American Ghost

by Janis Owens

  Jolie smiled, as even she had been touched by a whisper of nostalgia over leaving the shade of the old swamp, which in some ways was the most beautiful spot on earth, a ruined Eden.

  But she would never be as sentimental as Carl and would only shrug, saying, “Well, I don’t know about harmless. The first great love of my life left here in an ambulance, shot in the back.”

  Like the true small-town boy he was, Hugh thrived on gossip and immediately perked up, wanting more. When nothing was forthcoming, he asked after a delicate sip of wine, “Was he a local boy?”

  Jolie smiled at his shameless prying. “No. He was a Miami boy. A Miami Jew.”

  “Oh, my,” Hugh drawled lightly, obviously impressed. “That was very brave, of someone,” he allowed, unable to resist a gleam of delight at this fascinating revelation (oh, the joy of telling his friends in New Orleans, who knew about Jolie already, from his many colorful stories), though he tried to cover it with compassion, overlaid with his usual dry humor.

  “So I assume he survived—or does El Bethel have a Jewish section I’m unaware of?”

  Jolie decided maybe wine would go better with the conversation than tea and, fishing out another glass, allowed him to pour her a bare inch. She was not overly fond of the sharp, sour taste, but enjoyed the warmth and after a few sips assured him, “Oh, he still walks the earth. Has a job with the state. And a wife and a son. And a bad marriage, apparently.”

  She paused at that, as the part about the child was recent news, passed on to Carl by the ever-attendant Wesley Dennis, who’d come to the funeral with his mother. Jolie thought herself no longer affected by Sam at all, but hearing that he’d had a child by another woman had hit her badly, made her so bitter that she couldn’t carry the light tone any longer, even with Hugh. “Women carry the Hendrix curse,” she offered drily. “Men seem to get out all right.”

  Hugh digested it in silence, finished his wine, and offered to pour her more. When she refused, he poured himself another glass and sat back and mused, “So that’s the secret of Jolie Hoyt: a broken heart. The tradesmen in Destin, and a good many local boys, have asked me about you. You seem so alone, so solitary, for someone so young. I’ve been telling them that you were a churchgirl, devoted to your father. Heaven knows what I’ll tell them now. Where will you go?” he asked, as Jolie’s days in the parsonage were limited, now that the parson was a citizen of the graveyard.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Carl and Lena have offered me a room in their stucco mansion, which is generous, I’m sure. But I’d have to go to his church, and that would truly drive me insane, listening to all his homey Hendrix tales, while he prances around in that idiot watch and designer socks.”

  She halted a little unsteadily as she was talking to the Gucci king. But Hugh was truly too self-absorbed to take such a jab personally and just nodded sagely, as if he certainly understood her reluctance to join forces with Carl.

  “He does tend to romanticize the place,” Hugh allowed, then with a mild cut of his eyes asked, “Have you ever thought of moving to Cleary? I happen to know that one of the wonderful old houses downtown will soon be on the market for the right buyer—which is to say, someone who won’t immediately bulldoze it and build a Pizza Hut.”

  “Which one?” she asked with interest, as she had done small decorating jobs on most of the houses on Silk Stocking Row and knew their varied histories.

  “The old Altman place,” he told her with a small smile. “You might have heard of it. Not as stunning as the Thurmon mansion or the Jamison house, but well built and sturdy. Not air-conditioned upstairs, but always cool in the summer. Mother used to say that it was built over a cave.”

  Jolie was so stunned that she could only stammer, “D’you mean it, Hugh? You’re really selling? How much?”

  He smiled at her eagerness. “Oh, very affordable to the right buyer, as long as they promise to take care of the old girl and not rip out her claw-foot tubs or otherwise defile her—or my grandmother would haunt you and me both. Oh, and it does require membership on the city Historic and Beautification Board. They meet once a month and need new blood, as does the old house—and all of Cleary, for that matter.”

  “You don’t mean that you’d, like, live there, too?” Jolie interjected, so bluntly that Hugh sniffed.

