THE OLD BLACK WOMAN

I remember the old black woman mostly from what I heard from my family and the few friends in my town near Chelsea, Mississippi, who back then believed the incident still worthy enough to mention publicly.
          The woman in question was Louisa Black. She began her life as a slave with an unfortunate surname many found amusing, though not so the fact that in defying the law she almost lost her life trying to protect her young son from being lynched.
          “That was years after the war, the civil war that ruined our nation for generations,” my aunt said, trying not to take sides though she was born in 1892 and raised a young lady of Virginia.
          “What’s a generation,” I asked back then, mostly because I was ten and never stopped asking questions of anyone foolish enough to cross my path. By then I had finished fifth grade, an unheard-of achievement in my family.
          When I realized the old black woman’s son had been my age when the incident happened and almost lost his life, I was consumed with examining mine. If it could happen to him, it could happen to any ten-year-old, I reasoned and was shaken by a fear that struck my bones clean through.
          “They say he stole from the general store,” was the first I heard of the incident.
          It was a box of toy soldiers that went missing, claimed Harvey Jennings, the proprietor of the general store that quite plainly said “Whites Only” on both sides of the entrance to his establishment.
          “Right there in plain sight,” my aunt said repeatedly, “so he broke the law twice. By stepping in a White’s only shop and then stealing. My lord, that little black boy had damnation running through his veins. No way he was going to survive to old age,” she reminded her friends who hooted at the possibility of a criminal’s soul lasting as long as theirs.
          By the time I was ten, I had a fine collection of toy soldiers, more than enough to fill a dozen boxes. They were gifts from my mom and pa, and relatives who knew a boy might best play out his fantasies in the dirt in front of his home instead of losing life and limb as had his forefathers defending the righteous folks of the South from the godless merchants of the North.
          “How'd he get caught?” I asked my mom one day on our way back from church.
          “Who?”
          “The old black woman’s son.”
          “My lord, young man,” my mother said, stopping in her tracks while my father ignored the question and held tight to my baby sister as though any conversation about that subject could poison a young child’s defenseless heart.
          My mother knelt at my side. Her eyes filled with fear and justice. “It happened long ago, sweetie, and I don’t rightly recall the details now. I guess someone saw him steal them.”
          “But he was in the store, and he shouldn’t have been there,” I said, trying to grasp the extent of the circumstances.
          “Come on,” my father warned, and we continued home in silence.
          Still, I couldn’t understand what could have gotten into the boy I named Charlie because that’s what I figured it would be as no one seemed to remember it clearly. I wanted to know how the old black woman had saved Charlie, and from what?
          The old black woman was bent and cloaked in a cape of white hair when I first saw her. How could someone so old and small and in need of a sturdy walking stick save anyone, or herself? I had some idea what it took to help a stranger, and how you always should help a loved one, though I also knew God empowered all men to help everyone. I imagined even black folks.
          I could see Harvey Logan helping a stranger, though maybe not a black person. Harvey was three grades and fifty pounds ahead, and a full foot taller than me. When I saw him play ball, it looked like he could save anyone.
          Being white, sometimes it was difficult for me to understand the differences color made. They looked like us, ate and spoke mostly like us, and attended their own church, so they knew there was a God to be grateful to.
          “What if I was a black boy?” I asked myself while out with Chester, my dog, one afternoon.
          Chester was already a full-grown shepherd when I found him down by the creek a few years back. At first my parents weren’t taken with the idea of a strange animal in the house. After weeks passed, no one claimed him. Since I had found him, he followed me everywhere. That pleased my mother to no end and made Janie, my little sister, mad that a dog had chosen her brother over her.
          Then last summer, a raccoon came out of the woods looking for food after a terrible storm. Janie was out filling her toy plastic pails with as much rainwater as she could because she knew, as did I, that rainwater came from the sky where God lived, so it was almost as holy as holy water itself.
          My cousin Albert saw it happen so fast he couldn’t do much about it from where he lived. He spotted the raccoon, saw it hold off, and when it spotted Janie, it darted like a flash for the child, who couldn’t see it coming from behind. Just as it was about to strike, Chester flew from around the back of our home, teeth snarling, and gave three loud barks you could hear clear back in town before he heaved himself at the raccoon’s throat.
          Janie screamed, which brought my father and Albert, who by then was loading his rifle but couldn’t shoot from that distance.
          The raccoon fought himself loose and hissed a tirade of fury and defiance, flashing his fangs as Chester held his ground, separating the raccoon from my sister for what seemed forever, before a neighbor’s rifle bullet cut the varmint nearly in two.
          Janie wouldn’t go out of the house for a month afterwards, and Chester never left her side. He followed her everywhere until she went back to school, then rejoined me as the town hero.
          As I grew and was overtaken by school and chores and more responsibilities, and two of my aunts needed the kind of care a few hours a week only a teenager could help with, I learned more how the old black woman saved her son. And the more I heard, the more I couldn’t abide the circumstances.
          By the time I graduated and went away to college, the old black woman had passed away, her funeral more heavily attended than I or anyone in town could have imagined. A chorus was hastily formed to sing her favorite hymns, and the mayor had no hesitation to speak a few kind words about how generously she donated time and the few dollars she had to the local children’s hospital.
          It all seemed so strange and out of character, a town trying to make up for beliefs and cruelties of their past, and for the time when their sheriff tried to take the little boy from his mother, who stood resolutely at the door to her cabin, which was more a ramshackle shack at the time.
          When the sheriff ordered his men to drag the boy out, they couldn’t bring themselves to enforce the law. The old woman just stood with her walking cane chest high as though she were waiting for a fastball to hit until the sheriff warned that “he would be back,” and never returned.
          The toy soldiers were never found.
          I never forgot what I now understood was the truth of what had happened that terribly hot August afternoon and how she had, like Chester, set herself between the poor, half-blind mute that was her son, and the angry mob that wanted the poor child’s life in retribution for what could never have been the intent of his young innocence.
          I tell that story to my children every year around the holidays and hope they will repeat it to their children. I just couldn’t imagine anyone who would hurt another human over a box of toys and hold to those beliefs today, a lifetime after I left my birthplace.


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Arthur Davis is a retired management consultant who has been quoted in The New York Times and in Crain’s New York Business, taught at The New School and interviewed on New York TV News Channel 1. He was featured in a single author collection, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, received the 2018 Write Well Award for excellence in short fiction and twice nominated, received Honorable Mention in The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. Additional background at www.TalesofOurTime.com, the Poets & Writers Directory, and Amazon Author Central.