The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

thought his grandmother had made Freddie frightened of her. Parthenia Wilson had warned String not to marry a girl from the shop floor. It was one thing to play around under their skirts, another to set up house with them. All those hours standing at their machines made their minds weak, she said. She’d not give Freddie the same blessing. It was she who’d sent String’s widow away.

      Mr. Boothby shook his head. “Pitiful place,” he muttered. He looked as though he was going to push further, then stopped. He drained his Coca-Cola and stood. Elma was filled with a funny combination of relief and regret. It was the feeling she had after getting a crying baby to sleep—even though she finally had some peace, she always felt a little lonesome.

      “I have just one more question.” Mr. Boothby lowered his voice, looking down at Elma through the round lenses of his glasses. “You’ll have to excuse my directness. I don’t ask out of prurient curiosity, mind you. I ask because I’m after the truth. Miss Jesup, did that Negro do what they say he did?”

      An automobile passed. Elma watched the dust rise behind it and then settle, listened to the rumble of the engine disappear. She would not answer. She would not nod.

      “If he did, your fiancé might be handed a short sentence. Knowing the way they uphold the law in this state, he might even go free. I just want to see the proper people held accountable.”

      Mr. Boothby stepped away from the table, and then Elma felt his shadow at her side, and his hand on her shoulder. “God bless you,” he said, and then his hand was gone, and then his shadow was gone. Elma sat at the table for a few minutes, then left her half-finished soda and led her wagon home, forgetting to bring a sack of flour in exchange for the eggs.

      The next day, there was no mention of Genus Jackson or the twins in the Testament. But there was mention, in the three weeks that followed, of four more lynchings in Georgia. On September 8, a Negro accused of killing the chief of police was shot in his bullpen at the McIntosh County jail. The prisoner’s blood was said to drip through into a white woman’s cell below. On September 25 in Thomas County, a Negro accused of strangling a nine-year-old white girl on the roadside was seized by a mob at the county stockade, filled with bullets, and dragged behind a car from Magnolia Park to the courthouse. Some said the man had once raped a Negro woman, though his only convicted crime in the county was theft and concealment of stolen goods, for painting a black mule white. Three days later, in the same county, a Negro who had testified in court against two white men accused of raping a Negro woman was killed by four white men who came to his door. The men had been disguised by the women in their family with makeup and dark glasses. And on October 1, up in the Piedmont, another Negro accused of killing another chief of police was taken from his cell at the Bartow County jail, brought to the county fairgrounds, and swung up by the neck from an electric-light pole. The Negro’s brother, also held in the jail, hadn’t heard the mob come in the middle of the night, and didn’t learn of his death until the next morning, when his brother’s shoes were brought to his cell. After the last one—six lynchings, not counting Genus—Q. L. Boothby wrote in an editorial that an epidemic had returned. “The devil has settled in Georgia, and if we don’t exorcise him, I fear he’s here to stay.”

      All of these things were in the paper, but Elma didn’t read them. She was forbidden from going back to the crossroads store. The day after she sat with Q. L. Boothby, when Juke stopped at the store for his chewing tobacco, Mud Turner wasted no time telling him about the Macon reporter. From then on, her father delivered the eggs instead.

      She didn’t know that, in the years that followed, when folks said, with admiration for a fellow’s cleverness, “He could paint a black mule white,” they were referring to a Negro dragged through the streets behind an automobile, not three months after Genus Jackson was dragged down the Twelve-Mile Straight.

      After she returned from the crossroads store, exhausted, overheated, Elma found both babies napping. She lay down on her bed in her clothes, didn’t even take off her shoes, and with the crook of her arm laid over her eyes, fell into sleep. She dreamt of Freddie’s truck, a row of tin cans tied to the back of it after their wedding, the two of them driving down the Twelve-Mile Straight, man and wife, and then tied to the truck was Genus, and the cans and his body were dragged down the road together, tangled, clanging, the sound the sound of her wickedness, for there was Elma in the passenger seat.

      She shot up in bed, fist to her heart. The clanging went on. Was she still sleeping? She stood and walked to the window, following the sound, and as she crossed the room she allowed herself to hope that she had dreamt it all, that none of it was real.

      No—she was awake. It was the gourds in the wind, rattling like skulls.

       SIX

      

      GEORGIA WAS BORN DRY,” THE WHITE-RIBBONERS LIKED TO say. “The pity of it is, she did not stay that way.” The colony of England’s poor and persecuted, every schoolchild knew well, was the first state to try Prohibition. It lasted only seven years. By the time it came around again, in 1908, most of the counties, including Cotton, had already voted themselves dry, but that fact didn’t stop Reverend Quick’s wife, the choral director and a prominent member of the Florence chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, from singing every Sunday, to the tune of “Dixie”:

       From Georgia Land so fair and bright

       King Alcohol has taken flight,

       Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!

       Praise the Lord! Georgia Land!

      Juke Jesup had before then become well acquainted with King Alcohol. He was eleven and still called John when he took his first sip of moonshine under the railroad trestle behind the cotton mill, then spit it in the river. “Taste like turpentine,” he said, but he went back the next afternoon and took another sip and didn’t spit it out. String Wilson’s older cousins, who visited each summer from the piney woods of north Georgia, had built a crude still in a shed behind the mill. Down by the railroad, they liked to get String and Juke drunk, then spin them in circles and watch them fall to the ground, laughing. Once String landed in the fire pit and nearly burned his left leg off. Juke had to drag him into the river. Another time, the cousins dared String to cross the mill dam and he slipped and fell twelve feet into the water and nearly smashed his head like a watermelon on the rocks below. Then Juke had to drag him out of the river. String was always getting into trouble. It wasn’t his fault; he was too good-natured, too game, too skinny—that was why he was called String. He liked to let folks spin him around. He grew up helping his father in the mill, then, like Juke, married a spinner and had himself a baby. When the war started he got it in his mind to go across the waters and fight, and he came back to Georgia in a coffin made of such fine mahogany that Juke couldn’t help but run his hands over it. String did love to whittle a piece of wood.

      It was the same year the boll weevil came to Cotton County. No one knew where it came from. For all Juke knew it had stowed away in String’s coffin and traveled all the way from Europe. Juke remembered the first time he’d seen one, on the pink petal of a cotton flower, common as a cockroach, but with a snout as long as its legs. He’d plucked it off and crushed it between his fingers. That was May. By June, the field was full of them, the grubs eating through the bolls the moment they hatched. In September, String’s father, George Wilson, drove his automobile out to the farm. He snapped a boll of cotton and cupped it in his palm, studying the pod of seeds that never grew. “It ain’t your fault, honey,” George said. “It ain’t no one’s fault.” They stood out there until the sun went down, Juke in his straw hat, George in his white suit and bowler, looking over the ruined field. That year they lost nearly all the crop.

      After