I have just finished reading a story which began as a letter to you. A letter I began writing on a Greek island two years ago, but never finished, never sent, a letter which became part of the story I haven’t finished either. Rereading makes it very clear that something is wrong with the story. I understand now that part of what’s wrong is the fact that I never finished the letter to you. The letter remains inside the story, buried, bleeding through when I read. What’s wrong is the fact that I never finished the letter, never sent it and it is buried now in a place only I can see. Because the letter was meant for you. I began by trying to say some things to you, but they never got sent, never reached you so there is something wrong about the story nothing can fix.

In a way the story came before the letter. The story concerned the beginning of Homewood and a woman, a black woman who in 1859 was approximately eighteen years old. She was the property of a prosperous farmer who employed slave labor to cultivate the land he owned near Cumberland, Maryland. I wanted to tell the story of the woman’s escape, her five-hundred-mile flight through hostile, dangerous territory and her final resettlement in Homewood, a happy ending or beginning from our point of view since this woman turns out to be Great-great-great-grandmother Sybela Owens. The idea of the story had been on my mind for years, ever since I’d heard Aunt May tell it the night of Grandpa’s funeral. For some reason being in Europe again sharpened the need to get it down on paper. Maybe the trip to the concentration camp at Dachau, maybe the legend I’d heard about Delos, an island sacred to Apollo where no one was allowed to be born or to die, maybe the meals alone in restaurants where no one else was speaking English, maybe the Greek word helidone which means swallows and sounds like a perfect poem about birds, maybe all of that had something to do with sharpening the need. Anyway I was sitting in a cafe scribbling messages on postcards. Halfway through the stack I got tired of trying to be cute and funny and realized the only person I needed to write was you. So I started a letter in my notebook. And that’s when the first words of Sybela Owens’s story said themselves. Five or six sentences addressed to you and then the story took over.

Aunt May’s voice got me started on the story. Sitting in a cafe, staring out at the gray sky and gray sea, and mad because it was my last morning on the island and I’d been hoping for blue skies and sunshine, sitting there trying to figure out why I was on a Greek island and why you were six thousand miles away in prison and what all that meant and what I could say to you about it, I heard Aunt May’s voice. She was singing Lord reach down and touch me. I heard the old church rocking through the cries of sea birds. Lord, reach down and touch me, the Gospel Chorus of Homewood African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church singing, Touch me with Thy holy grace because Lord if you would touch me, Thy touch would save me from sin. And Aunt May was right there singing with them. You know how she is. Trying to outsing everybody when the congregation harmonizes with the Gospel Chorus. She had on one of those funny square little hats like she wears with all the flowers and a veil. I could hear her singing and I could feel her getting ready to shout. In a minute she’d be up and out in the aisle shaking everything on her old bones she could shake, carrying on till the ushers came and steadied her and helped her back to her seat. I could see the little hat she keeps centered just right on top of her head no matter how hard the spirit shakes her. And see her eyes rolling to the ceiling, that yellow ceiling sanctified by the sweat of Deacon Barclay and the Men’s Auxiliary when they put up the scaffolds and climb with buckets of Lysol and water and hearts pumping each year a little less strongly up there in the thin air to scrub the grit from the plaster so it shines like a window to let God’s light in and let the prayers of the Saints out.

That’s when the story, or meditation I had wanted to decorate with the trappings of a story began. At least the simple part of it. The part concerning the runaway and her dash for freedom, the story I had been trying to tell for years. Its theme was to be the urge for freedom, the resolve of the runaway to live free or die. An old, simple story, but because the heroine was Great-great-great-grandmother Sybela Owens, I felt the need to tell it again.

What was not simple was the crime of this female runaway set against your crime. What was not simple was my need to tell Sybela’s story so it connected with yours. One was root and the other branch but I was too close to you and she was too far away and there was the matter of guilt, of responsibility. I couldn’t tell either story without implicating myself.

