Lost Souls Recovered, page 13
As fortune would have it, the boxcar stopped again. Greeny barked and Douglas and John ran to catch up with him. They scoured the train looking for a suitable car to get in. “Let’s look in car twenty-one,” Douglas said as he looked at the white number on one of the box cars near the caboose.
John leaned over the opening and saw several cows looking back at him. He turned around and said to Douglas, “We’ll need to share space with cows.”
Douglas and John threw their haversacks into the boxcar. John picked up Greeny and put him on board. Douglas hopped on first, then John.
John touched his belly with both hands. He knew what he had to do, which he did not want to do in the boxcar even though he smelled the scat from the cattle. Cattle had no decency, and even in this moment, he’d show a modicum of it. Hoping the train would delay a few moments more, he jumped off the train and ran to an area densely populated with magnolia trees and juniper shrubs and emptied his bowels. Greeny alighted the car and tagged along with his new best friend. As John was finishing, the train started moving.
“John! John! We’re moving,” Douglas yelled as he stood on the edge of the car’s opening, leaning outside the car, holding onto a bar attached to the train.
Greeny quickly caught up to the moving train. As John ran full stride toward the train, he suddenly realized that he’d have to toss Greeny inside the car. He needed Greeny to jump up to his chest as he ran so he could carry him. “Greeny, come here,” John hollered. Greeny barked and bounced up and down several times in place on his front legs. “C’mon, Greeny. Come here, boy,” John said, hoping the dog would figure out what he wanted.
The caboose passed Greeny. John’s face with flushed with dread. “Dog! Dog, come here,” John shouted hoping the reversion to the Greenville’s original name would make him run to him. Whether Greeny responded to his original name or whether he sensed that John was in distress, he sprinted to John as fast as his little legs would carry him. John ran toward Greeny, patting his chest repeatedly, hoping that Greeny would jump to his chest allowing him to catch Greeny so he wouldn’t have to break stride. Greeny, running with equal determination, hit his mark. Douglas stood near the ledge, ordering John to throw Greeny to him.
“Move back a little,” John shouted, panting almost uncontrollably.
John counted on Douglas to make the catch. As John struggled to keep pace with the train, he tossed Greeny in the air where he seemed to hang for an eternity.
“Got him!” Douglas yelled when Greeny landed safely in Douglas’s chest and arms. The velocity of the throw knocked Douglas back onto the straw-covered floor. John breathed deeply, then sprinted several yards and jumped with all his might on board the train.
All were exhausted and soon fell asleep. Greeny snuggled in John’s arms. John woke after several hours to find a cow staring him in the eyes.
The train rolled along for hours. Movement was good. Douglas reached in his haversack and began to nosh on an apple from Kelly’s farm. John found a peach in his bag and joined Douglas for lunch. Greeny isolated himself in a corner gnawing on a pork chop that Douglas gave him.
The cattle made a stink in the car, but John and Douglas trained themselves to ignore it. Douglas needed a jolt to fully wake up. He reached into his bag and felt the familiar neck of the Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottle. “I’d like to meet you someday, Mr. Daniels,” Douglas said, holding the bottle at arm’s length at eye level. He took a swig and immediately crinkled his nose and face. Douglas looked at John, who was staring forlornly out the door. “What’s wrong with you?”
John shrugged. “I was thinking about leaving my mama by herself back there in Richmond.”
Douglas screwed on the top to the whiskey flask. “Maybe you send for her once you get to wherever you going in Alabama.”
John did what he could to ease the pain of missing his mother by doing what he often did—thinking of and holding onto her counsel and her many other admirable qualities. “My mama ain’t got a bad bone in her body. She’s good to everybody, treats everybody fairly.” John sensed he had seen her for the last time; he held the hope that Billingsly would keep his promise to take care of her.
“Yeah, I know, John. She did right by me,” he imagined Billingsly telling him.
John closed his eyes and went to sleep.
