CHARLES SINGLETON, A VETERAN OF THE WAR

BETWEEN THE STATES, BETRAYS THE CAUSE

OF OUR PEOPLE IN A NOTORIOUS INCIDENT

A picture accompanying the article showed twenty-eight-year-old Charles Singleton in his Civil War uniform. He was tall, his hands were large and the tight fit of the uniform on his chest and arms suggested powerful muscles. Lips broad, cheekbones high, head round, skin quite dark.

Staring at the unsmiling face, the calm, piercing eyes, the girl believed there was a resemblance between them – she had the head and face of her ancestor, the roundness of his features, the rich shade of his skin. Not a bit of the Singleton physique, though. Geneva Settle was skinny as a grade-school boy, as the Delano Project girls loved to point out.

She began to read once more, but a noise intruded.

A click in the room. A door latch? Then she heard footsteps. They paused. Another step. Finally silence. She glanced behind her, saw nobody.

She felt a chill, but told herself not to be freaked. It was just bad memories that put her on edge: the Delano girls whaling on her in the school yard behind Langston Hughes High, and that time Tonya Brown and her crew from the St. Nicholas Houses dragged her into an alley then pounded her so bad that she lost a back tooth. Boys groped, boys dissed, boys put you down. But it was the girls who made you bleed.

Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch…

More footsteps. Another pause.

Silence.

The nature of this place didn’t help. Dim, musty, quiet. And there was no one else here, not at eight-fifteen on a Tuesday morning. The museum wasn’t open yet – tourists were still asleep or having their breakfasts – but the library opened at eight. Geneva had been waiting here when they unlocked the doors, she’d been so eager to read the article. She now sat in a cubicle at the end of a large exhibit hall, where faceless mannequins wore nineteenth-century costumes and the walls were filled with paintings of men in bizarre hats, women in bonnets and horses with weak, skinny legs.