Sampiro, thanks for a great weekend. I’ve been reading this thread bit by bit.
To take a break, I picked up my library book, The Devil Kissed Her, the biography of Mary Lamb. This is how it begins:
And of course, I’m thinking, it’s** Sampiro** family ancestors!
There’s not a lot of real violence, just threatened. In the late 18th/early 19th century my family was too busy marrying their first cousins and other relatives by blood and marriage and making really really screwed up family tries where the branches cross themselves like a priest with Tourettes. (Actual occurences on the family tree: half-siblings who are also uncle/niece [and not as incestuous as it sounds- comes from an ancestress whose second husband was her stepson by her first husband], an ancestor who had a set of twins with each of his three wives, lots and lots of men who became fathers at ridiculous ages [I think the record is Uncle Reuben, whose 24th child was born when he was 85], etc…) By the 1950s the family intermarriages had reached such critical mass that LITERALLY in my mother’s family before you could marry anybody in Chilton or Autauga County Alabama you had to consult the family elders to compare notes and make sure you weren’t too closely related. This is one reason that my mother accepted the marriage proposal of her 9th grade English teacher (she was 15, he was 28)- he was from another county and therefore not a relative.
They’d been married for about two years when they discovered they were cousins (though a fairly distant Eleanor/Franklin type of thing).
Of course my paternal grandmother’s parents had 10 children who lived to adulthood, 8 of whom spent time in mental hospitals. Grandmother was a pyromaniac who not only went to the funerals of people she didn’t know to get a free meal but would call the house first and ask “what’s on the buffet?”. She was one of the “sane” ones.
I put down Harry Potter & the Half Blood Prince so’s I could read this thread from start to finish. My partner kept asking why I was crying so hard. I was gasping for air too much to tell her I was actually laughing hysterically.
It is a sin, sir, a SIN, that you are not published.
I’m standing in line at Midnight at buy Sampiro’s book.
(P.S., I’ve only one first-cousin marriage in my direct lineage.)
Having noticed that I’m only trailing it by a little over 1,000 views, ego compels me to continue add just one more anecdote to this thread to see if I can come just a little closer to the number of views enjoyed by the big Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince discussion thread (which I’d link to, but then it would boost that one’s hits, wouldn’t it?). So… some asked about the ghosts I grew up with. There were several, but this is my favorite story.
A couple of pre-story words: this isn’t a funny story or for that matter a sad one, but it is interesting and, while I don’t doubt anybody who doubts it, it did happen. I’m on record as having told people about the “Summer of '72 Occurrence” a few times when I was a kid until I got tired of being told I was crazy or hallucinating (and perhaps it really was an hallucination, though if it was the latter-day resolution is still incredible as a coincidence if not as a ghost story). And at some point I’m going to use a term currently considered racist, but it’s because it’s a direct quote and to change it would seem to compromise the retelling (if only to me).
Those who know me can vouch for the fact that I’m a very skeptical person by nature (I’m an agnostic or an atheist depending on the room temperature, I think Cecil’s comment that Nostradamus “was to bullshit what Stonehenge is to rocks” is well said, I think Roswell NM probably was an experimental weather balloon, etc.), but… I also believe in ghosts. I don’t know what they are, but they’re there.
This doesn’t mean that I believe every ghost story. My mother, for example, hear’s her dog start barking in the middle of the night and much prefers to think it’s due to a disembodied Indian chief seeking his pregnant wife than to the fact the refrigerator just clicked on, but then my mother loves the exotic. (If she heard horse hooves at Churchill Downs I’ve no doubt her first thought would be “I hear giraffes!”) Personally, when I happen to sometimes get the feeling that I’m being watched while in a room by myself then I usually chalk it up to some fluke of brain chemistry, or if something goes bump I assume something fell due to a combination of gravity and poor hanging, etc., but there are other things I can’t and don’t try to explain.