  “No. I mean a normal legal exchange. But thank you for the compliment. It means a lot to an aging, old bachelor to know that he’s considered such desirable company by the young people around town.”

  Jolie was too honest to pretend that she’d meant otherwise and asked, “But where will you go, Hugh? New Orleans?”

  He gave another well-bred shrug, not of a generation who liked to divulge personal matters to the hired help, though he did offer, “Well, eventually, that’s the plan. I’ve had an architect draw up plans for a cottage on the millpond. I think I’ll be quite happy, jumping back and forth between the two. The old house is really too much for me—hasn’t been cleaned out in years and years, so don’t get in a hurry about all this. It’ll take me forever to decide what to keep, and how to divide the family items. My sister hasn’t paid a dime for upkeep since Mother died, but I’ve confidence that when I announce the sale, she’ll fight me like a dog for every spoon and plate. I don’t expect I’ll have much of a summer, at that.” He came wearily to his feet.

  Jolie was unused to wine and a little tipsy at the turn in fortune, as the Altman house might not be an antebellum beauty, but was wonderful in its way, built at the turn of the century in the Craftsman style, with a deep front porch and a broad, single gable.

  She could hardly think of the words to thank him properly and in the end resorted to humor, standing at the door of the van and telling him with the same dryness in which she used to tease her father, “And let no one in Hendrix say after this day that Hugh Altman is a heartless, old, Gucci-wearing son of a bitch.”

  Hugh didn’t quite seem to get the joke and asked with a look of mild concern, “Who says that of me, in Hendrix?”

  Jolie grinned. “Well, me, usually. But once I close the deal on the house, they are words I’ll not utter never, no more, again. You have my word on it.”

  Hugh’s patrician thin skin couldn’t stand much heavy teasing. He rolled his eyes and keyed the engine, commenting with rare honesty, “You have your grandmother’s irreverent humor. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “One old man did”—she smiled—“every week of my life.”

  Hugh followed her nod to the old cemetery, which was gray in the twilight, moss-grown and peaceful. He nodded briefly, then murmured, “Well. God grant he rest in peace,” then told her he’d talk to someone at the bank the next day about the details of the house deal, see what the requirements were for the loan.

  When he left, Jolie didn’t go inside immediately, but stood there in the drive in the early-summer twilight, shell-shocked by the miraculous possibility that she might have somehow outwitted the Hoyt curse and might actually get out of Hendrix at last.

  Part Two

  When the Chickens Came Home to Roost

  Chapter Fourteen

  The mythical chickens of Hendrix, Florida, which left in the wee hours of the morning in late October 1938, amid smoke and chaos and the gnashing of teeth, began their circular return nearly seventy years later, from a most unlikely place: an upscale, suburban household east of Memphis in Germantown, Tennessee. There a seventy-five-year-old retired businessman named Hollis Frazier was finishing up a lonely Saturday night on his computer, returning an e-mail from his daughter. Thrice-divorced, Hollis had bought the little Dell for such a purpose, so he could keep up with his children: his son, a career man in the army stationed in Turkey; his oldest daughter, an English teacher in Kansas City; his baby (at twenty-three years), a lowly grad assistant at Wellesley.

  His Welleslian, Kate, had hooked up the little Dell for him and shown him how to navigate the web—slow going, as Hollis wasn’t a typist and his input was painfully slow: click, click, c
lick. He might have given up on it long ago if not for a double bypass the summer before that had revealed a congenital weakening of his aorta, which in his cardiologist’s humble opinion could no longer stand the stress of seventy-hour workweeks. He’d been forced to give up the day-to-day grind of managing his businesses (two barbecues and a meat market in Annesdale), and for the first time in his life he was faced with the curious by-product of modern American success called leisure time. With nothing better to do, he often found himself sitting at his desk late at night, surfing here and there, checking sports scores and his competition’s prices, the weather in Kansas City and Incirlik.

  He eventually grew proficient enough to dabble in genealogy and run people searches on his old army buddies, even finding one or two. But on this particular night in January, his search was both more personal and more somber, launched earlier in the evening after he’d come upon a rerun of Rosewood on TNN. Hollis had watched it with growing restlessness, as it reawakened many old ghosts; so much that he’d gone straight to his computer when it was over and had googled three terms on a whim, to see what he’d get: Camp Six+lynching+Frazier.

