By
Niceole R. Levy
Before the chains, things were quiet in Yazoo... downright silent, to tell the truth... deathly silent. Why, things in that little Mississippi town never seemed to cause much of a racket at all. They was just a bunch of folks shuffling, stumbling and stomping their way through life without much notice of any signs that there were higher powers at work in the affairs of the town. But that all changed with the coming of the chains.
You could barely hear it-—that slow, telling hum that was in the air of Yazoo. But everyone noticed it. The white shop owners who crowded the sidewalks to keep undesirables from entering their establishments heard it; so did the negro preacher who delivered the most non-ranting rants a preacher ever preached in what was left of the old burned out church down by the Resurrection Cemetery.
The bones heard it, too.
But then, that low, faint hum got mighty noisy on or about the night of October 31, 1889. Not all of a sudden, no shrieking change mind you, just a difference in tone. It was almost like someone put a drop of water into the middle of an empty plate just to see what would happen. Whoever did it probably thought it would be relatively harmless. After all, it was only one drop of water. But they didn’t consider the millions of small, unseen lives that exist in a single drop of water. They never imagined how strong a thing can grow when no one sees it.
Someone should have seen, of course. The date was too obvious, the weather a trite dark and gloomy. It was the perfect day for a murder. No one said so, but it was.
The white shopkeepers ran from their stores that day when they heard it—-that slight change in the hum that brought everyone out of their doors. Women doing housework leaned out their windows to see what had caused it. Children racing up and down the dirt road just outside of town stopped, then ran, hearts pounding, back to the center of town, not wanting to miss the thing.
After all, it wasn’t every day that Mahalia Hall was found floating in the driver, drowned irrevocably, to death.
The sheriff had pulled her body from the water, carefully untangling her long black hair from a log that had latched on sometime during the night. Sprawled on the bank, dressed in the elaborate fairy costume she had ordered from New Orleans, Mahalia was, without doubt, dead.
Mouths gaped as the shopkeepers and their maids and horseshoers and their families gathered around. Mahalia Hall... dead? “Lord almighty,” one man exclaimed. “How could this happen?” And indeed, it seemed a hard question to answer. By what means had the beauty of Yazoo come to be floating in the river wearing a hundred-dollar fairy costume brought in from New Orleans via riverboat for the sole purpose of ensuring that its owner would win the town costume ball for the seventeenth consecutive year?
The sheriff announced that he was “fairly certain” that Mahalia had drowned. Though, truth be told, if the water hadn’t killed her, the Moccasins had. Her arms and legs, even her alabaster cheeks, bore the telltale marks of Moccasin fangs. Water or snakes, one had killed her and the other had been the accessory. It didn’t make much difference which had played which part.
Johnny Hall arrived then, having been fetched away from the First Bank of Yazoo, of which he was the sole proprietor. He stared down at the body of his wife. The white townsfolk approached, patting his shoulder and offering words of comfort. The negroes nodded and said, “sorry, Mister,” and made their exits back to the various forms of labor that freedom had brought to Mississippi – cotton picking, house cleaning and horse tending. They all tried to ignore how much those sounded like the same jobs they’d done before being called “free.”
The sheriff inquired of Johnny as to when he had last seen Mahalia, and Johnny said last night, when she had been unpacking the costume. He had come in to town to prepare for an important delivery to the bank--no more could be said, of course, because such things were confidential—-and he had decided to spend the night in town.
Without much else to be done, Mahalia was moved from the riverbank to the barber’s shop so she could be prepared for burial. The sheriff theorized that Mahalia must have fallen off the back porch of the Hall house, which was just a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the river, and well, the costume must have just pulled her under. Case closed. The sheriff asked if Johnny thought they should cancel the evening festivities that were planned for All Hallows' Eve, but Johnny assured the sheriff that Mahalia would have wanted the town to have their party, in honor of her memory. The sheriff left to spread the word, and Johnny stood there on the bank of that river for nearly two hours, just staring out at the water. The change in the hum had begun... but no one understood what it meant yet.
At the All Hallows' Eve party that night, Purdy Hatcher came dressed as a witch. Purdy also assumed the mantle of Yazoo’s most beautiful woman, what, with Mahalia dying like that. Purdy, of course, took no enjoyment in this honor. The hum was ringing in her ears too loudly for that. Everyone understood, though. Mahalia and Purdy had been best friends since they could walk. They had always shared everything—clothes, books, even boyfriends. So people knew that Purdy’s drawn face was from grief. Why, the poor girl had to fight back tears when Johnny Hall entered the room.
