Breakheart Hill

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.

WITHIN 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:

“The Negroes formed two columns facing each other at a distance of about fifteen feet and which ran the whole length of the hill, from the bottom of the mountain to where it crested at the mountain road. Several Negro men were in a group at the bottom of the hill. They were very quiet, only muttering to each other, but not creating much of an uproar. Then a shot was fired at the bottom of the hill, and the young Negro men began running up the slope. No one cheered as they ran. And when the first one reached the top, he broke through a red ribbon. He was the winner, and he was given a small bundle of cloth as a prize.”

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.”

“And remember, Sarah Ann, how Daddy used to say, ‘Never mind, child,’ when we wanted to know things he didn’t want to tell us? I laugh so when I think of it, of how perplexed and long-jawed he’d get when he was trying to avoid things. He’d say, ‘Never mind, child,’ to anything that had to do with men and women, or with what happened to a person after death, or even when I asked him why the coloreds always had that race up Breakheart Hill.”

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