Let the Circle Be Unbroken by Mildred D. Taylor Page A

screamed. The courtroom erupted in sporadic clapping. Judge Havershack ordered immediate silence, then thanked the jury members for their fine service and dismissed them. T.J. he remanded to the hands of Sheriff Dobbs to be taken at the first opportunity to the state penitentiary at Parchman. Then he stood, adjourning the court, and left. The white courtgoers spilled from the building. Mr. and Mrs. Avery, Reverend Gabson, Mr. Silas Lanier, and the others stayed seated in their tiny corner until beckoned by Mr. Jamison to come forward.
    T.J. still sat in the courtroom. He showed no emotion at all, not crying, not talking. When he had stood for the verdict, he had looked as if he had not heard it and, since he had sat again, had not moved. Now as his mother reached him, throwing her arms around him and crying as she had done the night he had been almost lynched, it must have hit him that he had been found guilty, for he let out a mournful yelp like a wounded animal, hunted, captured, and now about to die.
    We couldn’t watch anymore.
    “Little Man, Christopher-John, Cassie, go on down,” Stacey said. We obeyed him and he followed with Moe, Little Willie, and Clarence.
    “Yeah, jus’ like I figured,” said the old man who had sat under the tree throughout the ordeal. “Trial or lynching, it always be’s the same. Sho’ is. Always the same. . . .”
    Mr. Jamison came out from the courthouse and over to where we were. His face was drawn and his eyes bloodshot. “We can go now,” he said.
    “Mr. Jamison,” said Stacey, his voice sounding hoarse,“we—we wanna see T.J. ’fore we go.” He paused as Mr. Jamison studied him. “We gotta do that.”
    Mr. Jamison nodded toward the corner of the courthouse. “They’ll be bringing him out that side door to take him back to jail.”
    We went—Stacey, Christopher-John, Little Man, Moe Turner, Clarence Hopkins, Little Willie Wiggins, and I—to the door to wait. Others waited there too, curious to see the prisoner. Shortly the door opened and Sheriff Dobbs and Deputy Sheriff Haynes came out. T.J. was between them. There were irons on his ankles now, making him shuffle when he walked, and his hands had been cuffed behind him, making him look even more like the prisoner he was.
    Stacey cleared his throat. “Hey, T.J.,” he said.
    At first there was no response from T.J. His head was lowered; his eyes saw no one.
    “T.J. It’s Stacey. We all come. . . .”
    Slowly, T.J. raised his head. The dark eyes brightened in recognition, and for a moment the smile that had once come so easily flashed across his face, making me forget how much I had disliked this frail, frightened boy. Before any more could be said, Deputy Sheriff Haynes shoved his way through the crowd, taking T.J. with him. Looking back over his shoulder at us, T.J. smiled one last time, then the smile and he were gone as he bowed his head and walked on. Tears stung my eyes and he blurred before me.
    We were never to see T.J. again.

  4  
    Winter came in days that were gray and still. They were the kind of days in which people locked in their animals and then themselves and nothing seemed to stir but the smoke curling upward from clay chimneys and an occasional red-winged blackbird which refused to be grounded. And it was cold. Not the windy cold like Uncle Hammer said swept the northern winter, but a frosty, idle cold that seeped across a hot land ever looking toward the days of green and ripening fields, a cold that lay uneasy during its short stay as it crept through the cracks of poorly constructed wooden houses and forced the people inside huddled around ever-burning fires to wish it gone.
    Through these days the boys and I continued to trudge to school and, once there, to scramble for one of the two potbellied stoves which warmed each building. After putting in our eight hours, we trudged home again. Uncle Hammer, Papa’s older brother, came Christmas Eve, but the day after Christmas he was gone