“What did they do?”
“Well, what they did was they burned Mrs. Harms’s house to the ground.”
“Good God! Was she in it?”
“She was until Josh pulled her out. And let me tell you what, Josh went after those boys. They went at it right up and down the town’s streets. I watched it from my office. You know, it must’ve been ten against one, but Josh put half of them boys in the hospital, until the rest beat him up bad, real bad. Never seen anything like it, hope I never do again.”
“It sounds almost like a riot. Didn’t the police come?”
Barker coughed in an embarrassed fashion. “Well, just so happens that it was rumored that a couple of the boys that were in on it, you know, who had burned the house down — ”
“Were the police,” Sara finished the sentence for him. Barker didn’t say anything. “I hope Josh Harms sued for all the money the town had,” she said.
“Well, actually, they sued him. I mean, the boys he put in the hospital did. Josh couldn’t prove anything about the fire. I mean, I had my speculations, but that was all. And the police sort of put together this story about him resisting arrest and all. It was ten people’s word against one, and a colored’s word at that. Well, the long and the short of it was he spent some time in jail and they took everything he and his momma had, little enough that it was. She died soon thereafter. What happened to both her boys, I guess, was too much for her.”
It was all Sara could do not to start screaming at the man. “Mr. Barker, that is the most disgusting story I have ever heard,” she said. “I don’t know much about your town, but I do know I would never want anyone I cared about to live there.”
“It has its good points.”
“Really — like welcoming home a war hero like that?”
“I know. I thought about that too. You fight for your country, get shot up and then come home to something like that, probably makes you wonder what the hell you were fighting for.”
“You sound like you knew the truth. Didn’t you use the power of the press that time?”
Barker sighed deeply. “This has always been my home, Ms. Evans, and you can only offend the powers that be so many times, even if they deserve it. Now, I can’t say that I’m any great friend of the blacks, because I’m not. And I wouldn’t lie to you and say I championed Josh Harms’s cause, because frankly I didn’t.”
“Well, I guess that’s partly what the courts are for: to keep people like those in your town from screwing people like Josh Harms. Please call me back with the name of Harms’s lawyer.”
She hung up the phone. Her whole body was tingling with rage from what she had just heard. But then, how many blacks had she known growing up in Carolina? The generations of squatters down the road? Or during harvest time when her father would bring in the part-timers to help? She had watched these men from the porch, sweat soaking the thin fabric of their shirts, their skin growing ever darker under the bite of the sun. She and her mother would bring them lemonade, food. They would mumble their thanks, never making eye contact, eat their meal and toil on into the darkness. Sara’s school had been all white, despite the string of Supreme Court cases demanding otherwise. These cases were the twentieth century battlefields of racial equality, replacing the Antietams, Gettysburgs and Chickamaugas of the last century. And some would argue with equal futility. And here at the Court there was one black justice, who occupied the so-called Thurgood Marshall seat, and currently one black clerk, out of thirty-six. Many of the justices had never had a minority person clerk for them. What sort of message did that send? At the highest court of justice in the land?
As she hurried down the hallway in search of Fiske, Sara wondered if they would ever really find out the truth. If the Army caught up to the Harms brothers before anyone else, the truth might very well die with them.