The Trial of the Small Black Woman

This story is about the case of the murder of a small black woman who never did anything wrong in the first place. The narrator of the story is the one that I thought had killed the woman. The narrator has a bundle of money that he accidentally drops in an alley and he blames the small black woman of stealing the parcel. The narrator goes to the priest and tells him what had happened. The mandal, who is like a magical medium, seeks out the small black woman and places some sort of curse on her saying that the guilty individual will blow up like the inflated animal carcass that they have, and die. Later the narrator finds that he never lost the money and that it was in his pocket the whole time. When he makes such a discovery he is at a loss of what to do. He already told everyone that the small black woman had stolen the money and if he said that he was wrong then he will look like the idiot. Furthermore, if he says that he was wrong it makes the mandal look like a fake and therefore creates this image of weakness of the church. So instead of telling the truth, I think the narrator murders the small black woman to make it appear as though she received her just punishment for stealing, like the mandal and priest said she would. In the end the narrator goes to the woman’s funeral but leaves in a hurry to avoid his guilty conscience regarding the matter. The story shows how even innocent, good people can be wrongfully accused of a crime. It just goes to show how imperfect society functions.