“Them two boys, that’s numbers three and four. Boys see the blood drops on the floor and get scared, too. So they scurry off to fetch help at the depot, leaving her at the gate. Pair of men on the platform hear the boys hollering, soon as they hear ‘blood,’ they roust the telegraph man Poindexter and tell him to send for the sheriff.”
Chas unhooked his thumbs from the belt. “Junior, I’m gone take R. D. over to Wine Street with me. Can I get you to stay here, keep them people on the street out of the house, messing up the crime scene?”
“That’ll be fine,” the deputy said.
“Awful thing, them girls coming up on their momma like that,” Chas said.
I stepped behind a porch post to make room for the officers to pass. When they were a ways down the sidewalk, I followed. The two colored boys who ran by me earlier fell in behind them. One of the boys hooted. The deputies turned and said something and the boys ran down the sidewalk away from them. The officers got in their car and drove down the street. The boys chased after the car as it turned the corner.
By the time I reached the front gate of 341 Wine Street, Chas and Officer Hope were walking a Negro girl out, one man holding each arm. That was the first time I saw Virginia Christian. She walked between the officers without raising her eyes. She was small, about five feet tall, and sturdy. Her color was very dark. She walked with a heavy stride. At the gate she looked up at each of the colored boys on the sidewalk. Then she looked at me. She looked angry. Then her face turned away. The deputies walked her past us. Chas opened the door to the vehicle. Officer Hope helped her onto the running board and eased her into the back seat. The officers stepped into the car and drove away. I shouted questions as they rode by but they didn’t reply.
One of the colored boys whistled.
“You see that, Jeff? She stared her a hole plumb through us. Like she gone murder us, too.”
“Hot dang!” the other boy said. “We got us our own murderer, right on this street.”
A colored man came out of the house and started down the sidewalk.
“Sir, what’s happened here?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He looked about him, befuddled, then turned and walked past the boys. I stepped in front of him.
“Sir, are you any relation to Virgie?”
“She my girl.”
“What is your name, sir?”
“Henry Christian.”
“Did the police arrest your daughter?”
“Yes,” he said. He held a thick piece of paper he kept folding and refolding. His hands were shaking. He placed the paper in the pocket of his coat.
“Did they state the charge, sir?”
“Them deputies didn’t say nothing. Nothing. Here, I got to get by. I got to see Mr. Fields.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. He continued up the street until he came to the gate for a big clapboard two-story house at 124 Wine Street. A shingle by the gate was painted, “George W. Fields, Esq. Attorney at Law.” I watched Mr. Christian pass through the gate and up the walk. He knocked at the door. When it opened he went inside.
I walked back to the Christian home. Black children were milling about the yard and in the street. I heard a woman sobbing inside the house. Through the front door I could see a colored woman reclined on a pallet. She was a big woman, with light skin. She leaned against thick pillows that held her torso upright.
“Oh, Lord! What they gone do with my Virgie?” she asked. The children in the yard began to wail.
I stuck my pencil and notes in my breast pocket. I wanted to smoke a cigarette. But I started to run as fast as I could toward the sheriff’s office.
A couple of reporters already were there.
“Looks like you been doing some serious bird-dogging and all, Charlie.” It was Charles Pace, my competitor at the Daily Press. Everybody called him Pace. We covered the same beats. I resented him because his instincts for the news were better than mine. He resented me because I’d had it easy, a college snob. He’d first come to Hampton as a bound boy, forced to work his keep on the docks.
My face was flushed from running and my eyeglasses had fogged up. I took a handkerchief from my trousers and wiped the lenses.
Pace was scanning the cork board at the front of the sheriff’s office. I hooked the wire temples over my ears. Pace was tall. Peering around his shoulder, I could make out Dr. Vanderslice’s signature. He must’ve posted the coroner’s report.
“Hey, how about making some room?” I asked.
Pace didn’t move. He made a couple more notes, then caught me with an elbow as he turned. He trotted out the door. I rubbed my ribs and started to read.
The body of the victim, Ida Virginia Belote, was lying face down in a back room on the right-hand side of her house. The deceased appeared to be about 50 years of age. Her upper and lower false teeth were lying on the floor of the room near her body. A bloody towel was rolled and stuffed tightly down her throat, pushing in locks of hair. The towel depressed the deceased’s tongue and inverted her lower lip. She had finger marks and bruises about her neck and beneath her jaw. Her right eye was blackened, and her left eye was swollen shut. Just above the deceased’s left ear was a three-inch long cut down to the bone. The head and face were bloody. At the throat of the deceased was a sailor’s neck cloth. There was a dry abrasion on the elbow of the left arm. There was no visible sign of rape.
In the middle room, near the front door, were shards of brown crockery. A spittoon covered with blood lay on the floor, along with three small black hair combs. On a box behind the door of the middle room were blood stains. There were blood stains on the floor leading to the adjacent back room on the right. Blood stains were on the door facing leading into the room on the right, about two-and-a-half feet from the floor. Under a bureau between the window and door was a pool of blood, and smeared blood and bloody clothing on the floor. A white porcelain jar top was found shattered into many pieces. No money or purse was found.
I scribbled notes and ran for the Times-Herald office. I just made the deadline. The front-page headline read, “IDA BELOTE IS BRUTALLY MURDERED, BLACK WOMAN HELD.”
I sat out on the porch of my rooms, smoking. We’d had a shower at nightfall. The wind was raw. I read the story for probably the twentieth time and folded the paper. When the wind stirred, water dripped from the trees onto the roof of the porch. My hands were freezing.
In the morning Tyler Hobgood, the editor at the paper, called me into his office. Mr. Hobgood usually looked like he’d spent the night away from home. When he’d hang his suit coat on the tree, his shirt was always rumpled, the collar askew, and his shirttail poked from the back of his vest.
“These coloreds,” he muttered, and shook his head. “A white woman in her own house.” He looked into my face. I had never noticed how sad his eyes were. His moustache needed a trim. “Stay on this one, Mears,” he said. “Day or two, you might be reporting a lynching.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Whole lot more serious than college, ain’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
He opened a desk drawer and took out a bottle. He poured a dram of whiskey into his coffee cup. He tilted the bottle toward me.
“Want a little hair of the dog?” he asked.
“No thank you, sir.”
“Still teetotaling?”
“Yes, sir.”
“In this line of work,” he said, “you might want to change that, Mears.”
“Yes,