The Book of Lost Friends(56)
A moment passes before I can process the information and stammer out, “You learned all that from the judge?”
“Yeah.” Her features arrange in a way that conveys the slightest bit of uncertainty about the mysteries the judge left behind. “Maybe he wanted somebody to know how to read it, since he decided not to show Miss Robin. Can’t say how come. I mean, she knew this place was built by people who had to be slaves. Miss Robin was way into doing research about Goswood. The judge just didn’t want her to feel guilty about stuff that happened a long time ago, I guess.”
“I guess…maybe,” I echo. The lump in my throat is itchy and uncomfortable. Part of me wishes the judge would have taken responsibility for nailing shut the coffin on this piece of history and burning the book. Part of me knows how wrong that would’ve been.
LaJuna pushes on, dragging me along on a trip I don’t want to take. “Now, see where there’s no daddy listed? Just a mama and then somebody’s born? That’s where the daddy was probably a white man.”
“The judge told you that?”
Her mouth thins and an eye roll comes my way. “Figured it out on my own. That’s what the little m means—mulatto. Like this woman, Mittie. She hasn’t got a daddy, but, of course, she had a daddy. He was the—”
That’s it. That’s all I can stand. “I think we should put this away.”
LaJuna frowns, her gaze probing mine, surprised and…disappointed? “Now you sound like the judge did. Miss Silva, you’re the one always talking about stories. This book, here…this is the only story most of these people ever got. Only place their names still are, in the whole wide world. They didn’t even get gravestones with it written on there or anything. Look.”
She flips back a page so that the heavy endpaper attached to the cover lies flat beside the flyleaf, open like butterfly wings. A grid of sorts has been drawn across them, sectioned off in somewhat orderly rectangles with numbers. “This”—she tells me, circling the grid with her fingertip—“is where they are. Where they buried all the slaves whenever they died. The old people and the kids and the little bitty babies. Right here.” She grabs a pen and sets it on the desk below the book. “That’s your house. You been living right there by these people, and you didn’t even know it.”
I think of the lovely orchard only a short walk from my back porch. “There’s no graveyard out there. The city cemetery is over on this side.” I place a deco-era stapler and a plastic clip to the left of the pen. “If the pen is my house, the cemetery’s here.”
“Miss Silva.” LaJuna cranes away. “I thought you knew so much about history. That graveyard over there beside your house, the one with the nice fence and all the little stone houses with people’s names, that was the graveyard for white folks. Tomorrow, when I come to help you with the books, I can walk over and show you what’s out behind your place. I went and looked for myself after the judge—”
A grandfather clock in the hall chimes, and both of us jump.
LaJuna jerks away from the table, pulls a broken wristwatch from her pocket, and gasps, “I gotta go. I just came over here real quick to get a book for tonight!” Snatching up a paperback, she dashes out the door. Her footsteps echo through the house along with “I gotta babysit for Mama on her shift!”
The door slams, and she vanishes.
I don’t see her for days. Not at Goswood Grove House, nor at school. She’s just…gone.
I walk the orchard behind my place alone, study the rise and fall of the ground, squat down and pull back the grass where it grows in little mounds, dig away a few inches of soil and find plain brown stones.
A few of them still bear the faint shadow of carved markings, but nothing I can make out.
I sketch them in a notebook and compare them to the narrow, numbered squares on the hand-drawn graveyard map in the Goswood library. It matches up as well as could be expected after the passage of time has been allowed to absorb the truth. I find adult-sized plots and smaller ones—babies or children, buried two or three to a space. I stop counting rectangles at ninety-six, because I can’t stand it any longer. A whole community of people, generations in some families, lie buried behind my house, forgotten. LaJuna is right. Other than whatever has been handed down orally among relatives, that sad, strange batch of notations in the Gossett Bible is the only story they have.
The judge was wrong to have hidden this book. That much I know. What I’m unsure of is how to proceed from here, or if it’s even my place to. I’d like to talk more with LaJuna, to find out what other information she has, but day after day goes by and there’s no opportunity.
Finally, on Wednesday, I go searching for her.
The quest eventually leaves me standing in front of Aunt Sarge’s house, shod in the worn, lime-green Birkenstocks that go with absolutely nothing I own, but are kind to a big toe that was in the way when a stack of books tipped over at Goswood Grove House, seemingly with a mind of its own. A few other strange things have happened there during my many hours alone in the library, but I refuse to think much about them. I don’t have time. All weekend, and for three days after school now, I’ve been sorting books at warp speed, trying to do what I can before anyone else discovers I’ve been given access and before I track down Nathan Gossett again to make him aware of what he actually has in that library.