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Themes: Guilt T.C. Diane Alexander's beauty shop in Montgomery, Alabama was empty when her husband Henry walked in. He sat down in the chair. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, 1992. Henry was dying. He would be dead before year's-end. "Mama, I need to talk to you," he said. "What things are bothering you?" she asked. "Well, Willie Edwards," he replied. Near midnight on January 23, 1957, Willie Edwards Jr. sat in his Winn-Dixie truck, drinking a soda. He had ended his run. Now he sat with the dome light on, working on his log book. It was the first time he had made this run. It was not his usual one. The regular driver had called in sick, so Willie filled in.
A few days before, people heard the regular driver, a black man, make a rude remark to a white woman. Some men sitting in the Little Kitchen restaurant in Montgomery decided to "teach that driver a lesson." The men belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, a group that hates blacks, Jews and Catholics. One of the men was Henry Alexander. Willie Edwards was black.
On the night of January 23, Henry and some of his Klan friends met at his house. Then they went out to find the driver. Soon they saw Willie's Winn-Dixie truck, and Willie in it. They did not know that he was not the driver who made the rude remark. Henry parked his car in front of Willie's truck. At gunpoint, the men told him to get out of his truck, and into the car. He told them he was not the driver they were looking for. They did not seem to care. They drove him to the Tyler Goodwin Bridge, fifty feet above the Alabama River. "Run, or jump," Henry told Willie. Willie jumped into the rushing river, and died.
Willie's wife, Sarah Jean, waited with their three small children for Willie to come home. Three months later, some fishermen found his body.
Henry Alexander was twenty-seven when Willie Edwards died. Later he became a contractor. He was proud of his success, and especially of the photograph of himself between the mayor and police chief of Montgomery.
Henry was near the end of his life when he told his wife about Willie Edwards. Four days before he died, he sat and cried. "My life hasn't meant nothing," he said.
Now Diane is left to apologize for her husband. She is sick and disgusted. "Henry left me with absolutely nothing," she says, "except his guilt of what he done to Willie Edwards. Henry lived a lie all his life." She has written to Willie's widow, Sarah Jean. In September 1993, she was to meet with Melinda, his daughter, who was three when her father died.
Henry, like Nabal of the Bible, was sorry for what he did. And Diane, like Abigail, had to apologize for her husband. But for both men, being sorry was not enough. Only the man who brings his sins to Calvary, and looks to the Lord Jesus Christ, who bore those sins on the Cross, can find forgiveness for his sins.
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