I CAME UPON A VISION of horror, all too real. Two men, one young, one older, naked and bloody, dangling from ropes. Already the smell of rotting flesh was rising in the morning heat. Flies were on the bodies.
On the ground beneath the stiff, hanging bodies, amid the cigar butts and discarded whiskey bottles, sat a woman and child. The woman was about thirty-five years old. The boy was no more than four. He was touching the woman’s face, touching the tears on her cheeks.
The woman saw me and her face furrowed over in rage. “You go on, now,” she shouted. “They already dead. You cain’t do no more to hurt ’em.”
I walked closer and she drew the boy to her, as if to protect him from me.
“I’m not going to hurt anybody,” I said. “I’m a friend.”
She shook her head fiercely. No.
I wanted to comfort her terrible sobbing, but I stayed back. “Are you Annie?”
She nodded.
Now that I was close to the dangling bodies, I saw the welts left by whips, the bloody wounds covering almost every part of their bodies. The older man’s arm hung down from his shoulder by a few bloody tendons. As the younger man slowly twisted, I saw that his testicles had been severed from his body.
My voice finally came out choked. “Oh, I am so sorry.”
I noticed a pink, rubbery thing in her hand, something she kept stroking with her finger as she wept.
She saw me looking. “You want to know what it is? It’s my Nathan’s tongue. They done cut his tongue out of his head. Stop him from sassin’ them.”
I looked up. Blood was thickly caked around the older man’s mouth.
“Oh, Jesus!”
“Ain’t no Jesus,” she said. “There ain’t no Jesus for me.”
She wept so terribly I could not hold myself back. I knelt by her in the clearing.
For a moment all was quiet, but for her sobbing.
Then a noise. A rustling in the underbrush, a crackling of twigs. I saw birds fly up in alarm.
Someone was there.
No doubt about it.
Someone was watching us.
And then out came several people, some men but also women, black people from the Quarters come to cut down the father and son who had been murdered.