I. Caleb Johnson’s Mayflower History (website), http://mayflowerhistory.com/voyage.
II. Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, “Squanto: The Former Slave,” History of Massachusetts (blog), https://historyofmassachusetts.org/squanto-the-former-slave/.
III. “Colonial Enslavement of Native Americans Included Those Who Surrendered Too,” Brown University website, https://www.brown.edu/news/2017-02-15/enslavement.
The Mayflower Compact:
IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, etc. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.I
I. History website, https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/mayflower-compact.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Bunny spent the majority of the Thanksgiving holiday refraining from reminding everyone about the slaughter of the Native Americans when Meredith printed out the family tree from Ancestry.com to prove that their ancestors had arrived on the Mayflower. She dispensed custom-made red, white, and blue “Indian headdresses” at the dinner table before dessert. After Bunny read that her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had had three wives (consecutively) and thirty children, she took off the headdress and smoked a joint behind the dying poplar tree. That’s what they did then, honey Bunny—they spread the seed! We had good seed.
Later that night under her covers with her mother’s stolen password, Bunny discovered their family had enslaved Native Americans. But because Bunny had never even heard of Native American slavery, she wasn’t about to put up a fight without a loaded gun. Meredith had conveniently left that detail out amidst her joy during Thanksgiving dinner. Overwhelmed with a sense of truth, Bunny felt like she was just beginning to understand the convenience of leaving the details out of history for the purposes of a narrative controlled by those who have something to hide born out of shame. What else are they hiding? Audrey’s death, the pall hanging over Bunny’s every thought, kept pushing her intense need to meet Anthony, the alleged murderer. Finding all of the paperwork for visitation online, Bunny used her fake ID, passed down from her cousin Grace Morrison on her mother’s side of the family when Grace turned twenty-one so Bunny could buy cigarettes without having to pay off a stranger every time. A common initiation from older friends or siblings—and Bunny wasn’t ever scared to use it. The Bartholomews are family friends with the United States Attoney General. Bunny is immune to arrest, to risk—living in her gilded existence of privilege, the thought wouldn’t even cross her mind.
* * *
Bunny drives east of the Capitol toward a brown cement building. She sees the sign: DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, CENTRAL DETENTION FACILITY.
She turns right toward the parking lot. Rain pounds across her windshield as she makes a wrong turn into the semicircle of what looks like an abandoned neoclassical mansion with boarded and blown-out windows and shattered glass under dead boxwoods, Corinthian columns, arched windows, a massive double limestone staircase, all having survived nearly a century of neglect. What is this? It looks like Audrey’s mansion—strange, Bunny thinks. ANNE ARCHBOLD HALL is engraved in the limestone above the rotting wood-covered doors.
Bunny parks behind the abandoned mansion and walks toward a dilapidated building next door where she sees more than a dozen women standing in a single-file line, shivering in the cold.
A female officer with SPECIAL POLICE written across her jacket smokes a cigarette while guarding the entrance. Many of the women are covered in blankets and holding brown grocery bags. Bunny approaches the officer, cutting in front of the line.
“Excuse me, Officer?” Bunny says.
The officer turns to Bunny, her hair in a high ponytail, gold rings on each finger. “Hey, honey,” she says.
Bunny notices she’s missing a front tooth. “Is this the line for the DC Jail visiting center?”
“Oh no, that’s in the trailer around the corner.” The woman points her cigarette to what’s obviously the jail surrounded with barbed wire, a tower in its center resembling an airport control tower. “It’s on the other side of that. Just walk around, you’ll come to a graveyard, make a left, then a right.”
“Thank you.… Um, what’s this line for?” Bunny can’t help but ask.
“This the women’s shelter,” the woman says.
Bunny gazes at the line of women waiting for a bed—for some kind of protection and safety, only to turn around for a view of abandonment and captivity.
“Got it, thanks again,” Bunny says.
“No problem, honey.” The officer inhales her cigarette.
Bunny walks toward the enormous wrought iron gates of a graveyard, chained with a silver lock at the center. “Redford!” a white woman yells as she chases her Labradoodle, off-leash, trampling the planted headstones with a tennis ball in its mouth. Bunny can see the trailer as she turns left, then right, on the other side of the brick wall separating the graves from the jail, a mystifying nexus between being alive and being dead.
Bunny waits in line under dry heat, which is blasting from the vents. She is, for the first time in her life, a minority. Except for the way in which the systemic world sees her—a silver dollar in a jar of pennies—one against a larger sum and somehow still worth more? Bunny is entirely unaware of this reality beyond the words on a page of her history books, of what she is witnessing—there are no words in any of her history books, they don’t exist, only in what she has seen in the news lately: marching in the streets, on the steps of the Supreme Court, the Capitol, the White House. In these moments, the story she thinks she knows becomes warped and ripped from the pages; she feels nauseated from the sight of homeless women in the building behind her, the scattered trash, a jail infested with rats and known to be one of the most violent. The heat blows down her back, beads of sweat forming under her jacket beneath her bra. It is alarming for Bunny; the families and individuals waiting in line are mostly Black. Alarming for anyone who’s witnessing a different story than the one they’ve always been told while cocooned in their own. But nothing could prepare her, no Hollywood movie, news segment, or documentary, for seeing it in person.
