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.
“All we know is how horrifying this history is,” Hawk said. “We don’t know what to do about it.”
“We haven’t developed all the pictures yet,” said Gretchen, feeling the now-unmistakable presence of Esther, her drive to solve this—to finish it once and for all. But she felt her own mind and feelings just as strongly. She didn’t care about the house. She cared about freedom. Hers and Hawk’s and Hope’s. It was too late for the dead. Nothing would change the lives they’d lived. Nothing would erase the awful things her ancestors had done. But people needed to know who had committed these crimes and stop calling it the work of a barbaric history, or the WCP or the Klan, or an accident. The Klan is not one single entity, it is made up of individuals. Individuals hanged those men and women, captured them and killed them. Individuals struck those matches. They had names and faces and they never paid for their crimes. Gretchen was glad there was no more romance around the idea of the mansion. It was built with cotton money, by racists. Who murdered her great-great-great-great-grandmother, and the Greens’ relatives too. She didn’t want her family having one more moment in that house. Any illusion she’d had about her family or its place in history was shattered. All she wanted now was to get the mirror, and she could feel just as strongly that all Esther wanted her to do was use the darkroom. The combined force of their wills was almost too much.
“I’m going over to the house,” she said, standing, crunching over the glass, a dark stain of blood spreading beneath her shirt where the lamp had hit her. “I’ve got to see the mirror again. I’ve got to use the darkroom. And quite frankly I could use a shot or two of gin.”
“You are crazy!” Simon said, looking genuinely terrified. “Do you know that?”
“Runs in the family, kid,” she said. “I didn’t get outta Saigon when it all came down by being sane.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Simon said.