![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
michael_gothard_archiveWARNING: the transcriber has retained all the dialogue present in the original story, including the racist and sexist language, which was in common use when the story was published in 1961.
Act 1
A low rent part of town. A lawyer mounts the stairs to a flat, and knocks on the door. When no one answers, he knocks more insistently. The door opens a crack, and Grady’s blue eye looks out suspiciously.
Grady: Who is it? What do you want?
Justin: Grady Boland?
Grady: Boland?
Justin: Yes, Boland; because you’re Grady Boland, aren’t you?
Grady: Boland … Ain’t nobody here called Boland.
Justin: Except yourself; yourself and Jackie.
Grady: Jackie?
Justin: Yes, Jackie. Jackie Tarr.
Grady: Boland ... Boland? Boland …
Justin: The hall’s uncomfortable. Do you mind?
Grady admits Justin to the flat. A dog is present in the room. A female voice comes from the bathroom.
Jackie: Grady, who is it?
Grady: Fella.
Jackie: What fella?
Grady: I don’t know. Some fella.
Jackie: You better give me my skirt. It’s on that chair.
Jackie’s arm appears. Grady hands her the skirt, and the arm and skirt are withdrawn.
Jackie: Don’t you say nothing until I come out!
The dog growls.
Justin: He’s not very fond of lawyers, is he? Well, I’m not either.
Grady: Rex. Rex. Lay down!
Justin: Rex? Is that what you call him? Rex means king. It’s Latin for king.
Grady: He ain’t no foreign dog.
Jackie comes in from the bathroom.
Justin: You must be cold up here. It’s not like the South this time of year, is it? March is a mean month.
Justin gets out a silver cigarette case.
Grady: I got some.
Jackie: I’ll smoke Grady’s.
Justin: Do you mind if I sit down? [Justin sits on the chair Jackie’s skirt was on] I know some people from down south who can’t stand a winter up here. They’re miserable whenever they come. I suppose they never quite thaw out. These people are from Florida.
Grady: Florida?
Justin: Yes.
Grady: That ain’t South.
Justin: Isn’t it? I didn’t realise you wouldn’t think so. But it isn’t, in a way. Not like Birmingham’s South. I guess it’s like any change of climate. The blood’s not used to it. [awkward silence] Of course, you remember me.
Grady: No.
Justin: No? That’s odd.
Grady: Yeah?
Justin: I’d have thought you’d remember everything and everybody. Faces, names, gestures: all of it. [Justin puts his cigarette case away] I was one of the lawyers. Oh, not for the prosecution. Still, I’d have thought you’d remember.
Jackie backs away slightly.
Jackie: Mister, I don’t go around remembering things. All right: you’re a lawyer. Grady let you in. Maybe it was because you had a hat on. And you were somewhere, and we’re supposed to remember you, Grady and me. Now what do you want?
Justin: Want?
Jackie: With us.
Justin: We’ve been looking a long time for you, Jackie. Didn’t you think we would?
Jackie: I don’t think anything.
Justin: Of course, Montague got you out of town fast enough. Oh, you tried. Hiding, I mean. And made it difficult, too: just digging you out wherever you were. But there was one thing you were all wrong about. A hundred per cent.
Grady? Yeah?
Justin: The idea you could hide at all. The idea that you could possibly ever be safe or finished with it. We’d have found you somewhere. Sometime. We wouldn’t have given up because we’re not the sort of people who give up, and that, [looks at Jackie] is what neither you nor Grady, [looks at Grady] nor Montague nor Judge Wilcox nor the state itself, I think, really understands. They’re accustomed to a case ending because there’s a verdict, and a verdict, deliberated over and duly brought in, is where it’s supposed to end; but a verdict’s where my organization begins.
Silence.
Justin: Where did you think it could run? We don’t have as much money as the state has, but by scrimping and saving and passing the hat around, we could always put up at least as much money to find you as the attorney general could give you to hide. Didn’t you think of that?
Silence.
Justin: It might seem easy enough to you to get up in court where some sheriff or some attorney has terrorized you, and testify whatever you think is the thing they want you to testify, and I suppose it’s not too difficult to say it, even with the sweat of your hand still on the leather of the Bible, if what you think it listening is just a jury and a judge and a court full of people from town. But you were wrong there, too: the audience, the real audience, listening to every word, was considerably larger.
Jackie: I told the truth.
Justin: Of course. And Grady, too. Grady told the truth, too.
Grady: That’s right.
Justin removes his glasses and polishes them.
Justin: You know it’s not as though they kind of lie you told wasn’t any different from something the girls tell every day before a divorce judge. It wasn’t at all like saying you spent a weekend in Atlantic City and being on a bed in a negligee when a private detective and somebody’s wife some breaking into the room.
Grady: No?
Justin: Do you think it is the same kind of lie?
Jackie: What makes it so different? Two niggers? Two niggers don’t make anything important.
Justin: Don’t they?
Jackie: No.
Justin: Would their being white, then, make it?
Jackie: No.
Justin: Why? Why doesn’t it? Hanging then, innocent as you know they are, doesn’t it mean anything to you?
Grady: Sure. Sure it does. They’ll be dead.
Justin: Dead?
Grady: That’s right. They can hang them any colour they want. I just want to see them dead.
Silence.
Jackie: What did you say your name was, Mister?
Justin: Louis Justin.
Jackie: Listen, I told it to all of you, twice, three times. I told the whole world it. Why should I tell it again just because you came up here?
