The Friend of Silence

Jo Mike stood at the foot of the grave and read from a heavily-creased sheet torn from a yellow legal pad, his wrists visibly chafed from the handcuffs.

Lane's mother and sister left the room, leaving Jo Mike's lawyer—a Mr. Grimes brought in from Atlanta—and the sheriff to sort out the details. Mr. Grimes went to the county jail and met privately with his client. He passed Jo Mike a legal pad and a blue pen to write out what he planned to read. Jo Mike took the pad and pen wrote feverishly for several minutes in a ragged script that only he could decipher. He filled half a page then ripped out the sheet, folded it four times and stuffed it in his pants' pocket. Mr. Grimes said "I have to read it ... I promised the family I would," so reluctantly Jo Mike pulled out the note and handed it over. The lawyer smoothed out the paper, glanced at the penmanship and asked him to read it aloud. Jo Mike complied. Mr. Grimes asked one question, "Are you sure?" Jo Mike blinked and nodded once, then waved him away and lay face down on the bed ending the interview.

The sheriff's deputy, searching by flashlight, had found Jo Mike sitting underneath an old oak tree where Lane's limp body lay in a tangle of rope. Jo Mike wouldn't speak so the deputy cautioned him and brought him to the county jail until such time as they could sort out what had happened.

One of the boys cut the rope and the body collapsed to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Looking over at Jo Mike who hadn't budged, the boy yelled out, 'Hey Jo Mike, think Daddy would get us off with that fancy-talkin Yankee lawyer?" His buddies' raucous laughter provoked no response. The boy who cut down the body reached into the cooler and finding no more beer called for a beer run. Since the boys were finished for now, they piled into the pickup and sped away sending clouds of red dust into the air to settle on the bodies under the oak.

Jo Mike stood there ... silently watching when the truck pulled away raising the man off the ground, the body jerking spasmodically as if to gain its footing.

This time the boys, drunk and rowdy as always, had a stranger with them—a black man probably somewhere close to the same age as their daddies. He was trussed up and was being dragged over towards a large, old oak tree. A rope had been strung across a large horizontal branch of the sprawling southern live oak, one end attached to the ball hitch of the pickup and the other dangling near the ground. The three of them struggled with their impaired balance to hold the man fast as they pulled the noose down over his head. Jo Mike watched from a distance in silence. Once their victim had been secured, the boys stumbled over to the truck belly-laughing at the man who now wasted his final words in the dusky light of day in this downstate peanut capital whose other claim to fame was its reputation as the 'hanginest county in Georgia outside Fulton County.'

Jo Mike knew these boys and he was afraid of them, just like most folks were. They were drunks and troublemakers—country hooligans—from the county across the river. They knew him, too. Most folks did. Son of the lawyer who'd hired that big shot defense lawyer, Melvin something or other, from San Francisco, way back. But in this part of the country most folks knew one another—nothing unusual there. That was just the way it was. And that dusty black F-150 they rode in—it looked like most others except that next to the rebel flag decal on the rear window of the cab there was a black swastika, hand-painted.

A foreman on one of the mega peanut farms, Lane often had to run the gauntlet in town, being a conspicuous black man and a bit too uppity besides ... in the prevailing view. He'd met these boys before and lots just like them over the years, but he'd never been cornered like today ... surrounded and held at bay by three white boys angry with drink and armed with 12-gauge shotguns on an out-of-the-way parcel of fallow land long past quitting time.

Lane kissed his wife good-bye in the morning and walked his two daughters to the elementary school, just like he did every day. He wouldn't see them again until after dark. Originally a 'negro school,' after desegregation, it had ended up becoming an elementary school right in the middle of the black side of town where white folks now, according to the dictates of the courts, had to send their kids.

It was going to be another dry day ... no rain in the forecast, short-term or long-term. Old-timers claimed that droughts were more common and lasted longer than they used to. But you could still just about taste the sweet dust of peanut country in the air.