LatinosUSA

The boy stopped walking to stare up at a huge tree, from which
a colored man was hanging.
The tree was a white oak, strong and tall,
and buffeted by a light wind not at all.

The trunk branched off about twenty feet
up, affording space for the man who hung there.
The bole continued on up into eternity,
while acorns lay strewn in profusion upon the ground.

The man’s body hung lifeless from what looked
to be a strand of blue-dyed sissal, common enough in these parts.
The coarse, bristly fibers probably accounted for the deep, bloody
abrasions and gruesome welts on the man’s neck and the
resulting bloody shirt from where he’d bled out.

The man’s rough leather work boots swung slowly in the gentle
breeze, high above the boy’s head and he wondered for a panicky
instant if there was anything that he might still do, to help, to save
the man’s life. Better that than to just morbidly stare up at him. He’d
do at least that for a stray dog.

But he could tell that the victim, a coal-black adult man, who was
bigger than his Uncle Joe, bigger even than his daddy, was
beyond any help that he might offer.

The youngster had seen death before, and yes, this was what it
looked like. The man’s hands were bound tightly behind his back
with what looked to be thick strands of cold metal wire, painful,
the boy thought offhandedly. He was growing bored.

There were flies buzzin’ around the dead man’s nostrils.
The boy glanced up at the sky. Dark gray clouds were clustering
in the west. There would be rain soon, and he’d get a whippin’ if he
got caught out in the storm.

He looked up at the hanged man a final time.
His pockets had been turned inside out, and there was a rough
stain on both the front and back of his brown sharecropper’s pants.
He’d been burned bad on the front of his shirt, too…

Shrugging against the inescapability of life, the boy gathered
his schoolbooks and his lunch pail, and began the rest of the
long walk home. He thought this was the third lynchin’ this
year. He wondered, why don’t them coloreds just change their
ways and be done with all this lynchin’?

But his Uncle Joe says as how they’s always just keep askin’
for it, gettin’ uppity and demandin’ this and that and the like.
The boy reckoned that that’s the way it’d always been and
likely that’s the way it’d always be. “Next thing you know,”
Uncle Joe had said, “them coloreds be votin’. Then ownin’
land and makin’ the laws. Cain’t have that, boy!”