by Tracy Deonn
“I’d be worried if you hadn’t. No quizzes this time,” she says, tugging her shawl tighter. “I brought you here because I’ve decided that I’d like to help you, and I believe this is the best place to start.” Without waiting for my response, she starts toward the entrance of the cemetery, which is really just an open gap in the low wall.
“A graveyard?”
Her pace is surprisingly quick, considering how much shorter her legs are than mine. I have to take a few quick steps to catch up.
“Indeed.”
The sky is a bright Carolina blue overhead, and the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, part green lawn, part wooded preserve, is probably the most beautiful graveyard ever. It feels like a hidden park, a respite away from the throngs of students bent over their phones on the way to class, professors chatting on the way to the campus coffee shop.
Bits and pieces from the campus tour come back to me as we walk: When UNC was founded in the late eighteenth century, it began with one building—my dorm, Old East. Only a few years after it opened, a student died unexpectedly and was buried on an empty tract of land not far from the then center of the campus. As the campus expanded, the university marked the perimeter of the cemetery with informational placards and a low rock wall built sometime in the early 1800s to separate it from the rest of the grounds.
“So this is how you’re going to help me understand my mother?”
Patricia huffs a bit as the path winds upward past an enormous crape myrtle. “I don’t know very much about your mother, Bree, so understanding is a tall order. But I know about root.”
“So the cemetery is where you’ll teach me about root?”
“It’s the starting point,” she repeats enigmatically. “The root of root, if you will.” She chuckles at her own joke, and I give up on pressing her.
The carved headstones we pass at the edge of the cemetery were made of polished, reflective granite. The engravings look freshly cut, even though they are ten, twenty, thirty years old. Some of them even have fresh flowers. Most grave markers are simple, flat stone squares with metal nameplates. Some are taller, solid rectangles atop stone slabs. There’s even a courtyard of mausoleums, for some rich family, probably. But as we get closer to the middle, the markers are getting older, changing shapes. Mildew-stained obelisks, thinner tombstones with two and three sets of names on them. Long names, births and deaths in the early 1900s and late 1800s.
Patricia walks us past older gray headstones onto a narrow path that leads to another section of graves. “The cemetery is managed by the town, and everyone buried here was associated with the university or town in one way or another.”
“Like deans and professors?”
“Mhm-hm,” she hums. “Originally, it was used to bury students who died while enrolled, and faculty. That’s the oldest section. The first was a young DiPhi boy buried in the late 1700s. Five more sections were added after that. A mix of faculty and staff, town philanthropists and donors, famous alumni and the like.”
We come to a stop at an ancient-looking stone wall that runs the width of the cemetery.
“Notice anything?”
“I thought you said no quizzes.” She tilts her head, her mouth folded in a secret smile, and it reminds me that Patricia holds all the cards here. And they’re cards I want.
I scan the way we’ve come. We’ve been walking on dirt paths, pounded flat and hard and made smooth over time by many feet. They serve a dual purpose: they silently direct visitors to avoid walking directly on any of the graves, but they also separate sections of the cemetery. Beyond the boundaries of the cemetery, cars whoosh by toward the football stadium, but other than that, the only sounds are birds and wind. The Bell Tower erupts in Westminster Quarters. When it ends, a lone bell tells us it’s two fifteen.
I stare at her, confused, but take another look at where we’ve stopped walking. On the other side over the stone wall is a grove. “There’s only a few stone markers here.” I point to a back corner, shaded by a low tree. “A few tombstones over there. It’s barely filled.”
“Oh, it’s filled. This wall marks where the segregation begins. All the Black folks are buried in these two sections.” She tips her head toward the grass beyond the wall.
My stomach twists at her words. This is not what I imagined therapy to be. This is not what anyone’s therapy looks like, I’m fairly positive. She wraps her shoulders in the shawl and continues.
