They are coming. In life, heavy was the crown of chains meant to keep their bodies down, but their spirits soon will rise. They are coming with their shackles, wearing them like armor, fuel that reminds them of their purpose. They bring the chains made from wrought iron, used across the wrists and ankles as they were stolen onto ships. They bring the iron collar, placed on as punishment, its four prongs sticking out to keep them still. They bring the leg irons, two horseshoe-shaped rings cuffed around the ankles with a bar between. The metal once rubbed against their skin, causing it to bruise and break. They are coming with the branding irons shaped with the initials of the men who seared their flesh, forever marking them with their names. Their own names were taken, erased, but they have them back now. The iron is hot from the burning flame. The skin will flush red after, the dermis deep enough to easily slough off. What remains will be the mark of the men and women who once owned them. They come bringing tools to slaughter and maim. One holds a gelding knife. His hand tightens around the handle, ready to take.
They are coming with the whip with its nine knotted lashes. Their hands carry glass jars of what will be rubbed in after. Turpentine. Lime juice. Hot brine. Piss. Whatever will make flesh sting. Virtue, you preached, came from being beaten. Redemption from blood. With the knotted whip raised high you delivered your sermon. The strike of the lash cracking the skin. In return the faltering pulse. Nearby, they watched in the fields as you then held your sons’ hands, teaching your boys to practice the whip on the trees’ flesh. Aim for the middle, you taught, imagine the trunk is the space between the shoulder blades, the safest spot to do the most harm.
They come wearing the clothes they died in. Clothes worn day in and day out when they were alive. See the house servants with their castoffs. They are barefoot, subjecting themselves to blisters and cuts rather than suffer wearing anything that would make them hotter. They wear quantiers. Softened oxhide cut to the shape of a foot and tied together with string. They wear the shoes bought by their masters. Children in calico slacks. Men tipping their straw hats to the women as they move further along. Women in their Christmas clothes, a few with ribbons tied in their hair.
How long, did you think, after all of this, it would be before their souls finally came for you in the night? These men and women remember. They remember the sight of their husbands and sons hanged from the trees they worked under. They remember the feel of the cold metal on their ankles. They remember the taste of it as the iron bit was forced in their mouths. They remember the taste of their own blood mixing with their saliva as it dripped down their faces, soaking what rags of clothes they wore.
It is too late to speak of such stories now, for they are coming—ready to sneak into your rooms, tiptoe through the familiar hallways, to find you and your loved ones in their beds, and maybe some of you will sense a shift in the air, something unfamiliar in the room, and maybe you’ll open your eyes to see, catch a glimpse, but it will not be long, for make no mistake—they will not flinch, they will not hesitate, they have come for you, they have come, and as you open your eyes the last thing you’ll see is the ax as the blade strikes down.
Do you see them hovering in the shadows? They are out there hiding in the thicket and behind the darkness of the trees. Hush and you can hear. It’s been said that on a quiet day in the woods a sound can carry for miles, although trees can absorb it and there’s also the thrush of branches against the wind, stifling what noise can be heard. In the summer, the sudden bursts of rain pound against the earth. Nature’s inhabitants—the birds perched on branches or the frogs with their mating calls—fill the woods with their croak and thrum, their whistle and pitter. During locust season, everywhere, you can hear their high-pitched hum, making the air feel electric and alive. Late at night there is the sound of dogs on a scent, followed by their last, yelping howl.
Hush though, and listen. If you’re quiet, you can hear their whispers in the water calling to those left behind. Hush and you can hear them lurking, waiting for the day they can make their return.
I.
AFTER, PEOPLE HAD asked Mira what she saw. After the arrest, followed by his release, for months afterward, people would ask, classmates at school, strangers even, whenever she found herself alone, they’d come up and want to know another truth—what happened out in those woods? At the house? Were there others like they say? Ghosts, we’ve heard. Spirits. Demons. We’ve heard the rumors and want to know. There must be more than you’re telling. Has to be. What’d you see?
