GodPretty in the Tobacco Field by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 1 7

Shaking, I moved back into the tree’s shadow, sucking air through my teeth between each slap on skin. Rainey never so much as whimpered. I shouldn’t have told knowing how Gunnar felt about the alcohol—my daddy. I couldn’t help feeling some of those lashes were meant for me.

From the porch, Abby cradled her face and wept quietly.

When Gunnar was through, he tossed his belt to the ground. “Rainey, get to the creek and clean yourself up. Don’t be going in the house like that.”

Rainey pushed himself up and staggered away.

Gunnar stepped onto the porch, put a hand on Abby’s arm, and said, “We’re not careful Rainey’s gonna end up same as his namesake. Our Rainey in his life’s got to honor Bethea, not end up like him—”

“Don’t say that, Gunnar!” she gnashed. “My boy’s not gonna end up like Rainey Bethea—he’s gonna be a fine soldier.”

I gasped. The colored boy, Rainey Bethea, had lived over on the banks of the Ohio River in Owensboro. He was the last one publicly hanged in Kentucky—even the whole country. During the Depression, Gunnar had gone to the spectacle, and for years now I’d overheard him talk about Bethea, comparing his own prison executions to this last hanging. Many times Gunnar’d told Abby the picnic hanging made him become an executioner so that he could bring dignity to the condemned man.

Gunnar said folks accused Bethea of robbing and killing an old white woman, but most weren’t satisfied. “Those type of crimes meant Bethea would get a private electrocution in prison,” he’d said. So they’d convicted him only of rape—a crime that called for a sure Kentucky hanging.

Gunnar said things went sideways when the new female sheriff, who was also a mama, and other officials botched the hanging. The sheriff didn’t want to pull the trip lever, so she hired a man from Louisville to do it while she watched from afar in an automobile.

Gunnar’d told about the thousands and thousands of people who’d swelled the small Kentucky town on that hot day in August 1936, saying most came from far and wide, with lots of reporters coming from big city places. But the hangman, Hash, showed up drunk, fumbled on releasing the trap, and later had the gall to bill the town $6.19 for his travel expenses. A few of Gunnar’s old newspaper clippings likened the whole affair to a “carnival,” saying as soon as the lever finally got pulled, some rowdy folks clawed and ripped at Bethea’s hood cloak to steal a keepsake. Other witness accounts said it wasn’t true; it was calm, hushed amongst them 20,000 folks, and they gave the Negro a dignified hanging.

“Just another colored boy gone fishin’ in a pond where he wasn’t supposed to be,” Gunnar would always say.

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