Breakheart Hill (23 page)

“And because of that, the market didn’t run all year,” Kelli said, clearly pleased by the knowledge she had acquired. “It opened in early summer, and stayed open until fall.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read about it,” she said. “The town library has a whole section about this area. I could show it to you sometime.”

She seemed quite excited, and in that excitement, rushed to seal the agreement. “How about this Saturday?” she asked almost girlishly, as if it were a dare.

“All right.”

She smiled with a new radiance, joyful, luminous. “Great, Ben,” she said. “You can pick me up at around ten.”

And so, two days later, I pulled up at the front of Kelli’s house.

She came out right away, but this time her mother came out with her.

“Good to see you again, Ben,” Miss Troy said as she came toward my car.

She was wearing a long wool coat, and her hair seemed to have lightened suddenly over that long winter. Still, it had yet to reach that shimmering silver it would take on in the last years of her life, and which, as I have often imagined, would have crowned Kelli’s head as well, lending to her old age the breathtaking beauty of a completed life.

“How’s your father?” Miss Troy asked.

“Fine.”

“Tell him I said hello.”

“I will.”

Kelli was beside me by then, bundled up in her coat, as usual, and with the same old checked scarf once again pulled tightly around her neck. And yet, to me, she looked quite different than she had only a few days before, more set on her course, determined and unflinching. An invisible force seemed to swirl around her, electrifying her eyes, lending an unearthly radiance to her smile. The self-doubt that had darkened the preceding weeks had completely vanished, and the girl it had left behind was intensely and magnificently alive.

In those days the Choctaw library was located in the basement of the city hall, a dark, cramped space presided over by one of the town matrons. Mrs. Phillips worked without pay and without title, a relentless promoter of local culture who, as I discovered that morning, had developed a great affection for Kelli Troy.

“Well, hello there, Kelli,” she said cheerfully as we came through the door.

“Hi, Mrs. Phillips.”

Mrs. Phillips’s eyes lighted on me. “Are you a reader, too?” she asked.

I nodded. “I guess so.”

“Kelli’s an avid reader,” Mrs. Phillips told me approvingly. She looked at Kelli. “I found that reference you were looking for.”

With that, Mrs. Phillips strode off toward the back of the room. Kelli and I followed behind her, edging our way deeper into the labyrinth of metal shelves and ancient, dusty volumes until we reached the back wall of the library.

“Sit over there,” Mrs. Phillips said, nodding to a small wooden table and chairs. “I’ll bring it to you.”

We did as we were told, while Mrs. Phillips disappeared behind a shelf of books.

“She’s helped me a lot,” Kelli whispered. “She knows every book in the library.” Her eyes swept up the shelf in front of us. “All those books are about Choctaw.”

My eyes followed the long line of books, surprised that there were so many.

“Most of them were written by people from around here,” Kelli said. “They published them with their own money.”

“Why?”

“Because they wanted to be remembered, I guess,” Kelli answered. “Or they wanted to record something.” She was about to go on, but Mrs. Phillips came up behind us and plopped a large volume on the table.

“This is the first reference to it I could find,” she said.

She drew her finger down the lines of a long paragraph, then brought it to a halt near the bottom. “Right there,” she said. “That’s the first reference.”

I bent forward and glanced at the words the tip of Mrs. Phillips’s finger had come to rest upon.

“Breakheart Hill,” I said.

Kelli glanced over at me, her eyes intent, piercing. “Have you ever wondered how it got to be called that?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I’ve never thought about it.”

Kelli lifted the book. In a voice that was soft and whispery, yet also charged with a strange, almost passionate devotion, as if she owed each life before her some measure of her own, she read aloud:

When she finished, Kelli looked up at me. Her eyes were very soft even in their intensity, and I could tell that that short passage had moved her in some way.

“April 7, 1886,” she said quietly. “By that time, the people around here were already calling it Breakheart Hill.”

