Never Too Late Read online

  © 2007 by Michael Phillips

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-1134-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

  Cover photography by Steve Gardner

  Cover design by The Design Works Group

  To those young people I have been privileged

  to teach and coach in track and cross country

  through the years, from Winship Junior High to

  Eureka and Fortuna High Schools. You have

  enriched my life in many ways, and I thank you

  for the pleasant memories of wonderful

  experiences and friendships.

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  1. Fire

  2. A World Long Before the War

  3. Strange New Home

  4. Friends

  5. One-Eyed Jack

  6. A Cup of Sugar and Two Sweet Biscuits

  7. Minuet

  8. Storm and Fire

  9. A New Dream

  10. Flight

  11. Fugitives

  12. Welcome Destination

  13. Waystation

  14. New Surroundings

  15. Sweet Biscuits and What Became of Them

  16. More Biscuits and a New Job

  17. New Life

  18. Terror

  19. Unexpected Reunion

  20. A Promise Fulfilled

  21. The New House

  22. Extra Helper

  23. Catching Supper

  24. Rob’s Letter

  25. A Scare

  26. Recovery

  27. A Bookcase

  28. Talk About the Past

  29. Mrs. Hammond

  30. Shopkeeper Katie

  31. A Visit

  32. Hard Talk

  33. A Coat of All Sizes and Shapes

  34. Two Hearts

  35. Another Letter

  36. Fateful Day

  37. Aftermath

  38. Three Conversations

  39. Henry and Josepha

  40. Parting

  41. Endings

  Epilogue

  Author Biography

  Other Books by Author

  PROLOGUE

  It’s mighty strange how you think you know folks so well, when you really don’t know them as well as you thought.

  Everybody’s got more thoughts and feelings going on inside than you realize. People have pasts too, whole lives you don’t know about, and might never find out about either if you don’t take the time to try.

  I reckon that’s what makes getting to know people so interesting, almost an adventure you might say. The stories people have to tell—even just about themselves and what has happened to them and where they’ve been and what they’ve seen and what they’ve learned—are some of the most interesting things there are in life. Maybe that’s why they say that everyone’s life is interesting enough to write a book about if you just knew how to go about it.

  That’s probably why I’ve enjoyed telling stories ever since I started spinning yarns for my kid brother Samuel. Back then, when we were slaves, I just made them up to pass the time. Or, I’d retell the old tales I’d heard around the fire—the ones about Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox were my favorites. But later as I grew, I discovered that the best stories of all were about people—true stories about what happened to them. Maybe they’re not really “stories,” then . . . I’m not exactly sure about that.

  But they’re still fascinating, and I still enjoy telling them just the same.

  FIRE

  1

  HENRY PATTERSON WAS A MAN WHO HAD NO enemies. At least that’s what people thought.

  Why danger would stalk such a peace-loving soul was a mystery no one in Greens Crossing ever quite understood except those involved. And they were not the kind of men who talked.

  The previous day had not been unusual. There were a couple visits from men Henry did not recognize asking for the owner of the livery stable. When told that he was not there, they had looked about in an odd sort of way before riding off. Henry thought little of it at the time. Yet the peculiar exchanges played on his mind long afterward, and kept him from sleeping soundly that night.

  He was awake as usual at daybreak the next morning. Most of the rest of the Rosewood family were talking around the breakfast table about going into town that day too. But as Henry and his son Jeremiah both had to be at their jobs early, they were the first to ride away from the plantation house about half past seven.

  The secret men’s vigilante club known as the Ku Klux Klan had spread rapidly throughout the South after the War Between the States, dedicated to the preservation of white supremacy and Southern tradition. Its members viewed it as their sacred duty as loyal Southerners to exact retribution on whites who embraced the new order . . . and on blacks who did not know their place.

  The Klan was not the only such vigilante group that roved the counties of the South, tormenting and killing what they called “uppity niggers.” But it was the most powerful and the most feared. The very thought of the silent night riders—clad in white sheets and hoods—awoke dread and terror.

  The Klan’s weapons of choice were three: the gun, the torch, and the rope.

  In the North Carolina communities of Greens Crossing and Oakwood, some twenty miles from Charlotte, a number of prominent men had been initiated into the mysteries of the Klan. Although there had been one attempted hanging, their mischief in the area had thus far produced no deaths. That seemed, however, about to change.

  On this particular day in the fall of the year 1869, the local KKK had decided to modify their tactics. They would strike in broad daylight and in plain sight, in order to teach a lesson none in the community would forget. Their target was a black man every one of them had known for years. If the truth were known, none had any personal quarrel with Henry Patterson. He knew his place, spoke respectfully, and never gave any trouble. But he was also involved with people who didn’t seem to know the difference between blacks and whites.

