Burden

by Courtney Hargrave

  Puckett’s body was left dangling among the laurels, but the townspeople returned the next morning to admire what they’d done. For avenging the woman—the papers never did release her name, but she was said to be a wealthy widow from a neighboring town—the governor praised “the good white people of Laurens County,” who, he told reporters, never failed “to defend the honor and virtue of the women of their county and state.”

  Eleven African Americans were lynched in Laurens County between 1877 and 1950, but the Puckett murder is the one folks still talk about. If contemporaneous reports are to be believed, nearly half the town showed up that night; farmers and mill workers from farther afield were still arriving to join the lynch mob in the wee hours of the morning, long after the man was already dead. And though Puckett’s body was cut down in the forenoon of the following day, a piece of the lynching rope was left dangling from the bridge. Maybe by accident. Maybe on purpose. Whatever the intent, nobody ever bothered to take the rope down—not as the civil rights movement came and went, nor as the schools were finally integrated in the fall of 1970, nor as marsh ferns and honeysuckle vines spiraled their way up the trestle pier and kudzu crept along the banks of River Street. For more than seven decades, the rope hung there, twisting in the breeze, a stark reminder of the horrors of the Jim Crow era.

  “We used to walk under that trestle,” said Reverend David Kennedy, who passed by the rope nearly every day as a child, each time he walked from Jersey, the largest of the historically black neighborhoods in Laurens, to the center of town. “And we heard stories. Whoever took that rope down, the same thing that happened to Richard Puckett was gonna happen to them.”

  The trestle was finally removed in the mid-1980s as part of a traffic flow project. But by then, the story of Richard Puckett’s death was as much a part of the landscape as the smokestacks and water towers, the abandoned Laurens Glass factory where workers once fired thousands of bottles for the Coca-Cola company, or the grand homes presiding over West Main.

  * * *

  —

  Until the afternoon of March 1, 1996, not many people beyond the Upstate had heard of Laurens. Certainly the residents could not have anticipated the sudden influx of national attention. About the only sign of anything unusual at all had been the banging of hammers and the cutting of plywood, sounds of construction ringing out from the old Echo theater. But when the block letters were finally slid into the marquee, announcing the name of a new business, the Redneck Shop and “World’s Only” KKK Museum; when the theater turned out to be owned by two proud Klansmen; when reporters started to descend on Laurens from New York and Washington and Los Angeles, then from as far away as Australia and Japan; when the courthouse square became the site of violent protests and general unrest, just about everyone in town claimed to have been blindsided.

  “That’s in the past,” a woman from nearby Gray Court explained to the Greenville News. “If I thought about it much, it would bother me, but I try to keep my mind on the Bible.”

  Perhaps the only person who wasn’t surprised by the sudden arrival of the Redneck Shop was Reverend David Kennedy. The Klan had been active in and around Laurens more or less since the days of Reconstruction—that was no secret—and every now and again, news of a cross left burning in someone’s yard still made the local papers. Just three months earlier, a little church up the road, Jesus Christ Holy Gospel, had burned down under suspicious circumstances. But for Kennedy, that length of rotted rope had been the surest sign of trouble. Though nearly a century had passed since the lynching, hardly anyone in town had learned the truth of what happened that night: that Puckett was framed and murdered, his death hailed as a victory for the white race.

  One by one, Kennedy would lead reporters away from the square, across the tracks, and on into Jersey, to the place where River Street descends into a swampy marsh. “America would love to put all the blame on the Ku Klux Klan,” he’d tell them, cutting a path through the saplings. “But what creates this atmosphere that allows the Klan to become bold?” He would then point to a spot in the middle distance, the place where his great-great-uncle died for a crime he didn’t commit, and explain that the rope had always been a warning.

