Just South of Home

by Karen Strong

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Blood Kin

  When we got back to the house, Mama went into her office to work on one of her court cases. Daddy still hadn’t returned with the boys from basketball camp, so Janie and I took this opportunity to visit Mrs. Whitney.

  We were disappointed when we got there and found both the gift shop and the history center with CLOSED signs in the windows.

  “Do you think she has an appointment?” Janie asked.

  I shaded my eyes from the sun and scanned Town Square. Two elderly women browsed a clothing rack outside of Lucille’s Consignment Shop. Sunnie was sweeping the sidewalk in front of Loren’s Grocery. Mr. Hawkins was putting two large pieces of lumber into a customer’s pickup truck. Then I spotted Mrs. Whitney coming out of the post office with a stack of mail. She was wearing one of her long white dresses, the fabric glowing off her brown skin. Mrs. Whitney opened an umbrella to shield her from the afternoon sun. When she saw us, she paused before continuing her walk. We decided to wave, and she returned the courtesy.

  “That’s a good sign,” Janie said.

  We waited for Mrs. Whitney to open the history center door and go inside before we made any moves. The clang of a cowbell on the door announced our arrival. Unlike in the gift shop, Mrs. Whitney had kept everything intact from the original train depot. Two rows of creaky pine benches and a long counter separated the lobby from the back rooms.

  Mrs. Whitney was sitting on one of the benches, waiting for us. “Did you come visit me to learn some history?”

  “When we had our appointment, we didn’t tell you everything,” I spurted out.

  “We were the ones who woke up the haints at Creek Church,” Janie quickly added.

  “You think I didn’t know that?” Mrs. Whitney chuckled. Janie and I exchanged confused looks. “I knew you would be back.”

  “Do you know anyone named Sophie and Abner Hopkins?” I asked.

  She stood up from the bench. “Come with me.”

  We followed Mrs. Whitney as she took us behind the counter and down a hallway to an open room. Names spanned the far wall from the baseboard to the ceiling. They had been hand painted in careful and elegant script. Stark white against midnight-blue paint.

  I walked into the room and stared. Janie traced her fingers over one of the names. “Who are all these people?” she asked.

  “Names of the victims lynched in Fairfield County,” Mrs. Whitney said.

  Janie jerked her hand away. Mrs. Whitney gazed at both of us for a moment before she spoke again. “Folks in Warrenville and Alton—both white and black—want to move on, forget about what happened to these people, but I won’t ever let them forget their names. Their deaths should never be overlooked. They are an important part of the history of our town.”

  We followed Mrs. Whitney into another room off to the left, with thick green carpet. She went to a cabinet and pulled out a display drawer. The glass cover reminded me of the butterfly cases I had seen at the science museum. Several old pictures lay on top of velvet.

  Mrs. Whitney pointed to a picture of a dark-skinned woman posing in a fancy coat with a fur trim. “Laura Hamilton was a teacher who taught the sharecropper children in Warrenville. They couldn’t go to school with the white children in Alton. The county didn’t build a school for us until 1948.”

  I wondered why the woman’s name sounded so familiar, and then I remembered. Miss Hamilton was the teacher who had given Sophie the diary.

  Mrs. Whitney pointed to another picture. “This is the 1947 Warrenville Colored School class.”

  The children stood in three rows beside Miss Hamilton. They were smiling despite their lack of shoes, raggedy clothing, and dirty faces. In the front row, a small boy held the hand of an older girl beside him. They looked like an exact copy of the picture we saw in Mrs. Greene’s attic.

  Janie bent down and touched the glass. “We saw this boy at Creek Church.”

  Mrs. Whitney didn’t seem surprised. “That’s Abner Hopkins and his older sister Sophie.”

  “What happened to him?” Nervous energy pressed against my chest. I controlled the rapid beating of my heart by taking a deep breath. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as we waited to hear what Mrs. Whitney was about to say. I thought of the names on the midnight-blue wall. The same color as the night sky. Would I see Abner’s name like a lost star? Was he a part of Warrenville’s dark history?

