The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson
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