PROLOGUE ROBERTA DU BOIS The sun was unusually hot for October on that morning in 1859 when I walked into Snaky Swamp, just south of our rice plantation in Alderman, North Carolina, wearing nothing but my pink feathered hat. The water was thick as wool and it clung to my skin like a net. Moccasins swam near me, skirting the top of the water, their eyes and fangs cracking the surface. I wiggled my toes in the soft mud of the swamp floor until the weight of the marshland was too much and my toes stopped moving. I walked forward into the swamp until my legs stopped lifting and I fell forward, my cheek hitting the water with a slap before sinking sinking into the blanket of algae and mosses, branches and vines, their tentacles covering my nostrils, wrapping my jaw tightly closed, my teeth fitted perfectly together until my skin fell away in clumps for the fish. On the day of my death, my husband, Jonathon du Bois, ordered one of his slaves, my half sister Claudia, whipped. The overseer poured salt onto her open back and I screamed from the silence of the marsh. Claudia’s eyes rolled in her skull and her tongue dripped saliva onto the earth On the day of my death, talk of an uprising was beginning. A man named Douglass was going to be the next Moses. Jonathon believed it and took to craziness. Our plantation, our rice fields, our livelihood, depended entirely on the men and women who worked it. Depended entirely on that human property of ours, bought and paid for with United States currency, now sweating under the Carolina sun. It had been a long time since I called Claudia my sister. I just couldn’t do it anymore. Especially after Jonathon took to leaving our bedroom and seeking his comfort with her on her straw bed on the cold dirt floor. Jonathon knew who she was. Knew that Claudia, of all the slaves, would be the one who would get to me the quickest. He knew that Claudia didn’t have a choice when it came to putting her legs up around his neck. Idyllic Grove rice plantation as I knew it has long since returned to dust. It’s me who’s still around. Poking in and around the tall pines, crunching my feet over the dried pinecones just enough to make you jump. Me who drips clear water down the hallway, my nakedness shivering in the air. The house that’s there now, in the very spot where our big house used to be, is a five-room clapboard with a black shingled roof. The property has been divided and divided and divided until nobody knows who owned what or whom or even why much anymore. The clapboard house is on about a hundred acres of woods and bottom lands, bordered to the west by Snaky Swamp, only I think now they call it Miller Creek, and I haven’t seen very many snakes there since they started building more houses around. The folks who live there, Lillian and Hannah Green, keep a really nice garden in the back by the septic tank. They grow corn and tomatoes and butter beans and even okra. The soil is gray, loose sand that washes away when the hurricanes come. There are shells here now, brought from trips to Wrightsville Beach, and a rusted green chair out by the back steps that sometimes shelters a white cat. It’s been almost one hundred and fifty years, and to people driving by in their motorcars on the new paved street, everything is as it should be. Beautiful land, a carpet of pine needles and leaves, a quiet house overlooking the water. Idyllic. But I still smell the broken bodies and bloody hearts. I press myself into the walls of this clapboard house and the vibrations are there still and again, still and again. When I dissolve through the walls into their living room with the single square of gray carpet in front of the fireplace, I see not Lillian and Hannah moving about, but the others. The shadow figures draped in blue with empty eye sockets and twisted fingers. The little girls, dancing in white flowing dresses. Ring around the rosies Pocket full of posies Ashes, ashes, we all fall down! The men, backs arched forward, arms over their heads swaying like reeds beside the swamp. The grinding sound of the wagon wheels plodding through the wet clay earth. The mosquitoes, big as big toes, swarming around the algae coated water. All of this I see, through eyes that never close. All of this wraps around my mind like satin ribbon, one layer at a time. When I walked into Snaky Swamp I fully expected that would be the end of it. At least the end of it for Roberta du Bois, daughter of Thomas Saunders, wife of Jonathon du Bois, mistress of Idyllic Grove rice plantation. I had no idea it would just be the beginning of my story. Time looped around me, caught me in its square knot, and held me tight. Held me here. Watching all of this madness unfolding in front of me, unwinding like snakeskin, dragging everyone along. I see others like me walking this property. It is this funny place though. I see them. They see me. But we can’t speak to one another. We can’t touch each other. We can only pass by, feel the coolness from each others’ paths, see the wildness in our eyes. I can only talk to you, and you pay me no mind at all. On the day that I walked into Snaky Swamp, I was thirty-six years old. I had no noble intentions. I wasn’t protesting the plight of the Negroes. I wasn’t lamenting my own role in the Southern society of oppression. I wasn’t even mourning my own dissolving marriage. It was the four girls, really, who called me into the water. Swamp sirens. Ring around the rosies. Pocket full of posies. