I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction

by Kidada E. Williams

At some point in Eliza and the children’s journey, they might have realized they were being chased. The family picked up their pace. Unencumbered by young children and personal belongings, the white men threatened to overtake the family, until, around ten o’clock in the morning, the sky opened up with a storm. The family’s trackers slowed, perhaps pausing to take shelter. But Eliza and the children kept racing toward the river, where they crossed to Tompkinsville.1 Eliza fled because she knew she and her family were no longer secure where they lived. But for those who survived harrowing night-riding attacks, “safety,” even in a new location, was a relative concept. In the poem “Home,” Warsan Shire writes of displacement by violence; the narrator notes that geographically and socially established people do not abandon the comfort and safety of their homes and all of their property for no reason. “No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark” or “the barrel of a gun.”2 Frantic escapes may be triggered by paramilitary violence upending a community, or by being marked as undesirables who must be cast out or slaughtered. People do not leave home, Shire’s poem explains, “unless home chases you,” breathing in your ear that any place else is safer than where you thought you belonged.3