Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

Indeed, the whole place had but a single occupant. In his office back of the circuit-court room Judge Priest was asleep, tilted back in a swivel chair, with his short, plump legs propped on a table and his pudgy hands locked across his stomach, which gently rose and fell with his breathing. His straw hat was on the table, and in a corner leaned his inevitable traveling companion in summer weather – a vast and cavernous umbrella of a pattern that is probably obsolete now, an unkempt old drab slattern of an umbrella with a cracked wooden handle and a crippled rib that dangled away from its fellows as though shamed by its afflicted state. The campaigning had been hard on the old judge. The Monday before, at a rally at Temple’s Mills, he had fainted, and this day he hadn’t felt equal to going to Shady Grove. Instead he had come to his office alter dinner to write some letters and had fallen asleep. He slept on for an hour, a picture of pink and cherubic old age, with little headings of sweat popping out thickly on his high bald head and a gentle little snoring sound, of first a drone and then a whistle, pouring steadily from his pursed lips.

Outside a dry-fly rasped the brooding silence up and down with its fret-saw refrain. In the open spaces the little heat waves danced like so many stress marks, accenting the warmth and giving emphasis to it; and far down the street, which ran past the courthouse and the jail and melted into a country road so imperceptibly that none knew exactly where the street left off and the road began, there appeared a straggling, irregular company of men marching, their shapes more than half hid in a dust column of their own raising. The Massac men were coming.

I believe there is a popular conception to the effect that an oncoming mob invariably utters a certain indescribable, sinister, muttering sound that is peculiar to mobs. For all I know that may be true of some mobs, but certain it was that this mob gave vent to no such sounds. This mob came on steadily, making no more noise than any similar group of seventy-five or eighty men tramping over a dusty road might be expected to make.

For the most part they were silent and barren of speech. One youngish man kept repeating to himself a set phrase as he marched along. This phrase never varied in word or expression. It was: “Goin’ to git that nigger! Goin’ to git that nigger!” – that was all – said over and over again in a dull, steady monotone. By its constant reiteration he was working himself up, just as a rat-terrier may be worked up by constant hissed references to purely imaginary rats.

Their number was obscured by the dust their feet lifted. It was as if each man at every step crushed with his toe a puffball that discharged its powdery particles upward into his face. Some of them carried arms openly – shotguns and rifles. The others showed no weapons, but had them. It seemed that every fourth man, nearly, had coiled upon his arm or swung over his shoulder a rope taken from a plow or a well-bucket. They had enough rope to hang ten men or a dozen – yes, with stinting, to hang twenty. One man labored under the weight of a three-gallon can of coal-oil, so heavy that he had to shift it frequently from one tired arm to the other. In that weather the added burden made the sour sweat run down in streaks, furrowing the grime on his face. The Massac Creek blacksmith had a sledge-hammer over his shoulder and was in the front rank. Not one was masked or carried his face averted. Nearly all were grown men and not one was under twenty. A certain definite purpose showed in their gait. It showed, also, in the way they closed up and became a more compact formation as they came within sight of the trees fringing the square.

Down through the drowsing town edge they stepped, giving alarm only to the chickens that scratched languidly where scrub-oaks cast a skimpy shade across the road; but as they reached the town line they passed a clutter of negro cabins clustering about a little doggery. A negro woman stepped to a door and saw them. Distractedly, fluttering like a hen, she ran into the bare, grassless yard, setting up a hysterical outcry. A negro man came quickly from the cabin, clapped his hand over her mouth and dragged her back inside, slamming the door to behind him with a kick of his bare foot. Unseen hands shut the other cabin doors and the woman’s half-smothered cries came dimly through the clapboarded wall; but a slim black darky darted southward from the doggery, worming his way under a broken, snaggled fence and keeping the straggling line of houses and stables between him and the marchers. This fleeing figure was Jeff, Judge Priest’s negro bodyservant, who had a most amazing faculty for always being wherever things happened.

Jeff was short and slim and he could run fast. He ran fast now, snatching off his hat and carrying it in his hand – the surest of all signs that a negro is traveling at his top gait. A good eighth of a mile in advance of the mob, he shot in at the back door of the courthouse and flung himself into his employer’s room.

“Jedge! Jedge!” he panted tensely. “Jedge Priest, please, suh, wake up – the mobbers is comin’!”