  “No one knows,” Mrs. Whitney said. “He disappeared without a trace.”

  “They never found him?” Janie asked.

  “The boy is a restless spirit, so I’m certain he met a tragic end,” she said. “Quite common during that time. There are no known records of his passing.”

  Janie and I looked at each other, stricken by Mrs. Whitney’s casual tone. She must have noticed. “Has anyone told you about the sharecropper farm, Shiloh?”

  We both shook our heads, afraid to speak.

  Mrs. Whitney went back to the cabinet and pulled out another display drawer. She pointed to a picture of two men. The older man sat in a chair and had pale skin and blond hair. He wore a dark suit and held a Bible. The younger man stood beside him; his light eyes were lifeless and cold. I felt a twinge of uneasiness.

  “This is Lucius Alcott and his son Evern.” Mrs. Whitney pointed to the men in the picture. “Back in the day, Lucius’s grandfather operated Shiloh as a plantation. After the Civil War, the former slaves sharecropped the land.

  “Abner’s father was named Jack. Lucius and Jack grew up together, knew each other since birth. Lucius had promised to give Jack and some of the other sharecroppers the land they worked on day in and day out. No one had heard of that before, but Lucius was different from most white men in Fairfield County at the time.

  “But when Jack was killed in an accident, Abner became proxy to the promise of his father’s land. Lucius’s son Evern was none too pleased. A lot of white folks in this area didn’t like it either. They used fear and violence to keep the sharecroppers in their place.”

  “So Abner was promised the land, but no one wanted him to have it?” I asked.

  Mrs. Whitney nodded. “It wasn’t too long after that Abner went missing. Several witnesses saw Abner get into a truck with Evern and with his friends, but Evern claimed the boy ran away.”

  “Why didn’t anyone do anything?” Janie asked.

  “What could they do? Back then a white man’s word was trusted over anything else.” Mrs. Whitney’s eyes had a sad, faraway look. “Broke poor Lucius’s heart. He died soon after.”

  “Is this around the time the Klan burned down the church?” I asked.

  “After the community protested in Alton for the police chief to search for the boy, Evern and his friends torched Creek Church as a warning. At the time Evern was the grand wizard of the Klan in Fairfield County.”

  Mrs. Whitney’s eyes grew dark as she traveled to the past. “Creek Church was a place of worship. A safe haven. But the Klan turned it into something else. A place of terror. A place these men decided to turn into a shrine of their hate.”

  “What happened after that?” Janie asked tentatively.

  “These were hard choices to make. Things were changing but not fast enough. The community in Warrenville had to make a choice: live in violence or suffer in peace. Both choices came with sacrifices. Evern continued to mistreat the sharecroppers. Cheated them out of their crops and wages. Never gave them the land they were promised. A lot of families left and went up north. Without the cheap labor to keep the land going, Evern ended up selling most of it. In the end, he lost everything and died without a penny to his name.”

  “What happened to Sophie?” I asked.

  “She settled in Warrenville. Took up as a seamstress and got married. But soon after, she turned ill and died young.”

  I thought of the possible reasons Mrs. Greene would have Sophie’s diary and family pictures in the attic. I thought of the principle of Occam’s razor. Sometimes the most simple and obv
ious explanation is the right one.

  “We found a picture of Sophie and Abner in my grandma’s attic. We also found Sophie’s diary.”

  I thought of Abner’s human form versus the shadows I had seen at Creek Church and outside my window. “Do haints only reveal themselves to blood kin?”

  “Very good, Sarah.” Mrs. Whitney smiled at me. “Sophie was your grandma’s mama.”

  So Abner had been trying to communicate with us, not scare us! It was all starting to make sense.

  “You also said blood kin can put a spirit to rest. Can we help him?” I asked.

  “Such horrid things have happened at Creek Church,” Mrs. Whitney said. “I’m sure you know by now Abner isn’t the only spirit that dwells in that place. Those killed by the evil intentions of men have become evil themselves. Their hatred keeps them bound to this world. I believe it would be hard for anything good to remain there without succumbing to the evil.”

