Chapter One
   The summer of 1934 was an unusual summer in Louisville, Kentucky. It was the summer children became scared to go outside and play. Although they never said a word, not even amongst each other, the children knew through the many warnings their parents gave them something more fierce, dreadful and evil than ghosts, goblins and imaginary monsters was outside . . . maybe at the park, just around the corner from their family home, perhaps at the edge of the school yard. . . .

   "Come 'ere, little girl," a wiry, middle-aged man said while he curled his finger. "Come on, now. I ain't gonna hurt you. I know you're going home from school. It's a long way. Come on with me. I'll give you a ride home so you don't have to walk all that long way."
   The freckle-faced girl grinned shyly at the man who was leaning out of the side of a rusty, old pick-up truck smiling and winking at her. A moment later, the little girl sat on the passenger seat with the man. She giggled each time he reached over and tickled her.
   In between a burst of laughter, the girl looked up at the man and asked, "What's your name?"

 

PART II
 

Chapter Two
   Four years later like a bad dream that would not end, evil snaked its way to Memphis, Tennessee and Tammy Tilson, a fiercely strong-willed woman, moaned, "God, help me," as she made her way from her bedroom to the bathroom. Her vision was blurred. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. "Oh, God," she whispered while she neared the bathroom, "Who killed that little girl?"
   It started yesterday evening when the news aired. Tammy had been in the kitchen cooking cube steak and mashed potatoes when she heard, "News Flash." She turned away from the stove and turned the radio up. "All of Memphis, a little girl is missing. The child was outside playing in front of her parents' home on Monroe Street when neighbors say they saw a Coloured man pick her up in a truck. Before the little girl's neighbors could race to her rescue, the man grabbed her and sped down the street. The little girl hasn't been seen since. . . "
   That was last night. Now it was early morning, and men were still being ordered from their homes or right off the street to report to the police precinct. There, angry police officers lobbed a series of questions at them in loud, threatening voices. "Where were you last night, nigger?" "I didn't ask you where you were in the morning, you fucking moron. Don't wanna hear another word about morning. Damn it! I'm asking you where you were between the hours of ten and eleven last night! You work? You got a job? Got your own car? Did you drive that car last night? Where'd you go? For how long? Were you gambling last night, boy? Do you like little girls? Ever killed before, nigger?"
   The possible answers to the questions only brought more questions to Tammy. After all, her husband, Philip, was one of the men rounded up early this morning. He told her he had been working at their grocery store when cops came down to the store, their car sirens blaring, grabbed him by the back of his neck and snapped a pair of tight handcuffs around his wrists. They drove him to the police precinct and questioned him for five long hours.
       Tammy glanced at a clock on the wall. It was six o'clock in the morning and her husband had only been home for two hours. She went into the bathroom, closed the door and sat on the toilet with her head between her knees. Life had never been easy for her. She'd grown up the daughter of a woman who took ill with "bad pressure" when she was only seven years old. Tammy couldn't remember a time when her mother played with her or spent longer than two hours out of bed. Oldest of her eleven siblings, from the age of seven, Tammy grew up taking charge and working as hard around the house and on her family's farm as a grown man. Even now she couldn't remember a time when she wasn't working. Not until she was grown and married did the hard work bring a reward. She and her husband were the first Coloureds in Memphis to open their own business at the center of town, a place usually reserved for companies owned by wealthy entrepreneurs and adult children of former politicians who hadn't outgrown riding their father's coattails. They were the first people in town to go door to door asking for signatures to sign a petition to have "mysterious" house fires on the poor side of town fully investigated. They stood up to the mayor when he told them "y'all ought to be grateful folks support y'all and allow y'all to thrive in these parts. Truth be told, in a lesser town, y'all would've long been dead . . . shot or something 'nother."
