MINNIE FLETCHER
The night of the first cross burning on Cherokee Ridge, well past midnight of a warm night in May, three men knocked on Minnie Fletcher’s door to request her services. Miss Minnie got out of bed and put on a house robe and came to the door. Such late night calls were not unusual for Miss Minnie.
She lived in a house out at the edge of town where she grew her garden and kept a milk cow and some laying hens and raised a few pigs each year, like most people in these parts. But also like everybody on the mountain she needed at least some income, so she provided a most unusual service. Miss Minnie could talk the fire out of you.
Everybody on the mountain knew that if you got burned the most expedient and the cheapest way to get relief was to go to Miss Minnie. Her emergency room was wherever she chose to see you when you got there; sometimes it would be her porch, sometimes her living room, sometimes her kitchen, sometimes her garden. It didn’t matter, and she took all comers. Miss Minnie always said there was no charge for her services because it was God that gave her the ability to “talk the far outcha”, but almost everybody who came for help left a few coins on her porch or the kitchen table when they left. Those who didn’t have any coins to leave would come back in a few days with a string of fish, or a rabbit they had just caught and dressed, or other produce of the mountain, including an occasional pint jar of a clear liquid that just about everybody around these parts appreciated, including Miss Minnie.
Miss Minnie’s place was the only fully integrated institution on the mountain at the time. If a Negro was there first and then a Cherokee and then a hifalutin White Man arrived, the order in which she performed her healing art was Negro, Cherokee, hifalutin White Man. Everyone was fine with that. Her place was neutral territory; those who came to her place came for relief from pain. They did not come to fight or to belittle anyone else who might be there, and so she was able to provide her services to all who came, and she never refused her services to anyone. She would even let these people use the telephone that hung on the wall in her living room next to the kitchen door. This was completely out of the question for most white people on the mountain; they would not allow Negroes or Cherokee to talk into their telephone for fear of catching something.
If the burn was blistered real bad, or if the skin was gone and you could see the quick, Miss Minnie would go ahead and talk the pain out of you and smear some lard or butter on the wound and then send you to the doctor so he could work on you and try to keep you from getting infected. She couldn’t do anything about infection. Even the doctors in town recognized that her ministrations were as successful as theirs, and perhaps even more successful, with burns that didn’t destroy the skin. The consensus in the medical community was that somehow Miss Minnie had acquired the ability to hypnotize; since she frequently sent bad burns to the hospital or to local physicians, they respected her and accepted her as a healer. They simply could not argue with her results. Unlike these licensed professional healers, however, Miss Minnie owed no duty of secrecy or confidentiality to anyone.
Miss Minnie flipped the porch light on and looked through the screen at the three men standing at her front door.
“Howdy Miss Minnie. I’m Johnny Mitchell from over on Mitchell’s Ridge. This here’s Milton and he just got his hand burned purdy bad and he needs for ya to talk the far outn’ it if ya will. This here other fella’s a friend o’ ours from over in Barlow County. Name’s Lester.”
She looked at their faces in the porch light; she didn’t know any of them. She opened the screen door. “Come on in and take a seat here in the living room. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Miss Minnie went into her bedroom and shut the door; she took her chamber pot from under her bed and squatted on it. The men could hear her urinating. After a few moments she came back into the living room and motioned for Johnny to pull up a chair by hers and have Milton sit down.
“Hold your hand out here so I can see it.”
She looked carefully. The burn covered his entire hand. Skin had already started peeling away from the quick. Milton was agitated but he was trying to control himself and not show his pain.
“This is pretty bad. What happened?”
“We wuz just having some fun over at one of the Cherokee farms and Milton spilled some gas on his hand when he wuz splashin’ it on the cross, and then when he struck the match his hand and his sleeve caught far – just kinda flashed right up and then kept on burning. He was jumping around screaming still standing right next to the cross so several of us jumped on him and jerked him away so the rest of’im wouldn’ catch on far.”
Miss Minnie looked at Milton’s face and attempted to look into his eyes but he looked away. She began passing her hand in a circular motion over his hand and chanting in a low voice. She finally was able to look Milton in the eye as she continued chanting for several minutes. Milton began to calm down and after awhile he appeared to be no longer in pain. Lester watched.
“Shore looks like he’s better,” Lester said to Johnny. “But I betcha he won’t be strikin’ the matches over at the Rogers place tomorrow night. That hand’s a mess.” He grinned and looked at Milton’s hand and then at Miss Minnie. Two of his front teeth were missing, one on top and one on the bottom. He looked proudly at Johnny. Johnny glared at him.
The Rogers place was a little farm over on Cherokee Ridge just outside of Cherokee Town, a grouping of habitations where some of the Cherokee people lived and had their gardens and backyard livestock. Some claimed that those Rogers were part of the same roots as the Will Rogers family out in Oklahoma but nobody ever bothered to trace it back. The Cherokee people on our mountain were descendants of those who had avoided the forced removal to the western Indian lands a hundred years before, either by hiding or by exemption because they lived on private lands instead of Indian lands. Their number had increased considerably since the Trail of Tears; they were now back up to about five percent of the total population. They were good hard-working folk that stayed out of trouble and took care of their own. Miss Minnie had talked the fire out of many of them over the years, and over the years some of their old people had taught her many of their herbal remedies.
“No, I don’t believe he will either,” Miss Minnie said as she stood. “Wait here a minute while I go mix’im up a lard salve to rub over it till he can go to the doctor. But before I do ya’ll need to listen to me – he needs to go straight from here to the doctor ‘cause that hand can get bad infected. We can go ahead and call the doctor now. Ya’ll can use my phone.”
“I’ll letcha put the lard on, but I ain’t gonna be goin’ to no doctor,” Milton said.
Miss Minnie glanced at Milton and with a nod and the faintest hint of a smile she stepped into her kitchen. She returned a few minutes later with a paper cup in her hand.
“I’ve fixed you up some burn salve here. Your hand won’t hurt for another ten or fifteen minutes after you leave here. You need to let your hand be calming for another five minutes or so after you leave here and then take a blob of this here salve in your good hand and smear it all over your burned hand real quick so it won’t hurt so bad while you’re rubbing it on. If it’s hurtin’ too bad, get one of these here boys to rub it on for you. But it shouldn’ be hurtin’ yet at that point. And you be sure you go straight from here to the doctor. He’ll give you something for your pain when you get there. You can get to the hospital from here easy in fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“I’ll rub it on myself and I ain’t goin’ to no doctor. My mama used to use butter. You sure this lard’ll work?”
Miss Minnie handed him the paper cup containing the salve. “It’ll work.”
The men stood and Johnny laid four quarters on the table next to the lamp.
“I’m tellin’ ya now young man, you’re gonna need to see a doctor for that hand less’n you want to lose it.”
Milton smirked, and the men got in their pickup truck and left.
Miss Minnie picked up the phone and called the hospital and told the shift nurse in the emergency room that a young man with a badly burned hand would be arriving in about forty-five minutes. The nurse asked her why it would take so long for them to get there being as how her place wasn’t fifteen minutes from the hospital. Miss Minnie told her it was because they weren’t going to be going there straight from her place, that they were heading out to Mitchell’s Ridge first but after about twenty minutes of driving they would be turning around and heading back into town to go to the hospital. She said they would be driving a lot faster coming back into town so they should be arriving at the hospital in just about forty-five minutes.
* * *
Johnny drove out of town and soon the men were on the narrow curving roads leading to Mitchell’s Ridge and Johnny’s place where the men were staying. They didn’t speak. After about five minutes of hard driving and a few miles down the road, Johnny pulled over and stopped.
“You want me to rub that salve on ya?”
“Naw, I’ll do it. Here, hold this cup.”
Milton took a blob of the salve about the size of an egg in his left hand and quickly rubbed it all over his burned hand, and thoroughly between his fingers. It didn’t hurt.
“She shore nuff knew what she was doing ditn she?” said Lester. “That’s the first time I seen anybody talk the far outta somebody.”
When Milton had thoroughly coated his hand with Miss Minnie’s salve, Johnny pulled back onto the road and drove on toward his place. Within a few minutes Milton started breathing in deeply and exhaling deeply and making grunting and moaning noises that the others could hear over the sounds of the truck. A few moments later he began to flail around in the pickup. He was sitting in the middle between Johnny and Lester and suddenly he leaned over in front of Lester to hold his hand out the window in the wind. After another minute or so he began to yell. Johnny asked him if he wanted to go back to Miss Minnie’s for some more talking and Milton said he never wanted to go there again, that she hadn’t done him any good at all except for just a few minutes and that now he was hurtin’ worse than when he went to her house and that in fact he was hurtin’ worse than he had ever hurt in his life.
