Blood Cries

by Louella Harper

copyright 1978

Prologue

Jackson City, Alabama stands on the front steps of the Piedmont plateau in a space between the pines formerly occupied by a Creek Indian village. Here, the Old South begins its slow collision with Appalachia. The hilly land is thick with timber, but the ground is fit for nothing, the locals say, but holding the world together, which it does by means of red clay packed between igneous rock and glittering with fragments of quartz.

At the start of the 20th century, a textile mill was established to satisfy the regional demand for undergarments. In 1920, the mill's founder, Langston Carmichael, along with his son Preston, invented the article of clothing now commonly referred to as the sweatshirt, which served as their entrance into the business of manufacturing sports apparel, a market Carmichael Mills would come to dominate. The Carmichael Corporation, as it is now known, boasts of factories across the South and as far away as Central America.

In 1922, the Alabama Power Company dammed the Muskogee river and formed Lake Robert along the southern border of McGillivray County. At the time, it was the largest manmade lake in the world. The presence of the lake immediately launched a real estate business to be dominated, naturally, by the Carmichaels. They took the best lakeside plots for themselves and their friends, erected fabulous houses upon them, and divvied out the rest while charging on a sliding scale.

A multitude of people have benefitted from their connections to the Carmichaels. They, in turn, have fortified the local economy, which remains as vibrant as any small-to-medium-sized town in the state. In addition to the textile mill and the cement plant, an array of small businesses and the timber industry provide dedicated individuals a means of acquiring capital.

None, however, have acquired more capital than the Carmichael family, and it is upon the steps of their domicile (figuratively speaking) that the social ladder rests. Their friends and family members inhabit the uppermost rungs. Passing them on the way down, one meets businessmen, judges, lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, firefighters, policeman, factory and mill workers, along with many others engaged in a hundred forms of meaningful employment or otherwise contributing to society as law-abiding citizens, including—and despite considerable obstacles—many black citizens, some of whom have climbed high enough to crack the professional ranks.

Despite some gains, blacks continue to lag behind whites economically, and most churches and some businesses remain segregated. The funeral business provides one of the most unpleasant examples of separate and unequal facilities persisting within the private sector.

If a white person dies, the friend or family member designated with making the necessary arrangements will pay a visit to the Robertson Family Funeral Home, directed by Somber Tom Robertson, who will ensure that their loved one will pass into the ethereal realm with the respect and dignity accorded to their race.

If a black person dies, the executor or next of kin will have to go see Ernie Smith.

Ernie is a squat, gruff, black man of indeterminate age and a reputation for unscrupulous business practices. He often stands on the ash-stained carpet of his funeral parlor, smoking his cigar, and peppering his conversations with bereaved family members with obscene language.

As a sideline, he runs The Colored People's Ambulance Service. The CPAS is a business developed to fill a gap in the market and to maximize profits generated by Ernie's back-up hearse. In the event of an emergency, a pink 1952 Cadillac Superior, affixed with rotating cherry beacons and a tornado siren, will arrive screaming onto the scene. Two hulking men dressed in the fashion of hospital orderlies will emerge from the vehicle ready to treat their patients with as much care or apathy as their temperament allows.

On the afternoon of April 7, 1957, Ernie and a young apprentice named Kevin Summers entered the home of 63-year-old Theodore Hall and emerged moments later carrying Hall on a pallet. After shoving him into the back of the hearse, Kevin climbed aboard and proceeded to connect him to the CPAS's first oxygen tank, which had been delivered to the funeral home earlier in the day.

Don’t worry, Kevin said, leaning over the man. We’ll have you at the hospital in no time.

Mr. Hall's eyes darted from side to side. The clear plastic mask he wore over his nose and mouth clouded with every tenuous breath.

The driver's side door slammed shut. Ernie adjusted the rearview mirror until his face loomed in the reflection. He chewed on the stub of a cigar. What's the diagnosis, Dr. Kevin?

Shit.

Come on, Summers. What do you think is wrong with the man? Ernie yanked down the gear shift and steered onto 11th Street.

I don't know. A heart attack? Kevin looked down at Mr. Hall My uncle had a heart attack three years ago. He came out of the hospital better than when he went in.

You know good and well that man died on the operating table, Ernie said. His eyes pivoted from the mirror to the road. Hey, Teddy, how old are you?

