“Notice I said they ‘played.’ I didn’t say they ‘flourished.’ Anyways, I made the team in Philadelphia. We was porters and butlers, iron men, lawn mower men during the week. On the weekends we played baseball.”

At Abraham’s nod, I followed him off his porch and toward the little “downtown” of the Quarters.

We were passing the colored general store, Hemple’s, where you could see the canned goods inside through gaps between the boards. By the front door stood a neat pyramid of beautiful peaches.

Abraham reached into his pocket for a couple of pennies, which he took inside to the old man at the cash box. He came back out and selected a nice fat peach from the side of the stack.

“Were you any good?” I asked the old man.

He smiled. He looked past me to a broom standing just inside the door. He asked me to hand it to him.

“You want to know if I was any good?”

He held the broom short, like a baseball bat. Then he tossed that beautiful peach into the air.

He swung.

He connected. Tasting a fine spatter of peach juice on my face, I watched it sail up and up, into the hot afternoon sky.

“Don’t bother to go lookin’ for that peach,” he said.

“I believe it is gone,” I agreed.

“In a minute or two it’s gonna be in Loo-siana,” he said with a grin. “They always said tall, skinny boys like you and me can’t play baseball. They say we too far from the ground. I’ll tell you something, I proved they don’t know everything.”

He wiped the broom handle on his shirt and put the broom back inside.

We walked a few minutes in silence. Then Abraham stopped, his face suddenly serious.

“I could talk baseball and swing at soft peaches all day,” he said. “But you and I have some other business.”

“Yes, we do,” I said.

“This is serious business, Mr. Corbett. Sad business. My people are worse off now than they were the day Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation.”

Chapter 34

“WE DON’T HAVE TO GO far to find a lynching tree,” Abraham said. “But I know how tired you young fellas get from walking in the heat of the day. I reckon we’d best take the hosses.”

The two “hosses” Abraham led out from a rickety blacksmith shop were mules-in fact, they were mules that had hauled one too many plows down one too many cotton rows. But those skinny animals proved their worth by depositing us, less than twenty minutes later, at a secluded swampy area that was unmistakably the site of a lynching.

Unmistakably.

A cool grotto tucked back in the woods away from the road. Big branches interlaced overhead to form a ceiling. The dirt was packed hard as a stone floor from the feet of all the people who had stood there watching the terrible spectacle.

Abraham pointed to an oak at the center of the clearing. “And there’s your main attraction.”

Even without his guidance, I would have recognized it as a lynching tree. There was a thick, strong branch barely a dozen feet from the ground. The low dip in the middle of the branch was rubbed free of its bark by the friction of ropes.

I walked under the tree. The hard ground was stained with dark blotches. My stomach churned at the thought of what had happened in this unholy place.

“Somebody left us a greeting,” Abraham said. “That would be the Klan.”

He was pointing behind me, to the trunk of a sycamore tree. About five feet up, someone had used an odd-looking white nail to attach a plank with crude lettering on it:

BEWARE ALL COONS! BEWARE ALL COON LOVERS!

“I’ve never seen a nail that color,” I said.

“You never seen a nail made out of human bone?” said Abraham.

I shuddered, reaching up to haul the plank down.

“Don’t waste your strength, Mr. Corbett,” he said. “You pull that one down today, there’ll be a new sign up there next week.”

His face changed. “We got company,” he said.

Chapter 35

THE DOUBLE-BARRELED SHOTGUN pointed our way was almost as big as the girl holding it. It was so long and heavy I was more afraid she would drop it and discharge it accidentally than that she might shoot us on purpose.

Abraham said, “What you fixin’ to do with that gun? That ain’t no possum you aimin’ at.”

I was distracted by the fact that she was very serious and very pretty. She wore a simple cotton jumper, stark white against the smooth brown of her skin. A perfect face, with delicate features that betrayed the fierceness of her attitude. Deep brown eyes flashed a steady warning: keep away from me.

“What y’all doing messin’ around the lynching tree?” she said.

“You know this girl, Abraham?”

“I surely do. This is Moody. Say hello to Mr. Corbett.”

Moody didn’t say a word to me. She kept her barrel trained on my heart. If she was going to stare at me this way, I couldn’t help looking back at her.

“Well, if you know her,” I said, “maybe you should tell her not to go around pointing firearms at people.”

“Moody, you heard the man,” said Abraham. “Put it down. Now, granddaughter.”

“Oh, Papaw,” she said, “what you bring this white man out here for?”