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RESPONSE: Witness!
CALL: Yes. Witness. The river remembers the Spaniard lusting for gold, proclaiming himself a god to those who came first. He cut off their hands and infected them with the pox of violence. The river heard their cries. It does not forget. Beware false gods, the river sang from its depths, and waited. That lustful man died of fever, and his men slipped his body into its watery shroud. The river has the last laugh. Hear the truth of the river!
RESPONSE: Hear the truth of the river!
CALL: Two men in a canoe thought they’d discovered this river. Huh. They didn’t discover nothing. The river is and has been.
RESPONSE: The river is a witness.
CALL: The missionaries and traders. The pioneers and trappers. The politicians and myth-makers. The settlers staking their claims through the hearts of those who honored this land first.
RESPONSE: The river is a witness.
CALL: The army builds its levees, claims victory over the river, but they will never control the great spirit of the waters. Nothing belongs to you, it whispers. The river changes course, digs in. It shapes the land the whole time. The river is not a line but a circle. The river is change, and change cannot be stopped. Change, it sings. Change or be lost.
RESPONSE: The river is a witness.
CALL: The river is a watery sword. It cuts the nation in two. But the nation is already divided. It must be healed. We must heal. Change or drown. Unify.
RESPONSE: Wade in the water.
Viola stopped. Tears sprang to her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
CALL: The ghosts of the river are awake and angry. They gnaw dirt from their man-made graves. They vomit it up, expose the bones. Too much history to swallow. The river roars with pain, with release. It asserts itself: No more. I will rise up, I will rise up, I will rise up. Hear the word of the river.
RESPONSE: Rise up. Rise up. Rise up. Rise up.
“Rise up,” Viola intoned. “Rise up. Rise up.”
In her clapboard church tomb with the stench of rotting daisies in her nostrils, Adelaide Proctor’s mind stops wandering its labyrinthine halls for just a moment. “Rise up,” she whispers.
Aboard Jake Marlowe’s silver dirigible high in the clouds, Miriam Lubovitch stirs, feeling the itch under the iron shackles at her wrists. “Podnimat’sya,” she says softly, again and again, a phrase carried over rough seas from the old country, a prayer, a battle cry.
Outside the jail where Sister Walker lies on her cot, the protestors shout for justice. “Rise up,” Margaret says into the darkness of her cell.
“Quiet in there,” a guard barks.
In the cell next door, a woman picks up the call: “Rise up. Rise up.”
The King of Crows walks among the graveyards where the dead do not rest easily. “Rise up,” he purrs. “Rise up and join me.”
The ground shakes as the dead obey.
The river rolls on, listening, taking down the history, burbling up its warning as it goes. Not far from that great river, in a small-town church equidistant from a Temperance office and a secret moonshiner’s still, the pews are half-full with parishioners, arms raised, eyes closed, fingers stretching up, searching for a signal from an absent god. The ghosts wander inside, drawn by the light. They take their seats in the back row, waiting.
“Ride on, King Jesus!” the preacher shouts to the rafters. “He is risen! Hallelujah!”
“Hell-elujah,” the ghosts whisper. Unseen, they move among the fervid faithful, touching galvanic hands to foreheads, pulling out life while the people fall to their knees and tremble with this new belief, the sudden, terrible knowledge of what awaits.
“Rise up,” the ghosts groan as the life flows through them and up into the broken sky.
A country road. Men swaddled in white call themselves knights, protectors of the empire. The ghosts of the Confederacy pass the torch, and the men set fire to the night.
On the reservations, the land cries like a refugee for the lost country. The land is choir; it sings a song of truth. In the company towns by the mines, the factories, the mills, the canneries. In the sharecropper shacks out from the plantations. In the small immigrant neighborhoods of the shining cities on the hill. In the watch factories w
here radium girls lick the ends of their brushes and glow like dying stars. Near the factories, the mills, the canneries, the river struggles for breath under the grime. The King of Crows touches staticky fingers to the struggling current. “Rise up.” From fouled waters crawl all manner of misshapen things: Four-eyed frogs with three legs, tumorous tadpoles. Birds, feathers heavy with oil, drown themselves in the shallows. Sickly fish swim past, seeing nothing.
In a dark alley dogs snap at each other over a single bone. They fall upon each other, tearing until both are too injured to eat it.
