Sycamore Row - John Grisham

And we were certain the sheriff would come out and arrest Cleon and the other men. The
sheriff would need witnesses, and that’s why we could never breathe a word of what we’d
seen. Never. We did not go to sleep that night. When we heard our mother in the kitchen, we
sneaked back to bed, just in time for Cleon to walk in and yell at us to get to the barn and
milk the cows. We did that every morning at dawn. Every morning. It was a tough life. I hated
the farm, and from that day on I hated my father like no child has ever hated a parent. I
wanted the sheriff to come get him and take him away forever.”
Off camera, Lucien seemed to need a break himself. He paused for a long time before
continuing with “What happened to the Rinds families?”
Ancil dropped his head and shook it in an exaggerated way. “Awful, just awful. The
story gets worse. A day or two later, Cleon went to see Esther. He gave her a few bucks and
made her sign a deed to the eighty acres. He promised her she could stay there, and she did
for about forty-eight hours. The sheriff showed up all right. He and a deputy and Cleon went
out to the settlement and told Esther and the other Rinds folks that they were being evicted.
Immediately. Pack up your stuff right now and get off his land. There was a small clapboard
chapel, a church where they had worshipped for decades, and to prove he owned everything,
Cleon torched it. Burned it to the ground to show what a big man he was. The sheriff and the
deputy helped him. They threatened to torch the shacks too.”
“And you saw this?”
“Sure. Seth and I missed nothing. We were supposed to be chopping cotton, but when we
saw the sheriff pull up in front of our house, we knew something was up. We were hoping he
would arrest Cleon, but that’s not the way things worked in Mississippi back then. Not at all.
The sheriff was there to help Cleon clean up his land and get rid of the blacks.”
“What happened to the blacks?”
“Well, they left. They grabbed whatever they could and ran into the woods.”
“How many?”
“Again, I was a kid. I wasn’t counting. But there were several families of Rindses living on
the land, not all around the settlement, but they were fairly close to each other.” Ancil took a
deep breath and mumbled, “I’m really tired all of a sudden.”
Lucien said, “We’re almost finished. Please continue.”
“Okay, okay. So, they were running away, into the woods, and as soon as a family vacated
their shack, Cleon and the sheriff would set it on fire. They burned everything. I vividly
remember some of the blacks standing at the edge of the woods, holding their kids and
whatever possessions they could grab, and looking back at the fires and the thick gray smoke
and crying and wailing. It was just awful.”
“What happened to them?”
“They scattered. For a while, a bunch of them were camping beside Tutwiler Creek, deep in
the woods near the Big Brown River. Seth and I were looking for Toby and we found him there
with his family. They were starving and terrified. We loaded up the horses one Sunday
afternoon, sneaked away, and took as much food as we could steal without getting caught.
That was the day I saw Esther and her little girl, Lois. The kid was about five years old and
completely naked. She had no clothes. It was just awful. Toby came to our house a couple of
times and hid behind the barn. Seth and I gave him as much food as we could. He hauled it