Trafford Publishing: A Mulberry Summer

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A Mulberry Summer

by Reed Blakeney

156 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #01-0494; ISBN 1-55369-092-3; US$19.00, C$21.99, EUR15.50, £11.00

World War II has ended but racial prejudice has not. This fictionalized version of an horrific hate crime takes place in the Deep South -- Mulberry, Georgia, U.S.A.

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about the book      about the author      sample chapter      catalogue info

About the Book

On July 25, 1946, four black citizens, two male and two female, were executed by a mob at Moore's Ford Bridge over the Appalachee river in Walton County, Georgia. Twenty to 25 white men armed with pistols, rifles, shotguns and even a machine gun shot them hundreds of times in broad daylight.
Incredibly, no one was ever charged with the murders. "The best people in town won't talk," said then Major William E. Spence, of the Georgia State Patrol. The murders were never solved, but the current Governor of Georgia has ordered a new investigation.
That tragedy really happened.
A Mulberry Summer did not. A series of articles about the actual killings appeared in the Walton Tribune published in Monroe, Georgia, and they became the inspiration for this tale. The question was how and why such a senseless and brutal incident could ever have occurred. There were no factual answers then, and there are none in this story. There never was a Birdie Lee Johnson, or a Mattie Lou Herndon, or a Judge Spencer Tolliver, or a Billy James Bradley, but you may have known people like them.

About the Author

James Reed Blakeney was born in rural Pickens County, Alabama and grew up during the bleak days of the Great Depression. As a 13-year-old boy, he watched his older brothers leave for Europe to take their places in the ranks of the Allied Forces during World War Two. He came of age in the aftermath of that conflict.
He has been active in the fields of education and industry. He is a published poet and is president of a medical gas and equipment company. He is very much a product of the times and events depicted in A Mulberry Summer.

Sample Chapter

Chapter 30
    The Atlanta terminal was crowded, even on a Sunday morning. Billy James hailed a cab and asked the driver to give him a tour of Peachtree Street.
    "Which one?"
    "Well, start with the main one, and circle around some."
    The cabbie grinned and pulled into traffic. Billy could not believe the changes in a city that he had thought he remembered. The IBM building, the High Museum, Peachtree Center and all the grand skyscrapers that had evolved since he last saw the city left him totally bewildered.
    They drove for an hour up one street and down another and out to Turner Field and over to the Atlanta Stadium and finally Billy James had the cab pull into a car rental facility.
    "You did a good job for me," he told the cabbie.
    "Well...put your money where your mouth is," the cab driver drawled, but his face was friendly and he grinned again when he said it. Billy nodded and paid the fare.
    The expressways too, were a complete marvel. He got a map at the rental agency and they directed him to I-20 for his trip eastward from the city. He came to I-285 and was tempted to just drive around the complete circle and he decided to put that on a list of possible things to do.
    He watched the progress from the window. Golf courses and apartments and condominium complexes had replaced the cotton fields he remembered on either side of old 278 to Atlanta. Off to the right of the expressway, he saw the beginnings of a great new mall in the Lithonia area and the building never stopped between that point and the charming old city of Covington.
    He got off at the Covington exit and drove into the old part of town that he remembered so well. He saw the refurbished courthouse, the delightful old trees on the square that were now so much larger. They furnished an umbrella of branches that reached across all four corners of the square. He drove around the block and alongside the First Presbyterian Church where Peter Marshall used to preach. He added a return visit to that new list he was making.

