(Only later did I suspect that not all of them were out of town people as claimed).
They picked the main intersection in town and lined the four way. It was Saturday.
As Momma and I rode past, my mouth open initially, alarms then going off in my brain, she told me not to stare and I felt her body stiffen next to mine as some of the white robes moved into the road.
Why are they here, Momma?
Hush.
When Momma said to hush, and said it like that (low, controlled), that meant to capital H hush.
I knew I would have to wait to ask her everything when we got to the house (sometimes I could get a satisfactory answer about such things and sometimes not, depending. Dad was easier to get information from until he realized you were getting information that Momma had declined to give. Would we even get home alive?)
I could hush, believe it or not, but this time I couldn't help but stare, as silently as I could (I learned how to cut my eyes way, way, to the side, in church, across church pew laps, undetected, to signal back and forth to my equally restless Sunday classmate, sitting further down the pew... it beat staring at the red wall-to-wall carpeted stairs leading to the pulpit, or at the pastor, without blinking until your vision started blacking out). I cut my eyes at the two figures in the road trying to give us some piece of paper to read, held out across the hood.
There was police in the grocery store lot, but they were not stopping them from getting in the road or from being there, all in the white robes.
They were saying things, I could hear some things. They had some signs. I already knew they were KKK from off the black and white news in the front room but they didn't exist here, just in Alabama, somewhere else, but not here. They didn't live here. Why were they here of all places. The white robes. Sure, we had people here who didn't like other people because they were different than them, but they weren't no KKK. The first sign I read confirmed it. KKK. With some smaller unreadable things. Bobbing up and down.
Supposedly in life, there is at least one face of a stranger, that just sticks in your head, that you are never going to forget. A tornado is swirling around but you see, the face.
She couldn't have been but a few years older than me. I saw her there. A child's mind gravitated to a child's form. Standing along the side of the road. She was so close. If I had rolled down the window I could have touched her (Momma would have yanked me a new something if I had rolled down the window and besides I wouldn't have). Flaxen straight hair, big brown eyes, fair unblemished skin (I didn't even see one single freckle), white robe, hood off, her small frame wedged in front of two big bellied bunches of white cloth. She stood there with a look of sass (defiance). After the pass, I automatically rubbernecked to look to see more for as long as I could now that we were passed, there was the sign she was holding, but we were gone by. And her face. I had automatically tried to read it in that, a few seconds slow motion passing. What was she thinking? Was she mad, out of her head, or something? Standing out there. It was a bad thing to do what she was doing. Didn't she know that? Didn't anybody ever warn her about the KKK? Did they force her to do that? How did she get her hair so straight? Where did she come from? Didn't she go to school?
Recalling this incident made me want to check back in with a relative who still lives there who takes delight in being able to remember events, both pleasant and horrific, even when you don't want to know all the details. You stop asking Momma or the relatives who have lost their memory or who don't want to remember things they would rather forget. And don't ask the one who always cries about most things and guilts you for not visiting more often, using over half the visit to complain that you don't visit. You know when you call your oldest living aunt, the one who can still hear you on the phone, and say, do you remember the time ...?
Sometimes the answer these days is yes, and sometimes it is no (sometimes it's a phone call a week later saying, I do remember, but it was in April, not August...) I do this now.
In my pursuit about information regarding the above incident (the answer was, I don't rightly recall that particular time, they rallied here more than onest), I found out something that I really never remember having heard anything about.
And as kids, we heard, yes, we heard all about a lot of things from relatives, who got to yakking and forgot we were there on the floor beside the devan playing jacks or didn't care, including about things that happened plum out to California. Or a hundred years ago, in Tennessee.
And what we didn't hear about from them (or about them), or from neighbors, was augmented by our bike riding, pop bottle breaking in the road, granny bead* wearing compadres, who like Randy Goldberg made sure we heard about the more unseemly underbelly of what a grade schooler knows. Or we read it in the murder mystery magazines with the black bars across faces and chests of dead victims, police photographs, that we weren't supposed to be looking at. (I'm still afraid of getting murdered in Michigan because they have "cereal killers" according to Randy Goldberg who moved after third grade, not to be heard from again).
I was more stunned at never having heard about this next thing than that it happened.
It was a scosh before my time, but the older relatives who were but little kids maybe could tell you if they ever heard about it from kin before they passed.
The night Tulsa burned. It was 1921 and a terrible race riot, some historians (I am reading it now to augment what I was told because the details relayed were sketchy) say the worst race riot in US history, broke out. In Tulsa. Not in all the places you know or always hear about having race riots, but in Tulsa, o.k. An area called Greenwood, The Black Wall Street (until its block after block destruction).
Why didn't anybody ever say anything about this before? (What else? Do I have an adopted out twin someone forgot to mention? Probably not, but lucky for the world. Did someone sneak off and get a tattoo and now I have to deal with it because it's infected? Did the rabbit die? Was the moon walk filmed in a Burbank studio?).
I don't have anything to share on past prelims about the apparently near secret worst, most costliest riot in US history, in Oklahoma, in Tulsa, a few miles and few hours from here, because I am just now learning about it myself, like I said. If you are interested in the topic of The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, which included aerial strikes, many deaths, a swath of destruction, internment, please look it up, I'm seeing a few things here, including documentary type videos. It seems like it is one historical wow ....
(*granny beads happen when you play outside and get dusty and it mixes with sweat and forms dirt beads in a line encircling your juvenile neck, or your old neck, or medium neck, if you never take a shower or bath, a necklace as grandmother would wear, but not really, because it's dirt and sweat)
