Trouble Erupts

School was off to a good start in September. My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Chatman, was someone who really seemed to like all of us kids. She wasn’t as strict as Miss Chatham had been. With one year behind me, school was no longer intimidating. We started doing more math than we had in first grade. I found numbers boring and preferred dealing with words. Reading problems made very little sense to me.

The playground got new equipment, so now, we had swings, slides, a jungle gym, seesaws and something like what my folks called a spinning Jenny. Still, most of the girls continued to prefer playing house, and the boys played ball. I hung out with girls, who like me, enjoyed the more active equipment. Sometimes we jumped rope or played hopscotch.

At home, there were some changes. Mother’s sister, Aunt Christine, who had moved to Detroit with Uncle Harry soon after the US got involved in the war, had to have breast surgery due to cancer. She and Uncle Harry moved back home to Mississippi to heal. When they first returned, they stayed with us until their renters could find another place to live. I was very young when they left Mississippi. Now, I was getting to know them better, and I really liked both of them. Mom was the closest to Christine of all her sisters since they had the same mother. Dad and Harry got along really well, so we started spending almost every Sunday afternoon with them.

On the first Sunday after they moved back into their house, Daddy and I drove over to pick them up and bring them back to our house for lunch. Aunt Christine had just finished baking a pie on her new oil burning stove. She checked to make sure the stove was off and the house was secure. She asked, “Do you think everything will be safe until we get back?” It was a kind of odd thing to ask, and I answered without thinking what I was about to say. I have no idea why I would have said such a thing. 

“Everything will be fine, except your house will burn down.”

Dad yelled at me. “Beth, don’t you ever say something like that. You know better than to talk like that.”

It turned out I had uttered something prophetic. We had barely finished eating when a neighbor came to tell them their house was burning. It was a total loss. I remembered what I’d said without even knowing why I said it, and I felt guilty, like I had somehow caused the fire.

The firemen attributed the fire to faulty wiring. Some people suggested the renters, who hadn’t wanted to leave and had hoped to buy the place, might have deliberately set the fire. The lady still had a key and was in the house after we left. She said she had come to pick up something which she had forgotten. She had been the last person there, but she claimed everything was fine when she left.

It took a couple of months for their house to be rebuilt. During that time, they stayed with us again. After the house was completed, we began spending Sunday afternoons there like before. It always meant Daddy, Uncle Harry and I would play several games of dominoes. Uncle Harry had taught me to play and I loved the game as much as he and Dad did. They made me the score keeper, so I began to understand basic math and decided maybe it was something worth learning after all.

It was after an enjoyable Sunday afternoon with Aunt Christine and Uncle Harry, when the incident I’d mentioned in the previous chapter happened. We returned home late in the afternoon to find our kitchen window screen had been cut and the glass was shattered. It was apparent someone had used it to enter our house. Dad went inside first to make sure no one was still there. When we got inside, the entire house had been trashed. Contents of all of the drawers in the bedrooms had been dumped onto the floor. For the first time in my life, I knew what it felt like to feel violated.

It appeared whoever had been there was looking for money and valuables. Since we had no jewelry and never left money around the house, the thieves were out of luck in that respect. The only things we could determine which were missing were Daddy’s rifle and shotgun. The thieves had somehow missed the pistol, which Dad kept beneath the mattress on his bed.

In those days, almost all the homeowners in Mississippi had guns. Dad didn’t hunt like many men, but he claimed he needed them for protection and to shoot at anything disturbing the chickens.

All three of us were upset, especially me. I was no longer comfortable inside my own house knowing someone had so recently been there touching everything we owned. Dad drove into town and called the police. They came out and took a statement, but since no one had left any obvious clues, it didn’t appear there was much that could be done. No one suggested looking for fingerprints.

It was a couple of days later, when I learned something, I hadn’t known before. Mississippi had its own vigilante laws, separate but often with the knowledge and blessing of the police department. My own grandpa who I adored and believed to be the kindest and gentlest man on the planet was involved. He apparently had contacts which I had not known about. I never learned who the other party was who grandpa partnered with. He wouldn’t say, and it really wasn’t something he wanted to talk about at all.

I did remember Grandpa had once told me he belonged to a secret society called Woodsmen of the World. Later that company was known as an insurance company, but maybe it was something else at first. His father had been a Mason, but I’m not sure if grandpa ever was. He once told me if he ever needed help, all he had to do was ask a member anywhere in the world, and someone would be there for him. I don’t know if this was his connection.

All I learned was by eavesdropping when the adults were talking. I found out there were two men involved and one of them was my grandpa. They somehow grabbed a young boy who lived in the tenant house below us and took him into the woods and tied him to a tree. They told him, they knew that he knew who broke into our house, and they were going to beat him until he told on the culprits. I don’t know if they actually hit him, but I’m sure the poor kid was afraid they would kill him. It turned out that he did know, and he told them one of the guys was his older brother and a friend. At that point, I wasn’t able to learn anything more, and I can only assume the cops arrested them.

The guns were returned and nothing else was ever mentioned about the robbery within my hearing. I don’t know if the men went to jail or not. It made sense that it would be someone from the rental house who was watching as we passed their place and returned late every Sunday. No one else would have known we weren’t home. No one would tell me anything when I questioned them. It made me sick to learn my grandpa had been part of the ones who threatened a young boy, likely no older than me.

At his gristmill, Grandpa’s main customers were black people, who brought corn to his mill to be ground. I was often at the mill as he worked and Grandpa was always pleasant and obliging around them. I did know he preferred the black men, many referred to as Uncle Toms. They were the ones who kept their heads lowered and answered “Yas Sur”’ and “Naw Sur”.  

It took me a while to adjust to sleeping in my house again. The incident made mother even more nervous than she had been about us being alone in the house after dark. When we would walk up the dirt road in late evening, Mom acted as though she suspected someone was hiding in the bushes. She would pretend she was carrying a gun and would make comments to me like, “Be careful, Beth. Don’t bump against that gun. It’s loaded and you might make it go off.”

All that talk of loaded guns only made my own heart beat faster.  I always breathed a huge sight of relief when we, at last, walked through Grandpa’s door.