Day 832: 5 Minute Freewrite: Thursday - Prompt: tick tock

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It was strange for a Lee – and he could not utter it in many places in Virginia, even as late as 2019 – to take so much inspiration from Abraham Lincoln, but Captain H.F. Lee had internalized many of the hated president's many pithy sayings.

“If you have six hours to cut down a tree, spend four hours sharpening the axe.”

Captain Lee believed that, and so gave himself six hours to draft the form letter he was going to have to send to the families of the 12,000 people undercounted by the precinct of the Big Loft, VA police force that he was taking over as interim divisional commander, at the express appointment of the commissioner of police.

3:00pm – the clock started after Captain Lee had awakened from a brief and refreshing nap after the lunch he had enjoyed with his beloved Maggie Thornton. After that, his heart was relieved and his mind clear, and he returned to his room and to his notepad.

Tick-tock … time passed swiftly as Captain Lee first recalled the form letters he had to write as a colonel and unit commander in the Army. “It is my great regret to inform you …” oh, he remembered each one of those and who they belonged to. He took his time remembering, knowing he had no choice but to take his time. PTSD was not to be played with. Captain Lee knew better than to fight the memories and emotions, so he just let them roll until they had rolled on out, two hours later.

5:00pm – Captain Lee knew all the men whose families he had written home for, and the temptation was to go more generic for 12,000 people he did not know. But that would be an even greater disaster, because already those 12,000 had been written off twice as people – once because nobody even bothered to try to evacuate them, and then to even try and count them. Even 12,000 was just a coroner's estimate – the vast majority of the people for whom these servants had worked had still not come through with lists of the missing. The estimate was 4,000 houses burned down, and three servants at the house working at the time of the fast-moving fire, and enough remains to account for that.

So: Captain Lee tried to imagine what the families must have felt like … the worry, the disbelief, the hopes dashed as time had passed, the grief, the further disbelief as no one in authority would even acknowledge what had happened, the rage … that, Captain Lee could identify all too well with, because his mother's family had partied over the death of his Black wife and son, and his commanding officers had gone right on as if nothing had gone wrong at Five Bright Nine. The rage, and the need for vindication … that, he knew.

But these were all people that Lofton County had worked since before it was its own county to keep powerless … the feelings of powerlessness, the feelings of inadequacy, the feelings of inferiority were all placed upon the Black and Latino community by design. 400 years of “by design” as far as the Black people were concerned.

6:00 – tick-tock – Captain Lee began to write down what his letter needed to provide in light of the total loss it was meant to address:

1. Acknowledgment of what was done
2. Acknowledgment of the harm done
3. Acknowledgment that BLPD was responsible

Captain Lee stopped short of adding a promise of a different future. Who would believe it? The fact that a nephew of the best-known Confederate general had been put in charge would put the icing on the cake of distrust. He opted instead to write down specific things that had been done and would be done to implement change, and also added an invitation to the affected communities to at any time come to him and demand accountability for the steps he was outlining, and to speak on necessary steps that he had not yet thought of.

That was the key. Apologies were necessary. Repentance was necessary. An active and continuing acknowledgment of the humanity and rights of the communities affected – that was the key to the whole letter. A letter as a beginning, not an end, not a washing of the hands of the whole matter, but the start of the work Captain Lee would have to carry through … perhaps he was not going to leave the police force as soon as he would like … but, so be it.

7:00 – tick-tock – time to start writing the letter.

To be continued ...

Photo by David Kennedy on Unsplash