An odd thing about my belief in hauntings: I don’t think they have much to do with the age of a place (at least not of a building). The only time that I lived in a town growing up was for a year (1969-70) when my family lived in a house in a small town called LaFayette (pronounced ‘la- FAY-it’) Alabama that in addition to being a rambling antebellum number (complete with spiral staircase and slave cabins [that were still occupied]) had for many years been a funeral home and still had a coffin upstairs. (My mother threw a quilt over it, put some overstuffed pillows on top and we used it as a sofa.) The only scary memories I have of the place are of sharing a bed with my grandmother who, quite without invitation, moved in with us while we were there (the sadness of Grandmother’s life was being born in the wrong time and place: she’d have made a first rate Nazi war criminal who’d have made Ilse Koch look like Shari Lewis, but was just too Alabamian). My main memory of her while at that house is that when she was left to babysit me she’d boil chocolate milk, pour it over oatmeal and give it to me still bubbling.
Anyway, I never felt fear there that I can remember and neither did anybody else in the house. Locksley Hall, on the other hand, wasn’t built until November 1963 (my mother moved in, turned on the radio and the first broadcast she heard was that Kennedy had been shot) and was extremely haunted. My father is the only person ever to have died in it (January, 1982) but even before then there was the occasional oddity (as I’m about to relate). During the last few years, heavy outside doors would open and close with some regularity, drawers would open without help, glasses would leap from cabinets, the TV set [a non-remote-controlled push button] would suddenly turn off [the button having been pushed in] while you were watching it, etc., and all of these things had many witnesses. My sister refused to set foot in the place after a 1985 event that made her scream, but that’s not this story.
And there were the woods that surrounded the place. There was a very small but clearly artificially made mound in the woods that was terrifying. I’ve lived in two college towns now that were very convenient to huge Indian mound complexes- neither scared me. This one did- there was just an “aura” about it, and I really am (Ogre if he reads this can verify) a skeptical person in most respects. There was also a cemetery in the woods behind our house that we didn’t know the history of; it contained about a dozen graves, all of them about 3 x 6 and covered with granite stones to a height of about 3 feet, but they were completely wrong for Indian graves (the Creeks buried rather unceremoniously under the beds of their house and never, to my knowledge, marked the graves) and too complex for slave graves (the place had been part of a huge plantation founded in the 1820s [don’t think Tara-like mansion but rather a supremely ugly 2 story dogtrot that was long abandoned by the time I was a teenager and wasn’t owned by my family] but slaves were usually buried in earth graves with simple if any markers) and didn’t seem right for a white cemetery either (there was a lot of work put into these things and yet no markers with writing). There was also another grave at a distance from the rest and on the bluff of a dry creek bed overlooking the others. (My sister, mother and I once decided to pull the rocks off of it and uncover it but gave up after having dislodged four feet of granite rocks without any evident end in site.)
Anyway, there were the legends of the place as well. Southern history everywhere is like a really elaborate liver dish- very rich and spicy and full of flavor but with an almost feral taste of blood that overpowers the other seasonings, and Weokahatchee, while tiny, was no different. There was the Holtzclaw girl, circa 1850, a daughter of the plantation family, who had been raped by a deranged slave (some of the Ancient Ones said it wasn’t raped, but that’s another story) and bore a child. The slave was “dealt with” as you’d think a slave who raped (or otherwise impregnated) his white master’s legitimate daughter would be dealt with, and the baby was smothered with the full consent of an on-looking minister. There were the black men accused of murdering a merchant in a town that no longer existed 10 miles away who were taken from their prison cell outside of Wetumpka AL (the prison was about 15 miles away), first pulled behind a wagon and then ridden like horses before being hanged a few miles from our house, then their skin boiled and their skeletons sold to a doctor who rented the back room of my family home-place and who kept one of skeletons there held together by wire and glue. (It was later given a burial in a local black cemetery by the family of one of the black men who didn’t know whether or not they were burying the right person.) There was the last person not of my immediate bloodline who lived in Weokahatchee, a very old man who killed his wife and spinster daughter, set fire to the house, then rode his horse to the nearest Baptist Church during Sunday service, sat in a pew, and when the call to altar was announced calmly went forward and blew his brains out in front of the congregation (ca. 1935). And who the hell knows what went down with the Indians who lived in the woods at one time (we were always finding arrowheads and pottery shards) or the girl who went missing in the 1910s and was never found, so, short story long, if any place is haunted, it had reason to be.
