The Manor and the Lesson

I do not intend to offend any of my readers with the content of this story. Reader discretion advised due to its violent nature. Based entirely on true events. Disclaimer: I'm not racist.

Setting: Somewhere during the early 1930s, southeastern United States.

It began with the scene of a crowded cellar. It was night. Black families in old-fashioned garments stood shoulder to shoulder and sang aloud in roaring praise. It was apparently a sort of mass was being held. I circled the room; pews, a podium. At the front, a man led the worship with joy as they each poured their voices to the heavens.

After a few moments, my view spanned the outside of the house. This manor sat aside a dirt road, surrounded by open meadow, a tall, lone oak tree, to its right. From the corner of my eye, a wave of dim orange light rose from the dark, a ways down the path. A mob. A menacing, angry mob.

They carried rocks and ropes and torches. I returned to the basement. They advanced without notice. Men threw rocks and flaming bits of debris or trash in through the basement windows. The room quickly ignited. The Black men and women grabbed their children and scattered, their faces twisting with panic. Covered in sweat, some portion of them escaped the building, while the other, did not.

These people were cornered, beaten, dragged on the ground. Few had the ability to fight off the nooses that were soon pulled tight around their necks. They were hanged by the branches of the near tree, before being lit on fire. Amber clouds bellowed into the endless sky.

I could hear screaming. I could feel an uncomfortable heat on my face. I could smell the burning flesh and hair.

I recall taking to a small nook outside the house, some kind of tool closet. I hid with a young teenage girl, who hadn't acknowledged my being there. Together, we peered out through cracks in the wooden door. The tension grew and grew. I could feel the fear, like a concrete pit expanding in my chest.

I woke up.

The next morning, I made it a point to relay my dream to a friend, for fear of forgetting it, not that I was able to erase the traumatic nightmare from my memory, if I tried, but I'd have rather recorded it. Sophomores in our fitness class, we joked about the insanity of having a dream so horrific and stressful and utterly random. I brushed off the embarrassment.

That day, my classmates and I awaited a brand new lesson in U.S. History. The teacher announced, as he did every single day to each and every class, "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, students of all ages..." A normal day, digressed and neared its end. I had most but forgotten my nightmare when, "Today, today we will start a new session on the infamous Jim Crow Laws." Never having had heard the term before, I tuned back in.

"What I'm going to begin class with today is only to get the gruesome images and stories done and over with, so we won't have to revisit them, later on. If anyone would like to leave the room at any time, feel free to do so.

"I'm going to show you the atrocities that took place during this time. More specifically, lynchings."

I froze.

"I must make it clear: lynchings were more than what you might think. They were tying men to the backs of cars and stepping on the gas. They were public humiliations. They were hanging people before lighting their sometimes still living bodies on fire."

I couldn't breathe. The experiences of the nightmare rushed back into my head and flooded my vision. He continued.

"It was said that for miles around you could smell-"

-Oh, God, don't say it-

"-the burning flesh."

I was partly terrified and partly mystified, but entirely nauseous. I felt as if my head had been cracked open and my thoughts violated. The timing was impeccable. Had I obtained previous knowledge of the new session, before that day? Had my subconscious picked up on keywords that hinted at the context of the curriculum?

Years have passed and I like to think, now, that, somehow, my mind took whatever knowledge it did have and used it as a coping mechanism to prepare my heart for the melancholy history lesson to come by presenting me with, what I deem to be, a premonition.

And that was not the only one of its kind.