ties, and done odd jobs. That nigra aimed to get ahead and had sense enough to save some money but not enough to take it to the bank. Calvin was taught that Jesus loved him so he trusted people. Carried his dollars in a little old satchel over his shoulder, and when he bought something, he’d take that satchel out and pay, so people seen he had money in there, twenty-dollar gold pieces and silver dollars and some greenbacks, too. My dad would say, ‘If he don’t look out, somebody’s liable to take and rob that nigra.’ Well, somebody done that, robbed and killed Calvin and his wife and another nigra along with ’em, and that somebody was William Leslie Cox.
“We figured Les tried to scare Calvin into telling where his money was hid, then shot him when he wouldn’t do that. Calvin Banks was maybe sixty and Aunt Celia well up into her seventies, near blind and she had rheumatism, couldn’t run no more: might been setting on the stoop warming her bones. Looked like Les shot her right out of her rocker but some has said she slipped down off the stoop, tried to crawl under the cabin. Don’t know how folks knew so doggone much unless Les bragged on it, which knowing Les, I reckon he sure did. Killed the old man inside, Aunt Celia on the stoop, then the son-in-law out here on the road. Didn’t want no witnesses, I reckon.
“Story was that Leslie got thirteen thousand dollars but our dad said it weren’t no more than maybe three hundred at the most. Back in them days a field hand got paid twelve to fifteen dollars a month, so even three hundred was a lot of money. One thing for sure, Les tore through that little cabin. I seen the mess next day. They said it was him took that metal box that two years later turned up empty in the woods, said it contained all silver dollars, so his mule had a tough time, had to walk lopsided. Les borrowed that mule from his cousin Oscar Sanford who told my brother Luther all about it.
“Our family field was directly west across the Fort White Road. On that late autumn afternoon us Kinards was picking cotton when Oscar Sanford come along, headed toward the Banks place on his mule. We heard one shot across the fields and then another, then in a little while another. Stood up to listen but finally decided someone was out hunting. Not till next day did we learn it was them poor coloreds getting killed.
“At the sound of those shots, Oscar turned that mule around and headed back home in a hurry. My brother Luther was putting in a well for Sanfords that same day, stayed over so he could finish work early next morning. In the evening Cox come by all pale and out of breath. Made my brother nervous, cause Luther had joined the Watson lynch mob and Les knew it. But Les paid no attention to him, just jerked his head toward the door, and him and Oscar went outside to talk. Might have wanted the borrow of that mule to go fetch that metal box.
“Because Bankses was nigras, Les might of got away with it, except folks knew that this young feller was mixed up in the Tolen business and most likely the guilty one; them killed nigras give ’em a second chance to see some justice. Luther Kinard was his teammate on our baseball club but even Luther turned state’s evidence against him. Folks wanted that mean sonofagun out of the way.
“Will Cox was good friends with the sheriff but his boy was convicted all the same. Les spoke up in court, ‘You’re giving that life sentence to a young feller that can’t tolerate no cooped-up life! I weren’t cut out to make it on no chain gang!’ Maybe the judge winked, as some has claimed, maybe he didn’t, but everybody heard him say, ‘You’ll be all right, boy.’ That judge knew what he was talking about, too.
“Les was sent to prison for the rest of his natural life and stayed three months. He was on the road gang out of Silver Springs. One day his daddy was out there talking to the guard and a railroad car got loose some way while Les was on it. Rolled down the grade to where he jumped off and run. Never been seen since, not by the law. Supposed to be dead but there’s plenty who will tell you he came back in later years hunting revenge. nobody around this county could believe Les Cox was dead and they don’t today.”
FORT WHITE
At the paved highway they turned south toward Fort White, then west again on the Old Bellamy Road. Where wisteria and a few old pecan trees recalled to him a long-gone homestead, Mr. Kinard said, “As a young feller, Edgar lived a while in an old cropper’s shack used to be right over yonder, shade of them oaks. Later years, he bought some Collins land just down the road here, built his own house and farmed several hundred acres. Good farmer, too, cause if he’d of been a poor one, we’d of knowed about it.”
