“Caroline Abernathy hadn’t always been a country girl. But the time when she wasn’t, or hadn’t been, was around 1937, and to be honest, it was only for a period of five years, between her fifteenth and her twentieth birthday, when she attended college, such a short period, the people she knew on the plantation and in Fayetteville, who were fifty or older, in 1972, only remembered that she was gone, and many of her old friends forget that he had never left North Carolina, because he had stayed on the plantation about twenty-two miles from the city all those other years, after he was married.
“She was then a young woman, attending a New York City college, her father had gone to Columbia University, and her brother to Harvard, and she to City College. Everyone, I mean, everyone in her family, believed that she didn’t need an expensive education, just to get married and have children, but she convinced her father and grandfather that it was more than just a formality for the family, it was tradition to receive a good education.
So they paid tuition for five years. One more year for her her Master’s Degree in Public Relations, in which she was convinced that she would get her doctorate. In reality, she refused to go on, she met Cole Abernathy and married him that following spring, and she brought what she felt at that moment to her family’s remote plantation.
She never felt like a victim, more of a confident wife, and with a job well done at school, who would help with the business her husband was in thereafter, and calling her new life -with a son- a great success in all conquered terrains.
Now, at fifty (in 1972), the story itself was old and unoriginal, she had told it a hundred times to herself, and to her late husband, who died of a heart attack due to the death of his son six months before his, who died of syphilis, given to him by his Vietnamese wife, Vang -your mother-, who was then living with her original husband -bigamist- in Saigon, it was all too much. So this farmer went into the barn, behind her Mansion, in 1972, and she hanged herself. Her imagination went off in all directions, I remember that quite clearly. She even went to Saigon to kill Vang, had a knife in her bag, found her with her grandson-you, confronted her, and about her feat conduct, being able to hide two husbands from each other, or at least to each other. another, then tired of reason, looking at her grandson, something forbade her from killing Vang, there was the predictable escape, she ran back home, to that barn and hanged herself, the final escape.
Now she’s buried in that little patch of cemetery in the back fields of her former 1,200-acre plantation, with Cole, her husband, and Langdon, their son, and Josh, who died just before she hanged himself, Josh Jefferson Jr., a black laborer, who had worked on the plantation for most of his life.
And a neighbor named Mrs. Stanley, who was the first on the scene, heard her dog barking from inside the barn, who had woken up to find her hanging, called the doctor and the sheriff, and the bill was paid off, and Betty Hightower, from New Orleans, her younger sister, came to fix what needed to be fixed on the farm.
“Some people came to claim money, and even property, but the will was specific, Betty got everything, and so was Mr. Josue Abernathy,” said Mr. Wright, the lawyer who handled Abernathy’s case. adding, “You don’t need to have come all the way from Saigon, I mean, it’s been twenty years since your grandmother died.”
“What happened to Betty Hightower?” Joshua asked.
“Everything was a mess back then, she went to finish what Caroline couldn’t, and in the process she was raped and died a mile from your mother’s house. Her husband was dead and her daughter too.”
“Well,” said Josué, “where did all the money go?”
“For all of us in this county, we paid for a park with the money, and even named it ‘…Abernathy’s Park!’ I hope you don’t want to fight the whole county over this matter.”
He stopped. And the attorney just slowly got up and bowed to his client, and said, “That’s $500, sir.”
“What…” said Josué?
“I don’t work for free!” said Mr. Wright.
“What if I challenge the will?” Joshua said.
“That would be your second mistake.” Said the lawyer, and Josué wrote a check at that very moment.
8-24-2008
