For NaNoWriMo: The Field of Blood, part 10

This portion was written on Nov. 11.

Preparation, protests, and the revelation of a great crime of the not-too-distant past -- Tinyville becomes the scene of all this and more as Captain Hamilton and the Lofton County Free Voice play a chess game with the peace of the town at stake! You can get caught up on part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, and part 9 to catch up on all the twists and turns!

It is amazing what two guys in yellow vests in a town that has only a few main corners and main streets can get done with cones and signs. Captain Lee and Lieutenant O'Reilly gently redirected all of Tinyville's traffic and created an inviting place for protest where traffic would not have to interact as much with even hundreds of protestors.

Captain Hamilton stayed at the office as the face of law and order and got on all channels available to him with one message: peaceful protests were allowed and peaceful counter-protests as well, but the minute the line was crossed, he was cracking heads of all colors. “Don't be the one that lets your people cross the line – I'm telling you and I will come get you if I don't get anyone else,” came the growl of authority into the morning of people who hadn't even decided yet what to do. Captain Hamilton simply preempted their considerations.

James Varick IV, Harvey Harrison, and Thomas Stepforth Sr., principals of the Lofton County Free Voice, were not among those who did not know what they were doing – their contacts were setting up to have a rally on the field where Mr. Rett had been killed, and then to march through downtown, but …

“Captain Hamilton gets up early too,” Mr. Varick observed. “He is shifting the parameters on us.”

“Brilliant, really,” Mr. Stepforth said. “Getting traffic out of the way so it can't be blocked up, leaving a beautiful space for the organizers in the town's center that can be defended if need be. He doesn't have the men to do it effectively, but he has given us a good space to defend ourselves if it should come to it, and that he can block off if the usual White pushback comes raging into the area.”

“Hamilton is no joke,” Mr. Harrison said. “He's not trying to have trouble start that he can't deal with here, so he is trying to head it off. I don't have a problem with that.”

“I don't either,” Mr. Varick said. “The last thing we want is a distraction from our real goals – J. Oscar's death properly investigated, and the field set aside as a memorial to the massacre. Let's focus on the rally, on letting the survivors and victims' families speak – recording audio only, with the key photographs of the 56 victims and the documents – and get out of sight again. What we don't want is people picked off visually while heading downtown and then revenge-killed one by one by local White supremacist terrorists for being involved in this move. Captain Hamilton doesn't have the staff to deal with that, and we know exactly how much help county will be.”

“I think Lofton County will soon be appointing a new sheriff,” Mr. Stepforth said, “but in the meantime, let's get to the rally, talk with the organizers, and get done what needs to get done. We want the composite video of audio from the rally and the photographs and the documents on social media by noon. Meanwhile, Captain Hamilton has laid a splendid trap for the local ne'er-do-well day labor contingency of domestic terrorists who will show up where we don't.”

Sure enough: in redirecting traffic around certain places and leaving a spot open for protests, Captain Hamilton had left a clear route out for counter-protestors and rougher types to get situated … only to get snatched up, because a bunch of them had warrants for other stuff and forgot that if they came loudly and proudly into the open, they could get arrested. Captains Hamilton and Lee just “tagged 'em and bagged 'em” all morning and into the afternoon, and Captain Lee kept driving down to deposit folks in the county jail until people realized: it wasn't worth it. All this excitement kept the real rally unnoticed on the field where Mr. Rett had been killed and the massacre had taken place in 1967 – so, at noon, the fact that it had come and gone became another unpleasant shock to many in town as the video came out.

“Hello. My name is Rufus Poynter. I'm 86 years old, and a survivor of the 1967 massacre here in Tinyville. I've volunteered to put a face on this thing because White terrorists missed killing me 52 years ago and I'm not worried about them killing me now. My wife and son were killed in the massacre, and since I couldn't protect them, I wondered why the Lord didn't just take me too. Now I know. I am still here as a witness. I knew all the people who were slaughtered. I know their families. I know how unsafe we have felt for 52 years as the White men who did that slaughter went right on and lived their lives with no punishment and even attained high position. We know, and today, we are speaking out. You'll see and hear me and more survivors my age, see pictures of those who were massacred, hear the voices of their family members, and see the documents in which the men who committed this crime against humanity boasted of their deeds – and so will the whole nation and the world. Not all of us are buried in that field. Our story won't be paved over, Tinyville. Our story won't be paved over, Lofton County. Our story won't be paved over, Virginia. We're here. The world is watching and listening. Our voices are still free.”

