A tree in D flat just barely hung onto the cliff face, clawing and scratching at the rocks for any patch of soil it could find. Dangling between two halves, it rested in the unnatural middle, a mistake away from one side or the other. No birds made nest on its branches, not a leaf grew on its arms, not a single green competed on the face for its precious nutrients- what little there were. The sand, as one could no longer call it dirt, was sucked dry from the tree’s greed. It was intimidating and rotting, past its prime, moments from death, living in a single breath. In a rough wind, many feared it would fall, but so it endured.

None so much as a girl with a voice of cream was as deserving of curiosity in the place. When she wandered past, doors were locked, curtains drawn, and whiskey poured. Everyone knew why.

Her mother was off, her father a drunk, and all in a wide radius believed in their incest. They all had seen the lights on late at night, the shrieks of pleasure coming from the floorboards itself, and all assumed. They were black besides, and everyone knew how those people acted. They thought their color was fitting of their sins, and wondered with plenty of explanations as to how they drew enough substance from that rock to support themselves. God knew how they managed to sell it, as not one white person in the state, and maybe the next state over, would touch their forbidden fruit. The Devil’s black poison runs in the place of blood in their veins, they said, and the Devil himself tills their soil. He has a deal with the black folk, not the other way around.
They saw the girl as her parent’s apprentice. She, darker than either of the two, was taught to look straight in the eye when she was spoken to, and to never turn away from anything. She walked through the place freely, dragging her corruption in her footsteps, as if it didn’t want to be associated with her. The white people hated her because she was the only black girl they’d ever seen to be this confident- even her parents wouldn’t dare tread how she did. So when she came to town, as she did almost daily, to meet the people, she was only met with closed doors and eyes peering through windows. Eyes of children, so their parents could point and say “There. That’s her. That’s the type of people you don’t want nothing to do with.” The only ones who stayed outdoors unafraid of her influence were those who had nothing to lose, but even they kept away. There was a story that one of the women had approached her with a wooden cross to tell her to turn back, but both the cross and the woman burst into flames.

The eyes were careful, however. The eyes are windows and doors, and Lord knows what hell that girl could unleash if given a door to their souls. She walked in step with hell’s hounds, and no one wanted to take a chance.

Oftentimes, singing was heard from their farm. Hollering, whooping notes would bury themselves in the ground, digging back to their origin. This scared the white folk the most. Their mortal sin and evil demeanor was separated not only by distance but often by walls, but this backwards worship snaked in through crevices and into reach of their ears, hitting them at their cores. They were tainted. God could judge them and hear the song that filtered through their skulls, and mistake them for allies of Satan. Children slept with earmuffs on and adults in paralyzing fear.

On Mondays, the family trio would come to town to sell their wares. The oranges they brought were always sweet and swelling with sin, perfectly ripe and always untouched. Somehow the family managed to pay rent each month, despite their fruit never selling, as far as they could see. They must steal, the white people thought. He must give them solid gold. Those oranges could never sell, so their money and means must be illegal or otherworldly.

But none questioned them. The days carried on. Neither the Judgment Day nor the Devil ever came. All remained in balance, a tip away from death, a hand away from life.

The white men decided to test the scale. They flocked together to appear bigger than they were, puffed out their feathers, and demanded to roost on that tree. Nothing could scare them away, they thought.
“We’d like to purchase your farm.”

It was cold, painfully cold, the day the four white men decided to take the walk up to the black farm. None had ever gone there since it had been last sold, and they didn’t remember how hard the trip had been. But they were determined. They pooled their money and were set to split the land. If the Negroes farmed on it, they thought damn well that white men could too, and deserved to. The wind screamed in mismatched harmonies, but the men went anyway. They wanted the oranges, the expanse, the view from the Cliffside. And they would have it.

“Please, suh, sit down. Have an or’nge?”

The black man placed a bowl of the finest looking oranges on the table. They seemed out of place- a splatter of neon paint on a dreary canvas, unnecessary electricity in an already tense room. It was not often his family had visitors, and the black man wanted to look his best. His arms were rough and steady from his work on the fields- no man worked for or under him- and his features were softened by sunshine. His wife stood in the back of the cramped sitting room, ready to get anything at a moment’s notice. The girl was nowhere to be seen, off in the fields or in town someplace.

They truly were nice folk, unlike the white people thought. Their song and exuberance was joy. Joy and love. Love of their family, love of their work, love of God. Their fingers always tasted sugary sweet and the sun seemed to rise each morning to please them.

But they were proud people. The man worked hard for this farm and his family. He went three towns over each Tuesday to sell enough of his extra fruits, as there was always plenty, to make rent. His family lived off their fruit, not only in business but also at home. They ate oranges with each meal, as often there was little money for anything else. But this was no curse, as who else could say they ate such a delicacy with every repast? Who else could say they had such a treat available to them at all hours of the day? For their people, the good and the sweet was so rare, to be rich in sugar was the same as gold. They had sweet company and sweet food, and the family couldn’t imagine anything more they wanted. However, the man never understood why the whites never bought their crop. He imagined that it was a misunderstanding, and the whites just didn’t realize how honeyed his crop was. He thought he would introduce them to the fruits of his labor and do some business. At that moment, however, his daughter walked in and the stars ruptured in the heavens.

All life stopped for her. The white men thought the Devil himself was coming to collect them. The room swelled in the heat. The lean girl towered over the four grown boys for the first moment, and the next movement was the arrival of her hounds. The sky clouded over, and the oranges seemed to grow until the table shook with the strain of keeping them up. Satan himself had arrived.

