Within two weeks the men were on trial for rape before Lydia Cantwell’s father and an all-white jury. Judge Hargrave ruled out evidence of prostitution. Three days later the blacks were found guilty and sentenced to death. In a riptide of publicity, against all reason except politics, clemency was denied. In January 1939, appeals exhausted, both men were electrocuted.

I finished too wrung out to look back at the pictures. But, two cigarettes later, I did.

The trial had been well covered. Judge, jurors, spectators, and accused had been amply photographed, and the writer had chosen with care. White spectators in bow ties or overalls stared from history’s fever swamp, dim eyes seeing nothing of how time would view them. Lydia’s father presided from his hand-carved bench, mouth a dutiful line. Northern newsmen in hats were there for another glimpse of the Sahara of the Bozart. The two black men leaned away from their white lawyer. Outside the spired courthouse the family of the blacksmith, Moses McCarroll, waited. A wife and a small boy.

I stopped there. There was something wrong with the picture. Something else.

I went to the kitchen and pulled a glassine bag of marijuana from the cabinet. Then I got a bowl and strainer and set them with the bag on the kitchen table. I sat down, opening the bag to put some of the brown, dirt-smelling dope in the strainer. I rubbed it back and forth until only seeds were left and the dope was fine powder in the bowl. Then I went to a drawer for the roller, put in powder and paper, licked the paper, and rolled a joint the size of a Lucky Strike. I did that twice. Then I pushed the excess powder from the bowl to the bag, and put away bag, roller, and paper. The two joints went with me to the porch.

There was nothing outside but crickets and a moon and wet, dank air. I lit a joint, lay back on the wicker couch, and smoked and slipped away into the second joint, and then the crickets were all around me …

I was trapped. The pictures roared around dark corners in an express train of white streaks and flashes. The back of my eyes and neck hurt like too much whiskey but the pictures wouldn’t stop.

Lydia Cantwell’s blue shoes matched her dress, but her tongue came from a rictus smile. Then a black man twisted with orange lightning while a small boy watched and I stood back. The man kept on shaking until my father threw me the baseball, beneath the elms in back.

It was all right, I remembered that. I could even feel the stitches as I threw it back to him, though he was quite pale. “You’ll be a pitcher, then,” he said.

But I knew now. “No sir, I want to be a policeman. Like you.”

My father looked concerned and held the ball. “But why, Adam?”