Day 836: 5 Minute Freewrite: Monday - Prompt: crazy eyes

Rev. Obsidian Stone was well-known as an excellent organizer in the Black community of Lofton County; people marveled at how he and his wife, Freedom Belle Stone, had inherited and kept his father's funeral home business running after integration hit and fewer and fewer of the families the business had served for generations felt the need to patronize his business.

“I never worry about such things,” he was known to say. “The day will come when the people will return, and Freedom Belle and I will be here. Right now, our people have crazy eyes – they think they see a love and acceptance for Black people in Lofton County that they do not. They will learn, and return.”

Rev. Stone's prediction came true after the Ridgeline Fire, and Big Loft refused to officially count or make any provision for the recovery of the scant remains of the estimated 12,000 servants who had perished in the 4,000 homes that had swiftly and violently burned.

Rev. and Mrs. Stone went to the Lofton County Free Voice for help in discovering who was considered missing. Then, they had gone into their savings to start preparing free memorial services for those families in need, and thus began adding dignity and solace back to the process for the 12,000 families.

Others with quiet but large money had stepped up to provide funds to the Stones to do this service.

Others also took heed to what Rev. Stone said about what to do about Big Loft.

“Protests and vigils do not work in the situation of getting the attention of people that have no concern about you. Neither Big Loft nor Lofton County care about the massacre of Black people, or Latinos either. The richest neighborhoods in the city have been turned into a mass grave for our people, and we cannot even get access to those neighborhoods to get the bones of our people out because we don't own anything there. When the rains come, the remains will be lost forever, and Big Loft and Lofton County do not care about the 60,000 people who are suffering this continuing loss.

“Protest and vigils won't work when you are dealing with people with frigid souls and seared-off consciences. What we will have to do is to take the pain they have given us and put it right back in the part of them that they have some actual feeling about: their monies.”

Thomas Stepforth Sr., co-founder and chief funder for the Lofton County Free Voice, heard about those statements and went to see the Stones with both a donation to cover the costs of the memorials they were organizing and with an idea for Rev. and Mrs. Stone to organize the exact work Rev. Stone had said was necessary.

And so Rev. and Mrs. Stone had also become the organizers of the Downtown Drive-In Lockdown, whereby for a week at lunch time and rush hour, the families of the uncounted victims of the Ridgeline Fire drove in and locked down downtown Big Loft, also the county seat, through their crowding all the roads and also overloading public transportation on their way to demand, 1,200 at lunch, 1,200 at rush hour, that the county prosecutor add counts to the murder charges for each of their family members.

On Thursday morning, four days in, the mayor's office quietly let it slip to the news that they were officially reconsidering the death toll of the Ridgeline Fire.

“That means nothing,” Rev. Stone said to the traffic leader for the 1,200 going in at lunchtime. “That is reading for people with crazy eyes, who want to see the good in people and systems that see no value in them. Tell our drivers for the day to stay focused: until we see an official death toll with numbers that square with the lists we have, we keep driving the pain they have given us with their weeks of lies right back to them.”

Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews