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The trees had no answer. Their leaves whispered in the wind, and Rachel imagined them taunting her—
What now?
Her body moved beyond the range of thought, with a desperate will of its own.
She kept running.
She had no way to mark the passing of time on that moonless night, but by the burning in her legs Rachel knew she had traveled an hour or more when she heard it. So faint she thought she was imagining it at first. Singing.
She saw a speck of light, flickering between the tree trunks. She advanced slowly, her mind filled with thoughts of ghosts and nighttime spirits. But as the singing swelled, accompanied by drumming, filling the forest with sound, her fears receded. The noises were joyful and human and drew her in.
A clearing. A tight circle of bare earth in between the trees. At its center, dozens of people were dancing round a crackling fire, with still more lingering at the edge. As the dancers spun past, Rachel heard snatches of different words and melodies all blending into one. She heard some English, but also other languages, older languages that spoke not to her ears but to her bones.
Rachel stood in shadow, watching. She had been to dances before, as a younger woman, but not like this. Those dances had always been folded into plantation life. They took place in the slave quarters, or in the market square of a nearby town. At any time, a white passerby could appear, or the face of the master in a window of the great house, reminding all present that their joy was not boundless; it could not overflow the confines of slavery. The clearing sparkled with a different kind of magic. With no prying eyes to break the spell, the dancers moved with an unencumbered grace.
The insistent pull of the drums drew Rachel closer, closer, into the light. She found herself one body among many, swaying in time to the beat. She began to tap her foot and hum a song of her own.
A woman threw out her arm, her eyes wide and white, with glittering circles of firelight at the center. She seized Rachel by the wrist.
She sang the command, her voice low and sweet. "Dance!"
Rachel was swept into the throng. In an instant, she lost all sense of herself. She had no end and no beginning, no edges or limits at all. Her whole body dissolved into the rhythm. The dance rippled through the crowd as if through water, and Rachel gave herself up to the music.
Every ache in her body eased. She emptied her lungs of a song she had not even known was inside her. Someone was holding Rachel's hand; she reached out and grabbed another's hand, who grabbed another's hand. As the flames leaped into the sky, Rachel thought she could see the chain of hands climbing to the heavens, a line of people through time and space, united by a single drumbeat.
As the last embers of the fire died, everyone stopped dancing. The dawn was beginning to break, gray light leaking through the trees, and the rising sun brought an end to whatever magic had bound them together. People began to leave, most of them tacking west, the sun on their backs, returning to their plantations. Hovering at the edge of the clearing, standing between two broad oaks, Rachel wondered momentarily if she should follow them. Her absence on Providence might not yet have been noticed. But she hesitated too long. Soon, everyone was gone and she was alone. She slipped eastward, back into the forest.
All of the running and the dancing weighed her down. She ached everywhere. It forced a slow pace. The terror of the first flight had faded to a kind of daze, and she stared up through the canopy at the sky. Somehow, the darkness had been easier—it had a kernel of mystery to it, a sense that the night held many possible worlds, their boundaries worn thin, so that anyone may pass between them. Sunlight was a reminder of the endless march of one day into the next, the unstoppable passage of time to which Rachel had been enslaved all her life.
Excerpted from River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer. Copyright © 2023 by Eleanor Shearer. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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