A nod from Harper sent a slave child scurrying toward the quarters. Within seconds he returned, yelling, “They gone. They gone!”
“Who’s gone? Where?”
“Henri, Charlemae, and the boy. They gone. Cabin empty.”
The dealers mounted quickly. “You got dogs?”
“I do.”
“Get your horse. We’ll track ’em.” And they rode off.
“I don’t ride,” Harper called. “I’ll be along in my carriage.”
The men followed Henri and Charlemae through the orchards and along Topps River. Their trail was easy to follow. The dogs reached the clearing first. They had cornered their quarry.
The runaways had climbed a steep cliff and were huddled on a ledge jutting out over the crashing water. Their backs were to the falls, with no chance for escape.
The dogs barked and tried to climb the wet, slippery rocks. Henri called out to the lead dog. “Blue!” Hearing his voice, all the dogs stopped yelping and wagged their tails in friendly recognition.
The slave dealers bolted into the clearing. Harper followed minutes later.
“Come down from there, boy!”
“We got no time for this. There ain’t no place else to run. So bring yourself down with the woman.”
But instead of backing down, Henri and Charlemae inched forward to the edge of the cliff. Then, after handing the baby to Henri, Charlemae leaped into the water. A split second later, Henri, the boy clutched tightly to his chest, leaped too.
Harper scrambled from his carriage and struggled to climb the cliff. Finally reaching the spot where Henri had stood moments before, he looked down, and his frightened brown eyes searched the churning waters.
Suddenly, miraculously, Harper saw a large beautiful bird rise out of the mists. It hovered overhead, circling. Another bird, a female, joined her mate. Screeching loudly, a fledgling flapped frantically to stay in flight. The parents waited patiently until the little one gained confidence. Once the three were airborne, the birds circled, then flew north.
“No,” Harper cried. “Come back. Come back. You always win!” The ledge began to crumble. The men tried to call to him, warn him, but it was too late. The ground gave way, taking Harper McAvoy into the crashing waters below.
They found his body downstream. But they never found a trace of Henri, Charlemae, or their child. The authorities called Harper’s death a terrible accident. The others were listed as suicides.
But the driver who had been part of the search told a different story. Down in the quarters, he told about a slave family who leaped into Topps River Falls but weren’t killed—they were transformed into beautiful birds who flew away to freedom.
* * *
Legends grew up around Pin Oak. After Harper’s death, the house went to Mr. Kelsey at the bank, but it was destroyed by fire during the Civil War.
Olive Hill had grown up in the shadow of Pin Oak ruins. Two of the six Doric pillars and a burned-out chimney were all that was left of the stately old mansion. Whenever Papa had gone fishing, Olive liked to tag along behind him through the plantation grounds and down to Topps River Falls. There he would tell her the legend of Pin Oak.
After twenty-five years of telling it, Papa’s Pin Oak story was always the same. Olive never tired of hearing it, and she had even made it the subject of a paper she was writing. For months she’d searched through old records, documents, books, and papers to see how much of the real story she could reconstruct.
The diary of Benjamin Stone, a well-known abolitionist and “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, had just been published, and it contained information she needed. When the Reader Bookstore called to tell her that her copy had arrived, she hurried over to pick it up.
Driving to the mall, Olive mentally sorted through all the details she’d uncovered about Pin Oak. Henri, a mulatto, was the son of Mary DuPriest, a free woman from New Orleans. Mary had died in 1840, and Amos had brought Henri to Pin Oak, although by law the boy was free. Years later Amos had made Henri overseer and put him in charge of Pin Oak operations—ordering, planting, harvesting, and selling crops. Henri had married Charlemae and they had had a son. It was speculated that the family had plunged to their death in Topps River Falls in a failed attempt to escape the plantation—though their bodies were never found.
Meanwhile, during the 1850s, the Underground Railroad was active in Tennessee. Through a network of conductors, runaways were led from one safe house to another, until they reached free soil.
