Free No Place Safe by Kim Reid

thrown at me by men in hooded robes, or hear my white friends called nigger-lovers by the same men (and women and children)—something I experienced seven years later during a march in Forsyth County, Georgia, where black people were outlawed from owning property simply because they were black.
    But in 1979, Klan involvement wasn’t impossible. The Klan was still burning crosses with regularity on Stone Mountain, in a suburb of Atlanta and official home of the Ku Klux Klan’s national organization. Stone Mountain is Georgia’s answer to Mount Rushmore, with its carving of Confederate leaders. The fact that the carving was officially completed only seven years earlier, and that the Klan used it as its base of operations well into the 1980s, should disabuse anyone of the thought that the Old South and its slave heritage was hundred-year-old history. Its roots wound deeply through Georgia clay. The weekend before the last two boys were found, the Klan had killed five Klan protestors in North Carolina. It wasn’t at all unlikely that they could have something to do with the boys.
    As a child uninitiated in the ways of the Klan, I tried to imagine a Klansman in his white hood, driving down Campbellton Road in Southwest, past Wingo’s Restaurant with its loud rainbow-colored sign and the best chicken in the world, looking for a fourteen-year-old black boy to steal. He would sit behind the wheel, moving slowly down the street populated by black folks going about their day while he tried to figure out which life was most valuable, would be held more dear, once the people on the street got word that it had been taken away. Taking which life would cause the most fear, the most panic?
    It could never happen if he was wearing a hood. So I imagined him without the hood, looking like any other white man in Atlanta, and I still couldn’t see it happening. Most black folks, at least in the 1970s south, came out of the womb mistrusting white folks, and one as racist as a Klansman? Any black person could probably tell you—no hood is needed to see the truth in people who hate a race for simply being. The danger just rises from them like steam from just-rained-on asphalt in summer. I just couldn’t see those boys getting into the car of one. But maybe they were too young, especially the nine-year-old, to know any better. At nine, you still trust everyone.
    Four boys turning up dead only gave Ma more ammunition to keep me from hanging out like I used to, not that she needed any because I was scared enough of her to do what I was told in most cases. After the two boys were found, Ma said, “See, good thing I told you to stay away from the Rialto. From now on, no hanging around downtown between buses. There’s no reason for you to mess around in Five Points, going into McCrory’s and Woolworth’s. Whatever you need, I’ll take you to the mall to get.”
    First off, it was never as easy as just saying I needed something. Because money was always tight, Ma had to first know why, understand why something we already had wouldn’t do just as fine, and just because your friends have it doesn’t mean you need it, too. And second, I didn’t see what the Rialto, or Woolworth’s and McCrory’s, had a thing to do with the boys being found miles away. Of course, I kept these opinions to myself.
     
    *
     
    “How far is six miles?” Bridgette asked me. We were raking leaves in the front yard, a job that took a month of weekends to complete and made me dream of having enough money to rent one of those riding lawnmowers that sucked up leaves in no time flat. When I suggested this to Ma, she said that if I ever had enough money to rent a lawnmower, we’d use it for something worthwhile like replacing the cracked pane in the kitchen window or fixing the rip in the screen door. We didn’t need to rent a lawnmower when Bridgette and I had two good arms and legs.
    “Six miles from where?”
    “That’s what I mean. Is it like from here to your