GIT FROM HERE

A true story about a child hood memory.

A long time ago when I was about nine or ten, my parent’s house was on a dead end street in Kansas City Kansas. At the back of my parents house was an alley that branched off to several smaller alleys. At the end of the main alley was a little shack where an old cripled white man lived. As you can imagine everyone in the neighborhood called him crip. I don’t think that anyone knew his real name.

Every morning crip would have tables in front of his shack with jars of candy and pencils and pickles and things like that to sell. If one had a Nichol you could get 5peices of candy for 1cent, 2 pencils for 1 cent, and half a pickle for 1 cent and get some change. After school let out and all the kids were gone home crip would take his goods and table in and close his doors for the night.

We being the kids that we were in the neighborhood used to love to mess with crip in the evening. We would go sown the alley and either tap on his back door or throw rocks at his back door until we heard him throwing off the locks to come out and holler at us. We would run lickety split back up the alley, and as we retreated we would hear him yell,” You kids git from here.” we would get to some one’s back yard and fall out laughing.

One day coming home from school I saw fire trucks and police cars all around crips shack. I heard some old men saying that someone had called the police because no one had seen the old man for days. I stood across the street and watched as men carried a big black bag out of crips shack one of them said, he is real ripe and it stinks in there. Before too long the city came and knocked the old shack down and hauled off the rubbish, leaving just an empty lot.

One Saturday a few of my cousins and me were at my Grandmothers house feasting on the cherries, mulberries and peaches off trees in her back yard. She came to the back door and yelled at us to go home it was getting close to dark. None of us lived in the same direction so the trip home was a solo journey.

Dark was falling fast so I decided to take a short cut through the hollow sort of a running depression through this end of town. It had a three foot climb down then cross a little stream and up the opposite side.

Crossing the hollow would save me about five blocks on the trip home.

Getting home before dark was worth taking the shortcut which we had all been warned not to do alone.

I had taken about five steps into the tree and bush lined entrance to the hollow when I heard a soft wind like voice whisper,” git from here”

I stopped momentarily then started to proceed on when the whisper repeated “git from here” I looked around and up into the trees, still thinking about getting home went nearer to the hollow. Then a booming thunderous voice that actually knocked me down shouted at me “ git from here “ I turned and ran back out to the street and took the long way home and believe me I was running at championship speed. I never ever told anyone about that, they would have had me committed, I thought at the time.

But I often wonder was that old crip trying to save me from something or was he just a creature of habit. Years after I was grown I was told that when the city drained the hollow to fill it in they found the skeletons of several children buried there–mercy!