Mary continued to smile brightly. “Well, most people in Choctaw are nice.” Her voice had the syrupy charm upper-class girls often affected in those days, and if her life had gone as she’d hoped, Mary would no doubt have matured into that same innocent, middle-aged sweetness that has since overtaken so many of the girls from Turtle Grove, some in reality, some as a mask. Like them, she would have fought to preserve her beauty, fought to fill her household with a decent warmth and love, fought to please and please and please, and in the end, perhaps she might even have succeeded somewhat in doing all those things. Certainly, even from the beginning, she had wanted to please Todd, to be his wife and the mother of his child, both of which she became, but on terms very different from what she must have imagined them that day in the hallway as she clung so tenaciously to his arm.
“Todd agrees with you,” she told Kelli. “He thinks the colored people have been mistreated here in the South.”
I saw Kelli’s eyes dart over to Todd, then back to Mary. “Yes, they have been,” she said.
“He thinks something has to be done about it,” Mary added.
“So do I,” Kelli said.
Mary tightened her grip on Todd’s arm. “Well, if anybody gives you any trouble, Todd’ll protect you, won’t you, Todd?”
Todd’s voice was very serious when he answered. “Yes,” he said, “I will.” He smiled. “I really will, Kelli,” he added.
Kelli’s gaze drifted over to him slowly, as if she were reluctant to settle it upon him, afraid, as I have since come to realize, of what her eyes might give away. “Thank you, Todd” was all she said.
Todd and Mary walked away after that, and as they did so, I noticed that Kelli’s eyes followed Todd a little way before they turned back to me. “That was nice of him,” she said.
I felt a quiver of jealousy, but I shoved it deep down into myself so that Kelli could not possibly have glimpsed it. “Yeah, it was,” I told her.
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: