

“You look the same, Mr. Stick,” said he. “Got the same fight, too. Let's see how we get on.”

No further slander crossed my tongue. Try as I might to tap wellsprings of resentment, the Negro's quiet confidence brought to mind the Soothing Foursome brother who'd lugged my body to the field of honor in 1902 without a word of thanks. To whom else had I to turn? My massacre in the Argonne had burned down Mary Leather's efforts to build me into a gentleman. A hidden forest cove was where
I belonged; running rotgut was the job I deserved. So I gave a curt nod. I'd move his moonshine. Perhaps for only a few days, maybe a full week if I was struck by the urge to grandstand. I'd show John Quincy which one of us was the natural-born sinner.

II.

H
AROLD WAS RIGHT. DRY DAYS
were here and Boss Man was bottling a flood.

Prohibition inaugurated its historic farce at 12:01 in the morning on January 20, 1920, beneath the lifted baton of six months of jail time and up to one thousand dollars in fines. Before it was done, it would flip social orders, rob power from some and stuff it into the pockets of others, squash industries here while giving rise to others there, and inject new life into folks who'd been living on the brink of ruin.

You could not hope for a better example than John Quincy and his brood. Yes, those many workers I had met were his extended, expansive family, ranging from great-great-aunts, step-nieces, and half-brothers to the beloved First Lady of mash liquor, his wife, known across hill country as Mother Mash. Viewed in isolation, each individual was a puffy-haired, singing, dancing ne'er-do-well possessed of not a single ounce of ambition. Together, though, they locked like cogs and cranked out, with the efficiency of Ford, enough drinkable alcohol to fill an ocean.

Forget the shade of your skin—you could not buy better hooch. Who couldn't recall their first nip of Stuck-Shoe Cider or Tin Tub Recherché? John Quincy used purest ingredients, cozying up to priests to purchase sacramental wine and entering into relationships
with druggists still permitted to dole out whiskey prescriptions. And who was sent to reassure these professionals of our honorable status? No less than a freshly scrubbed white boy in smartly pressed Marine fatigues!

Xenion and its neighboring anthills could not contain us. In 1922, I was graduated from horse patrol and formally introduced by Harold to the family's venerable Model T. I figured I could conquer it, but came close to dismantling the transmission before Harold quit his guffawing and taught me how to drive. We filled it with liquor crates stenciled “Choice Meats” and “Fresh Fish,” and Harold gave me directions to a speakeasy in Savannah that wanted the whole lot.

She was a hell of an auto, that Tin Lizzie! Electric starter motors and colorful pyroxylin paint jobs were the rage, but our dull black, hand-cranked clunker better concealed our success. John Quincy had tinkered with the engine and, boy, was she fast. High-speed pursuits were common, and, being unafraid of roadside crashes, I took blind corners and jumped ravines that no Prohibition agent would dare. The wind against my face was not unlike the rush of Death I'd experienced that one time back in 1896. It was grand.

City work was not for the timid. Agents deputized by the Volstead Act would shutter a gin joint one night only for it to reopen twenty-four hours later under a new guise, and it was my job to know where. Dozens of times, while unloading clandestine crates of liquor, I watched these half-wits, right across the damn street, confiscate beer barrels and axe them on the sidewalk. Little starvelings would then dart out with buckets to gather the beer from the gutter, either for their parents or some Faginlike sort who tipped them a few cents. Such displays lifted my spirits. Now
that
was the sort of youth I would have enjoyed!

John Quincy was coining money. His organization remained backwoods by locale but not by description; his lean-to had matured into a chimneyed warehouse replete with locked doors, blacked-out windows, and a surrounding forest armed with booby traps. My cut was not ungenerous, but I had little use for it. I kept my uniform in prime states of tidiness and repair, paid for adjustments upon the Model T of which I had grown so fond, and that was it.