On a hilltop on the north side of the road stood a sallow house with a dark-shaded porch and a rust-streaked tin roof shrouded by the Spanish moss on an immense red oak. “That’s the place. That’s where Brooks Kinard and Joe Burdett served him that warrant. I was up there one day with my dad, we was driving him a well, fixing his pump, so I remember Edgar. He was thick through the shoulders and uncommon strong, my daddy told me.”
Across the Fort White Road was Elim Baptist Church which Grover Kinard wished to visit. Though the church had been replaced, his parents awaited him in the old churchyard, also his sister and his brother Brooks. “See his dates? May 1910, same month we seen the Great White Fire in the sky. Some thought poor Brooks had took sick from that comet but I reckon he died of his consumption.” The lettering on the Kinard headstones was blurred by moss and lichens and the stones had shaggy grass around the base. “My folks ain’t hardly had a visit since the day they come here,” mourned the Deacon, scraping the lichens uselessly with a weak penknife.
Not far from the Kinards lay D. M. Tolen, 1872-1908. His gravestone read, “How Desolate Our Home Bereft of Thee”-a graveyard irony, Lucius thought, since according to Kinard, Mike Tolen’s widow had fled that bloodied cabin and gone straight back to her Myers family in South Carolina.
Nearing Fort White, the county road narrowed to a shady village street of gaunt frame houses in old weedy yards. At a counter in the grocery store, they bought barbecue ribs with soft rolls and soda pop, then carried their lunch outside to a wood picnic table where three old black men hitched along to the far end of the bench, ceding most of their space to the white men.
Working his toothpick, the Deacon frowned and muttered, patting the pockets of memory for something lost. “Born right here in this ol’ town and I ain’t been back in years,” he sighed, “and it ain’t like I live so far away. Eleven miles! Just goes to show how life leaks away when you ain’t paying attention. One day you look up, look around, and the world is empty. Not empty exactly but something is wrong, there ain’t no color left to life.” outraged, he glared at Lucius. “Watsons long gone and Coxes moved away, Burdetts and Betheas, too. Ain’t none of them good old families left. Died out or gone off to the cities, gone away like they was never here at all.”
Following Kinard’s directions to the Collins house, Lucius traveled south through the old woods on a clay track as white as bonemeal, with dust so fine that the tires made no sound. He passed no cabin, heard no dog. Then the wood opened and the old schoolhouse rose on a knoll under great oaks.
Already in the door was Ellen Collins, a rather thickset person who looked cross. Over her shoulder, gazing at him from the wall across the room, were three figures in a large old-fashioned photo in an oval frame. A young girl in a white dress, full-mouthed, not quite pouting, stood behind a pert, quizzical old lady in a black dress with white scarf and brooch who was seated beside an imposing man in a dark suit, white embroidered shirt, and black bow tie. The man’s gaze was forthright and his brow clear. His hair was plastered to his head after the fashion of the time, and a heavy mustache flowed down into bushy sideburns that extended to the corners of his jaw.
“Great-Uncle Edgar, about 1904.” Ellen Collins swept her arm in introduction, having missed his start of consternation at this unexpected confrontation: why was a portrait of unmentionable Uncle Edgar hanging on the wall of a Collins house? “With Great-Grandmother Ellen Watson and my aunt May Collins as a girl,” Ellen Collins was saying. She introduced Cousin Hettie Collins and her daughter April before pointing him to a chair.
When pretty Hettie welcomed him with a warm peck on the cheek, her daughter teased her. “Mama? Are we ‘kissin’ cousins’?” April Collins, not yet twenty, had taffy hair hacked short-by herself, from the look of it-and the same bald gaze as the great-uncle on the wall, the same white crescent underneath the pupil. “Yep,” she laughed. “I got ’em, too. ‘Crazy Watson Eyes.’ ”
Lucius saw nothing crazy in his father’s eyes, only that fixed gaze, as if he had never blinked in all his life. But as he watched, Papa’s likeness seemed to shift and resettle into a visage swollen with intransigence-a change effected by that crescent, white and hard as boiled albumen, as if a trapped madman were glaring out through the eye slits of a mask.
From their hard settee, the silent ladies watched him, mystified by his intense absorption in the portrait. He took a deep breath and let the vision go. On the wall, a serene Papa resumed his place between his mother and his
