Blind Hill

By Henry Fennell

It the late spring of 1968 and 13 year-old Coy is looking forward to the 7th grade dance, to the end of the school year, and to a summer of baseball and fishing. His plans are shaken when a civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King is murdered 50 miles away in Memphis, Tennessee.The people in the town of Harpeth Junction are on edge and unsure about the possible effects from the racial unrest nearby. For Coy, the is he dance goes badly and and two boys, one from Chicago and other from St. Louis, enter Coy's life most unexpectedly. Follow these three boys through a summer of discovery and drama - a summer that will change their lives in ways that could not have imagined in "Blind Hill".

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543916218

Book preview

Epilogue

Prologue

I’ve been thinking about telling this story for a long time. It’s an important story for me. I will tell the story now the best I can. Most of it will be true; some of it might not be exactly true because it happened fifty years ago and I am now sixty-three years old. I have probably forgotten or will misremember some of the details. If I had told this story a long time ago, I would have made myself the hero of the story. That would have been wrong. I was not a hero, not in any way. Is a thirteen-year-old boy ever the hero? Even so, I like to remember the story in a certain way, the way that suits me best.

Chapter 1

School lunch cost thirty-five cents, and some days I would have fifteen cents left over from my lunch money to spend after school. When that happened, I liked to see if Annie Shelby would walk up to the square in Harper’s Junction with me. She always had fifteen cents extra and the two of us would put our money together to buy a drink and a snack to share. The nice lady at the bakery would give us a big stack of donut holes for fifteen cents. We liked to go there and I was always proud and happy to be seen there with her.

I missed meeting Annie that Thursday after school. She must have gotten a ride home. I walked home, not stopping on the square to spend the change that burned in my pocket. I decided I would keep my money overnight and try to meet up with Annie on Friday. And I tried to hold onto my fifteen cents that evening, but I didn’t make it. I kept thinking about things I could spend it on and it got to be too much. After supper, I rode my bike up on the square to buy candy.

I went straight to Sonny’s Café. There was a candy rack at the cash register and I knew he had the candy I wanted. I grabbed a pack of my new favorite candy and waited for someone to come and take my money. Several men were sitting around a table nearby, talking loudly.

I heard one of them say, I just hope the goddamn nigger dies.

I wasn’t shocked by what he said, not even surprised really. I did wonder who and what he was talking about. I found out when I got back home.

The television was on at my house and a television station from Memphis was reporting that Dr. Martin Luther King Junior had been shot that evening and that he had been taken to the hospital. There was no announcement yet on his condition. A short time later a television reporter came back on to say that Dr. King was dead.

I don’t remember exactly what was said that evening in my home after he was killed. People were mostly scared, I think. They were scared of the possible reaction to the murder. The small town where I lived was about half black. What would these people say? What would they do? I wondered and worried, mostly about our safety.

We all went to school the next day. The kids talked a little among themselves about the killing and about what might happen in town because of it. Mostly, I think we borrowed worry from our parents. We didn’t exactly know what to think or what to fear.

As far as I remember, not one teacher said one thing about Dr. King’s death that day. My teachers didn’t; they conducted class just like they always had. Maybe they were told not to say anything. I don’t know. I know that I was in high school before anything was said by one of my teachers about the assassination of Dr. King, or about anything else that happened in the summer that followed. Imagine that.

We watched and waited for something to happen and nothing really did that I noticed. White kids attended all-white schools and all-white churches. There was not much mingling between the two races. If black people in Harper’s Junction were reacting to Dr. King’s murder, I didn’t see it or hear it. White children in town seldom talked to black people—adults or children. I was watching in the days that followed the assassination, but I didn’t really know what I was watching out for. We went back to school thinking about what we always thought about in the seventh grade. For me, it was baseball and Annie. It was getting harder and harder to think about schoolwork. It was warm outside and we felt the end of the school year getting closer. The baseball season would start soon and school would let out for summer. In the meantime there was the seventh grade dance to think about and we all thought about it a lot. I asked Annie to the dance and she agreed to go with me. Surely, it would be the best day of my life. How it could it have been anything else?

Chapter 2

The seventh-grade dance was held two weeks before the school year ended. I thought about it all the time, or at least it seemed so, in the days before. And I worried. I worried about my skin. I worried about my clothes. I worried about how I would dance. I worried and waited. Turns out those weren’t the things I needed to worry about.

My mother drove me to pick up Annie the night of the dance. I brought an orchid corsage for her to wear and was relieved when her mother pinned it on her. I could not have managed to pin it on her myself. She was beautiful, more beautiful than I could have imagined, in a long, shiny, blue dress trimmed in white. Her hair was pulled back and fastened with a pearl broach. In my mind, she might as well have been a princess.

We walked into the gym and Annie immediately went to speak to her girlfriends and I went over to huddle up with the boys. We stood there with our hands in our pockets, grinning at one another. So far, so good, we thought. But we knew what was next and we tried not to look worried about it. The music would start and we would have to dance with the girls. I don’t think any of us really knew how to dance. My mother had shown me a little two-step, though there would be no two-stepping. There would be rock ‘n’ roll played and we would have to move to the music in some dance-like fashion. I had seen kids dancing to rock ‘n’ roll songs on television, but I had never tried it. I had also seen what happened when a slow song was played, and I was even more nervous about that.

The music did start and the least shy boys among us walked out and joined hands with their dates. We headed out to the gym floor to give it a go. It was all pretty silly looking, but no one laughed, not even the adults who were there to chaperone. There was shuffling of feet, swinging of arms, and a slight movement of hips as Love Me Do by the Beatles came pouring out of the speakers. The guys smiled again at one another. We can pull this off, we thought. The girls smiled too and the spring of 1968 felt just right.