So why, if not for personal gain, did I keep on for five years? Reader, I can confide in you. The truth is that I discovered at that lawless Negro distillery soft bits of tranquility that helped me forget my failures with Johnny, Mary, Merle, and Church. The place was family personified, closeness incarnate: an office at which business was conducted; a community kitchen wherein kinfolk might offer one another comfort; and a safe zone in which one might let the indignities of America evaporate from one's skin and kick back with a hammered-tin stein. So, too, was it solace for a creature like me.

The daily glow of the frothing pots was joined each night by bonfires over which roasted stuck pig or egg-stuffed biscuits, and around which danced the whole whooping lot of Quincys, displaying a lack of inhibition that I found by sequence appalling, puzzling, and enviable. Mother Mash lifted her skirts and stomped about with the best of them, while Harold (by 1925 older than I) made his girl-cousins blush with his fast-talking flattery and even faster feet. They knew that I wished to go undisturbed and respected it, though Mother Mash kept ceremony by approaching me nightly, calling me “child,” and offering plates of strange delicacies I could not accept: ox tail stew, fried fatback, and vinegar chitterlings.

There was one other who refrained from the celebrations: John Quincy. Each night he sat across the clearing at the exact opposite
of my position, sipping at a single glass of wine with a grandchild bouncing upon his knee, gazing with satisfaction at the tribe he'd lifted from poverty. Near the midnight hour, his slumberous eyes would meet mine and he'd do me the great favor of a single nod. My role, I suppose, was to feel honored. But a young white man like myself had nothing so invaluable as his dignity, and thus I made no response. Let me whisper into thine ear, though, a long-kept secret: honored, Dearest Reader, is how I felt.

III.

I
T WAS DURING THE LAST
two years of my tenancy that sinister forces began to encroach. During city stopovers I always made time for movies, and I took in, as did thousands of others, a picture called
The Birth of a Nation
, put out by a chap named D. W. Griffith. It was advertised as a “Mighty Spectacle,” “The Eighth Wonder of the World,” “The Supreme Picture of All Time,” and starred no fewer than eighteen hundred people and three thousand horses. (When was the last time you saw horses receive top billing? I was excited.) I slapped down hard-earned moonshining moolah and told the ticket boy to make it snappy. I claimed a front-row seat before a thirty-piece orchestra.

The picture ran for well over two hours—and it was not nearly enough! During the intermission, I pouted; when it was over, I shook the hands of the musicians. For weeks while dodging Prohibition officers I imagined myself as the movie's dauntless Ben Cameron, wounded in the Civil War, pardoned by Abraham Lincoln, and founder of an energetic bunch of crime-fighters who wore dramatic white hoods.

Much time did I give to imagining the rescue of fainted maidens and the gunning down of would-be defilers. Little thought, indeed, did I give to the motivations of this masked group, which was called the Ku Klux Klan. It came to pass that
The Birth of a Nation
, the best
picture I'd ever seen, stoked red the gray embers of the KKK, giving rise to a revived movement that, in a snap of the fingers, swept the country by the millions, each chapter defending their “Aryan birthright” against the invasive species of the Negro.

I witnessed KKK marches firsthand while delivering goodies in Albany, Augusta, and Macon, and the men in the pointed hats took every opportunity to flaunt their fealty to Biblical mores. Was it any wonder that they were obdurate backers of Prohibition?

You have a capable mind, Reader.

I need not warn you where this is heading.

The Klan's arrival in Xenion was marked by a burning cross planted high upon a hilltop. Local infiltration was swift and deep. Fresh KKK inductees attended church services in full regalia, and fundamentalist Gød-botherers were happy to accept their anonymized parishioners as both rod and staff. Sunday school teachers signed up lads to the Junior Klan and gals to the Tri-K Klub. Teachers began lecturing about the hierarchy of races, and white children began to look at their colored playmates through a newly scratched lens.

