She came out right away, but this time her mother came out with her.
“Good to see you again, Ben,” Miss Troy said as she came toward my car.
She was wearing a long wool coat, and her hair seemed to have lightened suddenly over that long winter. Still, it had yet to reach that shimmering silver it would take on in the last years of her life, and which, as I have often imagined, would have crowned Kelli’s head as well, lending to her old age the breathtaking beauty of a completed life.
“How’s your father?” Miss Troy asked.
“Fine.”
“Tell him I said hello.”
“I will.”
Kelli was beside me by then, bundled up in her coat, as usual, and with the same old checked scarf once again pulled tightly around her neck. And yet, to me, she looked quite different than she had only a few days before, more set on her course, determined and unflinching. An invisible force seemed to swirl around her, electrifying her eyes, lending an unearthly radiance to her smile. The self-doubt that had darkened the preceding weeks had completely vanished, and the girl it had left behind was intensely and magnificently alive.
In those days the Choctaw library was located in the basement of the city hall, a dark, cramped space presided over by one of the town matrons. Mrs. Phillips worked without pay and without title, a relentless promoter of local culture who, as I discovered that morning, had developed a great affection for Kelli Troy.
“Well, hello there, Kelli,” she said cheerfully as we came through the door.
“Hi, Mrs. Phillips.”
Mrs. Phillips’s eyes lighted on me. “Are you a reader, too?” she asked.
I nodded. “I guess so.”
“Kelli’s an avid reader,” Mrs. Phillips told me approvingly. She looked at Kelli. “I found that reference you were looking for.”
With that, Mrs. Phillips strode off toward the back of the room. Kelli and I followed behind her, edging our way deeper into the labyrinth of metal shelves and ancient, dusty volumes until we reached the back wall of the library.
“Sit over there,” Mrs. Phillips said, nodding to a small wooden table and chairs. “I’ll bring it to you.”
We did as we were told, while Mrs. Phillips disappeared behind a shelf of books.
“She’s helped me a lot,” Kelli whispered. “She knows every book in the library.” Her eyes swept up the shelf in front of us. “All those books are about Choctaw.”
My eyes followed the long line of books, surprised that there were so many.
“Most of them were written by people from around here,” Kelli said. “They published them with their own money.”
“Why?”
“Because they wanted to be remembered, I guess,” Kelli answered. “Or they wanted to record something.” She was about to go on, but Mrs. Phillips came up behind us and plopped a large volume on the table.
“This is the first reference to it I could find,” she said.
She drew her finger down the lines of a long paragraph, then brought it to a halt near the bottom. “Right there,” she said. “That’s the first reference.”
I bent forward and glanced at the words the tip of Mrs. Phillips’s finger had come to rest upon.
“Breakheart Hill,” I said.
Kelli glanced over at me, her eyes intent, piercing. “Have you ever wondered how it got to be called that?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I’ve never thought about it.”
Kelli lifted the book. In a voice that was soft and whispery, yet also charged with a strange, almost passionate devotion, as if she owed each life before her some measure of her own, she read aloud:
“We all walked together up from where the park was laid out. There were lots of horses and wagons and men were working all around. It was noisy because of all the work, and there was a lot of dust because of all the digging. So we headed off toward the mountain to get away from all that. Mama had put some roasted corn in a sack, and Daddy said we should find some shade to eat it in. So we walked toward where the old slave yard had once been, and we found some shade near the mountain and that’s where we stopped to eat. When we were finished, Papa played the ukulele Uncle Newt had given him, and my sister Doris and I danced in the grass. When we finished our little dance, an old darkie that was passing by clapped his hands and said howdy to us. We said howdy back and Mama offered him a piece of corn that we had left, but the old darkie said, ‘No, thanky,’ and headed on up the mountain by way of Breakheart Hill.”
When she finished, Kelli looked up at me. Her eyes were very soft even in their intensity, and I could tell that that short passage had moved her in some way.
“April 7, 1886,” she said quietly. “By that time, the people around here were already calling it Breakheart Hill.”
“Maybe it was always called that,” I said.
“But why? I mean, it’s such a strange name.”
“It probably comes from some old legend,” I told her. “Lots of places have them around here. They’re usually Indian legends. There’s one for Noccalula Falls in Gadsden and Montesano Mountain in Huntsville.”
“What are they about?”
“Love,” I said. “Sort of Indian versions of
She watched me with a strange concentration. “Do you think the legend of Breakheart Hill is about doomed love?”
“Probably,” I said.
But it wasn’t, as she would soon discover. Although, after her, Breakheart Hill would have a legend of its own, one the people of Choctaw would stamp with the sure and unmistakable mark of history three decades later, returning Kelli to their memory in the only form they could, as a slab of cold gray stone.
It was erected in the summer of 1993, when certain, tumultuous events of the civil rights movement were approaching their thirtieth anniversaries. Several months earlier, Rayford Winters, one of Choctaw’s two black councilmen, had proposed that the town commemorate what he called the “martyrdom of Kelli Troy.” The town had responded with considerable enthusiasm, and not long after that a small monument was placed at the crest of Breakheart Hill. It read simply: IN MEMORY OF KELLI TROY, CIVIL RIGHTS MARTYR, MAY 27, 1962.
There was a ceremony at the unveiling of the monument, and although I was asked to speak, I found that I couldn’t, and turned the task over to Luke Duchamp.
It was a brilliant summer day, not unlike the one thirty years before, and I am sure that fact was not lost on Luke. Standing before the crowd that had gathered on the hillside, his voice older, more weary, but still able to carry its burden of remembrance, he said: “On that day, I drove Kelli Troy up the mountain road and left her here.” For a moment, his voice trailed off, and I could see him glance down, gathering himself in again, then look up and go on. “She was a beautiful girl, but that was not all there was to her. She was a smart girl, but that wasn’t all either.” His eyes shifted over to where I stood, my hands deep in the pockets of my trousers, my fingers balled into two tight fists. “Some of us remember how much there was to her, how alive she was, how full of things she wanted to do in life.” He glanced away, then down at his text. “Our fathers believed that one life lived nobly could make a thousand people want to live noble lives.” He stopped again, and I looked over and saw Betty Ann and Noreen standing together, sleeveless in their pale summer dresses. My daughter stood just in front of Noreen, and Kip, Betty Ann’s youngest son, stood beside her. Both women listened attentively to Luke’s remarks, although they could hardly have grasped the depth of what he said. Beyond them, Sheila Cameron stood alone, and just beyond her, Shirley Troy, in a dark blue dress, her hands folded before her, watched silently as Luke went on.
“Kelli Troy made the people who knew her want to live as nobly and bravely as she lived,” Luke said, “and that’s why Choctaw has decided to honor and remember her.”
He spoke of the recent effort the town had made to raise money for her monument, and thanked various people for their help. He mentioned that there were many people in the crowd before him who had known Kelli. He did not mention the ghosts who were gathered on the hillside along with them. Todd Jeffries. Sheriff Stone. Mr. Bailey. Mary Diehl. All of them were gone now, beyond the grasp of what the truth might have done to them.
