The Dead Hand of Sweeney County

by David L. Bradley

  On the following morning, Alice left to go visit a friend, and Elizabeth went for a long walk. As she had often done as a child, she walked down the dirt road to Roberts Ferry, then followed the river road past where Isaac had rescued her and Willie years before, following the riverbank until the Flat joined the Savannah River, slowly veering south until she reached Thornton's Ferry Road, which she followed on foot up the hill to the old Thornton place, then on another two miles to her house.

  When her house came into view, her first thought was how sad it all looked. Her Greek Revival was in serious need of a revival. The landscaping, the paint, the brick walk: everything needed to be restored, replaced, or somehow redone.

  Inside, she felt she could barely breathe, let alone move, the place was so thick with memory. The rooms were a maze of well-worn paths, every drape, every knick-knack, every piece of furniture arranged just so, in continued service to people and needs that were no more.

  She decided to take Grandpa's study on the first floor as her own. The heavy wallpaper and smelly furniture inside would need replacing. Her father's bedroom on the northwest corner of the house had the best view of the valley and the sunset-- as well as a private entrance to the new upstairs bathroom--; she would take that room, too. It would also need repainting and new furniture. Having made a long list of things that all needed immediate attention, she sat down in the parlor feeling completely overwhelmed, unsure where or how to start.

  She heard a knock at the door. Out in the side yard, three dozen black men and women, all Conley tenants, had come to pay their respects and offer their assistance to the woman they would forevermore know and love simply as Miss Elizabeth. The women had brought food, and Elizabeth and Aunt Sally, who was getting on in years, hosted everyone for a picnic lunch on the front porch and lawn. She told stories of Joseph and her travels abroad, and they filled her in on all that had transpired since her departure for New York, including the coming of the boll weevil and the return of the Klan. She shared her list of changes and improvements with everyone there, and they all promised to help in any way they could. She in return promised them she would stay in the house for the rest of her life, and she would always cherish them as her friends, not just her tenants, and she would always deal fairly with them, just as her Grandpa had. Everyone left, and Elizabeth wrote that the house no longer felt strange, and she no longer felt alone. She was finally back home in the South.

  When Ramon was born on Christmas Eve of 1924, it inspired a memoir of her years with Joseph. She wrote that at first they lived in sin, completely, perfectly in love. They traveled to all the parts of the world she wanted to see, including making a tour of Europe. Joseph, it turned out, was everything she had thought: charming, funny, experienced, sophisticated, and very much in love with her. She loved going to movies, and throughout her travels, she and Joseph saw films all over the globe, with title cards printed in dozens of tongues neither of them could read. He teased her that she was in love with a certain action star, and she insisted that he, Joseph, was her real-life hero. They married at his parents' house in Alexandria in1920 and bought a brownstone on Central Park West. After years of trying and waiting, in spring of 1924 she discovered she was pregnant, and their joy was complete. Two weeks later, he died, victim of a hit and run while crossing Wall Street .

  Just like that, he was gone and she was lost. Declining a polite offer from his parents to come live with them, she entrusted some investments to her late husband's attorney and adviser, then returned to Georgia. In honor of her two favorite action heroes, real and celluloid, she named her son Ramon Joseph Burroughs, after Ramon Navorro, star of “Scaramouche”, a huge hit they had seen the year before.

  “Ramon Navorro,” I said aloud, and the waitress asked, “More coffee, hon?” I looked up. “Please.” Sometimes sleep is has to wait.

  I read on and on. She also wrote about how she acquired Annie Pearl as a house maid and friend. When she became pregnant, she told herself she would not need anyone to help her raise a child. When she went into labor on Christmas Eve, though, there was no possibility of getting Dr. Greenwood to the house on time, and the local midwife was busy with another woman, so Aunt Sally called her eldest daughter to assist. Annie Pearl arrived two hours before Ramon. She held Elizabeth's hand and talked her through the process until it was time to deliver her son. She stayed on to help out through the first week, and she and Elizabeth became fast friends. In February of '25, Aunt Sally buried her husband and went to live with her nephew and his family, and Annie Pearl moved into Aunt Sally's house. From that day until Elizabeth's funeral, Annie Pearl never left Elizabeth's side.

  Then came the mom stuff I expected: Ramon's first laughs, first teeth, first steps, first words... Ramon learned to ride a bike; Ramon joined the Boy Scouts; she took Ramon to Augusta to see their first talking picture together; she took him to Atlanta to see old family friends and to shop. The newer of the photo albums chronicles his life, from infancy to his service in World War Two.

  Among those notes on Ramon's childhood are Elizabeth's social observations. About the Klan, she wrote about how she hated that “bullies” had adopted a public image as defenders of white people and how she believed they were afraid to harass any of her tenants, because they were afraid of her. Her finances took a hit in '29, of course, and Joseph's banker “friend” was discovered to be an embezzler, but she was far from ruined. She hired a Wall Street lawyer who had served her grandfather's interests, and after suing everyone she could, she rebuilt her portfolio and assumed personal control of it.

