Page 113 of Bound By Fury
There’s nothing surprising about the conversation I just had. Nothing that I haven’t heard before, growing up looking the way I do. But it’s still startling to encounter it every single time.
Dr. Rogers is adamant that there’s never been witches in Earnest. She attributed the verbiage of the article to the time it was written in, to hysteria and racism.
I desperately wish I could know the truth, that I could transport myself back to the past and see with my own eyes what these women really went through. What heinous things these people claim they must have done to get themselves into this situation. To earn themselves a noose around the neck. But I can’t. All I have to go by is the dream and the ghosts and the whispers. The feeling in my chest that I’m on to something.
And a message from the other side.
OCTOBER 30, 1926
At the crossroads of great power, buried beneath the earth, is a candlelit room, several stories above where the lines converge.
This is where we meet to talk about things can’t no one else know.
Time down here moves different, closer to the ley lines winding through Black Mountain.
Down here I always get to sniffling, the dank mildewy air making my nose run. That’s how come Ms. Lois thought I was crying earlier today.
“What’s wrong with you, girl?” she asked me, mouth all firm and eyes like Judgment Day.
Visions of the Mother and her orders that Mama Mae shared with me crowded my mind. Opened my mouth. Pulled the words from my tongue.
Ms. Lois face went from stern to scared to angry to something new altogether. She clapped her hands real loud and yanked me to the front of the room, her hair fluffing over her shoulder, still smelling like the hot comb.
Her grip on my arm was too tight. Now as I look at it, five fingerprint bruises darken my skin.
I held the lantern far out from my face, staring into the eyes of those gathered to hear Ms. Lois speak.
Usually she talks of revolution. Of freedom—’cause what we got now ain’t freedom, I don’t care what they try to call it.
She speaks of a future where we don’t have to worry about no hunter, no man in beast skin, no essence thief thirsting for the power that flows in our veins.
She speaks of a righteous universe. Of a world where we don’t have to give nothing, and no one can take nothing from us.
Today there was nearly twenty and a half of us. All brown skinned and buzzing with power, on edge from the fire, from the threats, from the knowledge that it only gets worse from here.
When Ms. Lois told the others what I’d seen, my heart felt like it was going to rip right out my chest.
Her hands helped her craft the story, weave the words with passion as her voice boomed, echoless against the dirt walls.
“She seen it herself! The prophecy will come, just as the Daughter foresaw.”
“Why would we give it all up? That don’t make no damn sense!” one of the women yelled. She wasn’t the only one feeling that way.
“Shoo’,” a tall man called from the back. “Why not just fight ’em back now?”
The men might not have power, but they have gumption. And guns.
Ms. Lois sucked her teeth. “And then what? We can’t kill ’em all. These days they outnumber us. And y’all know it ain’t just them that want us gone, neither.
“How many girls gotta go missing? Slowly, they taking what’s ours. More of us are marked every damn day. They planning something. Some of us still remember what happened down in Wilmington all them years ago.”
“Speak on it,” Mama Cora called from the back as she fanned her face. “They want a cullin’ all right.”
“Mhm,” her sister agreed.
Ms. Lois puffed out her chest. “If we don’t act soon, that will be us. Besides, the other covens are too far spread. Letters take too long to go back and forth, and by the time we get the help we need, half of us’ll be dead.”
“Not if we kill ’em first!” another woman yelled, her fist squeezed tight and raised in the air as she jumped to her feet. “We’ve taken this shit for too damn long! And now you want us to give up everything. Everything born from the Twelve. From the gift they gave to our people?”
