But by the end of the meeting, Meema had the promise that Victor would sell her a parcel of land. That parcel was not profitable for farming, though, so perhaps he was not so reluctant to part with it. Though the soil was very rich under the thick grass, the plot wasn’t level. In centuries past, when the Creek had lived on the land, they had constructed a large mound in the center. If somebody wanted to plant anything there, they’d have to work around the mound.
The Black men of Wood Place began to collect dimes and nickels to purchase the land. That took a year. And then another year of saving change to purchase the lumber from Victor. Then another year to build the church. As sharecroppers, the men on the farm could hammer only on Sunday, after the open-air services on the grassy plot where their wives had envisioned a sanctuary. Pop George had been selected as the elder of the church. He sat in a cane-bottomed chair that was placed in the grass, holding the Bible open in his palms, though that was for show. He never had learned to read, but his memory was extraordinary. He possessed long passages of scripture in his head: Isaiah and Luke. Here and there a bit of Ruth and Esther.
During services, there were prayers and lined-out songs, not the tidy, blanched versions of the songs that would be paraded in front of white audiences in North America and in Europe, in years to come. These songs were messy and sweet. Deeply felt in the guts of folks who picked the white fluff from cotton plants. After services, the fellowship meal was laid out by the women. Then, with full stomachs, the men would begin their work of building the church. In the background, the mound that the Creeks had built rose over the folks.
But somebody else had wanted that land: a white man named Jeremiah Franklin.
He was mad about that land. It was in his blood, the need to finally own something for himself. Jeremiah was a sharecropper, too, on Wood Place. Victor had moved him from a cabin that stood by the mound to another plot near the southern property line of the thousand acres that Victor owned. A plot far away from the Black folks, because Jeremiah was, after all, a white man, too.
Meema told her great-grandson Root, Jeremiah was one of those types who always stayed mad. It was hard to know why, but commonsense dictated, he probably was angry to be poor in a white man’s time. The war was over, and so was Reconstruction. Union soldiers had abandoned the south, and their protection of southern Black folks had left with them. Those few years of racial equality would forever appear as a fever dream. Once again, it was a white man’s era in the south, but Jeremiah didn’t have anything to show for being white. His labor in cotton fields corded his muscles. It was backbreaking work that took place when the sun was high and stained his neck a telltale red, the mark of poverty. Despite that labor, he was poor—poor as any Black man—and that probably hurt his feelings. No matter how low, everyone wants somebody to look down upon.
Jeremiah didn’t own one acre to his name, and land was what white men throughout the history of this nation had killed and employed deceit to get. Land occupied a space in white pride, and a white man without land was no better than the Black man he had enslaved or the Indian he had stolen from, through murder and connivance and a lack of sympathy. White men had laughed at the anguish of the displaced Creeks: sooner or later, every conqueror laughs at his victim. That’s what makes victory sweet, and more than that, justified.
Jeremiah approached Victor for the plot that had been promised to the Black sharecroppers for their church. Whether he knew the land was no longer available was not known. All that Venie James would report was that Jeremiah came for that same parcel that Meema had attained. He’d knocked on the door of the kitchen house. He told Venie to send word to Victor, but Jeremiah hadn’t been polite: he hadn’t even taken off his hat.
When Victor came to the kitchen, Jeremiah tried to order the cook to leave, but that didn’t work. Venie sat in the corner of the kitchen house and listened to the entire conversation, then spread the news about how Jeremiah had asked to buy the parcel of land. How he had been summarily turned down, so that the land that Jeremiah had saved to buy would serve instead as the blessed earth for the church where Black sharecroppers would worship, which would be called Red Mound Church.
But that’s not the end of the story, for Jeremiah bided his time.
That’s what poor folks do, whether they are Black or white. Poor folks have patience. They’re used to waiting a long time to receive what they view as justice. And in 1881, after the final plank of heart pine was set in the floor of the sanctuary, after Pop George had blessed their efforts, five white men rode up to the yard in front of Red Mound Church. Naturally, they were there to cause trouble, for all of them had the last name of Franklin. It was broad daylight, but they wore no hoods. In a few decades, they would officially be known as the Ku Klux Klan, but that year, they did not wear sheets or elaborate costumes. There was no official Klan in Chicasetta, a tiny town. That bureaucracy had spread nationally, but it took a while to arrive in the deep country. But let’s say—for the sake of argument—that the Franklins were the Klan, Jeremiah was the chapter president, and his four sons were the members who regularly attended meetings.