Growing up, I would hear stories of the old woman who lived at the end of the street and how she kept a man’s soul in a box. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I had never laid eyes on the woman and that the entire thing was probably some urban legend that had about as much gravity as an episode of Tales From The Crypt. And I was prepared to leave well enough alone, that is until I happened to catch her leaving her house one day.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. For seventeen years, before I went to college, I had never seen her, but now that I was home for the Christmas break during my senior year of college, I had somehow happened to chance upon her. Returning from my mailbox, I saw a small, withered shape moving roughly thirty yards away from me. I turned and stared, like people do when they find themselves passing a car accident. The little old woman was pale, her hair a chalky white. She moved about slowly towards a large black car parked in her yard. I watched in amazement, thinking to myself that there was no way such a small elderly woman could maneuver such a large machine.
Once she started up her car, I hopped into my own and decided to follow her. Struggling to keep a safe distance, so as to not alert her, I hung back more than half a block, just enough to keep her in sight. While tailing her, it occurred to me that what I was doing bordered on stupid, but in a small town like Daily, where there wasn’t much to do on Saturdays, no one could really blame me.
She parked at the Kroger grocery store, and as she exited her car, I cruised by her very slowly. In my rear view mirror, I could see the deeply drawn lines of age peeling back from her beady eyes. Her hair, tucked beneath a red knitted toboggan, was nearly the same color as her powdery face. But it was her eyes—those eyes—that reflected what I perceived as evil. Not like the evil of a master villain though. More like the glint of evil in a kid’s eye before he proceeds to pull the legs off of a small insect. And that image of the old woman stayed with me, long after she had gone into the grocery store.
Growing up I had often confused the word “coincidence” with the word “irony.” I think I preferred the latter because it sounded better, but it took me getting back a paper during my freshman year of college to realize that the two were, in fact, not synonymous. My composition professor wrote a nice little note in the margin of one of my papers stating something to the effect that a coincidence was a concurrent thing with no seeming connection, while an irony was something happening that was the opposite of what might have been expected. Only through repeated error did I eventually latch on to this concept. However, while surfing the website several days after the Kroger episode, I stumbled across something that I had trouble categorizing as either a coincidence or an irony.
I had been looking at a photo gallery on a website dealing with the Jim Crow era. Being that a number of the pictures in the online gallery were pictures of lynchings, I had painfully explored them, absorbing all of the details that surrounded each of the victims as they met their demises. Often I was so saddened that I could scarcely move to the next photograph. As I neared the end of that section of the exhibition, I stumbled upon yet another public lynching. This one, however, seemed a bit odd. I stared at the picture for several minutes before I began to recognize the buildings in the background. It was the Humma County Courthouse, and surrounding the hanged victim, who I could not even identify (either due to the quality of the black and white photograph or the fact that he had been beaten so badly—probably both), I noticed the large assembly of white people, many of whom I figured were either now living their last days in nursing homes or had managed to pass along their racists beliefs to their children and grandchildren. A chill went over me as I allowed this notion to sink in.
Ironically, or coincidentally, one of the women featured in the picture had the same beady eyes that I had seen on the old woman in the grocery store parking lot. I stared at the face, retracing in my mind the old woman’s appearance in my rearview window. There were not many things in this life that I was certain of, but I was convinced that the two women (the old woman and the woman in this picture) were one in the same.
Only then did I begin to take the stories about the box more seriously. I found myself obsessing over it during the day and dreaming about it at night. Was there really a man’s soul in the box, and if so, was it the black man in the photograph I had seen? The eeriness of what I had discovered haunted me, and I felt like a man trying to outrun his own shadow against the blaze of the sun. I was restless and confused and, at times, tormented by my own curiosity. It was only then that I knew what I had to do.
The decision to break into the old woman’s house was not a decision I toiled over for very long. It seemed like the only natural option for resolving this issue and bringing myself some kind of peace.
For roughly two weeks I watched her house, looking for patterns, any movements that would help me to understand her daily habits. It didn’t take me long to realize that she lived alone. Another thing that I noticed was that she would often leave her house at ten o’clock every morning and drive the mile and half to the post office. Unlike my family, she did not receive her mail at her actual house. It normally took her ten minutes to do this routine; however, I noticed on Thursdays that she would stop by Kroger to pick up groceries, always leaving with two plastic bags. On those days she would take close to forty minutes to run her errands. Once I had gotten her schedule committed to memory, I took some time to refresh myself on how to jimmy open door locks, a skill I had picked up after locking my keys in my dorm room one too many times. If the old woman had an alarm on her house, I would just resort to my tried and true method for handling major crises: run like hell.
At times I contemplated whether I should just leave well enough alone, but then the image of the lynching would come to mind, and I would remind myself that my purpose was far too noble to abandon. I was going to get to the bottom of all of this, and if there was in fact a box in the house, I was going to open it and release its contents to the world.
