1.
Early is the mane he was given. For no reason other than he was born into the world earlier than he was supposed to. It was always hard to explain this to those who questioned his name. They wanted his name to be “Earl Lee” to make them comfortable, but Early’s presence wherever he went to do his business was always the first to arrive and upon meeting in various places. Once they saw his intense eyes, they couldn’t get their words together fast enough beyond sorry before dropping their eyes out of fear, known and unknown…
Early sold life insurance to the people whom the policy makers forgot, consistently, though they knew these were the very people who were worked to death while making barely enough to take care of themselves while alive. Having to be laid to rest in a segregated cemetery didn’t sit right with him, and after he attended college in Alabama, he made it his personal mission to make sure the people in his community could bury their deceased better.
He’d buried his own parents in the same such place and no matter how many times he was on the road for work, he made sure when he returned it his small home in the small southern town he was born in that he took care of the area where his kin- and skin-folks were buried.
Truthfully speaking, Early was just as at home at the cemetery as he was in his own home; just as comfortable as he was doing the business of selling life insurance that included burial provisions…
Early never needed anyone’s help and everything he did was for the good of remembering when he’d almost believed the monosyllabic myths and tales of progress before the mob attacked him; whipping his back open leaving scars
that for pleasure they threw salt in the opened wounds causing him to writhe about on the ground just outside of town where they left him. They were sure that they had either killed him or killed his confidence but Early survived and grew up to become
a walking, talking, man of magic who defied the social and legal customs of the day when he fell in love outside the conditions and boundaries dictated by misinterpreted power plays over heart matters when
the sky healed and the roots helped him brace himself fo rate tomorrows that came and passed when he had to bury one parent then the other. He never left this small town where his people once yielded to them on sidewalks where they lowered their
glances, avoiding eye contact with them. Early walked pelvis first/forward and he stepped aside for no one and when the population of Blacks swelled and crowded out everyone in the town’s borders of African-descent, even the one-drop persons
who passed but came back to the race once they saw that they could be safe in the developing, self-sustaining community… only the cemetery remained the last vestige of racial hate. Early never imagined it would be him that tended to the place where
the first and only person he’d ever love laid to rest… when Early had been kidnapped and tortured in his early adulthood and left for dead outside of town, he wasn’t alone, but only he survived the incident where two people were left for dead except
Early had lived and still remained in the small town he couldn’t fully leave nor did he want to. He spent his time selling life insurance and making sure the colored section of the cemetery was kept as pristine as possible. Soon, the other part of the
graveyard became overgrown and headstones toppled over as relatives who used to make the trek weekly dwindled down to nothing. A man who was there as often as Early was, on the other side of the color line that divided the area for the dead asked
Early “why don’t you take care of this whole area and not just that patch back there?” To which Early pointed towards a figure only he could see standing back in the shaded corner of the colored section; they smiled at him, tipped their hat, and
pointed back in the familial way they’d always communicated without words; Early’s heart skipped a beat then just as it had all those years back when they were both walking the same Earth only aware of one another… which was how they were taken
away… Early held the gaze of the figure for a little longer than he meant to; instead of telling the man off like he wanted to, he pointed, again, towards the figure only he saw and told the man “I’m just an insurance man keeping my loved ones happy and
the one I loved most, that you made sure you murdered is buried just back there near that tree.” The man gasped at what Early told him; this time, he looked back where Early pointed and he saw them; wanted to scream but couldn’t…
Early had already made his way back to where the ghost of his friend awaited so that they could talk as they had been since the day they had to break the ground and add another body to rest there in the small patch of land Early still went to feel alive.
Walker 4-26-2020
BEING 40 SOMETHING 