“What do you think is going to happen when we get there? It’s not like we can escape. We don’t have a boat. You want to hide in the water?”

The river was where this had all started. Mr. Loomis’s body was found by the river and Mira suspected if they could get there, whatever had come for him would come for these men. If Jesse was right, Woodsman’s slaves had once escaped to the river, following it to the swamps. If they were going to come back, if they had returned to collect their revenge, then they’d be waiting at the river to start their insurrection. She finally understood that she needed to join in their struggle. Her whole life she’d looked away, but she saw everything clearly now and what she saw was these men, full of unhinged fury, the descendants of a long-soiled line. More pain would come unless she fought. She had to stop them. She would lead them to the river to meet their necessary fate.

“I just have a feeling,” Mira told Jesse. “Can you trust me?”

“Yes, I trust you,” Jesse said, relenting, and together they made their way to the river.

XXV.

THE WHISPERS FOLLOWED them. They were the whispers of the dead. Of the lost. Of the forgotten. Of the stolen during the night. The whispers of slaves murdered by those who once owned them. Their blood had been spilled on this land, soaking into the fertile soil, enriching the crops that other men bartered and sold. Everything after came from the exploitation of their bodies.

This was what Mira saw. All she could see. The ways in which they’d been harmed. When she looked at the trees, she saw all the bodies hanged from them. Round and round the rope had been tied to the base of the tree. The loop tightened across the neck as someone pulled them up. Fists clenched from their fury. Shouts and cheers as the men hanged. These are the men who would later cloak themselves in white, hide behind white as they crept through the dark. In gangs they came, breaking windows, stealing through doors to steal bodies, taking them away to disappear. Always bodies.

So many had been taken. So many lost. The men and women who’d died on these fields, falling from the work that broke them, only to later be thrown in unmarked graves or sold one last time to the medical hospitals. All that was left of them were these whispers, a cacophony of hushed voices building with every step Mira and Jesse took as they headed across the fields toward the river.

Far off in the distance, Mr. Tatum led a crowd of men. Wild-eyed in search of his justice, followed by the lynching mob in search of blood, all of them in search of Jesse.