He said, “I can’t tell you I have done wrong when I haven’t, not the wrong you all are accusing me of.”

His voice soft and plain, hardly a negro’s voice at all. Billy Gammon thought he sounded like a white man. And Pullen wondered for a furious second if the boy was mocking them. I’ll kill him myself, he thought.

“If I had violated either of those white women,” Delvin said, “I would have jumped off that train long before it got to Kollersburg. Any of us would. We were born knowing what the penalty for business such as that is. But we didn’t jump off. We didn’t run. Anybody who saw us when the train pulled into that town would know we didn’t suspect a thing. We were not guilty men. Not a one of us—”

He would have gone on, but he saw how they were looking at him. For a moment everything lost its name. He noticed a couple of yellowed leaves lying on the wooden floor between the judge’s bench and the defendants’ tables. The wind must have blown them in through the tall open windows. As he stared at the leaves — they were tulip poplar, black-speckled yellow — he realized he had forgotten the names of his fellow prisoners, and forgotten the names of the lawyers and the judge, of the women, and of everyone he knew or had known. That morning the light in the courtroom had been suffused with green, as if the sunlight coming through the windows had soaked up green from the trees and deposited it here, but now, in the late afternoon, the light in the courtroom was red, as if a storm was descending in the west and the sun had picked this up too and spread it around the room. He did not know who he was or what was happening here — everyone, everything, was strange — he only knew, and it was all he knew, where each of them was going, but this did not frighten him; it seemed only as it should be. A sweetness, a radiancy, filled him, and his weariness slipped away. I am. ., he thought and then he couldn’t think, and it didn’t matter. Their eyes had glazed over. Or else they were looking at him like they were about to jump up and slap him. He wanted suddenly to reach out and pinch their noses. Chuck them under the chin, thump them on the chest. Come on, we just joking here, aint we? He felt a chill so strong the thin coiled hairs on his arms stood up. He saw himself loitering on the edge of a hobo creek tossing crabapples into the water. He looked up from the witness chair and saw for the first time a woman with deep black skin and a sharp pretty face. For a second like an eternity he knew this woman for his mama, come to fetch him out of this. But no, not his mama. That was just a dream.

6

They sling a chain through the gyves and drag him naked across the yard and throw him into the former root cellar beside the warden’s house. A plank door set in the ground over eight wooden steps leading down to a square dirt room. A little light comes through the joining of the planks but not much. As he is dragged past the warden’s house he sees through the kitchen window the warden’s wife, a fat woman who wears a gray shapeless housedress around the clock, set a pan of cornbread to cool on the windowsill. “Wait,” he cries, “I think that white woman wants to give us some of that crackling bread.” Why would she be baking at night? The guard closest to him, Flimsy Plutter, jaundiced and twitchy, swats him across the face with the grommet-speckled work glove he carries for just such occasions. A fingertip cuts Delvin under the eye, making him yelp with pain. The woman looks out the window with no expression in her wide freckled face. On the radio in her kitchen Ethel Merman sings “You’re the Top.” On the little porch in back a calendar with a picture of the snow-covered Rockies is tacked to a post. I could be cartwheeling down that icy mountain, he thinks.