The Vain Conversation: A Novel

The Vain Conversation

Pat Conroy, Editor at Large

THE

VAIN CONVERSATION

A NOVEL

ANTHONY GROOMS

The University of South Carolina Press

© 2018 Anthony Grooms

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-1-61117-882-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-61117-883-8 (ebook)

Cover design by Faceout Studio, Charles Brock

Imagery by ThinkStock

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Dedicated to the memory of Alberta Grooms Ford,

beloved family storyteller, and to George and Mae Murray Dorsey,

Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, and Clinton Adams

Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers.

The First Epistle of Peter, 1:18

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

H.L. Mencken,

Prejudices (1922)

But what has our 230-year national experience been but a dialogue about race?

David Mamet,

We Can’t Stop Talking about Race in America (2009)

Also by Anthony Grooms

Bombingham: A Novel

Trouble No More: Stories

Ice Poems

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE: RIVER OF JOY

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

PART TWO: IF I PERISH

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

PART THREE: THE REDEMPTIONER

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

PART FOUR: THE REDEEMER

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

AFTERWORD

FOREWORD

Willa Cather in Death Comes for The Archbishop was able to create imaginary conversations and actions that gave her main character (based on Father Jean Marie Latour) and story depth and motivation, metaphors and textures, a sense of fullness and believability, that may not have been accessible to her had she written the book as a biography restricted to facts and speculation.

Truman Capote’s decision to write In Cold Blood as a non-fiction novel gave him a similar freedom to create a fictional truth out of facts that may have, by their very strict nature, placed limitations on Capote’s ability to tell a fully rounded story complete with details that facts alone could never render.

The same can be said of other books based on real events or real people, such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, about the Russian aristocracy as it was in 1812; and his Anna Karenina, whose protagonist was based on Anna Pirogova, a young woman who attempted suicide; Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, based on an article he saw in a newspaper; Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally, about the life of Oskar Schindler during World War II; Agatha Christie’s book, Murder on The Orient Express, and Psycho by Robert Bloch.

Anthony Grooms’ novel The Vain Conversation is based on reported news stories of a murder of four people. Grooms granted himself the same kind of fictive freedom Cather and Capote and the others mentioned above assumed. It gave him the chance to create his own truth and fictional reality.

Grooms’ novel is set in the 1940s, before, during and after the war. The reader is brought into the lives of the boy, Lonnie Henson; his father Wayne Henson; the dog Toby; Lonnie’s mother Aileen Henson; Aileen’s Aunty Grace; Wayne’s colored friend Betrand Johnson; Mrs. Crookshank, owner of the diner and a reporter; Luellen, Betrand’s wife and his mother Milledge; Beah, the cook at Mrs. Crookshank’s diner; her lover Jimmy Lee; and Vernon Venable, Jimmy Lee’s employer; Sheriff Cook, and a variety of other characters. As characters they have the ring of truth because what they experience sounds familiar to us; we recognize the validity of their lives. We see them come to life.

But what were the facts? Some of the main facts of the case: the murder of the four sharecroppers took place in rural Walton County, Georgia, on July 25, 1946. The victims—shot sixty times—were two couples: Roger Malcolm and his wife Dorothy Malcolm and George W. Dorsey and his wife Mae Murray Dorsey. It’s a fact that four people were murdered on that day.

Both couples were African-American; and despite an FBI reward offer of $12, 500 for information leading to their capture, the murderers were never identified and brought to justice. Mae Murray Dorsey was pregnant at the time, and her body was found with the fetus cut out.

Time magazine, August 5, 1946, reported that Loy Harrison, the employer of some of the victims, reportedly saw the killings. He is quoted: A big man who was dressed mighty proud in a double-breasted brown suit was giving the orders. He pointed to Roger Malcolm and said, ‘We want that nigger.’ Then he pointed to George Dorsey, my nigger, and said, ‘We want you too, Charlie.’ I said, ‘His name ain’t Charlie, he’s George.’ Someone said ‘Keep your damned big mouth shut. This ain’t your party.

This is Grooms’ imaginary fictional account:

"The crowd was coming toward them, about fifteen men. Two of them were Cook’s deputies…

"‘There are women in the car,’ Bertrand said. ‘A pregnant woman.’

"All was lost now. All the dream of whatever God had created for them, lost.

