Kenia woke just after noon to a knocking at her door. She opened it to find Colton, who had brought his Black Panther this time. He let himself in over the threshold and walked past her into the upstairs room. He stared at her still-unopened bag before becoming distracted by her laptop, tablet, and phone—its light flashing with Chiazam’s reply.
“You have a lot of devices. Can you play games on them?” he asked, pulling out a chair at the table but refraining from touching the electronics.
“Uh, not really. I don’t have any installed.”
“My mom lets me play games on her phone and watch videos.”
“Where is your mother?”
“In the kitchen with Grandma and Grandpa.”
“Oh yeah? And what are they doing?” she asked, casually picking up her phone to check her brother’s response.
“Making lunch. They want to know if you want to join them.”
“Is that why they sent you?”
“Yeah, I guess. But I wanted to show you Black Panther. You said he was your favorite.”
“He is. That was sweet of you,” she said. Kenia realized she was ravenously hungry, so she suggested that she and Colton walk over to the main house.
Over lunch she learned that Sandra was a preschool teacher, and her husband was in the army. Her father, Earl, had served as a Marine. Earl said he had learned to tolerate his daughter being married to an Army man, provided Sandra could put up with him.
Margaret, Sandra’s mother, was a retired nurse who worked part-time as a school nurse. She kept refilling Kenia’s glass of iced tea until the pitcher was empty and asked her a number of questions about her practicum and Healthy-Bytes. She, at least, caught the pun right away, “‘Bytes’ as computer bytes or bites of food, right?”
“Yes, that was what they meant.”
“Clever,” she laughed.
The lunch of cold cuts and cheese sandwiches finished, Kenia was suddenly aware of the long hours to fill between now and Monday morning.
“What does one do in Selah Station, on the weekend?”
Earl laughed. “Not much. You can help me woodwork if you like.”
“Earl,” Margaret said, punching him in the arm. “I’m sure Kenia has other interests.”
“You mean more interesting than woodworking?”
Sandra rolled her eyes. “There is a library a few blocks away. It is a museum too. It’s run by twin brothers, Octavian and Morris Coates. That might be a good place to start, given the history of the town.”
“Oh yes,” Margaret said. “The Coates have been here for generations. Their grandparents were students at the University—and so were ours actually—before the Selah Island was closed down after the accident in ’53.”
“What exactly happened?” Kenia asked.
“It was the CPP, the coal processing plant,” Earl said with a shake of the head. “Never did make sense to have that thing on the same island as the University and the town center, but that was the Bridgewaters for you. Those two sides of the family could never get out of each other’s way.”
“Bridgewaters . . . are they who the Med-Dent building is named for?”
“Yes,” Margaret said. “Prentice Bridgewater actually, who was the president of the University and died during the fire and explosion at the CPP in ’53. He had gone in to help the workers trapped there. Ironically, his relative Crowley Bridgewater, who actually owned the place, was nowhere near it when it blew.”
Colton slipped down from his chair making “whooshing” sounds with his Black Panther and Ironman.
“They’re an old family,” Earl said. “Old as Selah, descended from the founding brothers of Selah Station, Reginald and Leonard. Those two were involved in the Underground Railroad, and during the Restoration years, it was Leonard’s son David Solomon Bridgewater who founded the University. Leonard’s brother Reginald, his sons owned the mines around here and went on to establish the coal industry here in Selah.”
“There was a falling out between the families,” Margaret continued. “Really the stuff of Shakespeare. Go to the museum, you can learn all about it. Octavian can even set you up for a tour of the island.”
“Hazmat suit and all,” Earl said.
Kenia followed the Corrigans’ directions, walking down to the end of the street and heading south, back towards the center of town, then turning right on Xavier Street. The day had grown warm. Children played in sprinklers, bounced on backyard trampolines, and raced bikes and razor scooters in the street. The air smelled of cut grass, barbeques, and the Carolina Allspice and rock roses planted alongside the fluffy blooms of hydrangeas and the bushes of potentilla, all alive with clusters of swallowtail butterflies. There were even a few homes with the proverbial white picket fence, which she snapped a picture of and sent to her sisters, brother, and Audre with the caption, “They still do exist! I’m in a Norman Rockwell painting.”
When Audre would get the picture, Kenia couldn’t guess. She imagined Audre somewhere in Haiti amid palm fronds and banana trees, working in a clinic full of children waiting on their mothers’ laps for vaccinations. Or maybe Audre was conducting a focus group in a stone church somewhere with statues of a black Jesus, Mary, and other saints looking on. It felt worlds away from the place she found herself in. When she finally stopped in front of the museum and library she was eager for a distraction from her depressed thoughts.
