Entering the park, they encountered the gathered tribe of North Main Street, assembled as they’d been on that night — yesterday and long ago — when the earth had spasmed and split its seams. This evening they were joined, however, by a crush of strangers. Some were dusty farm families from the open market in the wagonyard off Commerce Avenue, others from the town in their Sunday best, a few brandishing torches though it wasn’t yet dark. Muni was surprised to see that his neighbors mingled so freely with the outsiders, who had kept their distance from the Pinch since the quake. The general mood seemed to extend the holiday attitude that had prevailed throughout the pages of his chronicle, though his co-religionists looked to have relaxed their exultatation, tempered now to a bland expectancy. While some were still costumed in vestiges of fancy dress — the Widow Teitelbaum in her harem pants, Eddie Kid Wolf in his samite robe — most wore their typically drab, out-of-fashion apparel. The children toddled about willy-nilly, their expressions suggesting they’d just waked up from a vivid dream they were trying without success to recall.
Muni was greeted with a cordiality that gave no hint of his long seclusion. Mr. Elster chucked Tyrone under the chin with an arthritic hand, while his dumpling wife exclaimed a bit cryptically, “Every child brings its own luck.” Others remarked with admiration how the boy had grown. The bruiser Kid Wolf snatched him up and set him astride his thick shoulders for a better view of whatever it was the crowd had gathered to see. Tyrone went wide-eyed at the sudden separation from his cousin but soon enough became acclimated to his elevated seat. He was further calmed, it seemed, by the grin he received from the stunted grotesque seated next to him on the stooped shoulders of Morris Padauer. Muni had to stand on tiptoe to look past the wintry garb (though the season was unequivocably spring) of a cluster of Shpinker Hasids for a glimpse of the spectacle, if spectacle there was. He noted with interest that in the midst of the fanatics, looking decidedly refreshed from his underworld sabbatical, stood their sable-trimmed rebbe, Eliakum ben Yahya. What Muni saw beyond them, beneath the roots that had replaced the broad boughs of the inverted oak, made him tighten the fist that gripped his aunt and uncle’s crumbled remains.
For next to the pit, out of which sprouted the roots like Hydras’ heads, was a cedar-staved nail keg, and on the keg stood a hatless black man, his wrinkled dome wreathed in a horseshoe of gray wool. His pants bagged around his spare shanks, and his homespun shirt was buttoned to the throat. His smoked lenses had been removed, so it was hard to tell in the failing light whether his eyes were sunk in their hollows or simply not there. Had his hands not been tied behind his back, he might have serenaded the crowd on the fiddle that someone had hung about his neck by one of its broken strings. Around that same wattled throat there dangled a noose. The rope extended from the Negro’s neck straight up into the leafless tangle then downward again at an incline, its tasseled end resting in the hands of a man in a hood like a dented dunce cap and a white linen robe. The man, his beefy face unvisored and flushed with the pride of his office, resembled a jolly monk about to ring a bell. That’s when Muni noticed that other cowled figures, a few of them holding rifles, were interspersed throughout the gathering.
Between the bell ringer and the nail keg stood another man whose white robe boasted the insignia that identified him as a figure of some rank in the Knights of the White Kamelia. This one, his badger face also exposed, cleared his throat as if tuning an instrument.
“Ghouls and goblins of the Invisible Empire,” he bellowed, “Anglo-Saxon brethren and sistern of our hallowed Dixie, we are gathered here this evenin’—”
“This ain’t no weddin’, Lawyer Poteet!” shouted a voice from the crowd, provoking laughter. Others chimed in to the effect that he should can the speechifying and get on with the main event, but the speaker would have his moment.
“To avenge the evil wrought on our citizens by these ape-like creatures of jungle darkness”—Asbestos turned his head toward Lawyer Poteet as if he hadn’t quite caught the gist—“and make a example of the vile species that would defy our laws and miscegenate,” tasting the word, “with our women.”
There was more laughter, since it was obvious to the audience that, had it ever been the case, the old Negro’s miscegenating days were long over. Some of the assembled yawned demonstratively; a bonneted woman distributed sandwiches and soda pop to her family from a hamper. Then Muni was suddenly moved to ask himself what day it was: for he had the marked impression that this evening — against whose chartreuse sky the park was thrown into stark relief — was fixed to a particular calendar date: rather than containing other days, this one had the distinct character of a Friday evening, when all good Hebrews should be in shul.
The Grand Syklops of the Memphis Klavern continued reciting the laundry list of crimes against nature that the nigra was guilty of, though there was no mention of Asbestos’s specific offense. At one point, spurring his hobbyhorse onward, Lawyer Poteet strayed into territory clearly intended for the ears of Muni Pinsker and his kind, declaring that Caucasians were the true Israelites (you could read it in the Bible) and America the prophesied site of the regathering of the tribes. The Jews themselves (again quoting scripture) were a mongrel breed, “satanic, poisonous, and parasitic.”
His neighbors shifted apprehensively, while Muni came only by degrees to understand what was happening. It had been a rocky passage back from the story he was writing to the one he was living, despite their being in theory one and the same. How, he wondered, had these interlopers come to invade the sovereign precinct of the Pinch? (The interlopers seemed to be asking the same thing with regard to the Jews.) Were such lumpen bumpkins as these really capable of pulling off any authentic mischief? Surely Boss Crump’s hirelings would appear on the scene in time to break up the mob and put an end to their shenanigans (though Mr. Crump’s handpicked high sheriff, Longwillie Tatum, could be seen mingling among the robes in a sheet of his own). Maybe it wasn’t too late for the scribe to hasten back to his room and devise a different course of events, but the prospect of writing anything at all now seemed beyond his powers, and besides, like everyone else Muni was glued to the spot.
That Lawyer Poteet’s general vitriol had descended into ad hominem abuse (“This’n’s proof skunks fuck monkeys, pardon my French …”) implied that his speech was winding down, and a hush fell over the crowd. The bound Negro, who had seemed almost incidental to the proceedings, was now the focus of everyone’s rapt attention. In the twilight the torches flared more brightly, prompting Muni to remember a phrase: auto-da-fé. So maybe Asbestos would prove as good as his name. But a nod from the Grand Syklops to his henchman reminded Muni that fire was not the chosen method of execution; this was a lynching pure and simple, a time-honored tradition of these peculiar southern states. And the locus they’d selected for the event was a sure way of demonstrating that the ghetto had lost its inviolability. The blind musician cocked his frosty head this way and that, presumably from the discomfort of the rope. Or was he listening for unheard melodies?
“God bless y’all white folks,” he murmured, his scratchy voice, though just above a whisper, still carrying in the silent dusk. “You done climbed the ugly ladder and never miss a rung.”