Voices in Our Blood (13 page)

On February 15, 1947, an incident occurred that drew the taxi-drivers of Greenville very close together. A driver named Brown picked up a Negro fare, a boy of twenty-four called Willie Earle, who asked him to drive to his mother's home in Pickens County, about eighteen miles from Greenville. Mrs. Earle, by the way, had given birth to Willie when she was fourteen. Both Willie Earle and Brown had been the victims of tragedy. Willie Earle had been a truck driver and had greatly enjoyed his occupation. But he was an epileptic, and though his mates conspired with him to conceal this fact from his employer, there came a day when he fell from the truck in a fit and injured himself. His employer, therefore, quite properly decided that he could not employ him on a job in which he was so likely to come to harm, and dismissed him. He could not get any other employment as a truck driver and was forced to work as a construction laborer, an occupation that he did not like so well and that brought him less money. He became extremely depressed, and began to drink heavily. His fits became more frequent, and he developed a great hostility to white men. He got into trouble, for the first time in his life, for a sudden and unprovoked assault on a contractor who employed him, and was sent to the penitentiary, from which he had not been long released when he made his journey with Brown. Brown's tragedy was also physical. He had been wounded in the first World War and had become a taxi-driver, although he was not of the usual type, because his state of health obliged him to take up work that he could leave when he needed rest. He was a man of thoughtful and kindly character. A Greenville resident who could be trusted told me that in the course of some social-service work he had come across a taxi-driver and his wife who had suffered exceptional misfortune, and that he had been most impressed by the part that Brown had played in helping them to get on their feet again. “You could quite fairly say,” this resident told me, “that Brown was an outstanding man, who was a good influence on these taxi boys, and always tried to keep them out of trouble. Lynching is just the sort of thing he wouldn't have let them get into.”

Willie Earle reached his home that night on foot. Brown was found bleeding from deep knife wounds beside his taxi a mile or two away and was taken to a hospital, where he sank rapidly. Willie was arrested, and put in Pickens County Jail. Late on the night of February 16th, the melancholy and passionate Mr. Roosevelt Carlos Hurd was, it was said, about certain business. Later, the jailer of the Pickens County Jail telephoned to the sheriff's office in Greenville to say that a mob of about fifty men had come to the jail in taxicabs and forced him to give Willie Earle over to them. A little later still, somebody telephoned to the Negro undertaker in the town of Pickens to tell him that there was a dead nigger in need of his offices by the slaughter-pen in a byroad off the main road from Greenville to Pickens. He then telephoned the coroner of Greenville County, whose men found Willie Earle's mutilated body lying at that place. He had been beaten and stabbed and shot in the body and the head. The bushes around him were splashed with his brain tissue. His own people sorrowed over his death with a grief that was the converse of the grief Brown's friends felt for him. They mourned Brown because he had looked after them; Willie Earle's friends mourned him because they had looked after him. He had made a number of respectable friends before he became morose and intractable.

Thirty-six hours after Willie Earle's body had been found, no arrest had been made. This was remarkable, because the lynching expedition—if there was a lynching expedition—had been planned in a café and a taxicab office that face each other across the parking lot at the back of the Court House. On the ground floor of the Court House is the sheriff's office, which has large windows looking on the parking lot. A staff sits in that office all night long. But either nobody noticed a number of taxi-drivers passing to and fro at hours when they would normally be going off duty or nobody remembered whom he had seen when he heard of a jail break by taxi-drivers the next day. When the thirty-six hours had elapsed, Attorney General Tom C. Clark sent in a number of F.B.I. men to look hard for the murderers of Willie Earle. This step evoked, of course, the automatic resentment against federal action which is characteristic of the South; but it should have been remembered that the murderers were believed to number about fifty, and Greenville had nothing like a big enough police staff to cope with such an extensive search. The sensitivity based on a concern for States' rights was inflamed by a rumor that Attorney General Clark had sent in the F.B.I. men without consulting, or even informing, the Governor of South Carolina. Whether this rumor was true or false, it was believed, and it accounted for much hostility to the trial which had nothing to do with approval of lynching. Very soon the F.B.I. had taken statements from twenty-six men, who, along with five others whom they had mentioned in their statements, were arrested and charged with committing murder, being accessories before or after the fact of murder, and conspiring to murder. It is hard to say, now that all these defendants have been acquitted of all these charges, how the statements are to be regarded. They consist largely of confessions that the defendants were concerned in the murder of Willie Earle. But the law has pronounced that they had no more to do with the murder than you or I or President Truman. The statements must, therefore, be works of fiction, romances that these inhabitants of Greenville were oddly inspired to weave around the tragic happenings in their midst. Here is what one romancer invented about the beginnings of that evil:

Between ten and eleven
P.M
. on February 16, 1947, I was at the Blue Bird Cab Office and heard some fellows, whose identities I do not know, say that the nigger ought to be taken out and lynched. I continued to work until about two
A.M.
February 17, 1947, at which time I returned to the Blue Bird Taxi Office where R. C. Hurd was working on the switchboard. After I had been at the office for a few minutes, Hurd made several telephone calls to other taxicab companies in Greenville, including the Yellow Cab Company, the Commercial Cab Company, and the Checker Cab Company. He asked each company to see how many men it wanted to go to Pickens. Each time he called he told them who he was. When he finished making the calls, he asked me to drive my cab, a '39 Ford coach which is number twenty-nine (29), and carry a load of men to Pickens. I told him that he was “the boss.” He then got a telephone call from one of the taxicab companies and he told them he would not be able to go until Earl Humphries, night dispatcher, got back from supper. After Earl Humphries returned from supper, Hurd, myself, Ernest Stokes, and Henry Culberson and Shephard, all Blue Bird drivers, got in Culberson's cab, which was a '41 Ford colored blue. We rode to the Yellow Cab Company on West Court Street followed by Albert Sims in his cab. At the Yellow Cab Company, we met all the other cab drivers from the cab companies. After all got organized, the orders given me by R. C. Hurd were to go back and pick up my cab at the Blue Bird Office. I would like to say here that Hurd had already made arrangements for everybody to meet at the Yellow Cab Company.

These sentences touch on the feature that disquiets many citizens of Greenville: A great deal was going on, at an hour when the city is dead, right under the sheriff's windows, where a staff was passing the night hours without, presumably, many distractions. They also touch on the chief peril of humanity. Man, born simple, bravely faces complication and essays it. He makes his mind into a fine wire that can pry into the interstices between appearances and extract the secret of the structural intricacy of the universe; he uses the faculty of imitation he inherits from the ape to create on terms approximating this intricacy of creation; so there arrive such miracles as the telephone and the internal-combustion engine, which become the servants of the terrible simplicity of Mr. Hurd, and there we are back at the beginning again.

A string of about fifteen automobiles lined up for the expedition. All but one of these were taxicabs. In their statements, the taxi-drivers spoke of the one that was not a taxi as a “civilian” automobile and of the people who were not taxi-drivers as “civilians.” When they got to Pickens County Jail, which lies on the corner of a highway and a side road, about twenty miles from Greenville, some of them parked on the highway and some on the side road. A taxi shone its spotlight on the front door, and they called the jailer down. When they told him they had come for the Negro, he said, “I guess you boys know what you're doing,” and got the jail keys for them. The only protest that he seems to have uttered was a request that the men should not use profanity, in case his wife should hear it. He also, with a thoughtfulness of which nobody can complain, pointed out that there were two Negroes in the jail, and indicated which of the two had been guilty of nothing worse than passing a bad check. This surrender of Willie Earle by the jailer has been held by many people to be one of the worst features of the case. It is thought that the jailer showed cowardice in handing the Negro over to the mob, and that his protest about profanity meant that he had strained at a gnat but swallowed a camel. When I visited Pickens County Jail, however, I found that the situation was not as it appeared at a safe distance.

The jail is a mellow red-brick building, planned with much fantasy by somebody who had seen pictures of castles in books and had read the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Mrs. Radcliffe, or had been brought up by people who had read them. It is a building that the Sitwells would enjoy. The front part is in essence like any home in the district, with two stories and a porch running around it. But at the corner looking on the highway and the side road there rises a rounded and crenellated tower, and over both the front door and the side door are arches and crenellations which suggest that the words “dungeon” and “oubliette” were running through the architect's mind, but that it was a kind mind, interested in the picturesque rather than in the retributive. This part of the jail, which seems to be the jailer's residence and office, is joined to a small, oblong building, severe except for a continuance of feudal fantasy along the parapet, with six barred windows on the first story and six on the second. The cells must be extremely small, and it is probable that the jail falls far below modern standards, but there is a pleasantly liberal notice hanging on the side door which announces that visitors' hours are from nine to eleven in the morning and from two to four in the afternoon. The floor of the porch is crumbling. On a wooden table there is a scarlet amaryllis. Beside it stands the jailer's wife, and it can be well understood that her husband would not wish her to hear profanity. She wears spectacles, a pink cotton sunbonnet, a blue-flowered cotton frock, a brown apron streaked with absent-minded cooking. She speaks sweetly but out of abstraction; her bones are as fragile as a bird's, her eyes look right through her spectacles, right through this hot and miserable world, at a wonder. She is a Methodist. God is about her as an enveloping haunt. Such of her as is on earth cooks for the prisoners, who usually number five or six, and for fifteen or sixteen people in the poorhouse up the road. She has a daughter to help her, but the daughter too is gentle and delicate, and has a child to care for. They are tired, gracious, manifestly not cherished by destiny.

