“But one hole in my head that counts, the one through which the Devil drawls my soul.”
-Big Daddy Gleason, to the NBA Ghosters, 1975
It was morning, nine hours on God’s side of the new day, which Whiff and other carneys traditionally believe extends from midnight to sundown, with the Devil granted his due from sundown to midnight. A man slain, abducted, cursed, arrested, or fallen ill between the hours of sundown and midnight was thought to possess a soul hunted by the Devil. Whiff, God judge his soul, believed in such monstrous notions—as superstitious as the next carney he was.
This haunting notion gave him both hope and pause. For had he not spent four accursed hours wheeling, dealing, promising, lying, pleading, begging and dissembling last night, in the Devil’s very shadow? It had taken all the day of Sunday and the day of Monday to secure phone privileges on the White Side, taking until precisely midnight to close the carney’s dozen of necessary deals begun near to eight. Unfortunately, the clincher, the deal he absolutely needed—to have Judge Able hear his client’s case in a special session of negro court in return for this darling consideration and that vision of a smile—had fallen flat when Judge Able had stroked out on the phone, at the mention of Miss Majesty’s charms it seemed…
So now he stood, having done the best a body could do, before Colonel Imbolden’s Courthouse. On the off hope that a local ruling could be made to stay CSA Naval extradition of a colonial marine from the Sovereign State of Maryland on the grounds of States Rights, he had to appeal to a judge. The militia captains and sheriffs that normally heard negro cases on the weekend in otherwise white courts could not make such rulings. Besides, although Whiff was a certified negro—but barely—his client was colored at best, and stood in blatant violation of ancient martial law.
Whiff looked up into the steely eyes of his client as they stood before the antebellum era courthouse with two Maryland Grays standing behind them under the eagle eye of Captain Hayes, the big militia man who handed him over to the black as night NBA Marshal Talbot three mornings gone. His client looked over to the Naval Corrections vehicle—an armored windowless paneled van guarded by a sinister looking Naval Policeman with a pistol grip shotgun slung from his shoulder and dark glasses obscuring his eyes—and then quipped, “Less you can pull Brer Rabbit out of your fancy hat that sombitch will be sinking my carcass to the bottom with a hole in the head by sunup tomorrow. They do us in morning glow so we can see hope die in our soul—rear echelon muvasucas.”
With that low hissing curse ‘Mister Texas’, who had still refused to give up his name, gathered the mucus from his throat with an unsavory gurgle and launched a terrifically arching wad of spittle at the Naval Policeman some ten paces off. The officer calmly moved his head so that the nasty missile splashed across the fender of the van, and intoned in a low dry voice, “You’ll be spittin’ up double-ot buck tomorrow boy.”
As the grays made to push ‘Mister Texas’ forward, awkwardly dressed in one of White Cap’s midway suits that came barely to his wrists and ankles and stretched the seams across the broad coat-hanger shoulders, Whiff put his hand protectively between the shoulder blades of the man who evoked in his heart disgust and dread in equal measure, and hurried him up the stairs to the court of Colonel ‘Whipping Post’ Imbolden; most feared judge of white, colored and negro in the Sovereign Confederate State of Maryland.
“Sir, as my client I advise no more spitting and the abandonment of that sardonic tone you seem so wedded to as an act of expression. The Colonel is the great uncle of the CSA President himself—has killed men in his own courtroom it is said. In fact he won the last duel fought in the history of our nation when he shot down some Yankee bank robber in the lobby of the County Bank and Trust of Towson—gave that no account a chance to draw his pistol rather than arrest him. I’m shaking in my shoes as is—don’t make this any harder than it already is.”
As they neared the great double doors of stained cedar and they opened, he tasted his heart in his throat as the form of Jordy, his former best friend, bodyguard, and carnival boxer, dressed as a court bailiff, held the door open. For Negro Barrister ‘Whiff’ Ben-Samson Gleason was going before the whitest man of a white state to make his case that he should be permitted to plead as a negro, for a colored, in the Whiteman’s court. And the colored fellow he deigned to represent didn’t seem to have a shred of humility in his being, shouldering by Jordy with the whispered snarl of “Make way boy,” simmering up from his savage soul.
Thank you Lord for seeing fit to give Jordy employ so soon after his firing—I wish so that it had not been.
Jordy for his part fairly glared at Whiff as he passed his best and only friend not two days after firing him for being an honor-bound champion of Whiff’s own hopeless cause.
I deserve that I do. Yet it still hurts—and all the more for being true. Wait, I could market that—perhaps as a white country song about a dog done died and a wife done been spied making love with a best friend?
They crossed the threshold of The Man’s inner sanctum, the very precinct Big Daddy Gleason had forever sworn Whiff not to cross ‘in any fool capacity’, to see to the left his hand of human cards, in the form of those folks summoned in the Devil’s hours last night. To the right stood the drug-peddling Union’s evil hand in the form of the Special Naval Council and policemen. Straight ahead—upon and behind his high bench—sat Colonel Wade Imbolden. Colonel Imbolden was the last judge in all the Confederate States of America to not only continue to hold court in his ancestral home, but to keep a whipping post out back for the dispensation of justice for which he judged the ‘bleeding heart sentiments of the law’ inadequate. He was famously known to hear appeals armed—and so he was.
Whiff felt a rush of excitement evoked by the sight of men in living history uniforms, which ever brought to mind his famous hero-saving ancestor, Uncle Ben Samson. The Colonel was near eighty and dressed like Robert E. Lee himself, a picture of the combative Confederate gentleman officer of old; white hair combed back, white mustache handle-barred below his cheeks, and his white beard trimmed to a devilish point, a point greased in black pomade.
Whiff had banked on making the dramatic last minute entrance, which appeared to be his latest in a series of uncharacteristic and critical miscalculations, for The Colonel’s blazing hazel eyes beamed down at him like motes from hell, and his gavel served to guide his fixed stare as he intoned, “So boy it’s not enough to bring your negro concerns and colored trash up in my court room. But you so choose to do it according to the negro clock as well?”
Whiff hesitated to gather the best possible answer into his tentatively opening mouth. The gavel came down with a crash and the old man’s voice boomed with surprising verve and vigor, “That’s one boy. Now sit your uppity self down.”
As he sat he noticed off to the right, beyond the Yankee-schooled Naval Lawyer and the three statue-like Naval Police, a sight that gave him pause to consider a possible betrayal, to wonder if Big Daddy Gleason’s sins had not been wiped clean in the eyes of the NBA, but were being applied to his person as well. On the right of the courtroom, where the soul-driving persecutors of the accused traditionally took their accusatory place, stood Marshal Talbot, regarding Whiff with eyes of disdain as he held the back of the cripplechair of Notary Council. The presence of this pale palsied person marked for the first time in Whiff’s considerable memory the presence of an NBA Notary in such a court.
So much for brotherhood it seems. Good Lord Whiff, you have done it now!