Johnny drove on and after two or three minutes Milton had completely lost his composure – he was jumping around wildly inside the cab, constantly yelling. He crawled onto Lester’s lap to get his hand farther out into the wind and stayed there until Lester finally managed to get out from under him and move to the middle next to Johnny. None of the men had ever experienced this much activity in the cab of a pickup truck, and by now Johnny’s main concern was to keep from running off the road and wrecking the truck.
Suddenly Milton yelled that he needed to see a doctor. Johnny yelled back that they were a good twenty to thirty minutes from the nearest doctor, which would be the emergency room doctor, and that he might not even be there at this time of night but might have to be waked up and called in, and besides, he had just said that he watn’ gonna go see no doctor. Milton yelled back that under the circumstances he had changed his mind and that now he did want to see a doctor and that he didn’t care what the doctor was doing he needed to see’im right now.
That settled it. Johnny slowed and did a U-turn and sped back toward the hospital in town. Milton kept his hand out in the wind and yelled and bounced all the way to the hospital. When they pulled up to the emergency room the duty nurse was dozing at her desk but Milton’s screams woke her. She took a quick look at Milton’s greasy hand and said, “I’m going to have to call the doctor. It’ll be about twenty minutes before he can get here.”
“Jesus God Almighty woman! I cain’t wait no twenty minutes. Why the hell don’t ya’ll keep a doctor here all the time? Don’t you know a man might need to come see a doctor any time of the day or night?” He was still screaming.
The nurse looked at his hand again and appeared to be a little woozy herself. “There’s a colored doctor already here in the hospital over on their side, but you probably don’t want to go over there do you?”
Milton yelled back that he just needed to see a doctor that it didn’t matter what part of the hospital he was in that what mattered was his pain and that he needed to do something right now not in twenty minutes. He was jumping around and holding his right wrist with his left hand and bending forward as if bowing and then standing back up and then bending his knees and grimacing and then straightening up, as he screamed and yelled. Down the hall a couple of heads popped out of their rooms and stared toward the emergency area.
“He looks like he’s really hurting,” the nurse said to Johnny and Lester.
“Yes Ma’am, it shore seems so. It wuz all I could do to drive’im here with him a jumpin’ around inside the truck and makin’ such a fuss the whole way.”
The nurse managed to get Milton into a wheel chair and rolled him through the dividing doors and into the colored section of the hospital emergency department with Milton yelling and kicking his legs as she pushed him down the hall. Milton was still hollering when Dr. Allison helped the nurse put him on an examining table and looked closely at Milton’s hand. He spoke to the nurse and a few seconds later she handed Dr. Allison a syringe. He found a vein and gave him the injection and within a few moments Milton was sedated. The doctor examined the dark brown salve that thickly coated his patient’s burned hand. He lifted the hand and leaned forward and smelled the salve and then asked the nurse to bring the other two men in and when they arrived he asked them what had happened.
“Milton burned his hand.” Johnny left out the part about the cross burning.
“I’d say it sure looks like he burned his hand.”
The doctor knew that he wasn’t going to get any more useful information about the burn from these boys.
“We taken’im over to Miss Minnie’s to get the far talked out’n it and she did it and it worked. But she told’im he needed to see a doctor right away ‘cause of the infection, and he said he watn’ gonna go see no doctor. She mixed’im up a salve and told’im to wait a few minutes ‘fore puttin’ it on and he did it just the way she said. We’uz two or three miles down the road ‘fore Milton rubbed the salve on his burned hand real good. But it watn’ long after he smeared on the salve that he started yelling and screaming and beatin’ around inside the truck and stickin’ his hand out the window, and then he decided to come to the hospital.”
Dr. Allison thanked Johnny and Lester and sent them back over to the white side and picked up the phone and called Miss Minnie.
“Miss Minnie, this is Dr. Allison. Sorry to have to call you at three o’clock in the morning.”
“That’s okay. I’ve been waitin’ up for a call from y’all.”
“Miss Minnie, there’s a man here with a burned hand, and the men with him say that you talked the fire out of him a little while ago.”
“Yes I did Dr. Allison. It worked real good, and I told him that he was still gonna need to see a doctor right now because it was a real bad burn. I could already see the quick all over his hand and between his fingers. But he said he wasn’t gonna go see no doctor, so I mixed him up a little burn salve in some lard that would cover his burned hand real good and kill the germs.”
“Yes I saw the coating on his hand, and what did you put in the salve Miss Minnie?”
“Well, just things that I knew would kill the germs, like salt and snuff and cayenne pepper powder.”
“Yes, I thought it was something like that. I thought I smelled the snuff.”
“Yes Sir. They mentioned something about a burning at the Rogers place tomorrow night, Dr. Allison, and I just felt like this hand really needed to be treated before they did something like that.”
He paused, sensing that she was telling him something.
“Yes Miss Minnie. And how much of this salt and snuff and cayenne pepper powder did you use?”
“Well, I used about a cup of lard, didn’t put any butter in it – butter’s been kinda scarce here lately since my cow dried up – and I put a heaping tablespoon each of the salt and snuff and cayenne pepper powder. Then I mixed it all together real good, and then I mixed in a little bit of Pinee so it would smell like a salve ought to. And they say the Pinee’ll kill germs too and keep flies off to boot. Don’t you think that was about right Dr. Allison?”
He hadn’t seen this particular formulation in his materia medica classes at Harvard Medical School but he would certainly have to agree with her science. She knew without a doubt that the application of this salve would get this man to the hospital and would prompt a call to her from the attending physician. These mountain people often amazed him. What would have happened if he had not been the doctor on duty this night? Surely most of the doctors would do precisely what he was going to do; but if not, certainly Miss Minnie would have taken the next step and notified someone who would know what to do. Obviously her objective was to communicate the information about the plans for the Rogers place without compromising her neutrality, but he was satisfied that she would have done whatever was necessary to get the message out.
Like most doctors on the mountain he moonlighted in the emergency department for a few shifts each month, and he saw some strange things; but this thing with Miss Minnie was a first for him.
“Yes Miss Minnie, I think that was just about right. Yes Ma’am. Well, we always appreciate you, Miss Minnie. If you ever need anything you let me know. You get yourself some rest now, and thank you. I’ll take care of it from here.”
He cradled the telephone and walked back to his patient and checked his pulse. He would keep him sedated for a few hours – at least until the doctor for the next shift arrived. He would get a nurse in here to clean the salve off the patient’s hand while he was sedated. The other boys could wait on the white side. He would get a message to them later in the morning. Now he needed to get a message to the Rogers family, and he was pretty sure they didn’t have a telephone. The day shift doctor who would relieve him would be arriving shortly. He sensed that big trouble lay ahead.
JOHNNY WOLF
Dr. Allison left the hospital at six o’clock when the doctor taking the next shift arrived. He stopped by his house and told his wife he would be late for breakfast, then drove to his preacher’s house. The preacher was up and cooking breakfast; he poured Dr. Allison a cup of coffee. The doctor told the preacher what had happened in the emergency room and what Miss Minnie had said about the Rogers place and the burning that was to take place there that evening. He finished his coffee and declined the preacher’s offer of breakfast, and upon the preacher’s assurance that he would get the message to the Cherokee as soon as he finished eating, Dr. Allison drove home and had another cup of coffee and breakfast with his wife.
When he finished eating, the preacher drove out to Cherokee Ridge and found Johnny Wolf. It was already a hot morning late in May. School would be out for the summer in less than two weeks. But for now the preacher knew that Johnny would be leaving for school in a few minutes. This was the second message that the preacher had received this morning. A man came over from Free Town – the Colored section of town, known by many as Nigger Town, at the edge of which the preacher lived – and told him that word was getting around that the Klan was bragging about how they were going to burn down a Cherokee house somewhere tonight, but nobody knew which one. Now he had the connection.
“There’s gonna be trouble tonight Johnny. Just wanted to let you know.”
“What’s happening Preacher?”
“Word’s out that some of the Klan are gonna burn the Rogers place tonight, not just a cross.”
Johnny looked out over the valley below Cherokee Town. For some time now he had felt that something like this was coming. For months the Klan had been making noises about the Cherokee. They had even slashed some Cherokee tires and had shot two of their dogs. He could feel the evil coming.
“Thank ya Preacher. We’ll take care of it. Looks like the time’s come. Lord willin’ we’ll return the favor to you and your folks soon.” The old black man looked at him and made a little nod but said nothing. Johnny watched him walk to his car. He loved these people almost as much as he loved his Cherokee people.
