“Where’s the gold at?” Lottie said. The walls did not look golden.
“Deep in the rocks. T’ain’t plain to the eye.”
Black water pooled just beyond the mining car, shimmering tar in the light. Dripping echoed around them endlessly. Again, Lottie fought the urge to run.
“We ain’t gonna drown down here, is we?” Lottie said.
“Not so long as you do as you’re told and don’t wander,” Uncle Jim said. “Come on.”
As he led them past the mining car, water seeped into her worn shoes, cold enough to tingle her toes. Water dripped just beyond her nose, and Lottie looked up: sharp rock formations like swords above them stood poised to fall and slice them in two. The next water droplet caught her eye, and she panicked as the cold stung and blinded her. With a gasp, she wiped her eyes clear. Her lungs locked tight until she could see Uncle Jim’s lamp again.
William pointed to a narrow enclave, a shelter to their right. “Here?”
“No,” Uncle Jim said. “Not far enough in. That’s where the men crouch during the blasts. We’ll find you another like it.”
The corridor forked, and Lottie tried to map their location the way she did in the woods, but by the next fork she was confused. No landmarks guided her here.
The sloshing grew deafening as the floodwater rose to their shins. Lottie gathered her dress at her waist to try to avoid soaking it in stink. Mama had warned her not to stay wet, that she could get sick and die. But even though both she and Mama knew death might await her, Mama had said, Yes, let William take you and that baby away. There ain’t nothing for you here. Go see Jim at his gold mine. At least it’s a chance.
But the longer Lottie walked, the less it seemed like any kind of chance. Death above or death below, it didn’t matter—dying was dying. And Lottie felt death down here.
William gave a start, staring into the water near his feet. “Ya’ll see that?”
“What?” Lottie said.
William probed the water with his foot. “I saw . . . something.”
“Quit your daydreaming,” Uncle Jim said, but he sounded frightened. He still had the bag of luck snugly beneath his shirt. Holding it tight.
The water was higher now, at her knees. The damp fabric she carried was a heavy load. Her shins hurt from walking downhill, and the baby’s bulk nearly toppled her with each step.
“What that bag do, Uncle Jim?” Lottie said. She raised her voice to be heard over their steady wading. “How you get it? Can I get one too?”
Uncle Jim faced her. The lamplight aged his face, made his eyes appear to burrow into his skin. His transformation startled her. “Stop that talk.”
“You say when you try to help, it always go wrong,” Lottie said. “How it go wrong?”
“You got to sell your heart for freedom, Lottie,” Uncle Jim said. “Just like me.”
“We’re not like you,” William said.
“Sure you are, red man. I’ve been watching them round up your people. Soldiers come knocking at the door, don’t give nobody time to gather clothes. Everything you had is gone. They take the children in one wagon, the parents in the other, just to make sure nobody runs. You think they dreamed that up special for you? The ones who run—well, they don’t listen to their hearts, do they? Their hearts are cold as ice.”
Lottie blinked away tears. She tried not to think of Mama getting lashed because Marse Campbell would never believe she didn’t know where her daughter had run to. Tried not to think about how Mama would never see her first grandchild. And that was just the best of what might come. Lottie’s shaking started again, her knees knocking like clapping hands. In a few steep footsteps, the water reached above her thighs; dark slime in her most unwanted places.
“How it gonna go wrong for us, Uncle Jim?” Lottie said.
When Uncle Jim was silent for a time, she gave up on having an answer. And when he spoke, she wished he hadn’t.
“It always goes wrong, girl,” Uncle Jim said. “Don’t get it in your heads you’ll both make it up to North Carolina—and then what? Philadelphia? You’re fools if you think this ends well. You never should’ve come. Think of the last words you want to say to each other, and be sure to say ’em quick. You won’t both survive the night.”
They had to stoop to enter the boxy blast enclave.
In the far back corner, the water didn’t creep as high. A narrow, uneven ledge was raised enough for them to sit out of the stinking muck. Lottie hoped the water would drop by morning. Uncle Jim had said it might—if the rain let up. She couldn’t tell if it was raining outside, but it was surely raining inside. The only sounds were the chorus of dripping water and Uncle Jim’s sing-song prayer as he walked back up to the world above.