  He wasn’t surprised when the search came up empty and almost left it at that, but tried one more variation, deleting the Frazier and tapping in only two words: Hendrix and Kite. To his amazement, he actually unearthed a hit this time, a link to a jumbled web page on the Five Civilized Tribes—or so the gaudy, orange banner proclaimed. It was actually an aggregate site, with a long list of links, and he could find no connection to Henry Kite or Hendrix at all, till he’d scrolled down to the bottom and came upon a link modestly titled Notes on the Muskogee Creek.

  His mother had a good bit of Indian blood—Creek or Cherokee, she said—and he read along with interest, the writing clear and conversational, if a little scattered. Mostly it was a hodgepodge of loosely woven data on the Indians who’d once lived on the lower reaches of the Apalachicola River. Hollis was impressed enough to hit the print button while he was still reading, thinking he’d send a copy to his son, who didn’t have access to Internet at the moment and was a great student of history.

  He continued to read as it printed, through pages of all sorts of dislocated but factual-seeming anecdotes, till he stumbled across a final section, curiously titled “The Illustrious Hoyt Tribe of Hendrix.” Hollis was taken aback by the name, which had made frequent appearances in his mother’s and aunt’s stories—an enormous local family portrayed as funny, hapless, and occasionally vicious. They weren’t known to be either famous or (for that matter) hugely literate, and Hollis was impressed with the depth of the writing that outlined their history, their households, and even their location on the 1930 census.

  He couldn’t understand why they’d been chosen for such detailed assessment and scrolled back to the top of the page and found the author of the piece: Samuel B. Lense, the University of Florida. The name meant nothing to him, and he returned to his reading, searching for the connection to Henry Kite. He found it on the last page, tacked on with no explanation or warning, along with an explosive footnote.

  *Local families such as the Hoyts still boast of owning pieces of the rope, and his fingers, which were severed as souvenirs, can still be found in Hendrix, though one native regretfully added that most of them were lost, as they’d been taken into Cleary the day of the lynching and thrown on black citizens’ porches, in warning.

  Hollis had been reading so quickly that his emotional reaction was slightly delayed, so jarring that he shoved himself away from the desk and came to his feet, muttering, “My God.”

  He stood there, agitated and unbelieving, then settled back in his chair and set himself to tracing the author, Mr. Lense of the University of Florida. The name brought up a half dozen hits, nothing connected to UF or the Creeks or Hendrix, but articles from the Tallahassee Democrat connected with the tragic death of a toddler who’d died while under the supervision of the state foster system in ’99. Samuel B. Lense hadn’t authored the articles, but was quoted in them, cited as a “supervisor at HRS,” who’d come to the defense of the beleaguered caseworker.

  Hollis had no concrete evidence that he was the same Samuel B. Lense who’d authored the Indian study, though his indictment of public policy quivered with the same left-wing passion (“—cannot expect a state employee carrying a ninety-three-client caseload to breach the gap of a narcissistic society that has all but abandoned these defenseless children”).

  Following his nose, Hollis ran a quick people-search in Tallahassee and there he was: Samuel B. Lense on the State of Florida employee contact site, with an e-mail address in a state office. Hollis bookmarked it, then went back and found the only other familiar name mentioned in the paper, a passing reference to a Jolie Hoyt, with no address or other information given. He typed the name into the same search and narrowed it to Hendrix. The surname popped up three dozen times, but the only Jolie Hoyt was listed as living at 115 SE First Avenue, Cleary, right around the corner from the courthouse where that luckless bastard Kite had been strung up for public amusement after they finished him off in Hendrix.