Mr. Hall's face turned from side to side. His eyes blinked rapidly.

What about it, Kevin? Ernie asked.

I don’t know. Late sixties maybe.

Might as well take the scenic route.

Kevin adjusted the oxygen mask. He’s only joking, sir.

I ain’t joking, motherfucker, and stop wasting all that oxygen. That man is breathing fine on his own.

Kevin shrugged and did as he was told. As he twisted his body to stow away the gear, Mr. Hall reached out with a trembling hand and raked the side of his shirt.

He's breathing funny, Kevin observed.

That's his problem, Ernie said. Now stop thinking and start using your head. We have to decide what to do with him.

I thought we were taking him to the hospital.

I mean we have to weigh out the values. How much money do you think we'll make for transporting Teddy to the hospital?

I don't know. Twenty dollars?

That's about right. We've got a five-dollar transport fee, five dollars for labor, two-fifty for gas and maintenance on the ambulance, the pallet fee...

We charge him for the pallet?

For using it. I ain't running no charity. I've got to clean the sheets, don't I?

You make me do that. Every month.

So, there's a fee for cleaning the sheets. Then, I've got to charge him for the oxygen.

He's not on oxygen. Kevin looked down at the patient. I think he's turning blue.

"Once he uses some, I've got to charge him for the full amount. That's just business. Now, it used to be in the old days we'd be lucky to get thirty-five dollars for the whole trip. We'd take a guy like Teddy here—spent his life cleaning toilets, ain't got a goddamn cent to his name—we'd fix him up, take him to the hospital, then after he'd get released, I'd have to spend all my spare time chasing him down for the money that was owed. I might even have to break his pinky finger or put a knife between his legs to show him the nature of my intent.

But then, two years ago, the federal government stepped in, offering to pay for the deadbeats, but they limited the payout to twenty dollars, so I'll still have to go to this joker's house to collect the other thirty-five.

If the government pays, how come you still collect from him? Kevin asked.

Just because the government pays don't mean he don't have to pay too. How else am I going to afford to pay you to clean those sheets?

I don't know.

Then, there's the funeral side of things. On a funeral, I can clear over a hundred dollars profit just on the casket. Then, you've got a service fee, the fee for renting the funeral parlor, the fee for flowers, the fee for the bulletins, the fee for cleaning up the parlor afterwards. All totaled, we clear almost four hundred dollars, and I don't have to cut nobody. It's a winning situation for everybody.

For everybody but Mr. Hall and anyone who loved him.

Then there is the insurance consideration. As it happens, Teddy's wife, Betty, believes in life insurance. I know because she came down to the parlor not two years ago to order a casket for her mother, and she got upset she couldn't afford the one she wanted. I recommended a policy agent, and she gave him a call.

How do you know that?

Because he told me.

Oh.

And he let me take out a policy on him as well.

On Mr. Hall? Kevin pointed to the man lying beside him.

Yeah, Man. He worked for me for a while, you know, cleaning toilets. All I had to do was sign his name to a little form. When he dies, his family will get some money and so will I.

Kevin considered this information How much will you get?

About seven thousand dollars.

Kevin looked at Mr. Hall in a new light. You mean if Mr. Hall dies, you get seven thousand dollars?

No, I'll get five. You'll get the other two.

Me? He looked down at Mr. Hall. But I'd be the one doing the dirty work. I should get half.

Half of what?

Have of all of it: the ambulance, the funeral, and the insurance.

You must be crazy. I got a business to run. I got expenses.

Half the insurance then.

I'll give you twenty-five hundred, and I'm over-paying.

Kevin considered the offer. Okay, he said and then looked down at the patient. You were a good man, Mr. Hall. He pulled the pillow out from under the man's head, letting it fall against the pallet. I hope you go to a better place.

The old man tried to cry out, but only a feeble moan escaped his lips before the pillow came down over his face and smothered him.

Later the same year, Ernie found himself in court facing charges of first-degree murder after an elderly former employee burned up in a house fire and Ernie was found to have taken out three insurance policies on the man. The case turned against him when the accomplice he paid to get the old man drunk confessed under police interrogation.

When told of the confession, Ernie shouted, That nigger is lying, but the jury believed him, and they believed the fire marshal who testified that a fast hot fire was a sure sign of arson. The judge handed down a life sentence.