When I was a kid my father would sometimes have my mother wrap the leftover food after dinner and give it to me to take down to my grandmother and great aunts. They lived a quarter mile away and you had to pass the scuppanong bush that’s about to be important and past the overgrown (except for the three times my grandmother set fire to them) pine woods where the cemetery thingy was (quite a ways back, but still) and I never seem to remember a full moon on any of these nights, but I do remember that my grandmother never once got all or even half of the food that was sent to her because I used the rest to bribe dogs to follow me and walked all the way there and all the way back singing out loud so that I couldn’t hear any sounds as I walked. I’ve walked in really bad areas of New Orleans (having strayed too far from the French Quarter) and Atlanta (having gotten off of the wrong subway stop) and other cities and never once been as terrified as those walks used to make me.
But anyway, for my favorite of the ghost stories, not because it’s the most scary (in fact it’s probably the least) but because of it’s odd latter-day revelation.
TBC
A weird thing about this story: it has an extremely sad component, but I’ve never been that depressed by it because in some (admittedly fucked up) way I’ve always seen it as one with a happy ending. Sort of. Hard to explain.
And a word about my great-aunt Carrie: she (like her twin) was quite probably the least racist Southerner I ever knew (at least among the generations born before the Civil Rights era). I honestly don’t think she had a racist atom in her body, she saw people as people, had many black people that she loved, lamented many times how unfairly blacks had been treated, etc… (The daughter of a poor white farmer herself [he owned land but never had money and was eternally in debt for his next crop] she looked down on nobody from a socioeconomic standpoint. She also used the word nigra interchangably with colored (the polite term of her generation) and certainly thousands of times more than she ever used black (and she wouldn’t have had the slightest inclination of who or what you were referring to with African American or even Afro-American), so please don’t think less of her for her use of terminology (which I considered changing but decided against it).
This is a story I don’t expect everybody to believe and very rarely tell, but on my oath it happened. I can’t swear there was anything supernatural to it- Alabama is an awfully hot place after all and we did tend to eat a lot of things that might cause hallucinations- but personally I’ve chalked it (along with Carrie’s conversation with God before she was ever senile) up to the “I can’t explain it and don’t even particularly want to” column.
The summer before I started school (1972) I was alone at the house one day other than for Rosa Mae, the maid we had at the time. My mother was a teacher and she was attending meetings at the school where she’d just started and by this time she no longer used the babysitting services of our octogenarian neighbor Miss Ruby because she was still mad at her for making me kiss corpses at the funerals she took me to or letting me hang out the windows while she drove 80 mph down dirt roads.
Rosa Mae was in the house and I was playing in, or rather under, my favorite scuppernong tree. The tree was very old and huge and was just off of our driveway in a little ditch, and the ditch and the leaves of the tree created almost a perfect little cave where I kept some of my outdoor toys and some of my favorite sticks. (I always loved sticks- I had them of all sizes and all woods and they were my favorite toys by far- my father was already convinced I was retarded by this time and was majorly embarrassed what I considered my first rate stick collection and my pride in it, but he tolerated it because at least “a boy playin’ with sticks might take attention away from the old woman pissin’ in the road”.)
From this little scuppernong grotto you couldn’t see the driveway or the little vegetable garden just on the other side, but you could hear anything from it, which was usually nothing. This was a late summer day. I was playing with the sticks and whatever blocks and other weatherproof toys I had there and I jerked upright when I heard children playing. That was a sound you just didn’t hear in Weokahatchee. Except for the few months I attended preschool in LaFayette I honestly don’t know that I’d ever played with other children other than my brother and sister by this time, who were 6 and 8 years older than I was respectively, and they weren’t here.
