When the Reckoning Comes

by LaTanya McQueen

Choosing to end themselves rather than go back, because at least death would be at their own hand, and there was freedom in that choice, and they would be free.

She felt shame for participating, for coming and being complicit. She felt shame for the circumstances that had led to a place like this existing. Shame for the realization that even after all these years of progress, this was where we’d come, to this corrupted version of the past we all thought we’d left behind.

Despite whatever the original intentions, the echoes of slavery were difficult to ignore. A new system had been created, one where the poor people in the town, faced with no other option, took jobs at the Woodsman because any job was better than nothing. It had not been lost on her that most of these jobs were service ones, and most of the people who’d taken them were black. And the visitors were mostly white; it was all haunting in its history.

“You’re telling me the ghosts are retaliating.” “Yes, that’s exactly it. Slowly, but surely, they’ve been waiting for their revenge.