Breakheart Hill

CHAPTER 13

WE THINK OF IT AS SOMETHING LURKING BEHIND A DOOR. We see it in the glint of a blade or the cold blue muzzle of a gun. It is supposed to come at us from behind a jagged corner or out of a dense, nightbound fog, and we often imagine it as a stalking figure, shadowy and threatening, moving toward us from the far end of the alleyway, watching us with small, malicious eyes.

That is how Mr. Bailey imagined it, and he tried to make it the way the jury would imagine it, too, each of them seeing it again and again as they sat in the Choctaw jury room deliberating upon the fate of Lyle Gates, remembering Mr. Bailey’s final words to them: Only hate can do a thing like this.

But Mr. Bailey had said other things as well, and as I sat in the courtroom that last day, each and every word fell upon me with a dreadful weight.

“You have to see what Kelli Troy saw that afternoon,” he told the jury in that high, ringing voice he so often used during the trial. “You have to see something come toward you from out of the bushes. You have to see a man, bigger and stronger than you. You have to feel the terrible hatred that he has for you, and the damage he has come to do to you. You have to see all of that in his eyes.”

He paused, lowering his voice to that softer, more intimate tone he used just as effectively. “And, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, although it is autumn now, and a cold rain is falling over Breakheart Hill, you have to imagine how beautiful it was on that bright, warm day five months ago. You have to say to yourself, as Kelli Troy must have said to herself, ‘I will never see such beauty again or hear the birds or feel the warmth of the sun.’ You, the members of the jury who have been chosen to render justice in this case, you, each and every one of you, have to do all of that before you can understand what happened to that young girl on that bright, sunny day. You have to see what she saw and feel what she felt and understand what she lost and will never see or feel or have again.”

I am sure they think they did, that as they mused over the events of Breakheart Hill, those twelve men and women saw Kelli’s eyes dart over to an unexpected sound, then widen as they watched Lyle Gates grimly emerge from the thick jungle greenness that surrounded her, his eyes aflame with the hatred Mr. Bailey had already described to them as “brutish and vengeful and probably lustful, too.”

But danger, even mortal danger, does not always look like Mr. Bailey would have had the jury see it on the last day of Lyle Gates’s trial. It is not always a stalking figure with raging, red-rimmed eyes, or even a coolly malicious one, patiently waiting in the shadows. It may be something else, something that calls to you gently, gathers you in warmly, caressingly, something that coaxes you sweetly toward destruction.

Some years ago, I said as much to Noreen as we sat at the breakfast table, reading the paper on a bright Sunday morning.

“It’s the ones who love you that you have to look out for,” I said, rather idly referring to an article I’d just read about a father who’d poisoned his two sons. But Noreen had glanced up abruptly, her eyes trained lethally on mine. “What are you talking about?” she asked tensely.

The strain that had suddenly swept into her face puzzled me. “A man in the paper,” I explained. “He killed his sons so they could go to heaven.”

She nodded. But her eyes were still fixed on mine with a terrible concentration.

“What is it, Noreen?” I asked.

She hesitated a moment, the tumult building in her even as she labored to contain it. “Nothing,” she said finally, her eyes fleeing from me, focusing on the newsprint once again.

Nothing, she’d said, but I knew better. I could see it in her eyes, and I knew that she’d heard my earlier comment in the context of that night so long ago. And in my mind I saw her as she’d appeared that evening, a motionless figure in the humid summer darkness, the powdery smell of violets clinging to her dress, her voice soft and oddly comforting in its conspiratorial whisper, What do we do now?

KELLI’S ESSAY ON WHAT WE ALL REFERRED TO AS “THE RACE problem” at that time was sent to Mr. Avery’s office the day after I first read it. In those days school officials always had to approve whatever students wrote, and I remember thinking that there was a good possibility Mr. Avery would not allow Kelli’s article to be published in the Wildcat. But he did approve it, and even went so far as to return it to Kelli and me personally.

“We can’t just turn away from our problems down here,” he told us as he stood in the corridor outside the basement office. Then he nodded with that exaggerated and anachronistic courtliness that still clung to the last of his kind, and walked away.