So… I went running from under the scuppernong tree, out of the ditch, up the slight hillside into the driveway and looked to find them. I didn’t see them at first, but then there they were: two little black children playing in the vegetable garden on the other side of the huge light post (there were twin light posts on each of the entrances to the driveway of Locksley Hall- they were originally to have had a gate between them but were too wildly uneven because of the hillside, so they were used strictly for light at night- for the few weeks after the building of the house before the power cords were cut in trying to level that part of the driveway, after which they never worked again- Locksley Hall was a very “Alf and Ralph Monroe” proposition from its very inception (though I think it does have the distinction of being the only cattle farm in central Alabama with a house named for a Tennyson poem).
Anyway, the black children: the little boy was the older one, perhaps (I’m not good at these things) three, or a hair younger, and I still remember that he was wearing a man’s ragged shirt, sans sleeves and with the hem raised, as his sole garment. It fit him like a gown. She was so little she was just old enough to walk good, her hair tied in rags, and she was wearing a flour sack as a dress (nothing fancy, just holes cut for the arms). Even in 1972, this wasn’t that unusual or even exclusive to the poor- I’m told that I had flour sack play-clothes when I was a toddler, though I don’t remember them, though from the fact the boy was wearing an obviously cast off man’s shirt as a gown I’m guessing this was economics almost simply.
Anyway, the little boy was spinning his baby sister in the sunlight and she was getting dizzy and they both were giggling. This was an unusual site, but our maid Rosa Mae was in the house so I assumed these were some of her kids or grandkids (she had both in abundance) that I used to see when we drove to her house to pick her up or take her home. I was glad of the company and called out to them “Hey… you wanna come over here and play with my sticks! I’ve got blocks and stuff too…!” and they looked straight at me with startled expressions and then they weren’t there.
No puff of smoke, no sound effects, no gradual fading out, they just weren’t there, which is to say that where they had been, nothing was. My mother was in Montgomery forty miles away. I’m still surprised she didn’t hear my screams.
From the base of the driveway of Locksley Hall to the front door was perhaps one/tenth of a mile. I set a new preschool record, screaming all the way. I ran in, determined to tell Rosa Mae what had happened, but couldn’t. At some point during the day my grandmother had come up to my mother’s cabinets to do her grocery shopping and was having an argument with Rosa Mae who wouldn’t let her. “Miz Blanche ain’t said nuthin’ bout nobody takin’ nuthin’ outta her larder to me!” “Well this is my boy’s house and I am accustomed to helping myself to anything in it! If I hadn’t borne him this house wouldn’t be here so I have a right!” “Well you needs to excise that right when he heah Miz Sibyl cuz I work fo’ Miz Blanche!” “Well you’re not gonna be working for anybody if you try to tell me what to do in my boy’s house!” Yadda yadda.
I was screaming and they were yelling at each other and I was out of breath and tried to tell them what I’d seen and they just looked at me and then went back to their argument. I was crying by then, which didn’t help my eloquence or articulation much, and in frustration just went into my room and slammed the door.
Rosa Mae is the reason that I believed until I was an adolescent that all black women had twelve toes. Rosa Mae, obviously, did, which I knew because she usually wore cheap sandals or else she wore really big shoes and then, once inside, took them off. I was startled the first time I noticed this (though not near as much as I was by vanishing black children in my mother’s vegetable garden) and asked my father “Do all colored women” (this wasn’t P.I. at the time) “have feet like Rosa Mae’s?” Daddy was a brilliant man in some ways, as he never tired of saying, but his observational skills couldn’t have been less if he’d had a 20 year old Boston Irish girl typing words into his hand* and had never noticed her extra digits so he just answered “Of course they do! What a silly question.” Everybody revered my father’s knowledge and called him “Professor”, plus parents are indisputable sources in the land B.C. (“Before ‘Cite?’”) so… my first syllogism.