The museum was also a large Victorian, in the style of the rest on the street. This one was converted into a public space, a large sign in the front declaring it to be the Selah Station Public Library and Museum of African American Heritage. There was a gateless fence, its planks and posts painted—thoughtfully, she imagined—in a coat of burnt sienna. She crossed the front yard, stepped up on the porch, and pushed on the door that read: “Welcome, Please Come In.”
The inside foyer was bright with ample sunlight filtering in through tall windows. The air was pleasantly cool, thanks to a window AC unit chugging away. The wood floor announced her presence with loud creaks. She heard an answering sound, a chair sliding across the floor, and a black man came around the corner. He appeared to be in his fifties, his head mostly bald. He wore a pressed button-down shirt with a starched collar and cuff links, but no tie. An elegant fitted blazer hung on his frame. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses gave him the air of a scholar; however, he removed and folded them before slipping them into his breast pocket and offering Kenia his hand.
“Welcome,” he said. His features were handsome, but his expression stopped just short of a smile, throwing her off a little bit. “I am Morris Coates. How can I help you?”
“Kenia,” she said. “I was hoping to take a look around.”
“Kenia,” he said her name slowly. “Short for Keniabarido or as in Kenya?”
“Keniabarido. I’m impressed.”
Morris shrugged, “I’ve tried to make sure I know a bit about where we came from. In your case, are you Ogoni?”
“We’re Igbo, or at least my father was—like every other Nigerian you meet in the diaspora,” she laughed. “All my siblings have Igbo names. I’m the odd one out. My mother just liked the name Keniabarido, but I usually shorten it to Kenia.”
“That probably saves you a lot of breath trying to explain to people.”
“Completely.”
“What brings you to Selah, Kenia?”
“Summer internship at the Med-Dent building. I’m staying with the Corrigans down the street. They said this would be a good place to come to learn about the history of the town and check out a book.”
“That was kind of them. I run the museum side of things. My brother Octavian is the librarian. Together we are sort of the informal historians of the city of Selah Station.”
“Your brother leads the tours of the old city?”
“When he is not running the library,” Morris said, gesturing to the half of the house given over to rooms lined with bookcases. Through the French doors behind her, Kenia noted a librarian’s desk with a bar code scanner next to a stack of laminated books waiting to be scanned.
“And this side?” Kenia asked, with a nod to the room that Morris had emerged from.
“Our current exhibit, Without Sanctuary. Tours are free. Would you like one while you wait for Octavian to return?”
“That would be lovely.”
“Let me show you around.”
The wood floor gave way to a beryl-blue carpet that muffled their steps as they entered the exhibit hall. It had a hushed silence to it that reminded Kenia of a funeral home. Without Sanctuary, turned out to be a collection of a series of lynching photographs gathered from all over the United States. Kenia could not help an intake of breath at the first photo of three black men in ragged clothes strung up just inches from the ground, their bare feet still dangling in tufts of grass, the tree almost comically small, but sturdy enough to bear the weight of their murders. White folks, men and women, gathered around posing—not unlike she had seen white hunters in pith helmets do over the carcasses of their kills on safari. In the background, a boy Colton’s age was caught in mid-swing striking the youngest of the black victims, a young teenage boy. The shutter speed of the old camera had been too slow to capture the swing of the little white boy’s stick and arm, so he appeared strangely armless, the weapon itself erased. Otherwise, the expressions of the adults were those one would expect to find on any group of neighbors and townsfolk attending a Sunday picnic.
She swallowed hard, wondering if she could slip out and wait in the foyer without offending Morris. But he was already a silent, waiting presence next to her. She turned to the caption but after a moment realized she was not even reading it.
“Sorry, it’s a tough exhibit,” Morris said in a gravelly voice.
“No doubt,” Kenia said, willing herself to move forward.
“It was a white historian, James Allen, who collected these over the years. A sad, sad testimony, but one we can’t forget.”
“We can’t,” she said, because she felt obliged to. They moved to the next display, this one of a crowd of hundreds gathered in a public square, a black man’s body hanging from a flag pole; the camera was too distant to capture what was left of his face or features, but the horror was undiminished, the strings of smoke still rising from his flesh.
She moved in shocked silence through the rest, noting a map of the United States; the size and darkness of red dots over each state recorded the number of reported lynchings from the early nineteenth century to the mid twentieth. Every state was marked, even ones she did not expect such as California, Oregon, and Washington.
It was the calm, self-satisfied expressions of the whites gathered in the pictures that Kenia found so chilling. These were not masters, these were everyday people: farmers, teachers, bakers, carpenters, really no different than the white people she interacted with now.
Like the Corrigans.