“Some were enslaved folk owned by faculty and kept on campus to help build and maintain the school. Some were servants or freed folk after slavery ended in this part of the Confederacy.” She sighs, nodding her head at the grass over the wall. “That memorial over at the Arboretum is the pretty acknowledgment, the polite one. But the blood? The blood’s buried here.”
“Why aren’t there any…” I swallow, suddenly wanting nothing else but to run from this place—this place that feels too close to home, too horrifying.
“Almost all are unmarked. People used fieldstones or wooden crosses, whatever someone could afford, or was deemed worthy. Some graves still have a bit of yucca or periwinkle, or a tree you can tell was planted deliberately,” she says, pointing at plants scattered throughout the grass. “Families and community members did that, I suspect. In the eighties, folks used this section for football game parking, so who knows what was destroyed then. They did a preservation study not long ago using radar of some sort. Found almost five hundred unmarked graves in the ground in these two sections and the one on the other side of the wall, but a Medium could have told them that.” She smiles, a bit of canny mischief sparking in her eyes. She walks through an opening in the wall and steps gingerly into the grass, turning when she realizes that I’m not following. I’m staring at the earth beneath our feet.
“Five hundred?”
“Yep.”
I swallow. “Do I really have to walk on the grass? I could be walking right over someone’s grave.”
“You will be.” Patricia turns away with a smile. “But we’ll acknowledge them. Thank them.”
I huff and let loose a long breath, then follow her footsteps, imagining that maybe she knows where the graves are and has avoided them for us both. We stop at an unmarked section of grass.
“This is where two of my ancestors are buried,” Patricia says simply, as if she were just sharing where one could find a glass in a cupboard. This is where the cups are. Here’s where to find the mugs. She sits down cross-legged in her long skirt.
I instinctively step back, but she regards me with a raised brow. “Sit.”
I kneel carefully. The freshly mowed grass is warm and spiky on my bare legs. I sit cross-legged in front of her as she opens the velvet pouch she’d been carrying and sets out a few stones on the ground between us: a bright green one shaped like a small, gnarled fist; a purple-and-white stone with a few rocky points—amethyst, I think; and a smoky quartz. To my surprise, Patricia arranges a few other items in front of us, items I’d never thought to bring to a grave: a smaller pouch with a bit of fruit in it, a plate with cornbread, and an empty mug that she fills with tea.
“I don’t know who my ancestors are, past my great-grandmother anyway.”
Patricia shrugs. “Lots of Black folks in the States don’t know their people more than four, five generations back, don’t know names before the late 1800s—and why would they? We didn’t exactly inherit detailed family records when we were freed.” She keeps arranging her offerings, not looking in my direction as she does.
I’m filled with a sour sense of betrayal, akin to the feeling I felt looking up at the Order’s Wall. “I never even met my grandmother.”
Patricia’s head tilts toward me, her expression curious. “You never met your grandmother?”
I bristle. “No.”
“She died before you were born?”
“Yes.”
“No aunts on her side of the family? Great-aunts?”
“No.” Frustration sparks in me, like a match has struck my insides,
turned them to fire. Suddenly, my skin feels too tight all over my body. The fine hairs on the back of my neck lift. My vision blurs. I don’t need to be reminded how alone I am. How lost.
“Bree, breathe.” She speaks softly, but her order is firm. “Take slow breaths in through your nose.” I hear Patricia speak, but her voice arrives from far away.
I do as she says until my heart slows down, but my throat is still the size of a straw. I have to clear it twice to get any words out. “So, what are we doing here?”
She smiles. “Do you trust me?”
I blink. “That’s usually what someone says when they’re about to do something weird to somebody else.”
She grins. “I can handle weird if you can.”
I think about all that’s happened in the last week of my life. “I can handle real weird.”
