“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.”