“Rosa Mae’s feet have twelve toes.”
“All black women have feet like Rosa Mae’s.”
Ergo, “All black women have twelve toes.”
In fact, I don’t think this is even true of half of them. But the case in point is that I screamed. And that speaking of Helen Keller references, one of the only times I ever fell apart laughing at my brother-in-law’s sometime daftness was when he couldn’t remember the name of the movie The Miracle Workers and asked me “What’s the name o’ that movie, you know, got the girl who was on the twins show and Mrs. Robinson in it… the one where the Yankee woman comes down to Alabama and beats up that blind gal til she talks?” It puts the movie in a whole new perspective.
Twelve years later…
My father was dead, died during (but not because of) the blizzard of ‘82. My great-aunt Kitty was dead, having caught fire two weeks after my father’s death, during a lesser snow storm, and sustained 3rd degree burns over more than 90% of her body. (Doctors said that a 20 year old in prime physical condition could possibly have lasted 3 days in her condition; Kitty was 92 and lasted for three weeks, but that’s another story.) My sister and my brother had graduated college and were now married pharmacists in other parts of the state. Rosa Mae was long long gone, finances had gone to hell in the proverbial handbasket, and the household was my perennially suicidal mother, my incontinent Aunt Carrie, and me. (We’d always known that having been together literally since their mother’s egg split, having slept together every night of their lives for 92 years, there was no way that when one of the twins died the other would last very long. Sweet Jesus did we call that one wrong… Carrie lived on and on and on and on and on…)
Carrie loved to talk. It didn’t particularly matter if anybody else was in the room. One of her favorite conversational partners, in fact, was Vanna White, and she became irked that my mother wouldn’t set a place at the table for her, though aside from confusing TV and reality she wasn’t usually senile (and considering that she’d been well over 70 the first time she watched a TV set and that pretty much everybody she’d ever known was dead, that was an alright exception.
Carrie also talked to her dead relatives a lot, none of whom let death stand in the way of good manners. “Guess what Little Jon?” (a childhood nickname that stuck even when I was really chunky 18 year old) “Your daddy came to see me last night. Stood at the foot of my bed. Said he always liked the way I fixed him canned salmon biskits. I told him it was Kitty fixed the biskits, I jist fried the salmon in some lard with a egg. He just missed Kitty. She came by when I was getting dressed this morning. Said she sure would be glad when we’re back together again. I told her I will be too, but I gotta stay here til the Lord sends for me. Then I lay back down and she lay down with me and we took a little nap with me. It was good to lay down with her again. I woke up she was gone. Maybe she went to fix Garland some biskits. I hope so.”
It was sweet and pathetic away, though slightly injured by the fact that “You know who was in my bathroom last night? Sandy Duncan from the tee-vee! I told her get out of here, I’m tryin’ to ish!” (‘Ish’ was Kitty and Carrie’s euphemism for elimination; having not had much training with toilets for the first 92 years of her life Carrie caught on somewhat but never did get the hang of indoor plumbing, plus she didn’t move like she used to, which in her defense having to put up with the prying remaining eye of ‘70s gameshow divas would give anybody performance anxiety.)
After a couple of years with us it was next to impossible to sit in the same room with her due to her incontinence. We tried everything, at one point getting her a bag of Depends and delicately broaching the subject, but she responded with a logical argument: “By the time I got ‘em on, I’d have done ished myself…”. She needed a nursing home but this wasn’t an option for many reasons, not least of which was we didn’t have the authority to put her in one (I was a great-nephew, one of many, and my mother was a niece by marriage) and more importantly we had absolutely no money and at the time it required two fatwas from Mecca, three acts of Congress and a Papal fiat to get a Medicaid recipient into Alabama’s extremely limited nursing home bedspace. Most importantly: Carrie had survived the Influenza epidemic of 1918, almost 100 Alabama summers, snake bites, God knows how many major and minor horrors or how many funerals, she’d seen her sister consumed by flames (and handled herself with abso-fucking-lutely amazing clarity-of-thought and swiftness-of-action when it happened, but that’s another story), but the only thing on Earth that absolutely terrified her was the thought of a nursing home (which was synonymous with the thought of a county Poor Home in her mind, and nothing could change the image. So we had her, lucky us.
