and I'm not alone in telling them

I was listening to a PRI radio show, To The Best Of Our Knowledge in the car. The episode was called When Sin Bears Fruit. It was about a famous lynching in Marion, Indiana in the summer of 1930. And the story of the song, “Strange Fruit,” which was inspired by that lynching. And, finally, a new novel, which begins on that terrible day in Marion in 1930. It’s called The Evening Road by Laird Hunt. 

Listening to this show and hearing Laird Hunt read from his book, was so moving I had to pull over and write down the title, The Evening Road, so I would remember to read it.

The final part that Laird Hunt reads aloud:

But I kept hearing it in my head. Keep hearing it. Down the years and always banging at my door. And when it comes, when I'm thinking back, the devil-hot, blister-bright afternoon sky I am driving through turns to black and the air grows scorching ever hotter and the cornsilks' heads glow red with the heat of it and they cackle and roar and move in their glowing thousands for the jail. The earth starts to shake when they go. The Director commences to rise up into the air and slam down. Up and slam down and I can barely get the door open but I leave the Director and go with them. I am in the crowd and above it and the sheriff steps aside and they take their sledgehammers to the walls and beat their way in. Then they are pouring across the tile floors and past the iron doors and through the hallways of the big jail and there I go pouring with them and as we pour there are shouts about God and about country and about honor and about truth and about death and death and death and we pour up the stairs and find where they are holding the boys. I'm not dreaming, it's something I'm seeing, I'm there and I tell them to stop and I'm not alone in telling them. There are hundreds of us, thousands, millions even, and the earth joins us and the sky and the moon and the stars and we say stop but they do not stop. The first boy is beat to death right there, then dragged around, then hung from the bars on the cell window. Then one by one they take the others. They drag them dead and about-to-be dead through the night and the heat and the roaring crowd and the universe twitching to the killing trees.

The part that made me pull over: "...I'm there and I tell them to stop and I'm not alone in telling them. There are hundreds of us, thousands, millions even, and the earth joins us and the sky and the moon and the stars and we say stop but they do not stop." And I keep thinking about that part. I read The Evening Road back in August and it comes back to me again and again: at the end of the movie, The BlacKkKlansman, during Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, again and again.

"...I'm there and I tell them to stop and I'm not alone in telling them. There are hundreds of us, thousands, millions even, and the earth joins us and the sky and the moon and the stars and we say stop but they do not stop."