“Samuel Worsham Beauchamp. Twenty-six. Born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi. No family. No — —”
“Wait.” The census-taker wrote rapidly. “That’s not the name you were sen — lived under in Chicago.”
The other snapped the ash from the cigarette. “No. It was another guy killed the cop.”
“All right. Occupation — —”
“Getting rich too fast.
— none.” The census-taker wrote rapidly. “Parents.”
“Sure. Two. I dont remember them. My grandmother raised me.”
“What’s her name? Is she still living?”
“I dont know. Mollie Worsham Beauchamp. If she is, she’s on Carothers Edmonds’s farm seventeen miles from Jefferson, Mississippi. That all?”
The census-taker closed the portfolio and stood up. He was a year or two younger than the other. “If they dont know who you are here, how will they know — how do you expect to get home?”
The other snapped the ash from the cigarette, lying on the steel cot in the fine Hollywood clothes and a pair of shoes better than the census-taker would ever own. “What will that matter to me?” he said.
So the census-taker departed; the guard locked the steel door again. And the other lay on the steel cot smoking until after a while they came and slit the expensive trousers and shaved the expensive coiffure and led him out of the cell.
II
On that same hot, bright July morning the same hot bright wind which shook the mulberry leaves just outside Gavin Stevens’s window blew into the office too, contriving a semblance of coolness from what was merely motion. It fluttered among the county-attorney business on the desk and blew in the wild shock of prematurely white hair of the man who sat behind it — a thin, intelligent, unstable face, a rumpled linen suit from whose lapel a Phi Beta Kappa key dangled on a watch-chain — Gavin Stevens, Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard, Ph.D., Heidelberg, whose office was his hobby, although it made his living for him, and whose serious vocation was a twenty-two-year-old unfinished translation of the Old Testament back into classic Greek.
Only his caller seemed impervious to it, though by appearance she should have owned in that breeze no more of weight and solidity than the intact ash of a scrap of burned paper — a little old negro woman with a shrunken, incredibly old face beneath a white headcloth and a black straw hat which would have fitted a child.
“Beauchamp?” Stevens said. “You live on Mr Carothers Edmonds’s place.”
“I done left,” she said. “I come to find my boy.” Then, sitting on the hard chair opposite him and without moving, she began to chant. “Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt. Pharaoh got him — —”
“Wait,” Stevens said. “Wait, Aunty.” Because memory, recollection, was about to mesh and click. “If you dont know where your grandson is, how do you know he’s in trouble? Do you mean that Mr Edmonds has refused to help you find him?”
“It was Roth Edmonds sold him,” she said. “Sold him in Egypt. I dont know whar he is. I just knows Pharaoh got him. And you the Law. I wants to find my boy.”
“All right,” Stevens said. “I’ll try to find him. If you’re not going back home, where will you stay in town? It may take some time, if you dont know where he went and you haven’t heard from him in five years.”
“I be staying with Hamp Worsham. He my brother.”
“All right,” Stevens said. He was not surprised. He had known Hamp Worsham all his life, though he had never seen the old Negress before. But even if he had, he still would not have been surprised. They were like that. You could know two of them for years; they might even have worked for you for years, bearing different names. Then suddenly you learn by pure chance that they are brothers or sisters.
He sat in the hot motion which was not breeze and listened to her toiling slowly down the steep outside stairs, remembering the grandson. The papers of that business had passed across his desk before going to the District Attorney five or six years ago — Butch Beauchamp, as the youth had been known during the single year he had spent in and out of the city jail: the old Negress’s daughter’s child, orphaned of his mother at birth and deserted by his father, whom the grandmother had taken and raised, or tried to.
Because at nineteen he had quit the country and come to town and spent a year in and out of jail for gambling and fighting, to come at last under serious indictment for breaking and entering a store.
Caught red-handed, whereupon he had struck with a piece of iron pipe at the officer who surprised him and then lay on the ground where the officer had felled him with a pistol-butt, cursing through his broken mouth, his teeth fixed into something like furious laughter through the blood.
Then two nights later he broke out of jail and was seen no more — a youth not yet twenty-one, with something in him from the father who begot and deserted him and who was now in the State Penitentiary for manslaughter — some seed not only violent but dangerous and bad.
And that’s who I am to find, save, Stevens thought. Because he did not for one moment doubt the old Negress’s instinct. If she had also been able to divine where the boy was and what his trouble was, he would not have been surprised, and it was only later that he thought to be surprised at how quickly he did find where the boy was and what was wrong.
His first thought was to telephone Carothers Edmonds, on whose farm the old Negress’s husband had been a tenant for years. But then, according to her, Edmonds had already refused to have anything to do with it. Then he sat perfectly still while the hot wind blew in his wild white mane. Now he comprehended what the old Negress had meant.
He remembered now that it was Edmonds who had actually sent the boy to Jefferson in the first place: he had caught the boy breaking into his commissary store and had ordered him off the place and had forbidden him ever to return.
And not the sheriff, the police, he thought. Something broader, quicker in scope.… He rose and took his old fine worn panama and descended the outside stairs and crossed the empty square in the hot suspension of noon’s beginning, to the office of the county newspaper. The editor was in — an older man but with hair less white than Stevens’s, in a black string tie and an old-fashioned boiled shirt and tremendously fat.
“An old nigger woman named Mollie Beauchamp,” Stevens said. “She and her husband live on the Edmonds place. It’s her grandson. You remember him — Butch Beauchamp, about five or six years ago, who spent a year in town, mostly in jail, until they finally caught him breaking into Rouncewell’s store one night?
Well, he’s in worse trouble than that now. I dont doubt her at all. I just hope, for her sake as well as that of the great public whom I represent, that his present trouble is very bad and maybe final too — —”
“Wait,” the editor said. He didn’t even need to leave his desk. He took the press association flimsy from its spike and handed it to Stevens. It was datelined from Joliet, Illinois, this morning:
Mississippi negro, on eve of execution for murder of Chicago policeman, exposes alias by completing census questionnaire. Samuel Worsham Beauchamp ——
Five minutes later Stevens was crossing again the empty square in which noon’s hot suspension was that much nearer. He had thought that he was going home to his boarding-house for the noon meal, but he found that he was not. ‘Besides, I didn’t lock my office door,’ he thought.
Only, how under the sun she could have got to town from those seventeen miles. She may even have walked. “So it seems I didn’t mean what I said I hoped,” he said aloud, mounting the outside stairs again, out of the hazy and now windless sunglare, and entered his office. He stopped. Then he said,
“Good morning, Miss Worsham.”
She was quite old too — thin, erect, with a neat, old-time piling of white hair beneath a faded hat of thirty years ago, in rusty black, with a frayed umbrella faded now until it was green instead of black. He had known her too all his life.
She lived alone in the decaying house her father had left her, where she gave lessons in china-painting and, with the help of Hamp Worsham, descendant of one of her father’s slaves, and his wife, raised chickens and vegetables for market.
“I came about Mollie,” she said. “Mollie Beauchamp. She said that you — —”
He told her while she watched him, erect on the hard chair where the old Negress had sat, the rusty umbrella leaning against her knee. On her lap, beneath her folded hands, lay an old-fashioned beaded reticule almost as big as a suitcase. “He is to be executed tonight.”
“Can nothing be done? Mollie’s and Hamp’s parents belonged to my grandfather. Mollie and I were born in the same month. We grew up together as sisters would.”
“I telephoned,” Stevens said. “I talked to the Warden at Joliet, and to the District Attorney in Chicago.
