PART 2
There were no gunshots and no shouting. If you live in the South long enough, you know how quiet country people can be when they mean business, but Harlem men have an even quieter way about them. They don’t waste breath. Red and Junebug moved through the side alleys of Walterboro like chimney soot.
By three in the morning, the back of the Buick smelled of damp horse blankets, river mud, and women’s lavender soap. Four houses had been visited between midnight and quarter past three.
Evelyn Miller had been taken right off her screened back porch where she was sitting up with a migraine. Maude Hembree had been pulled out of her sewing shed behind the dairy. Beatrice Vance had come out of her side door without her spectacles on, thinking her brother’s deputy had come by with news about the county road grader.
Ellsworth didn’t touch a single one of them. He sat in the front passenger seat with his hands resting on his knees, watching the dash clock tick toward four. When Junebug shut the trunk lid for the fourth time, Ellsworth pointed two fingers toward the town square.
“Take them to the hall,” he said.
The Walterboro Civic League hall had a wide porch with four square pine posts and a pair of green painted benches where the ladies sat during the watermelon festival. The street was dead silent. A yellow hound dog trotted across the dirt crossing, sniffed at a telephone pole, and vanished behind the livery stable.
Junebug and Red carried the four heavy bundles up the three porch steps. They weren’t bodies, though any man seeing them from thirty feet would have sworn they were corpses ready for the ditch. They were four heavy black coal sacks, the kind the railroad used to haul anthracite out of Pennsylvania, each one cinched tight at the neck with two feet of plow line. Inside each sack, something shifted and moaned, but the burlap was thick and the knots had been pulled down with a leather fid.
Red lined the four sacks against the front wall, right under the brass plaque that had the names of the town founders chiseled into the metal. Then Ellsworth got out of the car. He walked up the steps with that slow, rolling limp he had from an old scuffle in an alley behind Small’s Paradise. He took an envelope out of his coat pocket, pinned it to the center door with an eight-inch iron nail he had taken from Maybelle’s tool shed, and drove it home with the heel of his boot.
We were back on the highway toward Augusta before the sky turned gray behind the pine tops.
At seven in the morning, Sheriff Harlen Vance got the call at his breakfast table. The grocer’s boy had found the bags while delivering a crate of lard to the hotel kitchen. By seven-thirty, half the white men in Colleton County were standing around the civic hall steps with shotguns, axe handles, and old deer rifles, yelling about a Black uprising and demanding the blood of every sharecropper within ten miles.
Sheriff Vance pushed his way through the crowd with his deputy right behind him. He had his service revolver out, expecting to find four dead white women mutilated on the hall boards. The men in the street were already talking about kerosene and rope.
Vance reached the first sack. His hands were shaking so hard he could barely get his pocketknife into the hemp cord.
When he slit the top, Clara Pritchard rolled out onto the floorboards. Her hair was full of coal dust, her silk wrapper was ruined, and her knees were bruised blue, but she was breathing. She didn’t look at the crowd. She just curled up against the clapboard like a dog that had been beaten with a singletree and started to wail.
The second bag held Evelyn Miller. The third was Maude Hembree.
When Vance cut the fourth bag and saw his own sister Beatrice staring up at him with coal soot ringed around her mouth and her teeth chattering like dry beans in a jar, the sheriff’s knees buckled. He fell right down onto the pine planks beside her.
PART 3
The crowd went completely quiet. A hundred men who had been screaming for a lynching ten minutes earlier suddenly had nothing to say. The women weren’t dead. They hadn’t been cut. But their faces were gray with terror, and none of them would say a single word about who had taken them or where they had spent the dark hours between two and dawn.
Sheriff Vance stood up slowly and pulled the iron nail out of the door.
The envelope Ellsworth had left was made of heavy cream linen, the kind you buy at the stationer’s on Fifth Avenue. Inside were four items. The first was Maybelle Johnson’s broken hickory walking stick, snapped cleanly in half and tied together with a strip of black ribbon. The second was the receipt from the Colleton undertaker for six hundred dollars in gold coin, signed by the undertaker himself. The third was a small piece of cardboard from a box of .38 caliber ammunition sold in Walterboro three weeks before.
The fourth was a single sheet of paper written in black fountain pen ink, in a neat, clerkly script:
“You buried my grandmother without her shoes because you said she was only ditch trash. Her name was Maybelle Johnson. If Clara Pritchard, Evelyn Miller, Maude Hembree, or Beatrice Vance are still inside the Colleton County line by sundown on Monday, I will not send sacks next time. I will bring thirty men from Harlem who do not know the sheriff, do not care about the governor, and do not use trace chains.”