* * *
At last Bunny approaches the correctional officer and hands her the fake ID, Grace Morrison. There are no background checks, there’s no reason for anyone to suspect this isn’t her. Her whiteness: institutionally free of consequence.
“Cell phones are not allowed, everything you say and do is being monitored and recorded.” The officer hands Bunny her ID back.
“Yes, ma’am,” Bunny says, relieved her ID worked.
“You can have a seat over there.” The officer points with her eyes to the right-hand wall, an empty seat in front of a screen with a handset, like some kind of modern telephone booth. This officer has no interest in who she’s visiting—just another day, another body, another visitor.
Bunny walks to the empty chair and screen and stares at it. “Um, wait, what is this?”
“This is visitation,” says another officer, standing against the wall behind her.
“But this is a monitor. I’m confused.”
“This is how it works. You don’t like it, the exit’s right there.”
Bunny pauses. This isn’t what it’s like in the movies. “Okay, but how can you tell us we’re ‘visiting’ someone and not actually visi
t them? This is like a government FaceTime.”
“Are you staying or leaving?” the officer says; he has no time or patience for her questioning.
“I’m sorry, but… so there are no in-person visits?” Bunny feels completely blindsided.
“Miss, you can have an in-person after sixty days as long as they don’t commit any infractions.”
“So as long as he doesn’t get in trouble?” Bunny has created a physical change in atmosphere, a stir of attention; she can feel the resentful eyes behind her, hear whispering about wasting time—time they want to spend with loved ones.
The officer is becoming increasingly agitated. Bunny feels the thickening of racial and class tension, a lack of patience for her questioning, perpetuating the cycle of oppression that she is causing.
“That’s what I said,” the officer tells her.
“I see.”
Bunny turns around to see Anthony Tell’s face on the monitor. She pulls the chair back, looking down, more unprepared for this moment than she’d thought—that he responded, that he’s there. She looks up at the monitor, lifts her arm to grab the blue telephone receiver, but Anthony’s face keeps disappearing into static lightning. In between flashes of him on the screen, Bunny notices other inmates walking, orange jumpsuits passing through this overwhelming moment for her. She sees a man shackled at his feet and wrists; he waddles behind where Anthony sits, a prison guard pushing his back to move him along, and his torso is covered in blood. Finally the signal sticks. “Hello? You there?” Bunny says, the blue phone pressed to her ear.
“Who are you? My lawyer told me not to talk to anyone,” Anthony says, folding an arm across his chest, hunched over.
Bunny attempts to defuse the confrontation. “I was told never talk to strangers, so I guess we’re even.”
Anthony takes a beat, examines her. “We’re not even,” he replies.
Stirred, Bunny feels her confidence free-fall at the way that must have sounded coming out of her white mouth—unintentionally, but intentions are irrelevant. Heat continues to blast down her back from the vents; she’s soaked in nervous sweat.
“You a social worker or what?” Anthony asks.
“Uhhh, no,” Bunny replies.
Anthony loses his focus; distracted, he swerves in his seat left then right, looking to see what’s going on behind him, all that Bunny can’t see and know and smell and touch: the wet mold from the showers, a man furiously masturbating in the corner, another talking to himself, the straitjackets upstairs Anthony saw upon his arrival, the shanks hidden in the soles of shoes, the sporadic violence forcing him to duck and swerve. In the moments when he is still and looking at the screen, Bunny is reminded that he isn’t much older than she is.
Anthony regains his focus. “So you’re a reporter?”
“Um, I guess you could say that. My name’s… Grace, my name is Grace,” Bunny says, before she accidentally reveals the truth. “I think it’s important for people to know your side of the story, so I wanted to come and hear it.”
“You fucking people. You don’t give a shit about my side of the story, and you don’t get a prize for coming here. I’m not your fucking zoo animal.” Anthony hangs up, gets up, and he’s gone.
Bunny freezes, still holding the receiver. Shaken at the interruption of her entitlement; she’s never been dismissed before. (What?) As she’s about to hang up, an inmate jumps in front of the camera, the static image of a young white girl in a pink beanie staring aimlessly, offensively, terrified in front of the screen. He spreads his pointer and middle fingers into a V and slides his yellow tongue through it, then flicks it at her.
