MOUNTAIN MAGIC with Ann Hite

The Wedding Band

I am currently putting the final touches on a book due to my publisher next week. For the past six months, and intensely for the last several weeks, I have worked long hours on this book of mine I often thought would never be finished. My Opus. The book that took me ten years to write. I have published four novels and a collection of short stories in the time I signed the contract on this book until today. I have won awards, watched a new grandchild come into the world, and weathered a pandemic with the rest of the country. Still this book has been with me like a faithful friend or at times an enemy.

What is it about? Well, Granny started telling me the story of Leo Frank when I came to live with her in 1966 as a nine-year-old. I have known since the first time I heard the tragic tale that one day I would write a book.

Granny was nine-years-old, standing in the front yard of her home in the foothills of Appalachia, waiting for her father. It was a hot August morning, the 17th to be exact, and the year was 1915. The sky was that gray color, with just a tinge of blue, right after night but just before daylight. Geechee people call it Dayclean and believe all kinds of magic, both good and evil, can happen in this time. Granny’s father ran out of the house yelling for her to get in the Model T.

At that moment, a rumbling began in the distance and a convoy of automobiles drove past her house. Men stood on the running boards of the cars and hung out the windows waving guns and yelling. In the back of one automobile was a small, pale man with a delicate nose and big dark eyes. He wore a terrified expression, and Granny knew in an instant something bad was going to happen. The feeling soaked the air and was in the cries of the crows circling above the trees.

Granny got into the Model T with her brothers and her father. Her mother had died ten days before after her father pushed her from the automobile in a fit of rage. Now her father followed the convoy as if they were all in a parade. The line of cars kept going when her father stopped to pick up her uncle. The other automobiles were a dust cloud in the distance by the time Granny was back on the road.

When my great grandfather arrived on a road lined with other automobiles, the sun was up above the grove of trees to her left. On the right side of the road was a single farmhouse. People in their Sunday best stood here and there. Granny’s father told her to get out and come with him. She did as she was told. They cut through the trees to somewhat of a clearing, where a growing group of people stood around a smallish tree. Then she saw what everyone was looking up at. The man, who she had seen in the back of the automobile, hung from a tree limb by a rope. His throat had an open wound and blood spilled down his white shirt. This image stayed with Granny her whole life. She told me she read in the newspapers the man who was lynched, Leo Frank, had made a last request that someone give his wedding band to his wife Lucille.

It was this part of the story that always stayed with me. I wanted to know what happened to Lucille. When I sat down to write this book about Lucille Selig Frank, Leo Frank’s wife, I thought I would write a historical novel. But Granny’s voice kept ringing in my head.

“Ain’t one soul deserves to be killed in such a manner, him with that sweet young wife. She was a Georgia girl, born and raised right in Atlanta. They was both Jews. That didn’t set so well with some folks back then. That’s why they believed he killed that little factory girl, Mary. But his wife never stopped believing in him. Even them men that did the hanging knew that. So they made sure Lucille got the ring.”

I was told this story so often I knew it by heart, even now today some fifty years later. I knew I would do Lucille justice. I would write her story as nonfiction. I would tell the story of this strong, brave young woman who lost the love of her life because a group of men decided to take the law into their own hands.

To this day I can still hear Granny’s voice crack when she got to the part where she told of Lucille receiving the ring of her dead husband.

“Them men were too scared to take the ring to Lucille themselves, so they put it in the hands of a newspaper reporter. Them men couldn’t look Lucille in the eyes. If they did, they would see themselves as the cold-blooded killers they were.”

Writing this book has been a long journey, but Granny would be proud of me for telling Lucille’s story.

The mountain magic in this column is that stories can and do change the world, one person at a time.