Page 71 of Bound By Fury

OCTOBER 23, 1926

Sometimes I get afraid I’m too much like my mama. Too prone to break.

She don’t talk no more. She use all her energy to drift to another plane, her magic a vice she can’t let go of. I guess this world too much for her to take.

Like her, it seem I can’t keep the visions out my head these days. Visions of the Mother. They follow me into my dreams, they find me at the market, they shade every flutter of the baby in my belly in strokes of red like blood against packed dirt.

Through Mama Mae, I’ve witnessed the stories of the first hunter and his creation. How it was foretold by the Mother’s daughter that the theft of our power would come at a cost.

It seems that chicken has come to roost.

Never before has a vision clung to me like this. Taken hold of my mind in such a way as to force my hand. It ain’t even so much a vision as it is instruction from my ancestors. A push toward what they call a “prophecy.”

I can’t stop seeing it.

Gold-tinged starlight flashing through the plains of some far away place. Eyes rolled back and all white. Chants around a roaring fire. Embers falling from the sky like rain.

Blood spilled down down down into what lurks below.

On Sunday nights we meet at the schoolhouse, but lately Lucille ain’t been coming as much. I sit with Earl and wait for her. She the only one who know how it feel to lose Dorothea to those men. She the only one I think I could tell all this to if I wanted. But something done changed in her, too. Maybe we just ain’t change the same way.

Yesterday some men come around asking questions. Shining silver badges and long black sticks slapping against they hands. Lips poked way out with ’bacco, teeth all brown and stinking of rot, same as the tunnels do these days.

They tried to say we poisoned that man, even though most of us wasn’t even there at the market. Even though we know deep down they already got Dorothea. But they don’t need a reason to accuse us of something. If they say we done it, then we done it as far as the law concerned.

When none of us broke, they hung around. Faces twisted up and eyes filled with hate. We know it ain’t over. It’s only a matter of time.

I wish I could go back and stop Dorothea from killing that man. Earl says we should run away, but I can’t leave Mama like that, all alone in this town where magic’s a curse that’s keeping us shackled in a world where we’re meant to be free. But we ain’t been free for as long as we can remember.

As long as we been stuck here where it’s a calling, an obligation to protect the source of our power. And there ain’t no sense in wishing for things that can’t never happen.

I can’t tell the others what I’ve been shown. What we must do.

There has to be another way. ’Cause what the Mother did, what the Twelve did—that can’t be all there is.

The Daughter said sacrifices come in threes.

Through the eyes of my ancestors, I have seen what we’re destined for, but I cannot yet accept it.

I have to find another way.

Or we gon’ run out of time.

—Nora

TWENTY-FIVE

ICE COATS THE TIPS OF my fingers as I zoom in on the photo of the twelve hanging women. There’s a scream stuck in my throat. It’s a monster with vicious claws that scrape the tender flesh to ribbons. There’s something burning through the tissue in my lungs. The symbol. On every. Single. Woman. Painted like a Hail Mary, like a war cry, like a message meant just for me.

A triangle devoid of a bottom with a dot in the middle. On every sack that covers the head of a dead woman. Strange fruit for the crows to pluck come morning.

The cardinal zodiac symbol everywhere I turn—on the sacks, in the eyes of the wolves welded into the front gates of the school, on the necklace gifted to me by my dead grandmother. What was she trying to tell me? I grip the gold at my throat and squeeze my eyes shut.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

VIGILANTE JUSTICE

Following the blazing fire that erupted at the Beaumont Clark School last night, twelve colored women have been found hanged outside the burnt remains. This comes after numerous complaints waged against the negro members of the local community and a years-long legal battle with gem tycoon Theodore Biltmore, son of the esteemed Cornelius Biltmore, and his ever-expanding estate and tourism project.