Ernie went to prison not knowing the full force of his impact upon his community. His influence was felt beyond the suffering of his victims and their families. Greed, narcissism, and the willingness to do wrong by others persisted in Ernie's unwitting apprentices.

Together, these men form but a few links in a long line of weak and evil men that stretches back through the centuries, each generation another coil in the body of the Biblical serpent. With a tail rattling somewhere in the depths of human history, the head weaves forward through the present, testing the air with its flickering tongue. By the late 1960s, it was reared back over McGillivray County, poised to strike again.

Chrissy

2009

The first time I saw Melvin Little, he reminded me of a garden gnome. There was a split second when I thought he might actually be a gnome, or a small troll, instead of a little old man, sitting in his office, behind a cherry-top desk. He had a hump on his back that rose above his right shoulder and thick gray tufts of graying eyebrows with sprigs sticking out in all directions. There were sprigs sticking out of his nose and ears too. And he had these big jowls, one of which drooped down lower than the right. From a stroke maybe. 

In the dim lamp light, his eyes appeared to be closed, and his little pot belly rose and fell in a slow rhythm that made me think he might be asleep. I wondered if I should just keep standing there in his doorway, staring at him, or if I should clear my throat or something to let him know I was there. That's what I did; I cleared my throat. 

Nothing.

His little pot belly rose and fell.

It must be nice to have a belly like that, I thought, a built-in table to set cups on. And what was the deal with that hump? What causes a hump anyway? Is it contagious? What would happen if I touched it? Would it give me good luck? Or bad?

I never got the chance to test the idea because I took one step onto the Persian rug, and the floor creaked, and suddenly he was awake, and words went sputtering out of the side of his mouth in grunts and mumbles.

Normally I stand when a lady enters the room, he said, and then muttered something about his arthritis.

I couldn't see his legs behind his desk, but in my imagination, they were thin and floppy and just sort of hung from his body, like Muppets. I pictured someone carting him around the office in a wheel barrow. I'd love it if someone would ride me around like that.

He pointed a crooked finger toward a leather padded chair in front of his desk and invited me to take a seat.

How’s your mama? he asked in a voice that sounded like it had gone through a meat shredder.

Good, I said. She retired two years ago. 

She was a fine attorney. 

I nodded, not knowing what else to say, and then looked around the office. Behind his desk, the wall was filled with degrees and accolades, newspaper clippings highlighting his brief stint in the state legislature, and a framed quote which read, If you don’t know the truth, then make something up. 

This was my first trip back to my hometown in almost twenty years and it felt strange. Jackson City is one of those small southern towns that never seems to change, and yet, it felt different to me. I was eight when my father died, and my mother closed down her struggling law office and moved our dog Apples and me to Montgomery. She'd landed a job clerking for a judge on the Alabama Supreme Court. We moved from a big lake house in an all-white neighborhood to an apartment that rented mostly to families of foreign officers training at the Air War College. I'd always felt at home in Jackson City, but now I was in Montgomery and I felt like I was an alien. Twenty years later, I was back, and I still felt like an alien.

I'm weird, I know. People tell me that all the time, though I'm not sure what to do with that information.

Well, you came here to find out about the Reverend, so I guess we should get on with it, Melvin said. He twisted a finger through the thicket of hair growing out of one of his ears. I suppose you know who Louella Harper is.

I sure do. 

Every literate person in Alabama knew about Louella Harper. Her novel Murder of Innocence was required reading in schools throughout the state. A friendly librarian suggested the book to me when I was nine years old and still adjusting to my new life in Montgomery. I started reading it at school that day and within three pages I never wanted it to end.

I read between assignments, at the lunch table, while walking to and from classes, and on the bus-ride home. When I got to my house, I went straight to my room and read it underneath the covers until suppertime. I finished it that night and then started reading it again the next morning. I read it again and again and again, and at least once every year for the next twenty years. What can I say about Murder of Innocence? Within its pages I found the friends that eluded me in my real life and the moral clarity that doesn't seem to exist anywhere except within the boundaries of a fictional universe.

To Melvin Little all I said was, That book changed my life.

Uh huh, he said. And you know about Louella's involvement in this story?

That's the reason I'm here.