Johnny was a man of small stature in his early forties who was generally recognized as the leader of the Cherokee people on the mountain. He had graduated from the white high school and had gone down to Chapel Hill and worked his way through a four year degree in seven years, sweeping the floors of Old East and flipping burgers in the cafeteria and various cafes and restaurants around town. He finally got a white jacket job at the Carolina Inn where he worked until he graduated, building up his cash reserves from the generous tips he received from affluent diners. He came back to the mountain with more money than he had taken with him seven years earlier. He took over the coaching job at the Negro high school and taught social studies there. Johnny was one of those rare souls who wanted to earn just enough to meet his basic needs and nothing more. He had foresworn the pursuit of money beyond his basic needs to pursue his mission, and this empowered him in the sense that he was free from many of the burdens and constraints imposed upon someone who was driven by money.
Johnny took a great interest in the sociology of the mountain. The segregation had always disgusted him, and he had determined that no man would diminish his humanity because he was not a Caucasian. Before he left Chapel Hill to return to the mountain he had already made a commitment to resist racist assaults against his people and the Negroes using whatever means might be necessary. He had decided that no matter what happened because of his race when he returned to the mountain, or how painful it might be, he would never back down. If he had to spill his own blood to have the freedom that he envisaged for his people and the coloreds so be it.
The preacher’s news made him angry. For years he had wondered what it was about these people that made it possible for them to harm other people because of the color of their skin. No matter how you viewed it, no matter that this mountain was mostly populated with good people, there was here – as there was just about everywhere – a spirit of evil that existed side by side with the good. It was a spirit that wormed its way into a man and took him over and made him less than what humans are supposed to be, and it drove him to do things that destroyed innocent people’s lives. It hadn’t been ten years ago that the Klan had lynched a twelve year old Negro boy right outside of town. They claimed he had whistled at a fifteen year old white girl. For decades they had burned down houses and shot dogs and livestock that belonged to Negroes, and neither this sheriff nor the one before him nor the one before that one ever did anything about it. They never did anything about it! They would tell the Negro man or the Cherokee man to let the law take its course. Fools! How can an intelligent man tell them this when the law never did anything for them when they were the victims? What law? He knew as most real men know that there comes a time in a man’s life when he just has to take a stand and take action, and let the consequences be what they will. Sometimes the law just doesn’t work. That’s when a man has to appeal to a higher law, and Johnny knew what he was going to do. Two hundred years was long enough. The time had come.
* * *
Johnny thought about what the Klan apparently had planned for tonight. But whoever had made the decision for the Klan to come to the Rogers place tonight had made a major mistake. There was not a Cherokee on the whole mountain who had the slightest fear of these Klan imbeciles. He could not fathom why they would risk assaulting his people, other than that they were quite simply stupid. The truth was, they were not the mountain rabble; they were mostly average people – farmers, mechanics, day laborers who considered themselves better than others because they were Caucasians. That was certainly their call, but one thing was for sure: there would be unhappy white women on the mountain in the morning. The Klan might be able to use fear and intimidation to control people in some places, but it wasn’t going to happen here on Cherokee Ridge.
Johnny finished his coffee and got in his pickup and drove out toward the Rogers house. He had an hour and a half before he had to be at school. He stopped at several houses along the way and told the men to meet him at the Rogers farm at noon to discuss a community emergency. Knowing their attitude toward the clock – the people around here called it Indian time – he asked them to be there right at noon because he was on the government clock. This would give them time to finish their morning tasks, and since he didn’t have cafeteria duty this week he could leave school for an hour or so to meet with the men. They told him they would be there at noon.
* * *
The Klan had started disputing with the Cherokee people several months back, saying that white folk were racially superior to the Cherokees and that the Indians didn’t have any business being around the white folks just like the niggers didn’t. And the Cherokees said that’s fine. This aggravated some of the Klan members so the Klan said they would deal with the Indians just like they dealt with the niggers, and they picked out a family of Cherokees and put on their white robes and hoods and went over to that family’s house one night and put a cross in the yard and started burning it. The problem for the Klan was that this midnight burning didn’t scare the Cherokee. So the Klan put out word they were going to do some burning at somebody else’s house the next night and they didn’t intend to limit it to a cross this time. This didn’t scare the Cherokee either.
It would not have been the first time that the Klan had burned down a house on the mountain. In fact over the years they had torched several houses and barns and other structures, including a church or two, that belonged to black folk. Johnny made a decision this morning that the Klan had committed its last burning on this mountain.
* * *
There was a crowd of Cherokee men at the Rogers house just after noon. Johnny guessed eighteen or twenty at first glance. He told the men what the preacher had told him earlier.
“I’m going to send the Rogers women to somebody else’s house right after supper this evening, and I’m comin’ up here with my 22 rifle and my 30-30 and two or three boxes of ammo for each one of’em. I’m gonna wait for these imbeciles. When they get here and light the fire the first thing I’m gonna do is shoot as many of’em in the legs as I can, and then I’m gonna shoot the lights out of their vehicles and I’m gonna shoot their tires, and when I’ve done that I’m gonna start shooting their windshields and their radiators and any other parts of them trucks that I can hit from where I’m shooting. I’m not going to try to kill anybody, but I’m gonna put a hurtin’ on’em.
“Any of y’all that want to can join me. I think we need to put a stop to this nonsense before it gets started. How many of you think you can be here tonight?”
Every man there said he would be back by dark with a rifle and plenty of ammo.
“Alright. About half of you bring 22’s for shooting their legs and the rest of you bring your huntin’ rifles for shootin’ the vehicles. I’ve got to get on to the schoolhouse so y’all work that out before you leave.
“When you get here take that tractor path past the house and park in that little field back behind those woods and come on back up to the house. We’ll wait behind the bushes till we see’em comin’. Everybody bring some short pieces of rope for tourniquets. We’ll probably need’em.”
* * *
The night of the second and last cross burning on Cherokee Ridge, around midnight, the men who had gathered at the Rogers house saw the headlights of the Klan cars and pickups snaking up the curves of the farm road to the house. The Cherokee had taken positions where the Klansmen couldn’t see them when their headlights shone on the house. The Klansmen jumped out of their vehicles and set up the cross in the Rogers’ front yard and set it afire, and once the cross was in full blaze a white robe ran up to the cross and lit a torch with it and threw the burning torch onto the front porch. One of the Cherokee men jumped onto the porch, grabbed the torch and threw it back into the crowd of white robes.
“Now!” Johnny yelled, and the Cherokees who had the 22 caliber rifles started shooting the Klansmen in the legs, aiming about knee high; and the ones with the high powered rifles shot at all the cars and pickups. They shot out the lights and tires of every Klan car and pickup there except for one or two at the rear of the group of vehicles which managed to turn around quickly and drive away and even they had bullet holes in them. For two or three minutes the sound of the gunfire was like the finale of the fireworks at the annual county fair.
White robes scattered everywhere and men were screaming. The Cherokees stopped shooting and let all the men that still had functioning legs run into the woods and make their way back to wherever they came from. The Cherokee men went out and checked on the men that were lying on the ground or crawling around in the yard. They pulled the hoods off all of them. They knew most of them. One of the men lying in the yard moaning was a deputy sheriff that everybody on the mountain knew. Both his legs were a mangled mess from the knees down, shot all to pieces; and he had a small caliber rifle wound in each hand that he had received when he had instinctively tried to block the rifle fire with his hands. And to top it off one of the pickups that had managed to leave had run right over his legs as he lay moaning in the driveway.
There were seventeen disabled vehicles, every one of which had shotguns or rifles, or both, and several boxes of ammunition in it. Everybody on the mountain that had a vehicle drove around with a gun in it – that was normal here – but these Klansmen were known for carrying around a lot more firepower than other folk.
“Get their guns and ammo.” Johnny walked among the injured, looking at each man’s face.
The other men checked each Klansman for injuries. Several of the men gathered the guns and ammo from the Klan vehicles and piled them in the Rogers’ pickup truck while others applied tourniquets.
“Whatcha got?” Johnny asked.
“Looks like fifty-seven long guns and a hundred and twenty somethin’ boxes of ammo – I ain’t counted the pistols yet, but there’s a pile of’em – I’d say about thirty,” said the man who was stacking the guns and ammo. “Where we gonna take’em?”
“Nigger Town.”
“Jesus!” moaned a bleeding Klansman.
Johnny looked at him and smiled. “Sweetheart, you’da been better off calling on Jesus before comin’ out here tonight. I betcha anything he’d a tried to tell ya not to commit this foolishness.”
