Mendy fought back waves of nausea. Oh God, she thought. They were coming directly toward her, and there was nothing she could do.
The man at the head of the line, the man whose silhouette had seemed vaguely familiar, was on the path now, coming closer, closer. He looked down, and just for a second it seemed to Mendy that he stared right into her eyes. Mendy looked away. Her gaze rested on his shoes. She saw that he wore brown penny loafers, and he was so close that Mendy could see he had buffalo nickels wedged into them instead of pennies. Mendy could see every scuff and pick in the leather on the toes of his shoes.
Mendy was frozen with fear. In seconds he would step on her. Then, unbelievably, she saw him trip and topple to the side. Another man piled on top of him, then a third. The next man stopped to help them up. The man in the center yelled to them, “Halt. Fall back. Fall back in the circle. Let’s have our new brothers say their pledge and get out of here.”
The men moved back into the clearing. Mendy tried desperately to quiet her drumming heart and watch. One robed man touched his torch to the wrapped cross. Mendy could see it was the man with the dusty brogans and grimy hands. As the sleeve of his robe fell away, she saw that the dark color went all the way up his arm.
Whoosh. The blaze engulfed the wooden cross. Cinders floated skyward, piercing the night like stars.
Each man put his right hand over his heart. The man with the megaphone shouted, “Brothers, repeat after me. ‘By my own free will and instance I swear, by the mighty God, that I never to anyone will tell by a hint, sign, action, or word about the secrets, signs, handshakes, keywords, or ceremonies that belong to the Order, neither that I am a member of this Order, nor that I know a member. I will submit to the regulations for the Order and its commands.’”
After the men had repeated the pledge, they began shouting about defending and protecting the white race. Then Mendy heard one voice rise above the others, shouting, “I will kill any coon-dog–colored man, woman, or child to defend the white race.”
Mendy closed her eyes and prayed. She couldn’t bear to hear any more. She wanted to jump up and run away She wanted this to be over. It felt like poisonous snakes were crawling in her stomach. For the first time in her life, she wished she were home in her bed, being a lady like Mama wanted her to be.
And now all her mama’s fears made sense. Mama knew that there were men who hated—men who hated enough to kill anyone who wasn’t white, even her daddy, her mama, her brothers and sisters—even Mendy. She felt a tear crawl down her muddy face.
When the last flicker of the men’s torches had disappeared through the forest, she heard Jeffrey whisper, “You all right, Mend?”
Mendy couldn’t find her voice. Jeffrey helped her stand up. Her legs were stiff as boards. She was shaking all over, and her teeth were chattering, as if she’d felt a wind from the coldest place on earth. “Why do those men hate colored people so?” she asked Jeffrey.
“I don’t know, Mend,” Jeffrey said. “But we got to find out who they are and tell the sheriff. We’ve got three days before Mrs. Roosevelt comes to Highlander. We ought to be able to figure out some of them at least. Tomorrow I’ll meet you at McFee’s General Store at noon, ’round in the back. We can start there and see if we can recognize anybody Some of ’em is bound to live in town or come to town on Saturdays.”
Mendy headed home and quietly got into bed. The room seemed lonelier than ever. She realized that she’d never felt hatred before from anyone. Even when her brothers and sisters were mad at her, it didn’t feel like those men had made her feel. Sometimes Mama and Daddy had an argument, but Mendy could tell they still loved each other. She had never known until tonight that there were such people in the world. It was hard to believe that God let them be out there saying all those hateful things, and using his name too.
Mama was right—learning something new could hurt you. Those men hated her and her whole family Was there something wrong with being a colored person?
Mendy tossed and turned for the few hours left of the night. She wished she could crawl in bed with Grandma or Clara. Finally she got out her scrapbook and reread Mrs. Roosevelt’s saying about discrimination.
Mendy turned the page. She read another saying by Mrs. Roosevelt that she’d never paid much attention to before: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Mendy hugged the scrapbook until she fell asleep.