Olive speculated that Henri might have made contact with Benjamin Stone. Conductors sometimes used old spirituals like “Steal Away” to send a signal that an escape was being planned.
A cave located behind Topps River Falls was a well-known hiding place used by the Underground Railroad. Stone no doubt knew about it and might have told Henri the night before the planned escape. Perhaps Henri and Charlemae tried to make it appear as though they jumped to their death while actually leaping to a hidden ledge and crawling to safety in the cave. Stone could have then led them to the next station and finally to freedom.
This explanation for the missing bodies seemed plausible to Olive, and she hurried home as soon as she bought the book to see if the facts supported her theory. As soon as she walked in the door, she threw off her coat and dropped it in the middle of the floor. Excitement made her hands shake as she flipped the pages of her book, looking for relevant dates, names, and places. “Pin Oak! Here it is!”
As the last rays of sunlight filtered through the window, Olive turned on the lamp beside her chair and curled up with Benjamin Stone’s diary. He wrote:
I only lost two—no, three—lives as a conductor. They were a family. The man’s name was Henri from Pin Oak Plantation. I was supposed to meet him in the woods, but for some reason we missed each other. I never got to tell him about the cave behind the falls…
We Organized
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, government agencies sponsored programs designed to put people back to work. The Library of Congress hired hundreds of unemployed writers to interview and record the life stories of former slaves. The result of the project was a ten-thousand-page typed manuscript of folk histories, vividly retold by African Americans who had lived under the tyranny of slavery. The personal accounts in the collection, known simply as The Slave Narratives, are sometimes humorous, sometimes angry, and sometimes chillingly mysterious. The following poem is based on an actual slave narrative.
You ask how we all got free ’fore
President Lincoln signed the paper?
Write this what I tell you.
I, Ajax,
Massa’s driver…
I, Ajax,
Master of the whip … Got power!
Hear it crack! Hear it pop!
Can pluck a rose off its stem,
Never once disturbing a petal.
I can snap a moth in two
While it’s still on the wing,
Pick a fly off a mule’s ear
And never ruffle a hair.
One day Massa say,
“Ajax, see that hornets’ nest over there?
Snatch it off that tree.”
I say, “Naw sir. Not that I can’t do it.
But some things just ain’ wise to do.”
Massa ask,
“Why not?”
I come back with,
“Them hornets be trouble.
They organized.”
Tried to warn ol’ Massa,
But he never once listen.
He a poor man … marry money.
Money prove him a fool. A mean fool.
Massa turned out Pappy Sims;
Say he too old to pick cotton.
No more use.
Be careful, Massa!
Beat Lilly Mae;
Say she too lazy to breathe.
Have mercy, Massa!
Sell Sally ’way from her husband, Lee;
See her no more.
Watch out, Massa!
Slap cook—
No reason, just wanted to and did!
Then Massa bring trouble to his own front door.
He make a promise to free Corbella, the
Congo Woman.
He not do it.
Big mistake, Massa.
Just wouldn’t heed a warning.
So when the lilacs bloomed,
Massa be missing a button off his coat …
never mind.
Huh!
Deep in the night,
Hear the music, long refrain.
Dancing, chanting,
Digging a grave with words …
Old words …
Powerful words.
We pin Massa’s black button to a straw doll.
Hang it in a sycamore tree.
Spinning, clapping,
Calling the names of the ancestors…
Old names…
Powerful names.
Three days dancing in the dark.
Three days chanting till dawn.
Way in the night Massa hear the music
in his head.
He hear the whispered words
In a long refrain … and he come screaming.
“Lawd! Lawd!”
But it’s too late.
Come harvest-time Massa be low sick.
Near ’bout wasted away.
All the mean gone out of him.
Massa call all us to him.
He free the Congo Woman.
He free everybody—glad to be rid of us!
Wrote out the free papers, right now!
Then he turn to me.
He say,
“Ajax, git gone!”
He didn’t have to say it again.
Now, you ask me how we all got free
Tore Massa Lincoln sign the paper?
