She was hung above a Mississippi swamp in 1892. A group of them were, on sturdy branches of magnolias originally rooted for shade, all with Civil War artillery holes still buried deep in their trunks. Many trees fringed this shallow body of water ornamented year round by soft, white, droopy magnolia flowers. From way above (and I know because I slipped out of Darlene when it was all over and floated far above the water I left behind), the shallow depth of green with its luminescent white flowers could have been a Christmas tree year round. But shallow water is certainly no place for souls to rest easy, with not nearly enough weight to hold their bodies down; they could always rise above and wonder why they couldn’t get up and walk against the horizon. So the plan was not to drop the guilty into the swamp but only to suspend them above it. That way, a bargeman could just float up, cut the ropes, and carefully slide the bodies down into a twisted pile. Less mess when the mayhem wore off and it was time to get rid of the result.

Darlene’s morning had started off like most of her others. Around dawn, she had carefully squirmed loose from the limbs of her two little sisters. They all shared a twin bed and left their mother alone on the full one; the thirty-something widow fought people in her sleep and the girls had gotten tired of waking up with bruises. The family was lucky to have two rooms in their near-hut, one of many thrown up in a maze of streets and alleys the recently emancipated inhabitants had christened “New Africa.” The family had walked and hitched wagon rides from their native Georgia to this promised land, and this new place wasn’t any closer to paradise but at least it was farther from hell.