The Bunker
How Bibb County, Alabama, became home to one of the most horrifying accusations of child abuse in American history.
225 charges of rape, sodomy, human trafficking, and kidnapping have already been filed; as many as 28 perpetrators may be eventually be tried for sexually abusing children as young as 3.
But what really happened?
It happened in a forgotten place. The thick fog of a mid-August morning lingered atop the pines, drawing moisture from the tributaries feeding the Cahaba River as I turned onto Main Street from Bibb County Highway 1, the blue highway. Heading north towards the towns of Brent and Centreville, trees gave way to a Piggly Wiggly and a secondhand store just before the mayor’s office and Brent Baptist Church, where the town’s older, wealthier white residents worship. Behind the church, off Main Street, a side street leads to the Bibb Correctional Facility, inmate population 1,800.
Plantation Road is the main artery through Brent’s black neighborhood, which is labelled Zulu on maps but among locals is called “Zuzu.” The homes in Zuzu were built to house workers for the W.E. Belcher Lumber Company, which processed long and shortleaf pine at its mill on Plantation Road. The mill was the town’s largest …
Reservation Cowboy
A Lakota boy’s rite of passage in South Dakota
Which one are you, cowboy or Indian?
Any man can be a cowboy. But first you have to become a man.
The day is the fourth of July, Independence Day to some. “Nope,” Mom clarifies, “Firecracker Day.” On this Firecracker Day, the boy is sat in the kitchen in the morning, messing with his mom as she fits her cowboy hat to her head.
“This is my Fourth of July shirt,” Mom boasts, tugging the bottom corners of a yellow tee to show the face of a Native American man and his caption: “I loved America before it was called America.” Asked who the old man on the shirt is, the mother and son laugh to each other and mutter, “some ole Indun.” Then they slip on their cowboy boots and load their horses in the trailer, pack the saddles and halters.
For three years the boy hasn’t rodeoed, a sad span which sums to almost a quarter of his life. This national holiday may be just another day to the boy — albeit one in which he can light off his fireworks — but it’s actually more remarkable than that. He’s back …
The Front Porch
Moths
The old summer place has been in the family for seven generations, which counting the grand-children makes eight. For most of the year it sits dormant, being more like what was once called a “camp,” with plank walls and little to no insulation outside of the kitchen, with its great stone fireplace hinting at some greater ambition that was seemingly scaled back. It only really comes alive in the summer, when generations of cousins and their children visit, presided over by the surviving elders, who at this point include my mother, who is blind as a bat, and two of her three sisters, who I hope will live forever, so that they can continue to recite tales about the simple pleasures of their childhoods on this very lake, and of the men who came to pay court, and whose advances they ever-so-chastely refused, unless the beau happened to be rich enough, and therefore a fitting prospect for the wedding columns …