"He wondered at that moment why it was that he had been born and survived war, only to meet his fate, here, in his home country.

A car was pulling up behind them… Oh, God, let her get away. Let her run!… Cook, pointing to Jimmy Lee, was rushing past Jacks…

Readers looking for the facts will turn to the historical record. Readers who want the experience of an imaginative version with depth and nuance and fully developed characters to carry the story will find satisfaction in Anthony Grooms’ novel. It is a fine novel, beautifully written.

He explores the subject for all it is worth. And the novel exists independently of the set of facts regarding the mass murder that inspired it. The reader need not know anything about the actual murders because this is a work of art—a work of art that earns its rightful place (to borrow words from William Faulkner’s Nobel Banquet Speech) as something that did not exist before.

It is a novel I will never forget. Its lessons are deep. Those who turn to this book will come away with a greater understanding of human nature. This book should also be seen as a true testament to what Georgia and the Deep South generally were like before and during the 1940s.

Clarence Major

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to family and friends, ancestors and descendants, whose love and guidance have formed a great circle of spirit that encourages me to embrace the adventure that is life. Especially I am grateful to my wife, Pamela B. Jackson and our son, Ben, for all you do to make my life busy, full of laughter and wonder.

I am especially grateful to William Wright, poet and editor, for his encouragement and advocacy; to J.D. Scott, photographer, for his artistry and generosity; and, to Pam Durban, novelist and teacher, for her insight and support. Also, I am grateful to Clarence Major, T. Geronimo Johnson, Joe Taylor, Gray Stewart, Tayari Jones, Jonathan Haupt, and Dianne and Ernest Baines for their advice and support of my vision.

Bye and Bye is a traditional folk spiritual. Tobacco is a Dirty Weed was written by Graham Lee Hemminger, and was first published in The Penn State Froth in November, 1915.

PART ONE

RIVER OF JOY

ONE

Blackberries. Blackberries. The boy’s head was filling up with blackberries. He had moved slowly, deeper and deeper, into the bramble, until he was surrounded by it. The tangle of vines arched above and around him so that it seemed he had entered a cave of brambles. A gift from God, the boy thought. Light dappled through the vines. The thicket swayed gently in the breeze and the fine thorns scratched against him. He didn’t care. He was in the world of blackberries.

He knew how to step through the bramble to avoid a serious scratching, and how to share the bramble with a black snake or a ringed king snake. Thrashes and chickadees and sometimes a more brilliant bird like a yellow finch might land on a vine, bowing it and then springing to another. Only the ticks bothered him. They hid in the brittlegrass and broomsedge that edged the thicket. He rolled his pants to his knees, and let them crawl up his naked calves until he could see them and pick them off.

He left his pail at the edge of the patch and with his cup in front of him balanced on one leg and leaned over the briars to the nests of plump berries. They were so fat that three of them filled his palm—and the season was just beginning. In spite of his eating one for every three he kept, the pail was filling, nearly a gallon, and he had only been picking half an hour.

A shadow passed over and he looked up to see a turkey vulture. He liked them. They were like kites, the way they sailed on a breeze. Once, not far away, on Christmas Hill, he had followed a vulture back to its nest in the abandoned house on the adjacent ridge. It was an old settler’s house, his father had told him. It was a two-story wooden house with a rusty weather vane in the shape of an eagle on top. The vulture had flown into one of the upstairs windows, so the boy went into the house, climbed the dry rotted stairs to the second floor. Loose plaster crumbled under his feet and he thought the creaking floors must be paper-thin. In the second room of four he came upon the nest. The stench stupefied him. Before he got his bearings in the guano-splattered room, a bald, red-faced and completely white-feathered chick, the size of a small chicken, rushed at him. It spewed vomit at him, so unnerving him that he took three steps at a time, tumbling more than running down the stairs. The chick was the ugliest thing he had ever seen, and yet it would grow into such a graceful and beautiful bird to look at in the air.

At the end of the memory, he heard a rambling and puffing coming up the hill on the wooded side of the bramble. Once before he had heard this sound and a small black bear had run out of the woods. But there was something else, some popping and snapping of twigs. He heard a ripping of leaves and saw leaves floating down from high in the trees. Somebody was shooting. He squatted down in the briars. It got quiet for a moment, then he heard men’s voices and another shot, a snap from a little gun. It remained quiet for a few moments, and the boy crawled out of the patch and sneaked along the crest. Then he saw who the men were and he felt relieved. They were Sheriff Cook and some other men. Two of the men were dragging something. He stood up, thinking maybe they had shot a bear. But it would have been a bear with a flowered dress on.

