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of skin on his burned face—healed slick. His nose was flattened to a valley. And still, she managed to love the man I shoulda. A man that became like a mother to her. He’d shepherd his flock of one away from all the things that might hurt her.
    For him, couldn’t nobody care for her the right way, couldn’t nobody do it as good as he could: couldn’t feed her right, couldn’t hold her right, couldn’t watch her close enough.
    Everyone was to blame if she caught cold, so up until she was three years old, he wrapped her up at night hisself and worked hard in the dayto get back before them gossiping women let her fall in the stream. And when he labored, he never looked no one in the eye, never gave nobody half a reason to whip him. Never spoke.
    By the time Josey was five, everybody could see that his love and Josey were the same thing. The pair of ’em was as wrong as a dog nursing a kitten. And if he knew it, he never said and everybody else was scared to tell him. So at seven years old, when Josey asked him if he was her momma, Charles said, “Love is just love.”
    They would talk like that. Honest-like. As if the world had no boundaries and the lush green of East Tallassee, Alabama, was all there was to it. It was the place that became home. The place that became home to me, too. Like a sister to me, Tallassee is—the dirt, the trees, the river, the hillsides. For Charles and Josey, it’s home, where the real world disappears beneath forests of perfectly placed vines. They flow through these woods like silken hair, running over treetops as if they were shoulders and along the ground where pink flowers sprout and get tucked behind her ear. Pretty.
    Charles and Josey would walk along her creek—Stone Creek—far enough away from cotton fields and mills, hands carrying whips. They could dream of a future here, even though people say negroes are dreamless.
    Stone Creek was just a man’s skip wide but Josey couldn’t make it across without Charles’s carry. She was five years old the first time she saw the past there—red beads and pottery. Tallassee would let the past seep in that way, through overflowed waters from the fast and wide Tallapoosa River, scooping buried things and rearranging ’em. Resurrected. Drag marks of black sand and brown mud led to where old things ended up—the storms’ treasure turning over lame in the swampy banks. Charles would lower Josey over the water so she could reach down and pick ’em up, the back of her dress knotted in his fist.
    â€œCreek Indians,” Charles told her. “Chased out.”
    Josey wondered why they’d gone and left such pretty things. And before she could ask the question, Charles would answer. “The CreekIndians lived here before the Spanish,” he told her. And he told her how the French came, then the English, then the English again, the second time with a dream to build a new nation.
    Men rode the Tallapoosa River almost three hundred miles from Georgia to Alabama. Then just above Tallassee, thirty miles upriver, they built a dam in Montgomery. They came for the water’s strength—the waterfalls. They could power a mill with ’em, wet a town. They carved up Tallassee like cuts of meat. Sold her with the promise that she was theirs.
    The river splits her in two so the men named one side of her East, and the other West. But she still see herself as one. Be silly to cut a person in half and call ’em now two peoples, treat ’em different. But they did. On her east side, bluffs hold groves of magnolias and oak trees like a fistful of flowers, and plantation houses. The west holds the mills and the workers.
    Tallassee didn’t say nothin when they split her up. Of course she didn’t. She’s a piece of land. A mute spirit. Any voice she may have had went when the last Indian tribes left. But you can feel her fury. Angry at how she was tricked