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Chapter 116
IT WAS TIME TO TRY OUT the plan I had concocted. Maybe it was even past time, too late. Moody and L.J. had come with me. Jonah wanted to but knew he couldn’t. After all, he was representing the great state of Mississippi, and we were about to break the law in too many ways to count.
“Stinks bad in here,” Moody said.
The awful smell was everywhere, a sharp, nauseating odor, like a cross between bad patent medicine and rancid moonshine. It was the foul scent of the chemicals Scooter Willems used to develop his photographs.
I had just climbed through an unlocked window, with Moody and L.J. behind me, into Scooter’s old cabin off the East Point Road. Now we were in his studio, one large room with black curtains dividing it into three. The front part was a portrait studio, with a backdrop and a stool for the subject to pose on. In the middle section two large wooden tables held trays of foul-smelling chemicals. But it was in the last section that we found what we’d come for: boxes and boxes of Willems’s photographs, with dozens more pi
There was one box full of nothing but photographs of lynchings. Scooter Willems had been busy these past months. Beside that box sat a stack of postcards manufactured from the photos, souvenir pictures of hanged corpses, burned bodies, twisted victims, like the one I’d received in the mail.
“God Almighty,” Moody said. “The man has taken pictures of everybody who ever got hanged.”
“Look here,” said L.J., working his way along the wall. “These are all from the Bobby Burnett lynching.”
I held up the lantern to see.
“First, take a look at poor old Bobby hanging there,” L.J. said. “Now look who’s standing next to him. There. By his feet.”
There they were, plain as day in the flickering lamplight: Chester Madden and Lincoln Alexander Stephens, two of the three White Raiders on trial. They gri
One by one I pulled the photographs down from the wall, gathering them in a manila folder I found on Scooter’s desk.
“Look at this!” Moody exclaimed, holding a photo up to the light.
I came up beside her. There was her brother Hiram, dead on the ground, with a rope around his neck. His gri
L.J. pointed to the man on the end. “I’ll be damned if that ain’t Lester Johnson.”
I almost stopped breathing. “And now he sits on our jury.”
Then I recognized the man beside him. It was Jacob, Jacob Gill, with his foot resting on Moody’s dead brother. I felt my eyes filling.
Scooter Willems was nothing if not thorough. Everyone who’d ever had a hand in a lynching in this part of Mississippi had been assiduously recorded, their faces plainly recognizable. Some of the lynchings were of victims I’d heard about, others were news to us.
The horror increased with just about every picture. Before we were through, we’d seen the faces of many prominent Eudora citizens enjoying a night out, a night of murder and mayhem.
What a record of guilt! What amazing evidence! I couldn’t take the pictures down fast enough.
“Just put ’em all in the box,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”
“No, y’all can stay,” I heard.
Chapter 117
THE BLACK CURTAIN was yanked aside, and the studio flooded with light. At first I couldn’t make out who they were, but there were five of them. Their torches were much brighter than our lantern, and they dazzled us.
“I don’t recall inviting any of you folks here,” a voice said. That high nasal whine had to be Scooter Willems’s.
As he moved his torch I saw them all.
Two men with guns whom I didn’t recognize.
Phineas Eversman, chief of police.
And Senator Richard Nottingham, Elizabeth ’s husband.
“Go ahead and finish packing up,” said Nottingham, waving his pistol. “Saves us having to do it.”
Another man stepped into the cabin. “Yeah, y’all get to work, would you?” I knew that voice. And that face. It was Jacob Gill.
“’Preciate you gathering ’em up for us, Ben,” he said. “We were just go
“We knew we’d find you here,” Phineas said with a smirk on his face.
L.J. growled, “How did you know? Who the hell told you we were comin’ here?”
There was a silence, then the others looked at Richard Nottingham. Finally he said, “My wife.”
The words stabbed me in the heart. I felt my throat closing and thought I might be sick.
“ Elizabeth was spying for me. She told us every word you ever said, Corbett. She’s a good girl. Thanks for keeping us up to date. It was damn useful to Maxwell Lewis.”
Phineas took the box of photographs from Moody. One of the pictures caught his eye. “We don’t need this one,” he said.
He handed it over to me. “In case you want a souvenir.”
It was a picture of me-half naked, hanging from a lynching tree.
Scooter did a fine job with the picture. The detail was crisp; you could see every leaf on the tree. The dog licking my bloody foot, the flies swarming over my face.
“You always took a nice picture, Ben,” said Jacob Gill.
Chapter 118
“ALL RIGHT NOW, Ben, we tried your plan, and you might say it didn’t work out so well. So now we’re going to try my plan.”
Jonah was not in the mood to butter me up.
“You know those photographs would have worked,” I said bitterly. “All right, all right, tell me your plan.”
“Well, it’s not quite as audacious as yours. Matter of fact, it’s very logical, very well thought out.”
“Damn it, just tell us,” L.J. said.
“Tomorrow,” Jonah said, “I want Ben to give the summation to the jury.”
L.J. didn’t hesitate a beat before answering, “That is a fine idea.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “I was there on the night of the murders. I’m a witness but you’ve chosen not to put me on the stand. You’re the one who’s been telling them the story of these crimes all along. Why change now?”
“You know why,” said L.J.
“Because I’m white?” I said. “That’s no reason!”
“It never hurts,” Jonah said with a faint smile. “Look, you come from here,” he explained. “You know these people. The judge is your father. These jurors will trust you more than they will me. And not because you’re white-because you were there. You can give a summation that comes from your heart. For God’s sake, you’ve been lynched yourself. You have to tell them a story, Ben. They need to hear it from you.”
I dreaded the truth in what he was saying. The next thing he said cinched it for me:
“I tried the case. I fought the case. I pled the case. But all along, even before I got here, it was always your case, Ben.”