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down! Over and over that rhyme. The little girls. Two white, golden hair flying around them like capes. Two black, hair full and wild on their heads as they spun in endless circles on the other side of the swamp. Roberta! Play with us! Oh, yes! Roberta, come dance with us! Over here! Over here! We’ll wait for you! Come! Just a little bit closer! The little girls played on the sand bar in the middle of the swamp. You can’t see it anymore, but it was right over there where the pier ends now. They danced and danced. They came to my room and danced on the ceiling, carrying vines and pine knots. They danced in my dreams, bound together at the waist with snakes. When we were little girls, Claudia and I used to dance with these four spirits. We both saw them, and when the six of us played together, we laughed as loud as the Carolina parakeets. Now I only see glimpses of them in the trees. A bit of a dark ankle. A strand of blonde hair entangled in a branch. A square of indigo fabric. A whisper in my ear when the osprey take flight. Perhaps you see them? I think that Hannah Green sees them. I think that Hannah Green sees me too; she just wishes she could not. I have walked these acres for a century trying to come up with the best way to tell my story to you. The only solution I have come up with is just to tell you, and to hope that in the telling I can reach some truth. Perhaps the facts are wrong. Perhaps they never existed at all. It has been a long time. I am left with memory, unreliable in the best of times. I can only tell you what I know and how all this is wrapped up with Lillian and Hannah Green and Gabriel Wilson and Jay Transom and the mad boy Tommy Green in the crazy house up in Mecklenburg County. I can only hope you trust me enough to believe that what I’m telling you is truth. CHAPTER 1 LILLIAN GREEN I stopped speaking in 1949 when I was eleven years old. That was the year my older brother Tommy went crazy. The two events aren’t related. Not really. It wasn’t like they happened on the same day or anything. It was more like I stopped speaking and Tommy went crazy a few months later. Tommy is still crazy. He’s locked up out in Mecklenburg County at one of those homes for special people. Mama wanted him to have the best, and back then Alderman had enough to worry about, what with all the racial mess and the boys back from the war and all. Tommy doesn’t seem to know he’s crazy. When I go to see him, which isn’t as much as I should, he’s always got a big old grin on his face and he opens his arms to me and says, “Butter Bean!” Butter Bean is what he used to call me when we were growing up. I was kind of a short, round kid and one day Tommy called me Butter Bean at the supper table and it sort of stuck. Mama would never dream of calling me a frivolous name like that. To her, I was always Lillian, or sometimes Miss Lilly if I was in deep water. If I saw Tommy on the street today I’d hardly recognize him. His hair’s all gray now, and he’s got a full beard that hangs to the middle of his chest. He watches game shows all day. When I go visit him, he tells me what he’s won that afternoon. Sometimes it’s a washer-dryer set. Sometimes a brand new shiny car. Once he even won the Showcase Showdown and kept talking about going to Hawaii where he’d stay in a luxurious room with white carpet and eat grapes. The floor nurses tell me he’s not a bit of trouble. He shouldn’t be, I guess. He’s been there almost fifty years. I’d think he’d be as much a part of the place as the pea-green concrete walls. Alderman was an unusual place to be living. Especially in 1949. To me, it’s always been two towns. Even now that it’s gotten so darn big that on weekends there’s a line of cars stretched back to Carolina Drive waiting to cross the drawbridge into Wrightsville Beach. One part of us was a beautiful, sleepy little Southern town filled with cotillions and yacht club parties and church picnics. Then there was another part of us, darker and more volatile. Everybody walking on two feet had both those two sides. All the fancy sweet smelling magnolias couldn’t prevent that dark from oozing through. I’ve seen it. It’s that dark that made me stop speaking. It was that dark that made Tommy go crazy. We all knew it was there. We walked by it everyday. We tipped our hats to it on the street. But we never did talk about it. What would we say? “Two things this family don’t talk about. Politics and the niggers.” Daddy would say and then strike a match and light the tip of his Pall Mall cigarette, cross his skinny legs, and survey his family, all of us seated in the high-backed mahogany chairs at the dining table. Tommy and I didn’t know why Daddy always said this. Or even what it was about the niggers we weren’t supposed to be talking