From Place to Place | Page 8

bodies. The belief of the negroes that
this unholy traffic existed amounted with them to a profound
conviction. They held Mr. Dramm in an awesome and horrified
veneration, bowing to him most respectfully when they met him, and
then sidling off hurriedly. It would have taken strong horses to drag any
black-skinned resident of Chickaloosa to the portals of the little
three-roomed frame cottage in the outskirts of the town which Uncle
Tobe tenanted. Therefore he lived by himself, doing his own skimpy
marketing and his own simple housekeeping. Loneliness was a part of
the penalty he paid for following the calling of a gallowsmith.
Among members of his own race he had no close friends. For the most
part the white people did not exactly shun him, but, as the saying goes
in the Southwest, they let him be. They were well content to enshrine
him as a local celebrity, and ready enough to point him out to visitors,
but by an unwritten communal law the line was drawn there. He was as
one set apart for certain necessary undertakings, and yet denied the
intimacy of his kind because he performed them acceptably. If his aloof
and solitary state ever distressed him, at least he gave no outward sign
of it, but went his uncomplaining way, bearing himself with a homely,
silent dignity, and enveloped in those invisible garments of superstition
which local prejudice and local ignorance had conjured up.
Ready as he was when occasion suited, to justify his avocation in the

terms of that same explanation which he had given to the young
reporter from St. Louis that time, and greatly though he may have
craved to gain the good-will of his fellow citizens, he was never known
openly to rebel against his lot. The nearest he ever came to doing this
was once when he met upon the street a woman of his acquaintance
who had suffered a recent bereavement in the death of her only
daughter. He approached her, offering awkward condolences, and at
once was moved to a further expression of his sympathy for her in her
great loss by trying to shake her hand. At the touch of his fingers to
hers the woman, already in a mood of grief bordering on hysteria,
shrank back screaming out that his hand smelled of the soap with which
he coated his gallows-nooses. She ran away from him, crying out as she
ran, that he was accursed; that he was marked with that awful smell and
could not rid himself of it. To those who had witnessed this scene the
hangman, with rather an injured and bewildered air, made explanation.
The poor woman, he said, was wrong; although in a way of speaking
she was right, too. He did, indeed, use the same yellow bar soap for
washing his hands that he used for anointing his ropes. It was a good
soap, and cheap; he had used the same brand regularly for years in
cleansing his hands. Since it answered the first purpose so well, what
possible harm could there be in slicking the noose of the rope with it
when he was called upon to conduct one of his jobs over up at the
prison? Apparently he was at a loss to fathom the looks they cast at him
when he had finished with this statement and had asked this question.
He began a protest, but broke off quickly and went away shaking his
head as though puzzled that ordinarily sane folks should be so
squeamish and so unreasonable. But he kept on using the soap as
before.
* * * * *
Until now this narrative has been largely preamble. The real story
follows. It concerns itself with the birth of an imagination.
In his day Uncle Tobe hanged all sorts and conditions of men--men
who kept on vainly hoping against hope for an eleventh-hour reprieve
long after the last chance of reprieve had vanished, and who on the

gallows begged piteously for five minutes, for two minutes, for one
minute more of precious grace; negroes gone drunk on religious
exhortation who died in a frenzy, sure of salvation, and shouting out
halleluiahs; Indians upborne and stayed by a racial stoicism; Chinamen
casting stolid, slant-eyed glances over the rim of the void before them
and filled with the calmness of the fatalist who believes that whatever
is to be, is to be; white men upon whom at the last, when all prospect of
intervention was gone, a mental numbness mercifully descended with
the result that they came to the rope's embrace like men in a walking
coma, with glazed, unseeing eyes, and dragging feet; other white men
who summoned up a mockery of bravado and uttered poor jests from
between lips drawn back in defiant sneering