Daniel White for the Greater Good

Daniel White for the Greater Good

BEGIN WITH ABSOLUTE BLACKNESS. The sort of absolute blackness that does not exist in reality. A black as deep and profound as the space directly under a heel pressed to the ground; a black as all-surrounding as blindness from birth; a black that black. The black of a hallway devoid of light, and a black — advancing down that hallway — going away from you. At the end of a hallway so black as this, a square of light painfully white. A doorway through which can be seen a window, pouring dawn sunlight in a torrent into the room, through the doorway, and causing a sunspot of light at the end of the pitch-black hallway.

If this were a motion picture, it would be starkly impressive, the black so deep, and the body moving away from the camera, down the hall toward the square of superhuman white. The body clinging to the right-hand wall, moving down the tunnel of ebony, slowly, painstakingly, almost spastically. The body is a form, merely a form, not quite as black as the hallway mouth that contains it, but still without sufficient contrast to break what would be superlative camera work, were this a motion picture. But it is not a motion picture. It is a story of some truth.

It is a story, and for that reason, the effect of superlative cinematography must be broken as the body pulls itself to the door, lurches through, and stumbles to grasp at the edge of a chest-high wooden counter. The camera angles (were this a motion picture) would suddenly shift and alter, bringing into immediate focus the soft yet hard face of a police desk sergeant, his collar open and sweat beading his neck and upper lip. We might study the raised bushy eyebrows and the quickly horrified expression just before the lips go rigid. Then the camera would track around the squad room, we would see the Georgia sunrise outside that streaming window, and finally our gaze would settle on the face of a girl.

A white girl.

With a smear of blood at the edge of her mouth, with one eye swollen shut and blue-black, with her hair disarrayed and matted with blood, leaves and dirt … and an expression of pain that says one thing:

“Help … me …”

The camera would follow that face as it sinks slowly to the floor.

Then, if this were a movie and not reality, in a town without a name in central Georgia, the camera would cut to black. Sharp cut, and wait for the next scene.

It might have been simpler, had he been a good man. At least underneath; but he wasn’t. He was, very simply, a dirty nigger. When he could not cadge a free meal by intimidation, he stole. He smelled bad, he had the morals of a swamp pig, and as if that were not enough to exclude him from practically every strata of society, he had bad teeth, worse breath, and a foul mouth. Fittingly, his name was Daniel White.

They had no difficulty arresting him, and even less difficulty proving he was the man who had raped and beaten Marion Gore. He was found sleeping exhausted in a corner of the hobo jungle at the side of the railroad tracks on the verge of the town. There was blood on his hands and hair under his fingernails. Police lab analysis confirmed that the blood type and follicles of hair matched those of Marion Gore.

Far from circumstantial, these facts merely verified the confession Daniel White made when arrested. He was not even granted the saving grace of having been drunk. He was surly, obscene, and thoroughly pleased with what he had done. The fact that Marion Gore had been sixteen, a virgin, and had gone into a coma after making her way from the field where she had been attacked to the police station, seemed to make no impression on Daniel White.

The local papers tagged him — and they were conservative at best — a conscienceless beast. He was that. At least.

It was not unexpected, then, to find a growing wave of mass hatred in the town. A hatred that continually emerged in the words “Lynch the bastard.”

At first, the word black was not even inserted between the and bastard It wasn’t needed. It came later, when the concept of lynching gave way to a peculiar itch in the palms of many white hands. An itch that might well be scratched by a length of hemp rope.

It had to happen quickly, or it would not happen at all. The chief of police would call the mayor, the mayor would get in touch with the governor, and in a matter of hours the National Guard would be in. So it had to happen quickly, or not at all.

And it was bound to happen. There was no doubt of that. There had been seeds planted — the school trouble, darkie rabble-rousers from New Jersey and Illinois down talking to the nigras in Littletown, that business at the Woolworth’s counter — and now the crop was coming in.

Daniel White was safe behind bars, but outside, it was getting bad:

… the big-mouth crowd that hung out in Peerson’s Bowling and Billard Center caught Phil the clean-up boy, and badgered him into a fight. They took him out back and worked him over with eight-inch lengths of bicycle chain; the diagnosis was double concussion and internal hemorrhaging.

… a caravan of heavies from the new development near the furniture factory motored down into Littletown and set fire to The Place, where thirty-five or forty of the town’s more responsible Negro leaders had gathered for a few drinks and a discussion of what their position might be in this matter. Result: fifteen burned, and the bar scorched to the ground.

… Willa Ambrose, who washed and kept house for the Porters, was fired after a slight misunderstanding with Diane Porter; Willa had admitted to once taking in a movie with Daniel White.

