Breakheart Hill (26 page)

Certainly, I know that I was in deadly earnest as I joined Kelli that day, and that all during the lunch that followed I felt as if small explosions were continually going off in me. It was as if Lyle’s blows had dislodged something inside of me, a vital part that had always been tamped down but which now stormed restlessly all about, beating against my inner wall.

But for all my inward upheaval, I presented an outward face that could hardly have seemed more calm. I joked about my “war wounds,” as I called them, and dismissed the notion that in fighting Lyle Gates I’d done anything exceptional. Not only that, but I quietly assured Kelli’s mother that Lyle would never ask for more trouble, that she need not fear his knock at her door.

“Lyle’s basically a pretty good person,” I said magnanimously. “He won’t cause Kelli any more trouble.”

Both Kelli and her mother looked relieved by the time lunch ended. Miss Troy even thanked me for what I had done for Kelli.

After lunch, Kelli flung a light sweater over her shoulders, and I noticed that she’d slipped a small black camera into one of its wide pockets. “I thought I’d take a few pictures up on the hill,” she explained as she headed for the door.

It was nearly two in the afternoon by then, but still unseasonably warm, as it would be from then on. Miss
Troy followed us outside, her arms bare for the first time in many months.

“Tell your father I said hello,” she said.

“I will.”

She smiled. “Such a good man, your father.”

Thirty years later she would say the same thing, standing beside me in the town cemetery on another spring day almost as warm as that one, but with her arms covered by the sleeves of a plain black dress. She’d come in from Collier to be at my father’s funeral, and she looked older and considerably more weary than she’d ever looked before. “Such a good man, your father,” she told me quietly at the end of the service. She took my hand and squeezed it, and as she did so a thought seemed to come to her mind. Her eyes bored into me for a moment, then she said, “Ben, I was wondering if I could talk to you sometime soon.”

I nodded. “Of course you can, Miss Troy.”

Three weeks later she would appear one morning in my office near the courthouse, and ask a second question, one that for all its mild and unthreatening content would shake me to the bone.

But thirty years earlier, as I climbed into my dusty gray Chevrolet, it would never have occurred to me that Shirley Troy might one day be in a position to ask a question that could instantly fill me with a chilling dread. I saw her only as Kelli’s mother, a woman who’d done her job well, raised a daughter under difficult circumstances and through it all maintained a tight grip on her dignity. That she might later haunt me with her kindness, or give my life its single most harrowing instant, none of this could have seemed possible as she stood beside my car that morning so long ago.

“Well, see ya’ll later,” she called to Kelli and me as we pulled away.

It was just warm enough to keep the windows down as we drove to Choctaw, and as I glanced toward Kelli, I
noticed that she’d not buttoned her sweater, but had left it draped loosely over her shoulders.

“You must think summer’s already here,” I said.

She nodded slightly. “Do you plan to have children, Ben?” she asked suddenly.

“I hope so,” I answered, without in the least suggesting that I also fervently hoped that they would be hers as well.

“My mother says that there’s no love like the one parents feel for their children,” Kelli said. “She says it’s different from what people feel for their parents or the people they’re married to.”

“In what way?”

“She says it’s more intense.”

“You really
talk
to your mother, don’t you?”

Kelli nodded. “What about you? Do you talk to your father?”

“Not really.”

She looked at me closely. “Who do you talk to, Ben?”

I looked at her as sincerely as I ever had, then uttered the last truth she would ever hear from me. “You,” I told her. “Only you.”

I will always remember the smile that came to her face at that moment, how very sweet and uncomplicated it was. It was the last truly gracious moment we would have together, the instant at which I most nearly felt her love.

W
E ARRIVED AT
B
REAKHEART
H
ILL A FEW MINUTES LATER
. Kelli got out of the car, slipped off her sweater, plucked the camera from its pocket and laid the sweater neatly on the car seat.

