Fic: The Bridge
Title: The Bridge
Author: scythethewicked
Characters: Doctor, Martha, OC’s.
Wordcount: abt. 2750
Rating/Warning: Adult for Violence and Disturbing themes.
Setting/Spoilers: Somewhere in Season 3. (Between 42 and Utopia, I think.)
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and its characters are the property of the British Broadcasting Corporation. After reading this, you’ll know that I must never, never be trusted with them.
Summary: In a small town in modern day Mississippi, a local teenager recalls the horrid story of a lynching in the Depression Era South and the terrible miracle and tragedy that followed.
Author's Notes: Six months, six drafts, two complete rewrites and I've only come to the acceptance that I'll never be completely happy with it. I can only warn you: this is not a nice story. Some classic Doctor Who series knowledge needed to understand full context.
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Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction ... The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate…
Martin Luther King Jr.
I know indeed what evil I intend to do,
but stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury,
fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.
Euripides, Medea
The Bridge
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stare. Well, no, that’s a lie; I was staring, but not because of what you’re probably thinking. If I were you, I know I’d think it too, but just-
You know this bridge’s story, don’t you?
Well, sir, this bridge has a bad history. It’s not a very nice story and there’s not a person in this town who wishes it weren’t true, but if I tell it, I have to tell it all, or you wouldn’t understand.
You see about seventy years ago, June of 1932, there was a lynching on this here very bridge. It’s a wonder they haven’t torn this bridge down since then. I suppose it’s a wonder this thing is still standing at all. The town, the older folk of the town don’t talk about it much and try hard as they can to forget it. Other towns have histories of lynchings, some much longer and even more recent than ours, but what happened right here in ’32 stands out. Most people try to keep it quiet; it really wouldn’t do the town much good to be remembered for what happened.
You see, back then, in the middle of the Depression, a young black man and white girl fell in love. They had heard that in Europe marriage across races was legal, so they decided to escape to there and get married. You see, back then a black man and white woman couldn’t be together, not here in the South. Even today it ain’t what y’all would call a walk in the park. My friend Lydia and her boyfriend Cyrus just had to leave. After someone burned a cross in their front yard Lydia began having nightmares about Cyrus being hanged from this very bridge, so they just moved to Oregon.
Back then, if a black man slept with a white woman, no matter what, it was considered rape. It didn’t matter that this couple were in love or anything. If any of the white folk in the town found out about them, that man would be good as dead. Just as those two were getting ready to elope, the girl told her sister, who told her boyfriend, who told the town. From that point on, like I said, he was as good as dead. The sheriff arrested him on some trumped up charge and he was sitting in the local jail. There was probably a lynch mob already forming.
Well, just a few days prior to that this English couple had come to town. One was a white man and the other was a black woman. Well, they had heard what had happened and they helped that young man escape from jail.
That young man caught up with his girlfriend and they went to France. They’re still together now, I hear. He ended up becoming a scientist there, a famous one, too. He wrote up some important theory for physics or something. Once in a while a reporter will come down here asking about them, but people, the older folk just lie and say, nope, never heard of him. The best man this town ever produced and we just pretend we never heard of him. As you can imagine, that couple never came back here, not after what happened.
That English couple broke that man out of jail, but they ended up getting caught. The mob that formed died down, but they rallied up again, twice as strong to lynch the English couple the next night. I heard that the two had already escaped the jail themselves when they got caught by the mob. My granny thinks that maybe if they hadn’t escaped the jail they wouldn’t have died. I know that’s just not true. My grandpa said that the crowd had been itchin’ to see a hanging, and if they couldn’t, to use his words “hang a black man, they just as soon hang the two uppity English who had rid of them that chance.” Well, those weren’t his exact words, you can imagine what words he did use and I’d rather not repeat them.
It was a small crowd, maybe a hundred men taking part. It was only small ‘cause it was sudden. A hundred men might not sound small, but if there had been more time people would’ve come down from around the county to take part. I have to say at least a hundred men. Women and children too, though they mostly just watched. Nearly every white man in the town took part; some folk came up from Ashton too. Back then, a public lynching was considered a form of entertainment, if you were white. The whole town would show up to a lynching.
