The Fullers finally found a lawyer who would take the case on appeal, and though Sam warned them not to throw their money away, they did so anyway, on a desperately vain attempt to save their son. For over two years Mrs. Fuller wrote Sam a letter once a week begging for mercy as the case dragged through the courts and Reggie moldered at the Cummins Farm at Gould, where the Negroes were sent. When the Fullers ran out of money, they sold their house and moved into a smaller one; when they ran out of money again, Mr. Fuller sold his business to a white man and went to work for that same white man, who called him, behind his back, “the dumbest nigger in Arkansas for selling a business that did sixty thousand clear a year for sixty thousand!” Then Mrs. Fuller died, Jake Fuller, the older boy, went off to join the navy and the two daughters, Emily and Suzette, moved to St. Louis with their aunt. But old Davidson Fuller took up the letter duty and wrote Sam every week and tried to talk to him, to get him to look at the evidence one more time.
“You a fair man, sir. Don’t let them do this to my boy. He didn’t do it.”
“Davidson, even your own Nigra people say he did it. I have sources. I know what’s being said in the churches and the cribs.”
“Don’t take my boy from me, Mr. Sam.”
“I am not taking your boy from you. The law is following its course. This ain’t Mississippi. I gave him a fair trial, you had good lawyers, the reason he is going where he is going is because he has to pay. You had best adjust to that, sir. I know this is not easy on your family; it wasn’t easy on Shirelle’s either. The balance has to be squared off and restored, and we can go on from there.”
“Tell them I did it, if they want a Negro to die. I’ll go. I’ll confess. Take me. Please, please, please, Mr. Sam, don’t take my poor little boy.”
Sam just looked at him.
“You have too much love in your heart for that boy,” he finally said. “He’s not worth it. He killed an innocent girl.”
There was but one act to be played out and it occurred on October 6, 1957, at the Arkansas State Penitentiary at Tucker, where they’d removed Reggie from the Cummins Farm when his last appeal was finally denied. It was the day of the fourth game of the World Series, and Sam listened to the game that afternoon as he drove the hundred-odd miles to Tucker, just southeast of Little Rock. It was not his first time to make such a trip, nor would it be his last. On the other hand, he didn’t make it automatically; of the twenty-three men he sent to the electric chair, he only watched eleven die. Tonight it was Reggie’s turn.
Simply in terms of convenience, it worked out. He was able to get a clear signal from Little Rock and listened numbly to the baseball all the way over. Warren Spahn was on the mound, mowing them down. Sam hated anything with the word “Yankee” in the title just as he hated anything with “New York” in the title, so he lost himself in the baseball, hoping the upstart, uprooted “Milwaukee” team—really, just the old, pitiful Boston Braves—would triumph. Sam stayed rooted in the drama the whole way, even as the game went into extra innings, even as the Yankees tied the game in the ninth on Ellston Howard’s three-run homer and then scored the go-ahead run in the top of the tenth (goddammit!).
It looked over for the Braves, but somehow they clawed their way back into the game, when Logan doubled to left, scoring Mantilla to tie again, and Sam had the sense that something very special was about to happen. It did, shortly thereafter: Eddie Matthews’s two-run shot over the right-field fence, Braves win 7-5.
Sam looked up: he was at the prison. He’d driven straight through town, forgotten to eat dinner. He doubled back, found a diner, had roast beef and mashed potatoes.
Eleven . He pulled into the parking lot of the penitentiary after a nodding acknowledgment from a guard. He was known: there was no difficulty getting in, and getting through the checkpoints, until at last, with twenty-some others, he found himself in a little viewing room that opened on the death chamber. He recognized a couple of Little Rock newspaper boys, somebody from the Governor’s Office, the assistant warden, and a few others. It was an odd group; one could listen to the determined banality of the conversation, most of it now turning on the great game that afternoon and the Braves’ chances against the pinstriped colossi of Gotham, with the mighty Mantle, Berra, Larsen, McDougald and Bauer. In the chamber, a few guards were making last-moment adjustments; the electrician was tightening circuits on the chair, a sturdy oak thing that was so well made and severe it could have fit into a Baptist church.
“You must feel pret’ good, Sam,” said Hank Kelly, of the Arkansas Gazette.
“Not really,” said Sam. “You just want it to be over.”
“Well, I’ll be glad when it’s over too. I mean, he is just a nigger and he killed a girl, but now they got us believing niggers are human too. We had all that trouble with ’em this summer, the goddamned army and everything. Mark my words, it’s just the beginning.”
Sam nodded; Hank was probably right, though old Boss Harry Etheridge was raising hell in the House, aligning himself with the Dixiecrats and swearing to gut the army appropriation in the upcoming budget to make Dwight Eisenhower pay for sending the 101st Airborne to Little Rock and humiliating the great state of Arkansas before the nation. But everyone knew that Boss Harry would never do such a thing; it was all show for the folks who elected him with 94 percent of the vote every two years.
None of that had anything to do with tonight’s drama, however, which was simply the squalid end of some very squalid business, which nobody could really remember except Sam, and in which nobody had much vested interest and emotion. As ceremony, it was banal and flat; the Masons understood ritual much better.
He pulled away from the milling gents and went up to the glass window, where he got a better look at the engine of destruction: a chair, solid but upon closer inspection much worn, somehow institutional and bland for all its presumed meaning. Sam stared at it as he always did: heavy cables ran from behind a screen (where the executioner would do his business in private) to one leg, were bolted to the leg and pinned up the strut of the chair, rising to a sort of Bakelite nexus. Smaller wires extended from it, two down the front, one down each arm and one to lie across the top of the chair, which ended not in a wrist or ankle bracelet but a little cap. It looked very thirties, Sam thought, assigning to it the style of the decade that had spawned it.
A phone buzzed, the assistant warden picked it up and listened.
“Gentlemen, please take your seats. They’re bringing the condemned man up from death row.”
Sam looked at his watch. They were late. It was 12:02 . He found a seat as the lights dimmed; around him, as in the theater, people squirmed and made ready, then fell silent. The minutes ticked by; the assistant warden lowered the lights until they sat in darkness, and then he too sat.
In the chamber, the door opened. Two guards, followed by the warden, followed by a priest, followed at last by Reggie Fuller, nineteen, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, Negro male, 230 pounds, eyes brown, hair brown, though it had all been shaved off.
Reggie was weeping. The tears ran down his eyes and his face was puffy and moist. A little track of glistening mucus dribbled from a nostril, and Sam watched as his tongue shot out to lick at it. He was manacled, walking in little stutter steps, talking to himself in a desperate stream of chatter. His eyes were out of focus. He was still fat; prison had not slimmed him down or, apparently, toughened him up.
They led poor Reggie to the chair and sat him down in it, though his body appeared stiff and he had trouble understanding what they were saying to him. At last he was seated; then came a horrid instant when one of the guards stepped back quickly, out of reflex: a stain of darkness blossomed at the crotch of Reggie’s prison denims.