It was the first time Silas Lott, age sixteen years and three days, had ever left Mississippi County, Arkansas. The realization came to the boy in brief bursts, like the fields of cotton, still September green and full of potential, passing outside the bus window. One row at a time. There, then gone. There, then gone. Still for a moment, but so fleeting he could only focus on one row at a time, row after row.
His best friend, Bruce Hemphill, had talked Silas into signing up for the National Guard. Both were born during the War and had no proper birth certificate so when they presented themselves at the Armory in April and signed a statement saying that they were eighteen, that was that. It was the first lie Silas ever told and his mother let him have it when she found out.
“Lying to the Government won’t lead to nothing but trouble, boy. I raised you better than that.”
She had, but Silas longed for adventure. There was little chance for that in the corner of Northeast Arkansas where his people had come eighty some-odd years before.
Silas’s grandfather, William Lott, paddled up the tributaries of the Mississippi river from Alabama after his own father, Nathan, was killed by the Indians. For as long as Silas could remember Grandpa Willie told stories about growing up in the wild country of the Alabama hills. Their family had been the victims of various Indian raids over the years despite Willie’s grandfather (Silas’s great great grandfather) marrying a Cherokee named Sallie Lightfoot.
Grandpa Willie set forth upstream in a neighbor’s boat soon after the attack. Weeks later, carrying his canoe between creeks and camping on the banks each night, the fourteen-year-old hit the big river. He told Silas that going against the current was the only thing that kept him safe, so instead of going south, Willie paddled up the Mississippi, straight past Memphis until he was too tired to row another minute.
He ditched his canoe on the western bank and set up camp next to a big hill he figured to be a burial mound. He hoped the Indians in Arkansas would steer clear of it like they tended to back in Alabama. The next morning, he filled his pocket with small white stones he’d collected on the trip and walked west.
To mark his way back, he placed a stone at the base of the tallest tree within sight. This had been his habit each time he ventured beyond the banks and though he couldn’t remember where he’d learned it, it had served him well. (He only got lost once on a moonless night in Mississippi when hunger forced him deep into the woods hunting a half-dead Squirrel that a passing hawk had dropped at his feet.)
Before Willie had placed his fourth stone, he met a crew of men clearing large trees from the swampy bottoms. He asked about work. The foreman threw him a small-handled ax and said, “Show me what you can do.”
As luck would have it, Willie chopped those trees for the rest of his life. (Whether the luck was good or bad, was a question Willie never answered when Silas asked.) There was a boom in Arkansas after the Great Fire of 1871 and the timber cleared would be sent up the Mississippi to Chicago for decades. The following year, when he turned fifteen, Willie met Silas’s grandmother and the two raised a family in the swamps.
Once a piece of land was cleared, Willie and his family moved west, one parcel at a time. When Silas knew him, Grandpa Willie lived at Big Lake, the swampy remnant of an ancient sea about thirty miles west of the Mississippi. Silas’s grandmother, Dicey, was long dead by then and Grandpa Willie lived alone in a small cabin he built on stilts in a cove within the sprawling hardwood bottomland. Silas was fascinated by the roof over the bed that was rigged to be lifted with a rope so that the old man could duck hunt first thing in the morning.
Silas and his parents took Grandpa Willie store-bought groceries once a month. They would drive to the end of the road, then get into a boat and paddle the three or four miles to what Silas’s mother called ‘the shack on the shore’. Silas’s mother had an irrational fear of her son drowning, so insisted on going with them, holding Silas tight to her chest in the boat the entire time.
“You just missed it,” Grandpa Willie would say to Silas every time they visited. “That swamp monster was slinking by not five minutes before you got here.”
Even after Silas was old enough to know better, he would play along.
Silas’s dad was in California working at the metalworks factory in Torrence the summer Grandpa Willie died. (Three months of California wages lasted nine in Arkansas.) Silas and his mother had taken the last boat ride alone with the monthly delivery of groceries.
She sent Silas inside while she waited in the boat. He found the old man lying lifeless in his bed, his eyes wide open and turned skyward toward the raised roof with a shotgun in his hands.
Silas wiped at the side of his face and hoped it was too dark in the bus for anyone to see his tears.
“You figure we gonna be on the TV?” Bruce asked.
“I hope not,” Silas said.
“Hell, this face was made for the movies,” Bruce said.
“Yeah, the funny pictures,” Roy Briggs said from the seat behind them. “I’m gonna turn you two in for lying about your age, anyway.”
