I’ll remind her that we are cousins, he thought. He would not buy her a present at all; instead he would give her a nice piece of money. Explain that he wanted her to get something really nice for herself, but that his gift- giving was compromising her. That he was not what she needed. She needed a steady man who could marry her. He was standing in her way. And since they were related and all, she should start looking for someone else. It hurt him, he would say, deeply hurt him, after all these years, but if you loved somebody as he did her, you had to think of them first. You couldn’t be selfish with somebody you loved.
Having thought so carefully of what he would say to her, he felt as though he had already had the conversation and had settled everything. He went back to his father’s office, got some cash out of the safe, and wrote Hagar a nice letter which ended: “Also, I want to thank you. Thank you for all you have meant to me. For making me happy all these years. I am signing this letter with love, of course, but more than that, with gratitude.” And he did sign it with love, but it was the word “gratitude” and the flat-out coldness of “thank you” that sent Hagar spinning into a bright blue place where the air was thin and it was silent all the time, and where people spoke in whispers or did not make sounds at all, and where everything was frozen except for an occasional burst of fire inside her chest that crackled away until she ran out into the streets to find Milkman Dead.
Long after he’d folded the money and the letter into an envelope, Milkman sat on at his father’s desk. He added and re-added columns of figures, always eighty cents too little or eighty cents too much. He was still distracted and edgy, and all of it was not because of the problem of Hagar. He’d had a conversation with Guitar some time ago about the dragnet. A young boy, about sixteen years old, on his way home from school, had been strangled with what was believed to be a rope, and his head was bashed in. The state troopers cooperating with the local police said the way in which the boy had been killed was similar to the way another boy had been killed on New Year’s Eve in 1953, and the way four grown men had been killed in 1955—the strangulation, the smashing of the face. In the poolrooms and in Tommy’s Barbershop, the word was that Winnie Ruth Judd had struck again. The men laughed about it and repeated for the benefit of newcomers the story of how, in 1932, Winnie Ruth, a convicted murderer, who axed and dismembered her victims and stuffed them in trunks, was committed to a state asylum for the criminally insane, and escaped two or three times each year.
Once she had walked two hundred miles through two states before they caught her. Because there was a brutal killing in the city in December of that year, during the time Winnie Ruth was at large, Southside people were convinced that she had done it. From then on when some particularly nasty murder was reported, the Negroes said it was Winnie Ruth. They said that because Winnie Ruth was white and so were the victims. It was their way of explaining what they believed was white madness—crimes planned and executed in a truly lunatic manner against total strangers. Such murders could only be committed by a fellow lunatic of the race and Winnie Ruth Judd fit the description. They believed firmly that members of their own race killed one another for good reasons: violation of another’s turf (a man is found with somebody else’s wife); refusal to observe the laws of hospitality (a man reaches into his friend’s pot of mustards and snatches out the meat); or verbal insults impugning their virility, honesty, humanity, and mental health. More important, they believed the crimes they committed were legitimate because they were committed in the heat of passion: anger, jealousy, loss of face, and so on. Bizarre killings amused them, unless of course the victim was one of their own.
They speculated about Winnie Ruth’s motives for this recent murder. Somebody said she was raunchy from being cooped up and went looking for a lay. But she knew better than to expect a grown man to want her, so she went for a schoolboy. Another said she probably didn’t like saddle shoes and when she got out of the loony bin and walked four hundred miles to safety, the first thing she saw was a kid wearing saddle shoes and she couldn’t take it—ran amok.
Amid the jokes, however, was a streak of unspoken terror. The police said there had been a witness who thought he saw a “bushy-haired Negro” running from the schoolyard where the body was found.
“The same bushy-haired Negro they saw when Sam Sheppard axed his wife,” said Porter.
“Hammered, man,” said Guitar. “Twenty-seven hammer blows.”
“Great Jesus. Why he do twenty-seven? That’s a hard killin.”
“Every killing is a hard killing,” said Hospital Tommy. “Killing anybody is hard. You see those movies where the hero puts his hands around somebody’s neck and the victim coughs a little bit and expires? Don’t believe it, my friends. The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it’s in mortal danger.”
“You kill anybody in the war, Tommy?”
“I put my hand to a few.”
“With your hands?”
“Bayonet, friend. The men of the Ninety-second used bayonets. Belleau Wood glittered with them. Fairly glittered.”
“How’d it feel?”
“Unpleasant. Extremely unpleasant. Even when you know he’ll do the same to you, it’s still a very indelicate thing to do.”
They laughed as usual at Tommy’s proper way of speaking.
“That’s because you didn’t want to be in the army no way,” said a fat man. “What about if you was roaming the streets and met up with Orval Faubus?”
“Boy, I’d love to kill that sucker,” a heavy-set man said.
“Keep saying that. They’ll soon have your ass downtown.”
“My hair ain’t bushy.”
“They’ll make it bushy.”
“They’ll take some brass knuckles and make your head bushy and call it hair.”
Aside from Empire State’s giggle, which was wholehearted, it had seemed to Milkman then that the laughter was wan and nervous. Each man in that room knew he was subject to being picked up as he walked the street and whatever his proof of who he was and where he was at the time of the murder, he’d have a very uncomfortable time being questioned.
And there was one more thing. For some time Milkman had been picking up hints that one or more of these murders had in fact been either witnessed or committed by a Negro. Some slip, someone knowing some detail about the victim. Like whether or not Winnie Ruth couldn’t stand saddle shoes. Did the boy have on saddle shoes? Did the newspaper say so? Or was that just one of the fanciful details a good jokester would think of.
