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Chapter 116
IT WAS TIME TO TRY OUT the plan I had concocted. Maybe it was even past time, too late. Moody and L.J. had come with me. Jonah wanted to but knew he couldn’t. After all, he was representing the great state of Mississippi, and we were about to break the law in too many ways to count.
“Stinks bad in here,” Moody said.
The awful smell was everywhere, a sharp, nauseating odor, like a cross between bad patent medicine and rancid moonshine. It was the foul scent of the chemicals Scooter Willems used to develop his photographs.
I had just climbed through an unlocked window, with Moody and L.J. behind me, into Scooter’s old cabin off the East Point Road. Now we were in his studio, one large room with black curtains dividing it into three. The front part was a portrait studio, with a backdrop and a stool for the subject to pose on. In the middle section two large wooden tables held trays of foul-smelling chemicals. But it was in the last section that we found what we’d come for: boxes and boxes of Willems’s photographs, with dozens more pinned to the walls.
There was one box full of nothing but photographs of lynchings. Scooter Willems had been busy these past months. Beside that box sat a stack of postcards manufactured from the photos, souvenir pictures of hanged corpses, burned bodies, twisted victims, like the one I’d received in the mail.
“God Almighty,” Moody said. “The man has taken pictures of everybody who ever got hanged.”
“Look here,” said L.J., working his way along the wall. “These are all from the Bobby Burnett lynching.”
I held up the lantern to see.
“First, take a look at poor old Bobby hanging there,” L.J. said. “Now look who’s standing next to him. There. By his feet.”
There they were, plain as day in the flickering lamplight: Chester Madden and Lincoln Alexander Stephens, two of the three White Raiders on trial. They grinned up at the bloated, bloody, bursting head of Bobby Burnett.
One by one I pulled the photographs down from the wall, gathering them in a manila folder I found on Scooter’s desk.
“Look at this!” Moody exclaimed, holding a photo up to the light.
I came up beside her. There was her brother Hiram, dead on the ground, with a rope around his neck. His grinning killers each had a foot on his body, as if he were a prize lion they’d slain on safari.
L.J. pointed to the man on the end. “I’ll be damned if that ain’t Lester Johnson.”
I almost stopped breathing. “And now he sits on our jury.”
Then I recognized the man beside him. It was Jacob, Jacob Gill, with his foot resting on Moody’s dead brother. I felt my eyes filling.
Scooter Willems was nothing if not thorough. Everyone who’d ever had a hand in a lynching in this part of Mississippi had been assiduously recorded, their faces plainly recognizable. Some of the lynchings were of victims I’d heard about, others were news to us.
The horror increased with just about every picture. Before we were through, we’d seen the faces of many prominent Eudora citizens enjoying a night out, a night of murder and mayhem.
What a record of guilt! What amazing evidence! I couldn’t take the pictures down fast enough.
“Just put ’em all in the box,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”
“No, y’all can stay,” I heard.
Chapter 117
THE BLACK CURTAIN was yanked aside, and the studio flooded with light. At first I couldn’t make out who they were, but there were five of them. Their torches were much brighter than our lantern, and they dazzled us.
“I don’t recall inviting any of you folks here,” a voice said. That high nasal whine had to be Scooter Willems’s.
As he moved his torch I saw them all.
Two men with guns whom I didn’t recognize.
Phineas Eversman, chief of police.
And Senator Richard Nottingham, Elizabeth’s husband.
“Go ahead and finish packing up,” said Nottingham, waving his pistol. “Saves us having to do it.”