“Do it Briggs and I’ll kick your ass six ways to Sunday and you know it,” Bruce said.
Roy knew it alright. Bruce had spent most of their childhood doing just that. Normally, Silas rooted for the underdog in any fight, but not when the underdog was Roy Briggs, a rich kid, almost as wide as he was tall, with a mouth on him. No matter how many times it got him in trouble, Roy just wouldn’t shut up. As if the world was obligated to hear him out even though he never said anything new.
“That boy’s got a glass jaw,” Silas’s father used to tell him when Roy would pick on Silas in elementary school. “One good punch is all it’d take.”
Silas was never one to fight. He put up with Roy’s insults about the patches on his clothes and the fact that some days Silas didn’t have anything for lunch besides crackers. Bruce had shown up in the third grade and made fast friends with everyone, by force if needed. Since then, the three developed an odd connection. Silas, the longsuffering, Bruce the powerhouse and Roy the know-it-all.
Their bus was headed to Little Rock. The boy’s division of the National Guard had been deployed to keep Black kids out of the White school there. Silas had longed for adventure, but now that it presented itself, he missed his mother.
He hadn’t told her where they were going, only that he was called up and now that he was, there wasn’t anything to be done about it.
“I’ll not let my baby go off to God knows where,” she said. “I’m gonna call and tell them you’s just sixteen.”
“But I’ll get in trouble, Ma,” Silas said. “You wouldn’t want that.”
The truth was that he didn’t know what would happen if she told.
“Besides,” Silas added. “We could use the money. It ain’t gonna be dangerous. We haven’t even done a proper training yet. Maybe that’s all it is.”
Another lie. They had done some training after school at the Amory in town, just not down in Leesville, Louisiana as the recruiter had promised them. And the training consisted of how to wear their uniform, stand at attention and tie a slip knot.
In the end, Silas’s mother didn’t like it, but she trusted her boy. And though he didn’t like to lie, there was no way Silas could let Bruce and Roy go without him.
When they arrived in Little Rock late that night, the three friends, along with some other boys they’d picked up in Jonesboro and Bald Knob along the way piled out of the bus. A man started yelling at them immediately. Silas was so startled by it that he didn’t dare look him in the eyes, thinking he must be a General or something.
“Take your skinny asses to Barracks Three! Run, don’t walk.”
The busload of boys did as they were told, almost tripping over each other to get out of earshot of the screams. Silas was smaller and slower than most of the others and entered the barracks last.
“I saved you a spot.” Bruce said and motioned Silas over to a bunk on the far side of the room. “I know how you like to sleep up against the wall.”
“Thanks, Bruce,” Silas said. “Much appreciated.”
Roy Briggs mimicked, “Much appreciated,” in the squeaky voice he’d used to make fun of Silas since the 5th grade, when Roy’s voice had changed, but Silas’s hadn’t. “Ease up, Roy,” Bruce said. “Lest you wanna talk to Jonas.” (Jonas was what Bruce called his right fist.)
“If I know you, Jonas is gonna be too busy tonight to do much talking,” Roy said.
“Careful, I can jack off with my left hand now.” Bruce said, moving his left hand over his groin and holding up his right fist.
“If you touch me, I’ll tell,” Roy said.
Silas put his knapsack on the bed and left Bruce and Roy to their usual routine of threats and whines. In the end, Roy would swear he was going to shut up and Bruce would agree not to whoop him.
After the lights were turned off, Silas scooted over so that his back was to the wall, just like at home.
“Hangin’ in there?” Bruce whispered.
“Sure,” Silas said.
“We wanted to see the world,” Bruce said. It was pitch dark, but Silas could hear the smile in Bruce’s voice. “And here we are.”
“Yeah,” Silas said. “Little Rock.”
“Beats Blytheville any day.”
Silas lay awake most of the night next to the secret that even his best friend didn’t know. That he’d never spent a night away from home.
On the bus the next morning, all dressed in their uniforms, the boys sat in silence. The man who Silas thought was a General was just a cranky Sargent from Fordyce who sat in the front seat, eyes straight ahead.
Silas looked at the hills in the distance and wondered what it would be like to live in a place with so many ups and downs. Blytheville was flat as far as the eye could see. The only hill in town was the new bypass that crossed over the railroad tracks by Highway 181.
The woods seemed ripe for hunting, Silas thought. He had seen buck scrapings and some bobcat marks, which surprised him, being in the city as they were. When they passed downtown Little Rock each of the boys looked out the windows with their mouths open. Even the city boys from Jonesboro were impressed.