Hours later, John opened his eyes. Douglas was counting the bullets in the revolver he’d glommed from the stagecoach. He stood up and pointed the gun at one of the cows.
“What’re you doing?” John asked.
“This here baby will help keep the peace.”
The train began to slow appreciably, and Douglas was thrown into a wall. The gun fell to the floor and slid out of the door opening. “Damn!” Douglas snapped.
John went to the open boxcar door to see where it landed. No sight of it.
Thirty seconds later the boxcar was at a full stop. “We need to find that gun; we gonna need it,” Douglas said.
“Doug, it’s too dark. You won’t be able to find it.”
Seconds later, hearing footfalls, Douglas whispered, “Shh. We got company.”
He was older, bigger, and more powerful that John, so he’d be the one to confront danger first if necessary; he ordered John and Greeny to go to the nearby corner while he investigated.
Douglas jumped off the boxcar and sidled alongside it. As he moved stealthily in the direction of the ambient noise, he was startled by the luminescent eyes of a raccoon pointing at him like a bird dog on a quail hunt. The raccoon blinked first and returned to foraging. Douglas took a few more tentative steps forward when he spotted men on horses holding lanterns and brandishing rifles and ordering conductor and locomotive engineer to alight from the engine.
Trains were favorite targets of brigands because they were known to carry sacks of payroll money.
“What you hauling?” Douglas heard a brigand call out from astride his horse.
“Just some lumber and cattle,” the conductor answered.
The brigand brandished a Remington .36 caliber revolver, and said, “Mind if I take a look?”
The conductor alighted from the train followed by the locomotive engineer; the brigand said to the conductor, “Careful there, old man; don’t be stupid. I’ll blast you right through the head you think about doing anything foolish.” Douglas stooped down and ran to hide behind a long and high line of boulders.
John picked up Greeny and held him snugly and edged closer to the back of the car, standing directly behind a mature heifer, whose tail swished Greeny in the face. Greeny didn’t seem to mind, merely extending his left paw in a weak effort to deflect the swishing tail.
As the night marauders approached the locomotive, one of them jumped off his horse and strode to the open door where John, Douglas, and Greeny had decamped alongside the cattle.
Douglas’ stomach gurgled as he observed the bandit tiptoe toward the open door.
John felt the bile rising and swallowed hard to force it back down. Greeny met John’s eyes and knew to keep still.
The bandit held up his lantern as he leaned against the boxcar and peered inside the open door. The bearded man turned his head slowly as he tapped his rifle on the floor of the boxcar. Greeny emitted a whimper and John covered Greeny’s mouth and looked at him with reproving eyes. The bandit put his rifle on the floor and jumped up and sat of the edge of the door opening.
Douglas’s attention was now focused on the bandit inside the locomotive. He soon saw the bandit jump down from the locomotive and wave for the conductor and locomotive engineer to return to the locomotive, having failed to find any money.
The locomotive engineer restarted the train and heavy plumes of black smoke poured from the top exhaust.
The bandit remained perched on the floor at the opening to the box car. As the box car began to creep along, Greeny yelped, and the bandit turned around and fired his rifle in the direction of the sound. As he cocked his rifle again, John dropped Greeny and rushed the bandit as he was now standing. John punched the bandit in his overstuffed belly with his left hand, then in the throat with his right hand, causing the bandit to drop the rifle and fall to the floor disoriented. John used the butt of the rifle to strike the bandit in the head in an effort to send him to sleep for good.
As John began to roll the bandit out of the opening of the box car, Douglas yelled, “John, watch out, the man on the horse got a rifle.”
As John dropped the bandit to the ground below, he jumped off the slowly moving boxcar and aimed the rifle at the charging bandit as the bandit held aim at John.
John fired first, hitting the bandit squarely in the head, causing the bandit to drop from atop his steed. With one bandit likely dead and the other for sure dead, John ran and caught up with the boxcar as it gained a bit more speed. He tossed the rifle inside and jumped in. Douglas soon followed. Greeny wagged his tail feverishly to thank his companions for saving his life.
