Read Online Sacred Dust by David Hill - Free Book Online

malicious slaying of an innocent man sitting defenseless in his boat on open water in the moonlight? God help me, I pray I never make that connection!

    Not that the men were talking about it outright. It was an understood thing among them that none would ever mention it. When Marjean came telling me about that night, she kept her actual words to what a good time they’d all had at my house. She pretended she wanted to know the secret to my potato salad. Anybody outside the window listening to all the things Marjean and I didn’t say would know right off we had the whole story.

    The sheriff understood that, too, when he come asking Dashnell if he’d seen or heard anything the day they found that black man slumped over dead, a bullet through the back of his head in the boat. The sheriff danced a pretty show, flipping his pad and writing down answers to questions that any fool could see were pointingfarther and farther away from the truth. Of course he was one of them. The sheriff of these parts always is, at least in my memory. Our tall sheriff always pulls out of the group while he serves out his term of office. That’s so he can better protect them. Mother rails sometimes that she can recall a day when a different caliber ran this county. Old people talk like that. But in Mother’s case, I halfway believe her.

    We have no black people around this lake, nor anyplace else in Prince George County, not in the living memory of anyone much younger than Mother. People in Prince George call that a known thing with such intensity you would swear, and no doubt some believe, it was once handed down from heaven on a stone tablet.

    The trouble started last spring. Word got out that someone had seen a black man out there on the water fishing bass. Then it died down. We just naturally assumed it had all been a rumor. No black man who wanted to live would be that foolish. All that’s left of black people in Prince George County turned to dust decades ago in a section of one of my daddy’s fields that used to be a cemetery.

    Gradually it became substantiated that this black man was out there on the lake most Saturdays fishing bass and catching bream and crappie for his trouble. Dashnell and I talked about it. I told Dashnell to get in his boat and go on out there and tell that man he was encroaching. I figured he might be from up north or someplace. It might be that he didn’t know the lay of this land.

    Dashnell had heard a rumor that he was from Yellow County, and Yellow County is close enough to know. Pretty soon you’d hear little clusters of men muttering about it, and women too. Every now and again you’d hear somebody say they didn’t see the harm of one little black man fishing in an aluminum boat on a U.S. Government owned and operated reservoir. But the notion never took hold. It was drowned in a cloud of spittle about what somebody ought to do about it.

    I can swear on the Bible I never put a black face and a name together in one spot until I was maybe seventeen. I’d be hard pressed to recollect a Jew, and if there was one, he or she probablychanged their name and went to the Presbyterian or the Baptist church.

    It wasn’t so much a source of pride as a fact with us that the black people had all been run out of Prince George before anyone here had a telephone or a storm window. It was seventy-five years ago and I felt no connection to it. Mother remembered it. But she hated to talk about it. I think it still pains her in some way. All I ever knew was white and Christian people. I never knew any other kind while I was growing up here. I see no evil in myself because of that. I didn’t find out how ignorant I was, until I’d lived in Birmingham for many years.

    One Saturday morning early about a month before they shot him, I tried to warn the man myself. It was around six-thirty in the morning. The first thing I do after I start the coffee is grab some air on the porch. There was a strong mist on the lake. I