Ernest Hendon

摘要

They said Ernest Hendon did not look his age when he stood, two years ago, in front of the Alabama House of Representatives in Montgomery. His back was straight, his eyes bright. He felt good, he told reporters; and better still now that the Alabama House had expressed regret for what had been done to him. "I feel this means that it won't happen again," he said happily. Limelight was the last thing he had ever expected. He was born a poor black sharecropper's son in Macon County, Alabama, and was a sharecropper himself. Nothing came easily to him or his neighbours. They hoed small plots of red earth in the pine woods, lived in wooden shacks, and picked cotton in the season. There was little money around and small chance of seeing a doctor, though syphilis was more rampant there than anywhere else in the South. From time to time, the Ku Klux Klan lit their fiery crosses in the hills.