Which was true enough, of course. And yet, when I think of that afternoon, of the unseasonable warmth and the wild array of spring buds that surrounded us, I know that by “taken her there” Sheriff Stone had meant to suggest what my actual feeling was toward Kelli Troy, that it went well beyond the “friendship” I described to him so matter-of-factly in the basement office that day, and in which I am sure he never for a single moment believed.
And so, I know now, that as Kelli moved away from me, edging her way down the hill and into a flurry of tiny fledgling leaves that seemed to swirl around her like a light green snowfall, she was unconsciously entering the stage set of a play whose lines I had already written, a manufactured, hothouse tale not of doomed, but of triumphant love. Following behind her, my eyes fixed hungrily on the sway of her body as it shifted effortlessly among the clinging branches, I watched her descend into my own dark fantasy.
She was halfway down the hill before she stopped and turned back toward me. “It began all the way down there,” she said, turning back toward the slope, her arm outstretched, a single finger pointing down to where the slope suddenly fell sharply in its dive toward the bottom of the mountain. “The race, I mean.”
“They raced up the hill?” I asked.
“Yes,” Kelli answered. “From the bottom to where we are now.”
I glanced down the slope. “So steep,” I said.
She nodded. “Very steep,” she said. “What do you think the distance is from here to the bottom?”
“You mean to where that road is?” I asked, meaning the old, abandoned mining trail that skirted across the base of the mountain and along whose dusty, unused ruts Sheriff Stone would soon discern the fresh tracks of a car.
“Yes,” Kelli answered.
“It’s hard to say,” I told her. “Probably around five hundred yards.”
Kelli nodded. “That’s how far they ran then,” she said. “Five hundred yards, all the way from the road to here.”
I eased myself against a tree and stood watching her. “That’s how far who ran?”
She seemed hardly able to believe her own answer. “The fathers,” she said softly.
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.”