Breakheart Hill

by Thomas H. Cook

  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:

  “The Negroes formed two columns facing each other at a distance of about fifteen feet and which ran the whole length of the hill, from the bottom of the mountain to where it crested at the mountain road. Several Negro men were in a group at the bottom of the hill. They were very quiet, only muttering to each other, but not creating much of an uproar. Then a shot was fired at the bottom of the hill, and the young Negro men began running up the slope. No one cheered as they ran. And when the first one reached the top, he broke through a red ribbon. He was the winner, and he was given a small bundle of cloth as a prize.”

  Her voice was hushed. “It doesn’t sound like a celebration, does it?”

  “No.”

  “And I found this, too. It’s from a letter in one of those boxes of letters Mrs. Phillips keeps at the library.”

  “And remember, Sarah Ann, how Daddy used to say, ‘Never mind, child,’ when we wanted to know things he didn’t want to tell us? I laugh so when I think of it, of how perplexed and long-jawed he’d get when he was trying to avoid things. He’d say, ‘Never mind, child,’ to anything that had to do with men and women, or with what happened to a person after death, or even when I asked him why the coloreds always had that race up Breakheart Hill.”

  Kelli’s eyes were very dark and concentrated when she lifted them toward me. “What could have happened on Breakheart Hill that would make a father not want to tell his daughter about it?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe there was a lynching or something,” I offered. “Or it could have been a murder. Maybe even a rape.”

  I remember distinctly how the word “rape” suddenly threw a dark veil over Kelli’s face, a somberness and dread that plunged me back to her poem about a dark and frightening alleyway. The answer offered itself instantly. She had been raped. It had happened in the same dark alleyway she’d written about months before.

  For an instant, I saw it vividly: her lone figure moving between two narrow brick walls, a figure behind her, speeding up. I saw her face stiffen, her eyes seize with panic. The figure closed in and fell upon her. I saw his huge hands groping at her dress, ripping at her clothes. She was squirming beneath him, scratching at his eyes, but it was hopeless, and she finally gave up and simply lay on her back and let him finish, and prayed that he wouldn’t kill her when it was done
. It was a melodramatic rendering, of course, something conjured up from old movie scenes, but despite that fact, I felt oddly certain that it had happened exactly as I imagined it, and the more I thought of it, the more it seemed to explain certain aspects of Kelli’s behavior, her reluctance to talk about her life up north, her general lack of interest in boys, perhaps even the physical distance she maintained toward me. It was preposterous, of course, and as it turned out, not in the least bit true. And yet I became fixed upon it as we drove toward Cuffy’s that night, seeing it again and again, though never for a moment thinking that in re-creating such a scene I might unconsciously be acting out my own dark urge to possess her physically, even if, in the end, it was against her will and done by force.

  None of this came out in court, of course, and by the time I sat in the witness box, describing what happened later that evening, I barely recalled even having dreamed up such a “solution” to the riddle of Kelli Troy. Mr. Bailey would not have been interested anyway. He was tracking something far more ominous than a teenage boy’s feverish imaginings about a teenage girl’s mysterious past, and I can still hear his voice tighten as he moved toward the center of his concern:

  Now, you and Kelli arrived at Cuffy’s at around six in the evening, is that right?

  Yes, sir.

  And you just went in and sat down?

  Yes, we did.

  Even as I gave testimony that day, and despite all the distractions of the courtroom, the people watching me, the oddly empty stare of Miss Carver, the bowed head of Shirley Troy, I could still see it all before me just as it had happened several months before.

  We had gone to a booth in the far corner of the room. Kelli was still talking about Breakheart Hill, probing various ways of finding out more about it. Mrs. Phillips had directed her to a man named Taylor Prewett, who, she said, had collected a great deal of material on Choctaw’s past.

  “I’ve already called him,” she said eagerly. “He was very nice. He said he could talk to me tomorrow morning.” She paused, then added, “Mrs. Phillips thinks he may know the whole story.”

  “That would be great,” I said.

  We both ordered Cokes, and we were still sipping them when a group of road workers came in, walking slowly, dog tired after a long day. One of them was Lyle Gates.

  He did not see us as he came in. His head was lowered, his face hidden by the bill of his dark red baseball cap. He sat down with the other men, and from where Kelli and I sat, we could hear them talking in low voices, making small jokes, chuckling.

  Kelli sat opposite me, her back to the front of the cafe so that Lyle could not have recognized her from his position, facing me from near the front of the room. He could have seen only her back, the glossy black hair that fell across her shoulders, though at last, when he glanced over in our direction, I think he did sense that the girl who was with me that afternoon was the same one he’d met in Gadsden on a freezing night some time before.

  In any event, Lyle first nodded to me, then rose and came toward me slowly, in that lanky, still vaguely boyish gait of his. I remember that his shadow fell over Kelli’s body as he neared the table, then skirted away, as if half frightened to come too near.

  “How ya’ll doin’?” he said as he came to a halt at our table.

  He spoke to both of us, but his eyes were on Kelli.

  I answered him. “Pretty good. How about you, Lyle?”

  His eyes remained fixed on Kelli. “I remember you from Gadsden,” he said.

  Kelli smiled tentatively. “Hi,” she said.

  “Kelli Troy, right?” Lyle asked. “From Baltimore.”

  Kelli nodded.

  He grinned, again boyishly, though awkwardly now, perhaps a little intimidated both by the beauty he saw and the intelligence he must have sensed. For a moment he did not seem to know what to say, and so, as I believe now, he thoughtlessly blurted out something that at the time he meant only as a redneck jibe.