On the Thursday morning that I had picked to break into the old woman’s house, I woke up early and exercised in my bedroom. After getting myself warmed up, I messed with the morning crossword puzzle in the daily newspaper for a while. I wanted to make sure that I was operating on all cylinders when I went to the old woman’s house.
At around 9:55 a.m., I walked outside and pretended to go check the mailbox. As I walked slowly, watching for the old woman, she came out like clockwork. I stood at the mailbox, pretending to peer inside while using my peripheral vision to see the old woman start up the old black car and pull out onto the road. My back was to her as she passed by, headed to the corner stop sign. When she turned onto Main Street, I walked briskly to the end of the street and cut back along the back of the house in such a sly motion that I was impressed with myself. Before I knew it, I was standing at the backdoor of the woman’s house already jimmying the lock loose. When I twisted open the door, I could hear nothing more than the central air unit buzzing quietly. The dimness of the room, coupled with the thick, choking smell of mothballs reminded me that I was on foreign soil and had to move quickly.
The backdoor was by the kitchen, so I tiptoed through the kitchen, through the dining area, into the main room. As I turned, I saw a small hallway with several doors along each side. I worked myself quickly down the hall to an open door on the right. The thick quilt lying at the foot of the bed made me question whether or not I had found the right room. I went in anyway.
With my heart beating in my stomach (a feeling far worse than butterflies), I combed the dresser. Next to the vanity mirror was a jewelry box opened up to reveal small gold and pearl accessories. If I wanted to rob this woman, I would have made out like a bandit. Instead, I looked for the box, suddenly realizing I had no idea of what it looked like. I guess I had just assumed I would find it and automatically recognize it. A matter of fate and faith, if you will.
As furiously as I searched the room, I quickly realized that I might have been totally mistaken in breaking into this woman’s house. I looked at my watch and then walked over by the window in the room, unlocking it. If something happened and I needed to make a dash, I would have the window as a way out. Again, I stared around the room, looking aimlessly for anything that seemed odd, which, depending on the circumstances, would have included nearly everything in the house. It must be in the other room, I thought. Just as I started to dash across the hallway, I heard the old car pulling back into the driveway.
A sudden heat flushed around my face as the thought of being caught became a stark reality. If I didn’t find what I was looking for, I would have to come back again, and I didn’t know if I had the courage to repeat this adventure. Hearing her closing the door, I looked around the room again, quickly taking in one last glance at my surroundings. On the top shelf of the open closet, I saw an odd looking box, faded red velvet peeling away. The box was larger than a ring box, but smaller than one that might contain a bracelet. I quickly grabbed it, lifted the window and crawled halfway through before I felt something brush my leg.
I looked down to see a cat meandering around my leg. Hearing the door open, I slid through the window, landing on the ground. Quickly I pulled the window down and eased my way along the side of the house back to the street.
Had anyone seen me? I didn’t think so. I prayed they didn’t.
All I wanted to do was get back to my bedroom and open the box.
Sitting back on my bed with the box resting in my hands, I rattled it slightly. I could hear something inside, but whatever it was, it was not very heavy. Maybe I had picked the right box. Maybe this was the man’s soul. But did a soul rattle around in box when you shook it?
I lifted the lid carefully and placed it on the bed next to me. As I stared at the object, I was confused. What the hell was I looking at? It looked like a dark piece of leather, not different than what one might affix to a keychain. I picked it up, noticing how delicate it felt in my fingers. It was smooth and dark, and I rolled it around between my fingers until I began to notice some markings on the object. One end looked uneven, while the other looked as if it had a small thin plastic tip, a handle or something. And for a moment, I resigned to myself that I was even more confused by this object than I might have been by anything else I had seen in the old woman’s house.
Only when I continued playing with this object did my eyes peel back and reveal to me the actual visual of my own hands wrapped around it. At that point, I wondered why I had not noticed it before. I quickly dropped the object back into the box, my hands shaking, as I realized that I had just been holding a man’s horribly mutilated finger.
I buried the finger in my backyard. It seemed like the right thing to do. But what had the old woman been doing with it in her closet? Was it a souvenir from a lynching? I had no clue, and I realized that I had only opened the door for even more questions.
I would like to believe that I liberated what was left of one man’s remains and, by doing so, put his soul at rest. That’s what I want to believe, but I’m not very sure about anything anymore. The old white man at the hardware store. Was he in the picture too? Or the white woman who refused to touch my hand while giving me back change at the grocery store. Was she a child of one of the people in the picture?
When I returned to school for the spring semester of my senior year, I had trouble forgetting my town and what I had experienced that winter. I guess it is no wonder that I accepted an internship in New York for the summer and ended up relocating to Brooklyn that fall.
When I hear people talk about the South, I think about that red box, and realize that I will always have a love/hate relationship with my home.