The Blackberry Man (Second Place - Creative Nonfiction)

by Devon Williams

When I was young my parents used to visit this old lady Sally, and would often take me to her house with them. I remember driving out to her house deep in the country, wondering to myself why they spent any time with this creepy old lady. As we would pull into Sally’s drive way she would be standing there, arms folded across her flowered muumuu that was sewn from a 1970’s tablecloth, waiting for me to arrive. Waiting to pull me out of the car, squeeze my small cheeks, and threaten me with the blackberry man; this had been her normal routine since my parents started visiting her. 

 

Sally had crinkly leather skin with deep black bags sagging under her cold eyes. The black under her eyes was extenuated by her carelessly placed forest green eye shadow that didn’t do justice for her face. When she would hug me and give me smooches I would be engulfed by the mixture of her sweet pungent perfume and the smell from the pack of cigarettes she had smoked that morning, and every morning 60 years prior. Her thin old lips were smudged with a deep crimson lipstick and felt like old wet paper that was left  out to dry in the sun, as they were pressed against my unwilling cheek. As she cradled me her boneless body would swallow my small frame. Then in her gravelly voice she would half say, half cough, “watch out for the blackberry man," and then chuckle, cough, chuckle, and cough.

I think Sally was married to the blackberry man. The blackberry man had long dark hair that was turning grey, with patches of bald spots near the top of his head. A deep scar ran diagonally from above his eyebrow across his sun withered cheek. I assumed he got this gash from running through the black berry bushes he attended too. His scratch covered arms where covered by his brown flannel that he never changed out of. 

The black berry man got his name because he would throw bad kids over his shoulder, carry their screaming flailing bodies to the edge of the black berry patch and throw them into the waiting bushes. These weren’t average blackberry bushes as they covered a large field, and had been allowed to grow uncontrollably for countless years. In the middle of the patch, laid a spot where all of the thorns and bushes had been flattened down. In this spot laid the bodies of hundreds of other bad kids who had met a similar fate. Either bleeding out from the gashes from the thick razorblade thorns, or starving to death trapped in a cage of poisonous blackberry bushes. 

Although threatened with being hucked into the infamous blackberry bushes; for some reason the blackberry man decided to spare me. Although Sally consistently reminded me of the blackberry bushes I never found myself in the blackberry man’s strong grasp. Instead he stayed in the house during my parents visits, and I never really met the blackberry man. I later found out that her husband wasn’t a blackberry man, and that this monstrous person didn’t exist. The truth is the blackberry man died of cancer within months of my parents visiting Sally. Regardless she continued to threaten me after his death by saying, “Watch out for the blackberry man, he is going to get you, and throw you in the bushes.”