    It had been more than fifty years, but Billy James Bradley still remembered the hollyhocks. They had grown on either side of the dirt drive that led from the highway to Uncle Joe's house. They were tall and straight and the slender stalks were full of buds. They came flashing back into his memory as if there had been no interruption of half a century.
    He remembered the clustered petals, all pink and white in the sunlight. He had ridden alongside Uncle Joe in the old pickup truck with the dog in his lap, and he had watched the hollyhocks go by the window. Now he heard Uncle Joe's voice, just as plain as on that morning so long ago, "You know you can't never come back here no more, don't you, Billy James? You hear me boy? Not EVER-" and Uncle Joe's hand had tightened like a steel vise on his shoulder. Billy James had nodded his head, and because the vise got tighter, he had gasped a "yes sir."
    He turned off the Interstate and headed north up Georgia Highway 11. He traveled along the paved road with the railroad on the left side and the pastures on the right. He remembered the road was graveled then, and there were rows and rows of cotton plants on either side of the road.
    He saw a sign advertising the Blue Willow Inn, and it made him think of Lewis Grizzard. Before he died, Lewis wrote a folksy column in the Atlanta Journal and other papers around the country, and he appeared on Johnny Carson's show and got a lot of publicity for his humor. He was sort of a latter-day version of Will Rogers.
    Anyway, Lewis liked to eat at the Blue Willow Inn. He liked to eat anywhere that quality food was served, and he wrote about the best places in his newspaper column. Billy James knew that Lewis Grizzard saw life differently than some folks, and maybe that was because he sensed that he didn't have as much time as other folks.
    Billy James hadn't looked at this road in a long time. He saw the city limit sign for Social Circle. The sign said the town was founded in 1832. He remembered his uncle telling him the village had straddled the line between the Cherokee and Creek Indian nations.
    He drove over the railroad bridge and looked off down to the right toward the cotton mill, only the mill wasn't there any more. There were brick corners sticking up from the burned out remains, and scattered piles of broken brick still covered the grounds. The railway station was beyond the burned out mill and was no longer handling passengers. Billy could see the lines of freight cars and the maintenance trucks for CSX on the siding.
    The town wasn't dying, though. He saw groups of people on both sides of the street. There were black folks talking to white folks, and he saw them laughing and even hugging like they were friends, and he thought how much things had changed in that respect.
    The Blue Willow Inn was just up the street on the right. He pulled into the parking lot behind the restaurant. As he walked past the gift shop and up the steps to the front walk, a young lady in a Scarlett O'Hara costume greeted him at the front porch. He gave his name to the hostess in the hallway and went back outside to the porch where the young lady offered him free lemonade and a vacant rocker to pass the time until his table was ready. Billy James sipped on the lemonade and rocked on the porch for about twenty minutes before the hostess touched him on the arm, and then he went inside and followed her to a table.
    He got his empty place and quickly found there was no way he could put all the selections on a single plate. He decided to give priority to roast beef, country ham, biscuits, green beans, mashed potatoes, and coleslaw, then come back later for a different course.
    It was during the middle of the second helping that he saw somebody that he didn't expect to see ever again, and it made the food stick in his throat. He put his fork down and raised his napkin to his face, and was surprised to find it cold and perspiring.
    Billy James could tell the man was watching him although he knew that couldn't be possible. The man hadn't seen him since he became a grown man, and he had been a grown man for a long, long time.
    But, there could be no doubt of it. The man was watching him. He got up from his chair. Billy thought he must be at least 95 years old now, but his eyes were as bright and hard as a bobcat's and an odd color of pale green. His skin was stretched over his hawksbill nose and was shiny like the bottom of an old leather chair. The man steadied himself with a cane and began walking between the rows of tables, nodding and smiling here and there to acquaintances. It looked as if the smile was just an incision in his face that revealed nothing of the teeth behind it, and perhaps there were no teeth anyway. The old man was Judge Spencer Vinings Tolliver, unbelievably, still alive.
    He was even now with Billy James' table, and he paused long enough to whisper, "Why'd you come back?"
    He didn't give time for an answer, even if Billy had come up with one, but went on down the rows and out the big French doors and sat down in one of the vacant rockers.
    Billy James saw the man take a glass of lemonade from Miss Scarlett, and he knew he would have to face him. He wished he hadn't turned off the expressway, but he had, and now old Judge Tolliver was out there waiting on the porch. He had to be older even than 95, and he should have been dead long ago, but he wasn't. He was just shriveled up more and meaner looking than the last time he saw him. Billy pushed his plate away and got up from the table and headed out to the porch. He took a chair next to the old man, and after they sat there for a while, the old man began to rock back and forth very slowly.
    "Oh, where have you been, Billy boy, Billy boy, oh where have you been, charmin' Billy?" The old man recited the child's song in a raspy whisper sound, and then he rocked some more. "When your uncle died, and you didn't come to the funeral, I decided that you had pretty good sense after all," the old man said.
    "I was in Viet Nam when my uncle died," Billy replied.
    "I don't care why you came back," he said finally. "It's too late to bother me, and it won't help anybody or anything for you to talk about what happened. What good can it do to dig up the past?"
    "I don't know what I had in mind," Billy said. "I didn't expect to see you, that's for sure."
    "I guess you didn't," the old man cackled, "I guess you didn't...but here I am anyway...for what good it does anybody. I guess the good Lord left me for a purpose, but I haven't figured out why."
    "Maybe he wanted you to say you're sorry," Billy James said. "Even George Corley Wallace said he was sorry."
    "Not 'til hell freezes over," the old man said.
    "You might ought to be thinking about hell," Billy James said.
    "Well, that was a figure of speech. I don't think much about hell because I never spent much time worrying about fantasy. I think about reality, the here and now of things, and I'll bet you're wondering how I recognized you back there in the restaurant."
    "It did puzzle me some," Billy James said.
    "The price of fame," the judge replied. "Saw your picture in one of the papers right after you came home from Viet Nam. Lieutenant Billy James Bradley returns home to Augusta, it said. Former Georgia football star and all that. I kept all your newspaper clippings from the Georgia days."
    "I guess you spent a lot of time wondering just when I might expose you," Billy James said.
    "Nah, I didn't worry too much. I believe in family ties, and I knew you weren't likely to expose your Uncle Joe Bradley or embarrass the family that way. As I say, what good would it do?'
    "I guess I just find it hard to believe that 15 or 20 men could kill four other human beings and nobody even got arrested or indicted."
    "It was a different time, Billy James. You have to understand that. It was a different time."

Catalogue Information