  Despite the town's endless self-promotion and improvements designed to impress visitors, such as the paving and electric lights downtown, Carswell, the town built by cotton, was almost destroyed by the boll weevil. First one bank then another was bought by a larger national bank, then shuttered. After languishing ten years for lack of investors, a railroad project to connect Carswell with Reynoldston and points north officially failed.

  By 1931, many of her tenants had trouble making their annual payments. She declared a rent holiday to give people a chance to get back on their feet. When Randall Polk publicly called her a Socialist, she responded by going to his bank to close her account. Dickie Polk, who had taken over as bank president from his father, took her into his private office and begged her, for the sake of their lifelong friendship, to change her mind. He admitted to her that his bank was in an extremely precarious position, and if she withdrew her deposits, the county's only remaining bank would close. Out of respect for her friendship with Dickie, but out of loyalty to Sweeney County, she, as her grandfather had twice before, left the bank intact.

  In November of '32, she was a strong Roosevelt Democrat, and her support did not go unnoticed. She met Eleanor Roosevelt when the First Lady visited Sweeney County. In '34, the government announced the Highway Nineteen project that proved such a boon to her tenants. That is also when the government provided money and planning to build the new Thornton's Ferry Road; that's when she leased out all the rest of the family land, all but this ten-acre square. This is also the period during which CCC workers planted millions of trees on depleted, eroded cotton land in Georgia, creating the Oconee National Forest. In her typical enthusiastic fashion, Elizabeth decided to show her support by hosting a picnic for those workers and allowing them to plant hardwoods all over her ten-acre plot. She wrote in her diary,

  I am told that when white men first came to Georgia, a squirrel could run from Savannah to Atlanta and never touch the ground. For thousands of years those trees stood watch over the land, and every fall they enriched that land with their falling leaves. Within only a few generations, we worked all that richness from the soil. For decades I have looked out from this hill and only seen the fields my ancestors cleared with slave labor so they could plant tobacco, then cotton. Now I think I should like to spend my remaining years tending to my rose garden and watching the trees return.

  In July, she received Anne Waters Thompson, employed wi
th the WPA Writer's Project. Elizabeth wrote that she hoped she had not seemed too vain or proud when discussing her family and their contributions to the county.

  The biggest news of 1935 was the one event for which she had waited thirty-five years. On May 24th, Miss Elizabeth attended a ceremony at which she flipped a giant switch and electrified rural Sweeney County.

  When war began in Europe, she correctly predicted America's involvement and pleaded with her son to attend college until he was drafted, but Ramon had a fascination with airplanes, and two days after Christmas of 1942, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps, and two weeks later he was shipped to Texas for training. She worried when he was ordered to England in 1944, then relieved when she discovered his interests and talents lay in aircraft maintenance and repair, and even better, that he was a gifted instructor. He spent six months in England, then returned to Texas, much to his mother's delight.

  In 1954, Ramon visited his mother at Christmas, and before he left, he sat down with her for a talk in her bedroom. He was thirty, and he had come to tell his sixty-nine year-old mother something weighing heavy on his mind. He needed to tell her that he was probably a confirmed bachelor, and although he knew it would greatly disappoint her, he would probably not be marrying anytime soon. She wrote,

  I am not completely surprised. After all, am I not his mother? Ramon always had a refinement about him that made him different from the other boys. I asked him if he was happy as a confirmed bachelor, and he told me he was very happy. That is all a mother could want, and I told him so. He told me he loves me, and I assured him that likewise, I love him, and I always will. We wept tears of joy together then, and I enjoyed the longest hug from my son since he left home for the war.

  She tended her roses, accepted awards, and hosted meetings of the garden club and numerous civic organizations. She spoke out against school segregation in 1956, long before it was cool for seventy-one year-old daughters of the Confederacy to do so. She made a speech endorsing Kennedy. She watched her trees grow.

  I looked up from my fourth or fifth cup of coffee at the clock mounted over the grill. It was four-thirty. I was awake, thanks to the coffee, but body and mind craved rest. Just to stretch out for an hour seemed a delightful idea, the greatest possible luxury. I grabbed a napkin to use as a bookmark and closed the diary.

  “More coffee, hon?” she asked again.

  “Umm... to go, please.”

  Back at the room, I poured a shot of whiskey into my coffee and stirred it with my finger. I lay in my bed under the reading lamp, reading glasses in place. I took a swig of Irish coffee and opened the diary. I told myself that as soon as my eyes closed, I would put down the book. I began to read.

  November 23rd, 1963

  Young Kennedy is dead. A dozen thoughts crowd ones mind at such a moment, but chief among them is a sudden sense of my own mortality as an impending date, an event for which I should make plans. Not where to be buried or how, for these are well known, but what is a girl to do with forty tracts of land? Property is an encumbrance at any time of life, and never more so than at its end. Who should get what? Most women of my years have dozens of grandchildren happy to share in whatever Grandma leaves behind, but such is not my case. Ramon is happy with the life he has built for himself and has no real desire to move back to Georgia and manage real estate. Is it fair to burden him with what I know is a heavy, awful responsibility?