Justin: But Jackie, you’ll always tell it, or have to tell it. Don’t you see? Besides, you may have forgotten something you remember now: some piece of evidence, I mean.
Jackie: There ain’t nothing I forgot, and there ain’t nothing I remember now I didn’t remember then. What happened on that train happened like I told it.
Justin: Exactly? Exactly as you told it?
Jackie: I told it like it happened.
Justin: Think. You’re in that gondola, Grady and you. What time is it? Twelve thirty. A hot summer’s day. Soemwhere between High Point and Reevesville. There, sitting in that gondola. And they come climbing down over the tops of the boxcars: three boys. Think a minute. You and Grady, there in the gondola, and the three boys (You could see them outlined against the sky, couldn’t you? Their round heads, and the overalls, couldn’t you?) climbing down to you. And one of them had a gun. A gun. He carried it where? Where in his overalls? Or maybe tucked into his shoe tops?
Jackie: He carried it in his hand.
Justin: In his hand? He climbed down with the gun in his hand?
Jackie: I said yes.
Justin: Not in his overalls? Not tucked away or strapped down or anything like that?
Jackie: He had that gun. How should I know where a nigger’ll carry a gun? There’s always a place. And he put the gun on Grady.
Justin: On Grady and not on you?
Jackie: On Grady, and on me. I said that. I said it I don’t know how many times. He put the gun on Grady and he said to Grady now you stay still, white boy. Then the other two came at me.
Justin: Yes. They came at you. [looks at Grady then back at Jackie] And Grady?
Jackie [abruptly]: Grady? I told you Grady had a gun on him.
Justin: Yes, I know. The gun. And they came at you. Then one of them hit you.
Jackie: He hit me, with his fist, and dragged me away from Grady, and threw me down on some straw.
Justin: And ripped your dress.
Jackie: That’s right. He ripped my dress.
Justin: And Grady?
Silence.
Justin: They weren’t big boys; Grady weighs more than either of them do.
Justin looks at Jackie.
Jackie: Maybe he wasn’t bigger’n Grady, but he was bigger’n me.
Justin: Not much. Still, you fought. I mean, you said in court you fought.
Jackie: I scratched him. He had them scratches on his face.
Justin: Yes. One of them had scratches all right. But maybe they weren’t fingernails, and maybe they weren’t yours.
Jackie: The doctor said they were mine. He examined me, didn’t he?
Justin: Yes. He examined you. I wonder how many patients he’d have left in town if he said they weren’t … And then?
Jackie: We heard that sound.
Justin: Sound?
Jackie: Somebody shouting. I couldn’t hear what he was shouting.
Justin: While the boy was raping you?
Jackie: Yes, sir.
Justin: And?
Jackie: It was somebody on top of the boxcar looking down. Just a man’s head looking down and it was the brakeman.
Justin: Turner?
Jackie: I didn’t know his name then. He was looking down and shouting. Then he came climbing down into the gondola, and the niggers –
Justin: All of them?
Jackie: The one that was at me and the one standing and the one with the gun, yes sir. He got off and they started to climb out of the gondola to the next boxcar and I was screaming and trying to do something and the brakeman went up after them with that club of his up on the other boxcar. That’s when him and the other one fought and they threw him off up there and he dragged the other one with him and they both got killed. An when we got to Reevesville the sheriff and a bunch of men were down at the depot waiting and they took me off the car with my dress ripped and my back scratched and Grady too and took us in a car to the jail and they told me in the jail Mister Turner the brakeman he was dead and they asked me what happened and I told them just like I told them in court and just like I’m telling you now. Them boys raped me yes sir and killed Mister Turner the brakeman and that’s the truth and if anybody asks me anyplace I don’t care where, you or anybody, that’s the truth and I told it. You or anybody, now and forever, that’s the truth and I told it. They put a gun on Grady and that one raped me and all of them together they killed Mister Turner and you can ask me and that’s the truth, now and forever. Whoever sent you, you tell them. Whoever them people are, and think Grady lied and me, you tell them all right you found us and here we are and this is what I said. Them niggers I don’t care they killed that brakeman. They put a gun on Grady. They raped me. They did it like I said, now and forever.
Justin leans forward.
Justin: Poor Grady. Poor Jackie. Both of you started to run when that gondola pulled into Reevesville, and you haven’t stopped running yet.
Grady: You see us running? We’re here, ain’t we? You found us, didn’t you?
Justin: Every time a train comes into an inhabited place, you run. The world’s a place to hide in, and not be caught. That’s the important thing, isn’t it? Run: from the men coming toward you.
Silence.
Justin: When you met Jackie, you were just off a chain gang, weren’t you, Grady?
Grady: That’s right. I was off a chain gang. What about it?
Justin: Except that it’s sad; perhaps more than sad. Because when someone else traveling on a train would be glad seeing the telegraph poles come to an end and a town begin, the first thing that you feel is that now you’ve come to an inhabited place it’s dangerous, as though that’s where all danger lies: wherever men are. Were I you, or Jackie, and lived like that, I’d hate those who put me into it, who made it the air I breathe.
Justin looks are them.
Justin: Or am I wrong? Because I may be wrong, and you don’t hate them: not Montague, paying you off in just enough to get you out of town with, or the deputies, making certain you got on that train, baggage or no baggage, or the men driving the big heavy cars that always go in only one direction: toward a court or a jail. Maybe there’s no hate at all in either of you for any of the things that have been done to you.
Justin looks out of the window.
Justin: Oh, it’s not you alone. It’s the establishment of fear everywhere. We’re all running, or beginning to run.
Grady stirs.
