But what would I sign? We don’t have a sign yet for Julian, so I would have to spell out his name, and then—what? What would I say? That I think her unborn son will be dangerous? That I am afraid of him? I feel deeply lacking, without word or symbol to communicate the unutterable and perhaps incommunicable truth.

I can’t even come up with the words when we’re in the car, pulling away from the house, my mother’s face in the grimy window watching us go. Elizabeth plays with the radio to break the silence between us. She never could stand silence. I have never minded it, though. Perhaps that is why I have always felt more at ease in our silent house, in the silent swamp.

When you enter by canoe, there is a quiet mystery to the Great Dismal Swamp. Gray and hazy sunlight filters through tall thin trees that rise from their own rippled reflections in stagnant water to stand on top of themselves, and the way is veined with creepers and shrouded in the mists of time. Broom straw and river cane stitch the woods. Insects swarm in great black buzzing clouds that electrify the heavy sluggish air with a sense of disquiet.

I try to imagine what it was like for the people who once lived here, the maroons that those then-Wakefields, the ones of the early nineteenth century, helped in their escape.

I learned about one family by listening to the voices of the house—hearing them tell their stories to each other. If you are quiet enough, if you listen hard enough, there is much you can hear from the walls.

Here is what I heard: the father, Jonah, had been at a plantation eight miles from where his wife and daughter lived, and once a week on Saturday nights he would make the trek to see them, promising that soon they would be together—things that his wife, Clementine, did not believe. Once or twice she’d had to chastise him for putting notions in their daughter’s head, little Meriday being only ten years old.

But then one day Jonah appeared on a Sunday, wild-eyed and frantic. He gathered them up, told them they were leaving, and they went off under cover of darkness.

They found their way to Wakefield Manor, where Everett Wakefield put them up in the basement until it was safe to leave for the swamp. Constance seemed delighted by the family’s arrival, and was particularly taken with Meriday; she must have been unused to having playmates other than her brother.

While Jonah slept deeply that night, Clementine lay awake, gazing at her child’s face.

Her former master, John Garrow, was a genteel fellow known for his amiability—not like Jonah’s Thaddeus Carrington, who seemed to derive great pleasure from watching the quartermaster dole out beatings and never lifted a finger himself. But what many did not know was Mr. Garrow’s predilection for youth. As soon as a girl turned twelve, she would be invited into the house; sometimes she would come out pregnant, or else she would take up in a luxurious bedroom to tend personally to Mr. Garrow’s needs.