My grandparents were just kids at the time - grandpa was eight and granny would have been about seven, and they were taken along. Since the lynching was done on a bridge, most of the town watching was standing on the river bank. My grandpa though, was on the bridge itself; his father carried him on his shoulders for a better view. They dragged both those poor people to this bridge. My granny says all the while, all the while they were dragging them to the bridge, the man kept screaming the girl’s name. He screamed at them to just let her go, kill him all the same, do what they’d like, but just let the girl go. Even from down there, on the river bank where my granny was watching, they could hear him screaming that poor girl’s name. Whenever we get to that part of the story, my granny would start crying.
The mob pulled them to this bridge and tied the ropes to the railing and the noose end around their necks. My grandpa said they pushed them off the same time, but my granny claims they pushed the man off first a good ten seconds before they pushed the girl off, so long that granny thought they had just been planning to hang the man to scare the soul out of the girl and then just take her back to jail. God, if that had been true than no one would have died and I could tell you a miracle happened on this bridge instead. Instead they killed her too, pushed her off the bridge.
The men on the bridge, at least not those by the rail were cheering. They hadn’t realized that the people on the river bank had stopped cheering with them. My granny says that they don’t know how the ropes binding the man’s hands together came undone, since they know they were bound and tied when he hit the end of the rope, but they did. To the horror of everyone who saw, that man climbed up that rope, climbed up his own lynchin’ rope. Ask me, that alone is enough for any nightmare. Most men on the bridge didn’t know this till he was nearly at the top, and he climbed over the railing there right in front of them and took the rope off his neck.
Now, if this story weren’t strange enough, my grandpa swears up and down that man’s face was different. I don’t mean he just looked different, I mean, as in he looked like a different man in the same suit. His hair was blonde, while before his hair had been brown and his whole face was shaped different. Everyone else on the bridge who survived that day says the same thing, that his whole face changed, otherwise I never would’ve believed it.
The men on the bridge were so shocked at that, no one did anything. Finally one of the younger men, I think the sheriff’s son, ran forward to push him off the bridge again, but he grabbed him ‘round and took out the boy’s gun out of the holster and held it to the kid’s head and ordered them to pull the girl up. The men on the bridge, so scared out of what they’d seen did as he said. They pulled up the rope and brought her back on the bridge-
They brought her back on the bridge, but her neck had snapped so it was too late. It was too late the moment they pushed her off. They saw the man just take the noose off her neck and held that girl’s body and cried. My grandfather had never seen a man cry before, so he remembered that. He said it was a horrible wailing sound that made everyone in that crowd go quiet. I don’t know what sort a cry would make a lynch mob go quiet, I can’t even comprehend it. My great-grandfather took my grandfather off his shoulders at that point and told him to run home, but the crowd was moving so fast and everyone got so panicked, he just got lost in the crowd and never even made it off the bridge until it was all over.
The sheriff’s son ran forward again, to the lynched man while he was weeping over that girl’s body, when something in that man just snapped. I can’t condone all he did next, not all of it, but I can understand it. I have no problem understanding it. That man grabbed that gun and shot the sheriff’s son in the head.
Then hell broke loose.
First that man shot the sheriff’s son, then he turned into the crowd and kept firing. The men in the crowd with guns tried firing back, but he fought like something no one had ever seen. They say he dodged bullets, and when the bullets in his gun ran out, he grabbed one from a corpse or tore one from the hands from one of the men trying to shoot at him. He just kept on killing. I don’t know if he had killed people before or the town lynching him made him a monster, but I always thought it was probably more of the second.
While this was happening, the people on the banks were walking to the bridge, hearing gun shots but not knowing what was happening. With all the people trying to get on the bridge and people getting off, the place was chaos. There was a screaming and general mayhem, but no one was sure what exactly was really happening. No one was able to get off or on but just lay like lambs for slaughter. Eventually word got spread what was really happening and people began to run away. By then it was too late.
