The girls were growing up like weeds, time was ticking by, and life settled into that rhythm. Waking up before the rooster, making strong coffee, scrubbing the house, tending the girls, mending the clothes, cooking the food.
Otis would head out to the fields before the sun cracked the horizon and come back when the sky was turning purple. We’d eat dinner in silence, go to bed, sleep, and start it all over again the next day.
I won’t lie to you and say I was happy, but I wasn’t completely unhappy either. It was the life I had been dealt, and I accepted it. I had my healthy daughters, I had hot food on the table, and I had a sturdy roof. Many folks had far less than that.
That was how it went for thirteen years. Thirteen years of a quiet marriage without great soaring joys, but without catastrophic problems either.
Until that Tuesday.
I will never forget it. It had rained heavily at the end of December, soaking the earth, so the fields were looking lush. The corn had come in well. Otis even seemed a bit calmer, less serious than usual.
The girls were on break from school. Ruth was eleven years old by then and was already my right hand around the house. Ruby was nine, smack in the middle of that mischievous stage, climbing trees and getting mud on every dress I sewed her. And Pearl, six years old, still little, but already watching everything with those sharp eyes.
It was Tuesday, January 16th, 1968.
I remember the date so clearly because the next day was a special prayer meeting at church, and I always lit a fresh candle for it. So, I know for a fact it was the 16th.
It had been a completely normal day. I got up early, brewed the coffee. Otis went to the fields. I stayed back to look after the girls. I made lunch, scrubbed the laundry on the board.
In the afternoon, I sat down and mended a dress of Ruby’s that she’d torn playing outside. I made dinner—grits and collard greens with a bit of cured ham we had left over.
We ate together. The girls went to sleep early, worn out from playing under the Georgia sun all day. Otis and I stayed up a while in the living room. He was smoking his pipe, the sweet smell of tobacco filling the air, and I was darning a sock.
Then we went to bed. It must have been around 9 o’clock at night when we finally lay down.
I always slept on the left side of the bed, next to the wall. Otis slept on the right side, next to the door. It had been that way since the night we got married. The bed was wooden, old, and creaked in protest every time we moved. The mattress was filled with corn husks—hard, lumpy, and uncomfortable—but it was what we had.
I fell asleep quickly. I was bone tired. It had been a heavy day.
And then, in the dead of night, I woke up.
I woke up suddenly, with a start, the way you wake up when your instincts scream that something is wrong. You know that feeling when you have the absolute certainty that someone is watching you? That primal prickle on the back of your neck? That was the feeling.
I opened my eyes slowly, still half-groggy with sleep. The house was dark, pitch black. There was no moon that night to cast a glow through the window. Everything was swallowed by the dark.
But, child, I saw his silhouette.
The silhouette of Otis was standing right there by the bed. He was just standing there, looming over me.
My heart started racing like a trapped bird. I got so scared that, for a split second, I couldn’t even draw a breath. My mind immediately went to the worst—I thought it was a burglar, a drifter who had broken in.
But then my eyes adjusted to the gloom, and I saw the outline of his shoulders, his head. It was him. It was Otis, standing on my side of the bed, staring down at me.
I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t get a word out. I just lay there frozen, looking up at him, and he kept standing there, a statue in the dark, just watching me. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t move a muscle.
After a while—I don’t know how long, maybe a few minutes that felt like hours—he turned, walked back to his side of the bed, and lay down without saying a single word. He acted as if nothing had happened.
I stayed awake the rest of the night, my heart pounding against my ribs, my hands sweating cold. I lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, trying to wrap my mind around what had happened.
Why had he done that? Why had he stood there watching me like a hawk watches a field mouse?
In the morning, when the sun finally broke through the curtains, I pretended nothing had happened. I got up, washed my face with cold water to wake myself up, and made the coffee, just like any other Wednesday.
But my eyes were glued to him. I watched his every move, trying to see if he was acting different, if there was a twitch in his eye or a shake in his hand.
But he was normal. Just like always. He sat there at the table, quiet, serious, buttering his biscuit and drinking his black coffee without a care in the world.
I thought I was going crazy. I thought maybe it had been a nightmare, something cooked up by a tired mind, or maybe he had just gotten up to use the outhouse and stood there by accident, confused in the dark.
What do I know? I tried to convince myself it was nothing, just a trick of the shadows.
But the next night, the nightmare returned.
I woke up in the middle of the night with that same jolt of electricity running down my spine. I opened my eyes, and there he was again. Standing right next to the bed. Watching me.
This time, my eyes darted to the clock we had on the wall, an old wind-up piece his daddy had given him that ticked loud enough to drive a person mad. The hands glowed faintly in the dark. It read 2:47. Exactly 2:47 in the morning.
He stood there for about ten minutes this time. I lay there, rigid as a board, pretending to be asleep, but I was wide awake.
My heart was pounding so hard against the mattress I thought surely he could feel the vibration. I was trying to understand, trying to make sense of the senseless. Then, without a word, he went back to his side of the bed.
The next morning, while we were sipping our coffee, I couldn’t hold it in. I asked him, “Otis, did you get up last night?”
He looked at me over the rim of his cup with a face of total innocence, like he didn’t know what on God’s green earth I was talking about. “Get up for what? To go to the bathroom or something?”
“No,” I said, my voice trembling just a little. “I mean… did you just stand up?”
He shook his head. “No, Hattie. I slept like a log all night. Why?”
“Nothing,” I lied, looking down at my plate. “I thought I heard a noise. Must have been the wind.”
And that was it. Subject closed. He didn’t know, or he was pretending not to know with the skill of an actor. I didn’t know which was worse.
But child, it happened again the third night. And the fourth. And the fifth.
Every single blessed night, always at the exact same time. 2:47 AM.
I started to get desperate. I started to be afraid to close my eyes. I would stay awake, staring at the ceiling, waiting for that time to come.
And when the hands on the clock aligned, there he was. Standing. Watching me. Saying nothing. Doing nothing. Just watching.
I tried to talk to him again a few days later. I asked if he was feeling sick, if he was sleeping poorly, if he had any trouble on his mind. He always said everything was fine, that I was imagining things, that I needed to rest more.
But I wasn’t imagining anything. Every night, at 2:47, he was there like a sentinel of doom.