  He fed the address into MapQuest and found it listed as a business, a bed-and-breakfast in the Cleary historical district, with all the usual smarmy amendments—gourmet breakfasts and shady porches. The fax and phone number were listed, but Hollis didn’t consider contacting Ms. Hoyt directly, as the Hoyts were a duplicitous bunch, famous for their clannishness and chameleonlike ability to escape detection. Nailing one on the matter of Henry Kite would require finesse, bribes, and almost certainly a trip to Florida—his first since his mother put him on the train to Memphis almost seventy years before in a scene strikingly similar to the one portrayed in Rosewood (which had inadvertently brought the names Hendrix and Kite to his mind for the first time in many years). The notion was both exhilarating and a little terrifying, as Hendrix was no Rosewood; no celebrated injustice that had long been set to right with reparations and an official apology—or neatly tied up with a Hollywood ending.

  Hendrix was another world, a dreamscape of ill rumor—complex beyond repair. Hollis wasn’t even sure it still existed, though a quick Google search of the name yielded a surprising amount of information for such a small bump in the road: Population: 298. Elevation: 85 feet. Land area: 1.1 square miles. Even the racial composition was neatly broken down: White Non-Hispanic (95.6%); American Indian (3.4%); Hispanic (<0.7%); Black (<0.3%). In other words, not much had changed. It was still a backwoods Cracker paradise, white as hominy and about as tasteless, though surely it couldn’t be as white as all that. Surely there had to be more than <0.3% black people in all of Hendrix?

  Hollis found that <0.3% hard to believe, wondered what had happened to the thriving Camp Six, which had been populated by mostly colored folk—mule skinners and sawyers and turpentiners who’d sweated their lives away bleeding the catfacing on the yellow pine. Hollis had been so young when he left that he had little actual memory of the place. He knew of it mostly through the stories of his mother and aunt and maternal grandmother, who’d gone to their graves talking about the musically inclined Kimbralls and hardworking McRaes, and big Dave Bryant, who stood six foot six and weighed 340 pounds. “Big as Dave Bryant” was the way his mother described any big man, till the day she died.

  He wondered what happened to them and their descendants, and which of them had survived to fulfill that <0.3% black population. Most of all, he wondered, would that single living survivor be willing to talk?

  It was hard to say, hard to say.

  If he, Hollis Frazier, had spent his last seventy years scratching out a shadowy half life in the miasma of the flat woods, he wouldn’t be able to remember his name, much less a day so haunted that even his straight-talking papa never willingly spoke of it. But apparently someone was talking if the disorganized report of Samuel B. Lense was any indication.

  The least Hollis could do was go down to see him, talk to his sources, and that would be that. Hollis’s brother, Charley, could q
uit his moaning and be satisfied that they’d given it their best shot. Hollis glanced at his watch and thought about calling him, but old Chollie-Boy was six years his senior, and (in Hollis’s humble opinion) not the sharpest pencil in the pack. He simply couldn’t be made to understand how Hollis had happened upon this gold mine of information on the Internet—he who still shaved with a straight razor, who watched TV in black and white.

  To save himself a half hour of annoying explanation, Hollis decided to wait till morning and go over the river and tell him face-to-face. Better yet, he’d take the article to him and let him read it for himself. That was the ticket, Hollis thought, and as he undressed for bed, he made a mental note to stop by Walgreens on the way and refill the old pain in the ass’s prescription for nitroglycerin—because when he read that last page, he would certainly need one. Maybe two.

  Hell, Hollis almost needed one himself, and when he finally got to bed, he found himself too agitated to sleep. After a half an hour of tossing and turning, he gave it up and braved the cold hallway to fetch the printed pages. He sat up in bed with a glass of Absolut and read them again, start to finish, the unemotional disclosure on the final paragraph making him whisper aloud, “Damn.” Maybe Charley was right, he thought. Maybe some dumb Cracker still had them, sitting on his television, or on a shelf in his kitchen, a souvenir of a Big Night on the town.

  The idea was so vividly disturbing that Hollis said to hell with it and rolled over and called Charley in West Memphis. He waited for twelve long rings till a blurred, old voice mumbled, “Hellow.”

  Hollis didn’t bother to identify himself, just told him briskly, “Hey. I’m coming by in the morning—got something to show you.”

  “Who is this?” Charley muttered thickly. “Hollis? Whut time is it?”