Grady: I don’t see you in no sweat.
Justin: Part of me’s always been in flight even when there was nothing, apparently, for a man like me to be hiding from … So they put you and Jackie into a car and drove you to Reevesville jailhouse. That’s all there was to it except the going into court and the lying, but that wasn’t too important, the important thing was you’d been caught … And now you think because we’ve caught you too, in a way, that there’s no difference really between the sheriff and me, or Montague and me, that I too am just somebody with a certain amount of authority, visible or invisible, who wants something out of you, and so there’s no difference. The voices change, and the places where the conversations take place, and maybe the terms of the proposition change a little, but they all want something out of you. Still, there’s a difference between Montague and me though maybe you don’t think so since we’re both lawyers and press our pants.
Jackie takes a bottle of red nail polish out of a dresser drawer and crosses to the bed.
Justin: I don’t suppose either of you go to church much, but isn’t there a text that says, ‘Thou shalt not suffer the innocent to be punished, nor the guilty-
Jackie [to Grady]: There’s a rag in the top drawer.
Grady fetches the rag for her, and she begins painting her toenails.
Justin: They exist, both truth and justice. Or will, if they don’t now. When the running stops- … What is it, a fat fee you think I’m getting for this?
Justin gestures at the seedy surroundings.
Justin: I’m a lawyer, a corporation lawyer, that’s what I do maybe forty weeks out of the year, and there’s a pleasant twenty-thousand-dollar practice which can keep me as busy as I want to be kept, going into court with one big oil company’s suit after another. I don’t even have to do this the other twelve weeks. Maine’s a hell of a lot nicer in August than a town called Reevesville. But I do it. Why? Conscience, is that it? Something on a filter in a radio drama. Still, I could up my charity donations, and let it go at that: but I don’t. Instead, I come down here, leaving a wife and a home I’m rather fond of, on a March evening, to talk to both of you, admitted strangers, people who won’t affect my life much one way or another, hoping that somehow you’ll do what the committee who sent me want you to do. … I’ll tell you one thing. The people who sent me, if I fail, will send somebody else. He’ll come up the street as I did. He’ll knock. Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing. In bed or not. Awake, or sleeping. Together, or alone. In any state, in any city. Until you go back, and say you lied.
Jackie: Go back. Go back where?
Justin: Reevesville.
Jackie gets up, crosser to the dresser, puts the nail polish down and picks up a comb.
Jackie: Reevesville. Grady and me. Is that what you want? Go back. Get off that train and walk down the street with everybody there. Grady and me. That’s all you want.
Justin: Yes.
Jackie: Go back and say, ‘That wasn’t the truth. A fella came to us up north and said we lied and here we are, Judge.’
Justin: Yes.
Jackie: Holding hands. Would we be holding hands, Grady?
Jackie looks at Grady, who smiles.
Jackie: You listen. Grady and me live here, and we paid the rent. You got in and said your piece and all right. We listened. Didn’t we listen? We didn’t have to listen, neither Grady nor me. But we listened. All right. Now you just go back where they sent you from, and you tell them you talked to us, to Grady and me, and got it all said, and we just sent you home. Go back. Mister, you’re real funny.
Justin: Wouldn’t it be more comfortable if we had a drink? We’d all feel a little friendlier with a drink, wouldn’t we?
Grady looks at Jackie.
Jackie: There’s another glass in there.
Grady takes a used glass into the bathroom.
Justin: Is Grady your sweetheart?
Jackie: My what?
Justin: Sweetheart. Boy friend. What would you call it?
Jackie: We travel together.
A tap is heard being turned on, then off again. Grady emerges from the bathroom, carrying two glasses. Justin admires the flowers in a pitcher of water on the table.
Justin: My wife’s the gardener. She does all the planting. I don’t seem to be able to make anything grow.
Grady pours rye into the two glasses and hands one to Justin and one to Jackie.
Justin: Grady, if you ever had money enough, what would you do with it?
Grady: Do? How do you mean, do?
Justin: What would you use it for?
Grady: Maybe go to Alaska.
Justin: Why Alaska?
Grady: I don’t know. I’d go up to Alaska maybe and just look around.
Justin [smiling]: For gold?
Grady: Maybe. Maybe seals. Maybe nothing. Maybe I just like Alaska.
Justin: It’s even colder than here.
Grady: That’s right. It’s even colder than here. You asked and I told you: Alaska.
Justin: Would you take Jackie along? Or would you go and send for her later? Provided you found gold, of course; or made a fortune in seals … I suppose you’d send for her later if you struck it rich.
Jackie looks anxiously at Grady.
Justin: She could fly up there, or go by steamer. I think there’s a steamer goes from Seattle. I seem to remember something about a steamer. She could join you; help, too, with the seals. She’d look pretty up there, in furs, in Anchorage or Nome. On a sled, shouting to a team of dogs.
Silence.
Justin: Or were you planning to heave her behind for the state to take care of?
Justin glances at Jackie, then sighs.
Justin: I guess Grady thinks Alaska’d be too cold for you, Jackie; or possibly you’d get in trouble with a seal.
Justin finishes his drink.
Justin: When that boy had that gun on you, Grady-he did have a gun on you? The gun we couldn’t find, though we searched for it. Clear back to High Point, every inch of that roadbed. But when he had that gun on you, why didn’t you jump him? Why didn’t you try to take that gun away from him?
Silence.
