Jesse’s face lit up, and he talked faster, spilling out the story in pieces. There was a revolt, Jesse said, on the Woodsman land. A group of his slaves had started an insurrection, but one of them told Roman of the plan. The slaves were all caught in the middle of the night, and to make an example of some of them, Roman made the slaves dig the graves of those who’d been caught. Afterward, he decapitated the leaders and put their heads on pikes along a five-mile stretch of road. Negro Head Road, people called it after, as a warning to other slaves. Now known as Antebellum Road.

“Those graves are out there. The clearing we went to, it’s why there even was a clearing. I’d been to those graves this morning. I saw the men who’d created them. A group of slaves digging. It had to be those graves. I thought it was a reenactment, and I guess it was. They were ghosts trying to show me their story,” Mira said.

“Who else did you see?”

“Just the slaves. Oh, but also another man. Young. He was the one giving orders.”

Jesse stopped listening and shuffled through his stack of copies once more. The papers were getting everywhere, falling off the coffee table and onto the floor. Mira held a stack of them in her hands and she flipped through them, skimming the pages and pages of listed names in census records and slave records.

“Is this who you saw?” Jesse held up a page, a copy of a tintype image. Mira squinted at the picture of the man in the photograph. “This is Mr. Loomis’s ancestor, Henry,” Jesse said.

“No,” Mira said. “I don’t understand though. Why do you have a picture of his ancestor? How does Mr. Loomis fit in with all of this?”

“He died on the property too.”

“I know that.”

“Right, but it’s how he died. The police said he drowned by the river. The river. I had to research it, but Mr. Loomis’s family, his great-grandfather to be exact, was the overseer. It was his job to supervise the slaves, and he failed. They planned their revolt and some of them made it to the river and disappeared. Mr. Woodsman let him keep his job and he remained on the land, was able to buy his own plot. But, Mira, he had to be committed. The family moved away after that, disappeared, until two generations later when the property got passed to Mr. Loomis’s father, and then eventually to Loomis. He tried, I’ll give him that. For a little while he tried to make something of that land. There’s an article here somewhere of when he first moved back, a human-interest piece about his farm. He gave it a good shot, at least. Didn’t know what he was up against.”

“He was haunted by his failures.”