A quick aside about Carrie: long before she came to stay with us she’d been afraid she would not be resurrected when she died because she’d never been baptized. These fears were assuaged when an unparalleled Scriptural Authority, God, appeared to her in her kitchen and told her that baptism was only symbolic, deeds and faith were what counted. Before senility set in during her Sandy Duncan and the Ghosts of Weokahatchee Past phase, this was the only “hallucination” Carrie ever had, and it gave her enormous comfort. My father was sweet enough to tell her “Aw hell, God’s off fighting wars and spinning planets, I can’t imagine him pushing his way past the cats into your kitchen. You’re just old and your minds going and you’re hearing things. Fix me another of those salmon biscuits…” But til her dying day she believed what she’d heard and that was the only time I ever knew her to tell my father that he was full of ‘ish.”
Anyway, getting back on track, Carrie loved to read the paper aloud, not just the headlines (“Rea-gan Says” [rhymes with maize] “Tax Breaks Will Work”) but the ads (“Tampons buy two get one free while the sue-plize last”), school lunchroom menus (“Wednesday, Middle School… meatloaf, green beans, po-tay-tahs, chocolate pie… High School, pizza, green beans, squash, ice cream, Thursday, Middle School, fish sticks, jello…”) and local columns (if you’ve never read the local columns of a small town southern newspaper, they’re wonderful: “Suppah guests of Mr. and Mrs. Lionel Spivey on Tuesday night last was his sister Thelma and her daughter Butch who motored by car from their home in Luverne and brought a pork roast.”) And other times Carrie would just talk, to nobody in particular about nothing in particular, Faulknerian free form.
“And that was about the time that Maude got sick off them crab apples cause they was too tart and she said she wasn’t gonna do that anymore and she lived until nineteen and forty-two and never did eat another crap apple. Her man Bronson did though. Bronson liked a crab apple. He’d have one with carrots. His Mama was some kin to the Nelsons from over in Newhouse. I reckon it was through her daddy. He was Peter Mayhew, and his sister Villa Nova married Curtis Nelson, Junior, back in eighteen and eighty-six. Their first baby died of water on the brain. That was on a Tuesday in April. I reckon that old crab apple tree is still up there…”
Other times she’d talk to Kitty, or my father, or her parents, or others of the dead legions who unlike the legions of living relatives she had whom she’d spent the Depression chopping three cent cotton to help feed never bothered to call on her. Sometimes she’d inform us Kitty was hungry. My mother never could bring herself to set a place at the table for Vanna White but she never refused to set a place for Kitty, whose dead burned eyes were evidently bigger than her stomach as she never touched the food. Rather like living permanently in the rehearsals for a Centenarian Players production of Harvey. Even when she was walker bound Carrie insisted on “earnin’ my salt” by baptizing the dishes after dinner, picking them up individually and sprinkling enough water to piss off a cockroach on them then putting them in the drainer, pasta and spaghetti sauce or whatever still visibly clinging to them. We’d wait until she went to bed then wash them properly.
Usually her talking was white noise you could drone out. Once in a blue moon you’d catch something interesting. “What did you say Carrie? Who had an abortion?” and it might be a mule or it might be a cousin or it might be a soap opera character.
And one day after a particularly grueling White Night (while my mother was sleeping of the night before’s suicide attempt- by this time I honestly couldn’t think of a reason why she should go on, thank God for the Ouija Board and the alcohol abuse that had allowed me to stockpile tons of information that she had no memory of telling me that verified the messages were indeed coming from the spirit realm), while pouring through the Book of Mormon seeking yet more evidence that I was the reincarnation of Brigham Young (true story) I caught the last part of one of Carrie’s monologues.
