The Hanged Man (a folk tale for Black History Month)

Nobody ever really knew who the hanged man was. Didn't really matter. It was a muggy Mississippi night...a night too uncomfortable to be declared sultry by even the most optimistic of souls...and sixteen men in chlorine-white spirit robes were bored and drunk and malicious and they just needed something to do.

The hanged man wasn't from around those parts. He was a drifter...maybe an agitator bent on revolution and miscegenation. That was reason enough. Nobody could say for sure why the hanged man was put to death under the pale Mississippi moon.

But that didn't really matter either.

Maybe he was too smart. Or too dumb. Or too uppity. Or too black. Hell, he was breathing...and that was probably reason enough.

Young Black Joe dancing a jig with the Reaper in the thick Mississippi air...Billie Holiday understood all too well...strange fruit indeed.

Sixteen men doing ghost murders... alcohol-addled avengers in neatly-pressed Halloween costumes howling through the night, fighting their holy war to make things right again...giving glory to their vengeful white god with offerings of fire on the cross, blood in the night, and strange fruit on the trees.

Somebody cut the hanged man down when he began to stink...and it being a humid Mississippi summer that didn't take long at all. Nobody claimed him (of course) and so they dug a hole on the far side of the graveyard...reserved for coloreds only...a hop, skip, and a jump from the hanging tree...also reserved for coloreds only...and they put the hanged man in it. And they forgot him.

Or at least they tried to.

There are those...mostly folks old enough and black enough and stubborn enough to still be Negroes...who swear that the hanged man didn't linger long in that anonymous hole. And he certainly didn't stay forgotten. Not by the sixteen men who had set that particular Mississippi night ablaze with their righteous fury and drunken retribution... spooking the spooks and keeping them from wanting to step above their station (and having a high old time in the process.)

Years passed and, one by one, the sixteen men each met the hanged man one more time...always on a Mississippi night too uncomfortable to be declared sultry by even the most optimistic of souls...and they were forever lost to his patient, terrible vengeance.

Some died screaming in never fully explained accidents...horses and drivers of cars somehow spooked into bloody crashes; some died of seemingly natural causes... hearts and blood vessels giving way explosively and painfully with no prior warning, no prior history of life threatening weaknesses in their bodies.

And always...always...they died within shouting distance of the infamous hanging tree.

One of the sixteen didn't die right away after meeting the hanged man, instead he spent the last twenty years of his life as a human vegetable...having been found wandering in a ragged circle round the hanging tree...struck mute from that day forth, crying cold silent tears, the color forever drained from his face (white as a...)

One by one...according to the story the old Negroes told (a story almost always punctuated at some point in the telling with a rueful, respectful, unforgiving laugh)...sixteen midnight riders, fueled by homemade whiskey and home-grown hatred...met the hanged man one more time and found Jesus a heartbeat too late to save their souls.

Or at least, so the story goes...