“I guess that’s what you call a ‘gentleman’ down here,” Kelli said once he’d disappeared down the hallway.

I nodded. “Absolutely.”

We left the office together a few minutes later, and I remember that as we walked outside, I could feel the first thawing out of that long winter, the first hint of spring’s approach.

Kelli unbuttoned her coat, drew the long, checked scarf from her throat and tucked it beneath her arm. “It feels warm,” she said.

I glanced toward the sky. It was light blue, and the sun was very bright. “We should take a walk before I drive you home.”

“Where to?”

“We could go downtown. Then walk back and pick up the car.”

Kelli flashed me the smile I had seen so seldom since our trip to Gadsden.

We headed down the stairs, then along the sidewalk that led almost directly to the center of town.

“Do you think everybody will feel the same as Mr. Avery?” she asked after a while.

“Most people will, I think.”

“The only thing that bothers me is that the people who don’t like it, they can say that I’m just another ‘outside agitator.’ ”

I laughed. “Just another Yankee trying to tell us how to treat our Negroes.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, some people probably will say that, Kelli, but if they couldn’t say something like that, they’d just say something else instead.” I shrugged. “But we’ve got a lot of good people in Choctaw. Basically, it’s a nice town.”

She looked at me, clearly surprised. “I thought you hated Choctaw.”

“Not as much as I used to.”

“Why not?”

I didn’t dare tell her, so I lied. “Maybe I’m just a little more mature than I was a few months ago.”

“But do you still want to leave here as soon as you graduate?”

“Yes, but maybe not forever, though,” I told her. “Maybe just for while I’m in college.”

“And then come back?”

“Yes.”

She seemed pleased, and I allowed myself to believe that her pleasure in such a prospect was the same as mine, that it signaled the possibility that we might always be together, that slowly, incrementally, I was growing into that greatness she so intensely desired.

We walked on toward the center of town until we reached the park. The grass was still brown, the trees mostly bare, but the sense of their reawakening was everywhere, the earth poised to make its nod toward spring.

“Want to sit down?” I suggested.

“Okay,” Kelli said, then followed me to the short bench that rested at the edge of the deserted tennis court. It was the place she’d been sitting when I’d seen her that first day. In the manner of teenage love, it seemed sacred to me now.

I felt content enough to release a small portion of those feelings that had been growing in me for so long. “I saw you here once.”

“Here? When?”

“It was just before school started. You were reading.”

She suddenly recalled it. “You were playing tennis. You and … it was Luke, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

She seemed amused by the memory. “It feels strange that there was a time when I didn’t know you.”

It was far from a declaration of love, but I relished it anyway. “Yes, it does,” I said, then added cautiously, “especially since we’re so … close.”

She nodded, but added nothing, so I quickly went to another subject, one less charged with possible disappointment. “What do you want to write about for the next issue?”

Kelli’s answer came so quickly that I was sure she’d been considering it for a long time.

“History,” she said, her whole manner suddenly more alert, as if a starting pistol had fired somewhere, and she was off. “I want to find out what Choctaw was like at various times.” An invisible energy swept over her. “I’ve been looking into some things,” she said, even the rhythm of her speech now more rapid. “Did you know that there was once a slave market here?”

I looked at her doubtfully.

“It’s true,” Kelli said. “It was the only one in this part of the state.”

“A slave market? Here in Choctaw?”

“The big markets were farther south, where the cotton plantations were, but for a while, the northern part of Alabama had one slave market, and it was here in Choctaw.”

I still found it difficult to believe. “But there wasn’t that much slavery this far north. No real plantations. It was too mountainous for them. The farms were small.”

“And because of that, the market didn’t run all year,” Kelli said, clearly pleased by the knowledge she had acquired. “It opened in early summer, and stayed open until fall.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read about it,” she said. “The town library has a whole section about this area. I could show it to you sometime.”

She seemed quite excited, and in that excitement, rushed to seal the agreement. “How about this Saturday?” she asked almost girlishly, as if it were a dare.

“All right.”

She smiled with a new radiance, joyful, luminous. “Great, Ben,” she said. “You can pick me up at around ten.”

And so, two days later, I pulled up at the front of Kelli’s house.