Take heed.
Like them hornets, we organized!
Justice
The Ku Klux Klan is the most well known white supremacist organization in the country. Since its earliest beginnings, the Klan has used racial and religious intolerance to terrorize people in their homes, churches and synagogues, schools, and businesses—until recent years, with impunity. To the Klan, anybody who is different is automatically inferior. One of the most powerful periods for the KKK was the 1930s. Klansmen, draped in white robes and hoods, meted out horrific punishments for so-called crimes that sometimes amounted to no more than “sassing” or “being uppity.” But a nineteenth-century poet and editor, William Cullen Bryant, gave a warning to all those who would make a mockery of justice: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” You can count on it.
Riley Holt, the richest and most powerful man in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, was attacked and left for dead along State Highway 49. The whole state prayed for Holt’s recovery, but he died several days later, never regaining consciousness.
Nobody could remember a murder ever taking place in Tyre, unless you count Miz Jasper’s cat Sidney many years earlier. Folk didn’t know quite what to say or do about a real homicide.
The mayor, who was a pallbearer at Holt’s funeral, announced his personal outrage at the violence perpetrated against “one of Mississippi’s finest families.” Holt’s weeping, red-faced widow stood on the steps of the First Baptist Church and wailed for justice. The governor consoled the widow. “Don’t you worry none, Miz Holt. The truth will come out. You can count on it.”
Meanwhile, the burden of the investigation was dropped into the lap of Chief Burton Baker and his four-man Tyre police department. He decided to question Hoop Granger, whose filling station was near the Holt estate. Maybe he’d seen something.
Hoop Granger sat by the dirt-streaked window and watched Chief Baker walk toward Simm’s Ironwork Shop, where Hoop and the other local riffraff hung out. Hoop, who’d been a difficult child, was a downright ornery man. He’d grown up bitter as quinine and meaner than a swamp snake. He made a living as a self-taught auto mechanic, having inherited the service station out on Highway 49 from his father.
Hoop warned his friends that Baker was coming. The men greeted the officer coolly.
“Like to ask you a few questions, Hoop,” Baker announced.
“I’m wondering, Chief, why you wasting time talking to me, when you ought to be over in the Corners arresting one of them darkies for murdering Holt.”
“Why are you jumping on the defensive?” Baker was obviously annoyed. “I came to find out if you saw something.”
Hoop turned to the window. “I might have.”
“Hoop, if you know anything, you’d better tell me now. Did you see somebody from the Corners out at the Holt place?”
“I seen Alvin …” Hoop swallowed hard. His eyes darted around, never making eye contact. “Alvin Tinsley. Yeah. He went up to Holt’s on the day of the murder.”
Alvin Tinsley was a young black man who was respected by both the white and black communities. He’d grown up in Tyre, and after working his way through Tuskegee Institute in veterinary science, he’d come back home. But the state of Mississippi had denied him a veterinary license. Then Alvin saved one of Riley Holt’s prize walking horses, and the powerful Holt made sure Alvin got his license. Holt immediately hired Alvin to take care of all the animals on the Holt plantation.
Chief Baker looked around. Hoop’s friends were nodding their heads in agreement.
“Hoop, come on over to the station and we’ll talk more,” he said. He opened the door, then added, “I’m going to send for Alvin. We can get to the bottom of this right now.”
On his way out, Hoop turned to the chief. “You know the road leading up to the Holt place goes right by my station, so I see everything. And I swear I saw Alvin go by—looking mad enough to kill.”
Half an hour later Alvin Tinsley was shown into the chief’s office. Politely removing his hat, he took the seat Chief Baker offered him. Hoop shifted uneasily in his chair as he watched a black man being given the same courtesy as a white.
His mind went back twenty years when he and Alvin had sat in this same office. He remembered accusing Alvin of another crime—of hanging Miz Jasper’s cat. And he remembered Alvin admitting that he’d done it … just as Hoop had made him do. “If you don’t say you did it, I’ll tell my daddy to fire your daddy, then he won’t have no job.”