It was signed simply: *E. Johnson.*
By noon, the federal men had arrived from the field office in Savannah. Two agents in gray fedoras and wool suits stood on the civic hall porch with Sheriff Vance, looking at the black sacks, the broken cane, and the heavy nail hole in the front door.
The senior agent, a man named Miller who had worked the waterfront rackets in New York before the war, looked at the cream-colored paper and then looked Vance straight in the eyes.
“You know who this is, Harlen?” Miller asked.
“Some nigger up in New York,” Vance said, his face mottled red. “I want six warrants for kidnapping. Capital charges. We’ll have the state patrol on every crossing between here and the Potomac.”
Miller didn’t raise his voice. He took a pack of Lucky Strikes from his pocket, lit one with a silver lighter, and looked out over the crowd of angry, frightened farmers standing around the square.
“You go after Bumpy Johnson,” Miller said, “and you’ll have forty federal indictments down here before the week is out. You think the Bureau doesn’t know who owns the liquor warehouse in Beaufort? You think we don’t know who took four thousand dollars out of the county road fund last November? Bumpy has your bank book numbers from Charleston, Vance. He’s had them since 1938.”
Vance stopped talking. The color went out of his throat, leaving his sunburned skin looking like parched leather.
“What do you mean?” Vance whispered.
“I mean he does business with people who make your county commissioners look like schoolboys,” the agent said. “He pays two thousand dollars a month to precinct captains on the East Side who could buy this entire county and turn it into a watermelon patch. He didn’t kill your sister. He gave her back to you with coal dust on her skirt to show you that he can reach inside your bedroom while you’re asleep and take whatever he wants.”
Miller tapped the ash off his cigarette onto the porch floor.
“If you file a kidnapping report,” Miller added, “we have to open a full federal inquiry into the death of Maybelle Johnson first. We exhume the body. We document the skull fractures. We interview Clara Pritchard under oath about the trace chains behind the feed store. Then we let the New York papers print every single detail about what four white ladies did to a seventy-three-year-old grandmother on a Tuesday afternoon.”
ENDING
Sheriff Vance looked down at the porch boards where his sister was still sitting with her face buried in her apron.
The crowd in the street was waiting for him to swear in deputies. They had the shotguns leaning against the front fenders of their Ford trucks. They had the hound dogs whining in the truck beds, smelling the swamp mud on the wind.
Vance walked down the three porch steps, his big leather holster creaking with every stride. He stopped at the front bumper of his patrol car and looked at the men standing in the road.
“Go home,” Vance said. His voice sounded thin, like dry paper tearing. “There ain’t no investigation.”
“What about the women, Harlen?” one of the Pritchard boys yelled from the back of a flatbed. “What about Clara?”
“I said go home,” Vance told him, louder this time. “The women had a spell from the heat. Some boys from the turpentine camp played a prank with some coal bags. That’s the end of it. The first man who loads a gun in this town today goes in the drunk tank until Monday.”
He didn’t wait to see if they listened. He turned around, helped Beatrice up by her elbow, and walked her across the grass toward his private car.
We were already across the North Carolina line when the news came over the dashboard radio that evening. The announcer gave thirty seconds to a minor disturbance in Colleton County that had been resolved by local authorities without incident. Ellsworth didn’t smile. He didn’t turn around to look at Junebug or me. He just reached into his breast pocket, took out the other half of my grandmother’s walking stick that he had kept for himself, and laid it on the seat between us.
Before the month was out, the Pritchard house was put up for sale with a hand-painted board in the front yard. Clara and her husband moved across the state line to Waycross, Georgia, where they didn’t know anybody. Evelyn Miller took her children to live with her sister in Charlotte, and Beatrice Vance quit the choir at the Baptist church and spent the rest of her life behind drawn shades on Hampton Street, never walking past the feed store again.
Maybelle Johnson is still buried in that pine grove outside Walterboro. The stone Ellsworth bought for her is six feet tall, made of dark gray Vermont granite that doesn’t hold moss, with her name and her years carved deep enough that you can read them from the road without your glasses.
Every August until he died, Ellsworth sent three hundred dollars to the Colleton undertaker to make sure the grass was trimmed and the red dirt was swept clean of pine needles. The sheriff lived another twenty years in that county, but nobody ever saw him walk on the side of Church Street where the civic hall stood, and nobody in Walterboro ever picked up a trace chain again.
