Free Guardian by Julius Lester Page B

Willie the night he was lynched. That same night she drove Little Willie and his mother to Atlanta. Mama Esther heard from them almost every month. She shared their letters with me.Never once did either Willie or his mother ask about me, and I knew Mama Esther had told them I was there with her.
    She died a few weeks after my father. It was as if she waited until she knew I was established in the world, waited until Willie was a doctor. She had fulfilled her life’s purpose.
    I wrote and told Willie and his mother that she was dead. They never wrote back.
    I wished Mama Esther had lived to meet my wife and my children. It would have been good if they could have known someone who knew me before. Perhaps she would have helped them understand that my silence is not a rejection of them but an inability to explain a time and a place where cruelty and hatred were as ordinary as bacon and eggs.
    I’ve only gone back to Davis once. I had to attend a bar association meeting in Atlanta. After it was over, I rented a car and went to Davis.
    When I drove into town, the Confederate soldier was still pointing up the street, except there was no rifle in his hands. I suppose it had worn out or been taken by some teenagers as a prank.
    The stores on both sides of the street were empty.I could make out a faded sign that read Anderson’s General Store, except there was no store. When the interstate highway was built, there was no exit ramp at Davis. The town died. Everyone who was able moved away.
    I saw Zeph sitting with some other white men on a bench under the oak tree. He was only two years my senior, but he looked thirty. Either the bib overalls he had on were too big, or he had lost a lot of weight. His hair was white, and gray stubbles of beard lined his face. He was dying of cancer, I learned later.
    He saw me walking toward him and recognized me immediately. As I came near, I could smell the cheap moonshine whiskey on his breath.
    I had not said a word, but he started yelling, saying he had given me a fair price for the store and if I thought I was going to get another dime out of him I was crazy.
    Every other word was a swear word. I still had not said anything, but he acted as if I had. He wanted to know why I had come to town, and if I’d come back to try and pin the murder of the preacher’s daughter on him, I was a blankity-blank liar ’cause everybody knowed that nigger ravished that girl and stabbed herto death. Nobody but a nigger would do something like that to a white girl. Everybody in town knew that.
    As I turned to walk away, he pulled a knife from the pocket of his overalls. I tensed, but he took a brick of chewing tobacco from the same pocket. With his right thumb, he flicked the knife open and, as he cut off a plug of tobacco, I could see the knife plainly. It was the same one.
    I went over to the church cemetery and found my mother’s grave, my father’s, and Mary Susan’s. The stones at the head of each gave only the basic information—names and dates of birth and death. The cemetery itself was overgrown with weeds.
    I wanted to find the grave of William Benton, for that was Big Willie’s name. I drove out to what used to be the quarters. The only ones left were old. I found an old woman who remembered me and remembered Mama Esther. When I told her what I was looking for, she told me that his son had come a few years ago, had the body dug up and reburied in Atlanta.
    I arranged to have the bodies of my mother and Mary Susan exhumed, put in new caskets, and shippedto Boston, where I had them reburied. They lie together now—Mama Esther, my mother, and Mary Susan.
    I visit each week. I tell Mother and Mama Esther about my legal cases and the black kids I defend in court that the police have arrested for no reason other than because they are black.
    I tell Mary Susan about the family she and I would have had. Each week I make up stories about “our children” to tell