about. After all, we had one come and take care of our yard every month and Mama had one help out in the kitchen, especially when Daddy was having company-folks over for supper. Daddy sold insurance. I’d been to his office once. The thing I remember most was the rows and rows of black typewriters. Daddy said that was where the girls sat. I was happy to think that someday there would be a place for me at Daddy’s office. Daddy was real particular about our house when he brought his work people home. He’d worry the whole week before. Make Mama go out and get a nigger to help clean up the place and then he’d make her, the nigger not Mama, wear a black and white maid’s outfit and serve the meal while Mama sat across from Daddy at the long table. These games of pretend were kind of funny at first. But I remember that no matter how much it upset Daddy not to have a nigger in the house, it upset Mama more to have one. I don’t know what they would fight about for those hours before the fancy dinners. But there was not a dinner party that went by at our house that was not preceded by a fight. When the men from Daddy’s office showed up, Mama always smiled like she was the happiest woman in the world, but afterwards, when everyone had gone back home, Mama cried and things were very tense between Mama and Daddy for about a week. When we asked Daddy, he said Mama was going through “the change.” But we didn’t have any idea what that meant. I think that Mama must have been one of the loneliest people God ever put on this earth. She had a mask that she’d go into whenever anybody wanted to know something too personal. I called it her “face.” It was the most amazing thing. She could be talking to you about anything in the world and if you mentioned two things – the Baptist Church or her family – she put on the “face.” It was almost as if her eyes changed colors, they became so shiny. Wet with tears I thought at first. But Mama never let a tear fall in her entire life, best I can tell. Not even when Tommy went crazy. She became a doll. The corners of her mouth turned down. Her laugh lines around her mouth and eyes seemed to vanish. She clenched her jaw so her jawbone appeared sharp and angled, and she would always fold her hands on her lap, fingers interlaced tight like the stitches on Tommy’s football. Then she’d look right at you, but you knew she didn’t see you. Her eyes had gotten cloudy, and when that happened, we knew she was only going to say one thing. “Go run along and play. That’s a topic for grownups.” She’d turn her head at an angle and look at us. She reminded me of the RCA dog on the record album covers. She tried to smile, but her face simply wouldn’t let her. Tommy and I would go outside and peek back in the picture window, and still see Mama sitting there, as if in a trance, waiting for whatever strange forces kept her face frozen to let her go. Tommy never seemed as bothered by Mama’s “face” as I did, but then again, he never asked as many questions as I did either. Boys in general just didn’t seem to ask as many questions. I guess that’s why everyone says boys are smarter than girls. I adored my brother Tommy. He was five years older than me, so in 1949 he was already sixteen. Magic age. Sixteen. Tommy had sandy blond hair like Daddy and he had blue eyes the color of the ocean after a thunder shower. He was already tall – almost six feet – and lanky like Daddy. Mama always said he had a few more inches to grow because his feet were still too big. The rest of his body needed to catch up to his size twelve tennis shoes that we had to special order directly from Raleigh. Daddy hoped he’d be an athlete. A basketball player or a baseball player. But Tommy had no interest in that. He liked to draw. When he was a little boy, he spent hours in his room just sketching. He sketched anything he could see. Chairs, tables, beds. Sometimes, if he was feeling really friendly, he sketched me and Mama doing dishes. He was quite good too, but it didn’t make Daddy happy. Sometimes I think that if Tommy had just been allowed to draw none of this would have happened. He had all those pictures swimming around inside him that needed to get out. If he didn’t let them out they started fighting. It’s hard for a body to go through this world if your whole insides are fighting. Sometimes I think that was always Mama's problem too. Her whole insides were fighting. She didn't ever want to let herself say anything that would really have mattered. Anything that would have put her in conflict with Daddy. I used to watch Tommy sitting in the back yard on a rusted lawn chair. He stared and stared off into the woods that ran behind our house. He drank iced tea until one day he started adding rum to the glass. I don't know what you call that drink, or even if it is a real drink, but I know it made Tommy quiet. Even as a little girl, I knew that Tommy was searching for some place that was outside himself and if Mama and Daddy didn’t find him soon, they never would. That's sure enough what happened. Anybody with half a brain could have looked into Tommy's empty eyes and known something had a hold on him deep inside. Put