“Maybe it was always called that,” I said.

“But why? I mean, it’s such a strange name.”

“It probably comes from some old legend,” I told her. “Lots of places have them around here. They’re usually Indian legends. There’s one for Noccalula Falls in Gadsden and Montesano Mountain in Huntsville.”

“What are they about?”

“Love,” I said. “Sort of Indian versions of
Romeo and Juliet.”
I smiled mockingly. “Usually about ‘doomed love,’ as Miss Carver would call it.”

She watched me with a strange concentration. “Do you think the legend of Breakheart Hill is about doomed love?”

“Probably,” I said.

But it wasn’t, as she would soon discover. Although, after her, Breakheart Hill would have a legend of its own, one the people of Choctaw would stamp with the sure and unmistakable mark of history three decades later, returning Kelli to their memory in the only form they could, as a slab of cold gray stone.

It was erected in the summer of 1993, when certain, tumultuous events of the civil rights movement were approaching their thirtieth anniversaries. Several months earlier, Rayford Winters, one of Choctaw’s two black councilmen, had proposed that the town commemorate what he called the “martyrdom of Kelli Troy.” The town had responded with considerable enthusiasm, and not long after that a small monument was placed at the crest of Breakheart Hill. It read simply:
IN MEMORY OF KELLI TROY, CIVIL RIGHTS MARTYR, MAY 27, 1962
.

There was a ceremony at the unveiling of the monument, and although I was asked to speak, I found that I couldn’t, and turned the task over to Luke Duchamp.

It was a brilliant summer day, not unlike the one
thirty years before, and I am sure that fact was not lost on Luke. Standing before the crowd that had gathered on the hillside, his voice older, more weary, but still able to carry its burden of remembrance, he said: “On that day, I drove Kelli Troy up the mountain road and left her here.” For a moment, his voice trailed off, and I could see him glance down, gathering himself in again, then look up and go on. “She was a beautiful girl, but that was not all there was to her. She was a smart girl, but that wasn’t all either.” His eyes shifted over to where I stood, my hands deep in the pockets of my trousers, my fingers balled into two tight fists. “Some of us remember how much there was to her, how alive she was, how full of things she wanted to do in life.” He glanced away, then down at his text. “Our fathers believed that one life lived nobly could make a thousand people want to live noble lives.” He stopped again, and I looked over and saw Betty Ann and Noreen standing together, sleeveless in their pale summer dresses. My daughter stood just in front of Noreen, and Kip, Betty Ann’s youngest son, stood beside her. Both women listened attentively to Luke’s remarks, although they could hardly have grasped the depth of what he said. Beyond them, Sheila Cameron stood alone, and just beyond her, Shirley Troy, in a dark blue dress, her hands folded before her, watched silently as Luke went on.

“Kelli Troy made the people who knew her want to live as nobly and bravely as she lived,” Luke said, “and that’s why Choctaw has decided to honor and remember her.”

He spoke of the recent effort the town had made to raise money for her monument, and thanked various people for their help. He mentioned that there were many people in the crowd before him who had known Kelli. He did not mention the ghosts who were gathered on the hillside along with them. Todd Jeffries. Sheriff Stone. Mr. Bailey. Mary Diehl. All of them were gone now, beyond the grasp of what the truth might have done to them.

In conclusion, Luke returned to Kelli. “Kelli made us aware that we had a race problem in Choctaw, and that we had always had one. For that alone, and even if nothing had ever happened to her here on Breakheart Hill, we must never forget Kelli Troy.”

