not even — the jail — worth selling to the United States for some matching allocation out of the federal treasury; not even (so fast, so far, was Progress) any more a real pawn, let alone knight or rook, on the County’s political board, not even plum in true worth of the word: simply a modest sinecure for the husband of someone’s cousin, who had failed not as a father but merely as a fourth-rate farmer or day-labourer;
It survived, endured; it had its inevictable place in the town and the county; it was even still adding modestly not just to its but to the town’s and the county’s history too: somewhere behind that dingy brick façade, between the old durable hand-moulded brick and the cracked creosote-impregnated plaster of the inside walls (though few in the town or county any longer knew that they were there) were the old notched and morticed logs which (this, the town and county did remember; it was part of its legend) had held someone who might have been Wiley Harpe;
during that summer of 1864, the federal brigadier who had fired the Square and the courthouse had used the jail as his provost-marshal’s guard-house; and even children in high school remembered how the jail had been host to the Governor of the State while he discharged a thirty-day sentence for contempt of court for refusing to testify in a paternity suit brought against one of his lieutenants: but isolate, even its legend and record and history, indisputable in authenticity yet a little oblique, elliptic or perhaps just ellipsoid, washed thinly over with a faint quiet cast of apocrypha: because there were new people in the town now, strangers, outlanders, living in new minute glass-walled houses set as neat and orderly and antiseptic as cribs in a nursery ward, in new subdivisions named Fairfield or Longwood or Halcyon Acres which had once been the lawn or back yard or kitchen garden of the old residences (the old obsolete columned houses still standing among them like old horses surged suddenly out of slumber in the middle of a flock of sheep), who had never seen the jail;
that is, they had looked at it in passing, they knew where it was, when their kin or friends or acquaintances from the East or North or California visited them or passed through Jefferson on the way to New Orleans or Florida, they could even repeat some of its legend or history to them: but they had had no contact with it; it was not a part of their lives; they had the automatic stoves and furnaces and milk deliveries and lawns the size of instalment-plan rugs; they had never had to go to the jail on the morning after June Tenth or July Fourth or Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year’s (or for that matter, on almost any Monday morning) to pay the fine of houseman or gardener or handyman so that he could hurry on home (still wearing his hangover or his barely-staunched razor-slashes) and milk the cow or clean the furnace or mow the lawn;
So only the old citizens knew the jail any more, not old people but old citizens: men and women old not in years but in the constancy of the town, or against that constancy, concordant (not coeval of course, the town’s date was a century and a quarter ago now, but in accord against that continuation) with that thin durable continuity born a hundred and twenty-five years ago out of a handful of bandits captured by a drunken militia squad, and a bitter ironical incorruptible wilderness mail rider, and a monster wrought-iron padlock — that steadfast and durable and unhurryable continuity against or across which the vain and glittering ephemeræ of progress and alteration washed in substanceless repetitive evanescent scarless waves, like the wash and glare of the neon sign on what was still known as the Holston House diagonally opposite, which would fade with each dawn from the old brick walls of the jail and leave no trace;
only the old citizens still knew it: the intractable and obsolescent of the town who still insisted on wood-burning ranges and cows and vegetable gardens and handymen who had to be taken out of hock on the mornings after Saturday-nights and holidays; or the ones who actually spent the Saturday- and holiday-nights inside the barred doors and windows of the cells or bullpen for drunkenness or fighting or gambling — the servants, housemen and gardeners and handymen, who would be extracted the next morning by their white folks, and the others (what the town knew as the New Negro, independent of that commodity) who would sleep there every night beneath the thin ruby chequer-barred wash and fade of the hotel sign, while they worked their fines out on the street;
and the County, since its cattle-thieves and moonshiners went to trial from there, and its murderers — by electricity now (so fast, that fast, was Progress) — to eternity from there; in fact it was still, not a factor perhaps, but at least an integer, a cipher, in the county’s political establishment; at least still used by the Board of Supervisors, if not as a lever, at least as something like Punch’s stuffed club, not intended to break bones, not aimed to leave any permanent scars;
So only the old knew it, the irreconcilable Jeffersonians and Yoknapatawphians who had (and without doubt firmly intended to continue to have) actual personal dealings with it on the blue Monday mornings after holidays, or during the semi-yearly terms of Circuit or Federal Court: — until suddenly you, a stranger, an outlander say from the East or the North or the Far West, passing through the little town by simple accident, or perhaps relation or acquaintance or friend of one of the outland families which had moved into one of the pristine and recent subdivisions, yourself turning out of your way to fumble among road signs and filling stations out of frank curiosity, to try to learn, comprehend, understand what had brought your cousin or friend or acquaintance to elect to live here — not specifically here, of course, not specifically Jefferson, but such as here, such as Jefferson — suddenly you would realise that something curious was happening or had happened here: that instead of dying off as they should as time passed it was as though these old irreconcilables were actually increasing in number;
as though with each interment of one, two more shared that vacancy: where in 1900, only thirty-five years afterward, there could not have been more than two or three capable of it, either by knowledge or memory of leisure, or even simple willingness and inclination, now, in 1951, eighty-six years afterward, they could be counted in dozens (and in 1965, a hundred years afterward, in hundreds because — by now you had already begun to understand why your kin or friends or acquaintance had elected to come to such as this with his family and call it his life — by then the children of that second outland invasion following a war, would also have become not just Mississippians but Jeffersonians and Yoknapatawphians: by which time — who knows? — not merely the pane, but the whole window, perhaps the entire wall, may have been removed and embalmed intact into a museum by an historical, or anyway a cultural, club of ladies — why, by that time they may not even know, or even need to know: only that the window-pane bearing the girl’s name and the date is that old, which is enough;
has lasted that long: one small rectangle of wavy, crudely-pressed, almost opaque glass, bearing a few faint scratches apparently no more durable than the thin dried slime left by the passage of a snail, yet which has endured a hundred years) who are capable and willing too to quit whatever they happen to be doing — sitting on the last of the wooden benches beneath the last of the locust and chinaberry trees among the potted conifers of the new age dotting the courthouse yard, or in the chairs along the shady sidewalk before the Holston House, where a breeze always blows — to lead you across the street and into the jail and (with courteous neighbourly apologies to the jailor’s wife stirring or turning on the stove the peas and grits and side-meat — purchased in bargain-lot quantities by shrewd and indefatigable peditation from store to store — which she will serve to the prisoners for dinner or supper at so much a head — plate — payable by the County, which is no mean factor in the sinecure of her husband’s incumbency) into the kitchen and so to the cloudy pane bearing the faint scratches which, after a moment, you will descry to be a name and a date;
Not at first, of course, but after a moment, a second, because at first you would be a little puzzled,