Rocked. “Fuck you!” Bunny erupts, then slams the receiver, gathers herself, fake-smiles at the correctional officer, and runs out the door, back toward the gates of the graveyard.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Meredith slams the screen door. She stands in the foyer next to a full-length mirror, its mahogany frame found in a sunken ship off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard when she was a little girl. Meredith inhales her mother’s federal town house, its ingrained smell of cool wood and charcoal, age and human odor, the whiff of clammy blouses worn too many times. The musky residual pheromones are redolent of status and memory, a kind of territorial marking that Meredith doesn’t want to let go of. But the house is an asset and it must be sold.
The living room is rife with exposed brick, double fireplaces, a glass Tiffany lamp, and black-and-white photographs of her grandparents, two with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. Presidential inaugural ball invitations and old framed Christmas cards, sketches of their farm in Middleburg and Meredith’s horse named Shoo. She’s missing that dim light, the feeling of being cocooned by her parents; it hits her all at once, that dreadful pull again, the longing for her mother. Meredith’s father died from lung cancer over a decade ago, but it was always Elizabeth (Bunny), the matriarch, who kept the family nucleus strong.
Meredith wills her body into the kitchen, sits at the old wooden breakfast booth by the bay window, and lights a cigarette. She opens her mother’s laptop in front of her, the one she never used, googles the name of a psychic hotline, then dials from her cell phone.
A raspy voice answers, “Knight psychic hotline, can I have your name, please?”
Meredith hangs up. Throws her head in her hands. Pops up just to take a long drag and stare at the brick wall in front of her. She squints, cocks her head sideways. What is that? Some kind of black object is stuck to the brick, but that can’t be. Meredith cranes her head forward, takes another drag; smoke pours out of her lips, possessed now, when she sees the object move. It’s a black butterfly. Its wings slowly descend as though waking from a dream to reveal two red stripes on its body, before it pushes them up again as if its wings are trying to seduce her. Meredith stubs her cigarette out on the crystal ashtray, tiptoes closer to make sure she’s seeing it correctly, a butterfly, how did you get in here? As if breaking from a spell, Meredith tiptoes back to the computer and googles “black butterfly red stripe spiritual meaning”: A black butterfly is considered a symbol of misfortune and death. It is also associated with power, mystery, fear, and evil.
Meredith slams the computer shut. Stop it, Meredith, stop it, stop it. The butterfly jets off, looking for a way out.
Meredith takes the ashtray over to the sink, remembers there’s no garbage disposal. She opens the cabinet below. A mouse lies sideways, still, its gaping mouth staring up at her.
“Oh, Christ!”
Just as she begins to reach for a paper towel, the doorbell rings. Meredith jumps again. “Goddamn it!”
“Yoo-hoo!” It’s Phyllis Van Buren arriving to help clean out the house. Phyllis walks toward the kitchen in her Burberry trench with its faint odor of mothballs and Chanel Number Five, carrying two coffees from Booeymonger, the famous Georgetown deli next door.
“You scared the bejesus out of me. There’s a dead mouse under the sink. I can’t do it, I can’t, I can’t…” Meredith trails off, her lower lip quivering. She lowers herself to the floor of the kitchen, sits with her back against a closed cabinet door. Lifeless.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Phyllis sets the coffee cups down next to the computer, violently rips a paper towel from its roll, then kneels, grabs the mouse, and dumps it into the trash bin. “There. It’s done.”
“It’s still in the trash bin.”
“For Christ’s sake, Meredith, your mother lived a very long and wonderful life! You need to celebrate her, not wallow in this.”
WASPs are not ones to wallow.
“Her legacy lives on in you, and in Bunny, she is her namesake!” Phyllis says, trying to cheer her up.
“What does a legacy even mean, Phyllis?”
Phyllis extends her hand. “Get up off that dirty floor, will you?” Meredith takes her hand and stands.
“I’m serious. What does it mean? This country is eroding, Phyllis, as we know it, our children don’t care about ca
pitalism and they’re preaching in our streets, Black Lives Matter! Down with the one percent and big corporations! Gun control! And I agree with some of what they say, but they don’t even know what the fuck they are talking about. Remember how fearful our parents were—our grandparents were—of communism?”
“Is this about the Banks murders, honey?” Phyllis is trying to follow, be a supportive friend.
Meredith snatches her coffee, walks into the living room, and sits on the rose-colored sofa, matted and soft from the derrieres of presidents and royalty striking deals and declaring war. “I am saying that if a legacy does not remain upheld with dignity and respect, it will become nameless.”
“Well, isn’t that obvious, dear? And what a legacy you carry.” Phyllis smiles, puts her hand on Meredith’s shoulder. “It’ll be all right, dear.”
“We’re losing money, Phyllis,” Meredith tells her, hesitant at first, but she can’t keep it in anymore; her secret is imploding, which she knows is a liability. So she must tell only one person whom she can trust. And it is only because Phyllis has spent the last thirty years of her life protecting and preserving the legacy of the Manhattan Project, considered to be an American victory in spite of killing about eighty thousand people, that Meredith feels confident Phyllis will understand.
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