“…Lord… nothing like the smell of burnt flesh… just makes me want to puke a thinking about it, seeing you there in those flames, Kitty. Just like Crow’s chil’ren. Been… it’d been eighty years since Crow’s chil’ren and I still remember comin’ up here that day…where Blanche grew her cucumbers. Those two little dead nigra chil’ren, with that burn smell on ‘em, puttin’ ‘em in that flower box. And when you went up in the flames I remembered the smell like it’d been that mornin’…”
It took a second to sink in, then: “What did you say Carrie? Two little black children where the vegetable garden used to be?”
“M-hmm. Crow’s chil’ren. I was tellin’ Kitty it recalled me to that smell.”
“What smell?”
“Of Crow’s chil’ren.”
“What about Crow’s chil’ren.”
“The ones down where your Mama grew vegetables.”
“Who was Crow?”
“He was the chil’ren’s daddy.”
Yes, I get it, I thought… Vejur is he who seeks the Creator, the Creator is he who Vejur seeks, but I was patient…
“Who was Crow? Did Crow live here?”
”Crow was Fink’s daddy…”, this said like it should have been perfectly obvious and Fink a standard point of reference.
“Who was Fink?”
“Fink… had the trailer behind Maggie and Leon. Kitty, you remember when Fink brought us that bobcat he skinned?… heh-heh… sure did… that ol’ Rex dog tore it up, made us so mad. I’m glad you remembered that part.”
(Wishing there was a remote control for 97 year olds) “M-hmm. Who got burned? Fink?”
“No, Fink’s still alive." Again with a “haven’t you been listening?” provincial tone of voice. "One hundred years old it said in the paper about a year back. He was Crow’s oldest boy.”
“Who was Crow? What did he do? Where did he live?”
“He sharecropped for Daddy. His name was Marengo. Marengo Williams. But ever’body called him Crow, cause he was just black as a crow. Sister what was Crow’s wife named?… Sure was. Berta. ‘Aunt Berta’ we called her.”
“Who got burned?”
And after trying about fifty more combinations of keyword searches the story came out.
“It was a chilly morning, but we’d smelled the fire… just thought it was a woods fire from off some where what got in the wind. Must have been about November I reckon, nineteen hundred four. We was settin’ down havin’ breakfast, heard a knock at the kitchen winda’… it was Crow, callin’ for our daddy. ‘Mistah Jim-m-my! Mistah Jim-m-my! Please come out here to see me! And Daddy walk out to the door, and there stood Crow, and Crow’d been cryin’ his eyes out, all covered with soot and tears and he said ‘Mistah Jimmy, my house done burnt down… burnt down in the night… whole place gone… my two littlest babies dead in it… Mistah Jimmy, I needs to know… duz you got a box as is big enough to bury two little niggers in?’ Well, he wadn’t in no shape to go back on his own, so we hitched up the mule, took him in the wagon, and Daddy didn’t have a box so he got Mama to empty out the flour bin, and Gene and Garland Sr., that was your grandaddy, and we took some sheets and went wid him, and got there, and the house was gone, just smoke and ember, and Aunt Berta rockin’ and a prayin’ under the tree holdin’ her chil’ren to her that was near enough, and the two little dead younguns laying out on the ground. Little boy was burnt, couldn’t hardly tell he’d been a boy or girl, but the little girl wadn’t so bad… she’d breathed the fired and died of it, wadn’t hardly a year old I don’t reckon… Crow’s too littlest babies. We cleaned ‘em off best we could, wrapped ‘em in the sheets, put ‘em in the flour bin, and rode ‘em over to the colored church down outside Ephesis… not there anymore… they laid ‘em to rest, still in the flour bin. Crow never was right again. Took to drinkin’. Went to work for Mr. Lester Sawyer and didn’t live too long after that.”
And his house was where?
