Page 174 of The End of the World As We Know It

“No.” Abagail grabbed her purse and Bible. “No more.”

“Where are you going?” Hattie grabbed her elbow.

“Sometimes you have to get off your knees and do something,” Abagail said.

“Your faith’s not enough to keep you safe.”

“Iffen you’re fighting to be free every time you walk out the door, you ain’t promised to return,” Abagail said.

“Then I’m coming with you. Someone’s gotta watch your fool behind.”

The road wound its way from one end of the country to the other. A series of farms nestled. Snorts of pigs. The caws of a morning rooster who’d done lost all sense of time. They made it to the outskirts of Speese, where they spied the white mob marching toward town. The people of Gatlin only cared about reminding the folks in Speese of their place. What would happen if they got too ambitious, if they stepped out of line. Entering the woods, Abagail and Hattie approached a graveyard trimmed by an orchard of shrubs. They passed mossy obelisks, grave markers, which could have been for Confederatesoldiers if they weren’t so far north. Abagail nervously hummed “In the Garden” as she crept to the center of the grove. She stopped near the clearing of a Witness Tree. A low wind wound through its branches.

The leader trotted up on his white horse. The moonlight shown through the trees, though the shadows of the leaves dappled his face. His eyes blistered with fury.

“Hang him. If you can’t get him, hang someone else!” That voice. It belonged to the Moon Shadow Man. “We’ll get him if we have to burn the whole shack down!”

The mob undulated like an angry wave. Onlookers bore American flags. Two small girls made their way through the crowd carrying pails filled with stones, passing them out like communion wafers. The Gatlin sheriff dragged the young accused boy out from his vehicle before abandoning him like raw meat left to bait a bear trap. The mob descended on the boy from all sides, caught up in a certain madness. A contagion of hate, spreading from person to person faster than any superflu. They tied a rope around the boy’s neck. The way he thrashed, desperate to live. The will of the mob dragging him around to the front of the Witness Tree.

“I never did it. My God, I am innocent!” the boy screamed, his cries falling on deaf ears.

“Let’s show him some genuine southern hospitality.” The Moon Shadow Man gestured to the mob, a sinister conductor of terror. “Lift!”

“Lift! Lift for Gatlin! Lift for America!”

The roar of frenzied cheers and howls rose like they were at a party. The boy called out for Jesus, crying into a dead phone. They strung him up from a lamppost. His feet danced in the air. The images flashed by faster than Abagail could take them in, not wanting to linger on any of it for too long. Her heart couldn’t take the pain of it all. The eternal pain. The perpetual pain.

“Welladay,” Abagail lamented, abandoned in the face of absolute evil.

Not satisfied, some men in the crowd fired into his now still body, riddling him with bullets. Brutality took on a life of its own, an empty maw of suffering, unable to be sated. They were possessed by the impulse that made Cain split the skull of his brother. A group virus, a spirit outside of themselves, the way worker bees served their unseen queen. Drunk on the heady fumes of violence, they cut the boy down, tied him to a car. They dragged him through the streets. It might as well have been a flickering scene from a moving picture show, history captured in lightning, as his corpse was driven several blocks, reduced to a shapeless mass of broken bones and swollen flesh. Battered and bloody, no longer recognizable as human. Unsatisfied, they soaked him in gasoline and piled trash on him. They set what remained of him on fire. Tongues of flame lapped along the bark into the branches. When the fire died out, people kicked the torso down the street. The boy’s empty skull rattled to a halt, facing the dark sky.

The pain was unending, their need to destroy insatiable. And the Lord seemed determined to wait on the sidelines.

“No more,” Abagail said.

“Abby?”

“Sometimes you have to take a stand,” Abagail said. “We aren’t free until we areallfree. Go on now, you hear? Organize our people. I’ll buy you the time you need to get ready.”

Hattie retreated. Black folks took refuge in their houses.

The mob then formed a parade of violence, beating any Black man they came across on their march to the jail. Mugging for the assembled cameras. Laughing, shouting with glee, traipsing back to the jail to search for more Black prisoners to have sport with. They broke into the gun store, blocked the courthouse entrance. Even when police reinforcements arrived, the mob overwhelmed them and took their weapons. Laws, civility, God all weak and helpless before the mob. Lynch laws reigned supreme. They torched a parked car. The crowd charged the large oak doors of the courthouse, setting fire to walls and furniture. When the firefighters arrived, the mob cut their hoses.

Dozens of white men clustered under the wan glow of a streetlamp. With no one to stand between them and the city. Abagail stood in the road. Alone. Scared. The only person against the tidal wave of their hate, rotting in the belly of the beast. They approached her, a ring of wolves closing in. All bared teeth and low growls.

“Dirty spade, I hear tell there were coons with guns. They need to be taught respect for the law.” The leader hopped down from his white horse, his mouth opened, a terrible maw filled with a dark laughter, but not with his own voice. “Your blood is in my fists.”

A preternatural terror gripped Abagail. She avoided his eyes, scared she might see the fleeting doubt of her own reflected in them. She thought of what Hattie might do. And of David as Goliath tromped toward him. Reaching down, she found a smooth stone. She hurled it, hitting him in the head. Howling, he dropped to his knees.

“Get her!” He clutched his face, blood gushed between his fingers.

Her dress fluttered as she ran down an alley. Behind her, the crash of broken windows and the clatter of fences being knocked down, the wood set aflame. They made a game of throwing rocks right back at her. A car full of white men soon roared to a stop beside her in the alley. The same terrible grin leered from each of their faces. The nearest men all but bayed, wolves catching a scent. Abagail smacked the first man who hopped out of the vehicle with the lid from a nearby trash can, knocking him clean off his feet. The other men hesitated, enough for her to slip by them. They gave chase for sport.

She dashed between houses, grabbing at door handles as she ran. Finally, a cellar door gave way. Abagail nearly leapt into its darkness. Whatever fate waited her in its depths, better to fall into the hands of the Lord, for His mercies were very great, rather than into the hands of man.

The streets deathly still, their burgeoning silence took on a life of its own. Speese held its collective breath. Sharp rifle reports rang out in the darkness, all too near thunderclaps. A distant scraping drew near. In her mind, she knew the sound. Gun barrels and torchesagainst the sides of houses. The mob was coming. It was not her place to judge God. He judged with water once and would judge again one day, with fire.

“You can’t connect to your God because He was never real. We created an idea of Him—in our image, blond hair and blue eyed—designed to keep you in your place. Where we want you.”