“…the clerk in 1952 was…” Mr. Odom began, and he turned the great leather deed book to the front, where the old clerks had written their names in brown ink, and he ran a long finger down the page. Nia and I stood beside him in the cool, quiet records room of the Bibb County courthouse. The air smelled of paper and floor wax. I had come to that building many times in my life, to pay taxes, to buy a marriage license, to register Ezra truck. But I had never before felt that I was walking into a room where my family history was kept in a drawer.
“Raymond L. Pickett,” read Mr. Odom, in a low voice. “Clerk of the Superior Court, 1948 to 1957.” He looked up at us over his glasses. He was a gentle, stooped man in his sixties with a mustache the color of ash, and he had been very kind to me from the moment we walked in. He said that he had seen many strange entries in these old books, but that he did not often see a clerk personally withdraw a deed for a family member. He said, quietly, “Mrs. Johnson, I would be willing to bet that Raymond Pickett was kin to Leroy.”
Nia was already searching her phone. She is my daughter daughter, a paralegal in Atlanta, a serious young woman with a sharp mind and Ezra steady eyes. In two minutes she found a church record, a family tree, and an old newspaper column about the Pickett family reunion in 1955. Raymond L. Pickett, she announced, was Leroy younger brother. She said, “Grandma, the clerk who erased the record was the seller brother.” I sat down in a wooden chair. Nobody said a word. In the high window, a pigeon scratched at the glass.
A deed withdrawn in a clerk handwriting, a stack of tax receipts in the basement, and eight acres that were never in question.
Mr. Odom closed the book, very gently, as one closes the eyes of a friend. He said that a deed withdrawn in this way, by the clerk, without any order of the court and without the buyer consent, was an improper act, and that in his professional opinion, it did not undo the sale. He said the bill of sale in my Bible, signed and notarized, was a strong piece of evidence. But he said there was something else I should know. He had worked in this building for thirty four years, and he knew where the county kept its tax records.
He led us down a narrow stair to the basement, where long metal shelves held the old tax digests, each as thick as a family Bible. He pulled the volume for 1953 and laid it on a table beneath a bare bulb. He turned to the Johnson page. There, in faded blue pencil, was the entry. Isaiah Johnson, eight acres, District Five, taxes paid. Nia flipped to 1954. The same. She flipped to 1960, 1975, 1990. For thirty seven years, without fail, the county had accepted Isaiah tax payment on that land, and then Ezra. The name Pickett did not appear once.
I put my hand flat on the page. I thought of Isaiah, whom I had known as an old man with a white mustache and a cane, who had cut tobacco as a boy and bought his land with nine hundred dollars in cash that he had saved, one coin at a time, in a coffee tin. I thought of Ezra, who had plowed those acres for fifty years and who had told me, on the last night of his life, in the farmhouse bedroom, “Hattie, they cannot take the land. We paid for it every year.” Tears ran down my cheeks. Nia put her arm around me.
We hired an attorney that same week, a patient, well spoken woman named Ms. Carolyn Banks, with an office on Cherry Street. She read every paper in the folder. She said that under Georgia law, a family that openly farms a piece of land, pays the taxes, and lives on it for more than twenty years acquires title, whatever any old clerk may have scratched in a book. She said that my family had held that land for seventy three. She smiled. “Mrs. Johnson,” she said, “I would like to meet this young man with the surveyor.”
Dustin Pickett came to the hearing in a gray suit, with a tablet and an expensive attorney. He looked very sure of himself. Then Ms. Banks laid the evidence before the judge. The bill of sale. The withdrawn deed. The family tree. And, last, thirty seven years of tax receipts, which she had Mr. Odom bring up from the basement in a cart. The judge, a silver haired man with a slow, courtly voice, examined them for twenty minutes. Dustin attorney kept clearing his throat. At the end, the judge removed his glasses and said, “This matter is not close.”
He ruled that the eight acres belonged to Hattie Mae Johnson, and to her heirs, without question or encumbrance. He ordered the old withdrawal entry marked as improper, with a note in the record. Dustin stood very still. He did not look at me. But as people filed out, he stopped at the end of my row, cleared his throat, and said, in a low voice, “Mrs. Johnson, I am sorry. I did not know the whole story.” I said, “Now you do, young man. Go and tell it right.”
On Sunday, at Mount Zion Baptist, the pastor called me forward. He asked me to read the lesson, and I opened my big Bible to Exodus, where the old bill of sale had lain for seventy years. In front of the whole congregation, I laid it flat on the pulpit, and I read aloud the words of Isaiah, and Ezra, and Hattie. Afterward, the children gathered on the porch of the farmhouse, in their church clothes, and I told them the story of eight acres, nine hundred dollars, and a coffee tin. Nia sat on the step beside me, listening, and holding my hand.