liquor with all the pictures dancing around in his head and it’s a wonder he didn’t leave us sooner. That particular Saturday morning in 1949 Tommy didn't eat breakfast with Mama and me. On Saturdays, Daddy always left early to go to Beauford Country Club with his office friends and play golf and eat expensive food. He used to take Tommy with him, but Tommy wasn't very good at golf and he made Daddy lose. Eventually Daddy stopped asking him to go along. So the three of us, Mama, Tommy and me, always made a special breakfast. Sometimes strawberry pancakes. Sometimes French toast with real maple syrup. Sometimes omelets with three kinds of cheese and sausages. The only time I think I saw Mama really laugh was during those breakfasts. When the sun came through the window just right, I thought how handsome Tommy was, and that he was going to be a great man one day. But that morning Tommy had left the house even before Daddy. Mama tried to pretend like it didn't matter to her, but I could tell she was hurt. "I reckon Tommy had other plans this morning," She handed me a plate of blueberry pancakes, piled four high. "Maybe he's meetin' him a girl!" She winked at me. Both Mama and Daddy were worried that Tommy hadn't found a girlfriend yet. "Eewww," I said. "I don't think Tommy wants to do that." "Someday you'll understand," said Mama, and pulled the glass bottle of syrup out of the Frigidaire. I was never going to understand. Some of my girlfriends had already started to notice boys. I always figured maybe it was because I had a brother that I wasn't so enthralled with them. There wasn't really any mystery for me to figure out. That morning I helped Mama clean the house like always, only this time we didn’t have Tommy’s help for the high places. We dusted all the furniture, arranging the lace doilies over the shiny wood tables. We wore yellow rubber gloves and cleaned the toilet bowls with ammonia. Every other Saturday, we washed the windows, top to bottom, inside and out, Mama holding the ladder steady while I climbed to reach the highest corners. Tommy usually helped. I liked the feeling of knowing his hands were holding the sides of the ladder. It made me feel like he was lifting me up to heaven, and I felt safe knowing he was on the ground holding me steady, ready to catch me if I fell. But this Saturday we were on our own, and Mama’s grip on the ladder wasn’t as strong and the ladder swung from side to side as I reached for the corners of the windows. Mama tried to pretend that nothing was any different. She was an expert at that. Always acting like things were fine. I tell you on my own grave that she could look my dead body square on and tell you she had no idea what all the fuss was about. She had a knack for reshaping reality to whatever way best suited her. I kind of liked spending the day alone with Mama. We really didn't get much opportunity for what they call these days mother-daughter time. But Mama was like a closed off room at the top of the stairs to me and to Tommy. But especially to me. I always wondered what it was about me that made her so quiet. By the time Daddy came back from the country club, the house sparkled. He kissed Mama on the cheek. "How was your game, dear?" she asked. "Three under par." He set his golf bag down in the foyer. "Jimmy and I set a personal record." Daddy didn’t pronounce “r’s”. They rolled out of his mouth into vowels. "That's wonderful, dear." Daddy didn't notice how clean the house was. He walked over our polished floors with his outdoor shoes, leaving little pieces of dirt on the linoleum in the patterns of his soles. I watched Mama carefully, trying to see if she would put on her "face" for Daddy. When he passed her, she whispered something in his ear which made him stop and touch her cheek. When we sat down to supper, he even cut his own steak. We didn't talk about the empty place at the table. Mama had put out a plate and a cup full of milk like always for Tommy. Daddy tried to pretend like he wasn't mad by gripping his silverware too tight. "Tommy didn't say anything to you, did he, honey?" Mama asked me. My mouth was full of pork peas. I shook my head. "Well, I'm sure he'll be home soon." Daddy set his fork down on the plate. "If he knows what's good for him." I stared at my supper. The steak looked gray. The pork peas too green. I shifted in my chair. My feet still wouldn't reach the ground. "Honey, I'm sure he'll be back." Mama spooned more peas on my plate. "Mama, I don't want anymore." "Mind your mother," said Daddy. The meal continued in the kind of silence that falls thick as dust. The sun had set and the three of us were all reflected in the panes of the picture window, staring two feet in front of ourselves, shifting the food from one side of the plate to another. I don’t know how long we all sat there like that, watching the images of ourselves eating. Fork to mouth to plate and back to mouth again. It was hypnotic. The three of us moving in slow motion as if we were under water. Nobody looking at each other. Nobody touching each other. All of us locked tight in our worry, not daring to be the first one to break