The seasons went through a cycle and the boy just stood, getting a year older in a few minutes. His heart knocked against ribs. He did not realize that the moment, as prodigious and capricious as it seemed, was as deeply rooted and prickly as the blackberry vines. It was also a moment that jinxed him. The men were dragging a colored woman. She was dead.

He sneaked from tree to tree, staying just below the ridgeline. Soon he could see cars on the road, where the road dipped down to the old iron bridge and crossed the Appalachee River. They dragged the woman below the road, down the slope, to the shoal. It was hard for the boy to see from where he was, so he climbed down the hill to the level of the road and went along the bushes until he saw where the men had dragged the woman.

A grist mill had been there, just at the little cataract that spilled to the east of the bridge, but the mill had long since burned and where it stood was now a sandy beach with a scattering of cord grass and saplings. The water was not deep here. It gurgled around rust-colored boulders and pooled just before it made its leap over the falls.

From his position on the hill above the bridge, the boy recognized several of the dozen or so cars parked along the side of the road. There were Sheriff Cook’s battered police car—an old Ford, Mr. Venable’s black Nash Ambassador, and Mr. Jack’s new Buick wagon with its wooden doors and its hood the color of dried blood. The men rolled the woman’s body down the embankment, and it came to rest in the weeds just out of the boy’s sight. At the bottom of the embankment, partly blocked by the roadbed, he saw movement, and he realized that there was a crowd. Then he saw the barrel of a gun, and his heart thumped. There was killing going on, he thought, and he had better go home. But his legs would not carry him. He watched while Mr. Jacks and Sherriff Cook slid down the embankment where they had rolled the body. Above the rush of the falls, he could hear shouting and then he was shocked to hear another gun shot, a heavy gun, a shotgun. Now he moved closer, sliding on his rump down the hill to the level of the roadbed. Cautiously, he surveyed the road, and tried watching and listening for an approaching car. Except for the sound of the falls, all was quiet. Taking in a deep breath, he leapt into the road, kicking up loose gravel as he ran with his head down, crossed the road and hid in the bush just at the top of the embankment.

Then he saw clearly the crowd of people, about forty, he thought. And as his racing mind settled, he saw who they were, though he did not know them all by name. They were men he had seen in Venable’s feed store, local farm people. There was the clerk from Mason’s Five and Ten, located on Main Street in the town of Bethany. He recognized the heavy-set deacon from First Baptist Church, a man his mother said was a cousin of his father’s. Indeed, the man had come to their house several times just after his father died. Three women stood in a group slightly apart from the men. They seemed to have been chatting and laughing as if they were on the church yard. Two young men dragged the body of the woman by her feet. The flowered dress had come up over her head and her fat thighs and underpants were exposed. The boy knew one of the young men as a carpenter’s apprentice, a baseball player who had just graduated from the high school that spring and one whose athletic body he admired. Seeing the young man put the boy at ease and he thought he might reveal himself, walk down to the shoal and see what the killing was about. It was clear that a colored woman had been killed, and he wondered if she were a gangster of some kind. He had heard that gangsters still roamed the back roads, robbing banks in small towns like Bethany. But he had never heard of any colored gangsters, and the dead woman was colored. He moved closer to the crowd, crouching, still not ready to reveal himself. About halfway down, he was near enough to get the attention of the young man, who had stepped to the rear of the crowd as the other men gathered around the body. But before the young man’s name could form on the boy’s lips, he saw, lying beside the woman’s body, the bodies of other people. He swallowed air. Peering through the legs of the men, he counted four bodies on the ground. Only one of them was dead.

At first he thought that one of the living ones was a white man, and then, with a sudden recognition, he let out a shout. He knew them. He knew what was happening to them. He knew them all.

It seemed to him that he might have blanked out and slowly, his face tingling, his senses returned. He remembered to breathe, then hyperventilated. He shook his head to clear it and one by one focused on the people on the ground. He rubbed his eyes. Yes. There they were, unmistakably.