“Then we’ll proceed.” She draws herself up tall and folds her hands in her lap. “As you know, there is an invisible energy all around us, everywhere in the world, that only some people know about. Some of those people call it magic, some call it aether, some call it spirit, and we call it root. There is no single school of thought about this energy. Is it an element? A natural resource? I think it is both, but a practitioner in India or Nigeria or Ireland may not agree. The only universal truth about root is who—or what—can access it and how. The dead have the most access to root, and supernatural creatures have the next closest connection, but the living? The living must borrow, bargain for, or steal the ability to access and use this energy. Our people—Rootcrafters—borrow root temporarily, because we believe that energy is not for us to own.” She waves a hand over her stones and food. “We make offerings to our ancestors so that they will share root with us for a time. And then, after it’s returned, we thank them for being a bridge to its power. This is the unifying philosophy of our practice. Beyond that, families have their own variations, their own flavors, if you will. So it has always been, and so it is.”
“You said you don’t know how my family practiced.”
“I don’t. In your circumstance, it seems your family’s way is gone. All I can do is introduce you to the craft as my family understands it, using my way of sharing its truths.”
It makes sense, but… “What do you do with root?”
As Patricia looks at me, a soft, fuzzy warmth falls across my cheeks and nose, like sunlight uncovered. “Take my hands, and I’ll show you.”
Once I take her hands, there’s a heartbeat of sensation—her skin is warm, dry, and soft—before the world around us twists, then disappears.
PART THREE ROOTS
26
IT FEELS LIKE the hand of the universe has reached inside me and just… pulled.
The sensation of movement is so strong—I’m flying, expanding—then, just as suddenly, it stops.
I fall forward on my palms, dizzy and heaving large gulps of dusty air. Air that clings to the back of my throat and coats my mouth with the taste of copper.
“You’re all right, Bree.” Patricia’s voice soothes from somewhere near my shoulder. She’s standing beside me, her small, flat dress shoes right at my wrist. I open my eyes to find that my hands are spread wide on packed, crumbling clay that’s been brushed and smoothed into an even surface. A floor. I’m inside a building. No, a cabin.
But we were just outside in the graveyard.
A woman moans nearby, a strangled sound of pain. My head snaps up to find the source, and I nearly fall forward again.
The small, rectangular space is lit only by a waist-high fireplace in the middle of the longest wall. The walls are made of rough-hewn wooden planks, and between every few boards are small scraps of cloth stuffed between gaps to shore up the openings against the night. Beside me on the dirt floor are two thin blankets, smudged brown, with tattered and uneven edges. Once I see the fireplace, the heat of it hits my face and I know then that this is not a dream, that this is real.
And so are the two figures in front of its hearth: a Black woman lying prone on an area of straw-covered ground whose body is mostly blocked from my sight, and the other, a middle-aged Black woman bent over her companion and wearing a long, plain dress and a white cotton cap.
The prone woman moans again, and the other soothes in a low, reassuring voice. “Hold tight, Abby, hold tight. Mary’s coming.”
Abby hisses in response, and it’s the sound of sudden pain, so sharp it steals one’s breath.
“Where are we?” My voice is barely a whisper and is almost lost to the sound of Abby’s cries. I push up to my feet. Beside me, Patricia’s face is pinched as she takes in the scene before us.
She speaks full-voiced, no whisper. “About twenty-five miles from where we sat down in the graveyard.”
“How did—”
Patricia’s face is a strange mixture of sorrow and pride. “The branch of my root allows me to work memories, understand their energy and power over our present day. I’ve taken you on a memory walk: a sort of time travel, if you will, into a memory of my ancestor, Louisa, whose grave we visited. It’s a bit unorthodox for a memory worker to bring someone from outside the family along for a walk, but I’d hoped my intentions would be clear. With my offering, I asked Louisa to help me show you the world, and the people, that birthed our craft. And this is the memory Louisa chose.” She inclines her head toward Abby, whose body I still cannot see clearly. I can just make out her head and shoulders. Her wide-set doe eyes are framed with the long lashes people pay to re-create, and her tight curls are thick and full around a heart-shaped bronze face. She can’t be more than twenty.
“This is an example of the circumstances that strengthened the alliance of energy between our living and our dead, forming the tradition we call Rootcraft.”
