Trouble in July by Erskine Caldwell Page B

but every man present was prepared to resist any effort to make them give up the hunt. Some of them muttered threats against the sheriff, but most of them waited grimly to see what was going to happen.
    “Jeff McCurtain had better keep out of this,” somebody said in a loud voice, each word a threat. “It just ain’t healthy for him to come butting in around here now.”
    The crowd moved forward, surrounding the car when it came to a halt at the end of the lane. Several flashlights were turned on the car, and all the doors were jerked open. It was not the sheriff after all. The man who climbed out, blinking with fear in the dazzling light, was a barber named DeLoach from Andrewjones.
    “What’s the matter with you folks?” he managed to ask. He backed up against the car. I ain’t done nothing.”
    “What do you want out here?” somebody asked him, pushing through the crowd standing before him.
    “I heard about a nigger raping a white girl, and I wanted to help out in the hunt,” he explained. “I’ve hunted down niggers before, and I didn’t want to miss this one.”
    “He’s all right,” another man in the crowd said. “He cuts my hair in town once in a while. I’ve known him a long time.”
    The crowd drifted back into the yard, making the barber feel more comfortable. He followed the men to the smudge.
    “Anything happened yet?” he asked.
    Nobody said anything, but he could see some of the men shaking their heads.
    “I was thinking only a few days ago that it was about time for something like this to happen again,” the barber said. “The niggers have been laying low for about a whole year now, ever since that lynching down in Rimrod County. I was scared the next one was going to be off at the other end of the State, so far away I wouldn’t have a chance to get there. But that’s the way it is. If you figure back, you’ll find out nigger-rapes take place just like clockwork. I’ve been keeping track of them ever since I started barbering in Andrewjones nine years ago.”
    Everyone seemed to agree with him, but nobody said anything. Most of the men around the smudge were farmers, and they had been neighbors of Shep’s almost all of their lives. There were only a few men from Andrewjones present, but because they were town dwellers they were looked upon as outsiders. The neighbors considered the trouble a personal matter, and they resented it when men from Andrewjones acted as though they had as much right to be there as anyone else.
    “The last time I went on a nigger hunt was about three years ago,” the barber said. “That was the time when we strung up that nigger down in Feeney County. He was a tough one to catch, believe me! It took us three days and nights to find him, because he’d hid in a swamp. That happened just about the same time of year it is right now, along about the middle of summer.”
    Before the barber from Andrewjones got there, the men had done a lot of talking about rape, but no one knew for certain what had actually happened. Even then, some of them were still skeptical. Two or three of the older men had not hesitated to say that it seemed strange that Mrs. Narcissa Calhoun, who everybody knew was promoting the Send-the-Negro-Back-to-Africa petition, was the only person who had said that Katy Barlow had been raped by Sonny Clark. So far even Katy herself had not opened her mouth about it, and a doctor had not been called in to examine her. The same handful of men were slow to believe that an eighteen-year-old Negro boy with a reputation as good as Sonny’s would molest a white girl, even if it was Katy Barlow, unless he had received a lot of encouragement. One or two of them had come out openly and said the whole story sounded like something Mrs. Narcissa Calhoun had made up in a scheme to get signatures on her petition.
    But most of the men were ready to believe anything against a Negro. One of them, Oscar Dent, operated a sawmill down in the Oconee swamp in the