Axeman’s Jazz
by
Tracy Daugherty
For Margie,
who went there with me,
all the way
Either I’m a nation or I’m nothing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOVELS GROW from many sources — memories, suggestions, challenges, prohibitions — and with the help of many companions. I am indebted to all my teachers and friends, living and dead, from my Houston days. In particular, I wish to thank Glenn Blake, Michelle Boisseau, Rosellen Brown, Tom Cobb, Carl Lindahl, Martha Low, John McNamara, and Lois Zamora. For their part in helping me shape this work, I thank Ehud Havazelet and Kathryn Lang. For their support during the writing, I thank Marjorie Sandor, Hannah Crum, Gene and JoAnne Daugherty, and my colleagues at Oregon State University, especially Keith Scribner and Jen Richter. Finally, for their long-term encouragement and friendship, thanks to Molly Brown, Jerry and Joyce Bryan, Betty Campbell, Kris and Rich Daniels, Ted Leeson, Debra and Creighton Lindsey, George Manner, Jeff and Pam Mull, Marshall Terry, and the indefatigable souls at SMU Press, Kathie, Keith Gregory, and George Ann Goodwin.
1
EACH TIME I imagined the execution I saw it from a different perspective. First as a simple observer, then as a catalyst in the tragedy. Female then male. Once I was an officer. Next time a common foot soldier.
The sky was always lime, as just before a storm. Pine trees lined the meadow where the gallows stood. A commander — sometimes he was me — called, “Halt!” The prisoners, thirteen of them, all but two cleanly shaved, stopped in the dewy clearing, the chains around their ankles and wrists murmuring in disturbed unison, like a flock of startled birds. Their military uniforms were well-pressed and pleasing to see. A pair of them had soiled their britches; shit and fear tinged the air, along with the mulch of rotting cotton nearby. Several armed cavalrymen, following the commander’s orders, led the condemned men to two rows of folding chairs in the field’s center. The chairs were set back to back, six on one side, seven on the other.
From the perspective of a simple observer, a young woman much like myself — someone on the fringes, that is — I see the gallows’ fresh timber, flesh-colored against the green and cloudy predawn sky. (Women, of course, were officially barred from the field that day as the army dispatched its duties.)
And to be clear, when I say “flesh,” I mean my own light skin, not the boggy darkness of the men about to be hanged. In its coloration, the terrible contraption looked like me, not them.
A bonfire licked the sky’s first gold streaks. By an earlier fire’s sparks, the night before, the Army Corps of Engineers had erected the death-rig on hasty, top-secret orders. This I know from my perspective as an officer, just as I know the prisoners requested, at their trial, death by firing squad, a more dignified military exit than hanging. As I stand here swatting mosquitoes, I understand the significance of refusing the prisoners’ request, the example of lynching more than a dozen black men.
Am I uneasy with my knowledge? Is the sweat on my upper lip caused by more than humidity, stifling here in deep East Texas, even in fall, even in the hour before sunrise?
Might I be a better witness, come to a fuller understanding of these events, as an infantryman? You must know everything, a teacher once told me. So, mentally, I switch identities again, like pouring water from one cup into another. Now, standing among mesquite trees at a rough pace of twenty yards from my comrades, I see, just below a straw-covered hill, two rows of unpainted pine coffins next to thirteen open graves.
The six Mexican laborers hired by the army last night near the little river in San Antonio stand beside the crude boxes, wringing their hands. They will be asked, shortly, to untie the hangman’s knots and to bury the corpses, each with a soda water bottle in his pocket holding a paper ribbon typed with the prisoners’ names and ranks and the statement “Died September 11, 1917, at Fort Sam Houston.” As a foot soldier, just following orders myself, I suspect the Mexicans cannot read these statements and do not know where Fort Sam Houston is; but if they could decipher the words, I doubt even they would be fooled into thinking this slovenly, hidden field is anything resembling a fort.
As the prisoners sit, remarkably calm, in the folding chairs, surrounded by Sheriff John Tobin of Bexar County, seven deputies, 125 cavalrymen, two white army chaplains, and a black civilian minister, the hangman adjusts his knots. The men have refused blindfolds. They stare at the two waist-high wooden triggers, manned by twelve soldiers, where the ropes converge on the platform. Softly, one of the bound fellows drones a hymn, “I’m coming home, I’m coming home.” The others take it up with him, one by one, low and even.
Finally, the commander calls — I call — “Attention!” then I summon them, coldly (distantly, to protect myself, hunched and dyspeptic with my burdensome knowledge), to the scaffolding.
In my many varied draftings of this scene, I have never once viewed it from the prisoners’ perspective. Which of the doomed would I choose to be? I’ve recovered a name — Cletus, Cletus Hayes — from the bottom of a cardboard box in my mama’s chest of drawers. But which one is he? All accounts of that morning’s events, admittedly highly subjective, possibly wildly inaccurate, agree that only two of the men were unshaven. One of them, then: with distinguishing whiskers. To isolate him one more step, I could say he is one who shat his pants. But do I want this figure, with possible family ties to me, already disgraced by history, to be marred further by cowardly grime?
He steps forward with the others over a series of trap doors in the scaffolding, and I lose him again. It is too difficult to see, much less be, Cletus Hayes in my mind, so, as the men burst a last time into song — “Coming home, Lord, coming home!”—and the white guards from the Nineteenth Infantry yell to them, with grave sincerity, “Good-bye, Boys of Company C!” I become, again, a young, light-skinned woman — no: a white woman — standing on the fringes, watching in horror.
I am not supposed to be here, but because I may have suffered a trauma at the hands of one of the prisoners, the army, at my family’s request, has perhaps allowed a special dispensation (no orders exist confirming this), hoping the sight of punishment will restore me to myself. But as I witness the triggers’ swift arcs, the beams’ awful shudders, I want to shout, “Cletus!” both to save him and to cast him into Hell. I will never again know clearly what I want out of life, and therefore, I will never again know clearly who I am. My curse is a variety of perspectives, and I will pass it on.
The army seems as paralyzed as I am, torn between the desire to comport its duties with dignity and the need to hide its shame. As soon as the bodies are hustled down the straw-covered hill, into the steaming, unmarked graves, the Mexicans are ordered to dismantle the gallows and burn the lumber. By noon, the clearing looks as if no one had ever set foot in it, and the grassy fringe where the frightened white woman may or may not have trembled now begins to expand — not just by distance, but by years. Years of silence, uncertainty, sorrow, and lies.
This morning, I awoke from a dream of the lynching and, naked in hot sunlight, twisted in clammy sheets, wondered for a minute where I lay. Not home in my apartment in Dallas, where I would have heard my aquarium bubbling, my parrots chattering, demanding the day’s first affection. Instead, I was aware of close, rough walls, the difficulty of breathing — the scorch of each intake — and remembered: Houston. The leafy, humid sump, the Cajun-Southern-niggery mess of the neighborhood known as Freedmen’s Town.