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This book is dedicated to my father, Vick D. Mills.
He is my hero and will forever have my heart.
I promised him so long ago that I would write this story.
I wrote this for you, Daddy.
I’m sorry it took so long.
As a boy, he walked those dusty North Carolina roads, exulted in the beauty of the land, and basked in the love of his mother, Estelle.
He feasted on her homegrown, home-cooked meals, as well as her wisdom.
He also listened to the stories of the elders, grew strong from the love of family and community, and learned to face with dignity the sometimes harsh realities of life.
So this book is also dedicated to my grandmother, Estelle Twitty Mills Davis.
She lived from 1905 to 1983.
She, too, listened to the elders and learned to survive pain.
Her life was not always easy, and she struggled with many things.
But she loved her children and she passed her strength along to them.
And she kept her memories in that journal.
So this is Estelle’s tale and Vick’s tale combined.
It is a gift of love.
1
Flames Across the Water
Nine robed figures dressed all in white. Heads covered with softly pointed hoods. Against the black of night, a single wooden cross blazed. Reflections of peppery-red flames shimmered across the otherwise dark surface of Kilkenny Pond.
Two children, crouched behind the low-hanging branches of a hulking oak tree on the other side of the pond, watched the flickers of scarlet in the distance in fearful silence. Dressed only in nightshirts, Stella Mills and her brother Jojo shivered in the midnight October chill.
Stella yanked the boy close, dry leaves crunching beneath his bare feet. “Shh!” she whispered, holding him tightly. “Don’t move!”
Jojo squirmed out of her grasp. “It was me that saw ’em first!” he protested. “You’d still be ’sleep if I hadn’t come and got you. So lemme see!”
Stella covered her brother’s lips with her fingers to quiet him. Even though her toes were numb with cold and she knew they needed to get out of there, she could not take her eyes from the horror glimmering toward them from across the pond. “Do you know what would happen if they saw us?” she whispered, shifting her stinging feet, the crushing of dry leaves seeming far too loud.
Jojo pressed himself closer to her in answer.
Besides the traitorous leaves, Stella could hear a pair of bullfrogs ba-rupping to each other, but nothing, not a single human voice, from across the pond. She could, however, smell the charring pine, tinged with . . . what? She sniffed deeper—it was acrid, harsh. Kerosene. A trail of gray smoke snaked up to the sky, merging with the clouds.
“Who are they?” Jojo whispered, stealing another glance.
“The Klan.” Just saying those words made Stella’s lips quiver.
The Ku Klux Klan.
Here.
Here!
“What are they doing?”
“Practicing, I think.”
“For what?”
Stella paused and smoothed his bushy hair, trying to figure out the best way to answer. Jojo was only eight.
“Nothing good,” she said at last.
A horse whinnied in the distance—it sounded nervous. And there, in the shadows of the trees across the pond, Stella could make out half a dozen of them. The flames must be scaring them, too, she thought. The horses began to stamp and snort as the fire flared.
Stella inched forward, trying to get a better look. One of the harnesses seemed to sparkle in the darkness. Or was it just a stray ember from the flames? The men in the white hoods were now all raising their arms to the sky, and they cried out as one, but their exact words were muffled by cloth and wind.
“Jojo, we’ve gotta get out of here!” she whispered, now edging backward.
“Should we tell Mama and Papa?” Jojo asked.
Stella did not answer her brother. Instead she caught his hand in her tightest grip and ran.
2
Swift and Silent
The family sat huddled around the only table in the house, with Dusty, their brindle hound, curled underneath. Stella loved the feel of that table—she loved to trace the circular patterns in the warm brown wood. Made of elm and built by her father when he married her mother, the table was large, sturdy, and dependable—and so much more than a place for meals. It was a sewing table for her mother, a place to clean fish for her father, the battleground for many family games of checkers, and even a pretend track for Jojo to race his two wooden toy cars. Stella, now nervously circling the burl of the wood grain at double speed, thought tonight could be the one when she wore a hole clear through it.
She looked from her mother to her father to her mother again, telling them for the second time exactly what she and Jojo had seen. Papa had run outside fast as a shot to see for himself as soon as she had awakened him. When he got back, his hands were trembling, his words were short. “Red fire. Black cross. White hoods. They’re here. Now,” he told Mama.
It was 1932, in the little town of Bumblebee, North Carolina, tucked in the rocky bottom of the Blue Ridge Mountains, miles of stone-clogged farmland and forest all around. Folks on Stella’s side of town worked as maids and cooks, janitors and sharecropping farmers. A few lucky men got jobs at the lumber mill, the only real industry in town. But they weren’t allowed to handle the saws—only the boards and the sawdust.
Every Negro family in Bumblebee knew the unwritten rules—they had to take care of their own problems and take care of one another. Help from the white community was neither expected nor considered. It was as it always had been.
“Are you sure they didn’t see you?” Papa asked again brusquely, rubbing a hand over his unshaven chin.