Judge Priest came out of his nap with a jerk that uprighted him in his chair.

“What’s that, boy?”

“The w’ite folks is conin’ after that there little nigger over in the jail. I outrun ‘em to git yere and tell you, suh.”

“Ah-hah!” said Judge Priest, which was what Judge Priest generally said first of all when something struck him forcibly. He reared himself up briskly and reached for his hat and umbrella.

“Which way are they comin’ from?” he asked as he made for the hall and the front door.

“Comin’ down the planin’-mill road into Jefferson Street,” explained Jeff, gasping out the words.

As the old judge, with Jeff in his wake, emerged from the shadows of the tall hallway into the blinding glare of the portico they met Dink Bynum, the deputy jailer, just diving in. Dink was shirtsleeved. His face was curiously checkered with red-and-white blotches. He cast a backward glance, bumped into the judge’s greater bulk and caromed off, snatching at the air to recover himself.

“Are you desertin’ your post, Dink?” demanded the judge.

“Jedge, there wasn’t no manner of use in my stayin’,” babbled Bynum. “I’m all alone and there’s a whole big crowd of ‘em comin’ yonder. There’ll git that nigger anyhow – and he deserves it!” he burst out.

“Dink Bynum, where are the keys to that jail?” said Judge Priest, speaking unusually fast for him.

“I clean forgot’em!” he quavered. “I left ‘em hangin’ in the jail office.”

“And also I note you left the outside door of the jail standin’ wide open,” said the judge, glancing to the left. “Where’s your pistol?”

“In my pocket – in my pocket, here.”

“Git it out!”

“Jedge Priest, I wouldn’t dare make no resistance single-handed – I got a family – I – ” faltered the unhappy deputy jailer.

The moving dustcloud, with legs and arms showing through its swirling front, was no more than a hundred yards away. You could make out details – hot, red, resolute faces; the glint of the sun on a gunbarrel; the polished nose of the blacksmith’s sledge; the round curve of a greasy oilcan.

“Dink Bynum,” said Judge Priest, “git that gun out and give it to me – quick!”

“Jedge, listen to reason!” begged Bynum. “You’re candidate yourse’f. Sentiment is aginst that nigger – strong. You’ll hurt your own chances if you interfere.”

The judge didn’t answer. His eyes were on the dustcloud and his hand was extended. His pudgy fingers closed round the heavy handful of blued steel that Dink Bynum passed over and he shoved it out of sight. Laboring heavily down the steps he opened his umbrella and put it over his shoulder, and as he waddled down the short gravel path his shadow had the grotesque semblance of a big crawling land terrapin following him. One look Judge Priest sent over his shoulder. Dink Bynum and Jeff had both vanished. Except for the men from Massac there was no living being to be seen.

They didn’t see him, either, until they were right upon him. He came out across the narrow sidewalk of the square and halted directly in their path, with his right hand raised and his umbrella tilted far back, so that its shade cut across the top of his straw hat, making a distinct line.

“Boys,” he said familiarly, almost paternally – “Boys, I want to have a word with you.”

Most of the Massac men knew him – some of them knew him very well. They had served on juries under him; he had eaten Sunday dinners under their rooftrees. They stopped, the rear rows crowding up closer until they were a solid mass facing him. Beyond him they could see the outer door of the jail gaping hospitably and the sight gave an edge to their purpose that was like the gnawing of physical hunger. Above all things they were sharp-set to hurry forward the thing they had it in their minds to do.

“Boys,” said the judge, “most of you are friends of mine – and I want to tell you something. You mustn’t do the thing you’re purposin’ to do – you mustn’t do it!”

A snorted outburst, as of incredulity, came from the sweating clump of countrymen confronting him.

“The hell we mustn’t!” drawled one of them derisively, and a snicker started.

The snicker grew to a laugh – a laugh with a thread of grim menace in it, and a tinge of mounting man-hysteria. Even to these men, whose eyes were used to resting on ungainly and awkward old men, the figure of Judge Priest, standing in their way alone, had a grotesque emphasis. The judge’s broad stomach stuck far out in front and was balanced by the rearward bulge of his umbrella. His white chin-beard was streaked with tobacco stains. The legs of his white linen trousers were caught up on his shins and bagged dropsically at the knees. His righthand pocket of his black alpaca coat was sagged away down by some heavy unseen weight.

None of the men in the front rank joined in the snickering however; they only looked at the judge with a sort of respectful obstinacy.

There was nothing said for maybe twenty seconds.

“Jedge Priest,” said a spokesman, a tall, spare, bony man with a sandy drooping mustache and a nose that beaked over like a butcherbird’s bill – “Jedge Priest, we’ve come after a nigger boy that’s locked up in that jail yonder and we’re goin’ to have him! Speaking personally, most of us here know you and we all like you, suh; but I’ll have to ask you to stand aside and let us go ahead about our business.”

“Gentlemen,” said Judge Priest, without altering his tone, “the law of this state provides a proper – ”

“The law provides – eh?” mimicked the man who had laughed first. “The law provides, does it?”

“ – provides a fittin’ and an orderly way of attendin’ to these matters,” went on the judge. “In the absence of the other sworn officials of this county I represent in my own humble person the majesty of the law, and I say to you – ”

“Jedge Priest,” cut in the beaky-nosed man, “you are an old man and you stand mighty high in this community – none higher. We don’t none of us want to do nothin’ or say nothin’ to you that mout be regretted afterward; but we air goin’ to have that nigger out of that jail and stretch his neck for him. He’s one nigger that’s lived too long already. You’d better step back!” he went on. “You’re just wastin’ your time and ourn.”

A growling assent to this sentiment ran through the mob. It was a growl that carried a snarl. There was a surging forward movement from the rear and a restless rustle of limbs.

“Wait a minute, boys!” said the leader. “Wait a minute. There’s no hurry – we’ll git him! Jedge Priest,” he went on, changing his tone to one of regardful admonition, “you’ve got a race on for reëlection and you’ll need every vote you kin git. I hope you ain’t goin’ to do nothin’ that’ll maybe hurt your chances among us Massac Creekers.”

“That’s the second time that’s been throwed up to me inside of five minutes,” said Judge Priest. “My chances for election have nothin’ to do with the matter now in hand – remember that!”

“All right – all right!” assented the other. “Then I’ll tell you somethin’ else. Us men have come in broad daylight, not hidin’ our faces from the noonday sun. We air open and aboveboard about this thing. Every able-bodied, self-respectin’ white man in our precinct is right here with me today. We’ve talked it over and we know what we air doin’. If you want to take down our names and prosecute us in the cotes you kin go ahead.”

Somebody else spoke up.

“I’d admire to see the jury in this county that would pop the law to any one of us for swingin’ up this nigger!” he said, chuckling at the naked folly of the notion.

“You’re right, my son,” said the judge, singling out the speaker with his aimed forefinger. “I ain’t tryin’ to scare grown men I like you with such talk as that. I know how you feel. I can understand how you feel – every man with white blood in his veins knows just what your feelin’s are. I’m not trying to threaten you. I only want to reason with you and talk sense with you. This here boy ain’t been identified yet – remember that!”

“We know he’s guilty!” said the leader. “I’ll admit that circumstances may be against him,” pleaded the judge, “but his guilt remains to be proved. You can’t hang any man – you can’t hang even this poor, miserable little darky – jest on suspicion.”

“The dogs trailed him, didn’t they?”

“A dog’s judgment is mighty nigh as poor as a man’s sometimes,” he answered back fighting hard for every shade of favor. “It’s my experience that a bloodhound is about the biggest fool dog there is. Now listen here to me, boys, a minute. That boy in the jail is goin’ to be tried just as soon as I can convene a special grand jury to indict him and a special term of court to try him, and if he’s guilty I promise you he’ll hang inside of thirty days.”

“And drag that pore little thing – my own first cousin – into a cotehouse to be shamed before a lot of these town people – no!” the voice of the leader rose high. “Cotes and juries may do for some cases, but not for this. That nigger is goin’ to die right now!”

He glanced back at his followers; they were ready – and more than ready. On his right a man had uncoiled a well-rope and was tying a slipknot in it. He tested the knot with both hands and his teeth, then spat to free his lips of the gritty dust and swung the rope out in long doubled coils to reeve the noose in it.

“Jedge Priest, for the last time, stand aside!” warned the beaky-nosed man. His voice carried the accent of finality and ultimate decision in it. “You’ve done wore our patience plum’ out. Boys, if you’re ready come on!”