“We’re gonna divide’em up ‘bout equal for all the colored churches over there in town and let the preachers give’em out.” Johnny spoke loud enough for the moaning men to hear him. “I’m sure you ladies’d be welcome to attend some of their services and ask for your guns back. They probly won’t even make you sit on the back row. That’d be my guess. I don’t think they’ll give ya your guns back though. I imagine most of you girls are familiar with the ancient maxim ‘To the victor go the spoils’ and as you can see we’re the victor here tonight so these guns and ammo belong to us now; they’re our spoils and we can give them to anybody we please. And it will please us to know that your colored neighbors have in their possession a reasonable amount of guns and ammo for the foreseeable future. Course y’all can file a complaint with the sheriff if ya want to. But one thing’s for sure – we don’t plan to have any more cross burnings on this mountain. You think y’all could agree?” Johnny asked sweetly.
Most of the wounded men just continued to moan, and bleed. The Cherokee men moved about the men, examining them and tightening tourniquets as needed.
After they had done what they considered necessary to prevent any deaths, all of them, including the male members of the Rogers family, got into their vehicles and left. Somebody in the bunch stopped at one of the Cherokee houses on the ridge that had a telephone and called the sheriff’s office and told them what had happened and to go get the people that had been shot and told them to have the vehicles moved off the Cherokee farm by sundown the next day because they were all coming back to the Rogers place at dark and would totally destroy any vehicle that was still there.
Within a couple of hours the Rescue Squad’s two ambulances had delivered fifteen men with shot up legs to the emergency room that was designed to handle no more than three people at a time. Some of the men had to be put over in the Negro part of the hospital and a colored doctor worked on them. By the time they had all been treated and admitted, everybody on the mountain knew what had happened. The next day many businesses were closed and many farms unplowed. There were even two substitute teachers called in at the white high school. The school records reflected that the two regular teachers had been accidentally wounded in the legs while coon hunting the night before.
The Cherokee family returned home the night after the second cross burning with a crowd of friends and resumed their normal routine. The Cherokees on the mountain never had any further trouble from the Klan, and the sheriff never brought any charges against the Indians, who couldn’t have cared less, or the Klansmen, but he did fire the deputy who had been shot up. The colored doctor had had to amputate both his legs about six inches below the knees to save his life, so he couldn’t have worked as a deputy anyway. That deputy swore that he would still have his legs if a white doctor had worked on him. Daddy said that he would still have his legs if he hadn’t gone out to that Cherokee farm wearing a white robe and a hood.
As it turned out, many of those who had been able to flee had been shot and had small caliber bullet wounds in their legs. They trickled into the emergency room and various doctors’ offices over the next few days as infections set in and their home remedies failed. For the next week two or three Cherokee men hung out at the entrance to the emergency room and near the entrance to each of the various doctors’ offices in town, and smiled encouragingly when one of the injured men hobbled in or was carried in by his family. In most cases they knew the injured men, and wrote their names down in a notebook as they entered the doctor’s office or the emergency room. At the end of the week they turned all these names over to Johnny Wolf, who enlisted the assistance of some Cherokee high school girls to write, in the name of the Cherokee community, a get well card to each of the injured men and his family, including the two teachers who had gone coon hunting.
The towing company had worked all the next day following the second cross burning on Cherokee Ridge moving the seventeen vehicles off the Cherokee farm. The sheriff had told the towing company that every one of the vehicles better be gone by sundown. The two body shops in town stayed busy for the next three weeks plugging holes and replacing radiators and headlights and windshields. One of the shops was slowed down considerably because one of its men was in the hospital with a crushed knee cap and other leg injuries that he sustained while he too was coon hunting. By the end of the three weeks most of the medical staff on the mountain concluded that there must have been an influx of coons this spring the likes of which this mountain had never experienced. When one innocent medical novice indelicately questioned the reported cause of the injury of one of his patients, noting that one usually shoots upward into trees when coon hunting at night, not toward the ground where legs usually reside, several of the mountain sages suggested that there must be a new species of ground-hugging coon that had been brought in from out west where there weren’t any trees and thus the coons didn’t know how to climb them.
It would be difficult to describe accurately the hilarity of the Cherokee when this explanation appeared in the Saturday edition of the newspaper. Although the Cherokee are not often celebratory by nature, when this explanation was offered in the newspaper they were moved to declare a barbeque of four full grown pigs, which they gleefully denoted as ground coons, and to this barbeque on the courthouse square, or more accurately in the courthouse square because they dug a long barbeque pit for the cooking, they invited the whole Cherokee community, all of whom came, and all the black preachers and Miss Minnie and the sheriff, who also came. When someone pointed out that these pigs bore only the slightest resemblance to coons, for example they had four legs, a head, and a tail, the Cherokee solemnly noted that they were indeed like this new race of coons in two important respects: the pigs, like these new ground coons, could not climb trees; and when you shot them to dress them out for human consumption, you shot them in the head right between the eyes which is at about the same level as a human knee no matter how big the pig; this required that a man standing upright shoot downward as in the shooting of this new species of coon. The mountain seemed satisfied with this explanation.
The Cherokee drafted a special invitation to the barbeque for the men and their families whose names had been noted at the entrances to the emergency room and the various medical offices within the days following the incident at the Rogers house; none of the men came, but most of their women came and were warmly received by the Cherokee. The deputy whose legs had been amputated didn’t have a woman, so following the barbeque and festivities on the courthouse lawn one of the Cherokee women packed up a meal and took it to him. When she brought the meal to him he got mad. She ignored his anger as she unpacked the meal. Then he started bawling. She put her hand on his shoulder and calmed him. Because both his hands were still heavily bandaged she started feeding him the barbeque and the slaw and the hush puppies, and finally he settled down and finished the meal. The next day she brought him another meal, and this continued daily for several months. He got some artificial limbs and she helped him learn to walk on them. A week before Christmas she took him home with her and married him in front of most of the people from Cherokee Ridge and a good number of people from Free Town. The Cherokee bride had cleaned the judge’s house and the courthouse for several years and she got the judge to agree to come out to perform the legal ceremony, which occurred following the real ceremony which consisted of the little woman standing up and yelling out to the whole crowd “This here’s my husband and I’m his wife from here on out! Anybody got a problem with that come see me about it and we’ll git it straightened out right then and there.” That settled it – nobody had any problems, and as soon as they had made their vows with the judge, everyone gathered near a cooking pit in the ground from which two pigs had been removed. They all, including the judge, ate the pigs and celebrated the marriage. Out of deference to the sensibilities of the groom no one said anything about ground coons.
About a month after the little Cherokee woman married the ex-deputy, she took him to a church in Free Town. As was the custom, she and her new husband sat at the back of the church since he was a white man. She had told the preacher about a week earlier that she was going to be there with her husband. The preacher preached about forgiveness and the love that God has for us and how Jesus wants us all to forgive each other and love each other no matter what we have done to each other in the past. At the end of the sermon the preacher made an alter call, inviting anyone to come forward if he had anything on his heart that he wished to share with the congregation. The deputy looked around for a moment and then took a step forward and then another, and by the time he got past the third or fourth row from the back, black hands at the end of each pew reached out to steady him as he anxiously moved forward on his new artificial feet. His woman walked behind him. When he reached the front he turned to the audience and looked down at the floor and simply said “I’m sorry,” and he started sobbing, and his shoulders moved up and down and he kept sobbing. The singing had stopped and tears were coursing down black faces and the room was quiet except for the sobbing and the deputy kept crying as some of the men helped him stand there since he didn’t have any toes to balance himself, and the Spirit of God filled the room and there was peace and healing on the mountain.
* * *
Meanwhile, long before the union of the little Cherokee woman and the legless ex-deputy sheriff, the high sheriff himself spoke several times in the weeks following the big barbeque in town about what a great pig picking that was, and how it contributed to a sense of community on the mountain, especially since they had held it right down town on the courthouse square.
