two officers from the depot entered the rear of the house. I stood outside on the little porch. Inside was Deputy Charles Curtis, the one the officers called “Chas.” I recognized him from a story I’d covered, a domestic disturbance in a Negro house. He was a good investigator.
He looked up from where he was crouched. “Looks like we had us one hell of a catfight in here, boys,” he said as the officers walked in. “Watch, Junior! Don’t touch that wall.” He pointed to a smear of blood at the door frame. Junior snatched his hand back.
“Sorry, Cousin,” he said.
Chas continued to examine something on the floor. He sighed. Then he stood and hooked his thumbs in his holster belt. He was a big man with the same sandy hair and florid complexion as his cousin, but taller. “One of them won’t be caterwauling no more, that’s for sure. You interviewed anybody, Junior?”
“Neighbor lady and two girls over to the C&O,” the deputy said. “The daughters. What they said, reckon we need to hunt up this colored girl on Wine Street does the washing.”
“Girl name of Virgie, right?” Chas asked.
“That’s right.”
Chas rubbed his chin. “Yep, figures. Lady out front lives across the street claims she seen the colored girl leaving in a hurry this morning. Near as we can make out,” he said, tapping a finger on his holster, “the daughters was the first ones in the house this afternoon. Doc V and me talked to them here. The little one’s eight. She come home from school about noon. Walked into the kitchen and called for her momma, got no answer. So she put away her books, she said, and went to Mrs. Guy’s, that’s the neighbor lady next door, to see if her momma was there. Mrs. Guy fixed her something to eat. Then she goes outside to play with some of the neighborhood kids. Then the older daughter shows up. She said she’s thirteen.”
“Looks like a preacher’s wife, don’t she, Chas?”
“Reckon she does, Junior, now you say it. Real stiff-backed. Anyway, she’s the second one in. Gets home from school right after three carrying loaves of bread she bought with the dime her momma give her in the morning. Puts the bread down on a stool in the kitchen. She calls for her momma, too. No answer. Goes to the front room to put away her books. Starts to feel uneasy. By the door she sees her momma’s hair combs on the floor. Figures that’s strange. Some of her momma’s hair’s in the combs, too. Long strands. Then she sees blood drops on the floor.
“So she runs back to the kitchen. Notices more blood drops and bloody water in a basin on the sink. Now she’s good and scared. She runs out the front door to the gate and sees two boys in the street. Asks them will they come in the house and look around. She waits at the gate while the boys go inside.
“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
