questioning, but he elected, out of respect for Mr. Fuller’s position, to do the initial here.
“Reggie, where were you five nights ago, that is, July 19?”
“He was here,” said Mrs. Fuller.
“You let him answer, ma’am, or I will have to take him away.”
Reggie was an almost fat boy, with pale skin and an unfocused quality about him that had nothing to do with the late hour. His eyes drifted, he fidgeted. He smiled and no one returned the smile. He blinked, and seemed to forget where he was; for a while he stopped paying attention. He was wearing pajamas with butterflies on them. He betrayed more confusion than fear; nothing about him suggested aggression or tendency to violence. But Nigras were strange that way: they looked calm one second and the next they could go amok.
“Sir,” he finally said, “I don’t ‘member. Just around. Maybe in my room. I can’t say. No, I think I went for a drive in Daddy’s big old wagon.”
“The hearse?”
“Yes suh. I went for a drive, that’s all. Listen some to the radio, you know, from Memphis.”
“Anybody see you? Got people who can testify to where you were?”
“No sir.”
“Reggie, were you near the church? Did you go to the church and that meeting they had there that night?”
“No sir.”
“Reggie, you listen to me. If you were someplace you don’t want your daddy to know about, you have to be a man now and ’fess up. You were at a crib, drinking? You were gambling, you were with a woman?”
“Sir, I—”
“Mr. Sam, my boy Reggie, he’s a
“Sam.”
It was the sheriff.
“Sam, the boys found something.”
That was it, really. Sam walked into the bedroom and watched as one of the deputies pointed to a little corner of blue shirt that peeked from between the mattress and the box spring of the now stripped bed. Sam nodded, and the deputy separated the two: the corner yielded to a larger mass of material. Very carefully, with a pencil, Sam nabbed it and lifted it off the bed. It was a shirt, with the pocket missing, blue cotton. It was streaked with rust, which Sam knew to be the color of dried blood.
“Think we got us a nigger,” someone said.
“Okay,” Sam said, “mark it and bag it, very carefully. People are going to be looking at this case and we can’t afford to make a mistake.”
Then he headed back to the living room to arrest Reggie Fuller for murder.
The trial, three months later, was over in a day. The Fullers were willing to spend their life savings to hire a Little Rock lawyer, but Sam looked at the evidence and suggested that they’d do better to have Reggie plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of the court. A Fort Smith lawyer told them the same thing: the shirt was indeed Reggie’s, as laundry markings subsequently proved and nobody ever bothered to deny. The pocket matched perfectly with the ripped seams on the chest. The blood was AB positive, as was Shirelle’s. Reggie had no meaningful alibi; he had taken the hearse that night and just “driven around.”
No bargain was ever offered, because there was no cause to. The evidence was such that a confession had no meaning. Sam made the melancholy but firm decision that Reggie, though he was young and somewhat distracted, must die. It wasn’t that Sam was a cruel man but he felt the simple rhythms of the universe had been violated and must be forcefully returned to normal. An eye for an eye: it was the best system, the only true system. He spoke for the dead, and it only worked if he spoke loudly. Besides, it was Earl’s last case: Earl would have wanted it that way too.
The Fullers finally found a lawyer who would take the case on appeal, and though Sam warned them not to throw their money away, they did so anyway, on a desperately vain attempt to save their son. For over two years Mrs. Fuller wrote Sam a letter once a week begging for mercy as the case dragged through the courts and Reggie moldered at the Cummins Farm at Gould, where the Negroes were sent. When the Fullers ran out of money, they sold their house and moved into a smaller one; when they ran out of money again, Mr. Fuller sold his business to a white man and went to work for that same white man, who called him, behind his back, “the dumbest nigger in Arkansas for selling a business that did sixty thousand clear a year for sixty thousand!” Then Mrs. Fuller died, Jake Fuller, the older boy, went off to join the navy and the two daughters, Emily and Suzette, moved to St. Louis with their aunt. But old Davidson Fuller took up the letter duty and wrote Sam every week and tried to talk to him, to get him to look at the evidence one more time.
“You a fair man, sir. Don’t let them do this to my boy. He didn’t do it.”
“Davidson, even your own Nigra people say he did it. I have sources. I know what’s being said in the churches and the cribs.”
“Don’t take my boy from me, Mr. Sam.”
“I am not taking your boy from you. The law is following its course. This ain’t Mississippi. I gave him a fair trial, you had good lawyers, the reason he is going where he is going is because he has to pay. You had best adjust to that, sir. I know this is not easy on your family; it wasn’t easy on Shirelle’s either. The balance has to be squared off and restored, and we can go on from there.”
“Tell them I did it, if they want a Negro to die. I’ll go. I’ll confess. Take me. Please, please, please, Mr. Sam, don’t take my poor little boy.”
Sam just looked at him.
“You have too much love in your heart for that boy,” he finally said. “He’s not worth it. He killed an innocent girl.”
There was but one act to be played out and it occurred on October 6, 1957, at the Arkansas State Penitentiary at Tucker, where they’d removed Reggie from the Cummins Farm when his last appeal was finally denied. It was the day of the fourth game of the World Series, and Sam listened to the game that afternoon as he drove the hundred-odd miles to Tucker, just southeast of Little Rock. It was not his first time to make such a trip, nor would it be his last. On the other hand, he didn’t make it automatically; of the twenty-three men he sent to the electric chair, he only watched eleven die. Tonight it was Reggie’s turn.
Simply in terms of convenience, it worked out. He was able to get a clear signal from Little Rock and listened numbly to the baseball all the way over. Warren Spahn was on the mound, mowing them down. Sam hated anything with the word “Yankee” in the title just as he hated anything with “New York” in the title, so he lost himself in the baseball, hoping the upstart, uprooted “Milwaukee” team—really, just the old, pitiful Boston Braves—would triumph. Sam stayed rooted in the drama the whole way, even as the game went into extra innings, even as the Yankees tied the game in the ninth on Ellston Howard’s three-run homer and then scored the go-ahead run in the top of the tenth
It looked over for the Braves, but somehow they clawed their way back into the game, when Logan doubled to left, scoring Mantilla to tie again, and Sam had the sense that something very special was about to happen. It did, shortly thereafter: Eddie Matthews’s two-run shot over the right-field fence, Braves win 7-5.
Sam looked up: he was at the prison. He’d driven straight through town, forgotten to eat dinner. He doubled back, found a diner, had roast beef and mashed potatoes.
Eleven
