The Ancestors by Brandon Massey

Author:Brandon Massey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2014-12-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Aunt Lillie spoke for over two hours. She recounted her childhood growing up on the home place, back in the days of Jim Crow segregation. She spoke of running off as a hot-tailed teenager and marrying a man who dragged her to Chicago, gave her five kids, and then went off and died on foreign soil in World War II, a tragedy that brought her back to the home place to raise her children, in the warm, protective circle of family and friends.

She spoke of her parents, and how they’d also lived there on the home place; and her grandparents, too. Although many of the children produced by each generation had migrated from Mississippi to other parts of the country, several always remained behind to raise their respective families. The family’s property had never been abandoned.

In her narrative, Aunt Lillie echoed something remarkable that my grandma had told me, too. Unlike many other black folks in the pre-Civil Rights South, they had somehow avoided falling victim to the notoriously unfair sharecropper economy: an arrangement where farmers, usually former slaves, were loaned a plot of land to work, and owed a hefty portion of their crop earnings to the landowner. It was a system that virtually guaranteed blacks would never accumulate significant property, would forever be steeped in debt.

“We done always owned this land outright, and everything we grew on it,” Aunt Lillie said. “All three hundred acres here. Belongs to our people, and always will, God willing.”

“Three hundred acres?” Asha whistled. “That’s incredible.”

“No kidding,” I said. “I didn’t know we owned that much land back here.”

“Done had plenty offers to sell out,” Aunt Lillie said. She laughed. “Shiny-head white man came through here ’bout a month ago, wanted to mow down all God’s green beauty and build some new houses. Ha, I ’bout to laughed him outta the door! Told that man he ain’t gonna never have enough money to buy this from us.”

“Good for you,” I said. “Good for us.”

“I needs to stretch these old legs of mine now.” Aunt Lillie got to her feet and smoothed down the front of her dress. “Come on out back, y’all.”

We followed Aunt Lillie into the kitchen and through the back door, onto a large pinewood deck that looked newly built. At midday, it was hot and sticky outdoors, the air a fragrant haze.

“I don’t know how you can stand this heat, Aunt Lillie,” Asha said. She blotted perspiration from her brow with a napkin. “It makes me want to faint.”

“You get used to it, child,” Aunt Lillie said.

The grassy yard beyond the deck was flat as a football field, and about as long as one, extending to an immense cathedral of pines, oaks, and maples that seemed to go on for infinity.

Perhaps it was imagination, but when I looked toward those woods, and the impenetrable shadows within, the buzzing I’d been hearing got louder. I flashed back to my dream: a shotgun house with a blood-red door nestled deep in the forest .

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