“That oak tree where your Mama used to have her vegetable garden… it was in the back yard… wadn’t much of a place, just a throwtogether shack with a room or two. Ain’t even had a well, they used to pull the water up from that stream out in the woods.”
“And it was just those two who died?”
“M-hmm. All the rest of ‘em made it out, it was the two littlest ones who died. Little boy and a little girl. Barely old enough to walk was the little girl. Aunt Berta had another baby later and named it Anna after my Mama for the way she did up those dead nigra youngun’s, cause Berta wadn’t in any shape that day to do it. That’s Anna Nelson, lived in Eclectic last I heard. Rosa Mae was married to one of Anna’s boys. Berta and Crow made it out, and their older children made it out, even the old dog made it out, but the two little ones never breathed again.”
They may never have breathed again, but I like to think they played again. And if you just have to spend eternity in Weokahatchee, Alabama, I suppose there are worse ways than to spend it eternally as little children spinning in the sunlight.
Wow. I got chills. I love ghost stories.
You are the best story-teller, Sampiro.
It occurs that by this time this probably belongs less in The Pit than in MPSIMS. If anybody agrees, could you please send a note to the Mods?
Well?
Best. Thread. Ever. I’ve got goosebumps all up and down.
Well? We’re waiting. More stories!
This thread alone is worth every penny of the $14.95 I paid for membership. Thanks **Sampiro. **
I just wanted to say that I found something very appealing about the use of “ish” in place of various other expressions. I’m not sure what it is, and unfortunately I’m not sure that the persons in my life who most need such expressions are good candidates for being taught it, but there is something appealling about “ish”.
Note: The reason “ish” would not be a good expression to teach- the person whose bathroom habits are most discussed is age two. She needs to use words other people expect at this stage of potty training.
I was completely wrapped up in that story. It was interesting, funny, and then when I got to the end…wow. Thank you so much!
Quick!! Everybody over to the Harry Potter thread and give it more views!!
Sorry Sampiro - you can’t stop yet. That last one was too beautiful.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, Just daaaaaa-yummm Sampiro! Obviously these stories would appeal to lil’ ol’ southern me but I do believe you got yourself a yankee following as well.
Once again, our lives have almost crossed each other. See, I grew up in west Georgia (LaGrange, to be exact). It was a surprise to me when you mentioned LaFayette because that is not far from the big L at all. Next thing I know you’re going to be talking about the upstanding Alabama communities/towns of Standing Rock, Bacon Level, Rock Mills, Roanoke, Wadley and Wedowee. Those are the places of my father’s childhood. So far, you’ve managed to stay out of Heard County, GA, so maybe mom’s side of the family is safe. 
I grew up not terribly far from Roanoke. The other places I’m familiar with (Wedowee mainly because of the nationally famou “no mixed dating” principal- Alabama always gets such wonderful press representation) but don’t have a connection with.
Supposedly a cuneiform tablet turned up outside LaGrange and is housed in the college there. I’ve always meant to stop by and ask but never have time on one of my trips there. (I actually considered it the other day when I was presenting at a conference in Carrollton, a place with its own nice grisly history.)
The house next door to ours in LaFayette was built by “Cotton Tom” Heflin, a longtime Alabama senator (long dead by the time we lived next door) who had a little eccentricity of shooting at passing black people. The police department of course refused to stand for such behavior and promptly passed a law that no black people were allowed to walk down that street. More than thirty years later they still only came to the back doors on that street. (LaFayette is probably most famous for being where the movie Mississippi Burning was filmed.)
Another famous thing about LaFayette (well, not nationally but famous to us who grew up in those parts) is how the courthouse was always outlined in colored lights at Christmas. You could see it from quite a ways out of town at night. We used to go for a ride just to see it when I was a kid. We took our entertainment from wherever we could.
Sampiro ad infinitum
My friend, I am going to make a moderator change your name to Scheherazade in this “Tales of 1001 Alabamian Nights”
I was just thinking that. Unless he’s just a big tease…