Chapter XXIV

XXIV.

MIRA SCREAMED, UNABLE to keep it in any longer. Over the years she’d tried so hard to forget his face—the way his hands kept touching the skin to keep it from falling off, the way the skin glistened from blood as it dripped down his neck, how he’d smiled as he licked his lips over the carved flesh.

The muscles in Mira’s chest tightened. Her throat constricted. She let out as much sound as she could before her body’s response from the trauma took over, and then, defensively, she clenched herself into a ball and sobbed.

“Mira? Mira, I’m here. Are you all right? Can you hear me? I’m here.

It’s Jesse, Mira. Come on, open your eyes and see. It’s me.”

“Jesse?” Reluctantly, Mira opened her eyes and saw Jesse on the ground beside her. She was no longer in the barn. Roman and his torture devices were gone, gone was Jeffrey’s bleeding body. Mira was outside on the grass. The air smelled like the height of summer, the sweet mix of alcohol and pollen. She breathed in the grass below her, the odor of her own sweat, almost choking on the smell of it. It’s over, she thought, relaxing for just a moment.

Mira’s shovel was only a few feet away. Somehow, she had ended up where she’d started. Maybe she had run back to this spot without realizing.

It was not far and she could barely see anything in the dark. The Woodsman Plantation was behind her, the back door closed shut. The window, the one that earlier had beckoned her inside, was dark now. The entire house was dark. Empty and abandoned. Remembering the terror inside, what she’d seen, she backed away on the grass.

“What’s wrong?” Jesse kept asking her.

“The light was on,” Mira answered, keeping her gaze at the house. “I heard screaming and I—I ran inside, and I saw—”

“You saw what?”

“Did you hear it?” Mira asked instead. “What about Roman? Did you see him?”

“Roman? Mira, what are you talking about?” It took Jesse a couple of seconds to understand, but when he did, he turned solemn. “Tell me what you saw.”

“I saw what Roman did,” Mira said in a rush. “Oh, it’s horrible. All of it is so horrible. I also saw Lucy. They kept her in a cage. I saw one of the parties Roman had where he rented out the women to men of the area.

Anyone who could pay. They wore these masks. Oh god, the masks. I know why the slaves tried to fight back, and I saw what happened to the ones Roman caught.”

Mira abruptly put the rest together. The graves were empty. Nothing had been there. The slaves had dug those holes for the white men’s fun, and those in the sacks were the ones who’d started the revolt. Roman hadn’t buried them, instead skinned their bodies and used the flesh as leather. The soft inner thighs and arms used for shoes. The knotted marks of the lash on their backs a decoration for wallets. The masks the men had worn—they’d been made from the slaves he’d wanted punish.

“Did you not see any of it?” Mira asked with a pleading.

“No, I didn’t.”

They sat there on the grass, both of them exhausted, their bodies hunched over, defeated. “You believe me though. Right? Someone has to believe me.”

“I believe you,” Jesse said, and relief washed over her.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Jesse helped her to stand. She wiped what dirt she could from her clothes, a futile effort but she did it anyway.

Far off in the periphery, a cluster of lights glowed bright. Mira’s gaze narrowed on them as she feared they were the mob, coming back for them both.

“The mob is coming for you,” Mira said. “For us. We need to get out of here but I don’t know where to go. If we go back to the entrance we’ll be running straight into them.”

They stood frozen as the crowd of men grew larger. Their faces were a blur, but she knew who they were. She looked out at the looming crowd and saw the years of men like these inflicting their violence. They would not rest until black bodies lay crumpled below their feet as they stampeded over

their broken bones and bruised faces. They carried their pistols close to their chests, ready to fire, and they made their way through the woods searching for Mira and Jesse. Together, the mob was young and old—husky men who huffed with each leap as they tried to keep up, the fitter ones shouting as they ran, sweat running down their flustered faces.

Why had Mira tried to convince such men? Why had she believed there would be any outcome other than this? She should have known, should have seen it, but she saw that they were the devils, the murderers, the true thieves in the night. How many communities had men like these destroyed to rubble, leaving only ash from the burning wreckage as it billowed toward the sky? They escaped to their untouched homes while black people were rounded up on the streets and locked away. The elders left to remember had to be urged to tell of the damage done, too afraid if they spoke it would come to pass again. Bodies beaten, men and women with nooses tied around their necks as they were dragged through the streets. Mira saw the history of her people, of this country, of all the violence forgotten and ignored. It was here again. No, it was always here. What she saw before her could have been this year or last, ten years ago or a hundred. The scene was the same, the story the same, and she knew its ending.

“We could try and wait them out,” Jesse offered. “Morning’s not too far off, a couple hours, and then—”

And then? Mira had no answer because there was none, not for them.

There was nowhere they could escape where the mob wouldn’t eventually find them. They were never going to make it to his car. They could hide out in the fields, get down low under the tobacco stalks, and pray they could disappear. Maybe make the mob believe they were gone.

“We’re not going to make it until morning, and by then they might have decided to get the police on us too,” Mira said, pulling on Jesse’s arm. “The river. That’s where we need to go.”

“What do you think is going to happen when we get there? It’s not like we can escape. We don’t have a boat. You want to hide in the water?”

The river was where this had all started. Mr. Loomis’s body was found by the river and Mira suspected if they could get there, whatever had come for him would come for these men. If Jesse was right, Woodsman’s slaves had once escaped to the river, following it to the swamps. If they were going to come back, if they had returned to collect their revenge, then they’d be waiting at the river to start their insurrection. She finally

understood that she needed to join in their struggle. Her whole life she’d looked away, but she saw everything clearly now and what she saw was these men, full of unhinged fury, the descendants of a long-soiled line.

More pain would come unless she fought. She had to stop them. She would lead them to the river to meet their necessary fate.

“I just have a feeling,” Mira told Jesse. “Can you trust me?”

“Yes, I trust you,” Jesse said, relenting, and together they made their way to the river.