This woman, this Sybela Owens our ancestor, bore the surname of her first owner and the Christian name, Sybela, which was probably a corruption of Sybil, a priestess pledged to Apollo. The Sybil of Greek myth could see the future but her power was also a curse because like the black woman tagged with her name centuries later, Sybil was a prisoner. A jealous magician had transformed the Greek Sybil into a bird, caged her and robbed her of speech. She possessed only a song and became a bauble, a plaything in a gilded cage set out to entertain dinner guests in the Wizard’s palace. This was to be her role for eternity, except that once, addressed by a seer who heard a hauntingly human expressiveness in her song, she managed to reply, “My name is Sybil and I wish to die.”

On the plantation Sybela Owens was called Belle. Called that by some because it was customary for slaves to disregard the cumbersome, ironic names bestowed by whites, and rechristen one another in a secret, second language, a language whose forms and words gave substance to the captives’ need to see themselves as human beings. Called Belle by others because it was convenient and the woman answered to it. Called Belle by a few because these older slaves remembered another black woman, an African who had lived with a cage on her shoulders for twenty years and the cage had a little tinkling bell attached to it so you knew when she was coming and naturally they had started calling her Bell, in derision at first, mocking her pride, her futile stubbornness on a point most of the women had conceded long before, a point which peopled the plantation with babies as various in hue as the many colors of Joseph’s coat, then Belle because she had not broken, Mother Belle finally because she was martyr and saint, walking among them with the horrible contraption on her shoulders but unwavering, straight and tall as the day the iron cage had been fitted to her body; her pride their pride, her resistance a reminder not of the other women’s fall, but of the shame of those who had undone them. Called Belle because they saw in this beautiful Sybela a striking resemblance, a reincarnation almost of the queenly, untouchable one who had been sent to suffer with them.

Every morning the slaves were awakened by the blast of a conch shell. Blowing the conch horn would have been a black man’s job. To be up before everybody else while the sky was still dark and the grass chilly with dew. A black man would have to do it. And do it to the others who hated to hear him as much as he hated the cold walk in his bare feet to the little rise where he was expected to be every morning and every morning like he was some kind of goddamn rooster stand there and blast away on the conch till other feet started shuffling in the rows of dark huts.

Sybela would have heard the conch shell a thousand mornings. Strangely, the first morning of her freedom when she heard nothing but bird cries and the rasp of crickets, she missed the horn. The three or four dresses in which she had cocooned herself unfurl as she rolls away from Charlie Bell’s hard back. She shivers as a draft runs up between her clothes and her skin, breaking the seal of heat. She stares at the horizon while the sky drifts grayly across he mirror of her eyes. In the rifts between the dark hills, mist smolders dense and white as drifted snow; the absolute stillness is stiller and more absolute because of the ground noise of birds and insects. She rises to a sitting position and lifts her arm from the rags beneath which her children sleep and hugs the mantle of her entire wardrobe closer to her body. In the quiet moments of that first morning of freedom she misses the moaning horn and hates the white man, her lover, her liberator, her children’s father sleeping beside her.

Charlie Bell had stolen her, her and the two children, stolen them from his own father when he learned the old man intended to include them in a lot of slaves sold to a speculator. She had no warning. Just his knock, impatient, pre-emptive as it always was when he decided to take her from her sleep. Using no more words than he did when he demanded her body, he made it clear what he wanted. In a few minutes all that was useful and portable was gleaned from the hut, the children roused, every piece of clothing layered on their backs and then all of them rushing into the night, into the woods bordering the northern end of the plantation. He pushed them without words, a rage in his grunts, in his hands, rage she felt aimed at her and the frightened children though it was the forest he tore at and cursed. The dark woods responded to his attack with one of their own: branches whipped at the runaways’ faces, roots snarled their feet, dry wood snapped loud enough to wake the dead.