He stepped aside after that, and Eddie Smathers spoke briefly, then introduced Rayford Winters, who described Kelli as a kind of local saint. Rayford said other things as well, but my attention had turned away from him, my eyes searching the deep green wood just as Kelli’s must have searched it on that long-ago summer day. I could see her in her white sleeveless dress, her long brown arms pushing away the low-slung limbs as she moved deeper into the thickening forest. At some point she must have heard the scratch of the gravel as Luke’s old truck pulled away, but whether she glanced back, I will never know. I know only that she continued down the slope, her feet in summer sandals, her white dress no doubt catching from time to time on a bush or shrub, her eyes peering intently into the green filament of the wood, moving not toward martyrdom, as Rayford Winters would have had us all believe when he spoke on Breakheart Hill that day, but toward the heart—as I have come to think of it—of life’s disarray.

O
NLY A FEW WEEKS BEFORE IT HAPPENED, IT WOULD HAVE
been impossible for me to have imagined Kelli as moving toward anything but a bright future. She never seemed more absolutely sure of herself, more in command of her own life, than during her last days.

During that time she worked furiously to uncover the origin of Breakheart Hill, spending more and more time at the town library, poring over old books and piles of letters, tracking it down step by step while Mrs. Phillips looked on approvingly.

It was also during this time that her article about the civil rights demonstration in Gadsden was published, and I remember the two of us watching tensely as that particular issue of the
Wildcat
was distributed to our classmates.

It was strong stuff in the Choctaw of that time, and even Luke, probably one of the few genuine “liberals” in the town, greeted it with chilly resignation. “Well,” he told me with a shrug, “somebody was bound to say it sooner or later.”

But other people at Choctaw High were not so generous, and during the next few days, Kelli had her hands
full. It was usually in Mr. Arlington’s class that the arguments erupted, and he did nothing to contain them. He had not liked Kelli’s article and openly quarreled with her about it, accusing her of misinterpreting the social situation in the South, what he termed its “long and mutually beneficial tradition of racial separation.”

At first, Kelli had listened politely, but as the days passed, and Mr. Arlington continued to attack her, shamelessly encouraging like-minded students to join in, she began to bristle, and then fight back.

“The white people just use the Negroes to do the kind of work white people won’t do,” she blurted out hotly on one occasion, her manner so strained and angry that Mr. Arlington actually stepped backward slightly, as if he feared she might rise and strike him.

Eddie Smathers stared at her, aghast. “You make it sound like they’re still slaves, Kelli.”

She stared at him coldly. “Well, aren’t they?”

A few other students groaned loudly at such heresy, but Kelli refused to be intimidated. “When you can’t vote or send your children to a decent school, aren’t you a slave?” she cried, her eyes aflame. “What would you think if you were an adult, and you had to call everybody miss or mister, even if it was a child?”

The students stared at her in stunned silence.

“Have you ever seen a Negro policeman in Choctaw?” Kelli’s words now resounded like pistol shots, sharp, deafening. “They can’t even deliver the mail here.” Her eyes challenged them. “So they have to take the lowest jobs in town. Jobs white people won’t do.” She stopped, daring anyone to oppose her. “That’s slavery, and all of you know it.”

There were a great many arguments after that, and I began to take part in them, always supporting Kelli. So much so that over the next few days, as the battle raged on in Mr. Arlington’s classroom, I became known as no less a defender of Negro rights than Kelli herself.

It was a role I came to welcome. I even took pride in it as the spring deepened, believing that the things I said during that time, the things I stood for, came from the deepest part of me. I felt the hostility of various classmates, and even a few teachers, but I refused to let that stop me. In fact, it encouraged me, gave me the sense of being Kelli’s comrade-in-arms, joined with her in an epic battle against the forces of darkness.

But if there was fierce hostility to what Kelli had written, there was support, too. It came particularly from other girls. Like Sheila Cameron, who insisted on walking with her in the corridor, her arm linked defiantly beneath Kelli’s. And Betty Ann, who wrote a blistering “open letter” to her fellow students, then boldly posted it on the bulletin board in the front hall. Noreen offered her good wishes, along with several other girls. Even shy little Edith Sparks came forward, though in a different way, baking Kelli a dozen sugar cookies for “what you said about the colored people.”