Garden of Beasts

and the calm, piercing eyes, the girl believed there was a resemblance between them—she had the head and face of her ancestor, the roundness of his features, the rich shade of his skin. Not a bit of the Singleton physique, though. Geneva Settle wasskinny as a grade-school boy, as the Delano Project girls loved to point out.
    She began to read once more, but a noise intruded.
    A click in the room. A door latch? Then she heard several footsteps. They paused. Another step. Finally silence. She glanced behind her, saw nobody.
    She felt a chill, but told herself not to be freaked. It was just bad memories that put her on edge: the Delano girls whaling on her in the schoolyard behind Langston Hughes High, and that time Tonya Brown and her crew from the St. Nicholas Houses dragged her into an alley, then pounded her so bad that she lost a back tooth that still hadn’t been replaced. Boys groped, boys dissed, boys put you down. But it was the girls who made you bleed.
    Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch . . .
    More footsteps. Another pause.
    Silence.
    The nature of this place didn’t help. Dim, musty, quiet. And there was no one else here, not at 8:15 on a Tuesday morning. The museum wasn’t open yet—tourists were still asleep or having their breakfasts—but the library opened at 8:00. Geneva had been waiting here when they unlocked the doors, she’d been so eager to read the article. She now sat in a cubicle at the end of a large exhibit hall, where faceless mannequins wore nineteenth-century costumes and the walls were filled with paintings of men in bizarre hats, women in bonnets, and horses with wack, skinny legs.
    Another footstep. Then another pause.
    Should she leave? Go hang with Dr. Barry, the librarian, until this creepy dude left?
    And then the other visitor laughed.
    Not a weird laugh, a fun laugh.
    And he said, “Okay. I’ll call you later.”
    A snap of a cell phone folding up. That’ s why he’d been pausing, just listening to the person on the other end of the line.
    Told you not to worry, girl. People aren’t dangerous when they laugh. They aren’t dangerous when they say friendly things on cell phones. He’d been walking slowly because that’s what people do when they’re talking—even though what kind of rude claimer’d make a phone call in a library? Geneva turned back to the microfiche screen, wondering; You get away, Charles? Man, I hope so.
    Yet he regained his footing and, rather than own up to his mischief, as a courageous man would do, continued his cowardly flight.
    So much for objective reporting, she thought angrily.
    For a time he evaded his pursuers. But escape was merely temporary. A Negro tradesman on a porch saw the freedman and implored him to stop, in the name of justice, asserting that he had heard of Mr. Singleton’s crime and recriminating him for bringing dishonor upon all colored people throughout the nation. The citizen, one Walker Loakes, thereupon flung a brick at Mr. Singleton with the intent of knocking him down. However, the freedman
    dodges the heavy stone and turns to the man, shouting, “I am innocent. I did not do what the police say!”
    Geneva’s imagination had taken over and, inspired by the text, was writing the story once again.
    But Loakes ignores the freedman’s protests and runs into the street, calling to the police that the fugitive is headed for the docks.
    His heart torn, his thoughts clinging to the image of Violet and their son, Joshua, the former slave continues his desperate run for freedom.
    Sprinting, sprinting . . .
    Behind him comes the gallop of the mounted police. Ahead of him, other horsemen appear, led by a helmeted police officer, brandishing a pistol. “Halt, halt where you are, Charles Singleton! I’m Detective Captain William Simms. I have been searching for you for two days.”
    The freedman does as ordered. His broad shoulders slump, strong arms at his side, chest heaving as he sucks in the humid, rancid air beside the Hudson River. Nearby is the Tow Boat office, and up and down the river he sees the spindles of the sailing ship masts, hundreds of them, taunting him with their promise of freedom. He leans, gasping, against the large Swiftsure Express Company sign. Charles stares at the approaching officer as the clop, clop, clop of his horse’s hooves resonate loudly on the cobblestones.
    “Charles Singleton, you are under arrest for burglary. You will surrender to us or we will subdue you. Either way you