Silas heard the chanting before he saw any people.
“No N——s, no way! Not ever, not here, go away!” over and over, faint and constant, like the sound of ducks over the horizon just before you could see them.
It doesn’t even rhyme good, Silas thought.
The Sargent at the front of the bus stood up.
“You boys grab your rifles as you head out. I swear to God if one of you sumbitch bumpkins points this at a single n--—, I’ll have your hide.”
The bus pulled to a stop at the end of a dirt path off the main road and they filed out, each taking a rifle from the driver before stepping down.
“Sir,” Bruce said. “This gun ain’t loaded.”
“Damn straight, Slick,” the driver said and smiled at the Sargent. “You get in any trouble, you put those long legs of yours to use and run your ass back home to bumfuck. We can’t trust you hillbillies not to shoot a darkie when you get the chance.”
“We ain’t from the hills,” Roy Briggs said before he could stop himself.
“Shut up you fat turd and get back in line.”
Silas put his head down, took the rifle and stepped off the bus. The chants were louder then and seemed to come from every direction. The boys lined up in formation and the Sargent stood on the last step and shouted, “Your job today is to stand there. Don’t say a word. Don’t make a sound. We are gonna march you up to the front of the school where you will form a line. Ain’t nobody going to come up to you, but even if they do, you better not move or I’ll have your ass. Single line!” The Sargent hopped down in a slow trot toward the school, and they followed.
That night when they watched the news in a corner of the barracks, the day sounded more exciting than it had been.
“There’s my shoulder,” Roy Briggs said.
“Lucky they didn’t get your face in it, they’d a broke the camera,” Bruce said.
“That’s not you, that’s me,” a big boy from Bald Knob said.
Silas asked Bruce, “Are we just gonna stand around all day, every day?” He said it louder than he meant and one of the other boys answered.
“A soldier’s job is to do as he’s told.”
Silas blushed and shrank back a little.
He and his friends had talked about the Blacks that might be coming to school. The teachers had speculated for years, but to Silas, it sounded far off, like World War II. It didn’t seem likely to ever happen in Northeast Arkansas.
Roy Briggs was a proud segregationist of course. His family had slaves for generations he was quick to add to any conversation whether about civil rights or not. Bruce didn’t care one way or the other, though he said he’d seen Black girls that were every bit as pretty as White ones.
Silas didn’t know what to think. Blytheville had a large Black population for a town its size, but there was little interaction between the races. Silas and his family lived about five miles out of town in Half Moon with an all-White population of farmers. The Black people had certain sections in town with their own stores, garages and even a funeral home. The rich Whites lived in town over by the Country Club and shopped on Main Street. The poor Whites lived everywhere else. When Silas’s family came to town they went to Main Street as well, though they could never afford much there.
Silas’s father had once gone to one of the Black general stores to buy sorghum when times were bad, but he did it early in the morning and made sure nobody saw him.
Other than in passing, Silas had never spent any time around Black people. Grandpa Willie’s closest neighbor at Big Lake was an old Black man named Leon. Silas had only seen Leon at Grandpa Willie’s cabin once. The two men were talking on the small dock that served as a porch when Silas and his father and mother pulled up in their boat.
“Leon here was just buying some of my special decoys,” Grandpa Willie said. “You best be heading out, Leon.”
Silas’s father looked at the two funny but didn’t say anything while Leon stood and got into his small rowboat.
Leon said, “Ma’am,” and tipped his hat to Silas’s mother, who nodded her head. Silas’s father stood silent on the dock until Leon had paddled out of sight.
“I don’t really like you doing business with that sort,” he told Grandpa Willie.
“Don’t get above your raisin’ boy,” Grandpa Willie said.
It was odd hearing his father referred to as boy.
“I don’t mean it that way, Daddy. I hear he’s been in prison.”
“Prison don’t mean shit,” Grandpa Willie said. “Been there once or twice myself.”
Silas’s mother put her hands over the boy’s ears.
Silas pulled away and said, “I done heard it, Ma.”
Grandpa Willie smiled and said, “Beg, pardon Becky. I don’t mean to be a bad influence on the boy. Y’all come on in and visit.”
“I was mostly innocent,” Grandpa Willie whispered to Silas as they went inside.
Grandpa Willie told some stories about the goings-on at the lake that month. (They’d found a body in one of the bogs, and the only thing they could tell was that it was a woman, nothing else.) Silas’s mother excused herself and sat in the boat knitting for the rest of the visit. She tried to get Silas to go with her, but he refused after several pleas.
