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JUNE 1960 - SUNFLOWER COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI

Kinley John Blackwood was the third boy to come up missing this way since school let out for summer.

He disappeared sometime Friday evening after taking off with his other young, rambunctious friends. They gathered every weekend to do what boys do: drink beers, kiss girls, harass colored folks rushing to cross the city line before sundown.

His parents didn’t know about that last part, nor did the county police. Not that they would have been against it, but the fact wouldn’t have read well in his newspaper obituary.

Saturday passed without a word or a sign. 

What remained of Kinley John Blackwood was discovered on Sunday morning. Many drivers had passed him by, thinking he was roadkill or lowly debris. He would have rotted away in that ditch if one passerby hadn’t been curious enough to stop and examine the scene.

A scene that was just like the others.

Kinley John Blackwood had been slaughtered like a hog. He was cut at his jugular and hung upside down to drain the blood. Tongue removed. Skin and muscle shriveled down to the bone. Buzzards had picked at one of his eyeballs, but even scavengers found the carcass mostly useless.

He was, of course, buried in a closed casket.

In the town of Drew, where a young boy about Kinley’s age had been lynched not five years prior, there were rumors of retaliation. Some people say they heard screams and moans deep into the woods in the witching hours of the night.

Many dismissed it as one of those backwards congregations, screaming to God for revival, revelation, or revolution. Others say there was a slaughterhouse built especially for the whites. But those upright citizens of Drew, brave enough to maim a young colored boy, didn’t have the gumption to seek the truth for themselves.

Perhaps those who did never lived to tell the tale. 

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