the stillness with a real question. We just spooned food into our mouths and looked at Tommy’s empty chair and pretended not to see it. I had a piece of seasoned pork caught in my teeth that I was working with my tongue. Gave me something to do while we didn’t talk. Ever so often I'd catch Daddy's eyes shifting nervously towards the window. He avoided Mama's eyes. That much I can tell you. Now I wonder just what it might have been that Daddy knew about. But could be I'm just an old woman imagining again. Wouldn't be the first time. I asked Mama could I be excused, but she just kept chewing her food, so I picked up my plate and carried it into the kitchen and sneaked up the back stairs to my room. As soon as I closed my bedroom door, the shouting began. It was that low kind of shouting. The kind that is a single tone -- no rising and falling -- just one solitary note pulsing like the tell-tale heart across the bottom floor of our house. I tried, like I always did, not to hear it. I stuffed tissues in my ears. I practiced singing my scales for music class. I jumped on my bed as high as I could, almost hitting my head on the white ceiling. When I heard the dish break in the kitchen, I escaped. I opened the shade and lifted the window and climbed onto the branch of the oak tree that bumped up against the side of our house. It was cold, the night air wet, and my heart was pounding from the broken dish, the low shouting, the absence of my brother and the leap from the window. I'll never forget how soft the earth felt under my feet that night. It was as if everything in the world was sinking. I could see mama and daddy through the picture window, faces close, bodies apart. I knew without seeing that mama's lips were disappearing and that daddy's mouth was getting bigger, his lips puffier and redder with his rage at my mother's silence. My shoelace had come untied and when I bent over to lace it back I saw Bernie, my favorite horny toad, blinking up at me from an old log. He hopped away as quick as he could, the rustling of the leaves in his path sounding just like a diamondback rattler. I don't really recall how long or how far I actually walked. Seemed to me it had to be miles and miles, but lately when I go back home in my mind I feel like it all might have happened in my own backyard. I do remember wishing I had thought to take a jacket before I went jumping out my bedroom window, but once I heard the singing I wasn't able to stop both sweating and shivering. The crunch of the tires from Tommy's truck on the loose gravel road sounded like bones breaking. Tiny rocks sprayed onto the sandy roadside. I jumped out of the way, scratching my legs in the bushes that grew in clumps along the road. I wasn't sure at first the truck was Tommy's. The moon was only a crescent, and the tiniest one at that. In daylight, Tommy's Ford pickup was a baby blue, speckled with red mud that dried to a dull brown around the running boards and doors. In darkness, it looked black. He drove without his headlights on and maybe it was because he kept the lights off that I was able to see the squirrel tail that flew off the radio antenna. The truck stopped just at the end of the road. I tried to remember what was down there. Was that where Mr. Wilson lived? Or was that where the creek took a turn toward the inland waterway? I crouched as low as I could, my elbows up to my chin, my fingers holding me together. I inched forward, quiet as I could be. I wanted to be sure of what I saw. It was what was in the back of the pickup that stopped me from calling out to Tommy. It looked like a present you'd get at Christmas at first. A swing set or something like that from Sears. Then it moved. There were three boys around it, passing bottles of something that I thought must be beer. They were laughing and carrying on. Ignoring the bundle between them. Tommy got out of the truck. I recognized the angle of his shoulders, hunched too far forward, ashamed, as always, of his height. The crickets were carrying on so loud I thought they had crawled right up in my ears and were singing to the back of my skull. The bundle in the pick up bed twisted into an “s” shape, reminding me of the time daddy caught a copperhead in the backyard and put it in a burlap sack. The snake scurried across the grass in the darkness of the sack until daddy could get the garden shovel and crush its skull. Maybe Tommy had caught a huge snake. There were stories all the time about the creatures that lived in Snaky Swamp. Great stories about monsters and dragons and ghosts of pirates. Maybe Tommy had caught an alligator. That had to be it. The bundle was really too big for a snake. Even I knew that. Then I heard the noise. At first it was so soft I could have told myself I didn’t hear it at all. Then there could be no doubt. Fabric ripping. Knife plunging into soft, sticky substance. One of Tommy’s friends falling, hitting the back of his head on a rock in the ground. Bare black foot emerging from the pick up bed. White wrists wrapped around the foot. Man emerging from sack, unfolding like origami. Tommy, holding a rope, standing by a tree. Not enough