In the Company of Grace: a Veterinarian's Memoir of Trauma and Healing: A Veterinarian's Memoir of Trauma and Healing by Jody Lulich

Author:Jody Lulich [Lulich, Jody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs, SOC001000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / African American & Black Studies
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2023-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

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The man hanging from the tree in Mobile, Alabama, was Michael Donald. It took six months for the jury to acquit the three drug dealers of his murder. The jury knew that their indictment was senseless. Besides, there was no evidence, and Donald was a quiet, hardworking individual who never took illegal drugs.

It took two years for the FBI to arrest the real suspects. The event started when a Black man, Josephus Anderson, was tried for shooting a white police officer in Birmingham, Alabama. The trial took place in Mobile, Alabama, where Benny Hayes lived. The jury was unable to reach a verdict. The mistrial exonerated Anderson for shooting a white police officer.

Hayes, a prominent leader of the United Klan of America, interpreted the law how he saw it: “If a Black man can get away with killin’ a White man, then a White man should be able to get away with killin’ a Black man.” Henry Francis Hayes, Benny Hayes’s son, and James Llewellyn Knowles took those words to heart. They went out looking for a Black man to kill. Donald just happened to be out that evening walking to the convenience store. He was ambushed. His whereabouts remained unknown until the next morning, when his body was spotted hanging from a tree.

For having resurrected this ancient form of racial terrorism, the courts were not kind to the accused. Knowles was convicted of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison but avoided the death penalty by testifying against Henry Hayes. Hayes was convicted and sentenced to death and was executed on June 6, 1997.

Many years later, the father, Benny Hayes, was indicted for inciting the murder. His court case ended in a mistrial. The jury and judge became sympathetic to his condition when the seventy-one-year-old collapsed in court.

Before this, I never felt unsafe in Alabama. Sometimes when I walked to school, friendly drivers would stop and offer me a ride. After the death of Michael Donald, I was more cautious about getting into someone’s car unless I was familiar with the driver.

One car trip, however, put me on high alert. My classmate’s mother unexpectedly died, and he needed a ride to the Atlanta airport, a hundred-mile road trip from Tuskegee. I borrowed Grace’s car. Vicki, my lab partner, came with me. We drove to Atlanta with plenty of time for our classmate to catch his flight. We were in such a rush to get back, because we had a major exam the next morning, that I didn’t notice the gas gauge was sitting near empty. As we approached Opelika, thirty miles from home, the car sputtered. Before it stopped, I was able to park it on the shoulder of the road, yards from an exit ramp. It was dark, almost 10:00 p.m., and the interstate had no streetlights. We got out and walked up the exit ramp hoping to find a gas station. Instead, we came up into a poorly lit residential area with a few homes and many open fields.

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