Of course he’d looked at the girl. How could he not? He was a man. But that was what they’d questioned at the medical examination.
Fowler had talked of “rumors of his deformity and his perversion.” What were these rumors? They had not existed until Fowler called them into being.
Then the girls had come forth and alleged, “He could not do it like other men could,” and they said, “… his deformity,” two of the three stumbling on the word.
In what was it supposed to consist? This disgusting, undescribed, and indescribable malformation? That, as the others did, he had ungovernable sexual tastes but, unlike them, was incapable of satisfying them? That he, the Jew, was the same ravening lecher as the black, but his “performance,” unlike that of the black in the Southern fiction, was pathetic—that he was, in fact, a eunuch.
Was that why he’d been elected as the killer, in preference to the sweeper, Jim, who, it was clear, had killed the girl?
For Jim came in a dead man already. He was tried and convicted through proximity to the crime, and by the color of his skin—already sentenced absent the evidence, which served not to indict but merely to confirm and to add the verdict of reason to that of race prejudice.
Jim was already dead. He’d raped and killed the girl, and afterwards scrawled, “I rite this while big blk mans has his way wid me.”
“Why would a black man,” the attorney prosecuting had said, “why would a black man,” he said, “try to evade suspicion by writing a note pointing to himself …?”
“Why would a man want to kill?” the defense attorney said. “The note is false. …”
“Are you suggesting,” Fowler said, “that this nigger, the sweeper, as in a chess game, thinking three moves ahead, that the man little more than an animal resolved, ‘I will kill, I will molest and kill …’?”
Here the gallery and the jury and the judge inclined their heads somewhat as they always did at this point in the narrative, in respect for the dead, in solidarity with each other and with the generations past who had upheld the code, the amorphous code, the well-nigh or perhaps completely nonexistent code, to which they felt that they subscribed.
“What is this code?” Frank thought, as the prosecution droned on in that cadence, the substance of which never failed to entrance and delight his listeners.
“… and what is that right?” he thought. “What is that sweetness of which there is no surfeit?” Frank thought. “It is rectitude.”
“… to her death—to her death, I say—and wrote a note? Had the presence of mind, barring—barring, mind you—the ludicrous notion that he had the foresight, that he had the presence of mind, to forge a chain of causation whereby we would think, ‘It cannot be Jim did the deed. Why? Because a note exists, written by the girl, and naming Jim …’ But, of course, Gentlemen, the note is a forgery; and the defendant wrote the note. And so …”
Frank’s mind drifted. “What folly the law is,” he thought. “What might take its place? Perhaps it exists to prepare us for loss. And for sorrow—the clean promise of which becomes almost welcome after the obscene travesty of the law. And if we are to have cruelty, might we not call it by its name?”
And he saw that for which he wished, that for which he wished in the law was not “common sense” but “paradise.”
“I understand rage,” he thought. “How comfortable to have it endorsed by one’s peers. How lovely. That the state, that the community, that one’s home and religion, all say, ‘Go forth and kill. In the name of God.’ What have they done else these two thousand years,” he thought, “with their prattle of ‘progress,’ of ‘the future,’ of ‘change,’ of ‘America’? What swine, what fiends, what hypocrites—this American Religion.”
“… he wanted me to do it with him,” the factory girl had said, “and he made me go into the other room with him, and he told me I didn’t do it with him, I’d lose my job, but when we got there, he took down his things … but he …” And here she paused, and when the courtroom was cleared of the women spectators, and when the judge and the jury and the prosecutor all leaned forward, all quite, as solemn as only prurience endorsed can be, all that she would say was, “He was formed different.”
He was formed different. She would say no more. And she wept.
Then they would look at him—proud, vehemently proud of their restraint in not falling upon him then and there and having his life.
Formed different, she said. And the subsequently scheduled medical examination had the city rapt, waiting for news.