She came out right away, but this time her mother came out with her.

“Good to see you again, Ben,” Miss Troy said as she came toward my car.

She was wearing a long wool coat, and her hair seemed to have lightened suddenly over that long winter. Still, it had yet to reach that shimmering silver it would take on in the last years of her life, and which, as I have often imagined, would have crowned Kelli’s head as well, lending to her old age the breathtaking beauty of a completed life.

“How’s your father?” Miss Troy asked.

“Fine.”

“Tell him I said hello.”

“I will.”

Kelli was beside me by then, bundled up in her coat, as usual, and with the same old checked scarf once again pulled tightly around her neck. And yet, to me, she looked quite different than she had only a few days before, more set on her course, determined and unflinching. An invisible force seemed to swirl around her, electrifying her eyes, lending an unearthly radiance to her smile. The self-doubt that had darkened the preceding weeks had completely vanished, and the girl it had left behind was intensely and magnificently alive.

In those days the Choctaw library was located in the basement of the city hall, a dark, cramped space presided over by one of the town matrons. Mrs. Phillips worked without pay and without title, a relentless promoter of local culture who, as I discovered that morning, had developed a great affection for Kelli Troy.

“Well, hello there, Kelli,” she said cheerfully as we came through the door.

“Hi, Mrs. Phillips.”

Mrs. Phillips’s eyes lighted on me. “Are you a reader, too?” she asked.

I nodded. “I guess so.”

“Kelli’s an avid reader,” Mrs. Phillips told me approvingly. She looked at Kelli. “I found that reference you were looking for.”

With that, Mrs. Phillips strode off toward the back of the room. Kelli and I followed behind her, edging our way deeper into the labyrinth of metal shelves and ancient, dusty volumes until we reached the back wall of the library.

“Sit over there,” Mrs. Phillips said, nodding to a small wooden table and chairs. “I’ll bring it to you.”

We did as we were told, while Mrs. Phillips disappeared behind a shelf of books.

“She’s helped me a lot,” Kelli whispered. “She knows every book in the library.” Her eyes swept up the shelf in front of us. “All those books are about Choctaw.”

My eyes followed the long line of books, surprised that there were so many.

“Most of them were written by people from around here,” Kelli said. “They published them with their own money.”

“Why?”

“Because they wanted to be remembered, I guess,” Kelli answered. “Or they wanted to record something.” She was about to go on, but Mrs. Phillips came up behind us and plopped a large volume on the table.

“This is the first reference to it I could find,” she said.

She drew her finger down the lines of a long paragraph, then brought it to a halt near the bottom. “Right there,” she said. “That’s the first reference.”

I bent forward and glanced at the words the tip of Mrs. Phillips’s finger had come to rest upon.

“Breakheart Hill,” I said.

Kelli glanced over at me, her eyes intent, piercing. “Have you ever wondered how it got to be called that?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I’ve never thought about it.”

Kelli lifted the book. In a voice that was soft and whispery, yet also charged with a strange, almost passionate devotion, as if she owed each life before her some measure of her own, she read aloud:

“We all walked together up from where the park was laid out. There were lots of horses and wagons and men were working all around. It was noisy because of all the work, and there was a lot of dust because of all the digging. So we headed off toward the mountain to get away from all that. Mama had put some roasted corn in a sack, and Daddy said we should find some shade to eat it in. So we walked toward where the old slave yard had once been, and we found some shade near the mountain and that’s where we stopped to eat. When we were finished, Papa played the ukulele Uncle Newt had given him, and my sister Doris and I danced in the grass. When we finished our little dance, an old darkie that was passing by clapped his hands and said howdy to us. We said howdy back and Mama offered him a piece of corn that we had left, but the old darkie said, ‘No, thanky,’ and headed on up the mountain by way of Breakheart Hill.”

When she finished, Kelli looked up at me. Her eyes were very soft even in their intensity, and I could tell that that short passage had moved her in some way.

“April 7, 1886,” she said quietly. “By that time, the people around here were already calling it Breakheart Hill.”

“Maybe it was always called that,” I said.

“But why? I mean, it’s such a strange name.”

