Days slipped by like water through cracked fingers — days that should have been filled with the smell of pine and frying cornbread, with Ikrist Raya running barefoot down the path and Amie trailing behind him like a shadow. But instead, each sunrise felt heavier than the last, pressing down on the Raya house until the walls seemed too thin to hold it all in.
Anna Raya sat at the small kitchen table, her hair tied back, her hands cracked from scrubbing clothes she could barely focus on anymore. In front of her lay a piece of lined paper torn from an old schoolbook. On it, her neat handwriting spelled the same plea she had sent to every name someone whispered might help — preachers, colored lawyers upstate, a woman in Charleston who'd once fought for a fair wage for mill workers.
My son Ikrist Raya is fourteen years old. He is innocent. Please help us.
She signed her name at the bottom of each letter, folding them with careful hands, pressing the creases flat as if neat folds could make the words matter more. Amie watched her from the doorway, hugging her doll tight, her thumb pressed to her mouth though Mama said she was too old for that now.
"Mama," Amie asked in her small, tired voice, "when's Krist comin' home?"
Anna's breath caught in her throat. She smoothed Amie's hair back, her fingers trembling. "Soon, baby. Mama's gonna bring him home soon."
But her eyes flicked to the stack of letters, to the envelopes she'd begged a neighbor for, to the stamps paid for with coin scraped from the bottom of the flour tin. She wanted to believe the words as much as she wanted Amie to. But she had no choice but to speak hope, even if it tasted like ash in her mouth.
---
Caleb Raya had taken to spending his days on the courthouse steps when he wasn't at the mill. He'd lost three shifts now — shifts they couldn't afford to lose — but no foreman dared push him off the payroll just yet. Not when his boy's name was on everyone's tongue.
He spoke to whoever would listen. Deacon Henry from the colored church two towns over. A traveling pastor who'd once spoken up when a sharecropper got run off his land. Caleb pressed calloused palms into palms that were softer than his, repeating the same thing over and over: "My boy didn't do this. He needs a lawyer who'll fight. They got no proof but rumor."
Some nodded, muttered prayers. Some backed away, their eyes darting to the white men nearby who watched every word. Nobody wanted to catch trouble that wasn't theirs.
By sundown Caleb's voice was raw and his shoulders ached from holding himself upright under the weight of eyes that did not see him as a father — only as the father of the boy who did it.
---
At the jailhouse, Deputy Croft sat at his desk, pen tapping against a stack of forms he hadn't bothered finishing. Through the bars down the hall, he could hear Ikrist humming something — a tune that drifted out like smoke and curled into the empty office.
Croft closed his eyes. He'd asked Sheriff Hammond if Ikrist could see his mama. Hammond had laughed, teeth flashing like a wolf's grin.
"Let that boy stew. Make him talk. You get too soft, Croft, you best remember who signs your pay."
So Croft sat with his pen, the paper blank beneath it. He remembered his own boy back home, freckle-faced and loud, only twelve but already taller than Ikrist. He wondered if his boy would last five minutes alone in a cell like that.
---
Ikrist pressed his forehead to the bars. He'd run out of buttons to scratch the wall. He stared at the drawings he'd made — crooked flowers, a bird's wing half-finished, a fence that stretched into a corner and ended where the bricks swallowed it.
His belly ached. The cold beans sat untouched beside him. He tried to remember the warmth of his mother's hands on his cheeks, the soft hush of her hymn, the way she'd tuck him in even when he pretended to be too old for it.
He wondered if she was coming today. He wondered if maybe he'd dream her into the hallway, walking toward him with her apron and soft voice. He closed his eyes and told himself she's coming, she's coming until the words became a prayer he whispered into the cracks in the wall.
---
That night, Anna Raya wrapped her last letter, addressed it in her careful script: Thurgood Marshall, NAACP, New York City. She didn't know if it would reach him — didn't know if anyone that far away would even care about a colored boy in a tiny Carolina mill town.
She pressed the stamp down, sealing hope in a corner of an envelope that would have to carry it north on nothing but faith.
She closed her eyes, her hand resting over Amie's small head as her daughter drifted off beside her.
Hold him, Lord. Hold my boy in Your hands until mine can reach him.
Outside, the first fireflies blinked in the dark — tiny lights in a darkness that felt too big to fight alone.