She leaned in close to read one of the exhibit panels. The text explained that some of the pictures were from postcards that were sold to commemorate the lynchings with family and friends. The equivalent of Instagram, Kenia thought. The back of one was displayed in a case, the paper sepia-colored with age, the print faded but unmistakable:
The Dogwood Tree
This is only the branch of the Dogwood tree;
An emblem of WHITE SUPREMACY,
A lesson once taught in the Pioneer school,
That this is a land of WHITE MAN’S RULE.
The Red Man once in an early day,
Was told by the Whites to mind his way.
The negro now, by eternal grace,
Must learn to stay in the negro’s place.
In the Sunny South, the Land of the Free,
Let the White SUPREME forever be.
Let this a warning to all negroes be,
Or they’ll suffer the fate of the DOGWOOD TREE.
“It was like pest control to them, back then,” Morris said, his voice somber and bitter at once.
Kenia felt sick.
In another photo from South Carolina a black woman, a white man, and their son hung from a bridge, their limbs strangely misshapen, their bones broken. The man’s pants were dark with blood where the mob had castrated him. The text indicated that they had been killed for getting married in secret. A Confederate flag waved in the background. The next photo showed the charred skull of a man sticking out from the blackened remnants of a large wood fire. The date was 1930.
Kenia thought of what else had been happening in the world at that time and her trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. where she had seen other bodies, charred and burnt. But what she saw depicted on the soil of her own country seemed fundamentally different. Even though the engines of mass extermination by the Nazis in mid-century Germany were unparalleled in efficiency, the deed of it was done behind locked gates and brick walls. These lynchings were public, done by everyday citizens, who consented to have their pictures taken in the aftermath.
She thought of the boy with the stick. The fluttering Confederate flag. She remembered the words scratched onto the historical marker at the Junction: Go Home Nigger, and felt repulsed at the notion that some Americans still flew the Confederate flag as an expression of “Southern Pride” and “Southern Culture.”
“At least Nazi-ism was denounced by Germany. We still see fools flying that damn Confederate flag these days and you know the ruckus people kick up when you just try to take down an old confederate statue. Are there any statues of Hitler still up?” She looked at the display cases again. “Even the Nazi’s didn’t make postcards like these.”
“They did make reading lampshades out of the skin of Jews, though,” Morris said, shaking his head. “I don’t know if there is much gained in comparison. Evil is evil.”
“But the ignoring of it here . . . the will to forget it, or reimagine it . . .” She was not sure how to finish her sentence, or if she could, her stomach was roiling so. Although she felt a measure of relief, followed by guilt, when she neared the end of the exhibit. Without Sanctuary, however, had one last gut-punch left: a photo of the charred body of what she could only assume had been a black man. A white man with a broad-brimmed hat had leaned an arm against the tree supporting the victim. The legs had been burnt into stumps that stopped at the knees. The face was barely human. The heat had curled the skin of the arms, twisting the sinews and pulling the limbs into a gross parody of flexing, as if ironically displaying the prowess of the living that had now been obliterated.
Coon Cooking, read the inscription on the postcard.
“You all right young lady?” Morris asked.
Kenia noticed a room marked “Restroom” with a water fountain next to it, just beyond the exhibit space. “Yeah, I’m just a bit tired from the heat. I think . . . excuse me,” she said, heading for the bathroom.
She didn’t vomit, although she crouched over the toilet bowl ready to. Perhaps she didn’t because it was really not the first time she had seen, heard, listened to, or witnessed such atrocities. She could almost say there was no escaping the truth of it, if white people didn’t somehow live in obliviousness each day. “Crimes against humanity” had such a sterile, faintly bureaucratic air to it. Morris had called it what it was.
Evil.
She moved to the sink, washed her face and hands, and stepped towards the exit, thankful to find a bench just inside the door beneath some coat hangers where she could sit down, still in the semi-privacy of the ladies’ room.
Four by four by four.
She repeated it more than four times. She lost count, but knew she had done it enough when she felt calm and centered. The front door swung open; fresh sets of footsteps and muffled voices followed as Morris greeted the next band of visitors. The analogy of a funeral parlor came back to her. The victims here, though, would never be at rest.
More footsteps thumped over her head as, she imagined, someone came down the staircase. With so much movement, she did not expect her own pocket of solitude to last much longer, so she gathered her things and stepped outside. She was careful to turn left this time, away from the previous exhibit, and instead into the library. Once past a few signs about no eating or drinking, she found herself in the children’s section of the library. A thick foam mat covered in durable industrial carpet rested on the floor in the center of the section, and she found herself sitting down on it, taking in posters of cartoon bookworms promoting reading from the end of child-sized shelves. A display promoted the book of the month: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.
