The Vain Conversation , livre ebook

The Vain Conversation
Pat Conroy, Editor at Large
THE
VAIN CONVERSATION
A NOVEL
ANTHONY GROOMS
FOREWORD BY
AFTERWORD BY
CLARENCE MAJOR
T. GERONIMO JOHNSON

The University of South Carolina Press
© 2018 Anthony Grooms
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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ISBN 978-1-61117-882-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-61117-883-8 (ebook)
Cover design by Faceout Studio, Charles Brock
Imagery by ThinkStock
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Dedicated to the memory of Alberta Grooms Ford, beloved family storyteller, and to George and Mae Murray Dorsey, Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, and Clinton Adams
Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers.
The First Epistle of Peter, 1:18
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
H.L. Mencken, Prejudices (1922)
But what has our 230-year national experience been but a dialogue about race?
David Mamet, “We Can’t Stop Talking about Race in America” (2009)
Also by Anthony Grooms
Bombingham: A Novel Trouble No More: Stories Ice Poems
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PART ONE: RIVER OF JOY
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
PART TWO: IF I PERISH
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
PART THREE: THE REDEMPTIONER
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
PART FOUR: THE REDEEMER
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
AFTERWORD
FOREWORD
W illa Cather in Death Comes for The Archbishop was able to create imaginary conversations and actions that gave her main character (based on Father Jean Marie Latour) and story depth and motivation, metaphors and textures, a sense of fullness and believability, that may not have been accessible to her had she written the book as a biography restricted to facts and speculation.
Truman Capote’s decision to write In Cold Blood as a “non-fiction novel” gave him a similar freedom to create a fictional truth out of facts that may have, by their very strict nature, placed limitations on Capote’s ability to tell a fully rounded story complete with details that facts alone could never render.
The same can be said of other books based on real events or real people, such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace , about the Russian aristocracy as it was in 1812; and his Anna Karenina , whose protagonist was based on Anna Pirogova, a young woman who attempted suicide; Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son , based on an article he saw in a newspaper; Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally, about the life of Oskar Schindler during World War II; Agatha Christie’s book, Murder on The Orient Express , and Psycho by Robert Bloch.
Anthony Grooms’ novel The Vain Conversation is based on reported news stories of a murder of four people. Grooms granted himself the same kind of fictive freedom Cather and Capote and the others mentioned above assumed. It gave him the chance to create his own “truth” and fictional reality.
Grooms’ novel is set in the 1940s, before, during and after the war. The reader is brought into the lives of the boy, Lonnie Henson; his father Wayne Henson; the dog Toby; Lonnie’s mother Aileen Henson; Aileen’s Aunty Grace; Wayne’s “colored” friend Betrand Johnson; Mrs. Crookshank, owner of the diner and a reporter; Luellen, Betrand’s wife and his mother Milledge; Beah, the cook at Mrs. Crookshank’s diner; her lover Jimmy Lee; and Vernon Venable, Jimmy Lee’s employer; Sheriff Cook, and a variety of other characters. As characters they have the ring of truth because what they experience sounds familiar to us; we recognize the validity of their lives. We see them come to life.
But what were the facts? Some of the main facts of the case: the murder of the four sharecroppers took place in rural Walton County, Georgia, on July 25, 1946. The victims—shot sixty times—were two couples: Roger Malcolm and his wife Dorothy Malcolm and George W. Dorsey and his wife Mae Murray Dorsey. It’s a fact that four people were murdered on that day.
Both couples were African-American; and despite an FBI reward offer of $12, 500 for information leading to their capture, the murderers were never identified and brought to justice. Mae Murray Dorsey was pregnant at the time, and her body was found with the fetus cut out.
Time magazine, August 5, 1946, reported that Loy Harrison, the employer of some of the victims, reportedly saw the killings. He is quoted: “A big man who was dressed mighty proud in a double-breasted brown suit was giving the orders. He pointed to Roger Malcolm and said, ‘We want that nigger.’ Then he pointed to George Dorsey, my nigger, and said, ‘We want you too, Charlie.’ I said, ‘His name ain’t Charlie, he’s George.’ Someone said ‘Keep your damned big mouth shut. This ain’t your party.”
This is Grooms’ imaginary fictional account:
“The crowd was coming toward them, about fifteen men. Two of them were Cook’s deputies…
“‘There are women in the car,’ Bertrand said. ‘A pregnant woman.’
“All was lost now. All the dream of whatever God had created for them, lost.
“He wondered at that moment why it was that he had been born and survived war, only to meet his fate, here, in his home country.
“A car was pulling up behind them… Oh, God, let her get away. Let her run!… Cook, pointing to Jimmy Lee, was rushing past Jacks…”
Readers looking for the facts will turn to the historical record. Readers who want the experience of an imaginative version with depth and nuance and fully developed characters to carry the story will find satisfaction in Anthony Grooms’ novel. It is a fine novel, beautifully written.
He explores the subject for all it is worth. And the novel exists independently of the set of facts regarding the mass murder that inspired it. The reader need not know anything about the actual murders because this is a work of art—a work of art that earns its rightful place (to borrow words from William Faulkner’s Nobel “Banquet Speech”) as “something that did not exist before.”
It is a novel I will never forget. Its lessons are deep. Those who turn to this book will come away with a greater understanding of human nature. This book should also be seen as a true testament to what Georgia and the Deep South generally were like before and during the 1940s.
Clarence Major
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to family and friends, ancestors and descendants, whose love and guidance have formed a great circle of spirit that encourages me to embrace the adventure that is life. Especially I am grateful to my wife, Pamela B. Jackson and our son, Ben, for all you do to make my life busy, full of laughter and wonder.
I am especially grateful to William Wright, poet and editor, for his encouragement and advocacy; to J.D. Scott, photographer, for his artistry and generosity; and, to Pam Durban, novelist and teacher, for her insight and support. Also, I am grateful to Clarence Major, T. Geronimo Johnson, Joe Taylor, Gray Stewart, Tayari Jones, Jonathan Haupt, and Dianne and Ernest Baines for their advice and support of my vision.
“Bye and Bye” is a traditional folk spiritual. “Tobacco is a Dirty Weed” was written by Graham Lee Hemminger, and was first published in The Penn State Froth in November, 1915.
PART ONE
RIVER OF JOY
ONE
B lackberries. Blackberries . The boy’s head was filling up with blackberries. He had moved slowly, deeper and deeper, into the bramble, until he was surrounded by it. The tangle of vines arched above and around him so that it seemed he had entered a cave of brambles. A gift from God , the boy thought. Light dappled through the vines. The thicket swayed gently in the breeze and the fine thorns scratched against him. He didn’t care. He was in the world of blackberries.
He knew how to step through the bramble to avoid a serious scratching, and how to share the bramble with a black snake or a ringed king snake. Thrashes and chickadees and sometimes a more brilliant bird like a yellow finch might land on a vine, bowing it and then springing to another. Only the ticks bothered him. They hid in the brittlegrass and broomsedge that edged the thicket. He rolled his pants to his knees, and let them crawl up his naked calves until he could see them and pick them off.
He left his pail at the edge of the patch and with his cup in front of him balanced on one leg and leaned over the briars to the nests of plump berries. They were so fat that three of them filled his palm—and the season was just beginning. In spite of his eating one for every three he kept, the pail was filling, nearly a gallon, and he had only been picking half an hour.
A shadow passed over and he looked up to see a turkey vulture. He liked them. They were like kites, the way they sailed on a breeze. Once,