For most of the summer following the courthouse barbeque there was a general sense of peace on the mountain, except in the homes of the men who had been shot. The men who had been injured in the coon hunting accidents spent the ensuing weeks and months learning to walk again. Their wives did the work that their men would have been doing had they not been so unfortunately shot in the legs. The women punished their men for this by doing absolutely nothing for them. When the women cooked they prepared only enough for themselves. They couldn’t skip milking the cows because the cows would die from mastitis, so they milked them, set aside enough for themselves to drink and to make just enough butter and clabber for their own consumption, and fed the rest to the pigs. The men had no milk to drink, no clabber to mix with cornbread, and no cornbread or biscuits unless they made it themselves. When they dressed their husbands’ wounds the women would press and poke and scrub in such a way that the men yelled and broke out into sweats, and the women broke out into smiles. Then they went into the fields, where their husbands should have been, and did their own sweating, while anticipating with pleasure the changing of the men’s dressings in the evening. In the evening the wounds were salted as was the custom then, to kill the germs, and the women would push the salt into the hole with a finger that was slightly larger than the hole to make sure it got deep enough to do some good. The men yelled, but they used all their strength to keep from yelling loud enough for their neighbors to hear them. These women generally had a very happy and productive summer.
Thus it was that over a year later, after what came to be known as The Trial, as if only one trial in all the history of the mountain had so distinguished itself from all the rest that it alone merited, indeed required, the use of the definite article without more, The Trial, and after what the judge did the day following the trial, Free Town (or as it was known to the sheriff, the Klansmen, and many others, Nigger Town) was probably the most well-armed concentration of colored people its size south of the Mason-Dixon line, or come to think of it, probably north of the Mason-Dixon line. Free Town was full of guns and ammunition and mad black folks. And all the inhabitants of Free Town considered that this was righteous because almost all the guns and ammunition had been distributed by congregations of the church in Free Town. This concentration of guns and ammunition among the coloreds would later become a source of great consternation among many on the mountain following The Trial.
THE JUDGE
The judge who presided at The Trial was my father, Judge Jonathan Wesley Steadings. And although he was our judge, by definition a man of fairly high standing in our part of the country, he took life day by day and had his ups and downs like everyone on the mountain. Some people even said you couldn’t tell he was a judge when he was off the bench because he might get in a scrap just like the next man and he hung around with some of the low lifes on the mountain. In other words although his status was hifalutin, hardly anyone on the mountain considered him to be hifalutin.
One day late in the summer following the Cherokee education of the Klan, a few weeks before our local music competition, Daddy and I were outside doing some yard work and Lady, our Bassett Hound, was hanging out with us, as dogs do. Mr. Higginbotham lived three houses down the street and he had some visitors from California who had brought a big dog with them. While we were doing the yard work, their dog came running down the street toward us and when he got to Lady he jumped on her and bit her on the neck. She yelped and started bleeding and went down but the dog kept biting her. Daddy picked up a shovel and hit the dog on the head with it, hard. It looked to me like the dog was knocked out, but in a moment he yelped and got up and when Daddy started at him again he ran back up toward Mr. Higginbotham’s house with his tail between his legs yelping all the way. The California guy who owned the dog was standing outside and could see the attack from down the street, and when Daddy hit his dog the man came running down the street and rushed up to Daddy and started yelling right in his face.
Daddy just stood there looking at the man straight in the face and waited for him to finish yelling. The man stopped and stood menacingly in front of Daddy, and then Daddy said to him,
“Mister, I don’t know you – never seen you before in my life, and I’m not going to say this but one time. My dog was down here in her own yard minding her own business, not bothering anybody, and your dog came running down here and picked a fight with my dog. So I took this shovel and I hit your dog in the head with it real hard.” He motioned with the shovel toward the man, as if to make sure the man saw what he was talking about.
The man was getting madder.
Daddy paused for a moment.
“And now here I am down here in my own yard minding my own business not bothering anybody, and now you come running down here wanting to pick a fight with me.”
Daddy still had the shovel in his hand.
And that’s all he said. He didn’t say “I’m the local judge” or “Get off my property” or anything like that. I could see the man was startled – this was not what he had expected. I could sense him processing the moment, perceiving the parallels, still wild eyed. He looked at the shovel in Daddy’s hand for a moment and then turned around and stomped off. We never saw their dog again, and the next day the visitors were gone from the Higginbotham house before we ate breakfast. A few months later the Higginbothams moved out to California and we never heard from them again. But before they moved they would say hello and act like nothing had ever happened. Later that year Lady got hit by a car and died. Daddy cried when Mama told him what happened. Daddy pulled my wagon over to where Mama had drug Lady and picked her up and put her on the wagon, and he took that same shovel and buried her at the back of our vegetable garden. My granddaughter plays with that same wagon to this day, and I still have that shovel, and it’s as good as it was fifty years ago, for gardening or whatever else.
* * *
During the early evening of the night that Mama and Daddy worked until midnight moving me and J.C. to a downstairs bedroom, which was a few days after Mr. Higginbotham’s California guest narrowly avoided getting knocked in the head with a shovel, we had the preacher and his wife and an older couple from church for supper.
As usual, everybody got there about an hour ahead of mealtime.
“Y’all come on in and sit a spell,” Mama said, “I’ll have you some ice tea out here in just a minute.” Everyone went to the living room and started shootin’ the breeze. This was story time, and it played out in living rooms and kitchens and around campfires all over the mountain about this time of day. This was the way news traveled from one side of the mountain to the other within hours. Most of the stories were about current events, or more particularly about what had happened to this person or that person recently. This included farms lost through foreclosure; farms sold, farms bought; births, deaths, illnesses, and other particularized troubles or victories of interest to all. Inevitably these conversations gradually became historical rather than current, reaching back into the past and tying it to the present, telling of the culture of the mountain and indeed contributing to it. This was a live, raw history of us – The Story, without which this mountain would not be this mountain.
And so the old man visiting us that evening told a couple of mountain stories, ones that we had all heard before but which we enjoyed every time we heard them. Many of these mountain tales were grounded in humor because we had to have it; we could not do without laughter in our lives and remain well, and so they had to be true, or mostly so, because we had to believe them if we were really to laugh, and then they were medicine for our community spirit. We rejoiced in the victories of our heroes, were gratified by the defeats of those on whom our disapproval rested and for some reason we laughed at the misfortunes and pain of those on whom we felt Justice, whether poetic or institutional, should be visited. But it seemed that our greatest delights and satisfaction ensued when we heard about or watched poetic justice in action.
This evening Daddy was in a particularly jovial mood, and when that was the case he often told a railroad story or two.
When he was in his early twenties Daddy left the mountain and worked for the railroad during the summer to earn money for college. He primarily did grunt work in the freight yards in Rocky Mount and Richmond, and he often traveled from one city to the other in a caboose.
Daddy was committed to our system of justice, but from my earliest memories I can recall him saying that justice does not reside solely in a courtroom. When he wanted to make the point that it is in the nature of human existence that we are often blessed with and should always welcome this poetic justice, Daddy delighted in telling about something that happened on one of these trips in the caboose. I heard the story many times and it was always the same in its essentials.
Daddy had been working in the yards in Rocky Mount and he was riding in the caboose of a short freight train up to Richmond where he was supposed to work in the yards up there for a few days. Two other men and the conductor were also in the caboose. The conductor was a big hairy man who made it a point to go to church wherever he was laid over for a day or two, if that was on a Wednesday night or a Sunday, but in his day-to-day activities he tended to order his subordinates around to serve his personal needs. Generally he did nothing for himself that he could get someone else to do for him.
This train moved along fairly fast on long straight stretches in rural areas, but it would slow down in more populated areas and stretches where the tracks had tight curves. There was a coal-burning stove in the caboose on which the men made their coffee and cooked their stew or whatever they were eating that day. And although the weather was hot and humid outside, the men could keep the caboose fairly cool in the summertime by opening its windows.
On this trip they were making a pot of coffee in a heavy enameled steel pot and it had just finished percolating to a rich, dark, bubbling brew. The train was going slow. There was one small booth in the caboose where the men ate two at a time, and the conductor was sitting in it facing the rear of the train; another man was sitting on the other side of the table in the booth facing the conductor. The booth was just one seat wide and was rather compact. It was a hot day but people drank coffee all day long back then. Daddy used to say a cup of hot coffee would cool you down in the summertime. All the men were dressed in their railroad overalls, and because of the heat the conductor wasn’t even wearing a shirt.
“Git up and git me a cup of coffee,” the conductor said to the man facing him.
The man got up and set a mug in front of the conductor and took the pot of still boiling coffee from the stove and started pouring coffee into the conductor’s mug. Just as the man began pouring the coffee the engineer suddenly slammed on the train’s brakes and instantly the stream of boiling coffee moved forward from the mug into the conductor’s lap and up his chest to his neck and then down inside his overalls on his bare shirtless skin.