She noted half a dozen oil drums, their sides cut down and lined with carpet in order to repurpose them as reading nooks. The outsides were painted in cheery pastels and she could not deny her desire to regress and climb into one herself, curled up with a Virginia Hamilton or Jacqueline Woodson novel.
“Circle time is not for another two hours,” a soft voice said. She could hear the smile in the words. When she looked up she saw a man in a forest green cardigan over a gray Henley and pleat-less slacks. Otherwise he was identical to his more somber brother, even down to the wire-rim glasses.
“You must be Octavian. I just did the Without Sanctuary tour with your brother.”
Octavian’s knees popped as he settled down onto the opposite corner of the mat, his hand on the bookshelves for balance. He slipped a few picture books back into place, but once he had finished replacing them, he did not rise.
“It’s a heavy exhibit.”
“To say the least.”
“You take your time. You can even stay for story circle time if you like,” he smiled.
“Thanks,” she smiled.
“I can also recommend something light, Roald Dahl or something of the like.”
Kenia laughed, “You know my mother used to go through our books, including James and the Giant Peach, and color all the characters with a brown pencil so that they looked more like people of color.”
“Protagonists of color,” Octavian said. “I like that. She wasn’t defacing library books though, was she?”
“No, no, of course not.” Kenia laughed again despite herself. “They were our own. But I did not realize she had done it until I got in trouble at the school library, getting into an argument with the librarian because I kept insisting that she show me the Matilda books where Matilda was black.”
“How old were you?”
“Six or seven.”
“You were an early reader.”
“Mom saw to that. We all had expansive vocabularies. It helped on the SATs and GREs. I’m not a quantitative whiz like my siblings, but my score on the verbal section was perfect.”
“That’s commendable.”
“Is it?” Kenia thought aloud. “Or is it just a result of more pressure to be twice as good?”
“I guess it can be both now, can’t it.”
They both were quiet a moment, pondering, until Kenia realized she had not introduced herself.
“Kenia Dezy. I’m a summer intern at the Med-Dent building.”
“And, as you already surmised, I’m Octavian Coates.”
“Octavian, your brother has got to warn people about that exhibit before they dive in. Needs a graphic image warning or something.”
Octavian nodded his head. “I’ve told him just that. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. But here,” he pushed his knuckles heavily down into the mat and stood, “follow me. I’ll show you some reading that always helps me in such times.”
She followed Octavian past the history and sociology sections to the African American section, where he let his finger hover over the spines of the books before stopping over a series of titles by James Baldwin.
“I’m presuming you have read Baldwin.”
“Of course, but he did not write much about women of color, did he? Brother didn’t raise himself. I was just imagining sitting in that reading barrel with a Virginia Hamilton or Jacqueline Woodson novel.”
“That’s true about Baldwin,” Octavian said, pointing at the ceiling as if rewarding her a point before he returned to scanning the book spines, moving towards the works of young adult fiction by African American writers. “I have just the thing for you, I think.”
He tipped out a title by an author named Nnedi Okorafor: Zahrah the Windseeker.
Kenia noted the author’s name. “She’s Nigerian?”
“Nigerian American. You need a good escape, she’ll provide it.”
Halfrican. Her thoughts flitted to wondering what Audre was doing at that moment.
“Thanks so much.”
“Always happy to connect a reader and a book. Feel free to browse some more, you still have time before story circle starts.”
Kenia smiled, seeking out a few picture books she thought Colton would like if the opportunity arose. When she was ready, Octavian met her at the checkout desk and asked for her driver’s license to fill out a library card application for her. She handed it to him, reading the sign for tours to Selah Island on the desk next to his computer monitor.
“I heard you offer tours of the old town.”
“I do,” he said, his eyes lighting up behind his spectacles. “Are you interested?”
“Guess I ought to. After all, I’m living here for the next three months.”
“Well, this is a rich place for history. We have microfilms of the local newspapers going back nearly two hundred years. But there is nothing like seeing the old town. It’s a fascinating history, preserved— our own sort of Pompeii.”
It was an ominous comparison, plasters of bodies crawling, choking, on invisible ash flashing through her mind.
“When would you like to go?” Octavian asked, breaking her free of her ruminations.
“How about tomorrow?”
“Certainly, how about eight?”
“That’s early for a Sunday morning,” she said.
“Well, it’s summer and it gets warm in the hazmat suits. We’ll want to go when it’s still cool.”
“So you really have to wear a suit?”
“Afraid so. A mask as well, out of an abundance of caution, of course. We should be fine. But you will have to sign a release,” he said, clearing his throat.
Kenia paused a beat before answering, “Well, it will be a good experience for my public health education.”
“Great. Be here at seven-fifteen and we’ll start getting ready.”