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
Kelli walked over to the crest of the hill and stood facing out over the valley.
I started to say more, but the stillness in her face stopped me.
She continued to look out over the crest of the hill for a few seconds longer, then turned to face me. I knew that she would never in her life be more beautiful than she was at that moment, that her hair would never be more luxuriously tangled, her skin more darkly radiant, the moral gravity in her eyes more deep and thrilling.
She’d left the camera on a stone not far away, and impulsively I leaned over and picked it up.
“Do you want to take some pictures?” I asked.
She shook her head mutely.
“I’d like to take just one,” I insisted. “Do you mind?”
“No,” she said, then waited while I brought the camera to my eye, focused carefully and snapped the picture that I last saw in Sheriff Stone’s enormous hand.
WE LINGERED ON THE HILL AFTER I TOOK KELLI’S PICTURE. Kelli’s mood continued to be quite somber. She talked quietly about how she intended to write her article for the last issue of the paper, what she hoped to accomplish by it. She talked, too, about Lyle Gates, and even apologized for the way she’d acted at Cuffy’s. “I should have just talked to him,” she told me, “but when he started talking about ‘niggers,’ I guess it just sent me over the edge.”
“Forget about what happened with Lyle,” I told her, although, of course, that was the last thing I wanted her to forget about, since it had unexpectedly afforded me a cherished opportunity to play the hero, one I wanted her to remember forever.
Toward four in the afternoon, it began to grow somewhat chilly, and we decided to leave the hill.
“Do you have to go home now?” I asked as we drove back down toward Choctaw, “or could we go to my