Daddy said the conductor just as instantly lost his composure. He tried to back away from the stream of boiling coffee but there was nowhere to go because the back of the booth stopped him, so he flailed and slapped at the coffee pot and its boiling stream which caused it to spill its full measure – the whole pot of coffee – onto his chest inside his overalls. The man who was pouring the coffee lost his balance and dropped the pot into the conductor’s lap. Daddy said the conductor came out the side of the booth hollering and yelling and flailing and slapping and jumping, still trying to get the scalding liquid and the searing steel pot off his front side.
At this point in the story Daddy would often digress and talk about how we all, the simplest or even the most sophisticated of us, maintain a certain public composure, and that no matter how lowly or how hifalutin or powerful a person is there is a breakpoint at which composure no longer matters. When this breakpoint is reached it is not so much that one makes a decision to abandon one’s composure but rather that one enters an ontological zone where composure doesn’t matter for the simple reason that there is no issue of human relations there, and thus there is no social compact requiring a certain comportment by anyone in that zone. Daddy emphasized that when one enters that zone one is in a state of existence where there are no social constraints.
The digression often included a story about an event that occurred in one of the big law firms in Knoxville where Daddy was interviewing for a job right after he completed law school. All the candidates for the position had gone through the initial interviews and were finally being interviewed by the senior partner, who had recently completed two terms as a United States Senator before returning to his old law firm in Knoxville.
The senator was receiving two young lawyers at a time and Daddy was paired with the only female in the group of candidates. Daddy said she was a knockout gorgeous young woman, always adding that she was almost as pretty as Mama. Daddy and the young lady were escorted into the senator’s office and he motioned to Daddy and the young lady to have a seat in a couple of straight back chairs across from him at a small coffee table where he was seated in a nice straight back captain’s chair. He had beverages brought in and Daddy and the young lady took coffee, and the senator had water. They talked awhile and the senator asked each of them to tell him about their personal background. He began with the young lady and as she talked he appeared to be enthralled by her personal story. He relaxed and leaned his chair back and listened intently, occasionally asking a question. When she was concluding he asked about her matrimonial plans and she said that there was no man in her life except her father and that she intended to wait for just the right man. The senator smiled his approval and leaned back again. He was a handsome man in his fifties, rich, well bred, well groomed, well clothed, well connected, and head of one of the south’s great law firms. At approximately forty-seven degrees into the lean the senator entered the zone. He instantly relinquished all concerns about his handsomeness, his wealth, his breeding, his grooming, his clothing, his connections, his national status, and even his incipient thoughts about the beautiful young lady seated across the table from him. He let out a loud grunting sound, not quite a yell, his chin jutted forward, his eyes bugged out, his mouth opened grotesquely; he first reached for non-existent handles in the air and then flailed about, moving both arms wildly in a circle, probably in an attempt to move his center of gravity forward during that terrible pause just past the forty-seven degree point and before his descent toward the floor accelerated. None of this worked. As he crashed to the floor his legs flew up and turned over the coffee table and spilled the beverages that were still on it including the pot of coffee and accompaniments, and he knocked over a floor lamp that he tried to grab on his way down. All this made a loud commotion that brought the senator’s secretary and two or three others running in. The secretary helped the senator get up off the floor. He was breathing heavily, his hair was tussled, his suit was crumpled, and there was a gap where his two upper front teeth had been. He had somehow managed to spit out a partial plate and was now looking for it on the floor. Daddy and the young lady remained seated – what could they have done in a span of two to three seconds? They were both excruciatingly embarrassed for the senator and could only smile at him and his people. The senator never looked at them. The secretary glared at the two youngsters, as if they had caused this humiliating catastrophe, and walked the senator out of the room, telling him not to worry about his false teeth, that they would find them, and Daddy and the young lady got up and left. Daddy never got to complete his interview and neither of them got the job…
But back to the caboose.
The conductor yelled as the train came to a stop and all four men including the conductor climbed down out of the caboose to see what had happened. The engineer, a big, burly man, walked as fast as he could toward the rear of the train. He walked past the men and the caboose for another seventy-five yards or so and stepped down into the ditch by the tracks and bent down. He stood up and started walking back toward the men holding a huge mud turtle.
While the engineer was hustling back to where he had seen the mud turtle the conductor was grimacing and contorting from his rapidly augmenting pain, holding his groin and jumping like a young boy who had an uncontrollable need to pee. His entire front side had been scalded from his neck down, including his privates. As the engineer approached the men and the conductor saw the mud turtle and understood why the engineer had stopped the train, and precisely why he had suffered such an intensely painful scalding, which suffering was escalating moment by moment, Daddy said the conductor exclaimed to the engineer that he should never have stopped the train just to get a mud turtle, no matter how big he was. Daddy said the conductor expressed these sentiments to the engineer using a crescendoing stream of profanity and obscenities and other highly refined forms of invective. Daddy said the conductor even made references to the engineer’s mother several times during his admonitions to the engineer, and even grouped the engineer and his family right in with several forms of livestock.
The other men were stunned; they had been working with the man for years and had always known him to be a rather religious man who regularly went to church no matter what town he was in. They had never heard him cuss, and they had never heard anybody take it to the level they were now experiencing even though they had both grown up on farms down in eastern North Carolina where profanity was just another dialect.
The engineer hardly seemed to hear the conductor as he walked past the men toward the front of the train with a big smile on his face, holding his turtle up for the men to see. Daddy said the conductor continued to yell at the engineer, but the engineer never turned around. He was so focused on his prize that he never realized what had happened to the conductor. When he got to his engine, he lifted the turtle up into the cab and laid it upside down on the floor and grabbed the handrail and pulled himself up into the cabin and closed the door.
Daddy said the conductor finally stopped yelling and cussing and started grimacing and contorting and moaning again, and finally just stood still, defeated. Daddy said he was almost catatonic by now and the men had to help him back into the caboose. The men could see that he was in extreme pain from the stiff wet overalls rubbing against his burns, so they helped him remove his overalls; they mopped up the coffee with one of the sheets from a bunk, and so that he would not be stark naked for the rest of the trip to Richmond they draped the other sheet from the bunk around his neck like a barber’s cloth and then laid him on his back on the floor on the thin cotton mattress from the bunk; he didn’t have the strength to climb into the elevated bunk, and he wouldn’t let the men lift him up there.
The other men told Daddy to flag the engineer that all were aboard and the train could start moving again. Daddy looked around the caboose but he couldn’t find the conductor’s flag so he used the conductor’s overalls, waving them up and down outside the caboose. The engineer apparently understood the signal because the train began to move forward. Daddy saw the conductor watching him use his overalls to signal the engineer. When their eyes met the conductor looked away in a daze.
A couple of hours later they pulled into Richmond. The conductor had moaned and groaned the whole way. When the train backed into its offloading spur and stopped, the men helped the conductor down out of the caboose and all three of them walked with him to the boarding house where they stayed when they were working the yards in Richmond, two blocks from the rail yard. Daddy said there were lots of people who were out and about, and they stared at the conductor as he slowly moved down the sidewalk with the bed sheet draped around him, which was highly unusual on a public sidewalk even down by the rail yard, but the conductor didn’t seem to be aware of this because he was still in a daze, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. One of the men walked in step behind the conductor holding the sheet together so that the other people could not see the conductor’s bare backside. Daddy was carrying his overalls and people also stared at the overalls and at Daddy. Daddy said it only later occurred to him that some of the people staring at the overalls surely must have been wondering if the conductor had experienced some sort of bowel accident, but nobody asked. They just stopped and stared; this was probably a first for all of these people.
The men eventually got the conductor up the front steps of the boarding house and to his room and into his bed. Every time he made the slightest move he moaned. The other men left and went out onto the front porch to sit and smoke while they waited for supper.
Daddy stayed in the room with the conductor and around dark, without thinking, Daddy asked him if he would like a cup of coffee. Daddy said the conductor gasped and started shaking and his eyes went wild for an instant and then he settled and stared straight ahead. Daddy said at that point he realized he probably shouldn’t say anything about coffee for a while, at least not within hearing of the conductor.
The lady who ran the boarding house knocked on the door.
“It’s me. Can I come in?
“Come on in.”
She stepped in and stared at the conductor. He glanced at her and then looked away. He had been staying here in her boarding house for years. She had left middle Tennessee over twenty years before when she married a soldier boy from Richmond. He had got shot dead in a bar fight a few years back and she took the ten thousand dollars insurance proceeds and bought the boarding house.
“You’uns okay? I seen you’uns comin’ up the steps an’ him awearin’ a bed sheet. Why wuz you wearing a bed sheet right out in broad daylight?”
Without waiting for an answer she looked at Daddy, “Why wuz you carrying his overalls? He ditn’ soil hisself did he?”
“Ma’am?”