It began, like most things between them, in silence, at night. After an hour or so they had to carry the children. Charlie Bell lifted Maggie who was older and heavier than her brother, and Sybela draped Thomas in the sling across her chest not because she conceded anything to the man’s strength but because when she bowed into the darkness she reached for the sobs of fear and exhaustion she knew the man could not quiet. Maggie would cling to Charlie Bell, the plunge through the forest would become a game as she burrowed her head into his shoulder. She would be riding a horse and the jostling gallop, the fury of the man’s heartbeat would lull her to sleep. But the boy was frightened more by the white man than the crashing forest. Thomas was not much more than a baby but he would scramble along on his thin, bowlegs till he dropped. Never complaining, Thomas would pick himself up a hundred times and not even notice the shrieks of invisible animals, but he could not abide the man’s presence, the man’s anger, and he whined until Sybela pressed him to sleep against her body.

The first morning of her freedom she looked quickly away from the white man, forgetting the knife-thrust of hatred as she listened to the complaints of her body and surveyed the place where exhaustion had forced them to drop. Charlie Bell must know where they are going. She had heard stories of runaways traveling for weeks in a great circle that brought them back to the very spot where they had begun their escape. The man must know. All white men seemed to know the magic that connected the plantation to the rest of the world, a world which for her was no more than a handful of words she had heard others use. The words New Orleans, Canada, Philadelphia, Cumberland were impossible for her to say. Except silently to herself, sifting them through her mind the way old heathen Orion was always fingering the filthy string of beads he wore around his neck. She did not hear the conch shell and realized for the first time in her life she was alone. In spite of the children still tied to her with strings that twisted deep inside her belly, in spite of the man, she knew she could just walk away from all of them, walk away even if the price was heavy drops of her blood dripping at every step because she was nowhere and no one was watching and the earth could swallow her or the gray sky press down like a gigantic pillow and snuff out her life, her breath, the way Charlie Bell had tried once, and it would be nobody but her dead, nobody knowing her death just like nobody heard in the silence of this morning her thoughts; and that was the thing she would not walk away from, the drone of her voice speaking to itself, monotonous and everlasting as cricket hum. She could not leave it, or bury it and cry over it; she was nothing but that sound, and the sound was alone.

I wanted to dwell on Sybela’s first free morning but the chant of the Gospel Chorus wouldn’t let me sit still. Lord, reach down and touch me. The chorus wailing and then Reba Love Jackson soloing. I heard May singing and heard Mother Bess telling what she remembers and what she had heard about Sybela Owens. I was thinking the way Aunt May talks. I heard her laughter, her amens, and can I get a witness, her digressions within digressions, the webs she spins and brushes away with her hands. Her stories exist because of their parts and each part is a story worth telling, worth examining to find the stories it contains. What seems to ramble begins to cohere when the listener understands the process, understands that the voice seeks to recover everything, that the voice proclaims nothing is lost, that the listener is not passive but lives like everything else within the story. Somebody shouts Tell the truth. You shout too. May is preaching and dances out between the shiny, butt-rubbed, wooden pews doing what she’s been doing since the first morning somebody said Freedom. Freedom.

One of the last times I saw you, you were in chains. Not like Isaac Hayes when he mounts the stage for a concert or poses for an album cover, not those flaunted, ironic, who’s-shucking-who gold chains draped over his ten-thousand-dollar-a-night brown body but the real thing, old-time leg irons and wrist shackles and twenty pounds of iron dragged through the marbled corridors of the county courthouse in Fort Collins, the Colorado town where they’d finally caught up with you and your out buddy Ruchell. I waited outside the courtroom for a glimpse of you, for a chance to catch your eye and raise my clenched fist high enough for you and everybody else to see. I heard a detective say: “These are a couple of mean ones. Spades from back East. Bad dudes. Wanted in Pennsylvania for Murder One.”