  Racism, he often told his parishioners, is a strange organism. A living thing. You can trim the branch, you can try to cut it out by the root, you can bury it deep in the ground and deprive it of light. But when the conditions are right, it blooms.

  one

  THE MASK THAT GRINS AND LIES

  FEBRUARY 1996

  Reverend David Kennedy stood in his shirtsleeves at the edge of the pasture, studying the police officer loping toward him across the grass. The man was tall and lanky, hair close-cropped and side-parted, and he had a kind of hangdog manner about him—the way he rolled his shoulders forward and tucked his chin to his chest, as if trying to render himself invisible. The cop flicked away the butt of his cigarette, and Kennedy watched the glowing ember streak across the dark. A wind kicked up, bowing the trees. Kennedy crossed his arms against his chest and shivered.

  “They see me talkin to you, Rev, and they gon terminate me,” the cop said, extending his hand. “But I got to share this with you.”

  Kennedy had recognized the officer’s voice when he called earlier that afternoon—the reedy quality, the cowboy cadence. Calls like these weren’t altogether unusual; cops and reverends tend to weave in and out of each other’s lives in small towns, brushing past one another in the city jail or milling around together in the marble halls of the county courthouse. Kennedy knew just about everybody in the Laurens City Police and the Laurens County Sheriff’s Office. Quite a few state troopers, too. What made this call unusual had been the officer’s request to speak with the reverend alone, someplace private. “Safe,” actually, was the word he had used, and this was the spot Kennedy had chosen, a plot of brown pasture beneath a towering oak tree adjacent to the Beasley Mortuary, a black-owned funeral parlor in the southernmost reaches of Jersey. About the safest spot in town for a white cop who didn’t want to be seen.

  “You can share it with me,” Kennedy said. “It won’t go nowhere.” The reverend was a garrulous man by nature, but he spoke now in the practiced, almost detached manner of a priest taking confession. Not too eager, never excited. Almost aloof.

  “You can’t tell no one,” the officer said.

  “I won’t.”

  “I know I can trust you. That’s why I called you.”

  Kennedy gave an almost imperceptible nod and waited.

  “I saw some stuff,” the cop said finally, shaking his head. He glanced over his shoulder, lowered his voice, and shoved his hands into the pockets of his windbreaker. “I found out what they’re doin at the old Echo theater.”

  Exactly what had been going on at the Echo was a question folks in Laurens had been putting to themselves for several months. It was under new ownership, that much seemed certain, and some kind of renovation or refurbishment was under way. But whatever was going on, it was being kept a total mystery, a closely guarded secret. There had been no signage on the doors, no “Grand Opening” announcements in the local papers. The windows were dark and papered over.

  Kennedy hadn’t so much as stepped foot inside the Echo in nearly three decades, which was about how long the theater had been closed. As a boy, he’d preferred the Harlem theater, the movie house for black patrons over on Back Street, a small African American business district just east of the square. At the Harlem, he could watch the westerns he loved, Shane or the Billy the Kid flicks, without the indignity of having to enter through a side door and trudge upstairs to the colored balcony, without being hollered at for talking too much or having the audacity to laugh “too loudly.”

  One day when he was ten or eleven, however, Kennedy convinced his mother to let him go to the movies all by himself, for the very first time. An Elvis picture was showing at the Capitol—the Echo’s sis
ter theater, on the south side of the square. David bought his ticket and purchased a soda and found a seat in the balcony. Halfway through the film, around the time Elvis finished crooning “Puppet on a String,” David shimmied out of his row, approached the white man who’d sold him his ticket, and asked for directions to the men’s room.

  “He wouldn’t tell me,” Kennedy remembered, years later. “I said, ‘There’s nowhere we could use the restroom?’ He said no.”

  If Kennedy was angry or confused, those feelings quickly gave way to a more pressing emotion: panic. He had to relieve himself. Now. But finding a secluded spot somewhere outside, mere steps from the courthouse and City Hall and the police station, was out of the question. He thought fleetingly of making a run for the Back Street, but he knew he’d never make it in time. So instead, with a kind of sickening realization of the inevitable, he tiptoed back to the balcony, sat as far away from everyone else as he could manage, and tied a sweater around his waist to cover the growing wet spot on his trousers. The minute the house lights went up, he bolted.