John and Douglas decided that they’d disembark in the morning or with the next stop, whichever occurred first.
It was a little after dawn, and John awoke to Greeny licking his face. Douglas was sitting up against the wall sipping Jack Daniel’s.
The train slowed to a stop. No time to waste. John and Douglas quickly grabbed their haversacks; Douglas picked up the rifle and jumped out first, followed by John and Greeny.
15 — Summer, 1887
Two days later after disembarking from the boxcar, they were still walking through a forest. No matter how far they walked, the trees looked the same. Two days in the woods was taking its toll. It was like being locked up in a cabin for two days without seeing daylight. John hoped the curtain would lift soon, and they’d be out of the woods.
John removed the compass from his pocket once again and waited for it to settle down. It pointed south. “This way,” he said, eyes following the arrow’s direction.
The curtain lifted.
Thin clouds of gray smoke filtered through the trees. John sniffed a few times, recognizing the smell of brushwood and kerosene.
“Doug, look over there,” John said, pointing. A fire was raging off in the distance. They moved in the direction of the leaping fire, curious more than anything else. As they got closer to it, they heard a gaggle of people; they slackened their pace, but Greeny decided to gad about. John went after him.
“John,” Douglas whispered, “let him go.”
As they inched toward the fire, it became clear the fire was devouring a house about fifty yards away. They saw a short and paunchy white man dressed in black suit and gray Confederate kepi standing on a platform next to a tall, wide red oak tree, speaking to a throng of whites and a few Negroes.
As the crowd milled about, Douglas and John sneaked closer for a better view that allowed them to see a colored man sitting atop a piebald horse with a rope around his neck and his hands tied to the back.
They were too far away to hear the speaker. John, anxious to learn what the speaker was saying, spied another red oak tree and ran to it. Douglas quickly followed.
They could see that the paunchy man had a book in his left hand, which he used to punctuate the air as he spoke. The white attendees moved and swayed to the man’s words.
“I reckon he’s a preacher of some sort,” Douglas said.
As John and Douglas moved a bit closer, the man’s words rang in their ears.
“This man is a troublemaker, an agitator of the first degree. He’s been writing that darkies deserve equal treatment and all that crazy stuff. Probably thinks it’s okay for coons to marry white women! He had a coon baby with a white woman, is what they say.”
The preacher removed a pint of whiskey from his front pants pocket, uncorked it, and took a sip. He returned the whiskey to his pocket. “These coons think that traitor Lincoln freed them. They need to know this is still here a white man’s country. Always will be.” He pointed to the colored man on the nag facing imminent demise, and said, “This here coon needs to understand that.” Pointing to the few colored men in the crowd, he said, “You coons need to understand that.”
Greeny returned from his frolic and sniffed at John’s feet. John picked him up and scratched his head, a tonic that worked to calm him.
“For you coons out there, let this be a reminder that this can happen to you if you get too uppity. White privilege and power’s here to stay.” He paused to let the words resonate. Then speaking as though he just had a personal conversation with God where God told him whites are the favored people: “It’s ordained by God and that’s the way it’s got to be.”
John and Douglas, from the blind of the red oak tree, had an up close, in-real-time seat to the prevalent attitude held by the majority of Southern whites. The preacher typified the belief that Southern whites would not let the official end of slavery prevent them from asserting their dominance over coloreds; they would find a way to redeem the South.
President Rutherford B. Hayes fulfilled his promise to remove federal troops from the South, thereby ending the troops’ ten-plus years in Southern states. The second blow to Negro advancement came in 1883 when the United States Supreme Court held in an 8-to-1 decision that the 1875 Civil Rights Act—which was passed by Congress and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant to end discrimination against Negroes—to be unconstitutional. The clock was turning counterclockwise for Negroes, and men like the preacher would see to it that it continued to turn that way.