Justin: A boy like that, a nigger, not even twenty, in a train going through a countryside with not too level a track, why didn’t you try? If it was my girl being raped on a pile of straw, I think any man would have made a try at a gun even if there was a chance of his getting shot doing it. A nigger. With a gun. And you stood there. Or maybe you did try and I missed that part of the testimony. Maybe it’s there in the record, and I just overlooked it. You tried, after all, to jump that boy. And he hit you with the butt of it, a pistol butt. And you were out cold while it was going on. Perhaps that was it. You were out cold in that gondola all the time. You travel together. Trains, rooms, cities. Alaska if he’ll take you. I couldn’t tell a magnolia unless it had a sign on it, but I’d want a man who did more than stand by when something terrible was about to happen to me. I’d want him to try jumping even a gun if we were traveling together. Because you would, wouldn’t you, Jackie? If Grady were in danger, you, being a woman, would take that much of a chance for his sake.
Justin looks at Grady.
Justin: A nigger, and only one gun.
Grady: I’ll tell you one thing. There ain’t no gun on me now.
Justin: What?
Grady: There ain’t no gun on me now.
Grady smashes the rye bottle against the edge of the dresser. His hand starts bleeding. The dog stands up, hackles raised, growling. Jackie goes to Grady and takes the bottle from him.
Justin: Here …
Justin offers a monogrammed handkerchief.
Jackie: He don’t need a rag of yours.
Jackie takes an item of underwear from a drawer, rips it twice, and binds Grady’s hand. She wipes the floor with the remaining cloth. The dog snuffles over to the couple.
Grady: The jury gave a verdict, and it’s all over. But you come here and look for us. Why? Because I was off a chain gang and Jackie used to hustle? [looks at his bandaged hand] All right. I’ll tell you something I didn’t tell down there in court. I was off the county two days. I was standing there on a street in Birmingham, smoking, and she came up to me on that street and she asked me did I have the time. The time to what, I said, because I thought she was kind of pretty even though I could tell she was peddling it. But I’d been away a long time from any place where they even peddle it or have it around, and all you do is dream about it, so I gave her one of the smokes I had, and then we went into a chili parlour and we had two bowls of chili with meat in it which is all she had to eat, and all I had. And then later, when it was getting dark, we walked all the way out of town.
There’s a lake about six, seven miles out I knew about, and we walked all the way out there and I found this house, closed up, people had who came out to it only on the weekends, I guess, and there was an old hammock on the porch. It was late now, and a little cold. So we laid down in the hammock. There was a wind blowing in from across the lake; on the other side there was a house lit up and somebody had a phonograph in it, and you could hear the music across the water, and I say to her we got music, for free. She put her arms around me because she was cold. She was all right and it was more than six months since I had it. I said, ‘You warm enough now?’ and she said she was, and we fell asleep like that in the old hammock with the wind blowing and that phonograph playing music across the lake.
I didn’t like her so much in the morning. I got up and thought maybe I’d bust in the house but she didn’t want me to try anything like that. I had fifteen cents in my pocket, and I said to her well all she’d got out of it was a smoke and a bowl of chili but she said she didn’t care about that. Then she asked me where I was heading for, and I said the trains, and she said, ‘Why don’t we travel together?’ She asked me what I did when I wasn’t on the county, and I said I was an entertainer.
Justin [astonished]: What?
Grady: I play the harmonica, and I recite things. Then I take up a collection after I finish. We travel together, like she said. We don’t ask nobody who they travel with or why or where they’re going or anything. We don’t come in places we ain’t asked. You do. All right. You knocked and I opened the door. I gave you the drink. I said I’d like Alaska. I told you how come we travel together. Now you walk out the same way you come in and I’ll close that door I never should have opened. Because the next time a bottle’s broken, maybe I won’t let Jackie take it away. Next time, I might use it.
Justin: There’s another world than Montague’s. All the houses you’ve passed, on maybe a Sunday afternoon, with the smell of dinner in them and the papers on the front porch, and maybe a piano playing. And to own something: a lawnmower, a back fence, something that’s yours besides the shoes on your feet, or the fifteen cents Grady said he had in his pocket that morning.
All you can say about the South is that you were born in it: what else of it was ever yours? Oh, it paid you. For, as Grady says, playing the harmonica on a street corner, or ten minutes on your back. Still, the magnolias bloom, they tell me, in the spring. How old are you, Jackie? Nineteen, the records said. I’ve a daughter sixteen. There isn’t a dress shop she doesn’t stop at, even when we go for a short walk down the avenue. She talks even now about having kids, four or five she thinks, though she’ll settle for two, later, and find any house is hardly big enough for even two of them. Well: wouldn’t that be what you’d want with Grady if, as you say, you travel together?
It’s a question of choosing. We know what Montague thinks: a girl like you, and using the word rape, nigger or no nigger. There’d be whatever you needed, for you, Grady, even Rex here, who isn’t a foreign dog. Yes: why not? Even Rex. The biggest damn bone he ever had.
Jackie: How much money would you give us?
Justin: It’s not only money, Jackie. We’d give you more than that.
Jackie: What?
Justin: Hope. It’s just a negotiable. More, possibly.
Jackie: Sure. But how much of that would be in money?
Justin: Does it have to be an exact sum? [takes out his wallet] Will this make you feel more secure? Will this help you believe me?
Jackie: When would you or them people give it to us? I mean, before?
Justin: This much now, if you need it.
Justin puts his wallet away.
Justin: We’d leave tonight. You’d stay at a hotel, and then you’d meet my people. You’ll be comfortable, protected, taken care of. Why don’t you talk about it, you and Grady? Alone.
Justin picks up his hat and coat.
