What the Dead Want(47)

He looked from face to face. His eyes finally rested on Gretchen’s. “Okay,” he whispered. “How can I help?”

“There’s not a lot of time,” Hawk said. “Our refueling break is over. And I’ve got something to show you.”

They stood and cleared away the dishes and headed resolutely to the basement.



1861

Valerie and I are big as houses. And the midwife says the babies are due but two weeks apart.

Now how could that be? she asked me, winking. You and George really been married that long?

I smiled at her. This child is indeed an Axton, I told her. I place my hand on the Bible.

Instead of the parish being devastated by James’s death, it seems to have deepened the faith. George has done more work than ever to bring our Negro brothers and sisters into the fold. He sought out people who lived in the neighboring towns, seemed to know where everyone lived, went door to door and told them of James’s philosophy.

He has even seen to it that I don’t have to go away for school but has found a correspondence school. While my belly swells, I write essays and put them in the mail to my professors.

In two years I will be a certified schoolteacher. My greatest hope is that someday after that I can go on to college. Someday when the baby is bigger.





TWENTY-FOUR


DOWN IN THE BASEMENT HAWK HAD GATHERED THEIR mother’s primary-source research from within three weeks before and after the fire and laid it out on the table. Interviews with witnesses, photographs, and journal entries. He’d organized all of it.

“The main thing,” he said, “is the increase in lynching photographs in the area during the time.”

“Lynching photographs?” Gretchen said. “Like crime scene photographs?”

Hope shook her head. “No, cousin,” she said. “Like souvenirs. People used to collect them, send them to their friends as postcards, even hang them up in their homes.” Just hearing the words made Gretchen feel like she was going to throw up.

Hawk set the photographs out one after another on the table. They were devastating. Gretchen’s stomach sank and her heart raced, and she felt like she really would lose her fancy meal. She was filled with revulsion and hatred for the people who did this and, she realized, the people who photographed it.

Picture after picture of brown-skinned men hanging from tree branches. She started to cry.

Hawk looked into her eyes and nodded. Seeing the murdered men was sad and horrifying. Seeing the people in the crowd enjoying themselves or acting like nothing was happening was appalling.

She thought of her own mother showing her the “spiritualist” pictures—how she was fixated on finding the ghosts hidden in the frame. How superficial and ridiculous it seemed compared to the work Esther did or Sarah, researching real people being tortured and murdered, and the history of such brutality.

She felt the anger rising in her, steeling her. She took the photos one by one and looked more closely. From somewhere within she could feel Esther’s keen eye upon them. Some were taken on this land—it was clear. You could even see the steeple of the church in the background—like she’d seen in other photographs of the era. In some pictures the dead and tortured bodies were surrounded by crowds of people, almost like it was a festival; people were sitting out on blankets, eating, smiling in the foreground. The last picture was of men hanging side by side, their faces and bodies badly beaten.

“This one,” Hope said. “It was taken days before the fire. Then these four. This tree is still there, she said. Out by the road between our properties.”

Tears ran down Gretchen’s face as she looked at the picture. “Someone was meticulously documenting this.”

“Like the Nazis did,” Simon said, “keeping a record of all the things they did because they thought it was right, they were proud of it.”

“Mmhm,” Hope said. “And millions killed too. The death toll from the Atlantic slave trade was ten million.”

Gretchen had settled herself in a corner with a pile of papers from the house and was frantically going over them, looking for anything about lynchings on the land.

Hope handed Simon a box. “Any letters, put in this pile,” she said. “Looks like these are all journals; anything from 1862 to 1865 set aside. You find anything at all from George and James, hand it over quick. We know what Fidelia was doing, but apart from Axton Cotton correspondence we got very little from the men.”

Simon set to work, taking letters out of envelopes, leafing through journals for dates.

“Getting this information doesn’t change anything,” Gretchen said again. “Our mothers were trying to fix it by archiving—by making sure there were photographs of every person who died, no matter how gruesome.”

“But they’d been collecting these for a long time,” Hawk said. “And honestly the spirits have only gotten stronger. It’s almost like the more pictures, the more accidents in the town.”

“It sure seems like it,” Gretchen said, “given the pictures I took in the house over the last two days. I have rolls of them—plus shots on the Leica.”

She handed the digital camera to Hawk, who was compiling all the photographs. “Scroll through and see if it picked anything up that’s paranormal.”