The following excerpt is from Patricia Alford Williams’ novel, Place.

Prologue

September 1954

Dawn came peacefully over the Carolina hills. Its morning mist sprinkled the leaves of the China Berry trees and hung low sheets of haze over the plant life that stretched for acres of red clay farmland.

The farmhouse, a two-story stucco hatbox shaped house with a four-column front porch the full width of it, sat proudly on the highest point of land; a dewy stillness enchanting its morning slumber.

Inside, Elvira Rose carefully lifted back the covers of the bed she shared with her sister and quietly stepped out. Today was her ninth birthday and she had something important to do; something no one else must know about.

She dressed quickly putting on the clothes she had left on a chair by the door the night before and tiptoed downstairs through the first-floor hallway and out the back door into the still dark morning air. It was damp and thick with smells of honeysuckles and animals sleeping close to each other in coups, pens and meadows nearby.

She crossed the back lawn avoiding the meadow-sage and pots of geraniums that bordered the yard and entered the long stretch of rough grass that led downhill and out into the open space. The late summer foliage, useless now for bearing fruit, drooped with its own weight, forming ghost-like silhouettes against the faint sky. In the distance…past the pond and fields of drying corn…a dog howled chasing away the last spirits of the night: ancestors still hanging from trees to keep watch over her.

Elvira did not flinch. She knew every curve and every hollow of the land. There was nothing and no place on it that frightened her.

(Now, what was off the land was something else…entirely. Off the land she could be killed or raped…if they were pedophiles…by men whose color gave them impunity from the law. Sometimes they were the law; cruising in clearly marked sheriffs’ cars looking for Colored women and children to force into their government-issued cars knowing the law did not even take their victims’ lives into account).

But here, on her family’s land, boarded on all sides by families whose heartache had programmed them to protect the children, she felt free.

This was her playground: long stretches of rolling landscape cut off from the rest of the world by size and lack of necessity for outside offerings. School and church were with people who lived segregated like she did. Going downtown was rare and then only to buy shoes or fabric or to borrow books from the Colored library.

It was on this land that Elvira played with her sister on a raised flattened piece of earth far enough away from the farmhouse to play in freedom of their mother’s hearing and high up enough for their mother’s watchful eye to see. It was a large area of red clay, barren of grass and all but a few skinny pine trees. After a rain, the little girls drew blueprints of houses in the moistened clay; blueprints large enough that when the sun baked them into the earth the girls filled them with the details of homemaking and motherhood: tables made from planks of wood laid across three-gallon buckets emptied of lime their father used as a plasterer. Chests made of wooden vegetable crates. Sofas and chairs made of feed sacks stuffed with old clothes and fluffed up as cushions. And vases of discarded canning jars filled with flowers from their mother’s garden or picked wild from the fields.

The little girls would play for hours in their side-by-side blueprint houses with husbands off to war and children made of cut off two-by-fours with penciled-on faces and dresses made from their mother’s prettiest sewing scraps gathered and tied around their “waists.”

It was on this land that if Elvira slipped far enough away from the farmhouse and animal shelters, she entered a place so pure in silence she could hear the drying pine cones crackle. A place where she was free to know things for herself: that trees grow in clusters to filter sound so they can hear each other’s humming vibrations; that the sun changes the shape and shade of things so they can be seen in different lights; that the wind goes everywhere and belongs nowhere; knowing things stillness tells.

Now she came to a small circle of pine trees and entered them like she was entering a sanctuary. Elvira loved pine trees; the way they smell…poignant and citrusy; the silkiness of their needles that fall into beds; their tiny cones that come out in spring to be ready for Christmas; their greenness pushing through the snow. The trees all tilted toward a tall and elegant pine with topmost branches that fanned out like a crown. Elvira had seen the wind bow the other trees to this sturdy queen. She acknowledged the tree herself this morning, nodding as she passed.

She went straight to the center of the circle and lay on her back in a bed of pine needles gathered over time. She looked straight up at the sky and asked her birthday wish.

“I know you’re around here, God. I feel you watching me out here. Can you let me see you? Can you show me your face just a little bit? I won’t tell anybody…ever.”

The trees stopped humming to listen. Elvira felt their silence as a sigh. She had lain on her back many times in these trees hearing the faintest snap of a branch. She had watched cumulus clouds change shape above her as they floated by.

She closed her eyes to wait. She was her mother’s late blooming. Evelyn “Bunny” Rose was nearly forty when she gave birth to her second daughter and like most little girls Elvira emulated the woman most central to her wellbeing. She knew how to wait. The women of Bunny’s generation were always waiting. Waiting for spring to plant the fields and replenish their canning for winter; waiting for dough to rise so they could bake bread; waiting for the school bus to drop the children off at the end of the road; waiting for men to come home for supper; waiting on the Lord.

The sky was just beginning to show the first signs of daylight but Elvira knew there was still time. The earth wakes up slowly. Big things wake up first: trees and large animals, until the most delicate of flowers are kissed by the full face of the sun erecting open their tiny petals for insects to come and drink their morning juice; that magical moment in time when everything is awake with new light.

It was at that second that Elvira opened her eyes. The sun touched her eyelids and lit them from inside. At first she thought it must be a light from the heavens but when she opened her eyes she saw the sun. It had come up over the hill beyond the pond. It threw hazy ribbons of sunlight through the pine trees and turned the sanctuary into a cathedral where prayer did not need voice to be heard.

The trees started humming again. Birds joined in calling back and forth like a preacher and his congregation; a cadence of insects keeping time; the full sound rising to the treetops to join the rays of sun.

Elvira sat straight up in her bed of pine needles. Shimmers of sunlight bounced off the pond that could be seen through the tree trunks.

She got up and walked outside the trees and onto a mound of earth that sloped down to the pond. The mist over the water screened the sunlight like in a dream. Still, rods of light pierced through, turning dewdrops to silver sequins in the grass; creating sparkling points of light that winked at her from across the pond. Butterflies dipped and kissed the flowers to take their essence somewhere else to bloom.

This place that was her playground had turned to face the sun. Nothing had left or entered and yet nothing was the same.

Elvira stood mesmerized by the majesty of life waking all around her when a rooster crowed… piercing the air with its primal wakeup call and stirring her from her revere.

She walked back through the pine trees and up the hill to the house. Bunny would be in the kitchen now making breakfast.