Thus began an hour of devastating footage, excellently edited especially given the time it had to be edited in, that brought the 1967 massacre in Tinyville to vivid, heart-wrenching life. To Lieutenant O'Reilly's complete shock, Captain Lee could not get through it – the marble man broke down in deep sobs as he saw the women and children's pictures, before and after. Captain Hamilton, too, wept intermittently, thinking of the pain of the families and how they had carried that all those years … and, understanding why his own parents had begun to take the stands they had and had made the enemies they had. Tinyville had been covering up its great sin for 52 years, but the covers were now ripped off. The last image wrenched the heart the most – all the survivors and the families of the victims, those who were not meant to be identified holding up the pictures of those they had been related to.

That was what got to Lieutenant O'Reilly.

“There's a whole thousand of them,” he said, “and a lot of them are younger than me, and never got to know their aunts, uncles, grandparents, parents – this is terrible!”

And his green eyes became like the sea, full of water, splashing out onto the shore of his face.

“You see why we do what we do, and take the stands we take,” Captain Hamilton said, his voice thick with tears. “We cannot add to the sins, Lieutenant. We simply cannot. The burden we inherit is heavy enough already – we must do right, no matter the cost.”

“Yes, sir, I see it. I see it all now.”

Captain Hamilton looked over at his cousin Captain Lee, who was still sobbing deeply … his in-laws the Mortons had told him the story of the 1967 massacre, and how several of their relatives had been killed or severely injured there. Now he knew why there had always been fear and sadness in his own beloved bride, and the stress that had contributed to her death in childbirth … and that there were a thousand other people … tens of thousands … hundreds of thousands … millions in living memory of events like the 1967 massacre … or the Tuskegee Experiment that had not yet ended by that time … or the importation of guns and drugs into urban Black communities … all the wrecked families, the destroyed wives and children … Captain Lee could take a lot of things, but to know what his wife Vanessa had to contend with every day as a Black girl growing up in Lofton County was too much. Also, Mr. Poynter was too much … for the two men resonated all too closely in their sense of failure of their Black wife and son, and feeling as if they should not even be in the earth after such a failure.

Lieutenant O'Reilly's entire view of Captain Lee changed that day … some people presented coldly because they were actually deeply passionate but knew they had to hold themselves in check. For the lieutenant could see: Captain Lee was not only sad but also completely enraged, the anger welling up with his grief, until finally, he sat with glowing face and eyes and a look in his entire body that said that if he could just get to the people that had done it – and then the documents came on the screen, with names and dates, and also pictures. The video outed a bunch of the perpetrators … and Captain Lee started writing it all down.

“Harry,” Captain Hamilton said softly.

“I know some good judges,” Captain Lee gritted. “We will see what we can do, this week! God knows we could handle it another way, but let us see if the law will police and judge itself, just this once, before we have to go that other way!”

Down in his office, Sheriff John Nottingham got a phone call from his friend, Captain Angler of Smallwood.

“I don't know if you are online, John,” Captain Angler said, “but, you've been outed about 1967.”

“What?”

“It wasn't Captain Hamilton that did it – it's the Free Voice again. They rounded up all the survivors and the victims' families and had a whole rally – and they've got a copy of that postcard of you cheering on your brother as he lynched a man.”

“What?”

“Do you have a smartphone?”

“Look, man, I don't even have a computer – let me borrow one of my deputies real quick.”

“Whatever you do, don't do that. You're not going to lose respect with them for something that happened 52 years ago. You're going to lose respect by showing any kind of weakness. Address the topic in only this way: there are things that had to be done to maintain order then, but this is now, and now we have superior ways and all of y'all are a part of it. Tell them that all y'all are all there is, keeping the county from falling into disorder and reprisals and riots – play on the fear your men have for their families. That's easy.