She was wearing a sleeveless white dress, the same one she would wear several months later, a fact that Sheriff Stone noticed when he glimpsed the photograph I
took of her that day, then later taped to the wall of the basement office. By then he’d found the car tracks at the bottom of the hill and so he knew that someone other than Lyle Gates had been on the ridge that day, and I can still remember the muted accusation in what he said as he stared at the picture.
Same dress, same place
. Then he’d looked at me with a deadly seriousness and asked the first of several darkly probing questions:
Had you taken her there often, Ben?

I had never “taken” her there, as I explained to him, and on that particular day, as I quickly added, she had taken me.

Which was true enough, of course. And yet, when I think of that afternoon, of the unseasonable warmth and the wild array of spring buds that surrounded us, I know that by “taken her there” Sheriff Stone had meant to suggest what my actual feeling was toward Kelli Troy, that it went well beyond the “friendship” I described to him so matter-of-factly in the basement office that day, and in which I am sure he never for a single moment believed.

And so, I know now, that as Kelli moved away from me, edging her way down the hill and into a flurry of tiny fledgling leaves that seemed to swirl around her like a light green snowfall, she was unconsciously entering the stage set of a play whose lines I had already written, a manufactured, hothouse tale not of doomed, but of triumphant love. Following behind her, my eyes fixed hungrily on the sway of her body as it shifted effortlessly among the clinging branches, I watched her descend into my own dark fantasy.

She was halfway down the hill before she stopped and turned back toward me. “It began all the way down there,” she said, turning back toward the slope, her arm outstretched, a single finger pointing down to where the slope suddenly fell sharply in its dive toward the bottom of the mountain. “The race, I mean.”

“They raced
up
the hill?” I asked.

“Yes,” Kelli answered. “From the bottom to where we are now.”

I glanced down the slope. “So steep,” I said.

She nodded. “Very steep,” she said. “What do you think the distance is from here to the bottom?”

“You mean to where that road is?” I asked, meaning the old, abandoned mining trail that skirted across the base of the mountain and along whose dusty, unused ruts Sheriff Stone would soon discern the fresh tracks of a car.

“Yes,” Kelli answered.

“It’s hard to say,” I told her. “Probably around five hundred yards.”

Kelli nodded. “That’s how far they ran then,” she said. “Five hundred yards, all the way from the road to here.”

I eased myself against a tree and stood watching her. “That’s how far who ran?”

She seemed hardly able to believe her own answer. “The fathers,” she said softly.

Then, in the last revelation she would ever grant me, Kelli told the story of Breakheart Hill.

“The first race was on July 4, 1844,” she began. “It was organized by the slave market. It was part of a promotion, you might say.”

“What kind of promotion?”

“To promote the market. It had opened only a month before, and I guess the owners wanted to draw a lot of people into Choctaw for the auction.”

And so they’d hit upon the idea of a race, one that they hoped would demonstrate the strength of the young Negro males they intended to offer for sale later that same afternoon.

“But they had to give the men a reason to go all out,” Kelli went on. “They couldn’t have them just strolling up the hill. That wouldn’t make anybody want to buy one of them later.”

I smiled, thinking I’d guessed the answer. “So they offered the winner his freedom?”

Kelli shook her head and a shadow crossed her face. “They wanted to sell them, remember?” She turned away and walked swiftly to the crest of the hill. “The white people lined up, facing each other in two lines about fifteen feet apart that stretched from the bottom of the hill to the crest. The Negro men were herded to the bottom of the hill. They wore ankle chains, but nothing around their hands. That meant that they could claw at each other, or at the ground if they couldn’t manage to stand up anymore.” She smiled at the irony of what she was about to say. “There was a band to keep the people entertained, and just before the race began, a local minister said a prayer.”

I saw it through her words: the lush green of the mountainside, the crowds at the bottom of the hill, the two lines that ran jaggedly toward the crest, and amid all that festive sound and color, a small gathering of slaves, huddled together in the stifling heat, muttering to one another perhaps, or perhaps utterly silent, staring up toward the impossible hill and the single band of red ribbon that fluttered across the distant finish line.