The lynched man killed at least twenty people the first time, I think; I can’t be sure. He was shot, he was shot a couple times, but he kept on going. Finally someone managed to shoot him in the head and he fell.
Then he got up. And this - all people who survived swear up and down - his face had changed again. People who saw and lived swore his hair was red that time. His clothes were still bloody but as far people could tell, all his wounds had vanished like they’d were never there. And then he just started killing again. Men fought back, but he fought them off and kept killing. When he didn’t have a gun ready, he used what he could find. I’m told my great-grandfather shot him three times with a shotgun, hitting him in the chest, but nothing stopped him. He just yelped something horrible and threw a knife he got off one of the bodies and killed my great-grandfather. People were running then, all running off the bridge, leaving the bodies of the dead and wounded.
The lynched man fell one last time and only one person saw it. My grandfather was sitting at the body of his own father. The bridge was empty of life save those two. The lynched man’s clothes by then were a bloody mess. His blue suit was stained black by all the blood. Not red, not brown, but black the blood was so soaked through. He fell one last time, and then he awoke and stood back up. My grandfather said his face had changed again. He was older that time and his hair was black. There something cold in his eyes, something awful, though I suppose that’s not to be unexpected.
The lynched man walked back to the body of that girl and picked her up, holding that girl in his arms. He turned and looked at my grandfather, and spoke to that eight year old boy. My grandfather said his voice was different, cold, really cold, and chills went down his spine as that lynched man spoke. He spoke of hellfire coming back to Earth, of burning that town and the whole world to ash. He said he was tired of saving people just to watch them kill others. He was taking this town with him, taking its name and wiping the world clean with it. By then I don’t think there was anything sane left in him.
He walked off that bridge, carrying the body of that poor girl in his arms. About an hour later one woman saw him walking behind the general store, still carrying that girl’s body. She didn’t follow them, she was still afraid he had a gun on him. About a minute later she said she heard an awful roaring noise like an animal roar but when she finally got nerve to look behind the store, there was nothing there.
No one saw him again. The county organized a man-hunt, but no one found so much as a hint of what happened to him. Many people in the town thought he was the Devil himself. I know better.
Forty-seven people died that day. Thirty men, seventeen women. He spared children. That’s one small mercy out of the event; the youngest killed were a couple a’ teenagers about my age. He could have killed that boy, he could have killed my grandfather and I wouldn’t be here telling you this story, but he didn’t. He didn’t.
That was the last lynching this town ever had. One of the last lynchings in the county too. After that, that and the fact most of the men of the town were dead or wounded, people just lost their taste for it. ‘Course, lynchings had become fewer and fewer over the years up ‘till then, maybe that might have been one of the town’s last even if so many people hadn’t died. There was a memorial to those that died, not far from this bridge, but it was destroyed in a storm ten years back and the town council couldn’t bring themselves to re-erect a memorial to a lynch mob.
The town’s never quite recovered since then. Like I said, that couple, the scientist and his wife, never came back, not after they heard what happened. Her family disowned her and his family moved up to Ohio in the fifties. That couple just stayed in France though they spent the Second World War in England. After that they went back. I read somewhere that all three of their children became doctors.
A lot of people in this town just tried to forget what happened but everyone who was here that day carried it to their grave. The paint on this bridge hides stains that are never coming out.
That’s why I was staring. I mean, it’s not just the fact that you’re standing on this bridge, and you’re black and you’re white, but it’s the fact, you’re both English. And miss, my granny remembers the girl they hanged was wearing blue jeans too. She’d never seen a woman in blue jeans before. And your suit, sir, my grandpa said the man they hanged was wearing a deep blue suit too. And I couldn’t help but overhear you two talking about wondering what it would have looked like before they added those houses over there, which would have been seventy years ago. You see how that would scare the sweet Jesus out of me? That’s why I was stare-
The town’s name sir?
Valeyard, sir. Valeyard, Mississippi.
And this is Valeyard Bridge.