Breakheart Hill (24 page)

As for the boys, for the most part they merely withdrew from the fray, dismissing Kelli’s article as the sort of fool thing only a girl would do, particularly a Yankee girl, and then going on to those matters that were more important to them, sports and sex and racing cars. Only one of them came forward to congratulate her.

Kelli and I were just coming out of Miss Carver’s English class when he stepped up to us, and I remember that as he moved toward us, I felt Kelli’s body tense.

It was, of course, Todd Jeffries who came toward us, though not alone, but with Mary Diehl, with whom he had recently reconciled, clinging to his arm.

Todd barely looked at me, but focused all his attention on Kelli, instead.

“I just wanted to tell you that I thought your article was great,” he said.

Mary smiled amiably. “Me, too, Kelli,” she said. “It was great that you wrote it. We’re all proud of you.” She
glanced up toward Todd, her gaze nearly worshipful. “Aren’t we all proud of her, Todd?”

Todd nodded, his eyes strangely concentrated as he stared at Kelli. “Very proud,” he said.

“Has anybody said anything to you about it?” Mary asked, quite cheerily, as I recall, despite the seriousness of the question. “Anything bad, I mean.”

“I think a few people didn’t like it,” Kelli answered, “but nobody has really said anything bad to me.”

Mary continued to smile brightly. “Well, most people in Choctaw are nice.” Her voice had the syrupy charm upper-class girls often affected in those days, and if her life had gone as she’d hoped, Mary would no doubt have matured into that same innocent, middle-aged sweetness that has since overtaken so many of the girls from Turtle Grove, some in reality, some as a mask. Like them, she would have fought to preserve her beauty, fought to fill her household with a decent warmth and love, fought to please and please and please, and in the end, perhaps she might even have succeeded somewhat in doing all those things. Certainly, even from the beginning, she had wanted to please Todd, to be his wife and the mother of his child, both of which she became, but on terms very different from what she must have imagined them that day in the hallway as she clung so tenaciously to his arm.

“Todd agrees with you,” she told Kelli. “He thinks the colored people have been mistreated here in the South.”

I saw Kelli’s eyes dart over to Todd, then back to Mary. “Yes, they have been,” she said.

“He thinks something has to be done about it,” Mary added.

“So do I,” Kelli said.

Mary tightened her grip on Todd’s arm. “Well, if anybody gives you any trouble, Todd’ll protect you, won’t you, Todd?”

Todd’s voice was very serious when he answered. “Yes,” he said, “I will.” He smiled. “I really will, Kelli,” he added.

Kelli’s gaze drifted over to him slowly, as if she were reluctant to settle it upon him, afraid, as I have since come to realize, of what her eyes might give away. “Thank you, Todd” was all she said.

Todd and Mary walked away after that, and as they did so, I noticed that Kelli’s eyes followed Todd a little way before they turned back to me. “That was nice of him,” she said.

I felt a quiver of jealousy, but I shoved it deep down into myself so that Kelli could not possibly have glimpsed it. “Yeah, it was,” I told her.

We walked down the stairs together, and as we did so, I felt that old fear and emptiness sweep over me once again, the melancholy sense that I would inevitably lose her. But I had felt it before, and in a way, I suppose I had gotten used to it. And so I took it for something that would quickly pass, as it always had, and by the end of the day, when I drove Kelli home, the two of us talking eagerly about the final issue of the
Wildcat
, I let myself feel safe again.

W
ITHIN TWO WEEKS OF ITS PUBLICATION, WHATEVER CONTROVERSY
Kelli’s article had kicked up had died away.

And so, in general, it could be said that the reaction at Choctaw High, although heated at times, was not unduly harsh or threatening, a fact Mr. Bailey pointed out at Lyle Gates’s trial some months later, his questions making it clear that although arguments had flared up between Kelli and other students, the only truly ominous response to her article had come from outside the school, probably from some deranged member of that disreputable rabble we all vaguely feared in those days, the raw dirt farmers and hard-bitten factory workers who, on a drunken
whim, had killed and maimed in other towns at other times.

Now, Ben, during the time after the article was published, did you see anybody at Choctaw High act really hateful toward Kelli Troy?

No
.

Nobody threw anything at her, or called her any nasty names?

No, sir
.

But despite that fact, you were still a little afraid for her, isn’t that right?

Yes
.

Why is that, Ben?

Because of the phone call
.

The call came two days after her talk with Todd and Mary in the hallway of Choctaw High. It was a sudden, jarring intrusion that must have reminded Kelli that there was a world outside our high school, one far less restrained in its willingness to invade her life.

She told me about it the following morning, and although she did not look like she’d been panicked by it, she had certainly been a bit unnerved. It had come at around nine in the evening, a raspy, raging voice demanding to know if she was that “Yankee bitch” who’d written about “them nigger demonstrators down in Gadsden.” She’d tried to answer calmly, she told me, and had made herself call the man “sir” each time she’d replied to him. They had gone back and forth for nearly five minutes, Kelli said, his voice increasingly slurred, as if he were moving into stupor, while hers remained tense and frightened, but carefully controlled.

In the courtroom, Mr. Bailey asked me if Kelli had had any idea who’d called her that night. I told him the truth, that she’d had no idea whatever. From that answer, he went on to other, more immediate considerations:

Did that call worry you, Ben?

