Rebecca Ore: Scarey Rose in Deep History

Illustration by Laurie Harden

“History should not be ancestor worship,” Sarey Rose told them as she brought in the last of the time-viewer components and began to calculate how to form the microgates big enough for past light. Her hair was bound up for work. Whether or not she approved of the target, she was working.

“We need to see our ancestors as people,” Peter said. Wearing his family reunion T-shirt, he sat down in one of the reproduction chairs in the plantation house. Mulatto wasn’t a word that was used much these days, but Peter was significantly mulatto. His great-grandfather had owned his great-grandmother. The modern day family reunions included both sets of kin. So liberal, Sarey Rose thought, and such a neat way to avoid poor white trash. Now, he and his white half-kin had finagled use of the time-viewer to get back to the primal event. “After all, we’re all from here. And we’re pretty typical.”

“Who is this us ?” Sarey Rose said. “I’m one of those people whose promised land was always the future. When the old regime fell, we rose like rockets. Typical wasn’t planters and their children.”

“But you are in on this project.”

“I would have rather taken a look at Tom Paine or Heisenberg.”

Sarey Rose thought that using the time-viewer for Deep River wasted both her time and the money invested in the equipment. But the engineering department needed the history department to get funding, so here it was. Sarey thought that the history department, along with all other liberal arts departments, provided a refuge for upper-class twits who couldn’t master calculus and feared computers.

Peter said, “The only way we can really escape the past is to understand it.”

Martha, a brown-haired woman who always wore either suits or paint-stained jeans, came in and scowled. Probably she hated the two of them talking about “her” project when she wasn’t around. Martha also seemed surprised each time she saw Sarey Rose, the way a cat periodically seems surprised to realize that its human companion is a very large animal. Sarey Rose knew that if she’d been homely, in glasses, Martha would have been happier. Her image of Sarey didn’t fit the unruly reality. Scary Rose, the boys in high school used to call her, the girl who should have left the technology to them. Only ugly girls needed high-tech skills to compensate, the son of the high school science teacher told her. Two weeks later, Sarey blew up the toilets in the teachers’ bathroom. The principal couldn’t believe that a girl did it. Sarey’s classmates knew better.

About three decades earlier, Martha’s father finished his Ph.D. in classics on the last money from plantation acreage and never came back. Martha said, “Rose, are we ready?”

“Tractor beams holding the past, ready to beam up March 12, 1853, Captain.”

“Rose, I know that tractor beams are physically impossible.”

“Last week, then, were you being awful polite about my techno-babble?” But now Martha pretended she’d never fallen for the gobbledygook explanation. Sarey thought she’d omit asking Martha if she’d known better when she’d nodded sagely last week. No point in goading a High Wasp Queen. Oh, plenty of point, but after a while, the glaze of politeness and double-speak made a woman feel like she was walking in molasses.

Peter said, “We’re going to focus on the main bedroom, my great-grandmother’s cabin, and the front parlor. We all know what went on.”

Sarey Rose said, “I doubt it was all as neat as the family legends say. I’d like another two sites.”

Martha said, “You’re not an historian.”

“My people have their traditions, too.”

Peter said, “I thought you didn’t care about your own past?”

“I don’t care, personally, but if you are trying to get a picture of this time, we need other sites besides two plantation rooms and a slave cabin. I know enough history to know that! ”

Peter said, “Wouldn’t it be okay to start with these, then find two more sites based on what we hear from our first three sites?”

Martha looked like she wanted to argue, but her white liberalness forced her to nod to her second-half-cousin-several-times-removed. Sarey wondered if Peter’s great-grandmother got fucked by her owner because she was equally too diplomatic.

Individual glass fibers penetrated to three spaces in March 12, 1853. Screen one in the parlor cleared, showing a black woman dusting the mantel with a feather duster. On screen two, Sarey saw the newer version of one of the big beds in the present-day restored plantation house. Then the slave hut appeared. It looked rather good for a slave hut, containing a wooden dresser with a tortoise shell brush and a necklace of turquoise beads on it. Martha said, “He gave her my great-grandmother’s beads, but we must have gotten them back.”

Peter didn’t speak, just moved closer to the screen, looking at the cabin’s wood floor, two silk dresses, one purple, the other bright yellow, hanging from wall pegs, the bedstead with a feather bed and woven rope mattress support. “Bed cords! We’d always heard she tried to put him off. That he forced her.”

Sarey Rose sighed. “Now, we need a fourth site.”

“Do you have the capacity?” Martha asked.

“We can go in next door for a quick look around, then re-site to one of the main targets. Another slave cabin would give us a comparison.”

“If you can do it quickly,” Martha said.

Sarey Rose pulled from the master bedroom into another slave cabin. The floor there was dirt, the bed a lumpy mattress like a giant pillow on a rough wicker frame, rather like Iroquois beds.

Peter said, “Shit! She sure did have it better.”

Sarey Rose said, “Maybe he was bribing her not to poison him in his sleep?” She looked back at Peter’s ancestral cabin.

Martha said again, “She’s got my great-grandmother’s beads.”

Sarey Rose leaned back and said, “Do you want to know all the way, or should I find us other places that would be less emotionally stressful to view?” Knowing the high WASPs and their kin as she did, Sarey figured that saying that would lock them here. She hoped their eyeballs would blister. In a metaphorical way.

On the parlor screen, the woman dusting looked up as a white woman in her forties came into the room. The picture was somewhat grainy. Sarey Rose wanted to reach in and touch the feathers, the ashes, the crocheted bedcover—linen, cotton? Inquiring primate fingers wanted to know.

“What would it look like without the computer enhancement?” Martha asked.

Sarey said, “We have a tiny fan of optic fibers that moves. We’re copying the raw data stream, but the computer is enhancing the screens. If we saw a zebra, we might get a horse, but then we never see completely what’s out there, anyway. The brain always interprets. The resolution should pick up as the program picks up new data.” She put the master bedroom back on the third screen.

In 1853, the white woman spoke to the black woman. The computer threw up a small window in clearer pixels of Martha’s great-great-grand-mother.

“Could she be anyone else?” Martha asked.

“She’s acting like she owns the other woman,” Sarey Rose said. She keyed the computer to provisionally accept the earlier scan of a photo of the white woman. The image sharpened.

Then the black woman became clearer.

“What happened?” Martha asked.

“The machine learned how to see them,” Sarey said.