Raising Abraham

John Harris was murdered in cold blood on the stormy night of July 3, 1951, in central Mississippi. His lifeless body was found the next morning in the bed of a farm wagon which was deeply mired in the roadside mud adjoining the county-line spring. The sheriffs of both counties refused to investigate the killing because of what was referred to as 'jurisdiction issues'. The residents of the county-line community were not fooled, however. John Harris and his neighbors were all blacks. John's wife, Mary, was left with absolutely nothing; not even the wagon. It belonged to the landowner of the sharecropper farm where they lived. Her world had suddenly blinked from one filled with love and happiness to one overcome with grief and despair. She had been a good wife to John and a wonderful mother to six-year-old Abraham, their son. Now, she was alone with no source of food and shelter, the unsolved mystery of her husband's murder and a small son to raise without a father. While John was still alive, they had talked and dreamed of the day when they could buy a piece of land and leave behind the despicable living conditions and inhuman treatment by the landowner of the sharecropper farm where they lived. That dream had suddenly become a vanishing vapor. At John's funeral, with tears streaming down her cheeks, she said her final goodbyes. Standing alone at his graveside, her soft words came slowly as she promised him that Abraham would never have to live under the conditions of pseudo-slavery that a sharecropper's life typically degenerated into as a tenant. Further, she committed that somehow she would provide a path for their six-year-old son to rise above the poverty conditions he had been exposed to as a part of a sharecropper family. He would become a man that his father would have been very proud of, had he lived. Abraham would get an education! She had to admit; however, that it could well be an impossible dream. She, herself, could not read or write thus adding to the challenges of her situation. Mary had always been a strong willed and determined person. However, she had no way of foreseeing the magnitude of the pain and suffering that would accompany the triumphs and further tragedies that lay ahead in her effort to fulfill the promise she had just made to her dead husband.