… the Jesus Baptist Church was bombed the same night Daniel White made his confession. The remains of the building gave up evidence that the job had been done with homemade Molotov cocktails and sticks of dynamite stolen from the road construction shed on the highway. Pastor Neville lost the use of his right eye: a piece of flying glass from the imported stained windows.

So the chief of police called the mayor, and the mayor called the governor, and the governor alerted his staff, and they discussed it, and decided to wait till morning to mobilize the National Guard (which was made up of Georgia boys who didn’t much care for the idea of Daniel White, in any case). At best, ten hours.

A long, hot, dangerous ten hours.

Daniel White slept peacefully. He knew he wasn’t going to be lynched. He also knew he was going to become a cause célèbre and might easily get off with a light sentence, this being an election year, and the eyes of the world on his little central Georgia town.

After all, the NAACP hadn’t even made an appearance yet. Daniel White slept peacefully.

He knew he didn’t deserve to die for Marion Gore.

She hadn’t really been a virgin.

The NAACP man’s name was U. J. Peregrin and he was out of the Savannah office. He was tall, and exceedingly slim in his tailored Ivy suit. He was nut-brown and had deep-set eyes that seemed veiled like a cobra’s. He spoke in a soft, cultivated voice totally free of drawl and slur. He had been born in Tenafly, New Jersey, had attended college at the University of Chicago, and had gone into social work out of a mixture of emotions. This assignment had come to him chiefly because of his native familiarity with the sort of culture that spawned Daniel White — and a lynch mob.

He sat across from Henry Roblee (who had been picked by the terror-stricken Negro residents of that little central Georgia town as their spokesman) and conversed in three A.M. tones. Seven hours until the National Guard might come, seven hours in which anything might happen, seven hours that had forced the inhabitants of Littletown to douse their lights and crouch behind windows with 12-gauges ready.

“We’ve never had anything like this here,” Henry Roblee admitted, his square face cut with worry. He rubbed his blocky hands over the moist glass. A thin film of whiskey colored the bottom of the glass. A bottle stood between them on the table.

Peregrin drew deeply on his cigarette and stared into Roblee’s frightened eyes. “Mr. Roblee,” he said softly, “you may never have had anything like this before, but you’ve certainly got it now, and the question is, ‘What do we intend to do about it?’” He waited. Not so much for an answer as for a realization on the other man’s part of just what the situation meant.

“It’s not White we’re worried about,” Roblee added hastily. “That jail is strong enough, and I don’t suppose the Chief is going to let them come by without doing something to stop them. It’s what’s happening all over town that’s got us frightened. We never seen the people round here act this way. Why, they in a killing frame of mind!”

Peregrin nodded slowly.

“How is your Pastor?” he asked.

Roblee shrugged. “He’s gone be blind in the one eye, maybe both, but that’s what I mean That man was respected by everybody ’round here. They thought most highly of him. We got to protect ourselves.”

“What do you propose?” Peregrin asked.

Roblee looked up from the empty glass suddenly. “What do we propose? Why, man, that’s why we asked for help from the N-double A-CP. Don’t you understand?Something terrible’s gone happen in this town unless we decide what to do to stop it. Even the sensible folks ’round here are crazy mad with wanting to lynch that Daniel White.”

“I can only make suggestions; that’s my job. I can’t tell you what to do.”

Roblee fondled the glass, then filled it half full with uneven movements. He tipped it up and drank heavily. “What about if we just all moved on out for a few days?”

Peregrin shook his head.

Roblee looked away, said softly, ironically, “I didn’t think so.” He moved his tongue over his thick, moist lips. “Man, I am scared! ”

Peregrin said, “Do you think the Chief would let me in to speak to White tonight?”

The other man shrugged. “You can try. Want me to give him a call?” Peregrin nodded agreement, and added, “Let me speak to him. The organization might carry a little weight.”

It was decided, after the call, that Peregrin and Roblee would both go to see Daniel White. The chief of police advised them to come by way of the police emergency alley, where the chance of their being seen and stopped would be less.

In the cell block, Peregrin stood for several minutes watching Daniel White through the bars. He studied the face, the attitude of relaxation, the clothing the man wore.

He mumbled something lightly. Roblee moved up next to him, asked, “What did you say?”

Peregrin repeated the words, only slightly louder, yet distinctly. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. Sometimes I think there are too many fifth columnists.”

Roblee shook his head without understanding what Peregrin had said.

“Should we talk to him?” the Georgia Negro said to the Ivy-tailored visitor.

Peregrin nodded resignedly. “Not much bother, but we might as well. We’re here.”