A few weeks earlier while poking around on the internet, I came across a website that claimed Louella Harper had spent a year in Jackson City, writing a book about a voodoo-practicing serial killer who hunted members of his own family. As I stared at the computer screen, memories from my childhood flooded my head. I remembered sitting at the supper table, with my mouth hanging open as my mother told me about the killer who marked the doors of his victims with chicken blood and kept human heads in jars in his basement. His shelves were said to be lined with homemade dolls resembling family members, neighbors, and acquaintances. If ever he chose to stab one of the dolls with a pin, or light it on fire, or cut off its head, then the doll's real-life counterpart would suffer a similar fate.

One man experienced such serious leg pains he had to be confined to a wheelchair. Another man nearly had his arm burned off in a grease fire. Other people turned up dead, only no one could explain what killed them. They were the ones you could read about in the newspaper. If you ever see the Reverend coming your way, my mother warned, you better cross the street. 

Do you believe it? I asked her. Do you believe the Reverend has voodoo powers? 

No, my mother said, smiling. But it makes for a good story.

Fast forward twenty years to find me living in Atlanta, sitting in bed beside my sleeping boyfriend, with the only light supplied by the laptop computer balanced on a pillow on my lap, and I'm staring at that website, remembering my childhood. That's when I realized how great the story would have been had it been written by Louella Harper.

There was only one problem: after Murder of Innocence, Louella Harper never published another book.

I called my mother. Did you know about this?

Know about what?

Louella Harper was going to write a book about Reverend Baxter.

Who is Reverend Baxter?

You're no help, I said and hung up on her.

To find out what happened, I searched the internet. I read a million blog entries. I read Louella's unauthorized biography, even though everyone knows it's three hundred pages of lies. By all accounts, Louella went to Jackson City in 1978 and stayed for almost a year. She did her research and she wrote at least one draft of a book about the Reverend. No one knew why it was never published.

One thing you should know about me: I am not the type of person who will just let something like this go. Once I get an idea in my head, I have to follow it through to its logical conclusion, or, I don't know, I might explode!

I was going into Nancy Drew mode. I was going to solve the mystery of the lost true crime manuscript.

But how?

It's not like I could just call up Louella Harper and say, Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God. I am such a huge fan of yours. I've read your book a million times. Would you mind signing it for me? Also, how come you never finished that book about the Reverend?

I could not do that because I did not have her number.

So, I called my mom again.

I remembered who Reverend Baxter was, she said. She was so proud of herself. He was Melvin Little's client. I bet he could tell you all about him. 

I found the website of Melvin's law office and then sent him an email asking if he'd be willing to talk to me. The next day, I received a reply.

I'd be happy to talk to you about the Reverend. Give my secretary a call, and we'll set up a time. 

The rest, as they say, is history. And now I was about to hear the whole story of the Reverend, the murders, and what happened to Louella Harper's lost manuscript.

Before you start, I said, Could you do me a favor?

Melvin's eyes opened a millionth of a millimeter wider, which I took to be a sign I should continue. Before all the other stuff, I was wondering if you could skip ahead and tell me what happened to Louella's book?

I should probably mention, I am not a huge fan of mysteries, surprises, or suspense. I prefer knowing everything right up front.

I know what you're thinking, Melvin said, but I promise you that book will never see the light of day. She probably burned the damned manuscript. If you don't write this thing, then no one will.

Um, I think there might have been a misunderstanding, I said. I'm not planning to write a book. I just want to know what happened to hers.

Un huh, Melvin said in a way that suggested he did not believe me. Well, I'll tell you what I know, and you can do with that information what you will. 

I found this acceptable, and I scrambled through my hand bag for the digital recorder I'd purchased on the way out of Atlanta. I placed it on the desk in front of him and pressed record.

Melvin cleared some of the phlegm out of his throat and began to tell his story. Louella always said I was going to be the hero of her book. It would have been a good book too. One of the all-time greats... 

He talked for a long time, at least two hours, almost entirely about himself, while I did my best not to think about rubbing his hump. No matter how much I might have wanted it to, it wasn't going to grant me any free wishes.

From Chrissy's Research Journal

Oh my God! I can't believe I'm doing this! I am literally following in the footsteps of Louella Harper!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Get it together, girl. Act like a professional.

Alright. Alright. I've got this.

Interview with Melvin Little Transcribed from a recording taken July 2, 2009

Interviewer

What else can you tell me about Louella Harper?

Melvin

In the public consciousness, Louella Harper has been elevated to sainthood. Murder of Innocence was so great, people decided the author must