The next morning, when Mama called her, Mendy didn’t want to get up. For some reason, knowing people hated her just because she was colored made her not want to move. But you gotta move, Mendy thought. Grandma had taught her that. You always gotta move, even if your body don’t feel up to going. Mendy got up. She reread Mrs. Roosevelt’s words. She decided she would not give those men consent. Being colored was just fine.
CHAPTER 8
REVELATIONS
After breakfast Mendy practiced the piano for an hour without being told. She discovered that the music soothed her. Then Mendy opened the Bible and read the Twenty-third Psalm: The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures …
Daddy said whenever you needed a dose of bravery, you should read that and you’d be less afraid. Mendy needed courage now, because all she felt inside was fear. She was terrified to go into town and find out who in Cowan hated people just because of their color. What would she do when she faced those men? But she had to go meet Jeffrey. She couldn’t let Mrs. Roosevelt down.
After breakfast Mendy asked Mama, “May I go play with Brenda Hatfield today?”
Mama turned around slowly, eyeing Mendy from her shoes to her neatly combed hair. “Say what?”
“I’d like to go play with Brenda,” Mendy repeated. “You said I could.”
Mama frowned. “Are you up to something, Mendy?”
“No, ma’am,” Mendy said. “I’m bored, Mama, that’s all.”
“Well, all right. But don’t stay too long. And don’t go wandering off. You go straight there and come right back.”
Mendy walked quickly toward town. She hated that she’d told Mama a fib. There was no way in the world she’d go play with Brenda Hatfield. That poor girl didn’t know to play but one thing, a tea party. And Mrs. Hatfield kept her nose as high as a bird in the sky. Just because she and Reverend Hatfield were from Philadelphia, they thought the mountain folk were backward. But Mendy knew who was really backward, and it wasn’t the mountain folk.
Stores lined both sides of Cowan’s main street for two blocks. Mendy headed for the general store, careful to stay out of sight of anyone who knew Mama. Mendy slipped behind the store and hid. She and Jeffrey couldn’t risk anybody seeing them together and telling their parents.
Finally Jeffrey showed up. He held out a small notepad and pencil. “Here, I bought you this. If we find anything out, we can write it down.”
Mendy took the notepad. “Thanks, that’s a good idea. Now you go that way, and I’ll go this direction. We can both be on the lookout for anybody wearing that silver ring, or the shoes I told you about, especially the loafers.”
“And we’ll both keep our noses out for skunk,” Jeffrey added. “Let’s meet back here in an hour.”
Mendy headed down the sidewalk, her eyes glued to the shoes of the people walking past her. She saw brogans, work boots, saddle shoes, high heels—but no men’s loafers. She started to feel dizzy keeping her eyes on all those moving feet. How was she ever going to find what she was looking for this way? Then she had an idea.
Mendy walked up the street to the barbershop. The barbers were all white men, but three days a week they let a colored man shine shoes for tips outside on the sidewalk. If anybody could tell her who had the penny loafers, he could.
Uncle Steven was spitting on a brown shoe as Mendy walked up. She waited patiently until his customer left.
“Howdy, Miss Mendy,” he said, smiling. “What you doing hanging ’round up here?”
“I got something important to ask you, Uncle Steven. Something secr
et. I’ve got to whisper it to you,” Mendy said. He wasn’t her uncle, but colored children called all the old people uncles and aunts.
“It must be top-secret if you got to whisper. Ask on’t then.”
Mendy cupped her hand over his ear and whispered.
He raised his eyebrows. “Why do you need to know that, young blood?”
Mendy was proud he called her that. It was a name old men called young boys. Everybody colored knew that Mendy could ride a horse, fish, or trap as good as any boy around.
“I seen ’em, that’s all, and I just want to know,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t make her say more.
“Hmm. Let me see,” he said, rubbing his mixed gray beard. “Hit’s two or three men in Cowan with them penny loafers. There’s three or four more in Hixson, and a bushel of ’em up in Sewanee. But, now, you say he had nickels wedged in his shoes instead of pennies. Right now I can only reckon but one like that. That would be Boyd D. Bryson. He’s bad news to any colored man and a good, close friend of that old Jeb Connor.”
“Thank you, Uncle Steven,” Mendy said.