moonlight to see his eyes. Man shivering, surrounded by a circle of white boys. No sheets. No horses or crosses. Just boys. With ropes. And knives. And clubs. Laughter. Eenie, meenie, miney mo. Catch a nigger by the toe. Owl. Thud of wood on bone. Man on his knees. Suck me. That’s right. Nigger, deeper. Oh, ah. Yes, swallow. Nigger, swallow! Thud. Man on the ground. Curled tight. Crack! Tommy, standing. Tommy, watching. Owl. Screaming. I am screaming but no sound. My mouth is open. No noise. No noise. Where is the noise? Crack! Cry out. Beg. Crack! Fall. Thud not so loud now. Dragging. Dragging a man sounds like burrowing. Tommy, standing. Snake in the tree! Snake in the tree beside Tommy! I am screaming! Hear me! If he hollers, let him go. Hear me! I fall on my knees. Man lifted up. Limp. Tommy puts the man’s head in the snake circle. Man cries. Jesus! Sweet Jesus! Boys laugh. Ooga booga. You pray to your voodoo gods. What business Jesus have with nigger trash like you. Hear me! Oh, God! JESUS!!! Snap! Panting, heavy breath. Dog breath. Swimming through thick thick air to break through on the other side. Run! Run! Tommy, nodding. Tightening the snake loop around the man’s neck. Tommy, smiling. Drop him. Heavy. Snake becomes a rope. Tightening. Hanging, hanging, lord, lord. Lordlordlordlordlordlordlordlordlordlordlordlordlordlord. I am frozen. Vines wrap around my ankles. Hold me in place. Keep me away. Mouth open. No sound. No screaming. Eyes open. Eyes open. help help help let him go oh let him go Laughing. Tossing a pine cone around the circle. Man hanging. Snake around his neck. Feet twitching. Not dead. let him go Tommy shrugging shoulders. Patting backs. The only good nigger, he says. A dead nigger, they shout. Laughter. Vines snap from around my ankles. Fall forward. Who’s there? No noise. Mouth open. Who’s there? tommytommytommytommy please stop it Damnit! Someone’s here. Scramble. Boys in pick up bed. Gravel flying. Truck backs up. License plate six inches from my nose. Tires squealing. Gravel spray peppers my cheek. Man hanging. Owl. No noise. Breath stopped. Mouth closed. No noise. Mouth. Closed. I kept my face pressed into the sand as long as I could. I felt as if I weren’t wearing any clothes. The dampness chilled me, shook my teeth against themselves in a rattle. Then, the branch broke. Cut through the silence like a shotgun. I screamed and the sound of my own voice startled me more than the sound coming from beneath the tree. I began to walk, each step seeming to take the whole of my short lifetime. I faltered on my own ankles. I was panting now, no longer able to scream, my tongue fat in my mouth. I couldn’t hear Tommy’s pick up anymore and the sound of my own feet on the dried leaves was as heavy as elephant steps. I crossed the road and stopped suddenly when I reached the pile of human flesh and bones. A dark liquid dripped from his mouth, forming a puddle beside his head. His eyes were open and he made a gurgling sound from deep in his chest. “Are you alive?” I whispered. I tried to see if his chest was moving. It was hard to tell in the darkness and from the way he had folded when he fell from the tree. Every cell on my body was electrified. My chest was full of sounds I did not make. The body on the ground lay twisted into itself, legs splayed at forty-five degree angles to either side. I wanted both to believe I saw him move and that he was dead at the same time. His eyes opened and I must have jumped back a yard and a half. My chest was so full of screaming I didn’t know how to let it out. “I’ll get help,” I whispered, creeping as close to the body as I dared. But before I could decide which way to run, he raised his right hand up and grabbed my wrist. “Tell…” He sputtered the word at me and his hand fell from my arm. He was dead for keeps this time. I looked around to see if anything was lying around that belonged to Tommy. I knew sooner or later somebody would come by and find the body. I swallowed and stuffed what I saw deep into my belly and walked toward home. I don’t know what time of night or early morning it was when I climbed back up the tree and shimmied into my bedroom. The ground was damp and everything seemed very very still. I could hear the swamp frogs calling to each other and I couldn’t shake the feeling that when the sun came up my whole world was going to change. A mist hung low to the ground and the salt smell from the ocean coated my nostrils. No leaf rustled in the trees. No car drove by on the main road. I could have easily been the only person alive in all of Alderman, and if I could have erased the film of what I had just seen, I would have gladly given up my life. I kept looking over my shoulder, hoping I’d see Tommy come driving up. I needed to talk to him before we got inside. But he never came. It was three more days before Tommy drove back in the driveway, young blond facial hair sprouting from his chin, eyes a vacant blue. Neither Mama nor Daddy said anything to him. By that time, the man’s body had been found and an old tension grew stronger again. The body’s name was Gabriel Wilson and he lived over by the Cape Fear River