by Raydia Osborne

Created on: June 13, 2008

Somewhere there are two teenagers sitting under a great oak tree in the middle of a field, hiding under its shade in the sweltering heat, stroking each other's hair and giggling in each other's ears. Chewing on honey suckle. Sticking out their tongues to lick the breeze that sweeps under the tree. Surely, they're in love or at least they think they are. Surely, they believe they'll spend their life together. The boy strokes his sweetheart's chestnut brown face and runs his fingers over her full lips. The girl tussles his silky blond hair and kisses his milky white cheeks. But wherever they are is definitely not here. Not here in the state of Mississippi. Not here in the town of Rusty Creek. I know. I've had love like that before. Unconditional color-blind love. And thanks to the hate-filled people in this town, I'll never have love like that again.

Rusty Creek, Mississippi is filled with the most racist people you'll ever meet. If you're not white, you're nothing. Barely human. A piece of trash walking around the streets. I thank God everyday I'm white, not because I like looking like the racist people in my town, but because if I was anything else, I'd be dead. Hanging from a tree somewhere. Found shot behind an old plantation out house. Floating face down in the Mississippi River. That's how it is here. I've seen it my whole life. I've listened to some of my own family members describe how they can't wait until the weekend so they can go watch a lynching. It's a sport to them. They even bet money on how long it'll take a poor hanging black man to choke to death. But my parent's aren't like that. My father is the preacher of the biggest church in town, Rusty Creek Baptist Church. He's one of those rare white pastors who actually believes in treating everybody the same way, no matter their skin color. He's one of those men who has risked his life to help a black. The last black man he helped was a man named Sammy who was running from the owner of the land he was sharecropping. He claimed the landowner, Mr. Hubert, threatened to shoot him for stealing some chickens that he swore up and down he didn't touch. So he was running. He was a young guy, about twenty-one or twenty-two, with light brown skin and broad shoulders. You could look at his brawny arms and blistered hands and tell that he had been working in the fields his whole life. He towered over my father and it was hard to believe that a man so big could appear at our door step at three o'clock in the morning

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