For once, Cora took the shortcut home. Talking to Caesar would have helped, but he was at the factory. She lay in her bed until supper. From that day on, she took a route to the museum that avoided the Anderson home.
Two weeks later Mr. Fields decided to give his types a proper tour of the museum. Isis and Betty’s time behind the glass had improved their acting skills. The duo affected a plausible interest as Mr. Fields held forth on the cross-sections of pumpkins and the life rings of venerable white oaks, the cracked-open geodes with their purple crystals like glass teeth, the tiny beetles and ants the scientists had preserved with a special compound. The girls chuckled at the stuffed wolverine’s frozen smile, the red-tailed hawk caught mid-dive, and the lumbering black bear that charged the window. Predators captured in the moment they went in for the kill.
Cora stared at the wax faces of the white people. Mr. Fields’s types were the only living exhibits. The whites were made of plaster, wire, and paint. In one window, two pilgrims in thick wool breeches and doublets pointed at Plymouth rock while their fellow voyagers looked on from ships in the mural. Delivered to safety after the hazardous passage to a new beginning. In another window, the museum arranged a harbor scene, where white colonists dressed like Mohawk Indians hurled crates of tea over the side of the ship with exaggerated glee. People wore different kinds of chains across their lifetimes, but it wasn’t hard to interpret rebellion, even when the rebels wore costumes to deny blame.
The types walked before the displays like paying customers. Two determined explorers posed on a ridge and gazed at the mountains of the west, the mysterious country with its perils and discoveries before them. Who knew what lay out there? They were masters of their lives, lighting out fearlessly into their futures.
In the final window, a red Indian received a piece of parchment from three white men who stood in noble postures, their hands open in gestures of negotiation.
“What’s that?” Isis asked.
“That’s a real tepee,” Mr. Fields said. “We like to tell a story in each one, to illuminate the American experience. Everyone knows the truth of the historic encounter, but to see it before you—”
“They sleep in there?” Isis said.
He explained. And with that, the girls returned to their own windows.
“What do you say, Skipper John,” Cora asked her fellow sailor. “Is this the truth of our historic encounter?” She had lately taken to making conversation with the dummy to add some theater for the audience. Paint had flaked from his cheek, exposing the gray wax beneath.
The stuffed coyotes on their stands did not lie, Cora supposed. And the anthills and the rocks told the truth of themselves. But the white exhibits contained as many inaccuracies and contradictions as Cora’s three habitats. There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers. The enterprising African boy whose fine leather boots she wore would have been chained belowdecks, swabbing his body in his own filth. Slave work was sometimes spinning thread, yes; most times it was not. No slave had ever keeled over dead at a spinning wheel or been butchered for a tangle. But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it. Certainly not the white monsters on the other side of the exhibit at that very moment, pushing their greasy snouts against the window, sneering and hooting. Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.
The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others. Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn’t understand the words, most of them at any rate, but created equal was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn’t understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom. The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men bragged about the efficiency of the massacres, where they killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the crib.
Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora thought, the whites had begun stealing futures in earnest. Cut you open and rip them out, dripping. Because that’s what you do when you take away someone’s babies—steal their future. Torture them as much as you can when they are on this earth, then take away the hope that one day their people will have it better.
“Ain’t that right, Skipper John?” Cora asked. Sometimes, if Cora turned her head fast, it looked as if the thing were winking at her.
A few nights later, she noticed the lights in number 40 were out, even though it was early in the evening. She asked the other girls. “They were moved to the hospital,” one said. “So they can get better.”
The night before Ridgeway put an end to South Carolina, Cora lingered on the roof of the Griffin Building, trying to see where she had come from. There was an hour until her meeting with Caesar and Sam and she didn’t relish the idea of fretting on her bed, listening to the chirping of the other girls. Last Saturday after school, one of the men who worked in the Griffin, a former tobacco hand named Martin, told her that the door to the roof was unlocked. Access was easy. If Cora worried about one of the white people who worked on the twelfth floor questioning her when she got off the elevator, Martin told her, she could take the stairs for the final flights.
This was her second twilight visit. The height made her giddy. She wanted to jump up and snatch the gray clouds roiling overhead. Miss Handler had taught the class about the Great Pyramids in Egypt and the marvels the slaves made with their hands and sweat. Were the pyramids as tall as this building, did the pharaohs sit on top and take the measure of their kingdoms, to see how diminished the world became when you gained the proper distance? On Main Street below workmen erected three-and four-story buildings, taller than the old line of two-floor establishments. Cora walked by the construction every day. Nothing as big as the Griffin yet, but one day the building would have brothers and sisters, striding over the land. Whenever she let her dreams take her down hopeful avenues, this notion stirred her, that of the town coming into its own.
To the east side of the Griffin were the white people’s houses and their new projects—the expanded town square, the hospital, and the museum. Cora crossed to the west, where the colored dormitories lay. From this height, the red boxes crept up on the uncleared woods in impressive rows. Is that where she would live one day? A small cottage on a street they hadn’t laid yet? Putting the boy and the girl to sleep upstairs. Cora tried to see the face of the man, conjure the names of the children. Her imagination failed her. She squinted south toward Randall. What did she expect to see? The night took the south into darkness.
And north? Perhaps she would visit one day.
The breeze made her shiver and she headed for the street. It was safe to go to Sam’s now.