Baby's First Ghost Story

A Dark Theme Arises...

Queenie and I seem to be trading muses, lately. Only she does it better.
Not for the faint of heart...

And it got me to remembering...

I have a memory, of me, lying in my crib, and whistling. It is just a short memory. Me lying there, in perfect comfort, looking at the pale green walls, and rubbing my fingers on my silky black and green blanket, and whistling. What my Dad always called 'idiot whistling' when he heard someone doing it, because that is what his Dad had called it.

Just lying there, whistling in and out, two tones, over and over, and it fascinated me, and my world was pale green and perfect. Then the two huge, blurry heads of my parents appear to my right, looming over the edge of my crib, arms reach down, and the memory ends.

I told that memory to my Mother a few years ago, and she paled, a bit, and looked a bit stunned. "I remember that, and you weren't even six months old...we found you there, just whistling in and out, and it was amazing because I don't think you even had any teeth yet...that blanket was your baby blanket Grandma made for you, she re-covered it not long after that..."

I remember everything. Well, nearly everything. There is a period when the abuse got most intense that is mercifully blank, and I can't recall the beheading of my fiance, thank God, but everything else is there, in one context or another, and I occasionally thumb through the pages to see who I was, and where I have been.

The first black person I ever met knocked me out, one of the very few times I have been knocked unconcious in my life, and the first.

I probably deserved it, having called him a nigger and all. Actually, I believe I had put it in the form of a question. "Are you a nigger?" I had asked him in innocent wonder, unaware of etymology, as yet.
I reached out my hand to touch his perfectly fascinating brown face, and I woke up some time later in a ditch, one eye gummed shut by my own blood.

I was five. I was at a SDA Church camp-meeting, wandering through what seems like miles of tents, as I recall, when I ran into this group of black kids, and I just stopped and goggled, never having seen one in person before. Oh, I'd seen Amos and Andy on television, and my Grandparents watched Lawrence Welk, and Mr Welk had a token black that he brought out to tap-dance the same dance every show. My Grandfather loved him, I knew, because he would laugh til he cried, and say, in his thick Nordic accent "Look et det foony nigger go!".

Thanks for the smack in the face, Gramps.

You just did not see black people, back in the day. I know that seems odd, now, because they are ubiquitous (whuh he call me?) but during the time I refer to above, I lived in LA and Glendale and Long Beach, all over Southern California, and you just did not see black people. The westward migration of blacks had yet to occur, and the ones that were there stayed segregated. You didn't see them in parks, at the zoo, at the beach, on television ads...the one that knocked me out was the first black person I ever saw, and that still amazes me.

Later, we moved up north, to the Napa Valley, to get away from the LA smog that kept me in constant eye infections. I must have been seven, or eight.

After church one Saturday, and the usual potluck, the adults settled down to chat, and turned us kids loose to get us out of their hair, with stern instructions that we'd best not get our church clothes messed up.

Unable to take a proper romp through the woods, we played explorer, instead, and set out up the street to peep and peer into houses and yards, and spy, but it wasn't long before the houses petered out and we were left staring up the hill at what appeared to be nothing but a narrow, barely two lane country road, with scrub oak forest bustling up to either edge of it.

One of us spotted something white, off through the trees, and as we got closer, it turned out to be a large, clapboardish barn-like structure. A building, not a house, and one that had obviously stood empty for a long, long time.

Up to this time in my life, I was about as innocent as a child can be. Our religion forbade television and movies, unless they were nature films or documentaries. There was no such thing as a VCR, or any other technology that was designed to give children access to violent imagery.

My playmates were as innocent as I, so, as we wandered in through an open door on the side, we really had no perspective with which to judge all of the strange fruit that hung before us.

The building was a big, open barn-like affair. At one end, planks had been stacked on wooden crates to make tables, and there was stuff on those tables, but what drew our eyes upward and kept us all staring, round-eyed and silent, were the bodies of all of the black people hanging from ropes and hooks from the rafters that went across the room, from one end to the other.

How many? I don't know. Lots. More than a dozen. Bleeding, cut, some with eyes open, some not. Tongues lolled. Nothing moved, and there were no flies. I did not find that fact odd, then, as I knew nothing of death, or it's proclivities.

We just stood there. And stared. And then someone whimpered, and the spell was broken. We ran screaming out of there and tore down the hill to tell our Dad's.

With no real vocabulary to describe what we saw, and in hysterics, it was somewhat difficult to communicate, but before long, the adults got the idea that something very bad had happened just up the hill, and I was one of the boys charged with leading them back there to show them.

Unafraid, now, because my Dad could do anything, and protect me from everything, I held his hand and pulled him along as a gaggle of us went back to the building.

Something was wrong. It appeared there were more trees, for one thing, but I recognized the building and pointed it out, just there, up the bank a ways, at the top of a drive I hadn't noticed before. Same building, though, had to be. I hadn't noticed this sign, either, or that window, there. The adults went up to look through it, and we kids reluctantly went up and stood by our Dad's, and looked in at rows of groceries, a counter with a cash register, and a low ceiling, none of which had been there just minutes before. It was a country store, closed, of course, this being Saturday, and the owners being Adventists.

Of course they found nothing. Nothing was there. We didn't get punished, because our terror had been palpable, but it was writ off and forgotten, and we kids never spoke of it again, to my knowledge.

Many years later, I would research, after hearing a tale told, and find that a group of freed slaves, travelling in a wagon train, had stopped for the night in what appeared to them to have been an abandoned barn. They were set upon and murdered by a gang of evil white men, who stole their supples, and left their bodies to rot.

One day, even more years later, and a man now, I stood in front of that self same barn, long ago converted into a store, and now, again, long abandoned.

My kids, in the car behind me, were oblivious, and acting up. My one day to become ex-wife snapped at them, and this normalcy gave me the whatever to walk up and peer through the window.

Dust and cobwebs reigned supreme, and most of the store trappings were gone. I saw stairs that led up into darkness, near the back, by where the door that we kids entered through long ago would have been, but now covered over by wall.

I wondered what I would find, if I turned the knob and found it open. If I pushed the door in, and walked across the undisturbed dust, and went up those stairs. I wondered if the shopkeeper, and maybe his family, had slept in rooms there, above their store. I wondered at the quality of their sleep...their dreams.

I wonder if the building ever again worked it's Dark Magic for anybody, taking them to a different time. A different place.

I wonder...


.