Boyd D. Bryson sounded like the perfect match for those shoes. And he was friends with Jeb Connor, who owned the clearing. Mean old Mr. Connor must be in the Klan, too. Until now Mendy had just thought he didn’t want coloreds on his land. Mendy stopped at the corner and wrote Boyd D. Bryson and Jeb Connor on her notepad.
Next Mendy wanted to find the man with the grimy hands and arms. Mendy tried to think what could make somebody look like that. Sometimes Daddy’s hands looked all tar-greased black after he’d been blacksmithing, but his hands didn’t stay that way It seemed like this man was grimy all the way up to his elbows with some kind of stain that didn’t wash off.
Mendy leaned against the gray planks of a building and considered. What could those stains be? Grease, maybe. Brown, gunky grease. And hadn’t his nails been all jagged? He must be a mechanic. That was it. She headed for the train yard. Maybe he fixed train engines. All the trains crossing the Cumberland to Chattanooga had to come through Cowan.
Mendy loved the trains. Even though she was in a hurry, when she got to the train yard she stopped a minute to watch the pushers, the engines that pushed trains over the steep grades of the Cumberland Mountains. Then, off to the side of the yard, Mendy spotted a man repairing an engine. His body was almost hidden under the engine, with just his legs sticking out from underneath.
Mendy moved quietly, like she did when she was in the woods, until she was close enough to see his shoes. He had on dusty brogans, just like the ones she’d seen in the clearing, but she couldn’t tell if one of the strings was broken. Her heart pounded. She stepped back. Maybe she should hide behind something to watch him.
Suddenly he slid out from under the iron wheel. He sat up fast, so fast that Mendy didn’t have a chance to run and hide.
“What you sneaking around here for, gal?” he asked. He unfolded himself and stood, rising higher and higher.
Mendy’s eyes stretched wide. He was huge like an old oak in the woods, a tall mountain man with red hair and a bushy red beard. He was wiping his big hands on a greasy work cloth. Even without checking his hands or the strings in his shoes, Mendy knew he wasn’t the man she was looking for. No one at the clearing had been this big.
“You hear me talking to you, gal?” the man said.
“Yes, sir. I was just looking for—looking for a man that Mr. Whitehall wanted to talk to,” Mendy said, afraid to use her daddy’s name in case this giant was in the KKK, too.
“What man?” he asked, looking down at her.
Mendy wondered if she looked like a small ant to him.
“I said, what man? You hard of hearing, gal?”
“No, sir. Uh, he just sent me down here to find a man that’s got a brown stain on his hands and his nails all broken up,” Mendy said, realizing how stupid that sounded.
Suddenly the man started laughing. “What in tarnation you talking about? He musta just been playing ’round wid you, gal. Ain’t no man here like that. Now go on, git,” the man said. He was still laughing as he walked away.
Mendy blew out a big sigh of relief. That was close.
But if the man she was looking for didn’t work in the train yard, then where? Maybe something farmers grew had stained his hands. She ticked off crops that grew in the area—cotton, corn, oats—but none of those things would stain a man’s hands. What could it be?
Suddenly, like the moon rising full on a dark night, the answer came to her. There was only one person who did a job that would make his hands look like that. She headed for the stables.
In the back of the stables, where people got their workhorses shod and their wagons fixed and such, old man Benefield tanned hides. He made leather from all kinds of hides, even from snakeskin, and he used dyes to color the leather—dyes that wouldn’t wash out.
Mendy didn’t want him to see her, so she went around to the back of the building. She knew, since it was simmering hot out, that the back door would be flung wide open. She was in luck. Through the back doorway, she saw Mr. Benefield dipping hides in a large barrel.
Mendy peeped around the door, but she was too far away to see his hands or his shoes. She looked around to see if anyone was watching her. No one was in sight. Sliding her body against the building, she moved under the window. She checked one more time to see if anyone was watching her and then peered in. Bingo.
Mr. Benefield wore dusty brogans with one string mended. And each time he lifted the leather up out of the barrel, Mendy could see the brown dye dripping off his hands. His arms were dark all the way to his elbows.
