her smile, her dark-red skin. And I remember her stories of the world that was, stories brought across from water, stories she would share only at night, before bed, if I had been a good boy that day. I remember how the stories glowed in my mind, how they filled our nights with colors. I remember Cuffee, who tucked the drum into his bones. And Mami Wata, who lived in that paradise under the sea, where we would all arrive, after our Task, and find our reward.”
And now the fog gathered around us, and I felt the bridge disappear under my feet. Thena still had my hand, and I could feel the heat pushing out from the shell necklace all around me, and the waves that once marked the river were quiet and low.
“But Cuffee, with the drum tucked into his bones, was in the now time, in the midst of the Task. And my mother had the drum beating in each and every one of her bones. There were stories when she danced, maybe more true than stories in her words. I remember her patting juba with her sister Emma, how the shell necklace would shake, how the jar of water stayed fixed upon her head. And those were the good years, good years, under the Task. But the Task is the Task, and I do believe my mother, my aunt Emma, danced as they did because they knew what good there was could not last.”
And at this, they came, the phantoms that I had seen flittering about that fateful evening. They were all around us, and I could see that it was Holiday, a Holiday I remembered, when I was five, and it was still the high times of Elm County, and Howell Walker had sent demijohns down to the Street. And down near the bonfire, I saw them, my mother and my aunt Emma, trading dances back and forth. I stopped here and watched, for though the moment was conjured up by me, I wanted to savor it, but when I tried, I saw them begin to fade from me, fade like mortal life and mortal memory, and I knew that I must keep telling the story.
“The world changed. Tobacco fell. I remember the strange men with their worried faces. I remember the soil now hard and the old manses along the Goose left to possums and field-rats. And I remember that there were fewer uncles about; that cousins were off on long jaunts that did not end. And I remember how we were conducted over the bridge, off to Natchez. And I remember because I was there.”
And now, where the phantoms had once danced before us, we saw that these same men and women were walking before us, and where they had once worn looks of great joy, there was now sorrow, and a longing in their eyes deep as the river itself, and where their arms and their legs had once been dancing, I saw now that from ankle to wrist they were chained.
“I remember my mother kneeling at my bedside, waking me, and carrying me off into the night. And for three days and nights we lived out in the forests among the animals, sleeping by day and running by night. And all she would say to me was that we must go, ’fore we end up like Aunt Emma, and though I was young then, I understood that my aunt Emma had been sold. If we could get to the swamps, that was her aim, to get us there to get us away, for she could not run across the water like her mother.
“But they ran us down, Ryland did. Caught us and brought us back. And we were held in their jail in Starfall. I was there with my mother, and I could not wholly understand. And so lost was I that when my father came, I truly believed he had come bringing salvation. He was so soft, Thena. He held his hand on my cheek, and when he looked at my mother, he was pained.
“ ‘Why did you, go?’ he asked. ‘What have I ever done to push you so?’
“But there was only silence in my mother’s regard, and when he asked her again, still she would not speak. And I saw then that his pained look twisted into a rage, and what I then knew was that my father’s pain was not for my mother, nor for me, but