A Place at the Table (2 page)

They walked on, their footfalls forming a rhythm as they padded
along the ground, strewn with fallen leaves, many already turned the colors of autumn. Off in the distance Alice heard the distressed cries of an animal. The scant hairs on her arms popped up.

“What was that?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

Alice yearned to be inside her granddaddy’s house, beside the fire, safe and warm.

“Let’s go up here,” James said, turning left, making his way up an unmarked hill and through a growth of thin, young trees. The hillside was slippery with fallen leaves, and Alice had to grab onto the tree branches to support herself. But the one she grabbed snapped in two, and Alice, off balance, fell backward.

“You okay?” James asked.

Alice nodded. She was. She stood up, looking around for a moment while she got her bearings. She stared in the direction of an oak tree off to the side. She thought she saw an owl perched on one of its branches. She had heard the calls of a barred owl earlier that evening:
woot, woot, woot, woo; woot, woot, woot, woooh!

“Ready?” James asked. He was waiting for her on top of the little hill. He told her which trees to grab, and she followed his direction. When she was just below him he extended his arm and she grabbed onto it tightly. He helped her up, and they were safe and on another cleared trail, higher.

“Where are we going?” she asked. It was darker now, and she was cold.

“There’s a cove up here,” he said. “Maybe she’s nested in it.”

“I thought they rooted in mud piles.”

James turned and put his finger on his lips. “Shhhh.”

“Why are you shushing me? They do.”

James held his finger in front of his lips and glared at her.

And then she heard it. A rustle. A low hum. More rustling, more crunching. Someone or something was making its way through
these woods. She heard talking, but she could not yet make out what was being said. And then she saw them, down below, on the path they had walked on, three white men. Three guns by three sides, a lantern with a flickering flame lighting the way. One of the men had beautiful red hair, illuminated by the lantern’s glow, the hair the color of the skins of the apples she was supposed to have eaten for dessert that night. One man had something besides his rifle tucked beneath his arm, something round and coiled, which looked to Alice like a snake. Two bluetick hounds loped behind the men. Hunters, thought Alice. Looking for the sow, too.

“The look on that boy’s face,” said one of the men, chuckling, shaking his head.

They were closer now, in hearing range.

“ ‘Please, suh, I didn’t take no chickens!’ ”

“Lying nigger.”

“He’s eatin chicken now, boys. He’s eatin chicken now.”

An explosion of laughter.

Alice did not fully understand what these men were talking about, but she knew she needed to change into something other than a girl. She needed to become one of the trees, to plant her feet into the ground, to be unmoved, even if someone walked right up to her and stared her in the face.
Don’t blink.
Granddaddy was always saying that the trees had borne witness to all of human misery. The trees were here when Jesus Christ walked the earth, when he was hung on a cross made from one of them.

The men were directly below them now. When the sow had charged by at dusk, Alice had felt heat, smelled something feral and of the earth. There was a stench to these men, too, a musky mix of sweat and adrenaline. Alice closed her eyes. Relied on childhood logic:
If I can’t see you, you can’t see me.

Beside her James had turned not to tree but to stone. Like their namesake.

The men kept walking. Eventually Alice lost sight of them, though she could still catch snippets of what they said. Something about coming back the next day to show him off to the other boys. Something about maybe they ought to tree a coon while they were out there, but nah, they’d already done that. Laughing again, low and hollow.

Alice smelled something new, a whiff of ammonia. She turned her head toward the smell and by the moon’s white glow saw a darkened line down James’s pants.

•  •  •

They saw the rope first, illuminated by the nearly full moon, hanging from the branch of a pecan tree a good fifty yards away. They made their way down the hill toward it, picking up speed as they went. They slowed when they saw the boy, the boy hanging from the rope. His head was tilted back, his chin pointed toward the sky, as if he were looking for God. His hands were bound behind him with more of the thick rope. His once white shirt hung around his waist, the empty arms dangling. There were diagonal stripes across his back, the skin around the lashes puffed, swollen. How skinny he was, skinny enough that Alice could see his ribs. He was as skinny as James. He was a boy like James, maybe even the same age. This could not have happened to a boy like James, a boy who also had long, delicate fingers.

