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never smiling at all—which seemed curious, even to the children), she sat under a tree at the back of the garden just as the sun was sinking slowly through a black cloud bank in the west, and told the children the intricate, chilling story of the old man whose hobby was catching and burying children up to their necks and then draping their heads—which stuck up in rows, like cabbages—with wriggly eels clipped in honey. Long before the culprit received his comeuppance, young Saxon had slumped dead to the ground of a heart attack. He was seven years old.
    Many, many years ago, on the banks of the Lalocac River, in deepest Africa, there lived a man blacker than the night, whose occupation was catching little white children — those who had lost at least one tooth to the snags of time — and planting them in his garden. He buried everything except their heads: These he left above ground because he liked to hear them wail and scream and call for their mothers, who, of course, did not know where they were and never came.
    He fed them honey and live eels still wriggling that slipped through their lips and down their throats while underneath their ears the eels’ tails still struggled and slid. At night the children’s heads were used as warming posts for the man’s pet snakes, all of them healthy and fat and cold as ice, and loving to flick a keen, quick tail into a snuffling, defenseless nose. ... The man used to laugh as he —
    This portion of Louvinie’s story was later discovered on a yellowed fragment of paper and was kept under glass in the Saxon library. It was in the childish handwriting of one of the older Saxon girls.
    Louvinie’s tongue was clipped out at the root. Choking on blood, she saw her tongue ground under the heel of Master Saxon. Mutely, she pleaded for it, because she knew the curse of her native land: Without one’s tongue in one’s mouth or in a special spot of one’s own choosing, the singer in one’s soul was lost forever to grunt and snort through eternity like a pig.
    Louvinie’s tongue was kicked toward her in a hail of sand. It was like a thick pink rose petal, bloody at the root. In her own cabin she smoked it until it was as soft and pliable as leather. On a certain day, when the sun turned briefly black, she buried it under a scrawny magnolia tree on the Saxon plantation.
    Even before her death forty years later the tree had outgrown all the others around it. Other slaves believed it possessed magic. They claimed the tree could talk, make music, was sacred to birds and possessed the power to obscure vision. Once in its branches, a hiding slave could not be seen.
    In Meridian’s second year at Saxon there was talk of cutting down the tree, and she had joined members of the Chamber Music Ensemble and their dotty Hungarian conductor when they chained themselves to its trunk. They had long ago dubbed The Sojourner “The Music Tree,” and would not stand to have it cut down, not even for a spanking new music building that a Northern philanthropist—unmindful that his buildings had already eaten up most of Saxon’s precious greenness—was eager to give. The tree was spared, but the platform and podium were dismantled, and the lower branches and steps—which had made access to the upper reaches of the tree so delightfully easy—were trimmed away. And why? Because students—believing the slaves of a hundred and fifty years ago—used the platform and who knows, even the podium, as places to make love. Meridian had made something approaching love there herself. And it was true, she had not been seen.
    So many tales and legends had grown up around The Sojourner that students of every persuasion had a choice of which to accept. There was only one Sojourner ceremony, however, that united all the students at Saxon—the rich and the poor, the very black-skinned (few though they were) with the very fair, the stupid and the bright—and that was the Commemoration of Fast Mary of the