at the docks. The body had a wife named Minnie and a son named George who was the same age as I. “Unknown persons” killed the body, according to the paper. The body was apparently “beaten and hanged until dead.” The police had no comment. When I saw Tommy walk through our front door for the first time after that night, my stomach tore itself up over what to say – how to ask him about what I had seen. I felt that somehow Daddy knew what had happened, and strangely enough, I felt like he didn’t much care. Mama, on the other hand, hadn’t eaten a bite of food during the three days he was missing; she just kept vigil at the dining room table, looking out the picture window waiting for her boy to come back. Since nobody seemed to notice me at all during those three days, I pretty much stayed up in my room, picking at the threads on my quilt, unraveling squares at the bottom where I hoped no one would notice. Daddy knocked on my door the second morning and when I said, “Come in,” he opened the door, entered, and just gazed out into the room. I had half a square of purple velvet in my hand. “Your Mother’s not going to be too happy with you destroying that quilt. You know that’s been in the family for generations.” “Yes, sir.” “Reckon you’re old enough to know better.” “Yes, sir.” “You know anything about where your brother is? If you do, now is the time to let me know.” I squeezed the fabric, ripping more of the stitches from the quilt. Daddy sat on the bed next to me and slowly separated my fingers from the velvet, uncurling each one, pressing it out flat like a paper note. “Did you climb out of your bedroom window night before last?” “No, sir.” “There’s never any shame in telling the truth.” Maybe it wasn’t Tommy driving his pick up truck. Maybe he loaned it to a buddy who just looked like Tommy in the dark. Maybe I just had one of those really bizarre dreams where you actually feel wet if it’s raining or cold if it’s snowing. Maybe I didn’t crawl out of my bedroom window and walk down through the woods and see Tommy and his friends beating a body named Gabriel to death in the dark. I just couldn’t have. Because if I did, my brother Tommy was gone for ever. # After Tommy returned, there was a great deal of carrying on about him, like he was the Prodigal Son or something even bigger. Tommy and Daddy took their rifles and went out into the woods one morning and were gone clear past sunset. Mother wouldn’t say anything about it other than it was nice for the two men to spend a little time together. I’d never heard Tommy referred to as a man before, and it sounded false, like the noises of the caged animals at the zoo. I hung around the house trying to help Mother with the cleaning or the cooking. Tommy hadn’t looked at me once since he’d been back. I knew I’d been avoiding his eyes too, but I thought surely he’d want to talk to me. He’d grabbed the back of my head the first day he was back and rubbed my scalp. “How ya doin’, Butter Bean?” he said. But he didn’t really stay long enough for me to answer, and I don’t know how I could have replied anyway. By the time he asked me how I was doing, I had already begun to stop talking. Interestingly enough, nobody noticed at all. The first morning I played a game with myself. I wanted to see how long I could go without saying a word before anyone noticed and made me speak. Turned out the only thing Mother said was how nice it was that I was being so quiet. So I went on to day two of my game, completely certain that someone would make me speak by that point. I guess it was a good thing I didn’t have anyone to bet with. Mother loved my silence and Daddy never paid much attention anyway. Now that Tommy was back, they were stuck together like aluminum siding. I thought Tommy would want to talk to me, but when I think about it now, what would he have said? He didn’t know I was there. He didn’t know I had seen him kill that black body. He didn’t know. So moment by moment the fact that I witnessed this act dissolved into smoky shadows that grew large in moonlight and disappeared completely in daylight. Sooner than a person would think, I began to file away what I had seen into some untouchable place in my mind. There was a funeral for the black body named Gabriel Wilson. The national news came all the way from New York to do a feature about lynching. They talked about Gabriel Wilson and also eleven other black men who had been lynched in the past year. Daddy was furious that a Northerner could come down to our town and pretend that he knew anything about anything. The Negroes marched. The whites marched. Fire bombs went off like Fourth of July fireworks. The police found no information leading to the murderers of Gabriel Wilson and the case was officially closed fourteen days after the body had been uncovered by a little boy playing hide and go seek in the woods. Tommy listened to the news on the radio and stroked the stubble on his chin. He didn’t flinch at the mention of the body’s name. He didn’t shift in his chair when they spoke of the riots. When I watched him, I heard his voice saying “the only good nigger” over and over in my head. Tommy