“It probably comes from some old legend,” I told her. “Lots of places have them around here. They’re usually Indian legends. There’s one for Noccalula Falls in Gadsden and Montesano Mountain in Huntsville.”

“What are they about?”

“Love,” I said. “Sort of Indian versions of Romeo and Juliet.” I smiled mockingly. “Usually about ‘doomed love,’ as Miss Carver would call it.”

She watched me with a strange concentration. “Do you think the legend of Breakheart Hill is about doomed love?”

“Probably,” I said.

But it wasn’t, as she would soon discover. Although, after her, Breakheart Hill would have a legend of its own, one the people of Choctaw would stamp with the sure and unmistakable mark of history three decades later, returning Kelli to their memory in the only form they could, as a slab of cold gray stone.

It was erected in the summer of 1993, when certain, tumultuous events of the civil rights movement were approaching their thirtieth anniversaries. Several months earlier, Rayford Winters, one of Choctaw’s two black councilmen, had proposed that the town commemorate what he called the “martyrdom of Kelli Troy.” The town had responded with considerable enthusiasm, and not long after that a small monument was placed at the crest of Breakheart Hill. It read simply: IN MEMORY OF KELLI TROY, CIVIL RIGHTS MARTYR, MAY 27, 1962.

There was a ceremony at the unveiling of the monument, and although I was asked to speak, I found that I couldn’t, and turned the task over to Luke Duchamp.

It was a brilliant summer day, not unlike the one thirty years before, and I am sure that fact was not lost on Luke. Standing before the crowd that had gathered on the hillside, his voice older, more weary, but still able to carry its burden of remembrance, he said: “On that day, I drove Kelli Troy up the mountain road and left her here.” For a moment, his voice trailed off, and I could see him glance down, gathering himself in again, then look up and go on. “She was a beautiful girl, but that was not all there was to her. She was a smart girl, but that wasn’t all either.” His eyes shifted over to where I stood, my hands deep in the pockets of my trousers, my fingers balled into two tight fists. “Some of us remember how much there was to her, how alive she was, how full of things she wanted to do in life.” He glanced away, then down at his text. “Our fathers believed that one life lived nobly could make a thousand people want to live noble lives.” He stopped again, and I looked over and saw Betty Ann and Noreen standing together, sleeveless in their pale summer dresses. My daughter stood just in front of Noreen, and Kip, Betty Ann’s youngest son, stood beside her. Both women listened attentively to Luke’s remarks, although they could hardly have grasped the depth of what he said. Beyond them, Sheila Cameron stood alone, and just beyond her, Shirley Troy, in a dark blue dress, her hands folded before her, watched silently as Luke went on.

“Kelli Troy made the people who knew her want to live as nobly and bravely as she lived,” Luke said, “and that’s why Choctaw has decided to honor and remember her.”

He spoke of the recent effort the town had made to raise money for her monument, and thanked various people for their help. He mentioned that there were many people in the crowd before him who had known Kelli. He did not mention the ghosts who were gathered on the hillside along with them. Todd Jeffries. Sheriff Stone. Mr. Bailey. Mary Diehl. All of them were gone now, beyond the grasp of what the truth might have done to them.

In conclusion, Luke returned to Kelli. “Kelli made us aware that we had a race problem in Choctaw, and that we had always had one. For that alone, and even if nothing had ever happened to her here on Breakheart Hill, we must never forget Kelli Troy.”

He stepped aside after that, and Eddie Smathers spoke briefly, then introduced Rayford Winters, who described Kelli as a kind of local saint. Rayford said other things as well, but my attention had turned away from him, my eyes searching the deep green wood just as Kelli’s must have searched it on that long-ago summer day. I could see her in her white sleeveless dress, her long brown arms pushing away the low-slung limbs as she moved deeper into the thickening forest. At some point she must have heard the scratch of the gravel as Luke’s old truck pulled away, but whether she glanced back, I will never know. I know only that she continued down the slope, her feet in summer sandals, her white dress no doubt catching from time to time on a bush or shrub, her eyes peering intently into the green filament of the wood, moving not toward martyrdom, as Rayford Winters would have had us all believe when he spoke on Breakheart Hill that day, but toward the heart—as I have come to think of it—of life’s disarray.