“So . . . you’re saying . . .” Mama shook. “Th-th-they hanged him? My Hank? They hanged him?”
Uncle Clyde lowered his hand to his lap and nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“At the Dry Dock?” I asked.
“Yes.” Uncle Clyde’s voice dropped to a tone that creaked from the depths of his chest. “According to Hank, Mr. Franklin, the owner of the Dock, telephoned him that night and asked him to deliver a case of whiskey. When Hank arrived, a party of Klansmen awaited with a burning cross and a rope slung around that oak tree.”
Mama’s chin sank against her chest, and she broke into tears that made her shoulders convulse.
Uncle Clyde drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to Mama.
I rubbed my mother’s arm but kept my eyes on my stepfather. “What did they say to my father?”
“Hank said they told him”—Uncle Clyde swallowed—“that they didn’t tolerate bootleggers. They fastened a rope around his neck, and they raised him a few feet off the ground . . . to scare him.” His jaw stiffened. “To scare him out of town.”
“Who were the Klansmen?” I moved my hands to the armrests. “Did Daddy say? Were they boys?”
“Young men were, indeed, in attendance.” Uncle Clyde peeked at the doorway of the office, as though worried someone might be eavesdropping.
I craned my neck and checked behind me but found no one there.
“The Kleagle—that’s what they call their local recruiting officer,” he continued, and I turned back to him. “He was initiating members into the Junior Order. That part seemed to make Hank the saddest of all. Boys his own daughter’s age fastened that noose around his neck.”
“But they didn’t kill him?” asked Mama, lifting her face with the handkerchief pressed against her nose.
“No, they sent him on his way with a warning of a full lynching if he didn’t leave the state immediately. Hank said his left arm hurt like the dickens after that. He walked down the highway toward your house, and the pain grew so blinding, he ended up tripping into the road”—Uncle Clyde folded his hands on his desk, and his knuckles quaked against the wood like a telegrapher tapping a line of Morse code—“in front of Joe’s car, as you already know.”
“But the car injured him.” Mama scooted to the edge of the chair and grabbed hold of Uncle Clyde’s desk. “Joe still caused his death, didn’t he?”
“The Model T broke Hank’s leg,” said Uncle Clyde, “that’s for certain. But the arm pain and the breathing difficulty started at the Dry Dock. Hank said he hadn’t been able to catch his breath since the Klan let him go.” Uncle Clyde slid his glasses back over his ears. “Joe hitting him with the car certainly didn’t help matters, but Hank died because his heart was giving out after that mock lynching. I’ve observed other men with failing hearts who experienced that same arm pain, and I’m ninety-five percent certain his heart would have stopped beating that night even if Joe never drove down the road.”
I raised my chin. “Why did you lie in court?”
“The sheriff threatened to harm you if I spoke of what I’d learned.” He looked me in the eye. “I couldn’t risk them hanging you, too.”
I bowed my head—not to pray, but to absorb the density of those words, which bore down on my spine like a slab of stone. Beside me, Mama covered her eyes, and all three of us sat in silence.
“What do we do now, Clyde?” asked Mama, still pressing her palms to her eyelids. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know.” Uncle Clyde shook his head, his eyebrows puckered behind the top rims of his glasses. “I honestly don’t know if it would be better to stay and fight or to take Hanalee somewhere else. Somewhere where she won’t be threatened, and where she’s free to marry whomever she wants and live wherever she wants.”
“I’m attending law school as soon as I’m able,” I said, pushing myself upright in my chair. “Get me out of this place so I can obtain a solid education and come back with the tools to fight these high-and-mighty bigots. I don’t want to hear about people deciding who can live and breathe—and breed—another minute longer.”
“Oh . . . sweetie . . .” Mama reached over to my wrist. “I don’t even know if many law schools are accepting female students, let alone students who’d be considered ‘colored.’”
Uncle Clyde nodded in agreement. “It would be an awfully difficult path, Hanalee, but not an impossible one.”
“I’m already on a difficult path,” I said with a wheeze of exasperation, my palms raised toward the ceiling on the armrests. “What do you think this is?”
Neither of them responded, so I sank back in the chair, feeling quite old and weathered and exhausted—and sick with dread that my old friend Laurence had helped hoist my father into the air with a lynching rope when he was just sixteen.
CHAPTER 23
THE DEVIL TAKE THY SOUL