Roblee stepped up to the bars. He called in to Daniel White. The man woke suddenly, but without apprehension. He sat up on the striped tick mattress and looked at his two callers. He smiled, a gap-toothed grin that was at once charming, disarming, frightful, and painful. “Hey there, y’all.” He stood up and walked to the bars with a lazy, rolling strut.

“You the man from the N-double A-CP I bet,” he said, the words twisted Georgia-style. Peregrin nodded.

“Glad t’meetcha. You gone keep them sonofabitches from hangin’ me?” He continued to grin, a self-assured, cocky grin that rankled Peregrin.

The tall Negro moved his face very close to the bars. “You think I should?”

Daniel White made a wry face. “Why, man, you and me is brothers. We the same, fellah. You can’t let them string up no brother of yours. Got to show them damn ofay we as good as them any day.”

Peregrin’s face momentarily wrenched with distaste. “Are we the same, White? You and me. You and Mr. Roblee here? Are we all the same.” He paused, and leaned his forehead against the bars.

“Perhaps we are, perhaps we are,” he murmured.

Daniel White stared at him for some time, without speaking. But he grinned. Finally, “I gone beat this thing, Mister NAACP, you just wait an’ see. I gone get outta this.”

Peregrin raised his eyes slowly. “You don’t even feel any remorse, do you?”

White stared at him uncomprehending. “Whatch’ou mean?”

Peregrin’s face raised to the ceiling, helplessly, as though drawn on invisible wires. “You really don’t know, do you?” he said to himself.

Daniel White grunted and bared rotten teeth. “Listen to me, Mister NAACP you. I gone tell you somethin’. That little white bitch, that Gore child, she a bum from a long way back: man, I seen her in the woods with half a dozen boys from time on time. She not such a hot piece, I tell you that.”

Peregrin turned to Roblee. “Let’s go,” he said, slowly. “We’ve done all we can here.”

They moved back down the cell block: the empty cell block from which the three drunks and the vag had been removed when the first rumors of lynch had begun circulating.

Outside, it was not so quiet. There were mutterings from dark corners of the central Georgia town. Murmurings, unrests, fear, and rising voices.

In his cell, Daniel White returned to sleep. He knew what was going to happen. He had it locked. He was a poor darkie who was going to get all the benefits so long overdue his people.

The man from the NAACP would tend to all that … even if he was a fruity-looking cat in a funny suit.

“What the hell you mean, for the greater good? Are you crazy or something, mister? You can’t let that mob take him and lynch him?” Roblee’s face was a mask of horror. “Are you crazy or what? ”

Peregrin’s forehead was a crisscross of weaving shadow, caught in the flickering light of the candle. They sat at the table once more, joined by five others, all hidden in the grey and black of the room. The shades were drawn, and behind the shades, curtains had been pulled. And they sat staring at the man from the NAACP, Peregrin, who had just told them, without preamble, that they must not only let the whites lynch Daniel White, but they must do everything in their power to aid the act.

“Say, listen, Mister Peregrin, I think you out of your mind. That’s murder, man!” The speaker was a stout, balding man with coffee-colored skin and a wart at the side of his wide nose.

“Just what do you mean, ‘for the greater good?’” Roblee sank a hand heavily on Peregrin’s sleeve. Peregrin continued to sit silently, having said what he felt he must say.

Roblee shook him. “Dammit, fella, you gone answer me! What’d you mean by that?”

Peregrin looked up at them, then. His eyes caught the candlelight and threw it back in two bright lines. His face was shattered; there was conflict and fear and desperation in it. But determination. “All right,” he said, finally.

They stared at him as he dry-washed his cheekbones and temples with moist hands. “Daniel White is sleeping up in that jail, and he doesn’t care what happens to any of you. He had his fun, and now he wants to capitalize on all the work we’ve done for so long, to escape punishment. He’s banking on everyone making such a hue and cry that no one will dare hurt the poor nigger being taken advantage of, down in rotten Georgia.”

Roblee continued to watch the tall man, impassively, waiting. There was confusion in the cant of his head, in the frozen hand on Peregrin’s sleeve.

“Those people out there,” Peregrin waved a fist at the shaded window, “they’re stretched as tight as piano wires. They’ve been told that everything they’ve believed for hundreds of years is a lie. They’ve been told the Negro is as good as them, they’ve been told their white sons and daughters are going to have to move over and share five-and-ten-cent store seats with them, and schools with them, and buses with them, and movies with them …”

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.

If it was worth it, the end had to be in sight.

And had this been a motion picture, with a happy ending desirable — instead of a grubby little story out of central Georgia — then the man called Peregrin would have considered the inscription they must carve on the statue of the martyr, Daniel White.