“Good to see you’re getting some gumption with your momma,” Grandpa Willie said. “She means well but comes a time when a man goes his own way. But you always be sweet to her, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” Silas said.
“Not a day goes by I don’t miss my momma,” Grandpa Willie said. “Half Cherokee and half crazy, but nobody gonna love you like that again.”
“Dad, we need to talk about Leon,” Silas’s father said.
“Nothing to talk about,” Willie said. “He’s had a rough time of it and he’s my neighbor. Enough said.”
“Just don’t let one of these bottom boys catch him here after dark. Those boys from Manila would skin him alive and you along with him.”
“You don’t have to tell me and Leon how things work in these parts,” Grandpa Willie said.
“Okay, I’m just saying.”
“Shit. Worse than the Indians, the rednecks around here. They ever come for Leon or me, I’ll take a few with me, don’t you worry.”
Silas knew Manila was a sunset town. That Black people could come into town to spend money, but that was all. Before sunset they had to be outside the town limits and if they lived east of town on Big Lake, they’d best stay indoors after dark. No Blacks dared move further west. The fact the townspeople allowed them to hide away in the swampy bottoms was considered, by most, downright generous.
For a solid week, the boys would wake in the barracks at 6am, load into the bus and go to the High School. They’d collect their empty guns and stand silently while the crowds behind them yelled insults at the few people holding pro-integration signs.
The crowds would gather as the students arrived in the morning, then again at lunchtime, and once more when classes were dismissed for the afternoon. In between those times, the people would thin out. Silas noticed a few ladies who stood around most of the day talking to any reporters who might wander by. One lady, with painted eyebrows and a pink scarf around her neck, would follow the camera crews around and yell, “No Miscegenation!” in a shrill voice.
Silas had been there a week and still hadn’t seen a Black person. The boys weren’t allowed to talk to each other or any of the people in the crowds, even if they spoke to them first. For eight, sometimes nine hours, they would stand, often four or five hours at a time with no break. One of the boys had rigged a contraption so he could pee into a hot water bottle strapped to his leg. Silas was bored.
Even Bruce, who never found a rule he couldn’t stretch to its limit, got no consideration for being such a talker.
“It’s like torture,” Bruce would say at night when they ate their bologna sandwiches in the Mess Hall.
“I almost don’t care if they let them in the school,” Roy Briggs, the proud segregationist said, “if it means we could go home.”
“I never cared one way or the other,” Bruce said. “But the longer I listen to those hateful city boys holler, I agree with the Black folks. What do you think, Silas?”
Silas thought for a moment. “I been studying on it,” he finally said as if that answered the question.
“And?” Roy Briggs said. “Not that I care.”
“Shut up, Roy,” Bruce said. “Anytime Silas studies on something, you can bank he’s got a different take on it.”
Roy rolled his eyes but kept quiet. They both looked over to Silas.
“They’re gonna go to that school,” Silas said. “Sooner or later. The Supreme Court done said so and there ain’t no getting around it. I don’t see what everybody’s so worked up about.”
“Don’t see?” Roy Blount said. “You talk like going to school with a N--— is just an everyday occurrence. You ever been to school with one?”
“No, but I don’t think I’d mind to,” Silas said.
“You’re so poor, I can see why,” Roy said. “You ain’t got nothing they’d wanna steal. My daddy says white trash ain’t much different than N--—s so they don’t know better.”
“The day I listen to your daddy is the day I blow my brains out,” Bruce said. “The man raised you.”
“Well,” Roy said. “Daddy says there’s an order to things. You start messing with the order and the whole society’s liable to collapse.”
“Societies collapse all the time,” Silas said. “I’ve read about them.” Silas spent most afternoons reading the Encyclopedia at the Elementary School library. He went there because they had a newer edition than the High School.
“Daddy says,” Roy began.
“Daddy says,” Bruce mocked.
Silas could tell Roy was about to say something smart, then thought better of it. Instead, he took a big bite of his sandwich.
Even Roy knows a cold bologna sandwich was better than a knuckle one, Silas thought.
On the Monday of the third week, Silas noticed that instead of the usual sergeant that always yelled at them, there was a different man, still a sergeant, but with a cleaner uniform, sitting silently in the front seat. He didn’t yell at them to shut up once during the trip, but the boys, now conditioned to the silence hadn’t said anything either. (The old sergeant would yell occasionally just for the sake of yelling.)