It took leaving to make the questions stop, but after having been gone for more than a decade, she was returning to Kipsen. Mira was driving home for the wedding of her childhood friend Celine, someone she now could say she barely knew.
Since Mira left, Celine had managed to make a life for herself. She’d gotten a cosmetology license and worked at the hair salon downtown. She had a series of regulars who tipped her well and she had managed to earn up enough to afford a semblance of a middle-class life, or at least play the part, enough so that when Phillip met her for the first time he didn’t see what the rest of the town used to—a poor trash girl who’d once lived in the black part of town.
Celine had called her a couple months ago out of the blue. Mira was sitting at her desk grading when she saw the flashing light from her desk phone. School had let out for the day, and while she could have gone home, she preferred to finish her work in the classroom, to not bring any remnants of the job with her when she left. She hesitated in picking up to take the call, worried it was her principal wanting to talk further about the incident with one of her students, but soon relented, fearing if he did want to talk it was better to get it over with.
When she answered, she found that it wasn’t the principal or anyone from the school calling, but Celine, and she was calling to say how she’d met the love of her life and was getting married. She wanted Mira to be there for her.
“It took me forever to find you. What kind of person isn’t on social media? You’ve done a good job of disappearing. Almost, anyway. Your school has this number listed on its directory and it came up when I searched for your name. Thank goodness I thought to do that. Oh, Mira, just say yes and I’ll send out the invitation. Look, I know we haven’t really talked in forever, but it’s my wedding.”
Mira sat back in her chair, overwhelmed by Celine’s exuberance and in how quickly she fell into an easy, unearned familiarity, as if it had always been this way between them, as if it was yesterday since they last talked and not years. Celine’s giggly and energetic voice ushered in Mira a slight pang of nostalgia for their shared past. “His name’s Phillip Hunnicutt. He’s from Kipsen, or at least his mother is. She married into the Hunnicut family and moved back after their divorce. Aldridge is her name.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Not surprising, I guess. I don’t remember anyone named Aldridge either, but the Hunnicuts? Of Honey Leaf Tobacco? Everyone knows that name. I think I smoked some of their cigarettes when we were kids. He’s the grandson or something but he didn’t want anything to do with the company so he owns a dentist practice. It’s a little dull if you ask me though.”
“How’d you meet a guy like that?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Just that I wouldn’t have imagined he’d want to live in Kipsen, and if he did, he’d be keeping to himself,” Mira stumbled out, having picked up on the tension in Celine’s response. Celine’s emphasis on trying—what are you trying to say? The implication being Mira had meant more and had somehow failed to say it. A subtle yet targeted insult to distract from her own defensiveness.
“Well, you’re right. I’d been trying to meet him since he moved here but couldn’t figure out a good way to do it. The practice has been booked for months and months. Then Janice, one of my clients, said that she’d known his mother. That’s why he came back—his mother was sick, ovarian cancer, and she didn’t want to leave Kipsen, so he returned to be with her. Janice was throwing a small gathering at her house and invited me along. He took one look at me and that was that.”
“That was that,” Mira repeated. Of course. That’s how it’d always been with Celine. Men looked at her and wanted her for her beauty but despite being beautiful, she was never able to hide her insecurities and after all these years she hadn’t gotten any better. Underneath her pretense was the simmer of resentment for a poor childhood. While they’d all been poor—Mira, Celine, and especially Jesse, Celine dealt with her circumstances differently, harboring a bitterness for what she felt life owed her. Jesse used to tell Mira it was because Celine was white. “She thinks she shouldn’t be struggling like the rest of us.”
“That’s not true,” Mira would say, much to Jesse’s irritation.
“You’re always defending her.”
“She’s my friend. I thought she was yours too.”
“I can be her friend and still criticize her sometimes.”
Mira often felt like the glue between Jesse and Celine, sensing if not for her they would have ended their friendship a long time ago. As they’d gotten older, he’d become more suspicious of Celine, judging her because she was a white girl who chose to be friends with two black kids in segregated Kipsen. He’d often judged Mira too for siding with Celine instead of him when he made comments like these.