The man he thought was white was Jimmy Lee, who had come by his house not a week ago to buy his sister’s old baby crib. The woman next to him, her belly big with child, was Jimmy’s girlfriend. Next to the girlfriend, was Bertrand. He looked again, squinting his eyes as if doing so would sharpen his vision. It was not Bertrand, and he looked away from the squat, thick man attempting to rise only to be kicked down by a booted foot.

He looked across the river, sparkling with the afternoon sunlight. Shadows seemed to swim in the riffles. On the other shore was a stand of sycamores with massive trunks. The deep woods behind the trees were getting dark and the sycamores’ white bark shone brightly. When the boy looked again at the bodies, he saw first the dead woman, her dress still pulled over her torso. It was Luellen, Bertrand’s uppity wife.

In his superhero comic books, a muscled man in costume would throw himself into the crowd, karate chopping and kicking at the villains until they ran. Then, with no more than a nod to the victims, he would sprint away, leaving them stunned, grateful.

The white men kicked and spat on the colored people as they, except the dead woman, tried to stand or gesture. One of the white women looked in his direction. He could see her crow’s feet crinkle and her eyes dart around like beads. He felt like the wind had blown right through him. When the woman turned away, he felt his pants grow warm and he realized he was pissing on himself.

Suddenly there was a shot, different it seemed, from the others. He looked back to the crowd and saw the light-skinned man fall. It was as if he were falling from the sky. The boy hadn’t seen the man get to his feet, but only fall. The white men tussled above the body, pushing one another in and out of the circle in order to kick or club at the body. Then someone cleared them away. It was Sheriff Cook. He pushed the men back, making a circle around the dead man, as if to give him space. It was silent for a moment and then there was a cacophony of firing and the body seemed to wallow across the ground. One of the white women threw up her hands and turned away, the other two, laughing, held on to her.

More people arrived, sliding down the bank, slick now from their tramping. Two men brought down a chest of beers, and when they were noticed, people left the circle around the body to buy beer. Someone shot again, followed by a volley.

The boy did not look. He was trying to find a way to climb the bank without being seen. Darkness was settling in the woods, and he could see the patches of the sky over the crown of the hill. He started on his hands and knees, crawling and then scrambling through the leaf litter with the musk of the humus filling his nose and mouth. He slipped and lay flat until he had regained his senses. He could hear hooting and shouting from the crowd below and he sensed that no one was looking at him. Quickly he found a tree trunk wide enough to hide him. He was only halfway up to the road. He could see the crowd still, a tight circle of men next to the river, the three women still standing to one side. There were children, too, at least two boys. He thought he might know them. Probably he went to school with them, but then he focused on the top of the hill where the sky was pale blue, almost white in contrast with the gloom of the woods.

He reached the top of the hill and squatted again. All seemed quiet; the crowd was out of sight, behind him. Before him, and a little below him lay the road. On one side, it went up, cutting through the hill and curving out of view, the gravel looking nearly as white as the sky. On the other side, it went down to the bridge. He gazed at the top of the hill for a moment, calculating the shortest and safest path home. He would continue uphill, he knew, crossing the roadbed, and going back to the bramble where he would find the old spring path. Another volley of gunfire made little pops and one gun boomed. He knew it was Bertrand, and a scene flashed through his mind as clearly as if he were witnessing it. Bertrand, he said. He was unaware that he shivered until he looked at his hands in front of him and clasped them in his armpits. Tighter and tighter he drew into a ball, trying to control the shaking. When he could stop shaking, he would run uphill and cross the road just where it curved. Releasing a heavy breath, he stood, started to run, and stopped again, nearly throwing himself to the ground.

A yellow dog stood in the middle of the road. It was mud-spattered and lean, and it crouched with its tail between its legs when it saw him. Toby, he said aloud. Then he ran toward the dog, forgetting for the moment about the killings. It was Toby, his dog from long ago, he thought. The dog cowered, flattened itself into the road as he approached, and then with a growl, it shot past him running up the hill. He staggered a few steps, not sure now which direction to go. Then he heard the coarse sound of a car grinding down the gravel road on the other side of the bridge. It would have been someone coming from the direction of Bethany, he thought. He was tempted to look to see if it would be someone who could rescue Bertrand. But soon there was hooting and gunfire, and the boy clenched his fists, swallowed hard. He took several steady breaths, began to climb the embankment toward the field where he had left the blackberries. The sun was gone and the light was swooning towards blue-black. Stars were beginning to flicker in the sky above the road. From higher ground, he could see the bridge and in the failing light make out people, boys mostly, watching. They climbed the diagonals or sat on the roadbed and swung their legs over the side of the bridge. Two boys had climbed high into the truss and swung like monkeys from the struts. He knew some of the boys from school and felt now it would be okay to join them. That way, he told himself, he could see what was going on, and he would be with a group and no one would bother him.