“ . . . Lord, take pity on your poor servants on this long night . . . ” she heard his voice echo through the passageway. The words collided and faded, but she could make them out well enough to feel the prayer move her spirit. “Do not punish this poor shepherd, Lord, for we all have suffered enough. Do not punish the innocent, Lord, for all they desire is the freedom to serve you better . . . ”
Every few words, his voice hitched in a sob. He was the very sound of despair.
Then it was a faraway whisper.
Then he was no voice at all.
All around her, the dark.
Uncle Jim had given them two lamps, but the two-hundred miles since Augusta had taught them to save kerosene for dire necessity. They had checked their matchsticks before blowing out the lamps, and while Lottie’s had gotten wet in her pouch somehow, William had kept his dry. Lottie had fewer possessions now than ever. Before this night, she had never wanted for moonlight or air to breathe.
But Lottie was glad for the dark, since she didn’t want William to see her tears. He was helpless to soothe her, so why should they punish each other? She huddled against the best man she knew, hearing Uncle Jim’s prayer in her mind, rubbing her belly.
Uncle Jim had said that in the morning he would give them a treasure chest in the Irishman’s wagon: dry clothes, a packed traveling bag, food, boxes of matches, a new compass. And money—how much she could only guess, if Uncle Jim’s hired man didn’t steal it first.
Neither of them had a timepiece, but she thought it had to be ten o’clock. At least.
In seven hours, Uncle Jim would come back for them. Seven hours. Seven years, it might as well be. But he would come. He would come, this time.
Seven hours, Lord. Let them last seven hours.
Don’t let her mother’s lashes be for nothing. Don’t let William’s grandmother’s cries in her sickbed when the soldiers came be for nothing. Let it all matter for something.
Unless he means to drown you both here. For your own good.
And didn’t he? Hadn’t she heard his soul’s guilt in his weepy prayer?
Lottie couldn’t swallow away her sob, and William slid his palm against her hot cheek, all tenderness. Did he know it too? Did he know Uncle Jim had sent them into the mine to die?
Loud splashing flew toward them. Gone as soon as they heard it.
They sat closer, their bodies hard as stone. The splashing had come from directly outside the mouth of their enclave. Had Uncle Jim come back so soon? No more than half an hour could have passed.
“Uncle?” she whispered.
William covered her mouth with the palm. His heartbeat pulsed through his skin.
The next splash sounded like two limbs colliding. Then an undulating motion, one spot to the next. And sudden, impossible silence. They could be back out in the forest, jumping at bears and bobcats.
“That ain’t a man,” William said. “Didn’t I say I saw somethin’? He saw it too.”
“What it look like?” Lottie said. “A snake?”
“Too big for a snake,” William said. “Too wide. Can’t say what it looked like, but it wasn’t no fish or snake. It looked ’bout as long as me.”
“It’s a man, then,” Lottie said. “Somebody chasin’ us.”
“No,” William said. “Not a man.”
William calmly struck a match and lit his lamp. In the brightness, colored circles danced across Lottie’s eyes.
Her vision snapped to focus when she heard the splash again. The creature was beyond the poor reach of their lamp, but she could hear its size—the front end slapping the water first, then the back. Like William said, as long as a man. But maybe wider. Beyond reason, she expected a bloodhound to come flying from the water, teeth gnashing.
William sucked in a long breath.
“You see it?” Lottie said.
William shook his head, waving his lamp slowly back and forth across the water.
Lottie’s heart tried to pound free of her. “Maybe it’s a gator!”
“No,” William breathed. He stayed patient with his lamp’s spotlight, which showed only brown flecks floating in the murk.
“What, then?” Lottie said.
“As a boy,” he said quietly, “I heard stories about Walasi. A giant frog. My mother told me, her mother told her, her mother’s mother, through time. To the beginning.”