Suddenly, Mendy felt like she was choking; right then and there it felt like someone had put his hands around her neck. She had known Mr. Benefield all her life. Grandma had birthed his oldest boy before Mendy was even born, because white Dr. Pritchard had been away. Every Thanksgiving Mr. Benefield donated a turkey to the colored church for the needy.
Mendy squeezed her eyes shut. Maybe she had made a mistake. She tried to recall the scene in the clearing. Was the broken string on the left brogan? Was the man under that robe Mr. Benefield’s size? She pictured the man stretching out his stained arms to light the cross. She looked at Mr. Benefield again. It was him, all right.
Mendy backed away from the window. She turned an old tin bucket over and sat down on it. Her eyes filled with tears. She pulled out her pencil and wrote name number three, Mr. Benefield. A tear dropped down onto her pad. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
She took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. There was no time for crying. She had to keep going. She decided she would look for whoever had been sprayed by the skunk. But how to find him? Maybe she could ask some of the washerwomen. No, they’d probably go tell Mama. Mendy decided to just walk along the street and try to catch a whiff of skunk. Even if the man had thrown away the clothes that got sprayed, the skunk smell would linger on him.
Mendy started in front of the post office. There was a good cluster of people there, and anyway, she had always liked passing it because the United States flag fluttered in the wind. Mendy loved the flag because Daddy told her he had fought in the war to protect it. She passed people who smelled of tobacco, cement dust, lilac, spices, and plain rancid body odor. This wasn’t such a pleasant plan, she decided.
Just then, Mendy caught sight of a clock through a storefront and saw that her time was up. She rushed off to meet Jeffrey, feeling pretty good that she had three names. Maybe Jeffrey had found more.
Surely they could go to the sheriff now, she thought. Three or four names ought to give him enough evidence to start investigating. The men might deny everything, but if the sheriff questioned them all, maybe they’d tell different stories and the sheriff would catch them in a lie.
Mendy ran back toward the general store. As she passed Cowan’s only shoe store, she saw Mr. Franks coming out. He was a big man who smiled a lot and sometimes gave children horehound candy. Mendy waved to him
and ran toward his wagon. He was climbing up on the seat when Mendy got a whiff of him. She slowed to a snail’s pace.
“Hey, gal. Come on over here. I got some candy for you,” he called to her. Mendy didn’t move. The sight and smell of him now made her feel sick on the stomach. She quickly turned and walked the other way. She heard him hit his mules and say, “Gid up.” She listened as the hoofbeats moved away. Mendy could feel her heart breaking open.
She had always thought Mr. Franks liked the coloreds, but now she knew the truth. She sat down on the wooden steps of a storefront and added Mr. Leo Franks to her list. He had skunk smell all over him.
Mendy got up. There was no time for feeling sad. She had four names now! She was so eager to tell Jeffrey that she started running. By the time she reached the corner near the general store, she was racing so fast that she didn’t even see Jeffrey. She ran smack into him and almost knocked him down.
He stumbled back, and Mendy reached out to keep him from falling. For a split second they were actually holding hands. Embarrassed, Mendy let his hand go as soon as he balanced himself. They both looked around quickly, then ducked behind the store.
“Sorry,” Mendy said. “I was running because I got a name to go with the loafers—Boyd D. Bryson. And he’s friends with guess who—Jeb Connor.” Then she told him about Mr. Benefield and Mr. Franks. “What did you get?”
“You did good. I got two names,” Jeffrey said. “One was a man with the tattoo of an eagle on his arm. That one was easy. He’s a mountain man from Dayton. And the other one is somebody that’s gonna surprise you.”
“Who? Who is it?” Mend’s heart pounded. She didn’t want any more surprises like Mr. Benefield and Mr. Franks.
“You know the man with the long fingernails like a woman’s? Well, I got a good look, and I know who it is, all right.”
Mendy moved closer, “Who is it, Jeffrey? You look like you seen a ghost or something.”
“I didn’t want to believe it myself, Mend. It’s Mr. Archie Poole, the principal of the white high school.”
Circle of Fire (Mysteries through History) Page 7