The hindered hand

by Sutton E. Griggs

Bud felt fully able to demonstrate his innocence, but the ruthless mob would hardly give him time to collect his evidence, he feared. Thus, though innocent, he decided that it was best for him to leave Almaville and remain in hiding for a time at least. Foresta asserted her determination to go with him it mattered not where he went.

Bud gave to Foresta the privilege of choosing their exile. For a number of years the condition of the Negroes in the cotton states farther South had been weighing heavily on her mind. She had read how that under the credit system, the country merchant, charging exorbitant prices for merchandise for which the crops stood as security, was causing the Negro farmer to work from year to year only to sink deeper and deeper into debt. She had read of the contract system under which ignorant Negroes, not knowing the contents of the papers signed, practically sold themselves into slavery, agreeing to work for a number of years for a mere pittance and further agreeing to be locked up in a stockade at night and to pay for the expense of a recapture in case they attempted to escape. She had heard much of the practice of peonage, how that planters and contractors would enter into collusion with magistrates and convict innocent Negroes of crimes in order that they might get Negro laborers by the paying of fines assessed on these trumped up charges. She had read accounts of investigations of the prison system of the South, showing that the various states made the earning of money by the prisoners a prime consideration, and detailing how brutal overseers were wont to maltreat convicts leased to them by the state. These things coupled with the absence of reformatories for youths were destined, Foresta felt assured, to produce a harvest of criminals. What to her mind added to the hopelessness of the plight of the Negroes was the fact that an emigration agent was required to pay such a heavy tax and stood in such a danger of bodily harm from the planters that nothing was being done toward pointing the inhabitants of the blighted regions to better lands.

Foresta concluded to choose Mississippi, a state in which conditions were in some respects so thoroughly forbidding, as their future home. Two things influenced her in making a choice, a desire to use her education for the amelioration of the ills of which she had heard so much and the thought that a land reputed to be so destitute of hope for the Negro would be searched last of all for Negro refugees. So the two had gone forth in the darkness and journeyed southward.

With money that Bud had saved they bought a small farm near Maulville, Mississippi. It was not long before Foresta's quiet influence was felt throughout that region. The whites who had been preying upon the more ignorant of the Negroes were not long in tracing this new influence to its source. It was agreed among them that the Fultons (for such was the name assumed by Bud and Foresta) were rather undesirable neighbors and a decision was reached to put them out of the way. The thousands of individual murders, and lynching by mobs, had so blunted the sensibility of these whites that they reached this decision without any qualms of conscience. Sidney Fletcher was agreed upon as the man to rid the settlement of Bud and Foresta.

On this particular afternoon, Foresta's hair was hanging down her back in girlish fashion. A small cap sat upon the top of her head, while a blue gingham apron protected her dress. She had finished the milking and was walking toward the house when Sidney Fletcher, the owner of a neighboring farm, approached her.

"Where has Tobe Stewart gone?" asked Fletcher, in a very gruff manner, inquiring about a Negro lad who had run away from him.

Foresta looked at him steadily without replying.

"You —— wench, you, you can't speak can you? You and that dad blasted man of yours have got the big head, anyway," said Fletcher, drawing his pistol and starting toward Foresta.

Foresta dropped her milk pail and ran into the house.

Fletcher took a seat on a bench in the yard and awaited the coming of Bud Harper, Foresta's husband, who was out hunting and was not due for some time yet.