Ain’t no damned frog that big, Lottie’s mind tried to tell her, but she remembered the bullfrog’s call she’d heard outside. An omen after all.
William pointed left. “Look there,” he said, calm beyond reason.
Ripples fluttered in the lamplight. Then a frothy splashing showered them. Lottie screamed, but did not close her eyes. She wanted to see the thing. A silhouette sharpened in the water, like giant fingers stretching, or a black claw. Her hands flew to cover her eyes, but she forced her fingers open to peek through.
The creature churned the water, tossing its massive body. A shiny, bulging black eye as large as her open palm broke the water’s plane, nestled by brown-green skin. Lottie screamed.
The creature flipped, its eye gone. Was this its belly? Pale beneath the water, smooth as glass. Too big to be anything she could name. The mine’s thin air seared her lungs.
“Did you see it?” William’s grin made him look fevered. His eyes seemed as wild and wide as the water creature’s. “The frog?”
It can’t be, she tried to say, arguing with her eyes. But her mouth would not move.
Lottie was whimpering, a childish sound she hadn’t made since the day Marse Campbell turned Uncle Jim away. She sat as far back as she could from the water, her arms locked around her knees. Her bones trembled as she rocked.
William whipped off his tattered shirt. His readied knife gleamed.
“Leave it be!” she said.
“Any child knows about Walasi, but no one has seen him. And now . . . here he is!” William’s excitement unsettled Lottie. “Walasi tries to kill everyone in the village. But a warrior slays him.”
Lottie felt a fear deeper than the mine’s darkness. Maybe Uncle Jim’s mojo had confused his mind. Had that come of touching it?
“Waya . . . ” She called him by his mother’s name, hoping he would hear her.
William clasped her upper arm and squeezed. His face wore an eerie grin. “When the warrior kills Walasi, it turns to little frogs. Harmless. They scatter. The village is saved.”
“All your people is gone far away,” Lottie said. “You ain’t got no village. Ain’t nothin’ you can do!”
“What else should I do, dear Lottie?” he said. “Should I run and hide like a boy?
He laid his head across her belly, and she breathed him up and down. Lottie tried to summon words to bring sense to him, but she had no strength to speak.
Then he slipped from her, holding tight to his knife. He dove into the black water.
Lottie screamed. “Waya!”
Endless silence, except for the dripping water.
Every evil Lottie could dream felt certain: The creature was pulling strips of her husband’s flesh with its teeth, far worse than any dog. And it would come to take her next. It would tear the baby from her and scatter its limbs. Uncle Jim had bargained his freedom with a curse. He had sacrificed them.
The world spun, the mine’s darkness fighting to take her thoughts too. She felt dizzy enough to faint, but she could not. Could not. Lottie kept her mind awake by counting off in her head as she waited for William to pop up from the water. . . . eleven . . . twelve . . . thirteen . . . fourteen . . .
William could hold his breath a long time. He swam like a fish in the pond near the road where he drove past Marse Campbell’s farm once a month. Showing off for her.
Thirty-five . . . thirty-six . . . .thirty-seven . . . thirty-eight . . .
Lottie stood as close to the water’s lapping edge as she dared, using William’s lamp to try to see. She tried calling both of his names. After a time, fingers shaking, she lit the second lamp too. His absence only grew brighter. The water lay still and silent.
Ninety-one . . . ninety-two . . . ninety-three . . .
“No . . . ” Lottie whispered. “No . . . ”
At five hundred, she stopped counting.
She felt too breathless to sob. Even tears shunned her misery.
How could she have let William go? Why hadn’t she let him drag her down with him How dare he go to freedom without her!
Time passed uncounted. Lottie only realized she had slept when the water woke her with a start.
Just beyond her haven, something was moving—a steady gliding from one side to the next, back and forth. But even bleary-eyed, confused and sick with sorrow, Lottie knew the sound was not from William. No man could glide so quickly or make such a sound.
Her lanterns made no impression on the water’s void, showing her nothing.
“Git on away from me!” she shrieked at the dark, as if monsters heeded commands.