  It was what he represented. He had been the first free black to settle in the region before the war. Now with unsettling changes taking place everywhere, it almost seemed as if he had been the start of it all. The fact that he now lived out at the Daniels place made killing him the easiest way to get back at the whole pack of them—whites and blacks together.

  And so as the fifteen or more white-robed riders galloped toward Greens Crossing a little before noon, the burning torches in their hands were not to light their way, as would have been the case had the raid come in the middle of the night.

  They intended to put the fire to another use.

  Mary Ann, Templeton, and Ward Daniels, Kathleen Clairborne, and Josepha Black had all arrived in Greens Crossing sometime after eleven o’clock, and were now about their own business. The two Daniels brothers had gone to the bank. Josepha was in Mrs. Hammond’s general st
ore picking up Rosewood’s mail and a few supplies. Mayme and Katie had gone to the shoe and boot shop.

  The thundering approach of the riders, coming from the far end of Greens Crossing where the livery sat as the last building in town, did not at first attract the attention of any of the townspeople.

  Inside the livery, the moment Henry heard the angry shouts, he knew they were meant for him. He started to walk outside. Several gunshots at his feet stopped him in his tracks.

  “Get back inside, Patterson,” called one of the hooded riders, “or you’ll be a dead man!”

  Several more shots followed rapidly to enforce the threat.

  The livery was quickly surrounded by the horsemen. Escape on foot would be impossible. The first torch landed on the roof before the echo of the last shot had died away. It was followed by over a dozen more lighting the wall. Within seconds, the small building was encircled in a ring of fire.

  Henry heard the crackle of flames and smelled the smoke the instant the first torch landed. He ran to the stables to free the three or four horses inside. Their wide nostrils had also smelled the smoke and they had begun to whinny and rear in growing fright.

  With effort, Henry got them loose, then unlatched the rear door and kicked it wide. A blast of heat from five-foot flames sent him staggering backward. He shouted and kicked and whipped at the terrified horses, until at last, shrieking in panic and confusion, they bolted through the smoke and flame to safety.

  “Look out!” cried several of the riders, hurriedly getting their own mounts out of the way.

  “Don’t let him through!” shouted another. “Keep the circle tight . . . shoot him if he tries to make a break for it!”

  The instant the horses from inside stampeded past them, they closed ranks, guarding every inch of the perimeter so that no human could follow the horses and escape.

  The explosions of gunfire, followed so quickly by a plume of smoke rising from the livery—a tinderbox of straw and dried wood—brought everyone running out of stores and homes looking about to find the cause of the commotion. Mr. Watson was one of the first men into the street. Glancing toward the livery, he shouted for the fire brigade. Within seconds a dozen men were running toward the scene.

  In the bank, someone shouted, “The livery’s on fire!”

  At Watson’s mill, Jeremiah Patterson had been working inside. He too heard the shouts and was only seconds after his boss into the street. Ward and Templeton ran up to join him from the direction of the bank. The instant he saw where the smoke was coming from, Jeremiah sprinted ahead of them toward the livery.

  People were running and shouting from everywhere now.

  Inside the burning building, the dense, suffocating smoke was so thick that Henry could see nothing. All was blackness about him. He grabbed a bucket half full of water from near the anvil and doused it over his head and shirt, then dropped to the floor, avoiding the smoke and trying to breathe the little air coming through what openings it could find beneath the flames. Any possible route of escape was gone.

  Already flames from the front of the livery rose crackling into the sky. The building was too far gone for the makeshift fire brigade to hope to accomplish anything. Though men were shouting and running from all corners of town, one look at the place and they knew it was too late. Whatever they might have tried to do otherwise, most slowed down as they drew closer, intimidated at the sight of a circle of hooded men surrounding the blaze. No livery stable was worth getting killed for by that crowd—they would probably be crazy enough to start shooting if someone made a move to help. All they could attempt to do now was keep the fire from spreading.

  As more and more people reached the scene, no one held out much hope that life would be found inside once the flames began to subside.

  I don’t suppose Negroes in the United States of America would ever be able to think of themselves apart from slavery.

  It was slavery even more than the color of our skin that defined who we were—as individuals and as a race. Some of us were lighter (like me, because I was half white). Some were darker. But all of us who had been bought and sold before the War Between the States had been slaves together, whatever the shade of our skin.

  Of course there were lots of free blacks in the United States, mostly in the North. There were free blacks like Henry in the South too. Some of them had had kind white owners who had freed them on their own. Others had managed to buy their freedom. And then some, like Henry—though I doubt there were too many like him—who had won their freedom on a bet over whether or not Henry could break a wild horse. When he’d accomplished the feat, Henry’s former owner was mad as a March hare thinking Henry’d honey-fuggled him. But because he’d made the bet in front of another white man, he couldn’t back down. So Henry gained his freedom and had eventually wound up in Greens Crossing.