  “I hit that door real fast, and ran home. That’s how I remember the Capitol theater.”

  For a black child growing up in the Jim Crow South, the Echo and the Capitol were one and the same—both located on the courthouse square, both operated by the same proprietor, and both seemingly designed to humiliate you in your otherness. They were shuttered around the same time, too, in the mid-1960s, amid growing competition from drive-in theaters and the rising popularity of television, though Kennedy had not been particularly sad to see either of them go. Over the coming decades, retail businesses would sometimes take up residence in the former lobby of the Capitol, but for some reason the Echo was never included in the city’s revitalization plans, never benefited from the public-private funds raised back in the 1980s to improve the historic district. The building and all of its contents—projector, screen, concessions equipment—were sold at auction in 1989, but still the theater sat empty, slipping further and further into a state of disrepair. Until the construction started, it seemed as though the Echo might be vacant forever.

  “What’d you see?” Kennedy asked the officer. “What’s the problem?”

  The cop shifted his weight from foot to foot. From beyond the tree line came the whining blast of a CSX freight engine. “At first I thought it was just ’sposed to be a southern pride thing. Confederate-flag T-shirts and license plates and all that. But then I started lookin around.”

  Kennedy listened with growing interest, and then something closer to disgust, as the officer described the merchandise displayed inside the theater’s lobby: Maltese and Celtic cross patches lined up in rotating display racks, just like postcards; vintage WHITES ONLY placards and segregation-era signs; T-shirts and bumper stickers emblazoned with all manner of racist invective. The walls were lined with photos of cross burnings and Klan rallies. In the center of the room was a slender mannequin, the kind you might find in a ladies’ dress shop, outfitted in a Klansman’s hood and robe.

  “I reckon they’ll open for business any day.” The cop shook his head again, in sadness or in resignation. “I don’t know what’s going on in Laurens.”

  It was obvious now why the officer had called him: Reverend Kennedy’s reputation as a local civil rights leader. He’d built his congregation, New Beginning Missionary Baptist, from the ground up, and he’d founded the Laurens County Soup Kitchen, through which members of his congregation served an average of 1,500 meals each week. He knew, had heard of, or was related to just about everybody in Laurens. A simple crosstown errand could stretch to the better part of three hours, since he felt compelled to stop and chat with almost everyone he happened to pass on the way. He was quick with a hug and known for delivering one of his trademark phrases: “hallelujah up there” if the word was good, or a reminder to “pump it up for Jesus!” for someone down on his luck. He was used to taking calls at all hours of the day and night, to receiving visitors unannounced at the church and at his home, and to providing assistance to people seeking all manner of favors.

  Granted, the wisdom he dispensed these days tended to have less of a spiritual nature and be more concerned with matters of practical guidance. Help for a parishioner facing the threat of eviction. The name of a sympathetic lawyer or bail bondsman. Lately he’d been called more and more to help with the most basic of needs, especially food. David Kennedy kept stockpiles of food so that he’d always have something to offer—collards, okra, loaves of white bread, canned fruit, all of it donated from area businesses or members of his congregation and then tucked into the closet in his office or the trunk of his car. Every day he struggled to live his faith: blessed are the poor and the hungry, blessed are they who are persecuted. He served as coordinator of the local minority rights group, Project Awakening, and as a staff member at the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment. Over the last ten years, he’d organized protests and marched alongside local and state-level politicians, never failing to speak out against prejudice and hate. But as he watched the cop climb back into his car and head off down Harper Street, an uneasy feeling came over him.

  “That cop was nervous,” he said later. “I can see him now, just shaking.”

