Green Cotton

They say in the south that green cotton is bad luck. When green cotton matures, evil spirits come out of it to walk the earth. That's the folklore, anyway. I sat in a room full of people, just like me. All law enforcement types....prosecutors, cops, investigators. There were more empty chairs that morning because people were already headed home. Some were still sleeping off the drunk from the night before. Others were grinning sheepishly and awkwardly avoiding the eyes of someone they'd slept with, now regretting their poor impulse control. I watched the obvious, uncomfortable body language between several of them.

The slides came up on the screen and I sucked my breath in sharply. I normally won't look at gore not associated with my own cases. I'm long past the point of having any sort of morbid fascination with the graphic physical aspects of death and dying. I've seen more dead bodies than I would have ever wanted to, all sizes and shapes, in various states of decay and disarray. But I made myself look. I told myself that it was important to remember these particular images, to never forget them. I thought about his family and how they must have suffered. I thought about how hard it must have been for them to reconcile the hunks of flesh strewn on the road with someone they loved. How do you do that? How do you make sense of that sort of image in your head?

You would expect that, as I sat there, I would have profoundly examined the issues that led up to a man being dragged to death behind a truck simply because he was...who he was. I would have expected that from myself, but I couldn't. All I had in my head, in juxtaposition with the sneering face of this tattooed monster who shared the same last name with one of the greatest civil rights activists in history, was myself and Retta Lee playing jump rope at my aunt's house.

Retta Lee was a foster child that my great aunt Gladys raised for a while. Retta Lee was my best friend and jump rope partner for an entire childhood summer. She had eyes that would literally sparkle with mischief. We would run in the cotton fields out south of town, feed the chickens, tell each other all sorts of secrets and braid each other's hair. I wondered about her now. If she would still see me the same way. If any of this would matter, all of the ugliness that neither one of us could have possibly ignored as we'd matured. I forced myself to take in every gruesome detail while jump rope rhymes and the laughter of six-year-old girls circled in my head.

Cinderella, dressed in yellow
went upstairs to kiss a fella
made a mistake
and kissed a snake
how many doctors
did it take?

I rode all the way home wondering why I'd thought of something so completely out of the blue...a girl and days that I'd hardly thought of for thirty years. I look back at it now and it makes perfect sense. That was my heart's spell against the green cotton. That was my spirit struggling to fight back against those horrific images with memories of joined laughter and intertwined fingers, memories of love before words for differences between us were ever learned. I am heavy with the grief of my bearing witness to things that should have never happened. At the same time, I am blessed with the charms of so many moments of light in my life that I can never give up hope for the goodness in people, not even when I find myself in fields of green cotton.