He had just come by to thank all the townsfolk for their support this morning, he said. “Well," he was told by the sheriff, “you’re just in time for the awarding of the best costume prize.” So naturally, since this had been Mahalia’s favorite event and most cherished prize, Johnny stayed. Purdy was overcome and ran out crying and fussing, but everybody understood. They’d have felt just the same. And Johnny, being one of Purdy’s very best friends, through Mahalia, he said he’d go after her and make sure she was all right. And off he went to find Purdy in the night, not noticing the pulse that now accompanied the hum.
The next day, Mahalia Hall was buried in the Resurrection Cemetery. By afternoon, life returned to normal in Yazoo. Well, except for that pulse, but nobody was listening to that just yet.
No one paid it any mind until six days later, when Purdy Hatcher was killed in a fire that burned up half of Yazoo.
Nobody was sure how the fire started. No one could find any matches or gasoline or candles anywhere in what was left of Hatchers’ Mercantile, but it and nine other buildings, including three houses, had surely burned to the ground. It had just been Purdy’s bad luck that she lived in the five-room apartment above the Mercantile that her father ran. After all, if she had gotten along with her father’s second wife, well, she could have still been living in that big, beautiful white-columned house just up the road from the Halls. But she’d just never liked the woman, and so Purdy agreed when Mr. Hatcher suggested it might be best if she moved into town.
The white shopkeepers and the negro workers wandered into town again. They gawked jointly at the destruction and the dead. It took hours to determine who had been where and seen what and died in which place. So it was hours before anyone noticed the gaping hole that stood in the very place Mahalia Hall had been buried seven days before, hours before anyone noticed that the hole held a coffin with its lid standing open and its insides empty.
It was little Casey Kimmler who was the first to see it. He ran so fast from Resurrection Cemetery that his tiny heart was about to explode. The townspeople were struck with disbelief and uncertainty. How to explain such a happening... well, there just was no way to do it. Each man and woman formed theories in their minds; grave-robbers, wild animals—-something like those had to be responsible for this thing. Yet no one explanation dispelled the growing sense that something was terribly wrong. And that’s when Dante Tibidoux, the negro smithy, spoke up.
“Maybe, uh, and pardon me for saying so, but maybe there be some kind of spell or something on Miss Mahalia.”
An audible grumble of disbelief swelled through the group of onlookers. Nonsense, fantasy, yelled members of the crowd. But only the white townspeople were shaking their heads. It took a few minutes for them to notice that the negroes were staring at them, a look bordering on superiority masking their collective face.
Surely something silly enough for those people to believe it, there was no chance it could be true. That’s what they tried to tell themselves. But that look... well, it disarmed them a bit. Negroes just didn’t do that, not unless maybe they were right.
The pulse that lay beneath the hum grew steady as the white faces began to hold thoughts of strange, mystical rituals in their minds. Could it be possible? Could some sort of magic be responsible for this? Predictably, their next thought was black magic. It must have been some evil black African magic that had brought this about. Dante, sensing this, quickly told the townspeople that the spell would’ve had to be placed on Mahalia by someone close to her, someone with a private upset to settle.
Led down this path, the collective mind of the whites began to wonder who the mysterious someone could be. All the while, the pulse kept beating.
What wrong had been done, they wondered? What injustice had left Mahalia unable to rest, left her filled with such venomous hatred that she had returned from the dead to destroy the town? Well, that was it, someone yelled. What? the sheriff asked. The venom, the snake bites—it must have been the poison from the snakes that poisoned her soul and made her do this. Several of the shopkeepers grumbled at this idea, but another persisted in furthering it, fascinated by the thought. If there was no magic involved, then just how was it that no one could figure out how that fire had gotten started? This was a valid point, and even the sheriff had to admit that something mystical must have been involved. That’s when Dante, careful not to appear too bold, lest he be thought to be “forgetting his place,” suggested that they might want to talk with Harlan Tidus, what, with Harlan being the oldest man in the county—94 if he was a day. Even though he was a black man, Dante explained, he probably knew if anything like to this had ever happened before and if so, what had been done about it.
The townspeople weren’t so sure that they liked getting advice from one negro to go and ask for help from another, but they figured if it was some magical goings on, well, then those negroes had to know something about it. So a committee of the sheriff, Doctor Wilson and Johnny Hall, whose wife was, after all, the subject of the discussion, was chosen, and they arranged for Dante to take them out to old Harlan’s place that very day.
As the men mounted their horses, it was Johnny who suddenly looked back over his shoulder, looking around as if he thought he was being watched, as if someone knew something... But then he shook his head and turned back to his fellow riders. No one knew anything, he thought. That’s why we’re going to speak to the old negro. Yet he couldn’t account for one thing—-the pounding that was sounding off in his ears over and over again, almost like
a drum beat.