“No, they didn’t, Papa,” Stella replied, her finger tracing faster, faster. “I’m sure of it.”
“We hid behind a tree,” Jojo chimed in. “We’re smooth as shadows.”
“You’re not smooth—you’re bordering on stupid!” their mother erupted angrily. “If they’d a spotted you, no tellin’ what they would have done!”
“What were you doing up anyway?” Stella thought to ask her brother.
He made a face. “I had to tee-tee. But when I got to the outhouse, I thought I heard voices, and I thought maybe somebody was out having fun, so I peeked around back, saw the fire across the pond.” He paused and glanced up at his parents. “So then I got Stella.”
Papa banged his fist against the table. “And so both of you snuck out to look. . . . Lord a mercy, we are not talking about fun or games!”
Stella froze.
Then her father lowered his voice. “My job is to keep you all safe,” he said slowly and evenly. “Best way to do that is to stay away from trouble, not bring it to us. You got that?” He fixed a glare on them both.
“Yes, Papa,” they said in unison.
“Last time the Klan was active,” Mama noted, “was when Billy Odom had what they called the ‘accident.’ ”
Stella’s mind raced. The accident! Mr. Odom had fallen against a blade down at the lumber mill. She’d been younger than Jojo at the time, but Stella remembered the furtive whispers and the tracings of fear on the grown-ups around her when it had h
appened.
As if he had read her mind, Papa nodded grimly. “He was gettin’ ready to start his own blacksmith shop. Klan made it clear that weren’t gonna happen.”
“Those men . . . tonight . . . they looked like ghosts,” Jojo whispered. “They looked like they might be able to fly or something!”
To Stella, their father’s face, etched with worry in the lamp-lit room, was more frightening than any ghosts. This was real. She slipped her foot under the table until it reached Jojo’s, and gave his a tap for courage. It gave her courage too, made her brave enough to tell something else that had been gnawing at her.
“Papa,” she began.
“What?”
“Uh, some of those men had their horses with them.”
Her father leaned toward her. “And . . . ,” he prompted.
“I’m not sure, but I think maybe I might have recognized one of the horses. But it was dark, and I was kinda scared, and now that I think about it, I don’t really know for sure.” She traced a figure eight in the wood.
“What do you think you saw, honey?” her mother asked, reaching across the table to calm Stella’s fingers.
“I might have . . . well . . . I might have seen one of the horses before,” Stella said.
“At night, one horse looks pretty much like all the others, though, doesn’t it?” her father said. “Think now.” His voice had taken on a different edge, and Stella felt even more nervous. She pulled her hand away from her mother’s.
“It seemed like this horse had a saddle and harness that sparkled—like it was catching the reflection of the flames,” Stella said, trying to remember. “It seemed like the other horses didn’t stand out. But this one did.”
Mama reached out again, this time to tap Papa’s hand. “Doc Packard dresses his horses real fine.”
Papa cleared his throat. “I know.” He stood up and began to pace back and forth, nodding and mumbling as he walked faster and faster. Finally he stopped and looked at them all. “We have this knowledge now, and that gives us a little power. That’s about all I got in my back pocket. So in a way, it’s good you saw what you saw tonight. But this can be mighty bad. Mighty bad.”
He ran his fingers through his thick hair and started back up, walking and thinking, thinking and walking. Then he stopped yet again.
“Stella, you and Jojo come with me. We gotta wake the men down the lane.”
“How come?” Jojo asked.
“Because I said so, boy!” Papa was already headed for the door. “I’ll take the left side of the road. You two take the right. Tell them we gotta meet. Our house. A half hour. Shake a leg, now.”
“And be careful!” Mama admonished. “Swift and silent, you hear me? Take the dog.”
Stella and Jojo dressed quickly and dashed out into the night, Dusty padding close behind. Stella could still smell smoke in the distance.
They ran to the Winston house first, pounding on their front door. A few minutes later, Johnsteve, a burly, brown-skinned boy, opened it cautiously. “What y’all doing out here in the middle of the night?” he asked, blinking at them.
“Tell your daddy to get to my house right away,” Stella whispered urgently. “There’s trouble out by Kilkenny Pond. Klan.”
Johnsteve’s face shifted from sleepy and annoyed to instantly alert. “I’ll tell him!” he said, closing the door in a rush.
Stella and Jojo then ran on to the house of the only Negro doctor in town, Dr. Hawkins, then to the schoolteacher’s, then to every other right-side house on Riverside Road.
Folks reacted almost as quickly as the fire had spread up that cross. Men still tucking their nightshirts into hastily pulled-on overalls hurried down the road, a couple of them carrying shotguns. And in less than half an hour, Stella’s front room was filled with the bristling anger of the black men of Bumblebee.
3
Feeling Uneven
While the men talked in heated whispers in the kitchen, Stella and Dr. Hawkins’s son, Anthony, sat outside on the front steps. Jojo, very much against his will, had been sent to sleep in his parents’ bed in the upstairs loft. Anthony had come with his father, but the children had been told to make themselves scarce, which pretty much was what Stella was usually told when grown-ups started talking grown-up stuff. Most times, that made no never mind to her—their talk was usually pretty dull listening. But this time she was irked. This had to do with all of them!
Well, at least Anthony was there. Even though she and Tony were both in the fifth grade and had walked to school together since first grade, Stella felt a little self-conscious sitting in the dark with a boy. She touched her hair. She knew it was a mess, and she wasn’t quite sure why that bothered her so much. Plus, it was cold! She’d at least thought to grab a blanket off her bed before she left the house, and now she pulled it, and the dog, closer.
“You ever been outside at three in the morning before?” Stella finally asked Tony, who looked warm in a woolen jacket.
“Lots of times. I usually go with my father when he has an emergency,” he replied. “I like the night.”
“Me too,” Stella said. She looked up at the sky; dusky clouds shifted above, shielding, then revealing, then shielding the stars again.
“Me and Jojo saw the Klan tonight. Burning a cross,” she added quietly.
“Yeah. My father told me.” He paused, then asked, “Were you scared?”
“My guts felt frozen,” Stella admitted.
Tony went silent, as silent as the night. The insects and tree frogs, Stella figured, had tucked themselves into some muddy place, just trying to keep warm. No nighttime animals called to one another—at least none that she could hear. Even Dusty was quiet, folded at her feet, but he sniffed the air, watchful and alert.
“You want to know a secret?” Tony asked out of the blue.
“Sure,” Stella said, shrugging, still trying to feel as if sitting outside with a boy at three in the morning was a perfectly normal thing to be doing.
“Sometimes, at night, I go and run at the track of the white school.” As Stella gaped, he hurried on. “It’s honest-to-goodness cinder, you know? It’s so much better than running on our lumpy dirt road. On that white school track, I feel like an eagle or something.”
Stella didn’t doubt it—Tony was one heck of a runner. None of the boys in the school, not even those taking high school classes, could beat him in a footrace. Still, the white school track! Stella drew in her breath. “You’re gonna get in big trouble if they find out.”
“I’m too fast! Who’s gonna catch me?” Tony said, leaping up, bouncing from step to step. “My legs feel the burn of the run before my body even knows I’m moving!”
In spite of everything, Stella laughed out loud.
Tony stopped jumping and got serious. “I want to be like the Midnight Express.”
“What’s that—a train?”
“Don’t you know the Midnight Express? It’s Eddie Tolan. He won two gold medals in track at the Olympics this summer. World records, girl! In the hundred-meter and two-hundred-meter events. They even gave him the title ‘World’s Fastest Human.’ ” Tony bent his elbows into a running stance. “Tolan was the only colored boy to get golds in track!”
“I had no idea they let colored people be in the Olympics.”
“I guess so. I read about him in the Carolina Times back in August.” Tony began bouncing from step to step again. “I’m gonna run in the Olympics one day,” he declared.
“But we don’t even have a track team at our school, never mind a place to practice.”
“Yeah, but the white school does. That’s why I use their track at night.”
“You think if you went to that school, they’d let you run on their team?” Stella asked.
Tony’s step jumping slowed down. “Probably not.”
After a moment Stella said quietly, “You’re not the only one with a secret.”
“Yeah?”
Stella looked back at the door to make sure it
was still closed. “Sometimes I sneak outside real late at night too . . . to write.”
“To write? But . . . why? We get enough of that in school!”
Stella thought about that for a moment. “Well, I don’t like writing much, and I’m not so very good at it, so I practice when nobody is around.” He must think I’m really goofy, she thought, but Tony was quiet as she tried to explain. “But I do like being outside in the darkness. At least I did before tonight. Seems like stuff that’s hard for me at school is easier at night. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, I get it.” Tony glanced at the closed door, then lowered his voice. “You gonna write about the Klan?”
Stella’s eyes widened. “Oh, I couldn’t! What if . . .”
“What if what?”
She hesitated. “I know this sounds crazy, but what if somehow one of them finds out about what I saw? And . . . that’s not all. . . .”
“What’s not all?”
Stella’s heart began to thud. “Please don’t tell anybody, but I think I know who one of them is.”
Tony sat back down in a blink. “That kind of information can get you hurt, girl.”
“I know! That’s why I am not writing about it!” She paused. “Besides, I don’t think I could put into words the shiver down my back or the tingle in my toes or the thunder of my heartbeat while we watched.”
“You just did,” Tony told her matter-of-factly.
Stella shook her head. “Why do you think they were out there tonight? They haven’t done anything like this around here for a long time, Papa says.”
Tony stared out into the dark. “All I know is every time they get to showing off their pointy bedsheets, something bad happens.”
“I got a feeling they like making us feel uneven.”
“How you mean?”
“Well, it’s sort of like we’re living on a boat that might sink.”
Tony nodded. “With no oars, and holes in the boat!”
“I think when we get scared, they feel strong,” Stella reasoned.