“One minute!” The judge’s shrill blare of command held them against their wills. He was lowering his umbrella. “One minute and one word more!”

Shuffling their impatient feet they watched him backing with a sort of ungainly alertness over from right to left, dragging the battered brass ferrule of his umbrella after him, so that it made a line from one curb of the narrow street to the other. Doing this his eyes never left their startled faces. At the far side he halted and stepped over so that they faced this line from one side and he from the other. The line lay between them, furrowed in the deep dust.

“Men,” he said, and his lifelong affectation of deliberately ungrammatical speech was all gone from him, “I have said to you all I can say. I will now kill the first man who puts his foot across that line!”

There was nothing Homeric, nothing heroic about it. Even the line he had made in the dust waggled, and was skewed and crooked like the trail of a blind worm. His old figure was still as grotesquely plump and misshapen as ever – the broken rib of his umbrella slanted askew like the crippled wing of a fat bat; but the pudgy hand that brought the big blue gun out of the right pocket of the alpaca coat and swung it out and up, muzzle lifted, was steady and sure. His thumb drew the hammer back and the double click broke on the amazed dumb silence that had fallen like two clangs upon an anvil. The wrinkles in his face all set into fixed, hard lines.

It was about six feet from them to where the line crossed the road. Heavily, slowly, diffidently, as though their feet were weighted with the leaden boots of a deep sea diver, yet pushed on by one common spirit, they moved a foot at a time right up to the line. And there they halted, their eyes shifting from him to the dustmark and back again, rubbing their shoulders up against one another and shuffling on their legs like cattle startled by a snake in the path.

The beaky-nosed man fumbled in the breast of his unbuttoned vest, loosening a revolver in a shoulder holster. A twenty-year-old boy, his face under its coating of dust as white as flour dough, made as if to push past him and break across the line; but the Massac blacksmith caught him and plucked him back. The leader, still fumbling inside his vest, addressed the judge hoarsely:

“I certainly don’t want to have to kill you Jedge Priest!” he said doggedly.

“I don’t want to have to kill anybody,” answered back Judge Priest; “but, as God is my judge, I’m going to kill the first one of you that crosses that line. If it was my own brother I’d kill him. I don’t know which one of you will kill me, but I know which one I’m going to kill – the first man across!”

They swayed their bodies from side to side – not forward but from side to side. They fingered their weapons, and some of them swore in a disappointed, irritated sort of way. This lasted perhaps half a minute, perhaps a whole minute – anyway it lasted for some such measurable period of time – before the crumbling crust of their resolution was broken through. The break came from the front and the center. Their leader, the lank, tall man with the down-tilted nose, was the first to give ground visibly. He turned about and without a word he began pushing a passage for himself through the scrouging pack of them. Breathing hard, like men who had run a hard race, they followed him, going away with scarcely a backward glance toward the man who – alone – had daunted them. They followed after their leader as mules follow after a bell-mare, wiping their grimy shirtsleeves across their sweaty, grimier faces and glancing toward each other with puzzled, questioning looks. One of them left a heavy can of coal-oil behind him upright in the middle of the road.

The old judge stood still until they were a hundred yards away. He uncocked the revolver and put the deadly thing back in his pocket. Mechanically he raised his umbrella, fumbling a little with the stubborn catch, and tilted it over his left shoulder; his turtlelike shadow sprang out again, but this time it was in front of him. Very slowly, like a man who was dead tired, he made his way back up the gravel path toward the courthouse. Jeff magically materialized himself out of nowhere, but of Dink Bynum there was no sign.

“Is them w’ite gen’l’men gone?” inquired Jeff, his eyes popping with the aftershock of what he had just witnessed – had witnessed from under the courthouse steps.

“Yes,” said the judge wearily, his shoulders drooping. “They’re gone.”

“Jedge, ain’t they liable to come back?”

“No; they won’t come back.”

“You kinder skeered ‘em off, jedge!” An increasing admiration for his master percolated sweetly through Jeff’s remarks like dripping honey.

“No; I didn’t scare ‘em off exactly,” answered the judge. “They are not the kind of men who can be scared off. I merely invoked the individual equation, if you know what that means?”