  “But you said the haints were just restless,” Janie said.

  “Most spirits are harmless. Others have different intentions. Which is why I gave you the extra protection,” she replied.

  “But Abner isn’t evil,” I said.

  “Not yet,” she added.

  Mrs. Whitney returned the pictures to the cabinet. Janie and I looked at each other. The haints surrounded Abner’s light with their darkness. There had to be some way, as his family, we could help him.

  “I’m going to talk to your grandma about this. My hope is that she’ll come around,” Mrs. Whitney said.

  “When do you plan on speaking with her?” I asked. “Should we be there with you?”

  Mrs. Whitney gave us a look. “Not a good idea. I would also suggest you keep what you found out to yourselves. If she finds out you were up in her attic, picking through her things, she won’t be happy.”

  “Aren’t you worried about Abner turning evil?” Janie asked. “Shouldn’t we do something before that happens?”

  Mrs. Whitney placed her arms on our shoulders and ushered us out of the room. “Girls, I have a plan to get our community to help. No need to worry.”

  “We could still help you,” I said.

  “This is something that should involve grown folks.” She eyed us closely. “Don’t worry, girls. I do have a plan. All the Warrenville spirits will be released once and for all.” Mrs. Whitney’s voice was different, stronger and defiant. “The past will not claim these souls. Not as long as I’m still breathing.”

  • • •

  When we arrived home, Jasper and Ellis were eating ham sandwiches in the den. Mama was still in her office, working on her court case.

  “Where’s Daddy?” I asked Ellis.

  “He’s upstairs taking an old-man nap.” Ellis mashed the rest of his sandwich into his mouth.

  “We have something important to tell you,” Janie said.

  The boys looked confused as we sat down between them on the couch. “It’s about the boy we saw at Creek Church. We found a picture of him in Mrs. Greene’s attic. From 1947!”

  Jasper stopped eating. “Wait. What? So this means he’s been haunting Creek Church for over seventy years? Start from the beginning.”

  So we did. We told them about the history of the Shiloh farm, the Alcott family, the violence of the Klan, and our family bond to Abner and Sophie Hopkins.

  “Mrs. Whitney thinks he was murdered?” Jasper asked.

  Janie nodded. “She didn’t exactly say that, but she thinks he met a bad end.”

  I kept going back to the picture of Evern Alcott and his dead, flat eyes. I didn’t understand how someone could harm a little boy, but then I remembered the words in Sophie’s diary: We are not seen as human.

  “So if Sophie is our great-grandma, how come we don’t know nothing about her?” Ellis asked.

  I thought of Mrs. Greene and how she kept those items locked in a trunk in the attic. Full of memories of her family. She had put them in a corner of throwaway, forgotten things. Just like Granddaddy Greene’s belongings. Maybe she wanted to protect us from what had happened in our family history. Mrs. Whitney said the past couldn’t be changed, but we were finding out how important it was for it not to be forgotten.

  “You know Mrs. Greene never talks about her family,” I said. “Now we know why. What happened to Abner was awful.”

  “Did you see the Wall of Remembrance?” Jasper asked.

  I nodded. My shoulders felt like a force was pushing down on me, the weight of all the names I had seen. So many names. So many people hurt.

  “When she first started painting them, she was afraid the wall wouldn’t be big enough,” he said.

  As we grew up, Daddy had told us about Warrenville’s past and how our community fought against Jim Crow and survived terror from the Klan. I knew it was important to know these things even if I hadn’t experienced them. Warrenville was my home, a place where I could roam around without fear of being harmed. But it hadn’t always been this way, and it was a blessing I had taken for granted.

  “Mrs. Whitney says she’s gonna ask Mrs. Greene for help,” I said.

  Mama opened the French doors and came out of the office. When she walked into the den, we all fell silent. “You all having a secret meeting or something?”

  “We were just telling the boys about what we saw at the History Center,” Janie said. “You were right, Aunt Delilah. Mrs. Whitney knows a lot about Warrenville.”

  “That’s great to hear. I need to make time to go there myself to see what she’s gathered.” Mama disappeared into the kitchen.