“The race was always held at noon,” Kelli continued, “and it always began when the market owner fired his dueling pistol.”

At that sharp sound, the crowd would burst into a roar, and the slaves would begin their long struggle up the hill, moving in short thrusts, their ankles held by short lengths of rattling chain, but otherwise free to tear and grab and fall upon each other.

For the first hundred yards, the race moved quickly, with each man intent on leaving the others behind. But within minutes, the heat and the cruel angle of the hill had begun to overtake them, and the movement slowed so that by the time they reached the midpoint of the hill, the race had usually become little more than a slowly lurching
brawl, with the men desperately battling one another even as they heaved themselves inch by inch up the torturous slope.

“On the sidelines, people cheered them on,” Kelli told me softly. “Some even made bets.”

Ponderously, as the minutes passed, the great black tangle of flailing arms and legs continued its agonizing crawl up the hill’s steeper slope. Some of the men fell away, overcome by heat and exhaustion, and lay silent and motionless in the grass. But most pressed forward, sometimes on hands and knees, their chains now biting into the flesh of their ankles as they clawed their way toward the waving scarlet ribbon that waited for them at the crest of the hill.

As they closed in upon the finish line, the battle intensified and became more desperate, so that the upward movement nearly halted entirely as the men began to concentrate on keeping each other back, grabbing at the legs of the one in front of them or kicking savagely at the one behind. The earlier roar of the spectators quieted into a strange, whispery awe at the sheer fierceness of the struggle, so that for the last twenty yards the deadly battle was waged in almost total silence, with nothing but the groans of the slaves to orchestrate the scene.

Then, at last, it ended.

“Someone made it through the ribbon,” Kelli said, “and that was the winner.” She paused, then added, “And the winner got the prize.”

“What prize?”

“Freedom,” Kelli said softly. “The market owner guaranteed it.”

I looked at her, puzzled. “But I thought you said that—”

“Not freedom for himself,” Kelli added quickly. She seemed almost unable to tell me. “But for his youngest child.”

I looked at her wonderingly. “Are you sure about all this?” I asked.

Kelli’s eyes remained on the deep slope of the hill. I had never seen such anger in them. “The market owner had an agreement with an abolitionist society in the North, and they took the child. But the owner was allowed to have the race only a couple of times, because the state legislature outlawed it. They called it a ‘despicable and unnatural display.’ ”

“Which it was.”

“There was even talk of having the market owner arrested,” Kelli went on, “but since he’d arranged to transport the child out of Alabama before freeing it, he hadn’t really broken any laws.”

It was a harrowing tale, and for a moment I sat silently, my mind whirling with the images Kelli’s description had conjured up, the breathless flight, a dozen men pressing relentlessly up the murderous slope, fighting and struggling forward at the same time, clawing at the earth and at each other, their own minds no doubt filled with the terrible prize that lay ahead.

“And so they called it Breakheart Hill,” Kelli said. “And after the war, the Negroes began having their meetings here once a year.”

“Only this time they gave the winner a bundle of cloth that was supposed to represent his child.”

Kelli nodded slowly. “Giving it back to him,” she said.

I glanced down the hill and felt a terrible sense of outrage at what had happened there, at the cruel genius that had conceived it, the crowds who’d watched it, the contradictory atmospheres of both festival and suffering that must have washed over it on those distant summer days. A great sense of purpose suddenly seized me, naive, no doubt, but absolutely genuine, a need to right this ancient wrong, to redress its still abiding grievance, to take Choctaw into the future. I thought of the old Negro
cemetery again, bleak in its poverty and abandonment, and of the freezing line of demonstrators who’d seemed so pitiable to me that night in Gadsden but who now seemed part of a great renewal, fierce and united, a transforming power. And in that instant, brief as it turned out to be, I think I probed the outer wall of that moral greatness that Kelli had spoken of months before, became, for the first time in my life, larger than I appeared to be. “We’ll tell the whole story in the
Wildcat
,” I said resolutely. “We’ll let everybody in Choctaw know what happened here.”