“The boundary is marked by bottle trees here and there.” She points to a tree about six feet tall a little ways behind us, on the other side of the gold root barrier. Colorful glass bottles cover the end of each branch. The light of the barrier plays off the blues and greens, illuminates the yellows and reds. “When the barrier goes invisible and you’re walking around, you gotta ‘look left and right, keep two bottle trees in sight.’ If you see two, you can draw a line between them and know where Volition’s protection ends. Don’t expect y’all will be venturing out, but just in case you do. And if you do, you can’t get back without one of us.”

“Similar to a ward,” Sel murmurs. “Designed for certain entrants, and restricted for others.”

Mariah points out the grounds of Volition as we walk. “Okay, so on the left and right side of the main drive there are some modern buildings. An office. An archives room. Three updated residential buildings for guests.”

“Guests?” Sel asks.

“Yeah, guests. Like you, you’re a guest.” She points to a massive rust-red barn up ahead with a pair of large doors open on one end. “We don’t keep livestock here anymore, so the barn’s been finished inside and remodeled for community gatherings. Volition was a site of subjugation and is now a living cemetery, and we are that cemetery’s caretakers. While the ancestors buried here were brought to Guthrie Plantation against their will, the descendants of the enslaved choose to call on Volition. Choose to learn, to rest, to arrive, to leave.”

I fall behind on the walk, overwhelmed with the energy around us, my lids half-closed. With each step, I have to resist the urge to take my shoes off or run my bare hands over the ground. With each structure and stretch of lawn we pass, my Medium vision shows me what is and what was: ghostly outbuildings with mud sill cabin doorways that lead to interior dirt floors, gone now but there once. Black women in loose shirts and skirts flicker in and out of existence as they stride toward me with buckets of water from a river I hear in the distance, running high then but dry today. A small kitchen building up ahead that sits quietly now, but whose bleed-through shows me the smoke that used to curl from its chimney. The scent of cooking meat from over two hundred years ago makes my mouth water. By the time my friends notice I’m not with them and turn back, they find me kneeling in the grass, hands brushing over the pointy tips but lost in a vision of muddy hoofprints from the past.

Mariah laughs. “You really gotta get better at closing up shop, girl, or you’ll never get past the driveway. You’ll get bleed-throughs of this whole plantation if you’re not careful.”