FEELING SICK TO my stomach now, my brain reeling, I rode in the back of an open farm wagon with Jacob, Byram Chaney, and Doc Conover. I was the one with hands bound behind his back.
Cicadas made a furious racket in the trees, their droning rhythm rising and falling. We were driving south out of town into the swamp, an all-too-familiar journey by now.
I was almost as terrified as I was angry. When I spoke to Jacob, I could barely keep from screaming.
“How could you do this? The one man I thought I could trust!”
“Stay calm, my friend.”
“I’m not your friend,” I said.
“Ben, you can’t help it if you got some mistaken ideas about us,” he said. “You’ll find out, we’re nobody to be scared of. We’re fair-minded fellows, like you. I just ask you to keep an open mind.”
“By going to the swamp to watch you lynch another black man?”
“I said, stay calm.”
After a time we came into a clearing. I could have sworn this was the place where somebody hanged me. Where I almost died. But it was a different spot altogether.
Two men in white robes stood near a crude wooden platform. Between them they held a man in place, with a rope around his neck.
His face was turned away from me.
“Let’s go closer,” Jacob said.
“This is close enough,” I said.
But it wasn’t my decision to make. Byram Chaney lifted his reins and drove the wagon into the clearing for a better view of the murder.
Slowly the man on the platform turned to face the crowd. He was a small man. Frightened. Pathetic. On his nose he wore gold-rimmed spectacles.
The man was white.