Frozen

Back before the clock struck 1942 I was a nine-year-old boy, my brother eight, and my sister twelve. We lived a life protected from the war by a dirt road and endless pine trees.
The soldiers from Ft. Bragg were always training in the deep woods and were a comfort, since in my imagination I could see rows and rows of black boots goose stepping toward our house to gather us up for a long trip. We didn't know then about where those trips went.

The war was on the lips of the older ones; and in the shadows and the open spaces where all the older boys used to stand, walk, and run.
It was in the way we used to save our toothpaste tubes and roll tires up to the depot on collection day.

There was another war in those days, as I recall; or as recalls me.
That dirt road was our world in a nutshell. We knew every tree, fencepost and ditch.
We rode our bikes up to the pavement and down to the invisible borderline that separated
what I was to learn about impoverished spirits from skin color and hair texture.

My brother and I relished the insults hurled at the colored kids, especially that older girl,
who passed through our territory on the way to their school, just up and over from our house.

In our world they had their own doctor, their own school, their own church, and their own cemetery, where mysteriously a headstone or two would occasionally be toppled over.

The fact that they shared the same dirt road, the same patched clothing, and the same stream for water never occurred to us. I doubt that it would have made any difference anyhow.

One day my brother and sister and I were riding our bikes. My brother was riding on my handlebars and we were chasing our sister down the road. An old truck came sliding around the corner and ran over our sister, right before our eyes. My brother jumped off and ran home screaming, but I just stood there, frozen in time.

The old colored man got out and stumbled around in front of his truck, and fell to his knees; sobbing and holding my sisters head in his hands.

The next hour or so was a blur; my mother running up, crying. My oldest sister and her boyfriend yelling at the old man....to much noise to recall.

The old man just stood there, as did I, alone, also frozen in time.
My uncle was the county sheriff and showed up with his deputy and I remember them asking him a lot of questions and putting him in their car.
All he said to my Mama was, "drunk."

I never saw him again except in my frozen nightmares.
He took from me the one person in the world that represented sweetness, and hope for something besides this dusty road and the war in my little nine year old head.

About a year later, that older colored girl walked up our road as always with her little brothers and sisters as usual. We hated them even more now, and we threw rocks at them and called the usual taunts.
Through my tears I screamed "You killed my sister! You killed her!"
She yelled back "well, she shouldn't have been in the road!"

I was so angry that I screamed as loud as I could "NIGGER!!!"
She turned around and glared at me and gave me the middle finger and said;
"what is you, but that?"

...Some wounds never heal. Never.
Slavery of the spirit will follow a course along a dry river bed; through a treeless forest;
into a birdless sky; within a vengeful heart.

As the poet said, "Life goes on within you, or without you."

B