My grandfather, Arthur Ray Jackson, was a boy of eight in 1948 when he killed the crow. Walking down his dirt-lined road in the North Carolina town he called home, he came across the silken, black-feathered thing hopping into a small ditch on his left side. I don’t know where the crow was going, and, for the record, I don’t know where Granddad was going either; that part is never included in the story. What is included, however, is the sudden and bewildering urge that overtook Arthur Jackson, an urge to leap into the ditch with the crow; grab it by its neck, avoiding the violent beating of its surprisingly strong wings; and swing it round and round the way his mama and grandmama would swing their chickens’ necks to snap them for supper. Granddad, apparently stunned at what he’d done and disgusted at the mess of feathers and pinpricks of blood on his palms, dropped the crow where it had stood moments before, its lifeless little body making a thudding noise muted by the soft clover below. Its shiny, beady, doll-like eye stared up at him, frozen in lifelessness. Later, when he was just shy of twenty years old, he explained that he’d been thinking of the Jim Crow laws that terrorized Blacks across the South, the unfairness of the system under which he was forced to live. He lived in near-constant fear and anxiety, and so did his mama, and his daddy was a good man who made an honest living and was whip-smart and loved Mama and never bothered nobody. So when Granddad saw the jumping crow, it symbolized Jump Jim Crow, the minstrel show and character after which the laws were apparently named, and it made him angrier than he’d ever been in his whole life. People do odd and, sometimes, terrifying things when they’re angry. Granddad met Nana in 1961 and married her two years later. In 1964, after a period of difficulty that is now seen as a mercy, a grace period, my dad, Philip Gray Jackson, was born. Dad was the first and only son born from that marriage, because just over eleven months later, right before Dad’s first birthday, Granddad was tragically killed. He was twenty-five years old. No one knew at the time how he came to his demise; he hadn’t come home after work one Friday night, and, worried, Nana called all around for him, assuming he’d gone for drinks at some colored bar, or to a friend’s house to play cards instead of coming home right away to the sounds of a squealing baby. In the wee hours of the next morning, his car had been found on the side of a backroad he rarely used, the driver’s side door wide open, the car still running. It must have been running all night, because Granddad had been headed home. He was found in the ditch on the side of that road, a couple hundred feet ahead of the car. He was scratched and bruised, but his body was in a peaceful position, on his back and arms laid at his sides. The only disturbing part of the scene was his eyes, which were wide open and trained to the thick and thickly-leaved branches above him. His expression, it seemed, even held a tinge of horror, as if he’d died in a fit of disbelief. Everyone in the community, even in law enforcement, believed he was killed by white supremacists. It was what our family believed for a long time, too. So, my dad grew up without his biological father, but Nana did remarry nearly two years later. Dad’s stepfather was actually a wonderful man, and he raised him like his own, along with Dad’s other two half-siblings. Dad thrived so well under his stepfather, in fact, that he excelled in high school and college, where he met my mom, and got a job in financial planning in Charlotte, NC, in the 80s—a glorious time for just such a career move—and they settled into a secure, happy life. I was born a year after Mom and Dad got married, a few months after Dad’s twenty-fourth birthday. Even as a baby, I was a Daddy’s girl; my first babble was reportedly “dada,” and I took some of my first real steps toward him. Even with all of this love and closeness, I have no memory of him, and my feelings are somewhat distant, because shortly before my first birthday, my dad died in such a bizarre way, people in our area still talk about it now, well into my adulthood. Mom saw it. He pulled into our driveway after a long day of work, and Mom was seated on the couch at the window, looking at him while bouncing me on her lap. She smiled as he got closer, illuminated by the pale evening light of mid-autumn. He waved when he noticed her, then immediately flinched, grabbed his head, and looked upward. We had no trees in that part of our yard, but it seemed as if something had fallen from above, like an acorn—it was the time of year for things like that, after all. Mom wasn’t fazed, until he flinched again, this time crying out. She watched, her confusion turning to bewilderment, which turned to panic, which turned to horror, as dark objects began raining from a point she couldn’t see in the sky. She stood as Dad began screaming, flailing, dropping his things and running sideways to get out of the way. Had it begun hailing, somehow? Mom didn’t know, but she screamed at my dad through the window to take cover and hold on, she was coming to help, and she ran to put me in my Pack-n-Play to keep me safe while she rushed outside. By the time she made it out there, however, she found Dad in the middle of the lawn, surrounded by smallish, hard objects, mostly rocks and bits of asphalt that had crumbled off the road. Dad had been bludgeoned to death; his skull was cracked open and bleeding in spots, and there were contusions already forming in others. All headshots. His eyes hung lazily open, like he was gazing at the beautiful evening sky. Mom’s screams of anguish and horror were accompanied only by the