When the committee arrived at Harlan Tidus’ house, they found him sitting on the porch, an old iron chain stretched across from one side of the stair railing to the other, barring someone or something’s entrance. The old man sat on a wooden crate, his pipe in his mouth, his boot tapping a regular rhythm of beats out against the wooden porch. The noise sounded oddly familiar to the men, but they couldn’t place it.
It was the sheriff who first approached the porch. When he went to lift the old iron chain, Harlan raised his hand.
“Do not move that there chain.”
The sheriff, a man not used to being told to do anything, was taken aback. The other men moved behind him as if to provide ready support were it needed. Seeing this, Dante jumped over the side of the railing, standing just as firmly behind Harlan.
“And just why can’t I move this chain?”
“That chain is protecting my house, Sheriff. I’ll be more than happy to speak with you, but you can’t go lifting that chain.”
The sheriff seemed appeased by Harlan’s tone, and so he nodded in agreement to the bizarre demand.
“Harlan, we came to ask you...”
The elderly man raised his hand again.
“I know why you come. Who you think that chain is for?”
The men stared. What was he talking about? Johnny Hall, frustrated, stepped forward.
“Do you know something about my wife, old man?”
“I know she be walking the earth again. I know that. And I know she done set that there fire you all so upset about.”
Doctor Wilson felt compelled to step forward.
“That is impossible, Harlan. I checked Mahalia Hall myself, and she was most definitely dead, pardon my frankness, Johnny.”
“You can check all you want, that woman is back on this here earth, not under it. Somebody in this town got her soul all wound up, and she has to make peace with that.”
The men stood still again, each looking to the other. Did they dare believe such a tale? Did they chance ignoring it? If Mahalia had come back, if she had set that fire, could she be dangerous to someone else? The sheriff, knowing his duty was to protect the others in town, decided he had no choice but to believe the wild tale until something else proved true.
“Harlan, do you know what we can do to stop her?”
“You got to find out what’s riling Mahalia. If you can settle it, then she should go away. Unless someone went and put a spell on the poor thing. Then your only chance is to chain her back into the earth.”
“Chain her?” the sheriff asked.
“Yep. Bury her again, then put a big old chain round that grave so she can’t fight her way out again. That’s what we’d do. ‘Course, you may not believe, but I tell you, you don’t get her back in the ground, more folks is gonna die.”
The men thanked Harlan for his time and headed back to town. They had a duty to report this, whatever it was, to the town and to decide as a group how they would deal with it. Before they left, Johnny had stared hard into the eyes of the old negro. Did Harlan really believe that nonsense? Or could he... Johnny chided himself again. No one knew. Everything was fine. If only he could get that damn pounding out of his ears.
The next day, two things happened that made the town’s decision for them. Nettie, the Halls’ negro maid, found Mahalia’s diary, and Mahalia Hall was found sitting in a pew in the town church.
Nettie came across the book first. She brought it to the sheriff, telling him that she had found it and thought it might be important. And was it ever. That book explained to the world just what and who had hexed Mahalia Hall, and it set in motion events which would make the this new pulse in the hum of Yazoo permanent.
Now the sheriff didn’t just read the book, then announce its contents to the world. It was just one of those things that happen in a small town; no secret is safe. One whisper, much like that silent drop of water, can develop a life all its own. The trick is to know who to ask. And in a town like Yazoo, where one half of the town acts like the other doesn’t exist, well, there are a lot of people that just blend into the shadows. And it was in these dark spaces that the tale of Mahalia Hall and Purdy Hatcher became a legend.
As the folks in Yazoo had noted, Mahalia and Purdy had known each other forever and shared everything. As it turned out, a little more of everything than most folks had suspected. So while the whispers about the past week’s events began to grow, they joined forces, growing in strength, and feeding the pounding rhythm of the town hum, and they heralded the coming of the chains.
The shopkeeper and Doctor Wilson stood on the sidewalk and filled each other in on the details they had heard since the discovery of the diary that morning.
“Doc, really, I hear tell Purdy was shagging with old Johnny boy.”
“Can’t say that I’m surprised. Purdy always did want everything Mahalia had. She was always trying to compete with that girl, trying to prove she was just as pretty, just as special.”
“Well, you know what folks is saying, don’t you, Doc? They say that Purdy pushed Mahalia into that river, and that’s why Mahalia came back.”
At that, the doctor shook his head.
“Mrs. Hall is dead. She did not, nor will she ever, rise up from the grave. That old fool Harlan Tidus is filling this town with stories. People do not come back from the dead.”