The atmosphere at John Quincy's place clouded, darkened, and chilled, and for good reasons. A local Negro family, proprietors of a flourishing cabinetry business, was dragged from their beds to watch while their lawn was scorched with a cross. A colored boy alleged to have been forward with a white woman had the KKK symbol branded into his forehead. A black man caught with jugs of rum was covered with tar, and then, in an inspired ad lib, that tar was set aflame. Businesses were burned to the ground, children kidnapped, women flogged, men murdered.

Intimidation, though, was not among the repertoire of John
Quincy. Even when tragedy touched his family, he pushed toward expansion, slapping the backside of any worker caught gossiping instead of fermenting, bottling, and shipping. In such high esteem did his blood-relative underlings hold him that they kept up the singing and dancing; they even snagged copies of the Klan's newspaper,
The Searchlight
, and included them in their ongoing satiric collage.

It all left me quite conflicted. I was not one of those bleeding-heart Negro activists; my past aligned more with that of the average Klansman. Yet the Klan's single-minded pursuit of the dark-skinned offended me with its lack of logic—I knew firsthand that Negroes were our intellectual peers. It was a quandary I kept quiet, though I wondered what I might do if the KKK's Imperial Wizard paid me a visit and asked for cooperation regarding the apprehension of a certain local moonshiner.

In October 1925, John Quincy made the greatest gamble of his career. Word of his liquors had reached all the way up the coast, and a player in New York City's illegal trafficking racket wished to purchase an amount to distribute to the high-class clientele. Were the reaction enthusiastic, he would enter into a contract that would enable John Quincy to produce his moonshine up North and under the best protection. After one year his family need not worry about money ever again.

Harold was our most reliable driver (my affection for speed sent bottles helter-skelter), but given the current climate, a white envoy was the wisest choice. Only John Quincy, Mother Mash, and I knew the stakes, and after sardining Lizzie with thirty crates of their latest and greatest concoction—Dog Bowl Debbie—they counted out, with solemn ceremony, cash enough for nine hundred miles worth of gasoline, repairs, and bribes. Then came two words I shan't ever forget.

“Be careful,” said John Quincy.

This gnarled old root of a man rarely spoke to me, much less offered cautions. Having no suitable responses at hand, I lined my pockets with the cash and blustered through a reply.

“I shall not be careful.
Careful
would require a much higher percentage of the sale and I am in no mood right now to haggle.”

But decamp I did not, for Mother Mash reached out with her skinny arms and bound me within a sinewy embrace. I could not bury my ladylike gasp; I wrestled myself away only to find her smiling as if she had expected nothing less from me.

“You come back to us, Mr. Finch,” said she.

Her eyes glimmered with what might have been tears of affection. It was an emotion I hadn't the tools to handle; I harrumphed, straightened my uniform, planted my cap, and turned away to crank Lizzie's engine. After she began coughing forth her black clouds, I discerned the distant leaf-crunching of the husband and wife ambling off, the latter's low, musical humming dwindling into the woods. I put the automobile into gear while grinding my teeth. What the devil were these colored folk so worried about?

Minutes later as dusk settled upon Georgia like soot, I rocketed from the forest at impressive speed only to be flagged down by an old fellow standing alongside his parked auto. I was annoyed, but idled Lizzie. He doddered near, his face obscured by the plummeting sun.

“If you're carrying hooch, partner,” panted he, “you got to skedaddle.”

Part of my profession was playing the innocent.

“Hooch?” asked I. “Does that mean alcohol? Never would I touch such poison!”

The man scoffed. He wore a scraggled white beard; I recognized him as a past customer.

“There's agents up the road a piece and they're stopping cars, giving them the full search. You ought to go round the long way, you know what's good for you.”

This bewhiskered galoot might be my senior by four decades, but I was in no need of advice when it came to evading lawmen. Still I kept in mind the task with which John Quincy had entrusted me and wrestled down my tongue—quite a rascal, that organ.

“I thank you for the advice,” said I.

