reality Thena had put upon them. I waited a few minutes and then walked down to the far end of the Street, until I reached the farthest cabin, the one set off from the others, the one where Thena once stood with her broom, running off children, where I had appeared all those years ago, sensing that this woman, in particular, would understand the betrayal I felt. And now I saw her standing before her old cabin, lost in her own particular thoughts. I walked over and stood close enough so that she knew that I was there. She looked over at me for a few seconds, and I saw that her face had now softened, then she turned back to the cabin.
I stood with her for a moment and then walked back up, leaving her to her thoughts. When I returned, the conversation had turned back to stories, now reaching into a deep past, as much myth as memory.
“Ain’t no such thing,” said Georgie.
“I say it is,” said Kat.
“And I say it ain’t,” said Georgie. “If any coloreds had ever walked down to the Goose and vanished, I tell you I’d know it.”
Now Kat spotted me, and said, “You know it, Hi. It was your grandmother, was your Santi Bess.”
I shook my head and said, “Never met her. You know about as much as I do.”
Georgie shook his head, and waved his hands at Kat and said, “Leave that boy out of it. He don’t know nothing. I am telling you, if some slave woman walked off this here Lockless and took fifty-odd of us with her, I would know. I’m tired of hearing of this. Every year it’s the same.”
“Was before your time,” said Kat. “My auntie Elma was about these parts back then. Say she lost her first husband when he walked down with Santi Bess into the Goose. Said he went back home.”
“Every year,” Georgie said shaking his head. “Every damn year it’s the same with y’all. But I’m telling you—I’m the one who’d know, not none of y’all.”
I felt everything go quiet just then. It was true. At every gathering there was this dispute about my mother’s mother, Santi Bess, and her fate. The myth held that she had executed the largest escape of tasking folk—forty-eight souls—ever recorded in the annals of Elm County. And it was not simply that they had escaped but where they’d been said to escape to—Africa. It was said that Santi had simply led them down to the river Goose, walked in, and reemerged on the other side of the sea.
It was preposterous. That was what I had always thought, what I had to think, because Santi’s story came to me in a mix of rumor and whisper. And this faulty narration was fractured even more by the fact that so many of her generation, and the one following, had been sold off, so that by my time, not a single person left in Elm County had seen Santi Bess for themselves.
My thoughts were with Georgie—I doubted she even existed. But it was not Georgie’s assault on Santi Bess that made everyone quiet, it was his certitude—“I know,” he had said.
Kat walked over until she stood directly in front of Georgie. She smiled and said, “And how’s that, Georgie? How would you know?”
I looked hard at Georgie Parks. The sun had set long ago, but the light of the bonfire showed his whole face, frozen in discomfort.
Now Amber sidled up beside him. “Yeah, Georgie,” she said. “How you know?”
Georgie glanced around. All eyes were fixed on him. “Don’t none of y’all worry,” he said. “I. Know.”
There was a rumble of nervous laughter. And then the conversation switched back to Maynard and more news from all the far-flung places that our people now called home. It was late now, but the spirit was such that none wanted to part. And I am not sure how it happened, or when, because I was not watching for it, my mind was still on Thena, but by the time I caught wind it was all already in motion. I heard the beat but paid it no mind, until a few began to gather on the farther end of the bonfire, and looking over there I saw that one of the tobacco men, Amechi, had pulled a chair out from out of the quarters and a wash-pan and sticks and with this he was tapping out a beat, something up and happy, and