“Forget looking at the video until this evening when you get over here – next steps are to start calling the people whose secrets you know, and letting them know they had better protect your position and pay you well for the privilege of your leaving with their secrets still secret. Get that done this afternoon, and I'll see you this evening. I'll send my grandson to get you.”

(They had reckoned without knowing an enraged Lee was on their track, but, that nightmare for old crooked lawmen is another story)

By the time Sheriff Nottingham and Captain Angler had their conversation, things were eerily quiet in and around Tinyville … the first of the significant fall rains seemed to cool things down. Captain Lee had gone by that time to take a walk and compose himself, and Captain Hamilton had gone out to get lunch for everyone and also get a sense of how the town was – buzzing angrily, but subdued by the rain. People were ripping down copies of the Free Voice and stomping them into the mud early on, but as the rain increased people were driven indoors, to the shops and restaurants that made up downtown life, and into the library.

Segregation was in effect though not in effect … Black people were visibly upset and not afraid to show it, and were talking about the Free Voice and the rally video openly, and White people were angry about the same facts being released and how innocent White people were being framed as guilty when they had nothing to do with what happened in 1967. The conversations were sometimes taking place within 10-15 feet of each other. Tension was high. Fear was high. Yet, nobody wanted to cross that line. Captain Hamilton's walkthrough was a reminder: don't do it.

Yet at 2:15pm, the approximate time the 1967 massacre had happened 52 years before, all the Black people seemed to disappear from all the shops and restaurants – of course some people went back to work, but it seemed so deliberate. Captain Hamilton's memory plucked out a fact: where protests failed, boycotts often were more successful.

“You're right,” said Bruce Trainor, the proprietor of Trainor's Terrific Sandwiches. “They came in, ordered one sandwich between them, sat and talked loudly and angrily about what they needed to do relative to Tinyville trying to pave over the history, and then left, at 2:15.”

Down at Tinyville's only bank, there was a run – beginning at 2:15, all Black people took their deposits out and closed their accounts. The bank had to scramble to find that much cash, and at the end was paying out in rolls of quarters and pennies.

News traveled faster than people in the streets, but the town had been upended without the protest taking place – Captain Hamilton removed all the cones by 2:30, because they were no longer needed. He came back with lunch and with the news to Captain Lee and Lieutenant O'Reilly, the former of which shook his head.

“Tinyville is tiny,” he said, “and very few people who live here work here except in agriculture – meaning Tinyville's businesses cannot retaliate by firing boycotting Black workers. Black people are 28 percent of the town – if they are serious about a boycott, then it will go hard for Tinyville.”

“So instead of pulling money in, Tinyville is going to bleed money from 28 percent of its spending base,” Lieutenant O'Reilly said.

“And that's before we even determine whether J. Oscar Rett was murdered or committed suicide,” Captain Hamilton said, “but the good news is, in terms of the politics, it no longer even matters. The Free Voice has put the matter into the stratosphere using Mr. Rett's death to open up the matter of 1967, so, locally, we ought to be able to investigate in peace.”

“Perhaps,” Captain Lee said. “Someone is bound to say that if you had just done what Sheriff Nottingham would have done and gone on and declared the matter a suicide and hushed it all up on Friday, none of this would have happened.”

“Oh, they can say it,” Captain Hamilton said, “but, the Lofton County Free Voice has just returned the favor we did it back at the Gilligan House – we gave those with it cover, and now, it has given us cover to get to what is really going on. What I want to keep a watch on is how quickly Tinyville's powers that be and Topia Development give in – if it is quick, it may have something more to do with the documents we have than the documents the Free Voice has shown today. I've been thinking about the matter all weekend, although doubtless without the efficiency of Morton Data Master that has been running on while we dealt with all this other stuff today – if my understanding of the matter is correct to this point, a whole bunch of people in powerful places on both sides of the color line are going to be crying about today – not 1967, but today – when this is done.”

“My word, Captain Hamilton,” Captain Lee said. “Are you going to have both the Tinyville Times and the Lofton County Free Voice mad at you at the same time?”

“Always reaching for new horizons,” Captain Hamilton said, with a smile.

Part 11 is up