“That’s funny,” Nation said. “I thought that’s exactly what we were gonna do.”
“This ain’t the Wild West,” Daddy said.
“No. This here is a riverbank with trees, and we got us a rope and a bad nigger.”
“He’s an old man,” Daddy said.
“Yeah,” someone in the crowd said, “and he ain’t gonna get no older.”
One of Nation’s boys had slipped off while Daddy and Mr. Nation were talking, and when he reappeared, he had a rope tied in a noose. He slipped it over Mose’s head.
“Please, Missuh Jacob,” Mose said. “I ain’t hurt nobody.”
“I know,” Daddy said. He stepped forward then, jerked the rope off Mose. The crowd let out a sound like an animal in pain, then they were all over Daddy, punching and kicking. I tried to fight them, but they hit me too. Next thing I knew I was on the ground and legs were kicking at us, then I heard Mose scream for Daddy. When I looked up they had the rope around the old man’s neck and were dragging him along the ground, him clutching at the rope with his hands, his old body making ruts in the muddy grass on the riverbank.
Daddy and I got up and staggered after the crowd. My eye was starting to close where someone had kicked me. I saw Daddy reach in his pocket for his pistol, but his hand came out fumbling. He looked around on the ground, but if the pistol had fallen out, someone had picked it up.
“Stop,” Daddy yelled. “Stop it, goddamnit!”
They dragged Mose over to a clutch of oaks. One man threw the rope over a thick oak limb. In unison the crowd grabbed it and began to pull, hoisting Mose up. The rope slid over the limb like a snake, made a cutting sound. Hemp puffed up smoke as it rubbed tight against oak bark. The limb creaked. Mose pulled at the rope with his hands, trying to work it free of his throat. He couldn’t get his fingers between it and his neck. His feet kicked.
Daddy staggered forward, grabbed Mose’s legs, ducked his head under, and lifted him. Nation blindsided Daddy with a kick to the ribs. Daddy went down and Mose dropped with a snapping sound, started to kick fast and spit blood-tinted foam. His eyes turned red and his face puffed. Daddy tried to get up, but the crowd began to kick and beat him.
I ran at them, yelling, swinging, striking anyone I could hit. Someone clipped me in the back of the neck. The world jerked and I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t kneel. I couldn’t do much of anything. I saw the sky going up fast through the limbs and leaves of the oak, then I was looking up at the bottoms of Mose’s feet. Last thing I saw were holes in Mose’s shoes and cardboard inside them to plug the holes; it had gone damp and was starting to come apart. I could see the flesh of his foot through one of the holes where the cardboard had torn and slipped. The hole was directly over me. It seemed to widen and drop around me, then I was lost within it.
When I came to Daddy was still unconscious, on the ground near me. Mose hung above us, his tongue long and black and thick as a sock stuffed with paper. His eyes bulged out of his head like little green persimmons. Someone had pulled his pants down and cut him. Blood dripped from between Mose’s legs, onto the ground.
The crowd was gone.
On hands and knees I threw up until I didn’t think I had any more in me. Hands grabbed my sides. I was figuring the crowd had come back and were gonna hang me and Daddy, or give us more of a beating. Then I heard Mr. Smoote say, “Easy, boy. Easy.”
He tried to help me up, but I couldn’t stand. He left me sitting on the ground and went over and looked at Daddy. He turned him over and pulled an eyelid back.
“You did this,” I yelled at Smoote. “You leave my Daddy alone. You hear? Leave him alone!”
He ignored me, and suddenly I was glad for his assistance. I said, “Is he…?”
“He’s all right. Just took some good shots.”
Daddy stirred. Mr. Smoote sat him up. Daddy opened his eyes.
“That boy told,” Mr. Smoote said. “I come with ’em, but I didn’t mean for nothin’ to happen. I didn’t try and hang him. You ain’t gonna tell about… you know, are you?”
“You stupid, simple sonofabitch,” Daddy said. Then his eyes turned to Mose. He said, “For Christ sake, Bill, cut him down from there.”
16
Two afternoons later Mose was buried on our place, between the barn and the field. Daddy made him a wooden cross and carved MOSE on it, swore when he got money he’d get him a stone.
A couple black folks Daddy knew who knew Mose came out, but the only whites there were our family. There was some didn’t have no truck with what was done to Mose, but they didn’t want it known they’d show up at a colored man’s funeral.
At night, when I closed my eyes, I saw Mose hanging, his pants down, cut, bleeding, his eyes and tongue bulged, that rope around his neck. It would be some time before I could lay down and not have that image jump immediately to mind, and some years before it didn’t come back to me on a regular basis. Funny things would set it off. Just seeing a rope, or a certain kind of limb on an oak, or even the way sunlight might be falling through limbs and leaves.
Even now, from time to time, it comes back to me clear, as if it happened day before yesterday.
Part Four
17
From my window is a view of a great oak tree. One evening, in early spring, propped in a wheelchair, looking out, just as evening shadows fell like tangles of black and blue cloth, as the birds gathered in the boughs of the oak like Christmas ornaments, preparing for sleep, I thought I saw Old Mose hanging there.
His body seemed very real in that moment, a twisting shadow amongst other shadows, but it was clearly his shape, and there was the dark line of the rope. But when I blinked, he and the rope were gone.
There were now only the shadows beneath the tree filled with birds, and there was the night descending, and another day of spring was slowly draining away.
No shadows now, not even beneath the trees.
Daddy wanted to quit being a constable, but the little money the job brought in was needed too badly, so he stayed at it, swearing anything like this came up again he was gonna quit.
But for the most part he had quit. He was constable in name only. It was as if he were fading right before our eyes. He had been washed out to some dark and infernal sea, and there he floundered, then ceased to flounder, merely drifted on a single crumbling plank left from the wreck of his life. His life having crashed and shattered upon a reef named Mose.
Many of those at the lynching had been Daddy’s barbershop customers, and we didn’t see them anymore at the shop. As for the rest, Cecil cut most of the hair, and Daddy was doing so little of it, he finally gave Cecil a bigger slice of the money and only came around now and then. He turned his attention to working around the farm, fishing and hunting, and not doing much of any of those.
Mama and Grandma tried everything to bring him around. Patience. Anger. Encouraging words. Right out mean remarks. They could have been talking to a duck. Only the duck would have startled at least.
When spring came, Daddy showed minor improvement. He went to planting, just like always, but he didn’t talk about the crops, and I didn’t hear him and Mama talking much, but sometimes late at night, through the wall, I could hear him cry. There’s no way to explain how bad it hurts to hear your father cry.
Daddy stayed in the bedroom a lot. He mostly ate his meals alone, when he ate. He spoke, but the words were dry and crinkled, like dead leaves. If he sat outside, and saw us coming, he got up and moved away, as if we had caught him doing something embarrassing.
The house changed. It had never occurred to me before that, but a house is a shell like a body, and like a body, it’s the spirit inside it that makes it whole. And if we, the family, were the spirit, part of us, a great and