“Yas, suh – that’s whut I thought it wuz,” assented Jeff eagerly – the more eagerly because he had no idea what the judge meant.

“Jeff,” the old man said, “help me into my office and get me a dipper of drinkin’ water. I reckin maybe I’ve got a tech of the sun.” He tottered a little and groped outward with one hand.

Guided to the room, he sank inertly into his chair and feebly fought off the blackness that kept blanking his sight. Jeff fanned him with his hat.

“I guess maybe this here campaignin’ has been too much for me,” said the judge slowly. “It must be the weather. I reckin from now on, Jeff, I’ll have to set back sort of easy and let these young fellows run things.”

He sat there until the couching sun brought long, thin shadows and a false promise of coolness. Dink Bynum returned unobtrusively to his abandoned post of duty; the crowds began coming back from the Shady Grove schoolhouse; and Jeff found time to slip out and confiscate to private purposes a coal-oil can that still stood in the roadway. He knew of a market for such commodities. The telephone bell rang and the old judge, raising his sagged frame with an effort, went to the instrument and took down the receiver. Longdistance lines were beginning to creep out through the county and this was a call from Florence Station, seven miles away.

“That you, Jedge Priest?” said the voice over the wire. “This is Brack Rodgers. I’ve been tryin’ to raise the sheriff’s office, but they don’t seem to answer. Well, suh, they got the nigger what done that devil-mint over at the Hampton place on Massac this evenin’. Yes, suh – about two hours ago. He was a nigger named Moore that worked on the adjoinin’ place to Hampton’s – a tobacco hand. Nobody suspected him until this mornin’, when some of the other darkies got to talkin’ round; and Buddy Quarles heared the talk and went after him. The nigger he fit back and Buddy had to shoot him a couple of times. Oh, yes, he died – died about an hour afterward; but before he died he owned up to ever’thing. I reckin, on the whole, he got off light by bein’ killed. Which, Jedge? – the nigger that’s there in the jail? No, suh; he didn’t have nothin’ a-tall to do with it – the other nigger said so while he was dyin’. I jedge it was what you mout call another case of mistaken identity on the part of them fool hounds.”

To be sure of getting the full party vote out and to save the cost of separate staffs of precinct officers, the committee ordained that the Democratic primaries should be held on the regular election day. The rains of November turned the dusts of August to high-edged ridges of sticky ooze. Election day came, wet and windy and bleak. Men cutting across the yellow-brown pastures, on their way to the polling places, scared up flocks of little grayish birds that tumbled through the air like wind-driven leaves and dropped again into the bushes with small tweaking sounds, like the slicing together of shears; and as if to help out this illusion, they showed in their tails barrings of white feathers which opened and closed like scissor-blades. The night came on; and it matched the day, being raw and gusty, with clouds like clotted whey whipping over and round a full moon that resembled a chum-dasher covered with yellow clabber. Then it started raining.

The returns – county, state and national – were received at the office of the Daily Evening News; by seven o’clock the place was packed. Candidates and prominent citizens were crowded inside the railing that marked off the business department and the editorial department; while outside the railing and stretching on outdoors, into the street, the male populace of the town herded together in an almost solid mass. Inside, the air was streaky with layers of tobacco smoke and rich with the various smells of a small printing shop on a damp night. Behind a glass partition, hallway back toward the end of the building, a small press was turning out the weekly edition, smacking its metal lips over the taste of the raw ink. Its rumbling clatter, with the slobbery sputter of the arclights in the ceiling overhead, made an accompaniment to the voices of the crowd. Election night was always the biggest night of the year in our town – bigger than Christmas Eve even.

The returns at large came by telegraph, but the returns of the primaries were sent in from the various precincts of town and county by telephone; or, in cases where there was no telephone, they were brought in by hard-riding messengers. At intervals, from the telegraph office two doors away, a boy would dash out and worm his way in through the eager multitude that packed and overflowed the narrow sidewalk; and through a wicket he would fling crumpled yellow tissue sheets at the editor of the paper. Then the editor would read out:

“Seventeen election districts in the Ninth Assembly District of New York City give Schwartz, for coroner – ”

“Ah, shuckin’s! Fooled again!”

“St. Louis – At this hour – nine-thirty – the Republicans concede that the entire Democratic state ticket has won by substantial majorities – ”