(A True Story)
by Jerome Pearson
When I was six years old my mind became jolted by an incident that I have never forgotten!
It was on a late Friday afternoon when I saw the little pistol that would later be used in a murder! The pistol had a pearly white handle, and a silver snub-nose barrel. I thought it was cute, as I stood admiring it from a short distance.
I saw a young man who everyone referred to a “Boogie” and an older man referred to as “Brown”. They had come by our house and later decided to step out back to smoke a cigarette. I saw them because I was playing in a wood-pile out back.
Apparently, Boogie had just bought the gun, and was showing it to Brown; the man who drove him to our house. I saw Brown looking at the gun, and then feeling it, turning it over in his hand, and admiring it. He gave the gun back to “Boogie” which Boogie then placed back into his pants pocket.
Boogie would later kill Brown with that same gun within a few hours. Brown was able to see and admire the very weapon that would be used against him only a few hours later. He could see his fate, even if he did not know it!
But before Boogie killed Brown, they went back inside and continued to drink. During much of this time I had gone to bed. Over the next couple of hours, Boogie apparently became drunk and argumentative. My mother then asked Boogie to leave, which he did, but when he went outside, he decided to fire a bullet through our living room window. I must have been sound asleep because I heard neither a gunshot nor the commotion that I am sure ensued following that shot. Luckily, no one was hit during that incident.
However, the next morning, Saturday, I learned that the young man had killed the older man during the previous night, sometime after leaving our house. I immediately recalled that I had seen the gun, the victim and the shooter less than 24 hours before. Apparently, they argued as Brown drove Boogie a few miles away into the heart of Davis Station. There were several houses in the immediate area where they would also visit.
Before they left the town of Davis Station, their argument must have escalated, which resulted in Boogie shooting Brown with the same gun he had proudly shown him only hours earlier. Brown would later die because of his gunshot wounds.
This was, perhaps, my first realization of the tenuousness of life; the fact that two men joking around no further than 20 feet away from where I was playing would, within a matter a few hours, turn tragic. Obviously, this is an incident which has lived with me forever, since I was able to write about it more than 40 years later!
The local Sheriff’s Department was not interested in any kind of serious an investigation. The issue was not worth investigating. In the eyes of the law, it was just one Black man killing another Black man.
A few days later one of Brown’s sons came by our house! I guess he was trying to do his own little investigation. He had apparently heard that the two men had been at our house sometime earlier that evening. My mother gave him what little information she had. After all, although she was not responsible, she felt terrible about what had happened. Brown’s son was polite and did not make any insinuations.
I am reminded of short story by the writer Richard Wright, titled “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”. The story is set during the depression era when an innocent young man saw a shot-gun in a Sears and Roebuck Catalog. His family lived on a farm and they were sharecroppers. He convinced his parents to allow him to work and save up enough money to buy the gun. His parents did not want him to have a gun, but he cried and cried and finally convinced them. He claimed that he would only use the gun for hunting. After saving enough money and he could purchase the gun and bring it home. He was so excited with his new toy! His early morning chores included taking the mules out to pasture so that they could graze. On the first day after buying the gun, he got up early to begin his chores. Unbeknownst to his parents, he got up earlier than he needed to because he wanted to play with his gun and practice while the mules were grazing. His plan was to shoot in a direction away from the mules, but he was not used to the recoil. Finally, there was blast from the gun! BOOM! Before the young man realized what had happened, one of the mules was lying on the ground with a bullet-hole in its side. The young man tried to plug the hole with dirt, but it was too late. He therefore had to run away because the mule belongs to the white man for whom they share-cropped.
Boogie was like that young man, although perhaps not as innocent as the young man in Richard Wright’s story. Boggie bought the gun, not because he was under any kind of threat; he bought it because it made him feel good. He was a man who was only “almost” a man. He became drunk, and what might have resulted in a normal fist fight, now with a gun, resulted in the loss of two lives.
During the upcoming years, I would often see Boogie as he worked on a chain-gang. The chain-gang consists of a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging labor, such as chipping stone or cutting grass, usually along state highways or railroad tracks. They were monitored by guards with high powered rifles and could not escape without being shot; they were chained the entire time. Each time I saw him I would reflect on that fateful Friday evening that occurred years earlier. I would look into his eyes, and I would wonder if he remembered me seeing him with the gun that led to his current predicament. I don’t think so! To him, I was just another kid observing them cut grass. He would not have realized that he taught me a valuable lesson.
About ten years later, a friend of mine told me that he and his family were driving past this little store near the town of Jordan when they saw a crowd of people standing in the yard around a man who lying on the ground. My friend told me that he later heard that the man’s name was Boogie Johnson; apparently someone had just killed him. I told my friend that “I know of a Boogie Johnson; he had not long left prison for a killing he did years earlier!”
Perhaps the prominent saying is true:
What goes around comes around.
Wow! I was able to see this very true story from its beginning to its inevitable conclusion!
Jerome Pearson fff