Southern Fried Weirdness | Southern Speculations

Mama Debo and the Flying Horse

by Juanita Hendrix Holliman

In Memory of R.L.H. (1924-2000)

That hot late summer morning Larkin had made it all the way from his usual seat on the porch to the apple orchard, a distance of scarcely thirty yards. At his age, 103 at last account, he considered any outdoor activity to be a semi-major accomplishment. Most of the apples lay on the ground, half-rotted, with bees buzzing around their decaying sweetness. He found a fairly sound one, shooed away a few interested bees, brushed the dirt from its stripped surface, and was about to sink his teeth into it when he heard a whinny. No horses lived in the neighborhood, as far as he knew.

The whinny came from the region of the tree branches above him. Steadying himself on his cane, he craned his neck enough to see a patch of blue above him. It was, of course, the Horse! Certainty and amazement flowed through him. He felt 80 years old again—no, more like 75! Though his eyesight was not what it had been as a youngster of six or seven decades, it was good enough to make out the slick, dappled hide of the great beast and the surprisingly small, delicate wings that, whirring gently, kept it aloft in the clear, hot air of that wondrous Alabama morning.

Memories of Mama Debo formed and reformed in his mind as he watched the Horse dip and dive in the cloudless sky. He was eight years old, on the porch with Mama Debo and half a dozen other great-grandchildren, all listening to Mama’s stories, old folks tales, his mother called them. It seemed like only yesterday she’d told the story of the Flying Horse. Today, as then, it seemed as though she’d meant it especially for his ears.

Though dead for eighty years, Mama Debo sprang clearly into his mind, cutting through the fog of a century of living, the thousand memories that seemed to shift and tangle themselves into one long story, much of which he’d forgotten. Lately, it seemed he could never untangle one part of that story from the unwieldy whole it had become. But Mama Debo—how well he could see her, a little woman in a rocking chair on the porch, her gray hair escaping from its loose knot and gathering around her lined face in wiry curls. She was smiling because she enjoyed her stories as much as the children who were gathered around her did. Her brown gaze, when it fell on him had the warmth of a quick, hard hug, and at the same time, she seemed to reach toward him across some wide gulf of time and distance. She folded her spotted, work-worn hands on her clean apron and began the story.

“I never did see the Flyin’ Horse myself, but my Grandmother Sary did. She was just a girl of twenty years old standin’ in that orchard yonder.” And here she pointed to the apple orchard where Larkin was presently standing, mesmerized by the lovely Horse and engulfed by his memories of Mama Debo.” “The Horse, a big gray colored thing, passed right over her headed toward the east. Her daddy had two horses in a pasture right over there just past the apple trees. They saw the thing pass over them, and they nickered to it. The Horse looked down and nickered in answer to them two old horses.

"They was people picking cotton in the field out yonder, but they never looked up, never seen the Horse pass over them, going on east. Sary was the only one on the place who seen it. It was a glorious vision, she told her folks. They all talked about it for years.

"Some believed her, most didn’t. Not that it mattered, I guess. She saw whatever she saw and believed it to be a matter of some importance. The next day Sary told her daddy she believed the Horse was a sign to them, that only one more flying horse would pass over the earth before the end of the world came, and when that other horse passed over, things were about to be over with.

“Well, when my Grandpa Curt came to court Sary, she was known all over the country as the Woman Who’d Seen the Horse, but a year had gone by, and her talk was not so full of the Horse story as it’d been, and she was such a pretty thing and handy in all kinds of ways with housework and field work and such that he determined to marry her. And he did marry her. He was mistaken, though, if he thought not to hear about the Horse. As their children were born—and they had a houseful, little stairsteps they were—she’d gather them around her, and she’d tell them the story of seein’ the great gray-speckled Flyin’ Horse. As time passed, Sary may have changed her mind about the meaning of the Horse. It seemed like she believed the Horse’s appearance had some special meaning for some of her folks. She told the story over and over ‘til Grandpa Curt and all of ‘em was tired to hearing it, but she didn’t want any of them to forget it.

“And Sary’s children told the story, too, to their own families, and that’s why I can sit here now and tell it to you. Don’t any of us know what might or might not be important some time or other.” And then Mama Debo looked right into Larkin’s freckled, blue-eyed face, reaching across from her place on one side of things to his place on the other side. That gaze held until his mother opened the screen door and told him it was time to go home. And on the ride home in the wagon with his daddy talking gently to the two horses that pulled it, his mother told him several times that he had no business believing such foolish old tales.

Ninety-five years later the Horse was once again passing over the same orchard that Mama Debo had pointed to as she told the story to her great-grandchildren. The apple fell from Larkin’s hand. As the Horse circled above him, Larkin turned with more agility than he’d had in twenty years, as he tried to keep it in sight. Through the shifting leaves, he got a glimpse of its fine gray eye, just visible as it tossed its large head, long silvery mane flying in all directions, tiny wings beating effortlessly in the summer air.

Another twist and the Horse showed Larkin its broad speckled rump, and behind the little feathered wings something might have been clinging to the thrashing mane.

Pawing the air, the Horse was lost to Larkin’s sight as it seemed to fly into the sun, which stood now at high noon in the sky. Blinded and blinking in the sunshine, he turned on his cane again, trying to see what might or might not be on the Horse’s back.

Eyes almost closed, Larkin saw a quick snapshot of Mama Debo just before his foot hit one of the rotting apples that lay all around him. In the long, long fall that followed, Larkin saw the great Horse swoop downward. In the dense and pleasant darkness he found in the deep grass under the apple trees, shards of light sparkled and broke around him. The Horse, whose step made the ground tremble a little, nuzzled his outstretched hand, and Mama Debo’s gaze was deep and brown as she reached her hand down to him.