Mend the Link - A Screened Word Story for Juneteenth

It was around 1:30 in the morning, and this was my chance to make the most of it before my family blockaded me again, starting with a quick click on the lock. Then, very carefully, I kept my hands firmly on the knob as I slowly held it towards me until I heard a soft click in the door. Then, with the utmost care, I tiptoed across the grassy lawn in the middle of the humid, moonlit night until I noticed nothing but a pair of eyes staring straight at me. It gave me a fright, but thankfully, it was my best friend – and girlfriend – Liza Russell, standing nearby. “Come here, Ethan. Follow me,” she told me.

With the utmost precision, I lunged myself towards her while she grabbed my arm and guided me carefully through her lawn. Only she started to slowly pull me past her house, until she led me towards a long trail of clothes hanging from her window by her backyard.

“This might be the best way we can make it in, Ethan”, Liza said. “I’ll go first, and then I’ll help you up.”

“Very funny. I’ve climbed the rope plenty of times in school before. I’m sure this is nothing I can’t climb as long as it’s tight enough.”

Then, she quickly and quietly scurried across the grass, and I gazed upon that dark yet agile, feline-looking figure with the swamps standing in the distance as she pulled herself upwards on the long chain until she was in her bedroom window. I found myself walking closer to that chain as she climbed upwards. Once she was inside, I felt myself leap upwards and grabbed the chain with ease. I felt a tightness around the chain, just as I hoped to feel. And as soon as I felt my grip upon the soft cloth, I knew that I had to keep going if I was to follow her lead. Step by step, I scooted myself upwards closer and closer until I finally got my fist brushing up against the side of the bedroom windowsill. As soon as I felt that brush, what I felt next was Liza’s hands grabbing me, who was standing in front of me from inside. She meant to pull me in as quickly but also as quietly as possible, so as not to disturb anyone.

As soon as I pulled myself in, too, I lost my balance and felt the upper part of my neck land against the floor. I heard clatters all over her room, to which she shushed me in response.

“Quiet, Ethan,” she whispered loudly. “Do you wanna wake the whole family up?” I shook my head down. When I stood up, I saw her peeking out through the side of her bedroom door. She stood there for about a moment before she closed the door and came up to me. “I didn’t hear any noises from beyond from the halls. We should be good. This way.”

Then, I felt her hand on mine as she guided me through the halls shrouded in pitch black. I saw almost nothing except for some blue rays of moonlight that pierced their way through the darkness and into the house.

I remembered her telling me that she had known that it was going to be a full moon that night and recommended that we not use our flashlights until we reached our destination. At the end of the hall, to our left, was a door that went upstairs into the attic. We both walked in when Liza carefully closed the door behind me.

“Okay, now we can use our flashlights,” she whispered. Once our fingers felt and pushed the nozzle on our flashlights, two strong beams of light flashed down upon the dusty stairs, and we continued to walk upstairs slowly and quietly until we finally saw a door at the topmost end of the flight of stairs.

“My parents always told me and my brothers stories about how this is the most forbidden part of the house. It was forbidden because of some ties it may have between your family and mine. Personally, I think they were just exaggerating. Thankfully, however, I was looking around in my parents’ bedroom one day, and wouldn’t you know it, I found this key lying in one of their drawers. The only thing I remember them saying about this key is that it does not go into any other doors in the house. The truth is, I already tried this key in all the doors throughout the house, and yes, none of them fit. So I wonder, would this key go into this one?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“It’s a hunch,” she responded, “but I’m willing to get to the bottom of it no matter what.”

So, after a moment’s hesitation, the key slowly slugged its way in through the open slot in the door. After a quick clockwise turn, we heard a metallic clunk in the door. Thank God, the door just unlocked.

Liza seemed worried, and I was too. Thankfully, however, I didn’t hear any noises coming from downstairs. The coast was clear, it seemed.

I slowly pushed the door open, and a wave of dust and uncleaned carpentries brushed their way past me and Liza. They trickled down our throats, but for all our coughs, they still did not cause a stir. We quietly tiptoed our way into the attic with flashlights on hand and looked around until we saw what we were looking for. So far, we found nothing at first glance but bins upon bins of photos, family albums, and who knew what else that I’d have wagered used to belong to Liza’s parents and maybe her grandparents before her.