Justin: I owe you a bottle of rye, anyway. To replace that one.
Justin goes out, closing the door.
Act 1
A low rent part of town. A lawyer mounts the stairs to a flat, and knocks on the door. When no one answers, he knocks more insistently. The door opens a crack, and Grady’s blue eye looks out suspiciously.
Grady: Who is it? What do you want?
Justin: Grady Boland?
Grady: Boland?
Justin: Yes, Boland; because you’re Grady Boland, aren’t you?
Grady: Boland … Ain’t nobody here called Boland.
Justin: Except yourself; yourself and Jackie.
Grady: Jackie?
Justin: Yes, Jackie. Jackie Tarr.
Grady: Boland ... Boland? Boland …
Justin: The hall’s uncomfortable. Do you mind?
Grady admits Justin to the flat. A dog is present in the room. A female voice comes from the bathroom.
Jackie: Grady, who is it?
Grady: Fella.
Jackie: What fella?
Grady: I don’t know. Some fella.
Jackie: You better give me my skirt. It’s on that chair.
Jackie’s arm appears. Grady hands her the skirt, and the arm and skirt are withdrawn.
Jackie: Don’t you say nothing until I come out!
The dog growls.
Justin: He’s not very fond of lawyers, is he? Well, I’m not either.
Grady: Rex. Rex. Lay down!
Justin: Rex? Is that what you call him? Rex means king. It’s Latin for king.
Grady: He ain’t no foreign dog.
Jackie comes in from the bathroom.
Justin: You must be cold up here. It’s not like the South this time of year, is it? March is a mean month.
Justin gets out a silver cigarette case.
Grady: I got some.
Jackie: I’ll smoke Grady’s.
Justin: Do you mind if I sit down? [Justin sits on the chair Jackie’s skirt was on] I know some people from down south who can’t stand a winter up here. They’re miserable whenever they come. I suppose they never quite thaw out. These people are from Florida.
Grady: Florida?
Justin: Yes.
Grady: That ain’t South.
Justin: Isn’t it? I didn’t realise you wouldn’t think so. But it isn’t, in a way. Not like Birmingham’s South. I guess it’s like any change of climate. The blood’s not used to it. [awkward silence] Of course, you remember me.
Grady: No.
Justin: No? That’s odd.
Grady: Yeah?
Justin: I’d have thought you’d remember everything and everybody. Faces, names, gestures: all of it. [Justin puts his cigarette case away] I was one of the lawyers. Oh, not for the prosecution. Still, I’d have thought you’d remember.
Jackie backs away slightly.
Jackie: Mister, I don’t go around remembering things. All right: you’re a lawyer. Grady let you in. Maybe it was because you had a hat on. And you were somewhere, and we’re supposed to remember you, Grady and me. Now what do you want?
Justin: Want?
Jackie: With us.
Justin: We’ve been looking a long time for you, Jackie. Didn’t you think we would?
Jackie: I don’t think anything.
Justin: Of course, Montague got you out of town fast enough. Oh, you tried. Hiding, I mean. And made it difficult, too: just digging you out wherever you were. But there was one thing you were all wrong about. A hundred per cent.
Grady? Yeah?
Justin: The idea you could hide at all. The idea that you could possibly ever be safe or finished with it. We’d have found you somewhere. Sometime. We wouldn’t have given up because we’re not the sort of people who give up, and that, [looks at Jackie] is what neither you nor Grady, [looks at Grady] nor Montague nor Judge Wilcox nor the state itself, I think, really understands. They’re accustomed to a case ending because there’s a verdict, and a verdict, deliberated over and duly brought in, is where it’s supposed to end; but a verdict’s where my organization begins.
Silence.
Justin: Where did you think it could run? We don’t have as much money as the state has, but by scrimping and saving and passing the hat around, we could always put up at least as much money to find you as the attorney general could give you to hide. Didn’t you think of that?
Silence.
Justin: It might seem easy enough to you to get up in court where some sheriff or some attorney has terrorized you, and testify whatever you think is the thing they want you to testify, and I suppose it’s not too difficult to say it, even with the sweat of your hand still on the leather of the Bible, if what you think it listening is just a jury and a judge and a court full of people from town. But you were wrong there, too: the audience, the real audience, listening to every word, was considerably larger.
Jackie: I told the truth.
Justin: Of course. And Grady, too. Grady told the truth, too.
Grady: That’s right.
Justin removes his glasses and polishes them.
Justin: You know it’s not as though they kind of lie you told wasn’t any different from something the girls tell every day before a divorce judge. It wasn’t at all like saying you spent a weekend in Atlantic City and being on a bed in a negligee when a private detective and somebody’s wife some breaking into the room.
Grady: No?
Justin: Do you think it is the same kind of lie?
Jackie: What makes it so different? Two niggers? Two niggers don’t make anything important.
Justin: Don’t they?
Jackie: No.
Justin: Would their being white, then, make it?
Jackie: No.
Justin: Why? Why doesn’t it? Hanging then, innocent as you know they are, doesn’t it mean anything to you?
Grady: Sure. Sure it does. They’ll be dead.
Justin: Dead?
Grady: That’s right. They can hang them any colour they want. I just want to see them dead.
Silence.
Jackie: What did you say your name was, Mister?
Justin: Louis Justin.
Jackie: Listen, I told it to all of you, twice, three times. I told the whole world it. Why should I tell it again just because you came up here?
Justin: But Jackie, you’ll always tell it, or have to tell it. Don’t you see? Besides, you may have forgotten something you remember now: some piece of evidence, I mean.
