Never a Number
A journalist, a murderer, an improbable friendship
Twelve
#1057564
The Henry County Jail as a rule frowned on contact visits for felons awaiting transfer to the Virginia Department of Corrections system, an unofficial policy waived by Sheriff C.P. Witt as a favor to his brother who recognized the defendant in my Bulletin trial story as a day laborer he occasionally recruited to pick tobacco in fields on the other side of the North Carolina line.
Car ownership being a luxury few could afford in the rural corner of the county where Ben Brim lived, Witt’s brother asked a friend to give his mother and sister a lift to the jail from their shack in Mayo, 18 miles away.
The want of transportation had, in fact, kept Isabelle Brim from attending the murder trial that resulted in a judge sending her son away for life - an absence that decades later contributed to Roscoe Reynolds recalling the proceeding as the only time in his tenure as Commonwealth’s Attorney that not a single individual showed up to support the victim or defendant.
The great granddaughter of Henry Burgess - born into slavery in 1822, Isabelle Burgess Brim brought ten children into the world, the youngest five taking the surname of Ben Brim Sr.
Home for a fair portion of their childhoods was a single room without running water or reliable electrical service. An outhouse addressed one issue; extension cords stretched from the residence of an empathetic neighbor intermittently addressed another.
The Brim siblings shared a bed: Ben (1954) and Paul (1957) vertically at the top and bottom as Willie Mae (1958), Shirley (1960), and Jessie (1962) slept horizontally in the middle.
Each child as he or she came of age was expected to forage wood for the stove that doubled as a source of heat and cooking fuel - a daily chore that came to include hauling water-filled milk jugs uphill to the shack from Jumping Brook Creek (without spilling a drop) as they grew stronger.
Their mother saw to it that the children began the school year with used clothes and shoes from local charities, threadbare attire and footwear all had outgrown by the time winter settled in.
Isabelle, when possible, supported the family cleaning upscale homes along Mulberry Road, a fashionable Martinsville address for the families of mid-to-high-level executives of local furniture (Bassett, Stanley, American of Martinsville), textile (Fieldcrest) and chemical manufacturers (duPont).
Getting to work however meant hitching a ride the 12 miles from Mayo to Fayette Street, the city’s Black neighborhood, in time to catch the area’s sole source of public transit: A bus that deposited domestic workers at stops along Mulberry Road by morning and returned them to Fayette Street at the end of their shifts in late afternoon.
Struggling to keep food on the table, Isabelle dispatched Ben and Paul to snag catfish from the creek when her meager off-the-table wages and public assistance didn’t go far enough to feed a family of six.
Ben Brim Sr. visited his children infrequently, and rarely sober. Huddled in bed after dark, they tried to ignore the stirrings that meant their parents were engaging in two possible activities on the other side of the room - physical activity that frequently resulted in Ben Junior silently taking note of the bruising around his mother’s eyes come morning.
* * *
The county corrections officer unlocked Brim’s handcuffs.
“Few minutes, Ben,” he said, opening the door to the conference room where his mother and 14-year-old Jessie waited at a small attorney-client consultation table.
Isabelle apologized for not following up on a promise to attend the trial two days before.
Brim turned his attention to Jessie, ignoring traces of moonshine on his mother’s breath.
The bond shared by the oldest and youngest Brim siblings overlooked the unacknowledged likelihood of Jessie being Ben’s half-sister. Eight years older, Ben had been the father largely absent from her life, as his own father had largely been absent from his.
Awkward silences met Ben’s attempts to lighten the mood with brotherly banter and gentle teasing. Questions to Isabelle about Paul and Willie Mae pointedly omitted mention of Shirley, the sister he suspected of cooperating with investigators the day Lum Moore was discovered lying in a pool of blood.
The knock on the door twinned dread with a measure of relief for a family struggling to find words.
“Time, Ben,” the CO said.
Brim stood. A reserved embrace of Isabelle dissolved into sobs as Ben cradled Jessie until a gentle tap to the shoulder announced it was time return to his cell.
Shackled at the arms, legs and waist, Brim and two fellow inmates the following week ducked into the fortified prison van fueled and ready to transport them to their next destination.
The driver bolted the leg chains to floor anchors, loosened the waist restraints, and handed each man a soda bottle should they need to relieve themselves on the four-hour journey to a correctional facility once characterized by the ACLU as the “most shameful prison in America.”
Richmond’s Virginia State Prison was the site of 247 executions from the time it housed its first inmate in 1800 until the last departed in 1991.
Designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the architect of the U.S. Capitol (who won out over a design by Thomas Jefferson), the penitentiary counted Alexander Hamilton duelist and third vice president of the United States Aaron Burr, (awaiting trial for treason) among its former residents.
In addition to housing upwards of 3,000 offenders (three times the capacity of the original structure), Virginia State, doubled as an intake center for the statewide correctional system when the van carrying Brim arrived there in 1976.
The transfer of custody from the county to the DOC ran through a perfunctory physical, a briefing with an intake counselor and a vague promise of a timely transfer to an extended incarceration facility - a process that ended with the Commonwealth of Virginia assigning Ben Brim the seven digits - #1057564 - he would shoulder into the third decade of the 21st Century.