There was something white coming out of his mouth. Alice got closer, covering her face with her hand to block the terrible smell that was all around, a smell of shit and fear and mud and bile. Chicken feathers. They had stuffed chicken feathers into his mouth. There were so many feathers, some wet with vomit. They must have stuffed the feathers in his mouth before they hung him. They must have held him down. He must have been so scared. The feathers would have been dry and soft, but the quills would have poked him. They would
have poked the back of his throat, making him choke. He would have been gasping to breathe, but he could not breathe because the feathers were in his mouth. He would have gagged, then vomited, and the force of the vomit would have sent some of the feathers out of his mouth and onto the ground below. The men would have laughed. And then stuffed more feathers back in.

James put his gun down on the ground, hugged the trunk of the tree, and shimmied up it, swinging his body onto the branch the rope was tied to. James took his knife out of the back pocket of his overalls and started sawing away at the rope, sawing and sawing until finally it was down to its last threads. “Move,” he said to Alice before cutting the remaining tie. The body landed on the ground with a thump, still dead, as it had been the moment before, but no longer swinging, no longer on display for white men to gloat over.

“We gotta get Granddaddy,” James said. “Granddaddy will know what to do.”

•  •  •

By the time they reached their house, the rounded moon was high in the sky. They were so late. They were supposed to have been home hours before. Mother, Granddaddy, and Grandma Rachel were all waiting in the living room, their mouths straight lines across their faces, a child’s drawing of angry adults.

“Praise Jesus,” whispered their mother when they walked in the door. She was already out of her seat, running toward her children. She knelt before them, embraced them together, one in each arm. She must have fried something for dinner, for she smelled of peanut oil and, just beneath, lavender, which she dried and poured into sachets to bury beneath her undergarments. Her embrace lasted only a moment. She put her nose first to Alice’s head and then to James’s. She inhaled, as if checking to make sure these really were her kids, fleshy and alive.

She was crying, but her words were angry. “You my only babies, you know that? Alone in those woods, at this time of night.”

Their granddaddy had risen from his chair. He stood behind their mother, a thick leather belt wrapped around his hand. When he spoke his voice was more somber than Alice had ever heard it. “You have anything you want to say for yourself?”

He was talking to James.

“We found a boy,” said James, speaking quickly, as if he could stop what had happened in the woods if he got the words out fast enough. “A colored boy. Hung by a rope. We saw the men who did it, too. Three white men with two bluetick hounds. I don’t know their names, but I could point em out if I was looking at em.”

The muscles in Granddaddy’s face froze. He loosened his grip on the leather belt. It uncoiled and fell to the floor, the metal buckle hitting the wood with a clang.

“You know who this boy was?”

“No, sir.”

“The men who did this—they see you? They know you was there?”

James shook his head. “No, sir. We was high up on a trail and they passed under us, coming back from it. I had my rifle. If I had known what they had done, I would have shot em all dead.”

Granddaddy was in James’s face, grabbing the boy’s cheeks with his hand. “Don’t even joke about that.”

“I ain’t joking.”

Granddaddy didn’t flinch at the word “ain’t.”

“You sure they didn’t see you?”

“I’m sure. We waited till they was way off before we cut down the body.”

“You did what?” This came out a roar. Alice felt something seize up in her, and she worried she might go to the bathroom, right there.

“We cut him down. Weren’t gonna leave him hanging there. I cut him down with my knife.”

Granddaddy let loose James’s face. Backed up and sat back down in his rocker, made from a felled pine tree. The old man sat and stared straight ahead.

“Anyone see you cut down that boy?”

“No, sir. Was just Alice and me there.”

“Thank God. Thank God Almighty. He was watching out for you, that’s for sure.”

“I was only doing what was right.”

“I know, son.”

Alice glanced at James, but her brother did not seem to notice what Granddaddy had just called him.

