“What did you do about it?” asked Bob.
“Nothing. Suppose I had kicked up a ruckus about it. They found out afterwards that the girl hadn’t been bothered at all. But just suppose I had gone and cussed out the fellows who did the lynching. Most of them trade at my store. Or if they don’t, a lot of their friends do. They’d have taken their trade to some other store and I’d ’a’ gained nothing for my trouble.”
“But surely you don’t believe that lynching ever helps, do you?”
“Yes and no. Lynching never bothers folks like you. Why, your daddy was one of the most respected folks in this town. But lynching does keep some of these young nigger bucks in check.”
“Does it? It seems to me that there isn’t much less so-called rape around here or anywhere else in the South, even after forty years of lynching. Mr. Ewing, why don’t you and the other decent white people here come out against lynching?”
“Who? Me? Never!” Ewing looked his amazement at the suggestion. “Why, it would ruin my business, my wife would begin to be dropped by all the other folks of the town, and it wouldn’t be long before they’d begin calling me a ‘nigger-lover.’ No, sir-ee! I’ll just let things rock along and let well enough alone.”
“Mr. Ewing, if fifty men like you in this town banded together and came out flat-footedly against lynching, there are lots more who would join you gladly.”
“That may be true,” Ewing answered doubtfully. “But then again it mightn’t. Let’s see who might be some of the fifty. There’s George Baird, he’s president of the Bank of Central City, and Fred Griswold, president of the Smith County Farmers’ Bank. You can count them out because they’d be afraid of losing their depositors. Then there’s Ralph Minor who owns the Bon Ton Store. He’s out for the same reason that I am. Then there’s Nat Phelps, who runs the Central City Dispatch. He has a hard enough time as it is. If he lost a couple of hundred subscribers, he’d have to close up shop. And so it goes.”
“What about the preachers? It doesn’t seem much of a religion they’re preaching if the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ doesn’t form part of their creed.”
“Oh, you needn’t look for nothing much from them. Three years ago old Reverend Adams down to the First Methodist took it into his head he was going to tackle something easy—nothing like the race problem. He started in to wipe out the bootleggers ’round here, thinking he could get a lot of support. But he didn’t, because most of the folks he figgered on lining up with him were regular customers of the fellows he was after.” Ewing chuckled at the memory of the crusade that had died “aborning.” “When the next quarterly conference was held, they elected a new pastor for the First Methodist. No, Ken, it ain’t so easy as it looks. You’re asking me to do something that not a Southern white man has done since the Civil War—”
Rising, he walked towards the door and remarked:
“My advice to you is to stay away from any talk like this with anybody else. There probably ain’t another man in town who would’ve talked to you like this, and if the boys in the Ku Klux Klan knew I had been running along like this with a coloured man, I don’t know what’d happen to me. See you later. So long!”
Kenneth walked up and down the room with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets, his thoughts rushing through his head in helter-skelter fashion. He was suddenly conscious of a feeling that he had been thrust into a tiny boat and forced to embark on a limitless sea, with neither compass nor chart nor sun nor moon to guide him. Would he arrive? Or would he go down in some squall which arose from he knew not where or when? The whole situation seemed so vast, so sinister, so monstrous, that he shuddered involuntarily, as he had done as a child when left alone in a dark room at night. Religion, which had been the guide and stay of his father in like circumstances, offered him no solace. He thought with a faint smile of the institution known as the Church. What was it? A vast money machine, interested in rallies and pastors’ days and schemes to milk more dollars from its communicants. In preparing people to die. He wasn’t interested in what was going to happen to him after death. What he wanted was some guide and comfort in his present problems. No, religion and the Church as it was now constituted wasn’t the answer. What was? He could not give it.
“Here I am,” he soliloquized, “with the best education money can buy. And yet Roy Ewing, who hasn’t been any further than high school, tells me I’d better submit to all this without protest. Yet he stands for the best there is here in Central City, and I suppose he represents the most liberal thought of the South. How’s it all going to end? Even a rat will fight when he’s cornered, and these coloured people aren’t going to stand for these things all the time. What can I do? God, there isn’t anything—anything I can do? Bob is right! Something must be done, but what is it? I reckon these white folks must be blind—or else they figure on leaving whatever solution there may be to their children, hoping the storm doesn’t break while they are living. No! That isn’t it. They think because they’ve been able to get away with it thus far, they’ll always be able to get away with it. Oh, God, I’m helpless! I’m helpless!”
Kenneth had begun to