You and Ruchell were shackled together. In your striped prison issue coveralls you were the stars everyone had been awaiting. People murmured and pointed and stared and the sea of faces parted for your passage. In the eyes of the other greencoveralled prisoners waiting to be arraigned there was a particular attentiveness and awe, a humility almost as they came face to face with you—the Big Time. Your hair was nappy and shot straight out of the tops of your heads. Made you look a foot taller. Leg irons forced you to shuffle; your upper bodies swayed to make up for the drag of the iron. Neither of you had shaved. Neither looked down at the gaggle of deputies shoeing back the crowd. The two of you could have been a million miles away discussing Coltrane or pussy. Everything about your faces disclaimed the accident that was happening to your bodies. The slept-in, too small coveralls, the steel bracelets, the rattling pimp-strut shuffle through the marbled hallway some other black prisoner had freshly mopped. You were intent on one another, smiling, nodding, whispering inside a glass cage. I thought of your ambition to be an entertainer. Admired the performance you were giving them.

Bad dudes. Mean nigger men. Killers.

If they had captured Great-great-great-grandmother Sybela Owens, they would have made a spectacle of her return to the plantation, just as they paraded you, costumed, fettered through the halls. Because they had not allowed you soap or combs or mirrors or razors, you looked as if you had been hiding for days in the bush, bringing some of its wildness with you into the clean halls of justice. She too, if they had caught her, would have returned part wild thing. Her long hair matted, her nails ragged and caked with mud, her skirts in tatters, the raw smell of the woods soaked into her clothes and skin. She would have struggled to walk unbowed behind the horses, at the end of the rope depending from her wrists to saddle horn. Her eyes would have been fixed in the middle distance, beyond the slumped backs of the sleepy riders, above the broken line of slave row cabins the hunting party finally reached. Her shoes would he gone, her wrists bloody. There would be dark splotches across her back where the coarse homespun cloth has fused with her flesh. The shame she will never speak of, more bearable now than it will ever be because now it is a fiery pain in her groin blotting out the humiliation she will remember and have to deal with once the pain has subsided. A funky, dirty black woman, caught and humbled, marched through the slave quarters like the prize of war she is, like the pawn she is in the grand scheme of the knights on horseback. But her eyes are on the moon. Like yours. I ask myself again why not me, why is it the two of you skewered and displayed like she would have been if she hadn’t kept running. Ask myself if I would have committed the crime of running away or if I would have stayed and tried to make the best of a hopeless situation. Ask if you really had any choice, if anything had changed in the years between her crime and yours. Could you have run away without committing a crime? Were there names other than “outlaw” to call you, were there words other than “crime” to define your choice?

Mother Bess is down off Bruston Hill now. She talks about you and asks about you and says God give her strength she’s crossing that river and coming over to see you. She talks about Sybela Owens. May saw Sybela Owens too. May was staring at the tall, straight trees behind the house when she felt eyes on her, eyes which had burrowed right down into the place where she was daydreaming. May let her own eyes slowly find the ones watching her. Cautiously she lowered her gaze down past the tall trees, the slant of the roof, the rhythmed silhouette of gray shingles and boards, down past the scarred post supporting the porch roof, the knobby uprights of the rocking chair’s back, stopping finally at the old woman who sat dark and closed as a fist. Sybela Owens’s ancient eyes blinked in the bright sunlight but did not waver; they had waited patiently as if they had all the time in the world for May to reach them. Then it was May’s turn to wait. She quieted everything inside herself as the old eyes shushed her and patted her and said her name in a way she had never heard it said before. May. The eyes never left her, but after an instant which seemed forever, May was released. Sybela Owens’s eyes never left her but they had fallen asleep again. Among the million brown wrinkles and folds in the old woman’s face were two invisible shutters which slid down over her eyes. They were in place again and though May could not see through them, she understood that Grandmother Owens could still look out.

“And let me tell you all something. That’s right. You all listen up because I’m gon tell you what you ain’t never heard. That’s right. And you heard it from May and May be long gone but you all remember where you heard it. Yes indeed. About Grandmother Owens now. She had power. A freeing kind of power. I heard them say it and you might hear somebody say it and think that’s just old people talking or them old time down home tales don’t nobody believe no more but you listen to me and hear me tell it like it was because I was there, me, May, and I wasn’t nothing but a child in knickers but I had sense enough to know it when I felt it, sense enough to let the power touch me, yes Lawd, reach down and touch me, and I felt it from my nappy head down to my dirty toes, felt it even though I was a child, felt it raising me up from scratching at my backside and playing in dirt. Grandmother Owens touched me and I felt it. Felt all the life running out me and something new filling me up at the same time. Just as clear as a bell I heard her say my name. And say so many other things there ain’t no words for but they all rushing in so fast felt my whole self moving out the way to make room. Thought her power gon bust me wide open. Bust me clean open and I be running down off that hill like melting snow.”