The shopkeeper took the opportunity to nod his head in agreement, though truth be told, he firmly believed that Mahalia was out there somewhere, looking for her next victim. He just wasn’t about to let on that he believed it, that was all.
As the two men were finishing their conversation, Johnny Hall walked down the main street of town toward his bank. He was careful not to look to either side of him, for he was certain that the air was full of talk about him and his affairs. He had no time for rumors. His head still had that horrible pounding sounding off inside. In fact, it had grown louder during the night. He also had a growing sense of discomfort. Someone knew. He wasn’t sure who it was, but he was certain someone had figured it out. But there was a force at work in the town. And it was behind the infernal beating in his head. He was sure of that.
The citizenry headed toward the church to hold their town meeting. Most had resolved to just accept what had happened as a sad story of wronged friendship. Mahalia had either been killed by or killed herself over Purdy and whatever relationship had been going on with Johnny. Then Purdy, undone by her guilt, had killed herself by burning down the Mercantile, also getting revenge on her father for marrying that hideous second wife of his. That was all there was to it, and it made a perfectly sinister kind of sense.
Then the reverend unlocked the doors of the church, and the town dropped to its collective knees when it saw Mahalia Hall sitting bolt upright in the last row of the church.
Doctor Wilson approached cautiously. It wasn’t that he’d been afraid, he would later recount, it was just that, on the off chance Mahalia had been alive, he didn’t want to startle her.
But he needn’t have worried. Mahalia Hall was dead. For the time being, anyway.
They wanted to believe someone had just left her there, but the scene in front of them wouldn’t let that illusion hold. Her shoes were covered with mud, and sure enough, there were muddy footprints of roughly the same size leading from the side door straight to her seat on the pew. She sat calmly, as if she’d been praying to finally be released from the earth and granted peace. And, well, she just didn’t look like she’d been dead a week, the sheriff said. Truth be told, she looked like she’d just sat down in the church that morning, then up and died.
That left only one possible explanation... Harlan had been right.
Now their minds began to swirl. Mahalia had come back from the dead and killed Purdy. That’s what had happened. That was the reasonable thing to think now. And if she could do it once, surely she could do it again-—come back for Johnny or for the someones who had surely known about the cheating and said nothing, aiding and abetting Mahalia’s murder. And with that thought in mind, a decision was made to contract Dante Tibidoux to build a chain of such strength and magnitude that Mahalia would never be able to escape her grave again.
Dante began work on the chain immediately. To build it, he first melted down the metal from stacks of smaller chains that had been used just thirty, forty years earlier to hold living people in place. Each time he put one into the pot of bubbling liquid, a shaft of steam rose from the depths of the pot... perhaps a sigh of relief from the chains themselves that they would never again be used to shackle the living citizens of Yazoo.
The construction became a spectator event for the other negroes in town. They came by and watched Dante shape the metal and build each link of the long, heavy strand. Smiles crossed their faces, unobserved by most. But Johnny Hall saw them, and he knew what it meant. He knew that his fellow whites had been taken in by this story, this myth of Mahalia’s return. Yet he could say nothing to spare them, not without sacrificing his own freedom, and Johnny had never been big on personal sacrifice. He got everything he wanted, and he got rid of it with equal ease. At least he had until now.
The chain was finally finished, and Dante strung the massive links around iron posts in the ground. Mahalia was interred again, and then the chain closed around the last post, its power there to forever hold her in the ground, and its believers forever in the power of those they had once controlled themselves.
For ten years, Mahalia Hall lay at rest in that grave. And gradually, the white citizens of Yazoo began to forget who it was that had saved them from her wrath. They forgot the ugly sordidness of Mahalia and Purdy’s deaths and the events that had caused them.
Then the First Bank of Yazoo burned to the ground. And Harlan Tidus, still alive despite more than a century of living, told them townsfolk that they’d better check that chain.
One link had been broken, fracturing the protective barrier between Mahalia’s restless soul and the town.
Only one person outside of those responsible for it knew that the broken link had been made by men, not by some ghost intent on revenge. But he could say nothing. Johnny had been reminded to keep his own counsel, to be grateful that vindictive spirits didn’t really return from the dead, lest both women involved in this legend came back to brand him guilty for their deaths. He had no choice but to live with the knowledge that he had provided the material by which the formerly enslaved had themselves enslaved a town.
The next day, the chain was repaired by Dante’s son Alexander. That same day, the town counsel approved a measure by which a man would be employed by the city to check the chain each and every day to ensure its well-being. The measure passed unanimously and has never been challenged since.