“Soil hisself – mess in his pants. He didn’t mess in his pants did he?” She studied the conductor, looking him up and down. The conductor looked at her wild-eyed and quickly looked away, staring at the ceiling and breathing heavily.
“Yes ma’am, we’re all okay except for him. Naw, I don’t think he messed in his pants, but it’s possible – I hadn’t thought about that.” Daddy glanced at the overalls and looked at his hands front and back, and then raised them to his nose. “He got burnt on the train comin’ up here. He got scalded by a whole pot of live boilin’ coffee. The whole pot poured right down the front of’im inside his overalls, and he didn’t even have a shirt on or any undershorts.”
The conductor glanced wildly at Daddy and breathed even more heavily.
“You shoulda seen it. It was horrible, him kickin’ and screamin’ and flailin’ and slappin’ around trying to beat the hot coffee off of’im.”
Daddy looked at his hands again. “You know, come to think of it, he may have had an accident during all that jumping around and being scalded.” Daddy didn’t mention the turtle or the cussing.
The landlady stood with her mouth open staring at the conductor; she appeared to be trying to imagine the action in the caboose. The conductor glanced at Daddy again and then looked back at the ceiling, still breathing heavily.
“Well let me know if I can do anything for’im. You reckon he needs to go to the toilet?”
She studied him. He stared at the wall beyond the foot of his bed.
“Yon’t me to bring you a chamber pot in here? You need to make water?” She spoke louder to him than she had been speaking to Daddy, perhaps thinking that the scalding had affected his hearing.
The conductor grimaced as he shifted slightly. He was still breathing heavily. “I don’t believe I’d be able to make water right now even if I needed to,” he gasped. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to make normal water again. I’d appreciate it if y’all would just leave me alone now and let me git some rest.”
“You reckon we ought to call the doctor?”
“Naw, I ain’t goin’ to no doctor.”
“Yon’t me to git you one to come here?”
“I’m tellin ya, I just need to be left alone now so I can git some rest.”
“You want your supper? Everbody else is already in there eatin’.”
He didn’t answer. He stared straight ahead.
“I’m comin’,” Daddy said, “I’m hungry. That food smells good!”
Daddy started across the hall into the dining room, leaving the bedroom door open so he could hear the conductor call him if need be, and stopped in the middle of the hall. He looked down at his hands front and back and instead of going on into the dining room he turned and walked down the hall to the bathroom and gave his hands a thorough scrubbing with a chunk of lye soap. He then joined several other men at the dining room table, where there were bowls of fried chicken and vegetables of all sorts and hushpuppies and biscuits and mashed potatoes and gravy, and although the other two men had probably already briefly recounted the events of that day, Daddy told these men a moment by moment account of what had happened, recounting in precise detail the conductor’s encounter with the boiling liquid and his reaction to it as he was being scalded. The men began to chuckle as they imagined that scene, but when Daddy got to the part about the mud turtle and the cussing they started howling, and when he finally described the scene of the conductor walking through town naked as a jay bird except for the bed sheet wrapped around him, and the one man walking in step behind him holding the sheet closed, and the crowds gathering and staring at him, they couldn’t talk or eat they were laughing so hard.
After a few minutes the landlady came to the dining room door that was just across the hall from the conductor’s bedroom door, which was still open, and told the men to calm down for a minute – she had some good news for them. Being the southern boys that they were, the men settled down and politely obeyed, turning their attention to her.
“Y’all’s engineer just brought me a big mud turtle with his head cut off and I’m gittin ready to dress it now and I’m gonna cook y’all some turtle soup for tomorrow night!”
The men looked at each other and yelled their approval – what hardworking southern man didn’t love turtle soup? And at that moment from the conductor’s bedroom came a loud sobbing wail and then the sound of something crashing to the floor. The landlady hurried into his room and found the conductor still in bed, still partially covered, panting and sweating heavily. The lamp and his bedside table lay on the floor.
“What’s wrong?” She stared at his groin area, which was still covered by the sheet. “You hurtin’ from not being able to pass water?”
“You gonna cook that turtle in the kitchen?”
“Where else would I cook a turtle?”
“I gotta get outta here before you start cooking that turtle!”
“What for? You cain’t even move. You cain’t make water and you cain’t walk and no telling what else you cain’t do! What you got against that turtle?”
“Please don’t cook that turtle tomorrow. I just need a few days to get well.”
“I cain’t do that. That’d be a waste of a whole lot of good turtle meat that’d go bad – it won’t keep in the ice box. What you got against turtle soup now? You’ve eat it before rightchere in this house and loved it.”
“Would you throw it away for an extra month’s rent? I just don’t believe I can stand the smell of that turtle cooking in the morning.”
“I cain’t do that. It’s not my turtle to throw away. It belongs to y’all’s engineer and he wants me to cook it. Besides, I’ll bring you a bowl of it in here and you can eat it rightchere in this room. You won’t have to go in yonder to eat. It’ll give you some strength and perk you right up and that’s what you need. I’ll take care of ya.” She kept glancing at his groin area. The sheet covered him to a couple of inches below his belly button, and above that she could see red raw flesh with skin peeling away.
“What happened to this lamp and this bedside table?”
The conductor was panting more heavily now. He looked at her and then quickly back at the ceiling. He was almost breathless. She stooped and lifted the table and put the lamp back in place.
“I’m gonna bring you that chamber pot in here when I finish cleaning that turtle. You ain’t fit to even walk down the hall to the toilet. Now you just settle down and rest. I’ll bring you some of that turtle soup tomorrow evenin’ and you’ll be better before you know it! I bet you anything that just smellin’ it cookin’ all day’ll make you feel better. I’m gonna soak the meat in salt water with a little vinegar in it all night to take the stink out of it ‘fore I start cooking it.”
He gagged.
“I promise I’ll bring you the first bowl of it!”
He gasped and closed his eyes.
“Now I got to get out there and dress’im ‘fore dark. You need anything else other’n the chamber pot? I’ve even got a little bed pot for passing water in bed that I’ll bring ya. Yont it now?”
He opened his eyes and glanced at her and then turned away and stared at the wall. She left the room. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
In a few minutes he could hear the sound of the hatchet coming from the back yard as she split the turtle’s shell, chop, chop, chop. The men had finished eating and were back on the front porch smoking. The whacking of the hatchet became louder. Off in the distance a rooster crowed. He opened his eyes and the room was spinning… He sensed it before it started… He tried to rise but his legs wouldn’t move… He felt the trickle and then the flow began… He yelled for the bed pot.
* * *
This was usually the end of the story because Daddy would be laughing so hard that he couldn’t talk any more. Such was the case this evening; the whole crowd was in stitches when Mama stuck her head in the door. “Y’all come on in – supper’s ready.”
We all got up and went to the supper table. And even though the preacher was there, and the older gentleman from our church, Daddy said the mealtime prayer, after which we all dug in and the talking resumed.
During the meal the conversation got around to sports and Daddy remarked to the preacher that he looked very athletic and fit.
“Thanks, Jon. Nellie and I get together about three times a week at the Community Center to exercise with some other couples from church.”
“Well, whatever you’re doing it sure seems to be working. You look great.”
“We do calisthenics and some weight lifting. We work out as a group so we can encourage each other and keep up the pace. I think that really helps us stay with it.”
My brother J.C. piped up and said, “Mama and Daddy work out about three times a week right here at the house. I can hear’em doing calisthenics in their bedroom after Jackson and I go to bed. And Mama always encourages Daddy, too.” The idiot had never used the word calisthenics in his life.
During those years Mama and Daddy slept upstairs at the end of the hall and my brother and I slept in a room next to theirs. Their bedroom door was always closed at night and of course we were not allowed to open it without their permission. There were clothes closets between the rooms but we could still hear them talking and snoring in their room. Both of them snored, and both denied it.
My brother was two years younger than me and during those years I was convinced that he was an idiot (today he’s our governor). He was born Jonathan Charles Steadings, but we called him J.C. He was named after Daddy except they didn’t have the same middle name. He didn’t like to be called Charles and we couldn’t call him Jon or Jonathan because it would get too confusing around the house, so we all settled on J.C. and that was fine by him.
“What do you mean I encourage Daddy?” Mama asked J.C. She looked puzzled.
“Because I can hear you telling Daddy, ‘Don’t stop, Don’t stop,’ and ya’ll keep on doing calisthenics for awhile. I can hear ya.” J.C. was beaming – obviously proud of Mama and Daddy, and of his new word.
After a few moments a rooster crowed way off in the distance, gently piercing the silence with his bedtime crowing.