He started down the embankment, losing sight of the boys. As he landed beside the roadbed, the lights of a car shone on him. His muscles tensed and he went up on his toes, ready to dive for the bush. But he didn’t move. Though poised to spring, flexed so tightly they ached, his muscles failed him. The car approached, slowed as it went by. It was Mr. Jacks’ Buick wagon, now appearing purple in the dim light. Mr. Jacks was alone in the car, and as he drove by he peered out at the boy. Their eyes met momentarily, and the vacant, black look in Jacks’ face—nearly the look of a snake, the boy thought—sent a shiver through him. After the car passed, he ran.

When he was at the top of the hill, he thought he was far enough away that he no longer had to run. Now, the gurgling of the river, echoing up the ravine, and the rustling of the breeze through the woods predominated, though when he listened he could hear occasional shouting and laughing from the bridge. He walked blindly at first, until he realized he was following the path through leaf litter where the woman’s body had been dragged. He followed it until he came to the place where she had been shot. He did not recognize the place, until his foot slipped in the bloody leaves and roused a swarm of flies. Now, he began to run, crazily, not caring the direction. Branches cut across his face. He stubbed his toes on stones. He tripped, got up, kept running downhill, and he thought he was nearing the road. He heard the groan of a car, and knew to be safe he had to get away from the road.

Suddenly, he ran into a wall of vines. His legs tangled in the vines and when he tried to draw them back, they tangled even more. He tore at the leafy strands, but the vines seemed alive, wrangling and writhing and entrapping his body the more he fought to get through them. Finally, he gave up and let his body fall forward. He breathed heavily and slowly became aware of a faint floral odor, like a sour lilac. Kudzu. He was trapped in a drapery of kudzu vines that hung from trees over the road. Once again, he struggled to free himself, but exhausted he resigned himself to hang, like an insect in a web. Oh, Bertrand! he said over and over. Why Bertrand?

TWO

In the spring of the year before—the last year of the war, 1945—Lonnie’s great Aunty had come from Savannah to live with him and his mother. His father had been in the army for nearly three years, first at Fort McClellan, Alabama, and then in Africa, Italy, and Germany. The war had consumed everything—meat, milk, sugar—and Lonnie’s eight-year-old imagination. He saw the war pictures in the newspapers and newsreels when they went to the movie house, but in his mind he saw gigantic dirigibles shooting ray guns down on people fleeing through crowded city streets and robotic goons in hand-to-hand combat with muscular GIs and comic book supermen. You too young to worry about war, his mother would tell him, but he wasn’t worried. He only wanted to know where his daddy was and when his daddy was coming home. He’ll be back right soon, right soon indeed, but I can’t say when, though. He’s got to kill some bad men, his mother said. Like Tom Mix and Superman.

Great Aunty wasn’t so hopeful. Only the good Lord knows what’s true, she would say. She chewed tobacco and used a blue pee pot for a spittoon. Lonnie’s job was to empty it, as well as all of the chamber pots. He also had to bring in wood for the stoves and to take care of Toby, his daddy’s dog. War, Aunty said, is a bomination in the eyes of the Lord. Lord said ‘Love your enemies, as yourself.’"

But what you go’ do, Aunty, if they attack you? Whole country can’t turn the other cheek. We turn the other cheek, you go’ be learning to speak German, if they don’t kill you … Lonnie’s mother said. She turned to him. God on our side, so don’t fret none ’bout your daddy. He’ll be home, come next year. Lord willing.

These exchanges were frequent and Aunty never pushed, always allowing the boy’s mother the last say for soon, his mother left also. She went to Marietta, just outside of Atlanta, to work in an airplane factory. It was only two hours away by train, and she came home once every month or so. When she was gone, the