15 — Summer, 1887

Two days later after disembarking from the boxcar, they were still walking through a forest. No matter how far they walked, the trees looked the same. Two days in the woods was taking its toll. It was like being locked up in a cabin for two days without seeing daylight. John hoped the curtain would lift soon, and they’d be out of the woods.

John removed the compass from his pocket once again and waited for it to settle down. It pointed south. “This way,” he said, eyes following the arrow’s direction.

The curtain lifted.

Thin clouds of gray smoke filtered through the trees. John sniffed a few times, recognizing the smell of brushwood and kerosene.

“Doug, look over there,” John said, pointing. A fire was raging off in the distance. They moved in the direction of the leaping fire, curious more than anything else. As they got closer to it, they heard a gaggle of people; they slackened their pace, but Greeny decided to gad about. John went after him.

“John,” Douglas whispered, “let him go.”

As they inched toward the fire, it became clear the fire was devouring a house about fifty yards away. They saw a short and paunchy white man dressed in black suit and gray Confederate kepi standing on a platform next to a tall, wide red oak tree, speaking to a throng of whites and a few Negroes.

As the crowd milled about, Douglas and John sneaked closer for a better view that allowed them to see a colored man sitting atop a piebald horse with a rope around his neck and his hands tied to the back.

They were too far away to hear the speaker. John, anxious to learn what the speaker was saying, spied another red oak tree and ran to it. Douglas quickly followed.

They could see that the paunchy man had a book in his left hand, which he used to punctuate the air as he spoke. The white attendees moved and swayed to the man’s words.

“I reckon he’s a preacher of some sort,” Douglas said.

As John and Douglas moved a bit closer, the man’s words rang in their ears.

“This man is a troublemaker, an agitator of the first degree. He’s been writing that darkies deserve equal treatment and all that crazy stuff. Probably thinks it’s okay for coons to marry white women! He had a coon baby with a white woman, is what they say.”

The preacher removed a pint of whiskey from his front pants pocket, uncorked it, and took a sip. He returned the whiskey to his pocket. “These coons think that traitor Lincoln freed them. They need to know this is still here a white man’s country. Always will be.” He pointed to the colored man on the nag facing imminent demise, and said, “This here coon needs to understand that.” Pointing to the few colored men in the crowd, he said, “You coons need to understand that.”

Greeny returned from his frolic and sniffed at John’s feet. John picked him up and scratched his head, a tonic that worked to calm him.

“For you coons out there, let this be a reminder that this can happen to you if you get too uppity. White privilege and power’s here to stay.” He paused to let the words resonate. Then speaking as though he just had a personal conversation with God where God told him whites are the favored people: “It’s ordained by God and that’s the way it’s got to be.”

John and Douglas, from the blind of the red oak tree, had an up close, in-real-time seat to the prevalent attitude held by the majority of Southern whites. The preacher typified the belief that Southern whites would not let the official end of slavery prevent them from asserting their dominance over coloreds; they would find a way to redeem the South.

President Rutherford B. Hayes fulfilled his promise to remove federal troops from the South, thereby ending the troops’ ten-plus years in Southern states. The second blow to Negro advancement came in 1883 when the United States Supreme Court held in an 8-to-1 decision that the 1875 Civil Rights Act—which was passed by Congress and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant to end discrimination against Negroes—to be unconstitutional. The clock was turning counterclockwise for Negroes, and men like the preacher would see to it that it continued to turn that way.

After the preacher finished his diatribe on the perils of race-mixing and the superiority of the white race, he walked to the edge of the makeshift pine-board platform, bent down, and handed a skinny young white boy the book he held, instructing him to put it in the breast pocket of the man that was condemned to death for nothing more than his speech. The boy’s father picked him up and held up his son high enough so the boy could put the book in the man’s pocket.

The boy opened the jacket, exposing the waistcoat. The boy looked into the colored man’s eyes for two long seconds. The boy blinked first, knowing that he’d just stared into the desolate eyes of a dead man, something the boy’s father was happy to see his son witness at a young age.

John and Douglas looked at each other off and on—they knew what they were about to witness.

Douglas cursed the preacher as his eyes raged with fire.

John held the rifle by his side and contemplated putting a bullet between the preacher’s eyes. He could do it, he thought. He had killed the bandit at the lake and the two bandits that stopped the boxcar several weeks ago. But he knew in this instance that if he pulled the trigger, he’d be caught and would soon face the same fate as the man about to be executed. His dream of a bigger life would end, and he’d never see his mother again.

Damn.

The preacher jumped off the platform and walked to the victim’s horse. He bent down and picked up a sharp-edged rock from the ground with his right hand, positioning it so the sharp edge faced outward. He slapped the horse on the rump with his right hand and let loose a scream: “Giddy-up!” The horse raised his forelegs and leaped forward into a full gallop, not stopping until it was over a hundred yards away.

The people dispersed only after the preacher stayed long enough to ensure the noose had suffocated the life out of the man he’d ordered hanged.

Two colored men remained behind several minutes after the crowd had dispersed. A tall, spindly man sawed through the rope with his pocketknife while the other held the dead man’s limp body. They gently lowered the dead man to the ground.

John and Douglas walked out in the open. Greeny followed. The two colored men said a prayer for the dead. Despite hearing so much about lynchings that fed the flames of neighborhood talk of “an eye for an eye” back in Richmond, John had never witnessed one. He pulled on the thick, coarse twine rope with both hands, feeling and testing its strength, wondering why a rope so thick that it could easily strangle a thick-necked ox was necessary to kill a human being.

John’s eyes burned with hate as he turned and looked at the fire, which had begun to lose its intensity, revealing a small ramshackle house; it remained a mystery to him. He asked Douglas what he thought had caused it; Douglas told him he didn’t know.

The spindly elderly man overheard John’s question and told him that the whites were burning down houses of coloreds as a warning to stay in their miserable place and not to agitate the white man.

As the two colored men walked away, Douglas yelled, “Hey, can you tell us how to get to Atlanta?”

The spindly man turned around and waited for Douglas and John to come to him. “Y’all not that far. By train, about an hour. By foot, several hours, half a day.”

“What kind of train?” Douglas asked.

“It’s a passenger train,” he said.

John smiled and asked, “No cows on it?”

“The one I know for people,” the elderly man said.

“Good,” Douglas said, rolling his eyes at John.

“If you take the train, you boys best know your place,” the other, and noticeably younger, colored man said.

“Place?” John said.

“Yeah, find a place in the back, or tell someone you are some white person’s servant,” the younger colored man said.

“You boys got fare?” the older man asked.

Douglas nodded. “How do we catch this train?”

After listening carefully to the directions, Douglas and John thanked the men for their kindness. The two men left, walking in the direction of the fire.

Douglas and John sat the deceased’s limp body up against the red oak tree from which he’d been hanged, John wondering if that tree had been used for other lynchings.

“What did that white man put in his pocket?” John asked.

Douglas leaned over and removed it from the dead man’s tight breast pocket.

“What is it?” John demanded to know.

Douglas handed to John.

John held it up—the Holy Bible. He opened it and the well-worn crease opened the Bible to page 1,241. His eyes were immediately directed to the words circled in red contained in Titus 2:9—“Exhort servants to be obedient unto their masters, and to please them well in all things; not answering again.”

John ripped that page from the Bible and put it in his pants pocket. It was time for them to move on. As they walked away, they turned around to look at the man under the tree. He looked like he was taking a nap, his head cast down.