As I stood on the porch with them, I reflected that if I were in charge of that jail and a mob came to ask me for a prisoner, I would hand him over without the smallest show of resistance. The jail is far beyond shouting distance of the center of Pickens Town. On one side of it is a large vacant lot. On the other side, beyond a tumble-down fence, a long cabin that seems to be occupied by two or three families stands in a paddock where a couple of lean cows graze. Three women were standing about on the porch with their children, all pale and dispirited. (A startling hint as to the economics of the district was given by some particulars I collected regarding the terms on which most people become inmates of this jail. In Pickens County, a man who is run in for drunkenness is usually fined twelve dollars, with the alternative of going to jail for thirty days; if he has been drunk and disorderly, he gets sixty days or twenty-four dollars; if he has driven an automobile while drunk, he gets ninety days or fifty-two dollars.) Opposite the jail there are larger houses, which may be inhabited by more vigorous people, but the highway is wide and anybody answering the jailer's call for help would have to come a considerable distance without cover. My misgivings about the possibility of showing ideal courage in Pickens County Jail were confirmed when the jailer, Mr. Ed Gilstrap, arrived. He was a stout man in his sixties, with that passive and pliant air of geniality that is characteristic of men who hold small political appointments. He wore khaki overalls with green suspenders, and a derby. When he removed this to greet me, it was disclosed that there ran down his bald scalp a new scar, appallingly deep and about three to four inches long. He did not spontaneously mention the incident that had led to this injury, but, asked about it, he explained that on April 23rd, nine weeks after the lynching, three prisoners had tried to break out of the jail, and while he was preventing them, one had hit him over the head with an iron pipe. What had he done? He had shot at them and killed one and wounded another. The wounded one was still in the hospital. “I wish I had killed him,” said Mr. Gilstrap, not unamiably, just with simple realism, “for he was the one who hit me with the pipe.” And the third man? “He is still right here in jail,” said Mr. Gilstrap. “We try to be fair to him. We're feeding him just the same as before.”

The men who took Willie Earle away were in a state of mind not accurately to be defined as blood lust. They were moved by an emotion that is held high in repute everywhere and especially high in this community. All over the world friendship is regarded a sacred bond, and in South Carolina it is held that it should override nearly all other considerations. Greenville had at first felt some surprise that one of the defense attorneys, Mr. Thomas Wofford, had accepted the case. It was not easy for a stranger to understand this surprise, for the case might have been tailored to fit Mr. Wofford; but all the same, surprise was generally felt. When, however, it was realized that the group of defendants he represented included the half-brother of a dead friend of Mr. Wofford, his action was judged comprehensible and laudable. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if in Greenville a group of very simple people, grieving over the cruel slaughter of a beloved friend, felt that they had the right to take vengeance into their own hands. They would feel it more strongly if there was one among them who believed that all is known, that final judgment is possible, that if Brown was a good man and Willie Earle was a bad man, the will of God regarding these two men was quite plain. It would, of course, be sheer nonsense to pretend that the men, whoever they were, who killed Willie Earle were not affected in their actions by the color of Willie Earle's skin. They certainly did not believe that the law would pursue them—at least, not very far or very fast—for killing a Negro. But it is more than possible that they would have killed Willie Earle even if he had been white, provided they had been sure he had murdered Brown. The romances in statement form throw a light on the state of mind of those who later told of getting Willie Earle into a taxi and driving him to a quiet place where he was to be killed. One says that a taxi-driver sat beside him and “talked nice to him.” He does not mean that he talked in a way that Willie Earle enjoyed but that the taxi-drivers thought that what he was saying was elevating. Mr. Hurd described how Willie Earle sat in the back seat of a Yellow Cab and a taxi-driver knelt on the front seat and exhorted him, “Now you have confessed to cutting Mr. Brown, now we want to know who was the other Negro with you.” Willie Earle answered that he did not know; and it appears to be doubtful that there was another Negro with him. The taxi-driver continued, in the accents of complacent pietism, “You know we brought you out here to kill you. You don't want to die with a lie in your heart and on your tongue.”