Under the Tulip Tree

by Michelle Shocklee

But more than the money I was earning, which would greatly help my family, I was gradually coming to understand how little I knew about the world I’d grown up in here in the South. I’d studied slavery and the Civil War in school, but the history I’d been taught never told tales like those I’d heard from Frankie the past two days. Slave labor was a necessity in those days, and they lived and worked on plantations and farms in much the same way laborers do today. Or so I’d believed. Yet if what Frankie said was true—and I had no reason to think it wasn’t—it put plantation owners like my ancestors in a completely new light. I didn’t know much about their lives or how they’d treated their slaves, but according to Grandma Lorena, her grandparents and great-grandparents had owned a large number of slaves. Had they been benevolent masters? Or had they been the type that would beat and sell off children? But I couldn’t say any of that to Mama.

He closed his eyes. A lone tear slipped from beneath his lashes. “Why do men do it, Frankie? Why are they so bent on killing each other just so’s they can claim to be the victor?” “I don’t think even they know why they do it. Someone gets a hateful idea in their head; then they convince others on it. Like a disease spreading.”