Broken Branch

The year was 1939 when a small community near Augusta, Georgia first heard TC utter the riveting phrase, “Keep your elbows resting on the needle.” TC, a lumberjack and a rich timber baron made a pack. They had stepped across each others’ shadows since young boys – one being of enormous wealth the other having a perfect aim and strength for felling 60’ pines and cypress trees.  Amidst civil strife, TC convinced a small contingency of friends to follow him deep into the forest across the rugged Acorn Trail to grow their own dreams.  On an early morning in May 1945 ten covered wagons had reached the Acorn trail. Having been separated by politics, religion, race and the volatile mixture of love and revenge, few could ever return as the road home was splattered with the blood and ill deeds many had left behind.  Forty-five years later, they would take an accounting. Some would call them cowards who high-tailed it.  They would offer to drain two manmade lakes – slowly. There was Meeliah, an island girl left along while Clay Albert tended to the lives of a rich Philadelphia family and she knew how to bake a pineapple sweet potato pie that could arouse … and her jungle sting was severe. Her punishment would be unending; Clay Albert was determined to break her.  One day they could not coax her out of the lake.  One Sunday three brides-to-be would go off in a huff looking for adventure, a thing called hatching.  They came upon a black family.  Their intent was to enjoy some freshly churned ice cream and place ribbons in the pretty little girls’ hair. But three days later, one of the teenage boys would be bludgeoned to death. Was it something they did, said, or wrote? Would Barbara Lynn, a bride-to-be, get to live in the cottage behind the plantation house where slave graves were recently discovered?  Did Tim really love her or was he after her blood line. He’d proclaimed, “There are no brown spots about me; I am White from tick to tock and my eyes …” Really? While one community dismantled and escaped into the forest, another one a state away vowed to leave a forest in Dorchester County, South Carolina, beat their tools into cleats and create the greatest civilization of modern times one that would one day leave the gravity of the earth and float among the stars. They had promised their mother a homeland. But first they would tenderly assault unjust social and political structures. Some pressed into their minds that it would take 100 years, but more than one retorted, “We’re going to do it in one generation.”  The year is 2012 and counting to 2033 from 1933; a 100 years. Although Thelma claimed to be the mother of more children than any woman known hardly six could be counted at any one time; they having gone on to the other side she said. She’d referred to them as her glories, her carrots.  Were they fathom? With little to go on but the suspicious tone of a business attorney and some missing birth certificates, the author recreates this lost civilization in, “The Dark Circle – The Search for the lost children of the Mud.” The tenderness and love between Miles and Thelma Dunston are captured as the, “The Slave Girl and the Jew.”   Five overlapping stories tell of their courage and toils of rebirth of these families and the triumph of the human spirit.