Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [82]
At the station Richard gave his name and address and age and occupation. Then for the first time he stated that he was not involved, and asked one of the other boys to corroborate his testimony. This they rather despairingly did. They might, Elizabeth felt, have done it sooner, but they probably also felt that it would be useless to speak. And they were not believed; the owner of the store was being brought there to make the identification. And Richard tried to relax: the man could not say that he had been there if he had never seen him before.
But when the owner came, a short man with a bloody shirt—for they had knifed him—in the company of yet another policeman, he looked at the four boys before him and said: ‘Yeah, that’s them, all right.’
Then Richard shouted: ‘But I wasn’t there! Look at me, goddammit—I wasn’t there!’
‘You black bastard,’ the man said, looking at him, ‘you’re all the same.’
Then there was silence in the station, the eyes of the white men all watching. And Richard said, but quietly, knowing that he was lost: ‘But all the same, mister, I wasn’t there.’ And he looked at the white man’s bloody shirt and thought, he told Elizabeth, at the bottom of his heart: ‘I wish to God they’d killed you.’
Then the questioning began. The three boys signed a confession at once, but Richard would not sign. He said at last that he would die before he signed a confession to something he hadn’t done. ‘Well then,’ said one of them, hitting him suddenly across the head, ‘maybe you will die, you black son-of-a-bitch.’ And the beating began. He would not, then, talk to her about it; she found that, before the dread and the hatred that filled her mind, her imagination faltered and held its peace.
‘What we going to do? she asked at last.
He smiled a vicious smile—she had never seen such a smile on his face before. ‘Maybe you ought to pray to that Jesus of yours and get Him to come down and tell these white men something.’ He looked at her a long, dying moment. ‘Because I don’t know nothing else to do,’ he said.
She suggested: ‘Richard, what about another lawyer?’
And he smiled again. ‘I declare,’ he said, ‘Little-bit’s been holding out on me. She got a fortune tied up in a sock, and she ain’t never told me nothing about it.’
She had been trying to save money for a whole year, but she had only thirty dollars. She sat before him, going over in her mind all the things she might do to raise money, even to going on the streets. Then, for very helplessness, she began to shake with sobbing. At this, his face became Richard’s face again. He said in a shaking voice: ‘Now, look here, Little-bit, don’t you be like that. We going to work this out all right.’ But she could not stop sobbing. ‘Elizabeth,’ he whispered, ‘Elizabeth, Elizabeth.’ Then the man came and said that it was time for her to go. And she rose. She had brought two packets of cigarettes for him, and they were still in her bag. Wholly ignorant of prison, she did not dare to give them to him under the man’s eyes. And, somehow, her failure to remember to give him the cigarettes, when she knew how much he smoked, made her wept the harder. She tried—and failed—to smile at him, and she was slowly led to the door. The sun nearly blinded her, and she heard him whisper behind her: ‘So long, baby. Be good.’
In the streets she did not know what to do. She stood awhile before the dreadful gates, and then she walked and walked until she came to a coffee shop where taxi drivers and the people who worked in nearby offices hurried in and out all day. Usually she was afraid to go into downtown establishments, where only white people were, but to-day she did not care. She felt that if anyone said anything to her she would turn and curse him like the lowest bitch on the street. If anyone touched her, she would do her best to send his soul to Hell.
But no one touched her; no one spoke. She drank her coffee, sitting in the strong sun that fell through the