what happened? Tommy what did you do to us? To you? To Gabriel Wilson? Why won’t you talk to me? Why don’t you notice that I am not talking to you? Daddy and Tommy spent a great deal of time whispering together. Mother and I now ate our Saturday breakfasts by ourselves. Mother always made a little extra bacon or a few more pancakes in case Tommy dropped in, but he never did. Not since that night. One morning she asked me, “What is going on with your brother? Didn’t he tell you anything?” I shook my head ‘no’. He didn’t twirl me around his head in the backyard anymore. He didn’t rub my head and call me Butter Bean. He didn’t sneak up on me when I’m in the bathroom and make me jump so I squirt toothpaste all over my blouse. He most certainly did not tell me a thing. “I declare, he’s just not been himself,” Mother wiped the frying pan with a blue and white dishcloth. “I look at him at dinner and I don’t even recognize him.” She snapped the dishcloth at me. “Get on out of here and play. You shouldn’t be listening to your mama carry on like this.” I nodded and slid off the chair. # Right before the investigation wrapped up, Tommy locked himself in his room for three days. Daddy went in to visit him every few hours or so. Mother stayed downstairs in the kitchen, slamming pots and pans and occasionally crying like Mary at the foot of the cross. I hadn’t been out of my room much either. I had nightmares. Long loopy ones that always began and ended at the same place – a ragged rope swinging in the moonlight. Before that night, my worst nightmare had been about jellybeans. Jellybeans had danced round and round the highest part of my bedroom walls. They laughed and sang and multiplied over and over again until the whole room was filled with them and I couldn’t breathe. I saw them even after I woke up. Mother and Daddy didn’t believe me and talked to me like I was a baby, but I knew they were really there, multicolored and full of sugar, waiting to swallow me up. After what I saw in the woods, I’d have given anything to be afraid of jellybeans again. When Daddy went into Tommy’s room, he would shout. I never heard Tommy say anything back. One morning, I thought I heard a piece of furniture crash against the wall, but I never found anything broken when I sneaked into Tommy’s room after he’d left us for that special place in Mecklenburg County. Sheriff Paterson had been to our house twice since that night. Daddy invited him into his den for scotch and man-talk. When he left, Sheriff Paterson slapped Daddy on the back like they were both football players, and Daddy let out a tiny laugh that sounded so desperate my insides hurt. Sheriff Paterson put his big sheriff hat on and winked. “We’ll take care of it, Mr. Green. We’ll get this investigation closed right up.” Daddy nodded. “Thank you, kindly.” “Tommy’s a good boy. It’ll be all right. And I sure appreciate your offer.” Daddy looked at his wing-tips. I sat on the staircase, my arms wrapped around the railing. “Say hello to the wife, Sheriff.” “Will do.” Daddy walked past me on his way up the stairs to Tommy’s room. I don’t know if he even saw me. His neck was a strange red color. Mother was still in the kitchen. I could hear her scouring the pans. Daddy yelled some more from inside Tommy’s room. When he came back downstairs, he went straight to the study and slammed the door. Mother emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her paisley print apron. “Was that your father?” “Yes,” “Where’s your brother?” I pointed upstairs. Mother grunted and went back into the kitchen. I sat on the stairs as long as I could. I had to pee, but I held on to the pain in my bladder until the heavy pressing felt as natural as breathing. # On the third day, Tommy walked out of his room. I was lying on my bed arranging paper dolls. He didn’t look in my room at all. I leapt from the bed, scattering my dolls on the floor, and followed him down the stairs. I thought he must have lost twenty pounds those three days in his room. Daddy hadn’t been to work in a week. Mother’s eyes were thin paper cuts in her drawn face. They both sat at the kitchen table, staring at empty plates. When Tommy got to the foot of the stairs, they looked up. Mother ran to him, hugged him and then slapped him. Daddy stayed in his chair. Tommy turned around and looked at me, and I saw eyes I’d never seen. “Hey, butter bean,” he whispered. I stayed back, afraid to come close to him. He knelt on one knee. He doesn’t know, I realized. He doesn’t know I saw him. My teeth felt very pointy against my tongue. “Butter bean. Don’t be that way.” Tommy, my Tommy! I watched the sailboats on the ocean with you. I was so tall on your shoulders. You held me higher than the branches where you strung that man. I ran to him, shaking against his chest. “Shhh,” he said. “I’m going to be fine.” Eenie meenie miney mo That man isn’t going to be fine. Am I going to be fine? I pressed my lips against his ear. “Why?” He pushed me away like I was fire. He didn’t speak. I saw a flicker of the eyes I knew just one week ago. He blinked too quickly and the light went out. We’d never watch the sailboats again.