Cemetery Siege

"Open up!" ordered the Sheriff of Orange County, rapping at the front door of a rickety ten-room frame house next to Gordonsville, Va.'s cemetery one afternoon last week. The answer was a rifle crack. A bullet plowed through the door straight into the sheriff's heart. Leaving his body crumpled on the porch, his two companions turned and fled, sure now that the old Negro cemetery caretaker, William Walles, and his old sister Cora, had gone completely mad.

Ordered out of the house some days before, Caretaker null and sister had refused to budge, had begun patrolling the place with rifles and revolvers in their hands Last week a white woman complained that William Walles had threatened her with a gun. The Orange County sheriff swore out a lunacy warrant, went to bring the pair in.

His corpse was still on the porch when a detachment of State police appeared. Popping away from second-story windows, the crazy blackamoors would not let them get near it. As darkness fell the sheriff's brother made a rush, was stopped by a bullet in his cheek.

News of the siege swept over the countryside. Blue Ridge mountaineers swarmed down with squirrel guns. State troopers brought machine guns. Townsmen arrived with rifles, pistols, shotguns. Searchlights on Orange County fire trucks flickered across the house's blank, ominous face. Soon, crouched behind trees, knolls and fences, a posse of some 300 men were sending a crackling thunder of gunfire rolling through the peaceful hills. Yet the beleaguered blacks inside the house held firm. One after another five policemen and a countryman went down with bullets in their flesh.

As the siege went on hour after hour, the baffled crowd began to yap and howl like hounds at a treed possum. Tear gas fumes were whiffed away by a sharp breeze. Hurled torches fell short of their mark. Then, early in the sixth hour, a State trooper took off his shirt, soaked it in gasoline, inched up to an outbuilding, lighted the shirt, tossed it into the shed. Up it blazed and the breeze swept the flames across to the house. The tindery old clapboards went up with a roar.

Cora Walles bobbed up at a blazing window, crumpled in a hail of machine-gun bullets. Moment later the roof collapsed and William Walles ran squealing to the porch. A burst of bullets toppled him back into the fire.

Two hours later, when the embers had grown cool enough, members of the posse raked out the Negroes' bodies, sliced off bits of roasted flesh, carved out pieces of blackened bone to take home for souvenirs.

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