  But what I was fixing to say was that I doubted even free blacks in this country could think of themselves apart from slavery either. To be a Negro in those days was either to be a slave yourself, or to hurt from the sting of slavery for the rest of your race. We were all free now, several years after the war, thanks to Abraham Lincoln. But we all still hurt from the memories.

  Probably blacks in the United States would always hurt from it, no matter how much time passed. Maybe slavery would always be part of what it meant to be an American Negro.

  I had only known one black person in all my life who had never been a slave ever. His name was Micah Duff and he’d come from up North. He had recently married our friend Emma and they were now on their way out west. Micah hadn’t been a slave, but now he was married to Emma, who had been. They’d lost Emma’s little boy William because of slavery. And so even free Micah Duff would always know the pain of slavery too.

  Since I’d grown up as a slave, I had only learned to read a few years ago—thanks to my friend and cousin Katie Clairborne—though I still wasn’t that good a reader. I hadn’t had much schooling either, because slaves weren’t taught much of anything except how to work hard. Everything I knew about what I reckon you’d call the bigger world out beyond Rosewood (that’s the plantation where Katie and I lived) I’d learned from books or from Katie or from my papa, Templeton Daniels. But I still didn’t know much about history or the rest of the world and other countries, or even other places in this country.

  But I was about to find out about somebody who’d grown up a long way from North Carolina, just as far away as Micah Duff had been in Chicago—although in the other direction. She was from a place not far from New Orleans, down where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a place where the weather can get mighty severe sometimes.

  A WORLD LONG BEFORE THE WAR

  2

  AN AUTUMN BONFIRE HAD ALMOST BURNT ITSELF out under the Louisiana night sky.

  The remaining embers glowed dull orange in a bed of ash. The black revelers from the slave village on the De Seille plantation who had gathered after dusk to sing hymns and spirituals had mostly dispersed to their cabins.

  A black girl of six or seven still sat staring into the dying fire, her back propped against a tree in drowsy content, eyes nearly shut. The words of the last hymn echoed again in her brain.

  When we’s in that glorious place

  All dem tears gone from our face

  We be free.

  A rustling in the brush roused her. She opened her eyes to see a tall boy three or four years older. He crept forward, then crouched over the dying embers and prodded them with a long stick.

  “What you doin’, Mose?” asked the girl.

  “You still here, Seffie?” the boy said, glancing around.

  “I got sleepy.”

  “I gots me some nuts for roastin’,” said Mose. “Want one?” He held out a plump pecan in its shell.

  She shook her head. “I ate enuff already.”

  “Den you’d bes’ be goin’,” said the boy she had called Mose. “I heard yo’ mama axin’ ’bout you.”

  Slow
ly she rose and wandered toward the fire.

  “You really gwine roast dem nuts?” she asked.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too late.”

  “Not fo me. Da fire’s jes’ right fo roastin’.”

  He tossed three or four pecans from his pocket into the edge of the ashes, then stirred at them with his stick to keep them from bursting into flame.

  “Where you git dem nuts?” asked the girl.

  “Off de groun’ where dey fell off da trees ober yonder.”

  “Will you git me a stick, Mose, so I kin play wiff da fire too.”

  “I ain’t playin’, Seffie. I’s roastin’ dese nuts. ’Sides, you’s too young ter play wiff a fire like dis. Fire’s dangerous. Ain’t nuthin’ ter play wiff nohow.”

  Seffie sat down and stared into the red-orange embers, mesmerized by the glow, as Mose continued to poke and prod at his little stash of nuts, whose shells were now blackening and smoking.

  After another minute or two, he rolled them out of the fire toward him with the end of his stick, then anxiously waited for them to cool.

  “You shore you doesn’t want one er dese nice nuts, Seffie?” he said, picking one up and tossing it back and forth in his hands as he blew to cool it down enough to hold.

  But his young companion had grown sleepy again.

  Slowly she rose, leaving Mose alone with the dying fire and the treasure of his few nuts.

  When the girl called Seffie reached the row of shacks, a big black woman swept down on her and hustled her inside one of the smaller cabins.

  “Seffie, where you been?” scolded the girl’s mother. “I been lookin’ all roun’ fo you! Come on, git in here. Hit’s long past time you wuz in yo bed.”

  The child came in and was soon asleep in the corner with her older brothers and sisters. She awoke only an hour or two later from loud shouts and pounding feet.

  When she opened her eyes, flickering shapes and a strange glow filled the cabin. Smoke stung her eyes and throat.