The Dark-Thirty Read Free

the quarters, he told about a slave family who leaped into Topps River Falls but weren’t killed—they were transformed into beautiful birds who flew away to freedom.
    *   *   *
    Legends grew up around Pin Oak. After Harper’s death, the house went to Mr. Kelsey at the bank, but it was destroyed by fire during the Civil War.
    Olive Hill had grown up in the shadow of Pin Oak ruins. Two of the six Doric pillars and a burned-out chimney were all that was left of the stately old mansion. Whenever Papa had gone fishing, Olive liked to tag along behind him through the plantation grounds and down to Topps River Falls. There he would tell her the legend of Pin Oak.
    After twenty-five years of telling it, Papa’s Pin Oak story was always the same. Olive never tired of hearing it, and she had even made it the subject of a paper she was writing. For months she’d searched through old records, documents, books, and papers to see how much of the real story she could reconstruct.
    The diary of Benjamin Stone, a well-known abolitionist and “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, had just been published, and it contained information she needed. When the Reader Bookstore called to tell her that her copy had arrived, she hurried over to pick it up.
    Driving to the mall, Olive mentally sortedthrough all the details she’d uncovered about Pin Oak. Henri, a mulatto, was the son of Mary DuPriest, a free woman from New Orleans. Mary had died in 1840, and Amos had brought Henri to Pin Oak, although by law the boy was free. Years later Amos had made Henri overseer and put him in charge of Pin Oak operations—ordering, planting, harvesting, and selling crops. Henri had married Charlemae and they had had a son. It was speculated that the family had plunged to their death in Topps River Falls in a failed attempt to escape the plantation—though their bodies were never found.
    Meanwhile, during the 1850s, the Underground Railroad was active in Tennessee. Through a network of conductors, runaways were led from one safe house to another, until they reached free soil.
    Olive speculated that Henri might have made contact with Benjamin Stone. Conductors sometimes used old spirituals like “Steal Away” to send a signal that an escape was being planned.
    A cave located behind Topps River Falls was a well-known hiding place used by the Underground Railroad. Stone no doubt knew about it and might have told Henri the night before the planned escape. Perhaps Henri and Charlemaetried to make it appear as though they jumped to their death while actually leaping to a hidden ledge and crawling to safety in the cave. Stone could have then led them to the next station and finally to freedom.
    This explanation for the missing bodies seemed plausible to Olive, and she hurried home as soon as she bought the book to see if the facts supported her theory. As soon as she walked in the door, she threw off her coat and dropped it in the middle of the floor. Excitement made her hands shake as she flipped the pages of her book, looking for relevant dates, names, and places. “Pin Oak! Here it is!”
    As the last rays of sunlight filtered through the window, Olive turned on the lamp beside her chair and curled up with Benjamin Stone’s diary. He wrote:
    I only lost two—no, three—lives as a conductor. They were a family. The man’s name was Henri from Pin Oak Plantation. I was supposed to meet him in the woods, but for some reason we missed each other. I never got to tell him about the cave behind the falls…

We Organized
    During the Great Depression of the 1930s, government agencies sponsored programs designed to put people back to work. The Library of Congress hired hundreds of unemployed writers to interview and record the life stories of former slaves. The result of the project was a ten-thousand-page typed manuscript of folk histories, vividly retold by African Americans who had lived under the tyranny of slavery. The personal accounts in the