And Mother Bess said, Tell the truth. Said, Yes. Yes. And May kept on telling.

“That’s all. Ain’t no more. Old as she was and young as I was, she let me feel the power. And I’m a witness. That’s what I am now. Your Aunt May’s a witness. I’m telling you it happened and I don’t know much else about Grandmother Owens except what I been told cause that’s the only time I seen her. Just before they brought her down off Bruston Hill. Didn’t last a month they say. Took her down off that hill and she was dead in a month, a month after they carried her down. Strong enough to fight when they came for her. But she let them take her. Know she let them cause if she set her mind on not moving, nobody on God’s green earth could budge that woman a inch. Because she had the power. I’m a witness. Had it still as sure as she sitting in that rocking chair in petticoats and a black cape and a long black dress. Sun hot as fire and she never sweat one bit. Had it and touched me with it. And changed my life. Yes she did. Told me to live free all this time and be a witness all this time. And told me come a day her generations fill this city and need to know the truth.

“Yes, Lawd. Everybody talking about heaven ain’t going there. Hmmph. And everybody talking about freedom ain’t been free and never gon be. If the Lord set a burden on you so heavy you can’t move nothing but one thumb, you better believe what I’m telling you, the wiggling of that one thumb make you the freest thing in the world. Grandmother Owens now. She suffered in Egypt. She suffered under them cruel pharaohs. Told her when to jump and when to spit and beat her unmerciful she didn’t jump or spit fast enough to suit em. That’s what it was all about. Evil pharaohs and Hebrews who was God’s chosen people, chosen to suffer and get hard like iron in a fire. Now youall see people just like I do, see them every day strutting round here in them fancy clothes or riding them big cars and they don’t know they’s still jumping and spitting when they told. They don’t know it. Too ignorant to know it. Hmmph. And tell you g’wan out my face, nigger, you try and tell them something. But it be the same. Pharaohs and Hebrew children. Cept some few like Grandmother Owens get up one morning and gone. Run a hundred miles a day with little children on her back, her and that white man Charlie Bell and them babies run by night and sleep by day, crisscrossing rivers and forests full of alligators and wolves. Now that’s something, ain’t it? Grandmother Owens wasn’t hardly no more than a child. Hardly old as Shirley sitting there but she got up one bright morning and heard the freedom trumpet and lit out not knowing a thing but she was gon keep running till she free. . .”

On the first night of her first day of freedom after the children had finally fallen asleep under her arm and Charlie Bell’s restless tossing had quieted to the grunting and twitching of a hound dog dreaming of a hunt, and the stars and insects reigned absolute in the darkness, Sybela thought she saw a star fall and remembered the old story about a night when all of heaven had seemed to come unstuck and hundreds of stars plummeted from the sky and you couldn’t hear the rooster or the conch horn next morning for the prayers rising from the cabins. Niggers took the fiery night for a sign of Judgment Day coming. And the story said didn’t nobody go to work that morning and didn’t none the white folks come round and say a mumbling word neither. She believed she saw the star go, let go like a leaf does a tree, then tumble not like a leaf but with a stone’s dead heaviness through water. But the dark waters of the sky closed up without a ripple so she couldn’t be sure whether she saw a star fall or not. The swift turning of her eye loosed one of the tears brimming there and it slanted coolly and hotly down her cheek and she didn’t know its source any more than she understood why one star tumbled and the other didn’t and after she dug the back of her hand into both eye-pits and her eyes were bone dry again she couldn’t be sure if there had been a tear any more than she could be sure the flicker of motion crossing a corner of her eye had been an actual star’s dying.

