The Body

A friend told me this story several years ago. A now-dead old man told it to her.


The year was around 1910, and the old man was barely a teenager. He lived with his parents on a plantation they owned. During a particularly hot summer, one of their field hands died. The dead field hand was a large black woman around 40 years of age. They summoned no coroner or doctor to determine the cause of her early death. No funeral home came for her body. She was black and only a field hand.

The black folks built her a wooden coffin and lined it with pretty cloth. They dressed her in her Sunday best and placed her in the coffin, her head on a pillow. The very next day they held her funeral. After all, it was summer and she would soon begin to swell . . . and smell.

After many years the old man remembered the rock hard pews in the little church there on the plantation. He remembered the oppressive heat, remembered dozens of black hands holding paper fans going swish swish swish as they stirred the hot air. He remembered the sweat drenching his clothing, the sweat dripping from his parents.

The service finally ended, and the mourners slowly walked past her coffin and looked down at her and paid their last respects.

And the old man told my friend something which had haunted him for most of a century: "Her body was sweating," he said.

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