A Single Act of Hatred: A Story

by Michelle Morley

It’s strange how one’s life can change so dramatically because of a single act of hatred. I only realized this after that one act was carried out.
In 1934 I was 16 and was living in the town of my birth, Green Briar, Mississippi. It was just about as south as you could run without running smack dab into the ocean. Actually, Green Briar never was green; the sign that welcomed visitors to our little town was terribly misleading. It was all nicely whitewashed and depicted a lovely green valley. However, this was far from the truth since everything in Green Briar was covered in a thick coat of dirt.
I was no different from the average boy, except for the fact that I have been and always will be a girl. My momma died giving birth to me, so my daddy raised me the way he thought best: as a boy. I would hunt, fish, wrestle and josh around with all of the other boys. You couldn’t pick me out from all of them. I dressed the same as they did, wearing overalls and a cotton shirt. The only way anybody remembered that I was a girl was my stick brown hair in a single braid that reached below my shoulders, which I mostly tucked under my hat.
I was good friends with all of the boys, but I was especially close to Silas, a black boy my daddy took in when I was six. (Because there weren’t any black folks in Green Briar, Daddy figured he was abandoned further up the river in another town and then wandered to our house.) We were always together. Color was never an issue between the two of us or Daddy. We would run together, talk into the wee hours of the morning, and fish together at our favorite spot at Bracken’s Pond. He was a good friend. He would listen to me, offer me good advice, and wait around patiently until I got home from school.
But the townspeople never seemed to tolerate our happy friendship. They would glare at Silas and me as if we were diseased. “A nice little white girl like you shouldn’t be ‘round the likes of him,” the men would say. The girls would say, “Robin Cole, you should be ashamed of yourself, first disgracin’ yourself by actin’ like a boy and then bein’ friends with that boy.” I found out later that every single white man who hailed from Green Briar (except for Daddy) was an active member of the Ku Klux Klan. They would go into other towns to find people to prey on and to carry out their dirty work. It didn’t surprise me much when I found out. One day in July however, everything changed.
There was one particular man who everyone in Green Briar admired, except for Daddy, Silas and me. His name was Judas White, and he was about 45 or so. He was the judge and executioner for Green Briar. He stood up straight, combed over his grey hair, and carried with him the thickest whip and oddest Bowie knife I have ever seen. They said he was the best poker player in Green Briar; he could bluff his way out of the weakest hand. But what I feared were those eyes — golly those eyes. His left eye was blue, but the color was so washed out it looked almost white. His right eye was a reddish-brown color that looked as if it would gladly send you to hell if it could.
Silas and I had the misfortune of meeting Judas in the general store while we were buying a barrel of flour. He glared at me for a moment and then glared at Silas for almost a minute. He set his jaw, bumped me and then spat in Silas’s face. Silas acted as if nothing had happened and calmly wiped the spit off his face with his sleeve. The store owner was gossiping about Daddy, Silas and me to one of his friends. “That feller Cole must’ve been nuts! First raisin’ that otherwise pretty girl of his like a boy, and then takin’ in that nigger as his own and lettin’ him call him Daddy! Everybody knows that niggers are nothin’ but —” Then he stopped when he saw my shadow. Silas and I didn’t mind gossip about us, but when it came to gossip about Daddy, we couldn’t take it. Silas stared at the store owner, and I simply gave him my angry smile. We paid for our flour, and the store owner went back to jabbering about other people’s affairs. Silas went to go do something — I can’t remember what — and walked out of the general store. I was trying to balance the big barrel of flour on my hip like a baby, but it kept slipping, so I went to ask Silas if he could carry it for me. What I found outside would change my life forever.
Silas was walking down the street when Judas tripped him. Judas clutched his knee as if it was in pain. His face became redder than a freshly-painted steamboat. “What do you think you’re doin’, you dirty, ugly, clumsy, filthy nigger? You rammed into me without even lookin’ at me! You almost knocked me over, and it’s amazin’ I didn’t break any bones.” Silas was the one in real pain; I had never seen his face so twisted before. He tried to stand, but each time he tried, Judas’s hand shoved him back down into the dust. Silas then spoke up. “Suh, I ain’ nevah hahmed you befo. Why should I now?” Judas’s eyes were ablaze. “Are you callin’ me a liar?” he shrieked. “Imagine that! A nigger callin’ me a liar!” “No suh, I didn’t call you a liar neither. Actually, you pushed me down. I didn’t e’en touch you.” Judas was enraged. Nobody dared to call Judas White anything negative without paying dearly for it. Judas jumped on Silas and started landing heavy blows on his quivering frame. Other men who were there got in on it and started to beat Silas too. I dropped the flour and bolted towards the pile of angry, wrestling men and tried to pick them off Silas one by one. I heard the horrible sound of a knife being unsheathed and a muffled scream. Then all the men walked away from Silas and went back to their business as if they had done nothing more than glance at a dead dog in the street. Judas walked off and started laughing as if he had won some great victory over an incomprehensible evil. I saw why he was laughing. Silas, my closest friend, had a Bowie knife in his belly. His warm eyes were fixated on something unseen. I cradled him in my arms, and he started coughing up blood. My tears fell down on his face as I wiped the blood away with my hair. He looked at me and stroked my face, and as he tried to speak, I watched his soul fly to heaven. I sobbed for the first time in my life that day. Silas was gone.
Judas looked over at me smugly and muttered, “Nigger lover,” and strutted off into the distance. I glanced at the knife’s handle, and for the first time I understood that odd design. I had seen it many times, but never realized it depicted a skeleton suffering in hell. I felt helpless, angry, heartbroken and vengeful all at once. All I could do was wail. I took his body in my arms, and with all my strength, I dragged him to our favorite tree by the pond. I cut some of his hair that I loved to play with when we were little and cut a lock of my own. I placed them intertwined in a handkerchief and hid it in my pocket, next to my heart. Though Daddy couldn’t show it like I could, he was just as heartbroken as me. We buried Silas at our favorite spot. We talked it over and figured that we couldn’t do anything about it because Silas’s murder amounted to a lynching. And in Green Briar, no one did anything about lynchings. You might even say that murdering a black man was legal. We talked about the things that hurt us most, about how some people could do the things they do. But I never could tell my daddy about what I’ve always kept wrapped up so close to me. When it comes to love and hate, I’ve come to realize how much can be hidden in the human heart.