After the preacher finished his diatribe on the perils of race-mixing and the superiority of the white race, he walked to the edge of the makeshift pine-board platform, bent down, and handed a skinny young white boy the book he held, instructing him to put it in the breast pocket of the man that was condemned to death for nothing more than his speech. The boy’s father picked him up and held up his son high enough so the boy could put the book in the man’s pocket.
The boy opened the jacket, exposing the waistcoat. The boy looked into the colored man’s eyes for two long seconds. The boy blinked first, knowing that he’d just stared into the desolate eyes of a dead man, something the boy’s father was happy to see his son witness at a young age.
John and Douglas looked at each other off and on—they knew what they were about to witness.
Douglas cursed the preacher as his eyes raged with fire.
John held the rifle by his side and contemplated putting a bullet between the preacher’s eyes. He could do it, he thought. He had killed the bandit at the lake and the two bandits that stopped the boxcar several weeks ago. But he knew in this instance that if he pulled the trigger, he’d be caught and would soon face the same fate as the man about to be executed. His dream of a bigger life would end, and he’d never see his mother again.
Damn.
The preacher jumped off the platform and walked to the victim’s horse. He bent down and picked up a sharp-edged rock from the ground with his right hand, positioning it so the sharp edge faced outward. He slapped the horse on the rump with his right hand and let loose a scream: “Giddy-up!” The horse raised his forelegs and leaped forward into a full gallop, not stopping until it was over a hundred yards away.
The people dispersed only after the preacher stayed long enough to ensure the noose had suffocated the life out of the man he’d ordered hanged.
Two colored men remained behind several minutes after the crowd had dispersed. A tall, spindly man sawed through the rope with his pocketknife while the other held the dead man’s limp body. They gently lowered the dead man to the ground.
John and Douglas walked out in the open. Greeny followed. The two colored men said a prayer for the dead. Despite hearing so much about lynchings that fed the flames of neighborhood talk of “an eye for an eye” back in Richmond, John had never witnessed one. He pulled on the thick, coarse twine rope with both hands, feeling and testing its strength, wondering why a rope so thick that it could easily strangle a thick-necked ox was necessary to kill a human being.
John’s eyes burned with hate as he turned and looked at the fire, which had begun to lose its intensity, revealing a small ramshackle house; it remained a mystery to him. He asked Douglas what he thought had caused it; Douglas told him he didn’t know.
The spindly elderly man overheard John’s question and told him that the whites were burning down houses of coloreds as a warning to stay in their miserable place and not to agitate the white man.
As the two colored men walked away, Douglas yelled, “Hey, can you tell us how to get to Atlanta?”
The spindly man turned around and waited for Douglas and John to come to him. “Y’all not that far. By train, about an hour. By foot, several hours, half a day.”
“What kind of train?” Douglas asked.
“It’s a passenger train,” he said.
John smiled and asked, “No cows on it?”
“The one I know for people,” the elderly man said.
“Good,” Douglas said, rolling his eyes at John.
“If you take the train, you boys best know your place,” the other, and noticeably younger, colored man said.
“Place?” John said.
“Yeah, find a place in the back, or tell someone you are some white person’s servant,” the younger colored man said.
“You boys got fare?” the older man asked.
Douglas nodded. “How do we catch this train?”
After listening carefully to the directions, Douglas and John thanked the men for their kindness. The two men left, walking in the direction of the fire.
Douglas and John sat the deceased’s limp body up against the red oak tree from which he’d been hanged, John wondering if that tree had been used for other lynchings.
“What did that white man put in his pocket?” John asked.
Douglas leaned over and removed it from the dead man’s tight breast pocket.
“What is it?” John demanded to know.
Douglas handed to John.
John held it up—the Holy Bible. He opened it and the well-worn crease opened the Bible to page 1,241. His eyes were immediately directed to the words circled in red contained in Titus 2:9—“Exhort servants to be obedient unto their masters, and to please them well in all things; not answering again.”
