Man in the Moonlight

Penumbra

Summer dusk in Jim Crow Georgia, Muscogee County, 1907.

Robert lit the last of his tobacco with the flame of his lantern. The Johanson mansion loomed large before him. What it must be like to rest in a place like this, he mused. The thought threatened his resolve momentarily. A sudden breeze caused his lantern's light to waver, tossing the flame to and fro, briefly revealing hooded cohorts at his left and right flanks, his younger brothers Holder and Hoyt Rayleigh respectively.

The breeze passed and the stifling heat of the summer rushed back in after it.

Robert took a heavy drag off his flimsy cigarette. Holder, the youngest of the three surviving Rayleigh brothers though still well advanced in years, gestured to him for a pull from his smoke, and was reluctantly obliged. Hoyt lifted the hem of his robes and tucked them into his waistband, he knelt between plots of planted tobacco and tested the caliber of the earth with thick calloused fingertips. The soil was superior in both quantity and quality to the Rayleighs. The disparity vexed Hoyt to a terrible extent, so much so that he tarried on his knees "down in the niggers' dirt" for too long, unaware of himself. Robert noticed, eyeing Hoyt while frustratedly drumming his fingers against the hilt of the 1840 dangling from his saber belt. Holder lifted his dingy white hood to spit out tobacco, having sucked too hard on Robert's cigarette.

The nocturnal songs of summer fauna rang out like a maestro-less orchestra.

The 1000 acres of land the plantation estate sat on belonged to the Johanson family, formerly enslaved by its previous proprietor Janus Johan and emancipated during General Wilson's raid in 1865. Wilson himself officiated the survivors' emancipation and oversaw the transition of company authority over to its new heirs. When a surname was required to ratify documentation a young man named Henry, conceived in the big house and raised in the slave's quarters, proffered "Johanson" as his patronymic after who he understood to be his father, and the plantation was christened therewith.

The land's new inheritors, 11 emancipated families, immediately remodeled their squalid quarters into livable, respectable homes and agreed unilaterally to combine their agricultural efforts, alternating between tobacco, cotton, corn, and sugar crops and pooling yields to increase their collective market return. Cooperation was crucial on the Johanson Plantation, its survival and the survival of its occupant's households required overachievement. The freed families occupying the land had to provide for themselves, each other and produce enough from the land to pay off exorbitant extortion fees to the displeased (less profitable) neighboring white farmers. But the true cost of doing business was much higher than a simple percentage of the plantations returns. In the four decades of its operation, 10 of the 11 original families had either been shot, lynched, or menaced off the land. The resolute remainder currently occupying the Big House, Henry and his immediate family, saw a visit such as this as inevitable and decided to take proactive measures...

Holder crept from window to window, making his way around to the rear of the house, scouting much the same as he did in his youth under General Johnston's command. He peeked into one of the Big House's rear windows, slowly creeping up from the windowsill, his pointed hood visible through the naked glass like a shark fin. No candles or lamps were burning inside, only the moon provided illumination. Under these dim conditions, the tiny offset eyeholes of his frayed hood made it impossible to get a good look inside. Frustrated he snatched his hood off his head and cast it aside, revealing the mess of yellow hair atop his head, before peering one-eyed into the dark living room window like a sniper down a Whitworth's scope.

Inside, black bodies lied in repose, eerily motionless and barely discernible in the moonlight. Holder narrowed his eye and did his best to take an accurate count of the persons inside to report back to Hoyt and Robert, quickly exhausting his supply of fingers toward that end. In his haste and under the poor lighting he failed to notice those bodies strewn about inside were but hollow husks, cast-off skins like those of shedding snakes.