The water’s splashing told her that the creature still lurked. Watching her? Preparing to make her and her baby its next meal?
“You give me my husband back!”
She tried to shout again, but her throat’s tatters produced only a whisper, more frightened than angry.
How had she forgotten her knife? She prized the ivory-handled penknife William had given her as a wedding gift, of sorts, when they decided they would run. Their time in the woods had dulled the blade from too much hacking and cutting, but she still had it. The knife was all that remained of William now.
Lottie grasped her knife and held it out like a sword toward the churning water. Like her, the blade was weak and small, but she wielded it as if they both had greater power.
“You hear me?” she said, and this time her voice was stronger too.
The thing in the water did hear. It swam closer to her, splashing water over the ledge in its huge wake. Lottie had not believed she could feel greater terror, but the advancing creature awakened such a childlike fear in her that she wanted to cover her eyes.
But she did not. Arm outstretched with her knife, she watched. And waited.
The bulbous eye appeared again before the water swallowed the sight of it, much closer than it had been before. Gone before she could lunge at it. Then came a wet slapping on the stone as the creature hoisted itself nearer to her with shiny green-brown skin. It was not a claw, nor a human hand, but a large and sinister blending of the two that fanned across the ledge as if to reach for her.
Lottie had no time to scream. She stabbed at the closest—digit?—and hacked at it, feeling euphoria when a piece of the creature fell separate from the rest. The creature howled, muffled under the water, and the limb retreated to escape her, snatched away. Lottie kicked the cursed tendril away from her, back into the black pool.
Her laughter was not true laughter—just a desperate, gasping cackle—but the sound of it filled the cave. Then Lottie collapsed into sobs that joined the chorus of falling water droplets from above.
Drip-drip. Drip-drip.
A plan came to Lottie. With a plan, she stole shallow breaths. Her sobbing eased.
She would stay away from the water.
Drip-drip.
She would teach their child his father’s Cherokee n
ame. Drip-drip.
She would teach their child that Waya’s family had lived in peace along the Etowah River before soldiers took them away. Drip-drip.
She would feed their child the corn and hickory nuts Waya loved so much, alongside Mama’s corn cakes. Drip-drip.
Minutes passed, then hours, while Lottie made her plans for freedom that she would win at such an unfathomable cost.
“Lottie? You still here?”
When a voice came, Lottie shrieked. Hope swelled in her. But, no.
Not William. Not Waya.
Had she slept again? Her body was stiff against the stone.
Hours must have passed. Lamplight swayed in the passageway. The water had receded to a thin sheet. She smelled pipe tobacco. Her uncle’s shadow floated on the wall.
“We got to hurry, girl.”
Uncle Jim did not ask about William. He was not surprised her husband was gone.
“Waya,” she whispered to the ravaged cave.
“Come on, Lottie—my man’s outside waiting.”
As Free Jim reached for her, his two gold rings flared like droplets from the sun.
His pinkie finger, a bloodied crust, was freshly sliced away.
I wrote this for a former student, Daniel José Older, and Rose Fox for the wonderful anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. The story was inspired by a trip to a gold mine in Dahlonega, Georgia, where I first heard that a black man had owned a local gold mine. The mine was called Free Jim’s Mine, and he was indeed named James Boisclair. During my research, I learned that the little-known Georgia gold rush displaced the Cherokee people and set them on the Trail of Tears. The rest is entirely fiction.
The Knowing
Our teacher said one day that knowledge is power, and I had to raise my hand even though I don’t like to; I like to sit and be quiet and watch people and wait for lunchtime. But I had to ask him if he was sure about that, or if maybe knowledge isn’t just a curse. He asked me what I meant by that, and I said, Hey, that’s what my mama always says. Knowing is her curse, she whispers, touching my forehead at night softly with her long fingers, like spiders’ legs. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and she’s there whispering and rocking me. But I didn’t tell my teacher that part. I could tell from the way my teacher looked at me sideways and went on with his lesson that he thought I was trying to be a smart-ass. People always think you’re something you don’t want to be. Mama says that, too.