His older brother Otis died of diphtheria in late 1868 and his father Hank shot himself after losing his crops in the winter of 1874. At the ripe old age of 12 Virgil was left to care for his broken mother and sisters. 

In 1862 Virgil Sanders was born to Henry and Etta Sanders, slaves to family Sanders of Franklin, Tennessee. Etta Sanders had 9 kids all told, but most were lost to disease or childbirth. Virgil had 2 younger sisters and an older brother by the time the War Between The States was over in 1864. For all intents and purposes, he was a middle child.

“Aint really anything special for that time,” Virgil said, staring out over the valley, flushed with new green from spring. “No more bells and whistles than the 10s of thousands of freed slave families across the south.”

I knew he was right. A broken heart is no unique experience for any intelligent being.

I was quiet and let Virgil continue.

“I did what I could, I was just a small boy. Quiet, you know. Did my best to get along. Until then I was the middle child, mostly ignored and left to my own devices and when Papa shot himself, well, it was left to me to care for the girls and momma. Really and truly, tho’, I knew I was a little different from them. I’d had a vision of my father’s face covered in blood and him laughin’, winkin’ at me with his left eye. That was the one the bullet went through.

“Until then I really didn’t know what it meant to be angry. Lillian, the youngest, took me by the hand and led me from the smokehouse to the dog run and asked where papa’s other eye had gone. I knew what had happened and sent her on into the house.

“I had never known anger, but something in me exploded and I began to kick his body over and over. Momma came out and had to drag me away from him.

“I came to Huntsville looking for work in 1885. With a gang of other men I unloaded cotton bales at the exchange downtown for a penny a bale. We worked well together and sometimes did as much as hundred bales. Split five or six ways it was fair money for a black man at that time.

“By the next years harvest, tho’, we’d lost two men, one to cholera, one to a lynchin’. Tom Johnson. 

“The next morning a couple white men were laughin’ at his swinging body and pokin’ at him with a stick. I felt that rage again. Like when I found my daddy. Down deep. I knocked one of them down and beat the other until I couldn’t feel my fists. I heard the law men comin’ and ran off into these woods.

“I grew a beard. Due to lack of food I lost plenty of weight. When they began to build the rail up the mountain I just sorta blended in with the other men. The foreman never questioned who I was and paid me just the same as the other men.

“I still lived in the woods, you know. There’s plenty of natural shelter over this whole mountain.

“By and by I knew I would have to go home and find momma and the girls. I had no idea what had happened to them after I ran off.

“I snuck home early one morning in September. I was expecting to wake her gently and beg her forgiveness. I had maybe twenty dollars or more in my pocket and I thought that might make up for my absence. Instead I found momma drunk at the kitchen table. She was crying, singing to a bottle of whiskey, a single candle burning in front of her.. 

“She was singing ‘Rock of Ages’ to that bottle. Her eyes bloodshot, cheeks wet and red, lip soaked from her nose runnin. She was in her nightgown. She was always a big woman, but she looked as tho’ her body was being drawn into the ground. Her meat hung off her bones. I watched her through the kitchen window.

“She took a pull off that bottle and tilted her head, seein’ me through the window. She said, ‘I knewd you come home, boy. Come inside and set.’

“Well by now I was cryin’ too, you know. I came in slow at first, then rushed to her with my arms open. She didn’t budge. Told me sit down.

“She said, ‘Lillian run off with a boy from Nashville. Sybil’s a whore in Birmingham.’

“I offered her the money I had. She wouldn’t take it. I put it on the table in front her, maybe twenty two, twenty five dollars. She didn’t even look at it. I cried and begged momma to take the money. I told her I was sorry for runnin off.

“She said, ‘Fuh some reason the Good Lord has decided that ever man I loves gotta go. Why Virgil? You know why? ‘Cause I aint faithful to the Lord, boy. I done somethin, I don’t know what, Virgil, but He done forsaken me.’