“How about Boss Man? I'd hate to see any y'all caught out.”

“I am the last one departing tonight. Again, I thank you.”

The miser grinned, all four teeth of it, and legged it back to his auto. I wheeled Lizzie around to head off in the revised direction. True to the man's word, this alternate path contained no checkpoints, and for an hour I chugged along in peace. At last, a true adventure! I was overdue for one. I took a corner at top velocity and listened to the reassuring rattle of bottles against their wooden restraints.

It was this chiming that led me through a disconcerting cogitation. It had been peculiar, hadn't it, how the man on the road had used the name “Boss Man”? Most Xenionians were either ignorant of it or knew better than to speak it aloud. What's more, the fellow had been standing outside of his car when I exited the forest path. Had he been waiting for me? For how long? That was a good deal of effort expended by a casual customer, one who, come to think of it, hadn't even asked for the customary free nip for his trouble.

The old codger had outsmarted me.

Grow up,
I begged myself.
Please, please, one day soon.

I jerked Lizzie's wheel. The shatter of breaking bottles pierced the squeal of rubber. Her two rightside wheels left the road but, weighed down by the crates, she slammed back to the gravel, her engine gagging
as I shifted to a higher gear. I ignored the low-speed pedal and the reverse pedal; I would require neither.

When at last I roared back down that familiar forest path, I had settled upon definitive answers I would give to the Imperial Wizard should he ever come offering me my heart's desire in exchange for information on misbehaving blacks. The answers were my boot in his face, the blood that would choke him, the cold fingers I would slide beneath the white flaps of his hood and around his throat. I'd perform this murder upon a hilltop if one was handy, kicking aside the charred remains of a burnt cross in order to make known to his followers that masks could not hide you from your fate—believe me, I had tried.

Harold was collapsed in the autumn leaves outside the still, howling to the sky, runners of blood and spit giving his face the gloss of a fresh wound. That told me everything I needed to know. I did not have to put Lizzie into a neutral gear, though I did; I did not have to climb out; I did not have to approach the warehouse to catalog the damage done. The man on the road had once been a customer of ours, yes, but his current allegiance was with a larger, more lethal power.

John Quincy was dead, of course, dangling from the rafters of the distillery he had built, lynched on a rope so long that his feet dangled but an inch off the ground. Two details jumped out: broken fingernails and a tightly shut mouth. He had fought, there was no question of that, but he had not screamed. Mother Mash was hung much higher, her skirts fluttering in the October breeze. The ropes of husband and wife made the same death creak, and both bodies made a circle in the same direction, a final waltz in which they both joined in perfect accord.

This home, and a
home
was what it was, had been torn apart
as if by cyclone, furniture quartered, banjo busted, glassware shattered, barrels hatcheted, cauldrons overturned, bins of ingredients upset. The ground was a sweet-smelling bog through which bloodied family members struggled to cut down their murdered loved ones. I headed back to the door and not a single Quincy cared—and why would they? Like that, the years I'd spent with them were erased. I knew that I was, and would always be, an ivory outlander sporting vestments symbolic of a country that did not give a shit, not about this lynching, not about the lynchings previous, and not about the lynchings yet to come.

My backpedal became a dash. Harold, collapsed outside, saw me flee and likely tagged me as a Klan conspirator. Not true, but why dispute it? I'd been just as culpable in their demise. What mattered most was that Lizzie continued to vibrate beneath her forest canopy. That greasy machine carried the final hundred gallons of Dog Bowl Debbie, the South's finest shine, and people in New York City were primed to pay a price that would go a long way here in the South.

My mission had not changed. I forced myself to picture my boss—I was prepared, too late, to accept the Boss Man as just that—not hanging from a rope but tapping his bare foot to a banjo beat, and promised him, loud over Lizzie's engine, that I would deliver his drink as we'd planned, and when that was done, send the fat stack of cash to Harold to disperse among his woebegone kin. It was both the very most and the very least that I could do.