His breath came labored. He ground his teeth together and went on with difficulty.
“They’ve had the rug pulled out from under them, and they’re still falling. They’ll be falling for a long time. Done slowly, they could adjust to it. But then Daniel White rapes a sixteen-year-old girl and they’ve got a reason to hate, they’ve got something to focus their hate on. So they start taking out their fear and confusion in any way they can.”
“Look what has happened in just the few hours since the girl was found. Your church has been bombed. Negroes have been fired and ostracized, some have been beaten up and perhaps that boy they stomped will die. Your homes and that bar have been burned. This isn’t going to stop here. It’s going to get worse. And it’s not even going to stop with your town. It’s going to march like a wave to the beach, washing all the work we’ve done before it.”
“If Daniel White goes free.”
He paused.
Roblee made to interrupt, “But to let them haul him out of there and lynch him, that’s …”
“Don’t you understand, man,” Peregrin turned on Roblee with fury. “Don’t you hear what I’m telling you? That man up there isn’t merely a poor sonofabitch who got loaded and pawed a white girl. He’s a cold-blooded miserable animal, and if anyone deserved to die, it’s him. But that has nothing to do with it. I’m talking to you about the need for that man to die. I’m telling you, Roblee, and all of you, that if you don’t take their minds off the Negro community as a whole, you’re going to set back the cause of equality in this country fifty years. And if you think I’m making this up you better realize that it’s already happened once before, just this way.”
They stared at him.
“Yes, dammit, it happened once before. And though we didn’t have anything to do with the way it turned out — and thank God it turned out as it did — we would have told them to do it just the way they did.”
They stared, and suddenly, one of them knew.
“Emmett Till,” he breathed, softly.
Peregrin turned on the speaker. “That’s right. They didn’t even know for sure what the circumstances had been but the trouble was starting up — not even as bad as here — and they hauled Till out and killed him. And it stopped the trouble like that! ” he snapped his fingers.
“But lynching …” Roblee said, horrified.
“Don’t you understand? Are you stupid or something, like they say we are? Monkeys? Can’t you see that Daniel White dead can be more valuable than a hundred Daniel Whites alive? Don’t you see the horror that Northerners will feel, the repercussions internationally, the demands for justice, the swift advance of the program … can’t you see that Daniel White can serve the greater good. The good of all his people?”
“What he never was in life, that miserable bastard up there can be in death!”
Roblee sank away from Peregrin. The taller man had not spoken with fanaticism, had only delivered with desperate and impassioned tones what he knew to be true. They had heard him, and now each of them, where there was no room for anyone else’s opinions, was thinking about it. It meant murder … or rather, the toleration of murder. What they were deliberating was the necessity of lynching. There was no doubt that the trouble could be much worse in the town, that more homes would be burned and more people hurt, perhaps killed. But was it enough to know that to sacrifice up a man to the mob madness, to the lynch rope? Was it enough to know that you might be saving hundreds of lives in the long run by sacrificing one life hardly worth saving to begin with?
It might have been easier, had Daniel White been a man with some qualities of decency. But he wasn’t. He was just what the White Press had called him, a beast. That made it the more difficult; for had he been easier to identify with, they could have said no. But this way …
There were murmurs from around the room, and the murmurs were, “I … don’t … know … I just don’t know …”
It meant more than just saving the skins of the people in Littletown — though men had been sacrificed to save less lives — it meant saving generations of children to come, from sitting in the backs of movie houses, of allowing them to grow up without the necessity of knowing squalor and prejudice and the words “shine,” “nigger,” “Jim Crow.”
It meant a lot of things, that thin thread of life that was Daniel White. That thin thread that might be stretched around Daniel White’s neck.
It meant a lot.
It was a double-edged sword that slicing one way would tame the wrath of the mob beast, and slicing the other would make a path for more understanding, by use of shame and example.
But could they do it …?
Were this a motion picture, and not a story of some truth, the camera might play about the darkened room, candlelit and oppressive. It might play about the gaunt, hardening faces of the men, and mirror their decisions. If this were a motion picture. And the emphasis on good camera studies. But it is not a motion picture, and when they threw up their hands saying they could not decide, Peregrin had to say, “Let’s go talk to someone who knows this mob.”
So they agreed, because the decision was not one that men could make about another man.
When they opened the door of the house on the edge of Littletown, and stepped out, they did not see the mass of moving dark shadows. The first warning they had was the heat-laden voice snarling, “You goin’ tuh save that nigger rape bastard, Savannah man? Like hell you are!”
Then they jumped.
At first they used the lead pipes and the hammers, but after the first flurry they spent their fury and went on to fists and boots. Peregrin caught a blow in the face that spun him around, sent him crashing into the wall of the house. Off in the darkness he could hear Roblee screaming and the wet, regular syncopation of someone kicking at bloody flesh.
Later, much later, when all the lights had stopped whirling, and all the strange new colors had become merely reds and greens and blues, they dragged themselves to their feet
Roblee’s face looked like a pound of moist hamburger. He daubed at the ruined expanse of skin and said very defiantly, “It’s that White’s fault. All this. All this, it’s his fault. We don’t hafta take it for him.”
Peregrin said nothing. It hurt too much merely to breathe. His rib cage had been crushed. He lay against the house, listening, hearing what they had to say.
The others joined in, between sobs and rasps of breath. “Let them lynch him. Let them do it.”
They knew who to see … they knew the men with the ropes … the men who would start to hit them when they appeared, but who would listen when they said they had come to give up Daniel White. They knew who to see.
They told Peregrin: “We’ll be back. You rest there. We’ll do it.” And they moved off into the night, to make their vengeance.
Peregrin lay up against the building, and he began to cry. His voice was soft, and deep as he said to the sky, “Oh God, they’re doing it, but they’re doing it for the wrong reasons. They’re hating, and that isn’t right. They’ll give him up, and that’s what we need, Lord, but why do they have to do it this way?”
Then after a while, when he had fainted several times, and had the visions of the men storming the jail, and striking the guards and dragging the snarling, defiant Daniel White from his cell, his thoughts became clearer.
It was worth it. It had to be worth it. What they did, what they allowed, it had to be worth something in the final analysis. For the greater good, he had said. It had to be that. Because if it wasn’t, surely there could be no hell deep enough to receive him.