Jackie: There ain’t nothing I forgot, and there ain’t nothing I remember now I didn’t remember then. What happened on that train happened like I told it.
Justin: Exactly? Exactly as you told it?
Jackie: I told it like it happened.
Justin: Think. You’re in that gondola, Grady and you. What time is it? Twelve thirty. A hot summer’s day. Soemwhere between High Point and Reevesville. There, sitting in that gondola. And they come climbing down over the tops of the boxcars: three boys. Think a minute. You and Grady, there in the gondola, and the three boys (You could see them outlined against the sky, couldn’t you? Their round heads, and the overalls, couldn’t you?) climbing down to you. And one of them had a gun. A gun. He carried it where? Where in his overalls? Or maybe tucked into his shoe tops?
Jackie: He carried it in his hand.
Justin: In his hand? He climbed down with the gun in his hand?
Jackie: I said yes.
Justin: Not in his overalls? Not tucked away or strapped down or anything like that?
Jackie: He had that gun. How should I know where a nigger’ll carry a gun? There’s always a place. And he put the gun on Grady.
Justin: On Grady and not on you?
Jackie: On Grady, and on me. I said that. I said it I don’t know how many times. He put the gun on Grady and he said to Grady now you stay still, white boy. Then the other two came at me.
Justin: Yes. They came at you. [looks at Grady then back at Jackie] And Grady?
Jackie [abruptly]: Grady? I told you Grady had a gun on him.
Justin: Yes, I know. The gun. And they came at you. Then one of them hit you.
Jackie: He hit me, with his fist, and dragged me away from Grady, and threw me down on some straw.
Justin: And ripped your dress.
Jackie: That’s right. He ripped my dress.
Justin: And Grady?
Silence.
Justin: They weren’t big boys; Grady weighs more than either of them do.
Justin looks at Jackie.
Jackie: Maybe he wasn’t bigger’n Grady, but he was bigger’n me.
Justin: Not much. Still, you fought. I mean, you said in court you fought.
Jackie: I scratched him. He had them scratches on his face.
Justin: Yes. One of them had scratches all right. But maybe they weren’t fingernails, and maybe they weren’t yours.
Jackie: The doctor said they were mine. He examined me, didn’t he?
Justin: Yes. He examined you. I wonder how many patients he’d have left in town if he said they weren’t … And then?
Jackie: We heard that sound.
Justin: Sound?
Jackie: Somebody shouting. I couldn’t hear what he was shouting.
Justin: While the boy was raping you?
Jackie: Yes, sir.
Justin: And?
Jackie: It was somebody on top of the boxcar looking down. Just a man’s head looking down and it was the brakeman.
Justin: Turner?
Jackie: I didn’t know his name then. He was looking down and shouting. Then he came climbing down into the gondola, and the niggers –
Justin: All of them?
Jackie: The one that was at me and the one standing and the one with the gun, yes sir. He got off and they started to climb out of the gondola to the next boxcar and I was screaming and trying to do something and the brakeman went up after them with that club of his up on the other boxcar. That’s when him and the other one fought and they threw him off up there and he dragged the other one with him and they both got killed. An when we got to Reevesville the sheriff and a bunch of men were down at the depot waiting and they took me off the car with my dress ripped and my back scratched and Grady too and took us in a car to the jail and they told me in the jail Mister Turner the brakeman he was dead and they asked me what happened and I told them just like I told them in court and just like I’m telling you now. Them boys raped me yes sir and killed Mister Turner the brakeman and that’s the truth and if anybody asks me anyplace I don’t care where, you or anybody, that’s the truth and I told it. You or anybody, now and forever, that’s the truth and I told it. They put a gun on Grady and that one raped me and all of them together they killed Mister Turner and you can ask me and that’s the truth, now and forever. Whoever sent you, you tell them. Whoever them people are, and think Grady lied and me, you tell them all right you found us and here we are and this is what I said. Them niggers I don’t care they killed that brakeman. They put a gun on Grady. They raped me. They did it like I said, now and forever.
Justin leans forward.
Justin: Poor Grady. Poor Jackie. Both of you started to run when that gondola pulled into Reevesville, and you haven’t stopped running yet.
Grady: You see us running? We’re here, ain’t we? You found us, didn’t you?
Justin: Every time a train comes into an inhabited place, you run. The world’s a place to hide in, and not be caught. That’s the important thing, isn’t it? Run: from the men coming toward you.
Silence.
Justin: When you met Jackie, you were just off a chain gang, weren’t you, Grady?
Grady: That’s right. I was off a chain gang. What about it?
Justin: Except that it’s sad; perhaps more than sad. Because when someone else traveling on a train would be glad seeing the telegraph poles come to an end and a town begin, the first thing that you feel is that now you’ve come to an inhabited place it’s dangerous, as though that’s where all danger lies: wherever men are. Were I you, or Jackie, and lived like that, I’d hate those who put me into it, who made it the air I breathe.
Justin looks are them.
Justin: Or am I wrong? Because I may be wrong, and you don’t hate them: not Montague, paying you off in just enough to get you out of town with, or the deputies, making certain you got on that train, baggage or no baggage, or the men driving the big heavy cars that always go in only one direction: toward a court or a jail. Maybe there’s no hate at all in either of you for any of the things that have been done to you.
Justin looks out of the window.
Justin: Oh, it’s not you alone. It’s the establishment of fear everywhere. We’re all running, or beginning to run.
Grady stirs.
Grady: I don’t see you in no sweat.
Justin: Part of me’s always been in flight even when there was nothing, apparently, for a man like me to be hiding from … So they put you and Jackie into a car and drove you to Reevesville jailhouse. That’s all there was to it except the going into court and the lying, but that wasn’t too important, the important thing was you’d been caught … And now you think because we’ve caught you too, in a way, that there’s no difference really between the sheriff and me, or Montague and me, that I too am just somebody with a certain amount of authority, visible or invisible, who wants something out of you, and so there’s no difference. The voices change, and the places where the conversations take place, and maybe the terms of the proposition change a little, but they all want something out of you. Still, there’s a difference between Montague and me though maybe you don’t think so since we’re both lawyers and press our pants.
Jackie takes a bottle of red nail polish out of a dresser drawer and crosses to the bed.
Justin: I don’t suppose either of you go to church much, but isn’t there a text that says, ‘Thou shalt not suffer the innocent to be punished, nor the guilty-
Jackie [to Grady]: There’s a rag in the top drawer.
Grady fetches the rag for her, and she begins painting her toenails.
Justin: They exist, both truth and justice. Or will, if they don’t now. When the running stops- … What is it, a fat fee you think I’m getting for this?
Justin gestures at the seedy surroundings.
Justin: I’m a lawyer, a corporation lawyer, that’s what I do maybe forty weeks out of the year, and there’s a pleasant twenty-thousand-dollar practice which can keep me as busy as I want to be kept, going into court with one big oil company’s suit after another. I don’t even have to do this the other twelve weeks. Maine’s a hell of a lot nicer in August than a town called Reevesville. But I do it. Why? Conscience, is that it? Something on a filter in a radio drama. Still, I could up my charity donations, and let it go at that: but I don’t. Instead, I come down here, leaving a wife and a home I’m rather fond of, on a March evening, to talk to both of you, admitted strangers, people who won’t affect my life much one way or another, hoping that somehow you’ll do what the committee who sent me want you to do. … I’ll tell you one thing. The people who sent me, if I fail, will send somebody else. He’ll come up the street as I did. He’ll knock. Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing. In bed or not. Awake, or sleeping. Together, or alone. In any state, in any city. Until you go back, and say you lied.
Jackie: Go back. Go back where?
Justin: Reevesville.
Jackie gets up, crosser to the dresser, puts the nail polish down and picks up a comb.
Jackie: Reevesville. Grady and me. Is that what you want? Go back. Get off that train and walk down the street with everybody there. Grady and me. That’s all you want.
Justin: Yes.
Jackie: Go back and say, ‘That wasn’t the truth. A fella came to us up north and said we lied and here we are, Judge.’
Justin: Yes.
Jackie: Holding hands. Would we be holding hands, Grady?
Jackie looks at Grady, who smiles.
Jackie: You listen. Grady and me live here, and we paid the rent. You got in and said your piece and all right. We listened. Didn’t we listen? We didn’t have to listen, neither Grady nor me. But we listened. All right. Now you just go back where they sent you from, and you tell them you talked to us, to Grady and me, and got it all said, and we just sent you home. Go back. Mister, you’re real funny.
Justin: Wouldn’t it be more comfortable if we had a drink? We’d all feel a little friendlier with a drink, wouldn’t we?
Grady looks at Jackie.
Jackie: There’s another glass in there.
Grady takes a used glass into the bathroom.
Justin: Is Grady your sweetheart?
Jackie: My what?
Justin: Sweetheart. Boy friend. What would you call it?
Jackie: We travel together.
A tap is heard being turned on, then off again. Grady emerges from the bathroom, carrying two glasses. Justin admires the flowers in a pitcher of water on the table.
Justin: My wife’s the gardener. She does all the planting. I don’t seem to be able to make anything grow.
Grady pours rye into the two glasses and hands one to Justin and one to Jackie.
Justin: Grady, if you ever had money enough, what would you do with it?
Grady: Do? How do you mean, do?
Justin: What would you use it for?
Grady: Maybe go to Alaska.
Justin: Why Alaska?
Grady: I don’t know. I’d go up to Alaska maybe and just look around.
Justin [smiling]: For gold?
Grady: Maybe. Maybe seals. Maybe nothing. Maybe I just like Alaska.
Justin: It’s even colder than here.
Grady: That’s right. It’s even colder than here. You asked and I told you: Alaska.
Justin: Would you take Jackie along? Or would you go and send for her later? Provided you found gold, of course; or made a fortune in seals … I suppose you’d send for her later if you struck it rich.
Jackie looks anxiously at Grady.
Justin: She could fly up there, or go by steamer. I think there’s a steamer goes from Seattle. I seem to remember something about a steamer. She could join you; help, too, with the seals. She’d look pretty up there, in furs, in Anchorage or Nome. On a sled, shouting to a team of dogs.
Silence.
Justin: Or were you planning to heave her behind for the state to take care of?
Justin glances at Jackie, then sighs.
Justin: I guess Grady thinks Alaska’d be too cold for you, Jackie; or possibly you’d get in trouble with a seal.
Justin finishes his drink.
Justin: When that boy had that gun on you, Grady-he did have a gun on you? The gun we couldn’t find, though we searched for it. Clear back to High Point, every inch of that roadbed. But when he had that gun on you, why didn’t you jump him? Why didn’t you try to take that gun away from him?
Silence.
