REDEMPTION IN A SMALL TOWN

Chance Encounter

It was the fall of 2000 and time had carved its initials on the old black man's face. Maybe he had hoped that the wrinkles and the crevices, the gray hair and the stoop that comes with age would disguise him. He had managed, all these years to steer clear of Oliver Springs, ever since that afternoon 60 years earlier when the two men approached him in the yard outside the old Richards house and warned him that if he knew what was good for him, he'd leave that town.

Young man threatened by two men

He was just a boy then, still in his teens, but he was old enough and wise enough to know that when a white man threatened you in the old South, even if the threat was oblique, you'd best listen and do what the man said.

In all those years, he had never returned, or so it was said.

But it was a new world now, a new century, the old man figured. Surely he could go back, if not Oliver Springs, at least nearby. Even if anybody from the old days was still alive, he was certain no one would recognize him.

He was wandering around a car dealership not far from Oliver Springs, maybe dreaming a bit when it happened. A woman caught sight of him. Time had changed him, to be sure, but not so much that she couldn't recognize him.

Tentatively, the woman approached him. She called him by name, and when she did, a terror he hadn't felt in 60 years clawed at his heart. At first he tried to deny that he was the man she thought he was. Only when she managed to convince him that two men who had approached him all those many years ago were indeed dead, did he admit the truth.

"I'm who you think I am," he told her.

He had kept it inside for so long.

He had tried to forget.

Now it was time to remember.

It had been 60 years since anybody had really thought much about the murder of the Richards sisters and the death of Powder Brown. As far as most people were concerned, the old sheriff, Bob Smith, had put the whole matter to rest when he concluded that Powder Brown had killed the sisters, gunning them down in cold blood with a stolen pistol before he turned the gun on himself.

Sure, there had been some who believed Powder was innocent, and they could even point to the findings of a coroner's inquest that said as much at the time. But as the years had passed, the notion of Powder Brown's guilt had almost become an article of faith. Of course he had killed them. And of course he had killed himself. What else could have happened? What else could have justified the rage that some people in the hills had felt back then, a rage that became so potent that that there was even talk that some in town, or from a neighboring town, had planned to snatch the boy's body from the funeral home, tar and feather it, and drag it through the streets of Oliver Springs? That threat was so real that Powder's few relatives, with the help of the black folk's funeral director in town, spirited the boy's corpse to a secluded spot in the woods where they could bury him in an unmarked grave. Surely, that kind of rage, the kind of rage that seeks punishment even after death, had to be justified; it had to be based on solid facts, didn't it?

The old man knew better.

And now, reluctantly, he agreed to tell his story. Within a short time of that chance encounter in the car dealership, at the behest of the woman who had recognized him, the old man agreed to tell his story to a radio reporter from Knoxville named Sam Brown. According to the statement the old man gave on Brown's broadcast, he had been out for a walk with Powder Brown, an old friend of his, the day before the killings that had so horrified Oliver Springs, and they had decided to take a shortcut through the woods that cleaved close to the old Richards house. They noticed two men standing near the house, and recognized them as well-known and reasonably well-connected citizens of the town. They thought little of the encounter at the time.

Richards' home

Two days later, though, while the town was still in shock over the murders, the old man said, he saw the two men again, again just outside the Richards house. This time, he said, the men collared him. According to authorities who would later interview the man, "they asked him if he had any family in Oliver Springs and... they told him it would best for him to leave Oliver Springs and to never come back and... not to say anything about what he had seen."

Then, the old man said, they warned him that if he did talk to anyone about what he had seen, "if they didn't get him they had a lot of relatives and one of their relatives would get him." The old man left Oliver Springs that day.

The statement wasn't completely convincing. As Sylvia Lynch, a professor at Lincoln University of East Tennessee who spent months researching a book on the case put it, there were some who were skeptical of the old man's account. And even if it were true, the warning didn't necessarily shed any new light on the long-ago horror. There could have been a thousand reasons why the men had warned him away from the old Richards place.

All the same, the old man's appearance on Sam Brown's radio show was a watershed moment in the case. For the first time in more than two generations, people were talking openly about the case. They weren't just speaking in hushed whispers, not just repeating rumors and gilding old myths with them. In some quarters, there was, it seemed, a willingness to tear off the prejudices and preconceptions, to see what facts still remained, and to reexamine them in the cold light of reason.

There is always a danger when myth meets reason, that long-held belief and prejudices, ancient or modern, will smother fact. There are some, many perhaps, who believe that is exactly what happened all those years ago when the body of young Powder Brown, a young man who may very well have been a crime victim himself, had to be smuggled out of town to keep a mob from defiling him. And there are others who believe that as the recent reinvestigation played out, and as it continues to play out, the same sort of thing has happened again. But this time there is a new set of victims. In the new myth, the ignorant racial prejudice of the old days has been, in the minds of some, supplanted by an equally pernicious belief in the unbounded evil of people who once upon a time were powerful.