The sound of the crickets outside became almost deafening…
A dog barked somewhere.
J.C. and I looked around at everybody. Nobody was looking at anybody. Nobody was saying anything.
Daddy looked intently at the bowl of mashed potatoes.
The preacher and his wife looked at their plates silently; she shot a quick glance at the radiators and he studied the chandelier for a moment.
The older couple looked through the window at the beautiful street lights outside that were illuminating our street and sidewalk.
Mama looked like she was taking the flu. I’d never seen it come on that fast.
I watched Daddy as he looked harder at the bowl of mashed potatoes and pursed his lips.
After two or three minutes of absolute silence, the older man spoke up and told J.C. how it was good for us to keep on exercising all our lives because that’s what keeps us in good shape. That and eating good meals like this and spending time together and encouraging one another. He was an elder at our church and had baptized me in the creek the year before.
“I still love to exercise regularly, J.C., yessiree, I shore do. But I cain’t do calisthenics quite as much as I used to. Back in my day I’d sometimes do calisthenics two or three times a day.”
Mama made a high-pitched sound and jumped up and rushed into the kitchen.
J.C. was still beaming. It was rare that adults addressed him with this degree of approbation.
The old man’s wife glared at him and made a snorting sound. “That’s been awhile,” she grunted, as she jumped up and followed Mama into the kitchen.
By now practically comatose, Daddy continued to study the mashed potatoes, and the preacher and his wife resumed feeding and reloading as needed to keep a supply on their plates.
“Jon, would you please pass the mashed potatoes?” the old man asked merrily.
Daddy reached for the bowl of mashed potatoes in slow motion and handed it to him without looking at him or at anybody else at the table and the old gentleman thereupon spooned himself a massive serving of them and dug in.
“Man these mashed potatoes are good! I flat out believe they’re the best I’ve ever eat.”
When Mama and the elder’s wife returned to the table with dessert and coffee it looked like they were both taking the flu, what with their red eyes and general demeanor. Nobody except the old man ate much dessert, which was unusual in this house, and after a few minutes of nobody looking at each other while they slurped their coffee, the guests left. As they were leaving, the old man motioned for J.C. to come over and give him a hug, which left J.C. almost beside himself. I don’t believe I have ever seen J.C. as happy as he was that night.
I watched the old man walk with his wife to their car, whistling all the way, and when they got to the car, he jumped in front of his wife and opened her door for her and bowed with a sweep of his arm, motioning for her to enter.
After everybody left, Mama and Daddy moved J.C. and me to the first floor bedroom next to Daddy’s study at the other end of the house. They completely switched the contents of the two bedrooms that night. It took us until almost midnight. J.C. and I had never stayed up that late except when we went to see Daddy’s lawyer friend in Chicago and when we went down to New Orleans on vacation where we usually stayed with another one of Daddy’s law school friends who was a state senator. J.C. and I kept asking what the big hurry was, but they just kept moving. Afterwards, when J.C. and I were in bed in our new room, I heard Mama crying and laughing at the same time and making shrieking noises way up in her bedroom at the other end of the house before I fell asleep. I had never heard this combination before. I didn’t hear Daddy at all.
THE TOWN
Our place was like many others in town, except a little larger than most, although certainly not the largest. We had about three acres and we were seven blocks from the courthouse square. Some people at the edge of town had plots of fifteen or twenty acres. We had chickens and always three or four pigs, and every year Daddy bought a young steer and put it on our pasture which was a little over an acre. Like everybody in town that I ever saw, we had a garden that gave us all the vegetables that we could possibly eat throughout the year, and then some. We were constantly giving away vegetables to people who came by but I don’t know what they did with them because I’m sure they had gardens too – everybody in town did. Maybe they fed them to their pigs. We certainly did. And we had a little corn field, about a half acre, which with garden scraps and kitchen slops, including our dishwater, fed our hogs right up to hog killing in November or December every year. Mama used lye soap for washing the dishes, and the hog swill that we made with it wormed the hogs. They loved it, and we had healthy hogs.
The old aristocratic houses were mostly within a block or two of the square and from there on out to the edge of town were generally smaller houses on progressively larger plots of land; occasionally some of the younger generation who had made or come into money would build a big house out toward the edge of town on a big piece of land and would run their various enterprises from there. Most had domestic servants who resided in small but comfortable houses on the estate.
On the other side of the square from the old money, down toward the railroad, lived most of the white people in our town. Just beyond the railroad was a narrow band of shacks occupied by the less fortunate whites among us, and just beyond them were situated the first small Negro holdings, the beginning of Free Town. A progression of affluence similar to the white side of town could be observed as one traveled away from the railroad tracks through Free Town toward its outer edge. But almost without exception all these holdings, large and small, had one thing in common: they all produced food. Every one of them had a garden beside the house or behind the house, or both; and most of them had some form of livestock, even if it was only a dozen or so hens, and maybe a milk goat or a hutch of rabbits. Two does and a buck could easily provide a family with three hundred pounds of rabbit meat a year.
Occasionally people would move to the mountain from up north, or from down south where they had moved to escape the cold weather and found it too hot down there. One evening a couple of these outsiders, a woman and her husband, came to one of our monthly city council meetings, which were always well attended by many of our townsmen, and during the public statements part of the meeting asked to be heard on a matter they said they were very concerned about. The lady read from a prepared statement that she had written out.
“Council Members, my husband and I want to bring something to your attention that has been troubling us since we moved to this town.
“We moved down here three years ago. In the town where we lived before moving here it was illegal to keep livestock on your property if it was inside the city limits. The health department had done some studies of the dangers of keeping livestock in populated areas, especially chickens and hogs.
“My husband and I believe the time has come for this town to pass an ordinance prohibiting the keeping of any kind of livestock within the city limits, for the same reasons that many cities have passed such ordinances, namely the public health. We also believe the town would smell a lot cleaner without livestock in everybody’s back yard, and people wouldn’t be bothered by the incessant crowing of roosters. They crow throughout the day and night here, and the whole town has a very unpleasant smell. Thank you.”
The mayor thanked the lady and asked if there was any discussion from the council or if any of the council members had any questions. The council members sat there and looked at the lady. The mayor sat there and looked at the lady. The lady stood at the podium and looked at the council and the mayor. The mayor waited, still looking at the lady. For a full two minutes nobody said anything. Somebody coughed. The lady looked uncomfortable. Two minutes is a long, long time when everybody in the room is staring at you. Finally the mayor looked at the members to his right and his left and then he spoke.
“Ma’am, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that this council will ever pass such an ordinance. We’ve just come through what a lot of folks call the worst depression this country’s ever seen, but nobody in this town or on this mountain starved. They didn’t even get really hungry. There was very little money around, but our babies still got fat. In fact, every family in town had meat on the table when they wanted it. They had vegetables galore and those vegetables grew so plentifully because the folks here in town used their cow manure and their hog manure and their chicken and rabbit manure to fertilize their gardens. Our people had milk and clabber and cream and butter. They had fresh eggs every day of the year. Some people may think manure stinks, but here on the mountain we think it is one of the sweetest fragrances in the world. And I doubt that you could find a single person here in town that really hears the roosters crowing, much less being bothered by’em. In fact they’d probably miss the crowing if we didn’t have’em.
“We’re mighty proud to have ya’ll as neighbors – we always try to make outsiders feel welcome here – and we certainly don’t expect you and your husband to bother with keeping any livestock in your backyard, but we won’t be telling our people that they can’t keep a cow and some pigs and some chickens on their little places here in town. And if you need any country cured ham or bacon or stuffed sausage or eggs, there’s plenty of folks here in town that will be glad to sell you some. Just this morning my wife was talking about what in the world we’re gonna do with all these extra eggs we’ve got. If you and your husband need some just drop by the house and she’ll fix you right up.
“As always, Ma’am, you’re welcome to write up a petition and have two hundred voters sign it to force us to vote on an ordinance, but I am pretty sure that none of these councilmen is gonna do it by bringing a motion before the council. And frankly I doubt that you could find ten people in this town that would sign a petition. Again we want to thank you Ma’am, for participating in our democratic process here on the mountain, and you come speak to us any time you take a notion to.”
Again there was silence in the room. And then everybody in the audience started clapping. If the lady was uncomfortable during the silence that preceded this speech, she was now downright beaten. She and her husband walked out of the council room and to my knowledge never returned. A couple of years later they moved somewhere and nobody on the mountain ever heard from them or missed them. People in town still have their pigs and cows and chickens, and until he died Daddy fattened a steer every year on his little one acre pasture.