Artifacts by Mary Anna Evans Page B

even know that he had done it. Someday she hoped to have a face so peaceful.
    Faye was glad to think that Abby was resting easier. Sometimes she wished for a little rest herself.

    Douglass Everett settled into his after-dinner routine—the Wall Street Journal and a cigar, followed by The Micco Times and a glass of brandy. The Times featured another front-page spread on the Seagreen Island murders and his name was listed again alongside Cyril Kirby’s as a bystander to the discovery.
    Seeing his name in the paper, even a low-circulation local paper, still made him feel like an impostor, an upstart sharecropper’s kid. Seeing himself listed as a witness to the discovery of the Seagreen Island killings made him feel ill.
    He studied the way “Fredrick Douglass Everett” looked on the page. He had hated his name since the day in fifth grade that he realized his mother’s error. She had wanted him to have something to live up to, so she’d named him after the most famous black man she knew, but she could neither read nor write. She relied on the nurse to fill out her baby’s birth certificate. The woman had left the second e out of Frederick, then, inexplicably, she got the double s in Douglass right.
    On the day he learned who Frederick A. Douglass was and how his name was actually spelled, the former Fredrick became Douglass forever and ever, and woe to the person who forgot his new, true name. Except for Abby. She had called him Fred all her short life, and the hated word was lovely when it came from her lips.
    For decades now, Douglass had had the wherewithal to correct the spelling of his name. He hated the fact that it displayed his mother’s ignorance to the world, but correcting it would suggest to that same world that he was ashamed of her. Douglass lived with the name because he revered the memory of his parents. He would have traded ten years of his life for them to see the success he had achieved.
    He sipped his brandy and pored over the details of the Seagreen Island killings, doing his habitual accounting. Two dead people, both white. A white sheriff, a black undersheriff. The witnesses were a small throng of fairly random racial makeup that consisted of archaeologists, reporters, and political hangers-on. And, praise God, the investigators treated everyone absolutely evenhandedly. When the sheriff and his coterie had arrived, Douglass had felt it again, the fear of being accused just because he was a black man and he was handy. No matter that he was middle-aged and respectable and wealthy, he still felt that shadow.
    But this time he had been wrong. He’d been wrong a lot lately. Times change slowly, but they do change. He wished his parents were alive to see it.

    It was dark before the dishes were done, and Faye wasted no time getting to bed. Exhausted from her efforts to deface Joyeuse so she could save it, she knew she should go to sleep, but she had a late date with William Whitehall. The fact that she had found his journal tucked into the rafters, the very bones of her home, made her feel a connection between the long-ago man and this very old house—a connection that she wasn’t sure was real. Still, the adventure of reading his life story was worth wasting a few hours of sleep and a few dollars’ worth of battery power.
    ***
    Excerpt from the diary of William Whitehall, 8 August, 1798
    It has now been two months since Henri LaFourche, a cultured and educated Frenchman, gathered his men, his horses, one of my horses, & two bagsfull of horsefeed that belong’d to me. They were headed Southwest when they left and, had I so chosen, I could have track’d them down & kilt them. I have the skill to do it. I have Just Cause. No jury South of Philadelphia would convict me.
    On his last night with us, the blackguard LaFourche sat in my house in front of my hearth & proposed an agreement—not a Marriage agreement, but a business agreement. He ask’d to buy my Appaloosa Horse. There is no place nearby