“She rambled on, sayin’ all kinda mean things about herself, about daddy. She swore at the Lord, too. I never heard her say things like that.

“You know what she did, friend? She picked up that money I laid in front her and started setting it on fire with that candle. I tried to stop her, I did.

“She slapped me hard right across the face.

“‘You a goddam coward Virgil,’ she said to me, ‘just like yuh goddam daddy. Goddam coward couldn’t do anything lest a damn white man told him to do it. Lost one crop and the son of a bitch shoots his eye out, Virgil. A goddam coward, yuh daddy.’

“‘And you,’ she said to me, ‘you a lazy goodfornothin man. You can’t control yo anger, you beat a white man half to death… and you hid? You don’t think to let yo momma know you okay for almost three years?’

“She stood up and started really hittin’ me. Told me to get out, never come back. I begged her to stop, but she grabbed a knife. Told me if I ever set foot in her presence again she’d carve me up like the pig I was. Threw things at me until I left.

“As far as I know she worked at the mill until the day she died. I went to her funeral, but stayed mostly out of sight. I think one of my sisters was there, but couldn’t tell.

“I’ve had visions my whole life. I don’t know how to explain what they look like. All I know is occasionally I’ll see things without seeing them. I saw my daddy laughing, covered in blood while I was cuttin bacon. But it wasn’t like I saw him for real. 

“I couldn’t control those visions. They happened at random. Sometimes I didn’t have them for years. Sometimes day after day. One time I saw a man walking around with a crown made of stone on his head. That next day I made him move, just before a stone came down the mountain, right where he was standing.

“I believe I saw the end of that rail and even the ho-tel. I saw the rail curl up in an ‘O’ and sure enough, that big old rock landed on it in 1899. Curled it right up. Boy did they have a time tryin’ to clean that mess up! I saw the ho-tel just dissolve, like a seltzer tablet, up into a gray sky, leavin’ only the chimney.

“My momma died around 1889, 1890. I was a tender for the engine that ran up and down the mountain to Monte Sano Hotel. I still lived in the woods, but had built me a little shack down by what you folks call Fagan Creek.

“One winter night it snowed so much my roof caved in. Knocked over my oil lamp and the whole thing caught fire. After that fire ate everything I owned it got cold. Terrible cold.

“Now, I’d been cold before, lived without shelter for years, but this was bad. All my heavy clothes had burned up. I was out there with not much more than my skivvies. My old boots, no socks, pants and long-johns and an old wool blanket over my shoulders. I warmed myself as the embers die out, cryin’ not because I lost ever’thing, but because I knew it was gonna be a long, terrible cold night and I was exhausted.

“I can recall the way the woods glowed in the snow. There was no moon but you know how snow just bounces whatever light there might be, even star light. I saw this figure across the creek. At first I wasn’t sure if he meant to do me harm, but he made his way to the bank.

“He beckoned to me to cross the creek. I really wondered if I had died in that fire and he was Death. Be that as it may, I had no other option for the night and it was damned cold. Maybe he’d take me to my grave and let me sleep in peace.

I followed him along the creek and then up a good trail. I knew he was leading me to what you now call Three Caves.

I’d been in Three Caves before, but this gentleman took me deep, deep within the mountain. By and by the temperature warmed up. Damp, but it wasn’t like outside.

There was a fire with a chair beside it and a table next to the wall of the cave. The ceiling was easily sixty, maybe seventy feet up. 

He took his coat and hat off. He was an old white bald man with a bright white beard. 

He sat on the chair and opened a can of beans. He told me to sit and I sat.

“‘My name is Franklin Pedimore,’ he said, ‘I wish you no harm. You’re welcome to take your rest here by my fire.’

“Honestly, friend, I had no options. I was exhausted and I just didn’t have the will to worry. I remember I fell out next to that warm fire and slept like the dead.

“I don’t know how long I was out. When I woke it was every bit as dark as it was when I came there. Franklin Pedimore was still in his chair, pokin’ at that fire.”