“But you can’t go messing with a white man’s killing. Hurts my heart to tell you, but it’s the truth.”

“You didn’t see what they did.”

“You think I don’t know? You think I ain’t seen things? You think I wasn’t born into life under the mercy of a white man?”

“But that was back in slave days. Now they call you mayor. Now Hicks sells your hams.”

Granddaddy shook his head. “Hicks sells my hams cause he makes money doing so. Simple as that. And you can bet he don’t go advertising a colored man raised them, neither.”

“But we’re the Stones. That’s how we got this land in the first place. Cause we proved our worth.”

James and Alice, along with all of the other children in the community, had long ago memorized the story of the founding of Emancipation Township, same as they memorized Bible verses for Sunday school. How after the War Hortican Stone gave Granddaddy’s parents twenty-five acres of land in North Carolina, just across the state line, not forty miles from Hortican’s own farm near Danville, Virginia, where William and Nellie had been stalwart and loyal servants.
How Granddaddy and his family moved onto the land in 1869, when Granddaddy was only fourteen. How young as he was, Granddaddy already had a vision of what the land could become, a refuge for all freed men, where colored families lived, worked, played, and prayed together.

“Son, we got that land cause Hortican Stone started messing with my mother since before I was born and didn’t let up till his mind was so addled he couldn’t bother her no more. Got to thinking she was his wife once his own wife died of smallpox, right after the War, and neither Mama nor Daddy did anything to convince him otherwise.”

Alice looked at her brother. He was staring at Granddaddy and Granddaddy was staring at him and an electric understanding buzzed between the two of them. No words were spoken, but Alice understood what was being said.

White blood could hide inside dark skin for only so long.

There was a reason James was so light.

“You saying we didn’t earn this land?”

“We earned it all right.”

“You saying even though we kin to Hortican Stone, a group of white men could lynch any one of us, anytime, and there ain’t a thing we can do about it?”

“I’m saying nothing of the sort. I’m saying we got to be careful, that’s all. I’m saying we can never forget what a blessing it is we own this land. Don’t matter how we got it. Matters that it’s ours. Matters that we keep it ours. We got a precious, precious life here, son. You know that. Yeah, it’s dangerous out there, and nothing in this world is pure. But inside Emancipation, we doing bout as good as we can. We just have to be careful when we step outside, that’s all. We just have to know it’s another world out there. You’ve always known that. We all have.”

Except James hadn’t. This Alice knew for sure, as sure as she knew he was thinking of a chicken the other night, then an apple, then a horse.

“It’s just how it is, son. It’s just something you got to learn to live around.”

Three times that night Granddaddy called him son, but for James it no longer seemed to matter.

•  •  •

The next week, when they went into town to buy supplies, James stood by his mother at Sam Hicks’s counter and pointed to the bolt of blue fabric with the little red flowers scattered across it like a loosened bouquet, the fabric Alice admired every time she went to the store, thinking how pretty she would look in a dress made from it.

Of course James knew it was the fabric Alice had always wanted.

“Five yards, please,” he said, winking at Alice, as if he were doing something nice for her, as if he were doing something kind.

“Cain’t sell you that one, boy,” said Hicks jovially. “But I got a pretty red one I can cut for you. Real similar pattern, as a matter of fact. A mouse or some critter chewed up on its edges, so I moved it over here to the colored shelf, and now, lucky you, looks like it’s got your name on it.”

He pointed to a bolt of dusty red fabric lying beside the burlap and the muslin.

“Didn’t know my money was a different color, too,” said James, enunciating every word, just as their teacher Miss Robinson had taught them to do.

Alice wanted to point out that her brother was lying, that he didn’t have any money to buy the fabric with in the first place.

Hicks sucked on his teeth and stared hard at Alice’s mother.

“He been sick, suh,” she said. “Real feverish. He outta his mind. I so sorry. We gonna get him home. Get him home and into bed and when he all healed up you better bet his granddaddy gonna make it so he never say nothin like that again.”

Alice had never heard her mother speak so country.