Silence at the Lock

Chapter 2

2

I walked over to the young woman and sat down near—but not touching—her. She looked like she needed some space . . . although I wondered how that was possible since this woman had probably been alone for decades. Still, grief is not a simple thing. . . . I had learned that over the past couple of years.

“Yes, I can see the woman in the tree. She’s your mom?”

“Yes. They killed her, missus. They killed her.”

I forced myself to look up at the hanging woman’s face. “It’s horrible. I’m so sorry.” The words felt limp and weak in the air.

“Said she stole flour from the general store over in Terra Linda.”

I knew the store she was talking about. It sold antiques and scented candles now, but they still used a lot of the old fixtures from back when the shop carried everything from nails to candy to, apparently, flour. “Flour? How does someone steal flour?

“Exactly what I said, missus. It’s not like she could scoop it up in her hands and walk out with it now, is it?” The woman’s voice was getting sharper, brighter.

“Right. Ridiculous.”

The young woman looked me dead in the eyes. “You believe me?” She leaned toward me just a bit, her forehead lowering to the level of my eyes. “You believe she innocent?”

From my previous experience with ghosts, I’d learned that black people get accused—and convicted without trial—for crimes that had never happened. Couple that experience with the twenty-first century truths of police brutality and white people calling the cops on black folks for trying to go into their own apartment or for swimming in their community pool, and I found myself almost always believing the black person in a situation of violence just as an act of resistance to the doubt that seemed to trail black people in every story. I nodded.

The young woman leaned back and looked at me. Her gaze was softer now, but no less intense. “Missus, forgive me for asking, but who are you?”

“I’m Mary. Mary Steele. I’m from just over the hill there.”

She continued to look me dead in the eye. “And you here because?”

“That’s a long story. I will tell you sometime though. Do you mind if I ask your name?”

“I’m Sarah. Sarah Jennings, missus. We live back there in Wildy Hollow. You know it?”

I didn’t, but I could see where she was pointing: back toward Terra Linda, my town, and up into the hills. “Sort of. And your mom? What was your mom’s name?

“Beverly. But everybody called her Bo.” She paused and turned to look at the river. “Don’t quite know why they called her that except that everybody up the hollow is called something or other.”

I could see her almost smile with memory and belongingness. But then, she must have seen her mother’s feet up behind me because the tears sprung to her eyes again.

“When did this happen, Sarah?” I asked quietly, knowing the answer was complicated by time and memory and the way this thing—whatever it was that I could do—was.

“Last night.” She looked me in the eyes. “Last night ninety years ago.”

1928. I had some vague notion of women in high-waisted dresses and Model Ts when I thought of the 1920s. But in this context, the context where people were killed for supposedly stealing flour, I had nothing. I couldn’t even remember a movie I’d seen or a TV show set in the 1920s that included black people unless they were maids or butlers.

“So you can see me?” Sarah circled back to her original question.

“Yes.” I paused. I never knew how to explain this to anyone, living or dead. “I don’t know why or how. It’s happened before though.” She looked interested—or maybe she just had nothing else to do—so I told her about the two other times I’d seen ghosts. By the end of what was a far longer story than I’d thought it would be going in, her brow had furrowed.

“You only see the ghosts of black folks then?”

I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but it was true. I’d never seen a dead white person, that was for sure. “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

“Don’t you think it’s strange that a white girl would see dead black people?”

Now that she put it that way . . . “I guess so. You believe me though?”

“I do. But still . . .”

She didn’t look upset, just quizzical, and I felt the same way. I knew why I’d seen Moses; the fact that he was my ancestor made that pretty clear. But then why Charlotte a few months back? She wasn’t my kin. And why Sarah now?

Sarah and I sat staring out at the Maury River for a few minutes in silence, a comfortable, easy silence, before she said, “Can I ask you another question?”

“Sure.” I turned my body back to face her.

“Why do you think they lynched my mama here?”

I looked around again. The lock would have been much cleaner, maybe still in use, in 1928. I knew from those field trips that the lock had been built around 1840, so it was old even then. Maybe that had something to do with why Beverly Jennings had been hanged here . . . but somehow that didn’t seem right.

“Sarah, when you were alive, how big was this road?” I gestured behind us at the four-lane highway running between the base of the mountains and the river.

“Well, not that big.” She looked over at the highway. “But big enough for two wagons to pass.” I figured the road had long been a cut through in the mountains from Terra Linda to Lexington. There weren’t many easy places to move through the mountains.

“So maybe that’s it. Maybe they wanted people to see . . .” I didn’t stop myself soon enough.

Sarah’s face clouded over, and she stared out at the water again. “Yeah, maybe.” Her voice was almost a whisper.

A less comfortable silence settled down over us. I watched this girl—about my age, maybe a little older—from the corner of my eye. She had on a simple dress that was cinched just a bit at the waist. She was barefoot like me and like her mama. And her hair was pulled back into a tight bun at the top of her head. Her skin was the color of walnut bark, and she had this small mole just below her left eye. She was beautiful in a simple, unfussy way.

Then, I turned to look at her. “Sarah, how did you die?”