Khan's Cottage: A Fable of Privilege

 

Told by Wesley Wright, 1914

(2 Samuel 13: 1-39)

Back in Indian days, when it was open season on land-stealing, my granddaddy claimed Wright’s Hill and the creek bottoms under it. He cleared the woods and built two log houses, one of them for his brother Lot. With slaves from Georgia, the brothers set out to fulfill the first commandment: be fruitful and multiply. One slave—name of Amos—jumped the gun with a Indian woman who gave him a free daughter, but the white boys had to a slow start. Lot died without issue, so David’s people were the only white family. 

          In 1870, where I’ll pick up, my granddaddy David had two legitimate sons, O. C. and Lester. Lester claimed Lot's old house in the bottoms while O. C. stayed on the hill with David and the only mama he knew, Cleo, which was the half-Indian daughter of the slave Amos. Cleo cooked for David and gave him a son even before grandmama died giving birth to O. C. David loved and educated all his children, white and brown, including the two by Cleo, an Indian-faced boy called Khan and his baby sister Mae.

In Reconstruction days, Khan made money filling contracts for the army. He was tall, straight, and handsome as a stage Indian, envied and respected by everybody. Even the night riders preferred him taking Yankee money instead of carpetbaggers. Khan built a white cottage out of sawmill lumber the bottom of the hill, where he bought acres off neighbors the War ruined. He never married. His sister Mae cooked and kept his house. Folks said she was the prettiest girl in the county. Even white men did--one too many, as it turned out.

My Uncle Lester, David's oldest son, scared women, they say, especially colored women, so nobody but one hired hand stayed with him in Lot’s old house. Lester took his meals where he could. Sometimes with Khan, sometimes with David, where Aunt Cleo was training Mae to be an herb doctor. Anyway, it worked out that Lester saw a right smart of Mae and couldn’t get the gal off his mind, never mind she was fifteen and his half-sister on the brown side. Mae drove him crazy, seems like, made him skinny with lust.

Now, this worried Lester's white hand Scrapper, Lester being his meal ticket. They say Scrapper was a shaggy-haired orphan barely able to talk when David found him by the creek and raised him with Lester, not as a son but as his son's shadow. Anyway, Scrapper was a quick little devil no bigger than a girl and weaseled Lestet's torment out of him. “You want that little bitch," he said, "we’ll fetch her.” He told Lester to play sick. Quit eating or seem to. When old David came over, Lester told him maybe if Mae cooked him hoecakes, it'd help. There's something about a girl’s hands over a skillet, he allowed, which was close to the truth, but David didn’t suspect. The old fool loved Lester. Every soul on the hill minded David, so Mae had to go and cook for Lester, a bad idea.

Maybe Khan suspected. Maybe he tried to follow his sister in the kitchen, but Lester wouldn’t stand for it, and the white man got his way. They say it was just him and Scrapper there while Mae stirred herbs in the batter. Lester—most likely drunk, fortified for Satan's work—complained of the heat and made Mae to fetch the cakes to the front room where his old bed was. 

Lester lay down, I reckon, and told Mae to feed him with her hands, and as soon as she got close, Scrapper had done barred the doors. Mae was little. She couldn’t help herself. I reckon she begged him to leastwise ask David’s blessing or there’d be war in the family, but Lester just laughed. Mae being his sister, his only hope was the Devil himself. He hauled up her lacy dress—she had on her Sunday best at David’s command—and defiled the poor girl in the presence of Scrapper, who must have pleasured himself seeing a girl used and broken. Nobody knows, but it sounds like him. They were a pair.

Of course, it all came out, it being Sunday afternoon. Croppers were in the yard with Khan listening. Seems like Lester saw the horror in Mae's face and hated her just as crazy as he'd loved her before. He saw that something like a log was rolling down a hillside and he could never outrun it. Two octaves of screams were heard. Scrapper dragged the poor girl like a shoat out onto the porch and left her. All words in the yard were drowned out by the girl keening and tearing her bloody dress, the man behind the log wall lamenting lost honor like a bear in a trap. Khan helped his sister home, and the others scattered, leaving Lester and Scrapper forsaken behind barred doors. 