The fellas exchanged questioning looks but said nothing. When they arrived at the usual drop-off point, the new sergeant stood and turned to face them.”
“Gentlemen,” he said. “Raise your right hand.”
Most did so immediately, but a few took a startled moment before following suit.
“You are hereby federalized under The National Guard Code of Conduct to the service of the Federal Government of the United States of America. From this moment forward, you take your orders from General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Repeat after me. I accept my responsibility as a soldier in service of the United States of America.”
Silas felt his heart race as he repeated the words along with every boy on the bus. “I accept my responsibility as a soldier in service of the United States of America.”
They were led through various pledges, then filed out of the bus as usual. Silas noticed that this time his gun was loaded.
“You are not to engage the citizenry unless explicitly ordered to do so by me. Is that understood?” The sergeant repeated the question to each of them and waited for the verbal reply of “Yes, Sir.”
Bruce gave Silas a raised eyebrow as he took his gun. When Silas approached the sergeant, he repeated, “You are not to engage the citizenry unless explicitly ordered to do so by me. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir!” Silas said.
Silas stepped off the same bus in the same place that he had for the last three weeks but felt like he now stood on a different planet. Maybe it was the weight of the loaded gun. (A subtle difference, but one that any country boy would know.) Or maybe it was that Silas knew what the sergeant meant while the other boys had not. They were now federalized soldiers who no longer took their orders from the Governor, but the President.
The President supported the Supreme Court of the United States in service to the U.S. Constitution. They were now there to protect the rights of the citizens who wanted to attend Little Rock Central High School. The courts had ruled that the colored citizens had that right.
Silas remembered a few moments in his life when everything had changed.
The first time he shot a coon with his father. “Now you gotta gut and skin it,” Daddy said. “Nothing here goes to waste.”
His first kiss, outside the movie theater, with Vera Courtland. More tender and wet than he’d imagined. And nicer.
Finding Grandpa Willie that morning at the shack. The old man’s pale skin that nearly matched the blue of his eyes, open and dead, looking toward heaven.
Holding up his right hand while the bus bumped down the road and the new sergeant conveyed the oath to Silas and his friends.
The rest of the day was unremarkable. They stood in a line by the jeering crowd as usual, but this time the focus of the crowd’s taunts were the boys themselves, not any counter-protestors or students.
“Made you into turn-coat, N— lovers, did they?”
A girl with big sunglasses and her hair in a tight bun shouted so close to Silas that he could feel the spit from her mouth on his cheek.
“A traitor to your race!” She screamed over and over in his face.
They said worse things as well. Silas was pretty sure he’d heard every cuss word known to man. Grandpa Willie was known for his language and didn’t hold his tongue, even around Silas’s mother. But nothing was like the combinations these men and women, even some of them children, strung together. They insulted the soldier’s looks, their manhood and especially their mothers.
Silas had spent most of his life ignoring insults, but Bruce had a tough day, his hands gripping the butt of his rifle. A vein down one side of his neck throbbed in a way that Silas knew meant Bruce was moving inside even though all was still on the surface.
That night in the barracks, Bruce pulled out a bottle of moonshine from a bag underneath his mattress.
“Where’d you get that?” Silas asked.
“My cousin from Jacksonville snuck it in today while we was at the school,” Bruce said.
“Don’t let Roy see it or he’ll tell,” Silas said.
“I dare him to. I’d love an excuse to kick somebody’s ass right now,” Bruce said. “You want some?”
Silas had tasted alcohol a few times and didn’t like it. Every time Bruce offered when they were back home, Silas would shake his head and Bruce would say, “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
This time Silas took the bottle.
He looked at it a second then turned it up toward his lips and tried to let it go straight down his throat. Instead, it seemed to camp on his tongue and lips, burning like nothing he’d ever felt.
“Easy there, you ain’t used to real liquor,” Bruce said.
Silas tried to say that he wasn’t used to any liquor but couldn’t. His throat seized and he gasped for air.
“Quick, one more good swig, while it still burns, then you’ll be set.”
Bruce grabbed Silas’s hand and lifted the bottle back to his lips. Silas didn’t want anymore, but he let Bruce feed him the bottle like a baby and swallowed hard.
“That’s it,” Bruce said. “In a minute, it won’t hurt no more. Nothing will.”
A feeling from Silas’s stomach rose up and then spread through his chest, to the back of his head and down his arms, straight out through his fingertips.
“There you go,” Bruce said. “You ain’t never been drunk, it’ll pass, then it’’ll feel good.”