This divide hadn’t always existed. Somehow, over the years of their friendship, Jesse forgot how they’d all become friends, but Mira remembered. It was early January of her first year of middle school, the air hovering above freezing, and Mira blew on her hands to keep them warm, watching as Celine approached her. Strands of her blond hair bunched at the top of the puffer jacket she wore. The jacket had a hole near the bottom and Mira could see bits of the interior peeking out. The jacket was a faded pink, the color of the Pepto Bismol Mira’s mother used to make her choke down. Celine raised a hand and Mira noticed that Celine wore two mismatched mittens—one black, the other pink, the color of her coat.
Mira thought better than to comment on it when Celine introduced herself, and instead listened as she explained how they’d just moved into one of the houses up for rent.
“Which one?” Mira asked, curious.
“It’s blue. Three eighteen Milson Road? Do you know it?”
Mira didn’t, but only because so many houses went up for sale only to be foreclosed months later, the owners gutting the insides of anything of value to make up a fraction of what they lost. On her block Mira knew of at least four houses like these. Families moved into them because the rent was cheap but often left shortly after—because they couldn’t make the payments, because they were in search of a better dream, because in the end, they couldn’t bring themselves to live in this part of Kipsen. Whatever the reason, there was enough transition in the neighborhood that it didn’t matter which house it was Celine had moved into. She probably wouldn’t be staying in it for long.
Soon after, their bus came. Mira climbed its steps, found a seat, and sat near the window. She was surprised when Celine sat next to her, but there weren’t many white students on the bus, since most had their parents to drive them or they carpooled with others. Celine also seemed like the type to need to be around people, or at least attention, and wouldn’t have wanted to sit alone. She wouldn’t stop talking and she filled the minutes of the ride with offerings about her life. Mira continued to listen as she rambled on about nothing in particular—television shows she’d watched the night before, her favorite subjects in school, a crush she had on the member of a boy band Mira had never heard of.
“You’re so quiet. I’ve been talking so much. You got nothing to say?”
Behind them, the sound of snickering turned to a roar of laughter. A cluster of black students sat in the rear of the bus. Mira knew the students were making fun of them. Before Celine had entered the picture, they would tease Mira for preferring to sit up front near the exit. She didn’t realize they viewed her action as a kind of denial. As the bus continued on its route, it picked up more students, and the dynamics sharpened. White faces crowded around her. To the black kids it looked like she chose to be with them.
Sitting with Celine had made the situation worse, but since Celine ignored what was going on Mira chose to ignore it too. One kid named Marcus was the worst. “Don’t she look like one of those snowballs? Those cake things?” he yelled, commenting not just because of her jacket but because it was a play on snowflake, a name he gave to any white person he saw.
The rest of Marcus’s friends howled with laughter, and they all joined in the jeering.
Mira lifted her head to look back at Marcus, who made no attempt to hide his insults. Celine continued to ignore him, but Mira couldn’t concentrate on anything except Marcus and his group sitting behind them.
The insults got louder. Soon, the whole bus was laughing at the two of them. Mira lowered in her seat a little, but when she saw Celine was unfazed she straightened up again and forced herself to listen to Celine continue her conversation.
“Quit it, Marcus. It’s getting tired,” someone finally yelled in response, and Mira looked to see a lanky boy with a reddish-tinted Afro of curls. He caught Mira’s gaze before shifting to the window.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Marcus snapped. “Hey, snowball, will you let me taste your cream?” Marcus yelled, laughing.
With that, Jesse got up from his seat and moved toward the front of the bus. He found the seat across from Mira and Celine and sat down. He didn’t say anything but gave a simple nod, a subtle affirmation to let them know they were not alone. Marcus hollered for him to come back, but Jesse ignored him.