A chill runs through me, even with the fireplace cooking the room. “We’re inside a memory?”
No one of the Order has ever mentioned anything like this. Sel is an illusionist and a caster, and he can manipulate memories with his mesmer, but traveling into them?
“Yes,” Patricia affirms. “I know this one well, actually. This is early June, 1865. A couple months after the Battle of Appomattox, but before Juneteenth. We need to move closer. Mary is almost here.” She takes a step forward, but I hang back, shaking my head, because I can guess the source of the suffocating, terrifying copper smell: blood. Lots of it.
When Patricia notices that I’m not behind her, she takes in my expression, and sympathy falls across her face. “It’s all right to be scared, Bree. Like many true things, this is awful, and hard. If it helps, Abby endures, with the help of Mary. She lives a long life after this night.”
It does help, some.
“Won’t they see us?” I ask, watching as Louisa squeezes a wet cloth into a nearby bucket, worry etched across her brown face. Even in crisis, her hands are steady.
“No. Louisa’s spirit brought us here, but what’s past is past. We are observers only. She can’t see or hear us, and neither can anyone else.”
I gnaw on my cheek. “But why did she choose this memory?”
“You’ll see. Come.” Patricia offers me her hand, and I take it.
As we approach, the rickety door of the cabin swings inward and a young, dark-skinned woman wearing a deep beige dress sweeps into the room, focus pulling her elegant features tight. “What happened?”
Louisa exhales in relief, pushing herself to standing. The whole front of her dress is streaked with drying blood. “That rat-faced boy Carr got to her.”
Louisa moves back as Mary steps forward. She has a bag made from cloth in one hand, and as she kneels, she starts working on the knot at the top. “What’d he say she do?”
A sneer mars Louisa’s pretty features. “Same old mistruths. Gettin’ uppity with some white woman on the street, talking back to her or some such nonsense.”
Mary’s got the bag open now and spreads it out over the dirt. Inside are bundled herbs, small green glass bottles of murky liquids, and some plants freshly pulled from the grou
nd, moist soil still clinging to their spindly roots. Her mouth twists in a grimace. “Bet you that boy’s got a different story every time he tells it.”
Louisa’s so furious her fists shake at her sides. “Chloe said she ran to the garrison for help when I told this girl over and over that they ain’t here to protect us, they here to keep us in line. Carr dragged her out.” Louisa’s eyes turn hard as flint. “Left her there on the ground, passed out from the whip. Me and Chloe carried her back here, and she woke up halfway. I been keeping her calm, but—”
“Mary?” Abby’s voice is a reedy whisper.
“I’m here, Abby,” Mary assures the other woman while her hands work at the materials on the floor.
Patricia has been pulling me forward slowly. We’re at the hearth now, and I can finally see what’s happened to Abby.
Her back is torn open like a great cat has used her spine for a scratching post. Long stripes of split flesh crisscross from shoulder to hip, some thin as a razor, others open wide enough to reveal folds of tissue in pinks and reds that I’ve only seen at the butcher. The whip took skin and cloth, leaving both her body and dress in shreds.
A human did this to another human. Some boy did this to Abby over some perceived slight. She ran for help and no one gave it to her. They handed her over to a boy who tore her body open and left her for dead.
Fury builds in me like venom. A sharp, dangerous feeling I’ve never felt about someone I haven’t met. “Carr.”
Patricia nods. “His monument is on the quad.”
“His monument?” I turn to her, enraged that this monster is honored at Carolina or anywhere else.
She sighs heavily. “Everything has two histories. Especially in the South.”
I search her features for the anger that I’m feeling, but her face is a tired mask. She must feel it. She must.
Patricia stares back as if she knows what I’m thinking. “Never forget. Be angry. And channel it.” She reaches for my hand and grips it tight, and it’s the only thing keeping me from swaying to the ground. “Watch. This is the heart of Rootcraft, Bree. Protection from those who would harm us, and, if they do, healing so that we can survive, resist, and thrive.”