Hoop still remembered Chief Baker’s eyes staring at him. “Are you sure this is what happened?” he’d said.
“Sure, Chief,” Hoop had answered. “It was just like I said. Alvin killed that dumb ol’ cat for scratching him, but he’s sorry.”
“It’s strange to me … the only one who’s got scratches on his hand is you, Hoop.”
But Alvin had held to Hoop’s story and taken the punishment without complaint.
Now here they were again, sitting before Chief Baker.
“Seems like we’ve done this before,” Baker said, sighing. “How’s Miz Cora Mae?” he asked, putting off official business. Then, “Alvin, can you tell me about your movements on or around the thirteenth of June 1938 …? That was last Thursday.”
“Mama’s doing nicely,” Alvin said, answering the chief’s first question. “I was over in Mound Bayou,” he said, answering the second one. “Left Wednesday evening. My mother-in-law is sick, so my wife and I took the bus over to see about her. Is there a reason why you’re asking?” Alvin looked at Hoop with troubled eyes.
“That’d give you a good alibi, and it’s easy enough to check,” the chief said, immediately dispatching Officer Peterson over to the hardware store that doubled as a bus station to verify Alvin’s story.
“Why do I need an alibi?” Alvin was surprised.
“Hoop here says he saw you arguing with Mr. Holt on the thirteenth. Is that true?”
Alvin turned to Hoop. “Not this time you don’t,” he said. And turning back to Chief Baker, “No sir. Sure, I was out to the Holt place last Wednesday before I left. He sent for me. Wanted me to go up to Memphis with him to look at a filly when I got back. B
ut not one cross word passed between us.”
“You saying I’m a liar?”
Alvin sighed. “I’m not calling you a liar. I’m saying I’m telling the truth.”
The men sat in stony silence until Peterson came in and handed a note to Chief Baker.
“Well, Alvin, seems your story holds up. You see this, Hoop? Presley over at the store says he sold Alvin and Opal a ticket on the twelfth from here to Mound Bayou.” The chief stood and extended his hand, which Alvin shook. “You may go. Sorry we had to put you through all this, but for the record I had to ask. Tell Miz Cora Mae I’ll be over for a slice of sweet potato pie first chance I get.”
“I’ll tell her you asked about her,” Alvin said, glancing at Hoop before leaving.
Hoop slammed his fist into his palm. “You letting him go? I can’t believe you taking that darky’s word over mine.”
“Alvin didn’t call you a liar,” Chief Baker snapped at Hoop. “You and them shop boys got the coloreds around here scared to death of you. But I’m not. You’re lying out of your teeth, and I hate to think why.” The chief leaned over his desk and forced the man to make eye contact. “Where were you last Thursday?”
Hoop looked at his feet. “Working at my station pumping gas. Got witnesses aplenty. Ask Jake, Bo, and Tomie Lee.”
Chief Baker turned in his swivel chair. With his back to Hoop, he said, “Why, I’d have to be possessed by a clown to believe a word that fell out of any one of your mouths. Now git, and make sure that bald-faced lie you hatched about Alvin dies quickly.”
But the chief’s warning didn’t do a thing to stop Hoop. Back at the ironwork shop he told his buddies, “Alvin killed Holt, and I know it.” He sauntered over to the cooler and pulled out a cold drink, putting a nickel in the cup on the counter. He straddled a chair and leaned back against the wall. “I told Baker-boy what I seen, and what did he do? He insulted me, laughed at me in front of that uppity nigger passing hisself off as some kinda horse doctor with a fancy name!”
Anger fueled Hoop’s speech. “A white man’s life was taken right here in our town. Who’s next … our wives, daughters, mothers? And what does the chief of police do? I’ll tell you! He shakes the murderer’s hand like they was equals. That shows Baker ain’t gonna do nothing.” He spat as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. “I says it’s time we take charge. Like the Bible says. ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ ”
The Dark-Thirty Page 2