We danced to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, The Box Tops—all fast tunes. Then came Cherish by The Association. That meant it was time to get in close and see what all the fuss what about. Annie moved in against me and put her hands on my shoulders. I responded awkwardly by putting my hands on her sides. At least we were moving together. You might call it dancing; it was mostly a shuffle from side to side and all our friends were doing the same. We had stopped smiling and had begun to look more closely at our dates. It was obvious now that many of us hoped this would never end. That’s what I was hoping.

Of course it did end. For me it ended a little earlier than I expected. There was a break in the dance and the girls and boys huddled separately again. We watched the girls talk very excitedly from across the gym and imagined how happy they were with us. And they might have been happy to be with us, but it looked like they got a lot happier and excited when a group of eighth-grade boys showed up to the dance. The boys, six of them, were uninvited to the dance and, of course, totally unwelcomed by the seventh-grade boys. That did not seem to bother them one bit. They stopped and talked for a minute or two with the chaperones, then walked over to talk to the girls. Our girls, we thought.

I watched Annie closely and it looked like she brightened up even more than the other girls when she saw the eighth-grade boys. She looked to be the most excited of the bunch. Of course I was bothered, but I didn’t want to look bothered or worried. I turned away and pretended to focus on something else. How silly. It is one of the moments that I would look back on and wonder how it could have turned out better. Now I know that what happened that night was bound to happen. We didn’t know then that the girls in our class would never take us very seriously as romantic interests. They were moving on and leaving us behind, and we hadn’t quite caught on yet.

The music started up again and one of the boys asked Annie to dance. They danced and smiled. She really smiled. I felt forgotten. The music slowed and the boy held Annie very closely, way too closely for me. In those few minutes, I became sick and hopeless. Thankfully, and sadly, the chaperones finally intervened and the older boys left.

The girls huddled again, even closer, after they left. My friends and I stood silent and ashamed. I now wanted the dance to end. It seemed like a long time later before the girls took notice of us again. Annie came over and asked me to join her back on the dance floor. I didn’t want to go out there again, but I didn’t not want to go either. I wanted to disappear.

It was worse because Annie didn’t seem aware or concerned about what had happened. The dance would continue and she seemed to enjoy it, even though I was miserable. I figured that she was enjoying it even more because she was thinking about the boy she had danced with earlier. I imagined that she would call her friends the next day to talk about the older boys and their interest in them. The seventh grade boys would now have to wait for the sixth grade girls to get a little older. Maybe then we could get dates again.

Annie and I would never date again. What was worse, we would never share drinks and donut holes anymore. I know now that we had been best friends before the dance and that the closeness of the friendship had ended there. I also know that I went through a long period of time afterward thinking that girls and boys couldn’t be best friends. Of course, I was wrong. And that was the shame of being thirteen years old.

Chapter 3

We all suffered through the final few days of school. Summer was coming; baseball was coming. There was no use for any of us or the teachers to pretend that school could go on as it had. No one could focus. Homework ended and we spent our time on little projects designed to kill the time remaining in the school year.

Our English teacher asked us to write about our plans for the summer. Easy enough, I was going to play baseball. I was sure of that. Then she said list more than one thing. The other thing for me would be staying with my granddaddy. No one in the world welcomed me like he did and staying with him was a great joy. My grandmother died when I was ten and he had drawn me even closer to him since then. He would have little jobs on his farm for me and there was good fishing at the large pond on the place.

At my two favorites places, I wrote, a baseball field and my granddaddy’s farm, that is where I will spend this summer.

Momma drove me out to the country the day after school ended. I would get to spend a couple of days with Granddaddy, then come back in town for the start of baseball. His farm was located about seven miles out from town near a little crossroads community called Blind Hill. There was a small general store, a cotton gin, and a schoolhouse at the center of the community. Everyone knew everyone, of course, and there were few secrets among the people there. I was not a local, not exactly one of them. I was connected to Blind Hill through my mother, my grandparents, and an aunt and uncle who lived there. I was a town boy, but I did love the place.

Granddaddy was stooped over in his strawberry patch when we got there. He smiled big and waved, calling out to us right away as Momma drove down the lane to his house.

Come help me get some strawberries, he shouted to us.

I’ll be right there, she answered with an even bigger smile.

My mother cherished the time she could spend with her father and she knew he was out there in the strawberry patch that morning because of her. We would gather several quarts of berries for her to take back home and freeze for the winter. I would pick a little bit and eat a little bit. Nothing tasted better than a big, ripe, juicy strawberry from Granddaddy’s patch, nothing I could think of.

A short time before all the berries for the day were gathered, my mother headed into the house to fix dinner for the three of us. Granddaddy and I were left alone in the strawberry patch for a few minutes.

So, you’re going to miss school? he asked with a grin.

You know I won’t, I answered.

Not even sitting in class with that little girl you went to the dance with?

No sir. I won’t, I told him in a voice a little louder than was necessary.

Well, alright. I was glad he let that drop and changed the subject.

What do you think? Can the Cardinals do it again?

Granddaddy was a Cardinals fan. We were all Cardinals fans in West Tennessee. He had listened to Cardinal games on the radio from St. Louis for decades and I had picked up the habit from him. The Cardinals were on one of their best runs, winning the World Series in ’64 and again in ’67.

I believe they can, I told him and I did believe it. I believed they would be stronger than ever. That’s what any young Cardinal fan would say in 1968.

My mother called us in and we had