           For weeks, Wright's Hill was silent like nothing would ever be said again. Lester and Scrapper ate at home and averted eyes in the fields. Khan said nothing, and Mae never left their cottage. The next Sunday, Khan ate on David's porch as fitted his caste, and the old man came out as always to speak about crops. But not a word about rape or incest. Not a word about betrayal, shame, and infamy. Not a word about doom hanging over the family. Months passed, then seasons, and something like old times returned to Wright's hill, but there was a fire buried in Khan's heart.

Old David was in a spot. His daughter had been dishonored—his kin and responsibility—but the transgressor was his oldest white son, so he did nothing. Khan cherished his sister at the bottom of the hill, saying nothing, so nothing happened until they laid narrow-gauge rails out from the sawmill.

On Khan’s land was a stand of timber from Indian days, trunks big as two men could reach around and worth top dollar fetched to a sawmill—which he couldn’t do till three years after Mae’s dishonor when they ran tracks down the valley. Khan invited his brothers and their boys to a logging party and a cut of the proceeds. They say old David took some convincing. With all those big trees dropping, maybe he figured Khan might push Lester in harm’s way, something like they suspected David of doing with grandmama's first husband, but that’s another skeleton. Anyway, Khan wore David down, and he reckoned Lester would be safe with the three boys there. It all hinged on my daddy, O. C., the youngest white boy. But it turned out he couldn’t do much.

They had chopped down the daddy of all oaks, half an hour of ax work, and when it tipped over, crashing through neighbor limbs, it was a sight you couldn’t take your eyes off unless you had a reason. Khan did. While Lester was gawking at the sight, Khan split his head clean down to the chin. Out of nowhere, in plain sight, killed him. Daddy saw it and Scrapper too. Khan hefted the ax and eyed Scrapper, so the fool took off running. Nobody ever saw him again. Daddy ran up the hill to tell old David, but by the time they got down to Khan’s cottage, the door was ajar and him and Mae gone. Night riders called it a race killing and burned down the house, lighting up Wright’s hill like a giant candle that Daddy recalled watching from David's porch. All of a sudden, the old patriarch was down to one son.

“Not that I some wasn’t a comfort to Papa,” Daddy told me years later, “but he took it hard, losing the other two. Lester had been cold since the trouble, not much comfort, and now Khan was off God-knows-where, living with strangers. It broke your grandfather's heart. I had to do something.”

They paid Khan's taxes, keeping the land for him. And, sure enough, maybe six or seven years after the killing, Mr. Bentley hauled my Daddy aside at the store and said he could swear he he'd seen Khan in Birmingham but it turned out to be another fellow. “Walked right by me." Daddy knew Khan was too smart to say howdy to a white man from Russell County, not with the night riders, so he reckoned it was sure enough his lost brother in the Magic City. Daddy went straight to old David, and when the old man heard the news, he commenced crying.

So Daddy took the train to Birmingham and asked around for a good colored carpenter. He near-about fell over when he saw the twin of Khan's sawmill-lumber cottage, the bone-white porch and tall windows that used to set at the foot of Wright’s Hill. It was just like the burning house had collected up in the clouds and, made whole again by angels, dropped on a muddy North Birmingham side street. And who should answer the door but Mae herself, heftier now, but calm and healed looking, the full-blown rose that had been a bud. She didn’t even look surprised.

“Come on in, O. C. Your brother’s here.”

So, Daddy found himself holding a glass of sweet tea—Khan must have had an icebox—sharing county news and then telling his brother how much old David missed him, swearing to him that all was forgiven. No murder case could be made seeing as how the only witnesses were Scrapper, who was long gone, and O.C. himself, who would deny seeing anything. Mae stood behind Khan's armchair like they were posed for a daguerreotype, ousted from her rocker, no doubt, by Daddy, who found himself in the role of a suitor. The land had been saved, he explained, even the cash from the timber. All that Khan had lost was waiting at home for his return.

     The older brother, gray at the temples over high brown cheeks, slowly nodded. He smiled at his sister, and she smiled back, but that didn’t signify what Daddy had hoped for. “With all due respect, O. C.,” Khan said softly, “you and Papa can keep your goddamn  hill.”