TheBanyanTree: There was a day when...

[R J Fernalld]

....this story based on truth would have been too inflammatory to be made public in the US.

I do believe she was the kindest person I ever met in person.
Something like a nun, or one of those charity women that does things
for folks, but in secret, ya know? She came from someplace else, an
out of towner. Funny, she lived in that green house on Spring Street
for years as housekeeper for Old Man Eckles, but it didn't matter
none...she came to town from somewhere else. That made her an outsider.

She might have handsome I suppose...once. The widows peak and
long straight nose gave her a severe appearance, but it was those soft brown eyes that made her face compelling. Her way was to look into a person, not at them. Was like she could see your upsets or fears without you even letting on. Don't recall anyone ever saying mean things about her that's what makes what happened so hard, but I can't remember anyone talking much about her at all. She was a fixture, a constant that we quietly counted on like the heart of us. We needed her compassion toward us, but we didn't often understand it, and we never  admitted it.

It was a hot night in August of 1870 when many discovered that without her folks were lost. You know the kind os night...when the heat makes your ears ring, your heart swells and sweats and the mind just hovers above it all. Up on the knoll above the courthouse, came one chilling wail, that caught the wind and floated down across the empty town square and into the fears of us all. My daddy turned toward the porch and deftly took his shotgun off the gunrack in the hall.

"Keep the young'un inside," he said without looking at Mama.

He strode out into the night carried along on another steamy breeze toward the knoll. I could smell fear from Mama.

I sneaked out the upstairs window, as I was wont to do when confined to the house, and I followed my daddy up the knoll at a safe distance from his hound dog ears. And I tell you, what I saw when I got to the top...I ain't never forgot.

Her unmoving body was hanging on an old dead oak on the far side of that clearing. Those eyes were open and in the light of the torches all the towns menfolk were holding, those dead eyes seemed to shine. At the edge of the bracken where I was hiding, I could hear the men. They were...laughing! All except my daddy. His 
wrinkled face also seemed to sparkle in the torchlight. I could see twas tears on my daddy's cheeks that caught the fire! My daddy cryin'? I shivered so in that bracken I began to think they'd discover me there.

"I'm tellin' you, Frank, there was no other way."

"Damn you!" my daddy sobbed as his legs went weak and he fell to the ground.

"She was a threat to all that's right in this town. I don't give a damn how long she's been here! She shouldastayed back in that hole she came from! Its done, Frank. We saved your sorry ass. Get the hell up offathe ground and get home to your family!"

My mind went numb. For all my sixteen years she had been someone I admired, and there she was hanging from the tree I used to climb. Daddy's sobs lay gently on the air with the heat. His wail sang of love for this womanwho was not my mama. In that moment I somehow came to admire him.

I whispered my goodby to the man whose heart was broken and to she whose neck had been broken by the "holier than thou". From the safety of a small town a thousand  tears and bout a hundred miles away, I called upon that county's sherrif and told what I seen...telling every name except my daddy's. 

She was black, once somebody's bought and sold slave, and her crime was to love and be loved by my southern white daddy.

I stayed away from that town but my heart never left. Some sixty years later I still remember her sweet soft eyes, and my daddy's wailing heart.

copyright R J Fernalld 2006

The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the stupidity of your action.