Day 817: 5 Minute Freewrite: Wednesday - Prompt: well

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“You ain't gon' miss your water 'til your well runs dry.”

Commissioner Scott remembered hearing this as a boy in Antietam, Maryland, in the mid-1960s, as a very old Black woman was shoved off the road by a group of White young men. The back story was that she had been mammy to several of their grandparents.

“Without me, and my people, you wouldn't exist. You can't scare me with beatings or Heav'n. I'm past that. You gon' have to learn de hard way – you ain't gon' miss your water 'til your well run dry.”

They would have killed her on the spot. Young Winfred Scott had found his calling in life by causing a distraction that allowed her to escape – he had protected, and served, despite the fact that he, too, had been raised by people who believed Black people were inferior.

Winfred Scott never did go for unjust beatdowns, ever, and so had begun reforming the police department in Big Loft, VA with that in mind, given the department's record in taking it out of Lofton County's Black community in every way.

However, he had made a whole lot of enemies in his mere months of being commissioner, and, owing to the fact that few people recognized him outside of his black-and-gold uniform, he occasionally got to listen to the plotting against him as he was in the street.

Two local politicians in high position were going to lunch together, and roasting Commissioner Scott in doing it. His admitting the department's culpability in under-counting the 12,000 Black and Latino victims of the Ridgeline Fire had been the last straw, following up his firing the officers who had beat down the Black art students the week before the fire, and his protocols put out before that to assure fair treatment “to people no one in Lofton County has never bothered to treat as equals.”

Something in the heart of Winfred Scott, something that took him back to himself a five-year-old boy in the middle of the road, too young to be prejudiced enough to be able to watch another human be mistreated just because of a different skin color, broke.

Captain H.F. Lee, commander of the cold case division in BLPD, was shocked to see his commander returning to police headquarters with tears on his cheek.

“What's that thing the kids say nowadays – I can't even, Captain Lee – I can't even with this town!”

Captain Lee marched double-time to his office, made sure all his lieutenants were out to lunch, and then invited his commander to lunch to eat some of Mrs. Thornton's shepherd's pie and figure out what was going on. By the end of the hour, the most ominous sound for Big Loft's old regime was coming from that office – Commissioner Scott and Captain Lee, laughing after they had put their plans together.

“They think they are running things around here, but you know what, Captain Lee, you're right! Like a wise old woman once said, they ain't gon' miss their water 'til their well runs dry!”

Photo by Qang Jaka on Unsplash