  “Well, I guess that explains you writing that piece about the niggers.”

  He was still smiling broadly when he said it, but Kelli’s face stiffened and turned cold.

  For a moment, they stared at each other, Kelli’s eyes full of an icy contempt, Lyle’s oddly baffled, as if trying to figure out why Kelli now glared at him as she did, in utter rebuke, and from what he must have taken as the great height of her beauty, her intelligence, the wide sweep of her grand future. She gazed at him and saw, he was sure, a small, insignificant hillbilly who had not gone to college, had not even finished high school, had lost his daughter and his wife, and ended up in jail, who now worked with a lowly bunch of dusty laborers, dull and futureless and despised.

  All of that, as I know now, must have been in Lyle Gates’s mind, though I did not say that to Mr. Bailey or the twelve jurors who listened to me from behind the squat wooden rail that separated them from the rest of us. Instead, I clung as closely as possible to the bare facts.

  So Lyle Gates knew that Kelli Troy was the girl who’d written about the “niggers,” and told her so, isn’t that right?

  Yes, sir.

  And how did Miss Troy react?

  I think she was shocked.

  What did she do?

  She just stared at him for a second, then she got up.

  She rose in a single flawless motion, spun to the left and headed for the door. For a brief moment I remained in my seat, no less shocked by what Lyle had said than by the uncompromising fierceness of Kelli’s response. I had expected her to argue a bit, perhaps defend herself, all the while remaining as calm, and even respectful, as she’d remained when she’d been called a Yankee bitch by the anonymous caller. But she’d done something completely different, something that a southern man of that time could have regarded only as a brutal gesture of contempt.

  Lyle’s eyes shot over to me, utterly puzzled, as stunned as if she’d risen and slapped his face.

  “What the fuck!” he snapped.

  I got to my feet. “Forget it, Lyle,” I said quickly, then moved past him, following Kelli toward the door.

  “Forget it yourself,” Lyle said, though not loudly, or even angrily, a remark simply added as a parting shot.

  I could see the workmen turning around to face Lyle as he stood in place beside the now-empty table. He must have sensed their eyes upon him, too, and in their steady, evaluating gaze, felt the need for one further gesture of self-assertion and self-defense against a young girl’s arrogant rebuke. And so, fatally, he called out one more time.

  “Run, you nigger-loving bitch,” he shouted, though almost comically, trailing it with a short, dismissive laugh.

  It was the pat insult of the time, and yet hearing it fired at Kelli suddenly ignited an almost-smothered flame. This was my chance, the one I had been dreaming of for so long, the “right moment” when I could take up the sword, slay the dragon in all its smoldering fury.

  I turned toward Lyle in a slow, deadly motion, and felt the same trembling courage rise in me that had risen two years before when I’d faced Carter Dillbeck on the softball field. But now infinitely more was at stake. Now was the opportunity to prove myself once and for all.

  “What did you call her?” I demanded.

  He seemed reluctant to repeat it, but with the eyes of the other men leveled upon him, he had no choice but to do it.

  “I called her a nigger-loving bitch.”

  Like a sullen third-grader, I said, “Take it back.”

  Lyle sneered. “You Choctaw High people, you think you’re so fucking great.”

  “Take it back,” I repeated.

  “They threw me out of that fucking school, and now they’re fixing to take niggers into it.”

  The momentous consequences of desegregation could hardly have meant less to me at that moment. My mind was fixed exclusively on another matter.

  “Take back what you said about Kelli,” I told him. I started to say something else, then felt a hand at my arm.

  “Let’s go, Ben,” Kelli s
aid. Her dark eyes were very tense, and I could see the fear in them, the sense that things were hurtling wildly out of control.

  I did not answer.

  She tugged again, this time more forcefully. “Please, Ben. Come on.”

  I glanced at her, then back at Lyle. He did not move toward me, nor did he say anything else to either Kelli or me, and I don’t think he ever intended to do either. He would have let me go. He would not have pressed the issue further. I was the one who had to press it, though for reasons he could not have guessed.

  And so in a single outrageous, sacrificial gesture, I suddenly, and without any real provocation, lunged violently at Lyle Gates.

  His eyes widened in disbelief as I rushed toward him. He stepped back, drew a fist, but did not swing it, so that I was the first to strike.

  It was a glancing blow, just touching the side of his face, and Lyle responded instinctively with a quick punch to my chest. I swung again, missed and stumbled forward. I could feel his fist snap against the right side of my forehead, then another in my left eye, and finally a third on my jaw, halting, oddly cautious blows, as I realize now, meant only to warn me away.

  Still, they had come fast and blindingly, and though I was not seriously hurt, I staggered anyway, dazed and helpless, until I tumbled over one of the tables, then rolled forward, my head coming to rest only inches from the tip of one of Lyle’s dusty work shoes.

  I started to get up, expecting Lyle to deliver a quick kick to my face, but the shoe stepped away instead, other dusty shoes gathering around it as the workmen quickly surrounded him, edged him farther away from me, and finally eased him out the door.

  I pulled myself up slightly, pressing my palms against Cuffy’s checkered tile floor. A slender trail of blood hung from my mouth, and I could feel a steady ache spread out from my jaw. Even so, I was not in the least dazed, and could easily have gotten to my feet. But suddenly I felt Kelli at my side, her arms wrapped around me, and I let myself drift down again, into her cradling arms.

  “Are you all right, Ben?” she asked breathlessly.