Shades & Shadows: Sara's Story Begins (Book One)
The Origins of Sara
Sara's story evolved because of a recurring dream, some genealogical
data, and family information my father passed on. The dream came first and it began
well into my adulthood and came, I believe, from someone similar to the fictitious
Sara.
In the dream I walked down an unpaved country road to a bend. The
road and the bend exist. I walked there many times as a girl. In the dream I
was alone, unafraid, emotionless, simply walking. The dream always ended when I
came to where the road curved. If you round the curve, and walk another mile or
so you come to the house where I grew up. In addition to the repetitiveness of
the dream, the other puzzle for me was why the dream ended before I turned he
curve. It always ended there as suddenly as it had begun about 20 paces
back.
A few years after the dream began, my father told me that he needed
to show me where the family slave cemetery was. I was nauseous at the idea that
my ancestors owned slaves, but over the course of five years or so, I decided
someone should know where those bodies lay. No one still alive would know the
names or the stories of those souls buried there.
The next summer when I visited my family, I asked my father to
take me to the cemetery. We trudged roughly 150 yards into the woods from an
angle about 22 degrees south by southwest from where the road straightened to
the east. We left the roadway at the spot where my dreams always ended. We dodged
and moved briers, bent bushes out of the way, and watched for timber rattlesnakes
and copperheads. My father had not seen the cemetery since he was a boy hoeing
corn for an uncle who then owned the surrounding land.
More than 60 years of neglect changed the scenery considerably for
my father. The large old white house that stood at the bottom of what was once
a cornfield had collapsed in upon itself and had become food for termites. Beef
cattle grazed in pasture surrounding the house. The corn field was long overgrown
with a variety of vegetation, including large trees. The property no longer
belonged to any family member.
Dad remembered a few landmarks: a jumble of rocks, many too large
for a single man to move, and a large chestnut stump, five feet or more in
diameter. These were near the cemetery. Since the wood of chestnuts resists the
ravages of nature for years, he counted on the stump still being there.
Dad looked around for several minutes, moving first in one
direction, then another. He was not young, but he was still agile, with memory
intact. He located the stump, the rocks, and the cemetery which had been
disturbed. I later learned that a neighbor boy had dug there in the 1960's thinking
it was an Indian burial mound. That neighbor is dead now and I doubt anyone
alive knows what, if anything, he found and removed.
A tremendous sense of
loneliness fell on me standing there in those deep woods with an undergrowth as
thick as the tall trees would allow, but I never again had the dream. I was
called to that lonely place; of that I have no doubt. I have been back several
times since with a few people, including a brother-in-law who is a safe guide
in woods. The place has a stillness as if the dead are at peace, undisturbed by
animals and birds. Someone knows where the bones lie. The dead are satisfied, I
think.
- Mimi Mitchell
