This historic novel was inspired by stories, tales, folklore, and legends that were told by brick masons during their breaks and during lunch, and overheard by the author who supervised them in construction of a federal prison in the Georgia, during the 1990’s. Except for some transition and lib of his own in order to make the story more interesting, it is basically written just as he overheard it being told. They being Black persons and from various parts of Georgia, each had a different version of this legend that has been handed down through many generation by word of mouth, and it is quite obvious that they added something of their own in order to make it even more, interesting.
This is about the life of a Negro sharecropper named Bill, and not like most landowners who admitted that they needed freed slaves to tend the hundreds of acres of farmland as sharecroppers, and did gave them half the profit from cotton crops, Bill’s landlord happened to be the meanest, and cruelest of them all. He’d falsely accused Bill of committing a crime, and while Bill was gone one night he sent a hooded mob of white men to raid the shack in which he lived, and to give him a “flogging.” He wasn’t at home when they arrived, so they took their spite out on his wife, and while in the presence of their two young children, they dragged his wife outside. After they ripped off her clothes, they poured warm pine-tar all over her naked body, and especially in her crotch and in her face, and then rolled her in a pile of chicken feathers, and left her lying there in the yard, to die a horrible death.
When Bill returned home later he saw a cross burning near the edge of the yard, and he found his two children inside almost frightened to death, but he was unable to find his wife anywhere. And then, he went back outside and called for her, and when she didn’t answer, he walked around in pitch-darkness to the back of the shack calling her name, and searching for her. And then, his foot happened to touch her naked, tar-covered dead body lying on the ground, and he kneeled down beside her, and cried.
Other sharecroppers happened to see a bright glow in the sky from the kerosene-soaked cross that still stood burning in his yard, and came to investigate. After the women wrapped her body in a quilt, and brought her around to the front of the shack and gently placed it on the front porch, Bill, and his two children sat down beside her, and cried their heart out. Bill briefly talked with the others, and then after giving all the money that he had to a close friend, and asking him to look after his children while he was away, he kicked the burning-cross down, let out a loud, weird scream like no one had ever heard before, and then he suddenly vanished into the darkness of the night, never to be seen again.
From that night on he roamed around over the countryside at night screaming at the top of his voice, while he burned down buildings, and destroyed crops in the fields that belonged to the members of the hooded-mob that killed his wife. Even until this day some claim that he’s still out there roaming around at night, and on a cold, dark, and dreary night should a strange noise be heard coming from the woods, although it might be caused by one tree branch, scrubbing against another, you might hear an elderly Black person say, “I heard Bill scream again last night.”