What the Dead Want(49)

It was like something Esther had taken in Vietnam.

Hope squinted at the photograph, and then crouched down beside her.

In the center of the frame were two little girls maybe six years old wearing matching white dresses, looking up at a man dressed in a dark suit. He was holding a bottle of liquor over their heads—in the other hand a lit candle—which had already set light to one of the girls’ hair and dress, flames partly engulfing her.

“It’s Rebecca,” Gretchen whispered.

“And Celia,” Hope said, staring transfixed at the photograph, her eyes bright with tears. “They were used to start the fire. He burned them first.”

Beneath the picture in looping cursive handwriting were the words First Communion.

Behind this picture were two more, which came apart in brittle pieces. One in which the girls were being doused in alcohol, their faces looking simply confused. One in which both girls’ mouths were open in a horrified scream, and another where they were entirely engulfed in flame—their hands outstretched, reaching for help that would never come.



1864

He was changing. I knew once Adam was born. He would stay late with the hunting club, come back smelling of liquor and campfires. He thought I didn’t suspect. Like I didn’t know when a cross had been burned. Under James’s influence he’d denounced the ways of his friends. But with James off fighting he’d begun going to meetings again, new meetings he said. Just for business. Why, the whole town’s there, it’s not so bad. How could he keep doing business if he wasn’t in the club? Why should we be ashamed of our race? he’d asked. And then I knew he was too far gone. There was a new group, up from the South, like the White Christian Patriots, called the Ku Klux Klan. I knew he was going to their meetings. I knew he had turned.

I’d heard them talking, his friends from the “hunt club,”—people saying there was so much to be gained from “cleansing the town.” It made me sick. Then there was the lynching all but advertised in the newspaper—the war was coming to an end but a new kind of war felt like it was beginning. Three times in a row in the past months, people we were bringing to safety were captured on the road, hung, killed—strung up in the trees—and that had never happened before. Someone was telling those cowards where we’d be, what route we’d take.

He was like two different people. Our church had always been like an island in a sea of brutality. But just a week before, drunk after a “meeting,” he’d said the most horrible thing: Can’t you keep that little goddamn black ragamuffin away from our daughter? and I said to him: I married the wrong brother.

He’d slapped me so hard. He said, Oh, don’t worry, Fidelia, the Lord works in mysterious ways, you’ll all be as free as the breeze soon.

I have decided to leave. I am taking Celia and Adam and we are getting away from this place. George’s rages and his hatred are too much. My secret savings are barely enough for us to leave, but I have no choice. His irrationality and cruelty grow every day. Right after Celia’s Communion—then we will go, I swear it. I should never have stayed so long here, I should never have married at all.

I have only one hope now. And it’s that Celia and Rebecca will somehow have a good life. A better life, even if they don’t grow up together—that they will remember their friendship. That they will always remain as brave and loving as they are now, and not be poisoned by the hate of generations. And my hope for Adam is that he is young enough that he won’t remember this place. That he has some of the courage and temperance of his sister, that there is some small part of his uncle’s strength and kindness coursing through his veins, and that he does not grow up to be like his father.





TWENTY-SIX


“THEY WERE KILLED IN FRONT OF EVERYONE. THAT first fire was used to burn down the rest of the church, to murder dozens of people. They were killed by Celia’s own father.”

“Killed by the Klan,” Hawk said bitterly. “Same old.”

Gretchen could barely look at him. When she saw the pictures of those men, all she could think was, what if that happened to someone she loved? What if it was Simon, or her father? Or . . . Hawk?

Simon was speechless. He handed Gretchen her camera and then went to sit down. She looked at the digital display. In the photographs of the house she’d taken, fat leering white men leaned against the porch, drinking and smiling while gray smoke drifted across the frame.

In one of the photographs of Esther she was actually holding a child on her lap. It was missing a leg. In the other pictures inside the house there were people in every frame—sitting in chairs, reading, talking to one another, lighting candles, drinking tea. Playing the piano. The entire house was filled with men and women, seemingly living alongside Esther. And in nearly every frame Rebecca and Celia stood whispering to one another. Trapped forever by an event captured on film for the pleasure of killers who believed what they were doing was good and right.

“We have some of their names,” Gretchen said. “And now we have their faces. These pictures I took—the lynching photographs. We can see who is responsible.”

Her mother would have been astounded. This was certainly the work she would have wanted to do if she were alive, capturing souls on film. But Gretchen could feel how wrong it was, how voyeuristic and strange to obsess over the pain and misdeeds of the dead, to hold them in this world, locked forever in a single moment; evidence, or trophy, the existence of these photographs remained part of the violation of the human spirit.