“It already does,” Silas said. He brought the bottle back to his mouth and took two swallows that didn’t burn at all.
Silas closed his eyes and it felt to him as if he was swimming in the deep water of the creek behind the house. He leaned back and floated down to his bunk. Bruce climbed to the top bunk and pulled Silas back up, then sat down beside him.
“Don’t pass out on me already,” Bruce said.
Silas put his arm around Bruce and slurred, “I won’t.”
Bruce laughed. “We better keep moving, just in case. Let’s go see if we can find some trouble.”
"Sure!” Silas said a little louder than he meant to.
Bruce’s cousin met them by the fence and led them through a patch of woods. The pool hall was about a mile off base as the crow flies. He bought the two of them a whisky at the bar. It was a large old A-frame house with several pool tables off to the side and a wooden counter that jutted out from the hallway that led to a kitchen.
“Slow down, Silas,” Bruce said too late.
Silas set the empty glass down on the counter.
They weren’t in their uniforms, but the boy’s youth and crewcuts made it obvious to the locals who they were. Bruce knew this meant trouble but that’s why he’d come. He was itching for it.
And trouble came.
It was a garden-variety fight for Bruce. Silas only remembered bits and pieces but was told he gave as good as he got. The two made it back to the barracks just before sunrise. Silas told Roy that he’d fell out of bed and busted his lip. When Roy asked Bruce about his shiner, Bruce said, “Your momma was in a bad mood.”
They rode to the school that day in silence. Silas ran his tongue back and forth on the inside of his lip unable to resist the sting and a little proud that he’d been in his first fight (or so he’d been told). The protesters were already lined up and down the street and jeered as they passed.
“N— lovers,” several shouted at them.
The bus came to a sudden stop when someone in the crowd threw a bottle against the windshield. At first, Silas thought it was a shot and ducked down in his seat. The crowd swelled around the bus and began to push against it. First pounding, then once they got momentum, rocking the bus back and forth.
Silas looked at the row of rifles in the front two seats and wondered if they were loaded today. The rocking intensified and the shouting became deafening. A man’s hand reached through the open window next to Silas and took hold of him by the shirt. The man pulled Silas into the window frame so hard that his forehead began to bleed from a cut just above his brow.
He felt the wet warmth cover his eyes and resisted an urge to grab the man’s arm and slam his weight against it.
I could, Silas thought. I could snap the bastard’s arm in two.
Something came over him that he’d never known. He supposed it was hate and it scared him more than anything in his life ever had.
Silas yanked himself free of the man’s grip and crouched down in the floor by the seat.
He looked up as the man’s hand grasped at the air above him, and again resisted what was bubbling up from somewhere inside. An urge to hurt.
To retaliate.
To injure.
Instead, Silas thought of Grandpa Willie’s shack on Big Lake and the dead look of the old man’s eyes the day they found him. He recalled his mother’s hand against his forehead when he was sick. His bedroom back home and how he wished he was there; under the bright patched quilt a spinster aunt had made him for his twelfth birthday.
Silas would think of this moment until the day he died. The hateful hand reaching back and forth through the window above him as the bus rocked.
The anger he felt, even decades later, made him ashamed. Of himself, his state, and his station. So many contradictions that he rarely spoke of it.
Bruce would go on to join the Army right out of high school and move to California. Roy Briggs stayed put and took over his Daddy’s business. He and Silas rarely spoke when they passed each other on the street all through their lives and into old age.
Silas passed away at the age of eighty-one, surrounded by his children and their children. Outside in the hospice hallway, even more children, too small for such things, played with a favorite granddaughter, not ready to say goodbye to BaPol, the teller of stories.
A final realization came to Silas that day, like the rows of young cotton outside the bus window decades ago and just as fleeting. He would die no more than five miles from where he was born, but hoped he’d covered some territory. He had been many places, California, the Grand Canyon, and even Plymouth Rock. But Silas knew that September day in Little Rock was the only one of true consequence.
We all stand in line and hope that someday the rules get explained.
In his life, Silas had told many stories, but not this one; unsure if he should be proud or ashamed of his small role in our American history, he kept it to himself.
When the rocking of the bus finally stopped, and the crowd moved away, Silas stood up and watched as a group of Black children walked down the street surrounded by men in suits. A little girl with red bows in her braids waved at him and Silas waved back. She disappeared around the corner, followed by the angry crowd.
Not caring who saw, Silas sat down in his seat on the bus and cried while he licked his swollen lip.