Justin: A boy like that, a nigger, not even twenty, in a train going through a countryside with not too level a track, why didn’t you try? If it was my girl being raped on a pile of straw, I think any man would have made a try at a gun even if there was a chance of his getting shot doing it. A nigger. With a gun. And you stood there. Or maybe you did try and I missed that part of the testimony. Maybe it’s there in the record, and I just overlooked it. You tried, after all, to jump that boy. And he hit you with the butt of it, a pistol butt. And you were out cold while it was going on. Perhaps that was it. You were out cold in that gondola all the time. You travel together. Trains, rooms, cities. Alaska if he’ll take you. I couldn’t tell a magnolia unless it had a sign on it, but I’d want a man who did more than stand by when something terrible was about to happen to me. I’d want him to try jumping even a gun if we were traveling together. Because you would, wouldn’t you, Jackie? If Grady were in danger, you, being a woman, would take that much of a chance for his sake.
Justin looks at Grady.
Justin: A nigger, and only one gun.
Grady: I’ll tell you one thing. There ain’t no gun on me now.
Justin: What?
Grady: There ain’t no gun on me now.
Grady smashes the rye bottle against the edge of the dresser. His hand starts bleeding. The dog stands up, hackles raised, growling. Jackie goes to Grady and takes the bottle from him.
Justin: Here …
Justin offers a monogrammed handkerchief.
Jackie: He don’t need a rag of yours.
Jackie takes an item of underwear from a drawer, rips it twice, and binds Grady’s hand. She wipes the floor with the remaining cloth. The dog snuffles over to the couple.
Grady: The jury gave a verdict, and it’s all over. But you come here and look for us. Why? Because I was off a chain gang and Jackie used to hustle? [looks at his bandaged hand] All right. I’ll tell you something I didn’t tell down there in court. I was off the county two days. I was standing there on a street in Birmingham, smoking, and she came up to me on that street and she asked me did I have the time. The time to what, I said, because I thought she was kind of pretty even though I could tell she was peddling it. But I’d been away a long time from any place where they even peddle it or have it around, and all you do is dream about it, so I gave her one of the smokes I had, and then we went into a chili parlour and we had two bowls of chili with meat in it which is all she had to eat, and all I had. And then later, when it was getting dark, we walked all the way out of town.
There’s a lake about six, seven miles out I knew about, and we walked all the way out there and I found this house, closed up, people had who came out to it only on the weekends, I guess, and there was an old hammock on the porch. It was late now, and a little cold. So we laid down in the hammock. There was a wind blowing in from across the lake; on the other side there was a house lit up and somebody had a phonograph in it, and you could hear the music across the water, and I say to her we got music, for free. She put her arms around me because she was cold. She was all right and it was more than six months since I had it. I said, ‘You warm enough now?’ and she said she was, and we fell asleep like that in the old hammock with the wind blowing and that phonograph playing music across the lake.
I didn’t like her so much in the morning. I got up and thought maybe I’d bust in the house but she didn’t want me to try anything like that. I had fifteen cents in my pocket, and I said to her well all she’d got out of it was a smoke and a bowl of chili but she said she didn’t care about that. Then she asked me where I was heading for, and I said the trains, and she said, ‘Why don’t we travel together?’ She asked me what I did when I wasn’t on the county, and I said I was an entertainer.
Justin [astonished]: What?
Grady: I play the harmonica, and I recite things. Then I take up a collection after I finish. We travel together, like she said. We don’t ask nobody who they travel with or why or where they’re going or anything. We don’t come in places we ain’t asked. You do. All right. You knocked and I opened the door. I gave you the drink. I said I’d like Alaska. I told you how come we travel together. Now you walk out the same way you come in and I’ll close that door I never should have opened. Because the next time a bottle’s broken, maybe I won’t let Jackie take it away. Next time, I might use it.
Justin: There’s another world than Montague’s. All the houses you’ve passed, on maybe a Sunday afternoon, with the smell of dinner in them and the papers on the front porch, and maybe a piano playing. And to own something: a lawnmower, a back fence, something that’s yours besides the shoes on your feet, or the fifteen cents Grady said he had in his pocket that morning.
All you can say about the South is that you were born in it: what else of it was ever yours? Oh, it paid you. For, as Grady says, playing the harmonica on a street corner, or ten minutes on your back. Still, the magnolias bloom, they tell me, in the spring. How old are you, Jackie? Nineteen, the records said. I’ve a daughter sixteen. There isn’t a dress shop she doesn’t stop at, even when we go for a short walk down the avenue. She talks even now about having kids, four or five she thinks, though she’ll settle for two, later, and find any house is hardly big enough for even two of them. Well: wouldn’t that be what you’d want with Grady if, as you say, you travel together?
It’s a question of choosing. We know what Montague thinks: a girl like you, and using the word rape, nigger or no nigger. There’d be whatever you needed, for you, Grady, even Rex here, who isn’t a foreign dog. Yes: why not? Even Rex. The biggest damn bone he ever had.
Jackie: How much money would you give us?
Justin: It’s not only money, Jackie. We’d give you more than that.
Jackie: What?
Justin: Hope. It’s just a negotiable. More, possibly.
Jackie: Sure. But how much of that would be in money?
Justin: Does it have to be an exact sum? [takes out his wallet] Will this make you feel more secure? Will this help you believe me?
Jackie: When would you or them people give it to us? I mean, before?
Justin: This much now, if you need it.
Justin puts his wallet away.
Justin: We’d leave tonight. You’d stay at a hotel, and then you’d meet my people. You’ll be comfortable, protected, taken care of. Why don’t you talk about it, you and Grady? Alone.
Justin picks up his hat and coat.
Justin: I owe you a bottle of rye, anyway. To replace that one.
Justin goes out, closing the door.