fading sounds of crows’ caws as they flew away. Mom didn’t tell me this story in this way, of course; in fact, I only learned most of the details, and how she’d felt that day, when I was older. The rest of it I gleaned from police reports I’d dug into when I was in college, and other hearsay from neighbors that always found its way to my ears whenever I was home visiting. Following in my parents’ footsteps, I met my now-husband when I was a sophomore in college, and we got married while I was still doing clinicals for my nursing degree. Mom never remarried—Dad was the love of her life, and she was too traumatized to think about anything else but raising me successfully. She did it all on her own, and she fussed over me every minute of every day, ordering me to check in with her every evening while I was away at college, and so on. When I got married, she told me about Granddad, Dad’s dad, and about the rumors surrounding his death…that even though he was deemed a victim of racial violence, his death mirroring that of the crow he confessed to killing as a boy was a constant whisper that turned into a shout when my dad was then killed by a murder of the same bird. Mom talked about it like it was ridiculous, but the panic in her eyes and intense phobia of the dark-feathered creatures has never gone away. I could tell that she was worried about my fate. But things are different with me. I was born a girl, for one, and I had my son when I was twenty-five. By the time he turned a year old, I was nearly twenty-seven, and his first birthday came and went with me still by his side. Mom and other members of my family held their breath as these milestones approached and even after they passed, which I saw as overkill. Still, whenever I was out walking my son in his stroller, or going for a run, or spending time in my yard alone, and I would hear a crow calling overhead, I couldn’t help but look up, try to find it in the sky, figure out how close it was. I wasn’t paranoid until the day I found myself in my fenced front yard with my son. After dinner, evening in the early summertime, the first time the sun had done that truly thick and hazy and holding-on-strong thing that it did despite the later hour of day. My grass was tall—it needed cutting—but it was soft and must have felt like an adventure in the jungle for my one-and-a-half-year-old. I was looking at some plants in the front flower bed, deciding what would need watering along with the mowing, glancing over my shoulder at my son every so often to make sure he didn’t get too close to the fence, since even though it shielded him from our slow-moving yet well-used neighborhood street just beyond the yard, I didn’t want to take any chances; subconsciously, I was overprotective. About everything. But I got distracted by some trees on the side of the house, thinking about telling my husband of my plans to get the ones closest to the house cut before winter came, and ice settled on them, and they had a better chance of falling into the house. I heard the flap of wings near me, but nothing registered until I heard the unmistakable caw that announced a crow’s approach. I yelped and ducked instinctively, worried for my own safety for a split second before my motherly instincts took over and I whipped my head about the yard trying to lay eyes on my son. I found him, toddling on chubby legs toward a spot in the middle of the yard. A halo of soft sunlight illuminated him so that I couldn’t make out what he was doing, just that his back was to me, and he was bent at the waist. I exhaled and began walking toward him, but I stopped dead in my tracks several yards away as the sun’s angle moved behind the trees behind the house across the street, and my vision cleared, and I saw that my son was looking into the eyes of a single crow. An abrupt sense of cellular dread flooded my body from core to extremity, making me feel cold on that humid summer evening. I was locked in place again, torn between saving my son and saving myself—because, really, the crow would be after me. Right? “Art,” I called my son’s name, though my voice was thin and barely audible. “Arthur.” He babbled a bit, then extended his arm toward the crow, as if to pet it. Before I could speak up again, move, grab my baby before he could touch the wild bird, I saw something glitter in his hand. The crow cocked its inky black head one way, then another, then gently craned its neck toward my son’s hand, took the glittering thing in its beak, and then hopped a couple paces to the side. It looked at me. I swear, we locked eyes for several long moments. It was like looking into the face of a human. And then it flew away. When I finally made it over to my son, who was at once elated by the interaction and already on to the next thing to catch his attention—a grasshopper shuffling through the dandelion patch where the crow had once stood—I noticed there were several more bits of shiny near his feet. Silver streamer, somehow missed when we’d cleaned up the yard after his first birthday party months earlier. Or maybe it’d blown over from somewhere else. Over the next week, Arthur and I were in the yard every evening. And every evening, a crow, the crow, would visit. Art would hand it something shiny, like a coin from his great-grandfather’s collection, or a candy wrapper, and the crow would fly away with its treasure. After seven days, the transaction was seemingly completed, and I never again felt uneasy in the presence of crows. Crows are intelligent, familial, and mysterious creatures. They’re a lot like us: When we’re wronged, there is a path to forgiveness. When we’re hurt, consequences must be paid for. I suppose the Jacksons have finally paid for their transgressions.