Other Earths Read Free

groaned under the weight of faded tomes on the subjects of Enlightened Marriage and Women’s Suffrage. I came from a genteel family of radical tendencies and modest means. I was never sure Maggie’s people understood that poverty and gentility could truly coexist.
    “Maggie’s indisposed today,” I had told Percy, who may or may not have believed me, and then we had settled down to the business of planning our three-month tour of the South, according to the map he had made.
    “There ought to be photographs,” Percy said, “before it’s all gone.”
     
    We traveled several miles from the tavern, sweating in the airless heat of the morning, following directions Percy had deduced from bills-of-transfer, railway records, and old advertisements placed in the Richmond and Atlanta papers.
    The locality to which we were headed had been called Pilgassi Acres. It had been chartered as a business by two brothers, Marcus and Benjamin Pilgassi of South Carolina, in 1879, and it had operated for five years before the Ritter Inquiry shut it down.
    There were no existing photographs of Pilgassi Acres, or any of the institutions like it, unless the Ritter Inquiry had commissioned them. And the Final Report of the Ritter Inquiry had been sealed from the public by consent of Congress, not to be reopened until some time in the twentieth century.
    Percy Camber intended to shed some light into that officially ordained darkness.
    He sat with me on the driver’s board of the carriage as I coaxed the team over the rutted and runneled trail. This had once been a wider road, much used, but it had been bypassed by a Federal turnpike in 1887. Since then nature and the seasons had mauled it, so the ride was tedious and slow. We subdued the boredom by swapping stories: Percy of his home in Canada, me of my time in the army.
    Percy “talked white.” That was the verdict Elsebeth had passed after meeting him. It was a condescending thing to say, excusable only from the lips of a child, but I knew what she meant. Percy was two generations out of slavery. If I closed my eyes and listened to his voice, I could imagine that I had been hired by some soft-spoken Harvard graduate. He was articulate, even for a newspaper man. And we had learned, over the course of this lengthy expedition, to make allowances for our differences. We had some common ground. We were both the offspring of radical parents, for example. The “madness of the fifties” had touched us both, in different ways.
    “You suppose we’ll find anything substantial at the end of this road?” Percy asked.
    “The landlady mentioned some old sheds.”
    “Sheds would be acceptable,” Percy said, his weariness showing. “It’s been a long haul for you, Tom. And not much substantial work. Maybe this time?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Documents, oral accounts, that’s all useful, but a photograph—just one, just to show that something remains—well, that would be important.”
    “I’ll photograph any old shed you like, Percy, if it pleases you.” Though on this trip I had seen more open fields—long since burned over and regrown—than anything worthy of being immortalized. Places edited from history. Absences constructed as carefully as architecture. I had no reason to think Pilgassi Acres would be different.
     
    Percy seldom spoke out loud about the deeper purpose of his quest or the book he was currently writing. Fair enough, I thought; it was a sensitive subject. Like the way I don’t talk much about Cuba, though I had served a year and a half there under Lee. The spot is too tender to touch.
     
    These hills were low and covered with stunted pines and other rude vegetation. The road soon grew even more rough, but we began to encounter evidence of a prior human presence. A few fenceposts. Scraps of rusted barbwire. The traces of an old narrow-gauge railbed. Then we passed under a wooden sign suspended between two lodgepoles on which the words PILGASSI ACRES in an ornate script were