“They some the first settle here in Homewood. On Hamilton Avenue where Albion comes in. Trolley cars used to be on Hamilton but Charlie and Sybela Owens come here long before that. Most the city still be what you call North Side now. Old Allegheny then. Wasn’t but a few families this side the river and hardly none at all out this way when Grandmother Owens come. Brought two children from slavery and had eighteen more that lived after they got here. Most born up on Bruston Hill after the other white men let Charlie know they didn’t want one of their kind living with no black woman so Charlie he up and moved. Way up on Bruston Hill where nobody round trying to mind his business. Stead of killing them busybodies he took Grandmother Owens up there and that’s the start of Homewood. Children and grandchildren coming down off that hill and settling. Then other Negroes and every other kind of people moving here because the life was good and everybody welcome. They say the land Charlie owned on Hamilton was fixed. After he left, nothing grow or prosper there. They say Grandmother Owens cursed it and Charlie warned all them white folks not to touch his land. He said he would go to keep peace but nobody better not set a foot on the land he left behind. That spiteful piece of property been the downfall of so many I done forgot half the troubles come to people try to live there. You all remember where that crazy woman lived what strangled her babies and slit her own throat and where they built that fancy Jehovah Witness church over on Hamilton that burnt to the ground. That’s the land. Lot’s still empty cept for ashes and black stones and that’s where Grandmother Owens first lived. What goes round comes round, yes it does, now.”

And Mother Bess said Preach. Said Tell the truth.

Sybela’s story could end here but it doesn’t. I still hear May’s voice:

“It hurts me. Hurts me to my heart. I remembers the babies. How beautiful they were. Then somebody tells me this one’s dead, or that one’s dying or Rashad going to court today or they gave Tommy life. And I remembers the babies. Holding them. Seeing them once or twice a year at somebody’s wedding, somebody’s funeral or maybe at the Westinghouse picnic. Sitting on a bench at Kennywood Park watching the merry-go-round and listening to the music and a brown-skinned boy walk by with his arm around a little gal’s shoulder and he grin at me all sheepish or turn his head real quick like he don’t know the funny looking old lady on the bench, and I know he’s one of the babies and remember the last time I saw him and how I patted his nappy head and said My, my, you sure are getting big or My, my, you’re grown now, a big man now, and remember him peeking at me with the same sheepish grin and don’t you know that’s what I remembers when I hear he’s robbed a store or been sent to prison or run off from some girl he’s left with a baby, or comes around on Westinghouse picnic day at Kennywood Park to ask me for some ride money or to show me his family, his babies and let me hold them a minute.”

My story could end here, now. Sybela Owens is long dead, rocking on the porch in her black cape like the sea taxis on their anchors when the water is too mean for the journey to Delos. Great-great-great-grandmother Owens is meeting May’s eyes, gazing through the child to the shadowy generations, to storms which will tilt the earth on its axis. The old woman watches her children fall like stars from the night sky, each one perfect, each one a billion years in the making, each one dug from her womb so the black heavens are crisscrossed infinitely by the filaments of her bright pain which no matter how thinly stretched are unbreakable and connect her with her progeny and each point of light to every other. The vision blinds her. She sighs and crosses her wrists under the ruins of her bosom.

It could end here or there but I have one more thing to tell you. The Supreme Court has decided to hear a case in which a group of inmates are arguing that they had a right to attempt an escape from prison because conditions in the prison constituted cruel and unusual punishment and thereby violated the prisoners’ human rights. It’s a bitch, ain’t it? The Court has a chance to say yes, a chance to author its version of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Court could set your crime against Sybela’s, the price of our freedom against yours. The Court could ask why you are where you are, and why the rest of us are here.

So the struggle doesn’t ever end. Her story, your story, the connections. But now the story, or pieces of story are inside this letter and it’s addressed to you and I’ll send it and that seems better than the way it was before. For now. Hold on.