Marcus and his friends quieted soon after. It was clear to them Jesse had made a choice, and the insult of his decision silenced them. Jesse didn’t ask to join Celine and Mira’s conversation. He opened the flap of his bookbag and took out a photography book, one of portraiture, and flipped through the images. Throughout the rest of the ride, he concerned himself with the book and nothing else.
“Well,” Celine huffed when they hopped off the bus, grabbing his arm and pulling him to her. “If you’re going to do all that, we might as well at least know your name.” Celine wrapped her other arm around Mira as they huddled along the sidewalk to the school building.
After that, they were always together. Despite whatever disagreements between them, they stood by each other because in a way they were all each other had. All through middle school and into high school they remained friends, until that day in the woods when everything fell apart and Mira moved away.
Celine was getting married. They hadn’t needed to keep in touch for Mira to know how much this wedding meant. As teenagers, Celine filled their spare conversations with talk of gowns and decorations, flavors of cake and themes. Mira entertained the fantasy with her. They had so little in their lives that the dream of a wedding felt extravagant. They’d linger in the magazine aisle of the supermarket, flipping through the bridal pages as they scanned the dresses. Sheath or A-line, mermaid or ball gown. Sequins. Lace. Celine searched for the perfect one, always thinking she found it to later find another. They were all beautiful, Mira told her, they were all already perfect, but for Celine it was about more than the dress. The wedding was a chance for her to be seen as someone worthy, as beautiful, as deserving of the attention spent.
Still, they weren’t teenagers anymore, and it had been a decade since she’d seen Celine, almost as long as the heyday of their friendship. They hadn’t been friends for a long time, but Mira wondered about all of those years in the beginning. How long did the sense of obligation to someone last? Did she owe it to Celine to come to her wedding if they’d once been friends?
“Oh, I don’t know what I’ll do if you’re not there,” Celine continued on the phone, and the knot of guilt wrangled inside of her. Celine told her the wedding would be during the height of summer. Mira mentally mapped out the logistics of the trip, allowing herself to entertain the possibility. Of course she’d have to find something in her closet to wear, buy a dress on sale if she couldn’t. A summer wedding meant she wouldn’t have to take off from teaching. It was not a long drive from Winston-Salem; it would take a couple hours if she didn’t hit any traffic, a half day at most. If she left early enough it wouldn’t be so bad. A new dress, the cost of gas, and the expense of a hotel for a night or two. She could afford all that, so it wasn’t a question of if she could or couldn’t go. The real question was if she wanted to, and she couldn’t say she did, not with any real sense of authority. “If it’s the money, don’t worry about it. I’ll pay for your room. I can send you money for your travel too. Anything you need, Mira. Just let me know. All you have to do is come.”
Mira bristled. Was this another insult hiding underneath? She couldn’t be sure. “You don’t have to pay for my travel. I can afford it.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean—I know you can afford it, but free is always better, isn’t it? What about your room? It’s the least I can do. They’ve made these suite-sized cottages on the property. I’m sure you’ll love it.”
“Wait,” Mira said. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask where the wedding would be. She’d assumed it’d be at the country club right on the border of the town, near the golf course and the old-moneyed homes, but the mention of cottages threw her off. “Where are you having this?”
“This millionaire bought and renovated the old Woodsman property. It’s become a pretty popular touristy place since it opened. We’re going to be the first to have our wedding there, which is a little exciting when you think about it.”
“Celine, you can’t be serious,” Mira blurted, refusing to hide her disapproval. “You can’t possibly be having your wedding at that plantation.”
“You wouldn’t even recognize it now,” Celine responded, missing Mira’s point. “The property’s been completely redone.”
Celine should have known it wasn’t about what the place looked like, but then Celine hadn’t been with them that day, only heard the story afterward like everyone else. Mira and Jesse were the ones who’d snuck off, and in the time since, who knew what it had become? The history rewritten, erased, having become something entirely new. This was what Celine was trying to convince Mira of as she pressed the phone against her cheek and thought back to a past she’d hoped to forget, ...
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