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over the years—slow and steady. If it was done to her quick, she might have noticed.
    These settlers weren’t forceful, at first. They were charming-like. Whispering sweetness in her ear as they passed through. Coming back more and more regular. Mapping things. Told her they were drawing pretty pictures of her. It’s how they do. Capture things on paper. Would catch the spirit, if they could. Would capture music, if they could. But some things you just got to be there to see. It’s why I thank God for making the spirit like running water. Even captured water will steam away. It’s what the Creek Indians believed Tallassee was—a spirit, uncatchable ’til she was caught.
    Maps is how they did it. They separated East and West Tallassee on their papers, marking squiggly lines that meant “Tallapoosa River.” And on the paper, two waterfalls—the power that would turn the water wheel and give life to the mill. A mill that first made cotton cloth. Amill that would last make bullets. Even the gray bedrock that the river tumbled over was drawn in, unmoving. Proof you can’t capture everything. ’Cause in real life, the waterfalls splash on the green moss blanketing rocks and spray red berries stuck on leaning branches. But that didn’t matter on paper. And what don’t matter, don’t survive. Nothing survives its usefulness to white folk.
    The Creek Indians were driven away (they got Africans and poor whites instead) and the waterfalls were made mules, and the river’s rocks were used to build stone buildings. Only gravel remained in the water, mostly unbothered. That, and the animals they couldn’t catch.
    â€œThe past always got a way of coming back,” Charles told Josey, pointing at the beads in her hand. “And this land got a memory.” It’s why Charles thought the bridges went down over the Tallapoosa River regular.
    Tallassee would always start that happening the same way. She’d send the morning gusts first, high above the ground, rushing it through the treetops that covered the whole five-mile forest like a God-made roof. Even when heavy rains came, hardly a drop got through.
    The wind would rush like water above the town, uncatchable, bending trees south. The limbs would lean, layering a thick cover of roof over the world of folks and things underneath, not disturbed.
    I once watched a dried orange leaf hang from a branch by a single thread of shimmery web. While it stormed above, the leaf played in the calm space below, spinning, unaware of the darkening skies, nudged only into rocking by a bluebird seeking shelter. By the noon hour, it had been plucked away, stolen like everything else not rooted in the earth, then shoved into the wind-made tunnel that burrowed a pocket through Tallassee.
    â€œThis is a day of reckoning,” a white man said, standing on the wet cliff above another fallen bridge. Another said, “You can’t contain this landscape. Can’t beat her back. These vines are relentless growing in.” But people must beat it back, and they do to live here. Those who been here long enough call Tallassee the green-skirted gypsy of the South.Full of illusions. She’d set clouds on her hilltops like floating pearls. Even on days when no weather would call for ’em and no storms were on their way, she’d put just one cloud above a cluster of three or four oaks, making it look like the nesting jaybirds were smoking.
    Good weather.
    â€œFertile and stable ground,” visitors would say, while a torrent simmered beneath her trick of “perfect place to make a life and start a family.” The Creek Indians knew her better. A thousand years they respected her, the way Charles and Josey do.
    Those men shouldn’t have cut her up. Shouldn’t have tried to own her. Define her. Not with their caught pictures, their maps. The Creek Indians wouldn’t do it until they were forced to. The Creek