   After she sat on the toilet with her head between her knees for a few minutes, Tammy looked up. She watched a caterpillar inch down the window and thought about her husband. He was good to her and their four children. She knew she was the only person he trusted. All his life he'd "made-do" and kept his deepest thoughts to himself. He was like a locked door that would only open for her. If not for her, he wouldn't have told a soul he was the one who came upon his mother hanging from the barn loft. He was only six years old. All he knew to do was scream and run. Mothers didn't kill themselves he told himself while he ran to tell his father to hurry and get his mother down from the top of the barn. His mother wasn't dead. She was just swinging in the air. It was all so easy to believe until his father raced back to the barn with him. The tortured look on his father's face and the hard groans moving up out of his mouth made him step back and hide behind his father's thick legs. After he told Tammy the story when they were first married, he never said the words "my mother" again. To Tammy it was as if her husband had no mother. It was as if he was born straight out of his father's rib.
   Seconds later, when Tammy heard her daughters talking in their bedroom, she stopped recalling the past, stood from the toilet and washed her face. She'd keep moving. She'd stand with her shoulders tall and walk like she didn't fear anything. For her children, she would.
   "It's gonna be all right," she repeated to herself until she entered her bedroom and saw her husband, Philip, wrestling in his sleep. Her husband had never been in trouble with the law. The cops had no right to embarrass him in front of their customers, handcuff him and force him to go with them to the precinct, a place where justice was never allowed for the poor or the Coloured. While Tammy watched Philip try to sleep, she thought back to their first grocery store. If not for the store, her husband and she would just be farmers who'd never break even despite how many hours a day they worked. She almost smiled. She was the one who talked Philip into purchasing the large grocery store they bought seventeen years ago. She didn't even argue when he demanded that the store be named after his kin. Two weeks later the store was torched and burned to the ground. Tammy ran after the hooded men in the trucks and two police cars as they laughed and cursed their way back down the street, away from the burning store. "You bastards! God'll get you for this! God'll get you for this!" she shouted while she threw heavy rocks at the trucks and cars. She didn't stop throwing rocks until she heard one of the car windows shatter.
   "We'll get another store," Philip told her that night while he sat next to her on the front porch cradling a shotgun in his lap.
   "Do you know how much money we're out? Insurance company ain't gonna give us no money for the store. They'll say it was our fault the store burned to the ground."
   "I know. I know." He reached out and tapped her hand. "We'll build a new store. And if those ignorant asses burn this one down, they're gonna get a load of what's in this here shotgun."    
   With the help of men in the community, they did build another store, nearly twice the size of the first one. The grand opening of Tilson's Grocery Store in Greasy Plank, a small town in Memphis, Tennessee's Shelby County, was the first story on the cover of Memphis Prize, the city's only Coloured newspaper at the turn of the century.
   Most houses in Greasy Plank were small, wood structures. Most women in the town still pushed their laundry up and down splintered wood boards before they dipped the laundry in a tin pail of soap and water and hung the clothes on the line in the back yard. Roads were narrow and seemed to stretch for miles with there not being many businesses or shops nearby. Greasy Plank was country, a place where grass, dirt and weeds ruled over brick, mortar and concrete. The closest highway to Greasy Plank was twenty miles from the town. Strangers didn't stay in the town long. Old timers ran them out with hard stares and bitter gossip. It was a town that consisted of the memberships of four churches, New Mount Holly, the church the Tilsons attended, being largest of the four. Everyone in Greasy Plank went to church. Children from the town grew up and married former classmates. Adults stayed in the town until they died. The biggest business in town was Tilsons Grocery Store. More customers shopped at Tilsons than made deposits and withdrawals at the bank, visited the theatre or went shoe shopping on Beale Street.
   Every night, with a loaded shotgun nearby, Philip and Tammy cleaned out the grocery store cash registers and counted money customers exchanged for clothing, meat and produce. Tammy placed the money inside a tin box beneath their bed. Monday, she climbed inside the family truck and drove through the business districts paying invoices. Other revenue remained locked in the tin box until she had time to get uptown to Beale Street to Shant's Savings & Trust Company and deposit the money in Philip and her account. Winter Tammy didn't go to the bank; instead, Philip and she gave money to the poor. Within the last month, twice, after the police chief refused to investigate a series of house fires, they lent two neighborhood families money to rebuild homes nightriders burned to ash. They also donated a large sum of money to a home for retarded children. Every donation they made was in the memory of a little girl named Bobbie Long. "Keep this quiet," Tammy would ask when she dropped the checks off.