She was wild. Wild and spiteful of confinement. She had cultured a malicious fascination with the white people, those who were so similar to yet so distant from her. She imagined them as elves, only out for bad. And now they were in her home, threatening her. But her parents were smiling, welcoming them. So she smiled. They had taught her manners. She nodded, recognizing the company, and sat herself at the table across from the men, her eyes never wavering from their discomfort. She listened.

The tree hadn’t always been on the brink of perishing. A hurricane years ago had left it so. Lightning battered the cliff, the highest point in the area, and the tree was its unfortunate victim. The rock was bashed away from underneath it, and it was struck many times with electricity. It just barely survived, and hadn’t grown since. But neither had it died. Strange, and sad, for it was only fitting that the tree should be a weeping one, though for whom it wept was a mystery. Self-pity was a widely accepted notion, as many thought it wept at its master, for it laid on the land the black Devils possessed.

“I’m not understanding. Why our land. You’ve all never wanted it before.”
The girl’s voice dripped with juice from the fruit, and was beautiful to hear. The men were taken aback by this, as they expected a raspy, deep tone from one as dark as she. They had explained to the man of the house their intentions, and stated their bid. A polite argument ensued. The man would not give up his land, as he had nowhere to go, and was proud of his earnings. They weren’t bothering anyone, he said, why do they have to go? The white men had no answer, so danced around his pry. But his daughter would not let go.

When she was seven, the girl met a white boy who had wandered free and escaped into their farm. She hadn’t found anything wrong with him, but her parents informed her otherwise. Her mother and father seemed afraid of the boy younger than she. They approached him slowly, like he was a rabid dog, and stood between the two children. After shooing him back- gently- towards where he came from, they explained to her the dark inside the boy’s people. They told her how they themselves had been enslaved. They told her how the white folks sold them only the worst piece of land. They told her how they still treat them and their fellow black folk. They hadn’t planned to tell their daughter as these were new times, but they now saw that no matter the length of time that had passed or the distance between them and their lighter counterparts, some of their stink would leak in and try to choke their daughter. They had to protect her.

“But why?”
They couldn’t give her an answer. They tried to teach her in a favorable light: always be respectful regardless of their history, as past is past, never to be afraid, and never think she’s lesser. But that couldn’t change the girl’s instinct. How could a people do the things they did to another, she thought, even at seven years.  God, as she was taught, loved all his children, but how can these people be loved after what they did to their brothers and sisters? Are they even children of God? She knew they saw her as beneath them; she could see it in their eyes when they ran from her when she came to town to test their goodness and humanity. She came to the conclusion early on that they themselves must be working for the Devil, keeping the promised people, the good people, from heaven. She lived in a hell, and she accepted the fact. She saw herself as an angel among beasts, and armored her skin and sharpened her mind to fight them off.

She walked through town to show she was unafraid. Unafraid of the hate that ran red as their blood. She grew proud of their fear of her. Evil should always back away from the goodness of God, and she felt empowered by the white stallions that she felt pushing her forward. Regardless of lack of schools nearby, the girl taught herself. Once her mother taught her to read from her own rudimentary knowledge, the daughter studied the bible and could contest with the most well-read preacher in the state, and also read a plethora of history, arithmetic, and language books. And thus she was proud.

“What’s here that you want from us.” Her voice boomed down from heaven itself, but the white men just felt the heat from the breath of the Chimera sitting in front of them.

A man spoke on instinct, voicing what much of the town desired, even if not their real motivation. “That tree,” he said, “we want to cut down that tree.”

The black folk laughed! What an idea. The poor tree, hanging onto life by a thread. They had found it strangely handsome, but hadn’t cared either way. “Why’d you wanna cut down that tree?” The family could not understand what the tree did to them.

Another brave white man spoke.
“It’s the Devil’s tree.” With those words the laughter was silenced. “That’s where the Devil came to take that young girl’s soul.”
The trio’s eyes turned as dark as their skin. They had known the white people didn’t like them, but never thought they could be that cruel. They were God loving people. The white folks, after all they’d done, were the hell-born fiends, if anyone was.

“Please, suh’s, come back ‘nother day. We’ve got a field to tend to.” At the woman’s words, the white men started their walk home, sweating and jogging to outrun the evil shadow that chased them.

Three days went by without a word, but the girl’s notions proved correct. The white men were evil. They had brought the Devil into their home, and tried to take the only place she had ever known away from her. She no longer went to the town. She did not want to see them; her pride was gone, and she was afraid. The family stayed together, praying. But God did not hear them. The white men returned. They brought no money, only hatred. Hatred and a whip.

When the black father was nothing but a bleeding carcass and the women tasted nothing but the salt that dug into their wounds, the men turned on the women. They would have that land, and if the black girls didn’t leave them and take the Devil with them, they would be the next Negroes to water white man’s rightful crop. The ground trembled as good and evil met in the sky and on the earth. The mother tried to drag her daughter away, but she wouldn’t leave without a last word to her accusers.

“We can’t take away the Devil- he’s screwed y’all over so hard, no one can cut out that hate growin’ inside all you.”

The men would have gone after her, but a major snap coming from an inferno struck a chord through the field, and the women got away. The men had pride, but were not so dumb as to chase their Satan to God knows where. They had done their duty: excised the black that plagued their home. They had won a bitter victory. The felt God’s critical eye on their backs, frowning at a loss of one of his own, but the burning on their necks was pushed aside as the beating of the sun, and the feeling passed.

Their next order of business was to expunge that damned tree they thought was the bridge the Devil used to send his underlings into their town, acting like a steady stream of wicked venom that soaked the ground they walked on. But something beat them to it. Their hatchets had no purpose against a sheer cliff face covered in sand. Not even its roots were left- the whole thing had just got up and dropped straight back down to the hell they assumed it came from.