The Little House in the Woods
	When I was about twelve living on Ellicott Street, after where our house was our street became little more than a dirt road. There were a few houses down there and the road was only sort of paved. It came to a "T" at the end at 22nd Street. On the other side were dense woods that went for miles. We. Called them the 22nd Street woods. Very inventive. We, of course played in the 22nd Street woods a lot. Most of the kids in our neighborhood that were our age were boys. I've always thought that was interesting. One day a new family moved into the neighborhood. Their house was on New Orleans, the next street over, and they had a whole gaggle of kids. Seven, I think. One of the boys was about fourteen, my brother, Andy's age. Their last name was... well, I won't try to spell it because it was French but it was pronounced Boo lon jay but said with a French accent. They went by Baker. I don't know if this was because it was easier for the family electrical business or because the family had to flee in the middle of the night from Maine practically with only the clothes on their back. The father had gotten into a wild tavern fight in Maine, grabbed a sword that was hanging on a wall and literally ran a guy through. It didn't kill him but went in the front and came out the back just below his shoulder. I don't know why they ended up in Tampa. Maybe they just followed the east coast until they got this far down and the lure of Jose Gaspar's legend of our pirate history of Tampa appealed to him. AARRRRR. One day a few of us were on our way to the 22nd Street woods and we saw Roland, our new friend from Maine, and asked him if he'd like to go with us. He said "Yes." so he and Norman, Joe Gray and Andy and I headed straight for a huge mulberry tree that was loaded with mulberries. Not many people knew where it was but we all did. They were so good. Roland really loved that whole experience. He said that they didn't have mulberry trees in Maine. He was actually a really good mulberry tree climber. He also was blown away by palm trees. We made sure he knew the paths so he could find the tree again if he wanted to. The next day we went to his house and his mother a youngish "Aunt Bee" type woman said "He took a pail and said something about some kind of berries." It was funny. Yes, he was hooked. We went to the woods and there he was sitting high up in the top if the mulberry tree eating, purple around his mouth, and we all joined him. When we left we decided to show Roland around and go all over the woods. There were areas down in there where we hadn't even explored. Usually we'd head several miles all the way to the back boundary of the woods which were the railroad tracks. There was a little Hobo camp there that was always fun to poke around in. Because the fire was usually smoldering I always got the Heebie Jeebies thinking we were being watched. That day we went through some parts of the woods where we hadn't been before. We came up on this very small one room house. It had a little porch with steps. It didn't seem deserted. It was painted. White. It just seemed so out of place there. We walked up the steps. We turned the doorknob and the door was unlocked. Someone opened it slowly. I don't know who it was. It wasn't me. We went quietly inside. You couldn't even hear us breathing. It was just the one room and there were about twenty wooden chairs all lined up in rows. There were windows, a closet door and a back door. We slowly opened the closet. In it there were hanging a whole lot of white robes and hoods with eye holes cut in them! We felt the robes and they were made of a course cloth. It was a Klan meeting house. My legs went numb. They must have been getting ready for a meeting at any time or the door wouldn't have been unlocked. The only thing I remember is as we turned and ran was our mulberry handprints on those robes. We ran down those steps and our eyes looked like big white poker chips. Many years later a trailer park was put there where we had stumbled upon that little house in the woods and the house itself became the office for the park. After that, the very spot where the KKK meeting house had been, and the trailer park as well, everything was leveled except for the really big live oaks trees. It's now the location of Middleton High School, a predominantly African American school. I wonder if the mulberry tree is still there. Lynn Ash