Yes, sir, it did
.

I mean, you were a little more worried for Kelli’s safety after she told you about that call, weren’t you?

Yes, I was
.

And so after that, you felt you needed to stay pretty close to her, I guess
.

Yes, I did
.

Because your main goal at that point was to protect her, isn’t that right?

If Mr. Bailey noticed the fact that I never actually answered his question, he did not indicate it, but merely rushed on to his next question.

And so you were with her at Cuffy’s on the night of April seventh, weren’t you, Ben?

Yes
.

It was a warm night, the first of that spring. It was cloudless, and the stars seemed to crowd the sky, a swirling mob of light. Kelli and I had completed proofreading a few of the articles that were to be included in the final
Wildcat
, and we were tired. But we were excited, too, and full of purpose, perhaps even more so because of the threatening phone call she’d received the week before. It had to some extent fired both of us to further effort. Certainly it had made me feel like some kind of local crusading editor. As for Kelli, it seemed to deepen her commitment to Choctaw, heightening her need to explore its subtler aspects, uncover its hidden past.

It was the origins of Breakheart Hill that now consumed her, and it was Breakheart Hill we talked about as we drove toward Cuffy’s that sultry, starry night.

“I’ve found some more evidence,” she began.

“Evidence of what?”

“That something strange happened on Breakheart Hill. Something the Negroes couldn’t forget.”

“What do you mean, couldn’t forget?”

“Well, they used to have some kind of commemoration,” Kelli told me. “The local papers always called it a
‘Negro festivity.’ It was always on April seventeenth, and I think it had something to do with the old slave market.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, for one thing, that’s where the old slave market was located. Right at the bottom of Breakheart Hill. And the other thing is that April seventeenth, the date when the Negroes always had their commemoration, was the same date the old slave market closed.”

“Well, maybe that’s it, then,” I told her. “Maybe they were celebrating the fact that it closed.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. Her face already suggested the oddity of what she had discovered. “It wasn’t a celebration at all. It was a race.”

“A race?”

“Well, not a race exactly, but a commemoration of the races that were once held on Breakheart Hill.” Kelli reached for her bag, opened it and drew out a piece of paper. “I copied this from a memoir by a woman who was present at the first commemoration, the one that was held on April 17, 1875.” She turned on the car’s interior light, then unfolded the paper and read the text of what she’d written there:

Her voice was hushed. “It doesn’t sound like a celebration, does it?”

“No.”

“And I found this, too. It’s from a letter in one of those boxes of letters Mrs. Phillips keeps at the library.”

Kelli’s eyes were very dark and concentrated when she lifted them toward me. “What could have happened on Breakheart Hill that would make a father not want to tell his daughter about it?”

I shrugged. “Maybe there was a lynching or something,” I offered. “Or it could have been a murder. Maybe even a rape.”

I remember distinctly how the word “rape” suddenly threw a dark veil over Kelli’s face, a somberness and dread that plunged me back to her poem about a dark and frightening alleyway. The answer offered itself instantly. She had been raped. It had happened in the same dark alleyway she’d written about months before.

For an instant, I saw it vividly: her lone figure moving between two narrow brick walls, a figure behind her, speeding up. I saw her face stiffen, her eyes seize with panic. The figure closed in and fell upon her. I saw his
huge hands groping at her dress, ripping at her clothes. She was squirming beneath him, scratching at his eyes, but it was hopeless, and she finally gave up and simply lay on her back and let him finish, and prayed that he wouldn’t kill her when it was done. It was a melodramatic rendering, of course, something conjured up from old movie scenes, but despite that fact, I felt oddly certain that it had happened exactly as I imagined it, and the more I thought of it, the more it seemed to explain certain aspects of Kelli’s behavior, her reluctance to talk about her life up north, her general lack of interest in boys, perhaps even the physical distance she maintained toward me. It was preposterous, of course, and as it turned out, not in the least bit true. And yet I became fixed upon it as we drove toward Cuffy’s that night, seeing it again and again, though never for a moment thinking that in re-creating such a scene I might unconsciously be acting out my own dark urge to possess her physically, even if, in the end, it was against her will and done by force.

None of this came out in court, of course, and by the time I sat in the witness box, describing what happened later that evening, I barely recalled even having dreamed up such a “solution” to the riddle of Kelli Troy. Mr. Bailey would not have been interested anyway. He was tracking something far more ominous than a teenage boy’s feverish imaginings about a teenage girl’s mysterious past, and I can still hear his voice tighten as he moved toward the center of his concern:

Now, you and Kelli arrived at Cuffy’s at around six in the evening, is that right?

Yes, sir
.

And you just went in and sat down?

Yes, we did
.

Even as I gave testimony that day, and despite all the distractions of the courtroom, the people watching me, the oddly empty stare of Miss Carver, the bowed head of
Shirley Troy, I could still see it all before me just as it had happened several months before.

We had gone to a booth in the far corner of the room. Kelli was still talking about Breakheart Hill, probing various ways of finding out more about it. Mrs. Phillips had directed her to a man named Taylor Prewett, who, she said, had collected a great deal of material on Choctaw’s past.