  * * *

  —

  Reverend Kennedy was born in his grandparents’ house, in the Brown Franklin Court Negro housing project, in the summer of 1953. Of course, he wasn’t a reverend then—it would be eighteen years before he received his call to ministry. In those days, he was just David, the first child born to John Henry and Mary Frances “Frankie” Kennedy, but already part of a large, boisterous, close-knit family that had lived in Laurens and the surrounding rural area for generations.

  Back then, the “projects” were still new, constructed after the Housing Act of 1949 initiated a sweeping expansion of the federal government’s role in public housing. David, along with his parents and grandparents and a revolving cast of aunts, uncles, and cousins, lived at C-51 Spring Street—“C” for “colored,” though the label was hardly necessary, as the projects were rigorously segregated. Low-income white families lived on the west side of the complex in what were called the Henry Laurens Homes, in honor of the town’s namesake. (Born in 1724, Henry Laurens had been president of the Second Continental Congress and a partner in Austin and Laurens, the largest slave trading house in North America.) Black residents, meanwhile, were situated exclusively to the east, at the bottom of a low hill. Aside from the crude alphanumeric distinction, the housing tracts were alike in virtually every way—row upon row of single-story redbrick homes, with backyards that butted up against each other to form long, grassy alleyways—split into perfect halves by Spring Street. For black residents, Spring Street was the proverbial line in the sand, the line you did not cross. And in that way, the projects served as a kind of microcosm of the larger community.

  In the late 1800s, after Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow, after they were stripped of political power and basic civil rights, African Americans in Laurens began to carve out their own unique spaces: On the north side of town, just beyond the courthouse square, the neighborhoods of Sunset Park, Rich Hill, and Stumptown sprang up around the town’s first two black churches, St. Paul First Baptist and Bethel AME. By the early 1900s, a thriving business district—the Back Street—developed just east of downtown, filled with groceries, restaurants, barbershops, fish and meat markets, and pool halls that catered almost exclusively to black residents. The rest of town, however, remained lily-white. And with the color lines thus drawn, the white residents in Laurens went about their daily lives, heeding a social order both cruel and duplicitous.

  In the Wattsville section of town, white patrons kept Bell’s Café packed from sunup to sundown, even though everyone knew that the food—cornbread, collards, black-eyed peas, potato salad, fried chicken—was prepared exclusively by black women. (Black patrons could purchase food, too, provided they entered and exited through
the back door and ate their meals standing up in the parking lot.) David’s grandfather often came home from work talking about a white man, Clyde Francis, who at lunchtime didn’t much mind eating in the company of his black coworkers so long as he had a physical object—a brick, usually—to set down in the dirt, a crude way of delineating the color line himself. And while it would have been unthinkable to eat in the same restaurant or drink from the same water fountain, white families regularly brought black women into the intimate functions of their homes: hiring them to cook their meals, launder their clothes, and care for their babies. Even some of the poorest whites in Laurens could still afford black domestic labor.

  “Oh, God, it was cheap,” said Samuel Shipman, whose own home didn’t have indoor plumbing until he reached the age of nine or ten. “My neighbor was a half textile worker, half farmer. He had some property and he had a family of three living on his property. They didn’t earn any money, just sharecropping food. They’d call him ‘Massa Craig’ and they took his last name.”

  Perhaps what’s most jarring about Shipman’s recollection is that he wasn’t talking about race relations at the turn of the century. He was describing Laurens in the 1950s.

  Even in the Kennedy home, there were lines you did not cross. Because David’s parents worked most days, including the weekends, he was often cared for by members of his extended family. The patriarch, however, the undisputed head of the household, was David’s grandfather. “He was a powerhouse,” Kennedy says. “Not a mean man, but a serious guy. Everybody respected him.” At dinnertime, the notion of even looking at a fork before his grandfather had blessed the meal was as unthinkable as the prospect of loitering around the homes on West Main.

  But no matter how steadfastly black residents adhered to the racial etiquette of the day, the color line was readily—and frequently—crossed by white residents.