  Jasper leaned closer to us. “You think she can convince Mrs. Greene?”

  “Our grandma ain’t gonna help a root witch,” Ellis said. “I can tell you that already.”

  “Mrs. Whitney says she has a plan,” I said.

  Janie frowned. “A plan that she’s keeping secret. We have no idea what it is. She wouldn’t tell us. She won’t even let us help.”

  “I want to trust Mrs. Whitney,” I said. “If she has a plan, then we need to believe her.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Heritage Festival

  Every third Saturday in July, the townsfolk of Warrenville came together and celebrated the community at the Heritage Festival. Even far-flung kin returned home to reconnect with their roots. It was a family homecoming filled with memories and laughter. Located in Marigold Park, each festival booth boasted homemade crafts, art, and specialty food. Kids sat on folding chairs, getting their faces painted, while others walked around with huge clouds of cotton candy or corn dogs on big sticks.

  We went to Town Square as a family. Mama and Daddy held hands as they walked down to Main Street. Ellis, Janie, and I strode ahead and practiced our balance on the narrow iron beams of the railroad tracks near the Train Depot.

  “Can I get something to eat?” Ellis asked.

  Daddy pulled out a few dollar bills from his pocket and gave them to my brother. “This is all you’re getting. Make good decisions.”

  Ellis’s face opened up into a huge grin, and he rushed toward the funnel cake booth.

  Mama and Daddy stopped to talk with some neighbors, so Janie and I ventured into the crowd to explore before it was time to help Mrs. Greene. We split up to browse the booths. Mrs. Folet sold jewelry with feathers from her peacock farm. Dante Smith passed out personally recorded gospel music. Mr. Hopewell displayed his oil and watercolor art of Warrenville landmarks. I stopped and stared at a small painting.

  “You like it?” Mr. Hopewell rubbed his beard, stark white against his brown skin. His eyes focused on me. “That’s Creek Church back in the day.”

  I picked up the painting for a closer look and could now see the stone steps leading the way to a door. I imagined wooden pews and a small pulpit for the pastor. Then all of a sudden I saw the church in flames. White planks singeing black, embers lighting up the night. Pale faces in the amber glow watching the church burn. I placed the painting back on the table.

  “You interested in bu
ying it? I can give you a discount on account of your mama,” he said. “She helped me when those white folks tried to take my pension.”

  “I’ll think about it and come back. Thank you, Mr. Hopewell.”

  Janie and I finally met back up at the Deaconess Board booth. Several desserts were on display, but everyone wanted a slice of Mrs. Greene’s red velvet cake.

  Our grandma promptly held out our aprons. “Y’all are late.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  We sliced cake and wrapped up pies. Mrs. Greene beamed every time someone complimented her on her baking skills.

  Pastor Munroe stopped by the booth. “My wife adores your red velvet cake. Thank you so much for setting one aside for us.”

  “My pleasure,” Mrs. Greene said.

  “So are you going to follow in your grandma’s footsteps? Be a renowned baker?” he asked me.

  “Sarah is going to be an astronaut,” Janie said.

  Pastor Munroe stepped back impressed. “Is that right, now?”

  “Actually I’m going to be an astrobiologist,” I corrected Janie.

  “With God’s love, anything is possible.” He squeezed my hand. “Stay blessed.”

  The crowds started to thin, and I spotted Jovita and the Jones Girls. They were coming toward our booth, and I touched Janie’s shoulder.

  “We’ve got company.”

  Janie put on her rotten-egg face, complete with a frown. Jovita and the Jones Girls stopped in front of the booth. Yvonne showcased her wolf grin and looked at us as if we were two tasty snacks.

  “Y’all got any more red velvet cake?” she asked.

  “Not for you we don’t,” Janie sneered.

  Sheree popped her gum, and Lola rolled her eyes. Jovita rubbed her arms as if she was cold and stared at the dessert on display, avoiding eye contact with me.

  “That cake is dry and nasty anyway,” Yvonne said. “Folks only come by here because they’re trying to be nice.”