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Prologue
S
There are two kinds of memory. One is the ordinary kind, rooted in things that happened, people you knew, and places you went. I remember my father this way: laughing, picking me up, singing lullabies in his gentle bass. I see him swinging my mother in a half circle, the hem of her blue skirt flying up to show the rough white thread she used for mending, like a bed of stars along a ridge.
The second kind of memory is rooted in the things you live with, the land you live on, the history of where you belong. You tend not to notice it, much less think about it, but it seeps into you, grows its long roots down into the richest soil of your living mind. Because most of us pay this second kind of memory no mind, the people who do talk about it seem to us superstitious or even crazy. But they aren’t. The power of that memory is equal to any of the memories we make ourselves, because it represents our collective being, the soul of a place.
After losing my father, after nursing myself to sleep nights on end with glimpses of the past with him, I was well enough acquainted with the first kind of memory. But by twelve I was still too young to pay much mind to the memories held by the town we lived in, by Eatonville itself.
That all changed the night we found Mr. Polk, his blood soaking into the earth. When I look back, I wonder how it had never before occurred to me that Eatonville, America’s first incorporated colored town, might have a history that stretched back beyond its name and my twelve years. How could I have thought our town began with Teddy, Zora, and me, that it had just opened into the infinite present of our young lives? In fact, we were living out Eatonville’s history as blindly as pawns in a century-old chess game. We were no more new or free than the land itself, but like all young people, we confused our youth with beginning and our experience with knowledge. It wasn’t until that night — when we heard the town mute speak to the town conjure woman — that Zora and I began to forge a real connection with the land, a connection that let us know ourselves through a past we hadn’t lived but was inside us all the same.
Eatonville
R
1903
Chapter One
S
I lay wide-awake in the dark, watching the flares of faraway lightning light up the hand-hewn beams of my best friend’s bedroom. It was well past midnight. Light rain drummed gently on the tin roof, nervous fingers anticipating the storm that hadn’t quite reached us yet. Zora was next to me in the narrow bed, deep asleep.
I was staying with Zora’s family for the week while my mama tended her employer’s sick baby over in Lake Maitland. After Daddy died, there was just me and Mama. I was an only child. Alone with Mama I might have felt lonely in the world, but I had Zora, my best friend, my secret keeper, and my talisman against sorrow. From the time I was old enough to have a conversation, Mama always liked to tell how my three-year-old self toddled over to Zora, who was squirming and fussing one pew away from us in her father’s church, grabbed her hand, and didn’t let go for the next hour. Zora took a long look at me, tried once to shake me loose, then settled right down to the idea of us being joined. Zora’s mother liked to say that after I took a hold of Zora, Sunday morning service once again became a place of worship and peace for her. I don’t remember that at all. In fact, my own first memory of Zora has the roles reversed: instead of me grabbing her, she’s grabbing me and pulling me with her as she scrambles after a lizard that turns out to be a baby diamondback rattler. My screams brought our parents running, and Zora was praised for saving me. Only, I knew there would have been no need to save me if she hadn’t taken hold of me in the first place. But I never held the scrapes against Zora. She made life in a town no bigger than a teacup feel like it held the whole world.
Thunder cracked softly in the distance. I had just closed my eyes when the shrieking began. It came from right outside — high-pitched and truncated. A shiver ran through me before I recognized the sound: horses!
I slipped out of bed and went to the window. Two horses were in the yard below. One whinnied again and they both galloped away, jumping the low garden fence almost abreast.
A hand touched my back and I jumped.
“Shh,” whispered Zora. She was just behind me, staring after the retreating horses.
Still spooked, I gave her arm a squeeze. “You about scared me out of my skin!” Zora held a finger to her lips and pointed to her older sister, Sarah, and her little brother, Everett, who shared the bedroom with her. She took my hand and pulled me out of the room.
“Those are Mr. Polk’s horses. How you reckon they got loose?” she whispered.
“Something scared them.”
We crept down the stairs, careful to avoid the tattletale creaking spots. Zora motioned for me to keep following her. At the front door she cloaked her nightgown with her brother John’s work jacket and handed me her father’s work shirt.
“Something’s wrong if those horses are loose.
Maybe we should go see.” Her worried whisper didn’t match the glint of excitement in her eye — the one that spelled adventure and trouble all at the same time.
I hesitated. Zora’s plans often led me to do things that went against my inclination, not to mention my better judgment. Tonight had trouble written all over it, and nothing in me ever caught a thrill from courting trouble.
“Wait,” I said. “Let’s wake your daddy. He’ll know what to do.”
Zora shot me a scathing look. “Daddy will tell us to go back to bed.” I sank back on my heels and crossed my arms. Zora shook her head. She knew my posture meant that I was closed for business.
“Carrie, you sitting at the feast of knowledge, but you don’t want to eat. Now, I want to pull up a chair and have a heaping plate — only I don’t like to eat alone. Come on, don’t make me go over to Mr. Polk’s by myself.”
Her sorrowful pleading was weakening my resolve, but I still shook my head.
Unfortunately, Zora had caught the split second of my ambivalence and used it as a shortcut across the field of my will to the junction of our compromise.
“OK, let’s make a deal. If there’s any trouble, we’ll get help.” She hooked her arm through mine, but I didn’t budge.
“Promise?”
“Promise! I promise! Now, come on.”
Oh, how I wished Zora couldn’t lasso me so easily with her words! But before I could add another condition to her promise, she was opening the front door and yanking me through.
