Mr. Ewing looked at Kenneth sharply.
“I know that things aren’t altogether as they ought to be. It’s pretty tough on fellows like you, Ken, who have had an education. While you were away, a bunch of these mill hands ’cross the tracks got Jerry Bird, a nigger that’d been working for me nearly five years. He came here from down the country some place after you left for up North. Jerry was as steady a fellow as I’ve ever seen—as honest as the day was long. I trusted Jerry anywhere, lots quicker than I would’ve some of these white people ’round here. He had a black skin but his heart was white. One night Jerry was over to my house helping Mrs. Ewing until nearly ten o’clock. On his way home this bunch of roughnecks from “Factoryville” stopped him while they were looking for a nigger that’d scared a white girl. When Jerry got scared and started to run, they took out after him and strung him up to a tree. And he wasn’t any more guilty of touching that white girl than you or me.”
“What did you do about it?” asked Bob.
“Nothing. Suppose I had kicked up a ruckus about it. They found out afterwards that the girl hadn’t been bothered at all. But just suppose I had gone and cussed out the fellows who did the lynching. Most of them trade at my store. Or if they don’t, a lot of their friends do. They’d have taken their trade to some other store and I’d ‘a’ gained nothing for my trouble.”
“But surely you don’t believe that lynching ever helps, do you?”
“Yes and no. Lynching never bothers folks like you. Why, your daddy was one of the most respected folks in this town. But lynching does keep some of these young nigger bucks in check.”
“Does it? It seems to me that there isn’t much less so-called rape around here or anywhere else in the South, even after forty years of lynching. Mr. Ewing, why don’t you and the other decent white people here come out against lynching?”
“Who? Me? Never!” Ewing looked his amazement at the suggestion. “Why, it would ruin my business, my wife would begin to be dropped by all the other folks of the town, and it wouldn’t be long before they’d begin calling me a ‘nigger-lover.’ No, sir-ee! I’ll just let things rock along and let well enough alone.”
“Mr. Ewing, if fifty men like you in this town banded together and came out flat-footedly against lynching, there are lots more who would join you gladly.”
“That may be true,” Ewing answered doubtfully. “But then again it mightn’t. Let’s see who might be some of the fifty. There’s George Baird, he’s president of the Bank of Central City, and Fred Griswold, president of the Smith County Farmers’ Bank. You can count them out because they’d be afraid of losing their depositors. Then there’s Ralph Minor who owns the Bon Ton Store. He’s out for the same reason that I am. Then there’s Nat Phelps, who runs the Central City Dispatch. He has a hard enough time as it is. If he lost a couple of hundred subscribers, he’d have to close up shop. And so it goes.”