“How about this, Ethan?” I heard her whisper. “Maybe if we’re quiet enough, we can dig through some of these bins until we find what I was wanting to look for. I hope it’s in here. But judging from what I heard my parents say, I suspect that it couldn’t be hiding anywhere but here.” For the next half hour, I carefully and quietly took down each bin and made sure to carefully press it on the floor so it would not cause a noise or a creak. She and I had been digging around almost without end, opening each bin, peeking inside each one, and catching ourselves up with Liza’s family history.

Finally, after I took down the last bin, I noticed what looked like some sort of a chest, one that had been buried underneath all the other bins and was made of brown leather that began to wear off.

I swear, of all the things Liza and I had seen in this whole attic, this chest looked like the oldest. “Hey,” I whispered. “Is this what we are looking for?” I heard a few steps coming up behind me, followed by some very quiet screams of glee.

“Yes, Ethan. This is it. This is exactly what I was hoping we’d find!”

So it had not been in vain after all. I was happy for her. After having to climb our way over the bins we helped take down together, we huddled down together and got a closer look at the chest. To our surprise, this did not have a lock on it. I would have been a monkey’s uncle if we could have opened the chest and taken a look inside lickety-split.

“If we’re going to open this chest, let’s at least do it together,” I told Liza. “I agree,” she said with a nod.

So, pressing our hands together, we grabbed the latch. And with a heavy heart, we counted down to three before finally lifting up the lid. Coming into our faces was a much worse stench than what hit us when we entered the attic.

Whatever was in here must have been really old. Yet, strangely enough, the oldness that we noticed from here was what caught our interest the most. What we saw first from within that chest were neatly organized documents and folders. We both touched one of the documents, and the paper seemed much harder yet more faint than the paper we normally had to carry around at home or in school. From there, she and I continued to dig deeper and deeper and look at all of the family records from Liza’s side of the family.

But at the bottommost part of the chest, I noticed a folder that caught my eye. It was a cardboard folder colored red and not like everything else. In handwriting, it said ‘slave ownership’. As soon as I noticed that, my hand quickly went towards the folder as my fingertips slid along the leather, throughout the roughness of the rusty cardboard. So, with the tightest grip, but the softest hold, I slowly but surely used my other hand to lift up the other documents and give it enough room to slide on out. “Maybe this will help,” I told Liza.

Recognizing it, she quickly grabbed the folder from me, opened it up, and was about to flip some pages before she looked transfixed on something from the folder. As she dug into the folder, I noticed a slow but evident change in her mood. What started off as excitement and a satisfied sense of closure slowly melted away to reveal moments of shock and confusion. I’ve noticed this gradual change in her expressions the further she dug deep into the folder and records. Then, when I least expected it, the folder was slammed shut.

“I can’t do this,” she whispered. “It’s too much. I don’t know if I wanna look at this anymore.”

“May I see?” …was what I heard come out of my mouth. She glanced towards me, and then she turned away a little bit, fearful of what she had might have discovered in the folder. But she did extend her arm out to me with the folder. As soon as it ended up in my hands, I peeked inside the folder for the documents she saw, and I noticed that the documents looked all too familiar. William McIntyre was declared an owner, and the slave that he purchased was named James Russell.

“Was James your…?”

“My great-great grandfather,” Liza interrupted. In between gasps, she continued, “All this time, my parents all convinced me that he was a proud black guy who owned his own land here in the South as proud can be, even before the Civil War. Why did they keep this from me?”

I wondered the same thing. William McIntyre was the name of my great-great grandfather also, and the documents here confirmed, whether we wanted them to or not, that our ancestors were no more than each other’s master and property. I felt numb for a minute. I couldn’t have believed that he did that, that my parents refused to tell me about it too. All they ever told me about him was that they never remembered our ancestry any farther back than the early twentieth century. But I caught onto it being a façade that wore off soon enough.

My ancestors immigrated here as Americans in the early nineteenth century, and soon made the move down here to Alabama. Did my parents really not remember this, or did they not want to remember it?

Once I snapped out of it, of course, my focus shifted back to Liza. Underneath her faint voice, I could hear her crying. Slowly, I slipped the folder back into the chest. Wherever it landed, it didn’t matter to me. I slunk my way past her defenses and towards her as my hand settled upon her shoulder. She looked up to me, with streams of tears on her cheeks.

“I know this must have been so hard on you, on both of us, maybe,” I said to her while my fingers were stroking her ebony hair. “But no matter what happens, I will always love you.”

Then, my arms slowly crawled their way around her shoulders and upon her back as I felt her hands slink around my body. She sounded slightly comforted in my embrace, and with a slow confidence, her crying began to stop.