  It is a dilemma. I should just as easily give the land to the tenants themselves, some now in a fourth generation of faithful occupancy. They have done well with what they had, and they more than anyone deserve ownership, yet I know that unscrupulous men will buy judges to deprive them of it if they can. Only a legal heir can have any real legal clout.

  And there may lie the answer. There may be some truth yet to the old stories. Even those we idolize have their weaknesses, and even an illegitimate child is an heir. Over time, a fine oak veneer cracks, revealing the yellow pine beneath. Time, then, an old woman's mortal enemy, becomes my friend and ally. I shall engage a lawyer to help me work out the details.

  I had emptied my Irish coffee, and my eyes were nearly closed. I turned one more page.

  June 1st, 1964

  Another anniversary of a day I never thought I would survive.

  My eyes opened wide.

  And here I am, the sole survivor. All other witnesses and attendees are dead. There are some things I simply cannot write, even now, although a day has not passed in sixty-four years that the events have not presented themselves for review. Whether I choose to indulge or dismiss them, there they are. What I will write is that it happened on a day when Isaac Cooper was attending to some broken piece on Papa's carriage. I was in the barn feeding an apple to Ivory, Papa's mare. He had come home late the night before and had gotten up early to resume drinking. Papa approached me and asked me to open my blouse. I asked him to please go away. He started to beg, but when I refused again, he got angry and began to curse.

  “Leave her alone!” Willie shouted from the doorway. Papa cursed again and pushed me aside, then ran out the door. He caught Willie outside, slapped him to the ground, and kicked him. He told him he could do whatever he pleased on his land, with his property. And we were all his property. Papa started to walk away, and Willie got up, infuriated. The wood-splitting ax was at hand. Papa began screaming something awful. A group of masons and their helpers were at the house to repair a chimney, and they came on the run.

  They saw Papa screaming and bleeding on the ground with an ax nearby and Isaac standing over him. The rest could be guessed. Once the crime was committed, Papa appeared stricken with a remorse-- or possibly fear-- I had never seen before. After those evil men cut souvenirs from poor Isaac's corpse, Papa had them bury Isaac in the garden patch and made them all promise to say they had pursued him to the river, where he jumped in and swam away. Willie couldn't stand it. Daddy said he ran off with the circus, but he had to tell people something.

  But who would bury this terrible family secret? God Himself had fixed it to fall upon my shoulders. I am done asking forgiveness for what I did. Once should have been enough, and every day for over sixty years should be plenty.

  Being of family and prestige is a curse as often as it is a blessing, and it is frequently both at once. I have done what I can to make things right. I have left a map to the truth and a plan to establish justice, but it remains for time to tell whether I have succeeded or not.

  Of late, other thoughts occupy my mind, but I suppose I learned from Grandpa always to plan ahead. From Grandma I learned that nothing trumps being loved by someone you love in return, and I would add that such love is worth waiting for. Soon now, my waiting will end. If there is a Heaven, I will be with Joseph. If all is emptiness, then that will be that. I am content either way.

  Nothing but empty pages followed. I closed the diary and laid it and the glasses on the table. Almost time to get up.

  I clicked the light off and lay in the dark. It would all be over soon. In hours, mere hours. No closer to solving the puzzle, no new clues to an heir. But the trees. I could explain the trees. And I know who buried Willie, if I don't know where. Poor Elizabeth, keeping such wicked family secrets her whole life. But she was cool. She left a map to the truth and a plan to establish justice, and she's beautiful and sexy, besides all that.

  “Wake up, you.”

  I heard the voice as if she were in the room with me.

  “Sleepyhead...” the voice gently sang. “Time to go to work.”

  I opened my eyes. In a chair at the table next to my bed, Elizabeth sat naked. “Hey, yourself,” I answered. “Sorry I'm so tired, but I was up all night reading your diary.”

  “That's fine. It's time to go to work. You have to finish the job.”

  “Yes,” I said stupidly. “I'm a surveyor.”

  “I know, silly. And I left you a map. It's time to get busy. Come on, sleepyhead” she sang playfully.

  I sat up in bed. Steve was sitting
up, too.

  “Good mornin',” he said, snapping on his light. “Who ya talkin' to?”

  Elizabeth was gone. “She said she left me a map.”

  A shower and a short walk later, we were finishing breakfast at the Huddle House I'd just left and discussing the day ahead with Jack and Randy. We filled them in on the night before, and I told them I was expecting the sheriff to come up with a few more questions for me as soon as he talked to one of Polk's boys.

  They asked again where we had been, and Steve started telling them about visiting the lawyer in Augusta after I found a suicide note that proved a black man had been lynched at the Conley place. When Jack asked what his crime had been, I responded offhandedly, “He was black.”

  “Well, not technically black,” Steve repeated Frank's words, “but dark enough.”

  It was like the moment when the image of a vase becomes two people kissing. It's all in how you look at it.