Anatomy of Injustice Read Online Free PDF Page B

open one eye and say to the visitor, with a smile, “I got my eye on you.”
    Edward was “soft-voiced,” a teacher noted on his report card. He “likes school—likes playing ball—dislikes spelling most.” Even though he couldn’t do the work, teachers promoted him through the third and fourth grades. In fifth grade, he dropped out, barely able to read at a second-grade level. He was fourteen but said he was sixteen in order to get a job at the J.P. Stevens textile plant in Abbeville. The machine he worked on would have to be shut down occasionally because of mistakes he made. He didn’t like the noise or being inside, and he quit. He wanted to try school again. He was sixteen and school officialsthought the other fifth-graders would laugh at him, so they put him into the eighth grade at Wright Middle School. There was no way he could handle that level of work, and after twelve days he dropped out.
    As an adult, Elmore would not be able to tell time or draw a clock. He didn’t understand the concept of north, south, east, and west or of summer, fall, winter, and spring. He briefly had a checking account but was unable to do the elementary math necessary to have enough in the bank to cover the checks he would write. He never lived on his own. He gave his money to his mother and a girlfriend to pay his bills, as he didn’t know how.
    He was, however, a steady, trustworthy handyman. He was taken on by Clarence Aiken, a black general contractor who lived on the rough side—he had been shot in a bar brawl and had lost an arm in an automobile accident. Aiken trusted Elmore with the keys to the Abbeville County Courthouse when they were cleaning there. Elmore worked for two weeks cleaning and painting inside the palatial Spartanburg home of Roger Milliken, the textile magnate and one of the richest men in the South. There were never any complaints about his work or his stealing anything.
    Elmore worked hard, doing chores around people’s homes in some of the most fashionable neighborhoods of Greenwood. In a good week, in good weather, he might earn $600; most of the time he earned between $200 and $300. Many of his customers were elderly widows, friends and neighbors of Dorothy Edwards’s. They liked him. “He was a black man that southern women got along with,” recalled James Bradford, a lawyer. Elmore painted and did odd jobs for Bradford’s mother and his mother-in-law. He was polite, deferential, sweet-natured—in a word, he was “servile,” as blacks were supposed to be. Slight of build, he was not at all physically threatening.
    Elmore’s history was notably void of any clashes with the law. He was never arrested for drugs or drinking. Indeed, he had no criminal record whatsoever, except for a few minor charges arising out of fights with his girlfriend, Mary Dunlap.
    They had met at the Depot, a Greenwood nightclub. “Oh, he’s so handsome,” she said to her girlfriend when she saw him in the crowd. He was taut and had an Afro with a slight reddish tint. She was five foot six, lithe, and beautiful. He came over, introduced himself, and asked her to dance. “That done it, he was my date for the night,” she remembered, a glint in her eyes even many years later. She invited him back to her apartment. He was proper. They had a couple of beers, and he left.
    A week later, she saw him again at the Depot. “That night he stayed over,” she says. Their relationship had begun. She was eight years older and married, with two small children. After she separated from her husband, Elmore moved in. She lived in the Greenwood Gardens Apartments, a small complex of two-story buildings on the south side—the black side—of Greenwood. Mary’s apartment, on the ground floor, had two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen—and three televisions. Elmore brought all his clothes; Mary didn’t need a second closet for them.
    It was a tempestuous relationship. She was temperamental. He was jealous. “He just wanted me