by Mystery Post, finalist of the African Diaspora Award 2024
The river brought the girl’s body to Nina bright and early that morning. It wasn’t the first it’d carried into her path. Nor was it the first she’d haul, heavy and bloated, out of the shallows and onto shore, turning it over so its fish-chewed sockets could gape at the Missouri sky. In her long years of mudlarking the Mississippi river shoreline and shallows, Nina Davis had seen it all. Yellow bones eroding out of the soil on the bank. Stripped naked figures without heads or hands. The freshly dead, calm-faced, looking almost as if they’d fallen asleep and let the current carry them away. She knew right away this one was different.
Judging by the slender form, stiff with rigor mortis, and waterlogged as she was, Nina could tell the dead girl had been young and probably pretty—once. Young and attractive and dressed for dancing.
Her dress was trendy, all lace and satin, with fringe and beading clicking together with each lap of the river’s tongue, glittering in the wet light of dawn. That was how Nina had spotted her. On her way to the usual spot, Nina stopped to slip into her waders, seeing the gleam of the dress in the water before she saw the body attached to it. The corpse floated face down, red hair fanned from her head like algae blooming against the gray-brown water. Not the flotsam Nina had been looking for, but the river liked its surprises every now and again.
Suicides and murdered drifters were the most common find and were usually, if not always, men. Not that finding women was rare in and of itself. Murderous menfolk weren’t too picky about where they dumped the bodies of their nagging wives, troublesome mistresses, or rebellious sisters or daughters. No, it was the pale skin on this one that set her apart.
White menfolk killed their women just as much, if not more, than black and brown ones, but those bodies rarely wound up here—in the bend closest to the colored part of town. This body was trouble, a trouble Nina felt deeply tempted to let float on by as the limp figure bobbed in the current.
Nina’s family lived on the banks of the Mississippi River on the colored side of New Madrid, Missouri, since before the end of the Civil War. They’d been cotton farmers, once by force, then by choice. Next, they were fishermen, then domestics in the big houses on the white side of town. Her aunt still worked in those big houses, watching after the children and doing laundry.
It was a decent enough living for a colored woman in 1920s Missouri, but Nina never had the temperament for domestic work. The river had called to her young, a magic to it that she could not explain but could taste, could feel, rushing in her blood. A magic that did not sit still.
Called to the water, Nina took first to fishing as her daddy before her. But the needs of the river had changed since her daddy’s time, and so Nina’s purpose changed as well. The decades of settlement, the Civil War and before that, the countless other conflicts, migrations, and moments of historical collidings buried an untold amount of scrap and refuse in the Mississippi silt. The river preferred not to hang onto trash, but Nina found that some of it could fetch a fair price at the scrap yards if nowhere else. Mudlarking was a hard but honest living. On good days, it could even be lucrative. Not to mention it gave her an excuse to be near the water.
Magic was still okay for folks on the fringes, for poor Black fisherman’s daughters with Mississippi River in their veins, folks who knew how to keep a secret. But society at large deemed such old power a thing of the past. And while no one hung witches anymore, no one wanted them around either. A mudlarker, though, could work the banks and shallows of the river in search of what amounted to buried treasure or, at least, other people’s buried trash.
This and the surrounding half mile were Nina’s turf. Everyone on the colored side of town knew her spot. The other mudlarks respected it and her; left both alone. Whatever she found along this half mile was hers to sell, and any body that turned up was hers to deal with or ignore.
If left, the dead girl would float downriver. Nina could walk away. Maybe go to the south bank instead, pick up digging in the spot she’d started last week. She likely wouldn’t find any worthwhile scrap, but she’d avoid the trouble a dead white girl’s body could bring her live brown one.
But Nina was old enough to know ignoring the body wouldn’t do her any good. Her family had magic and the river and trouble in their blood, and not one drop of hers thought the dead girl floated into her life by chance alone. Nothing, as her aunt would say, happened to their family without reason, especially near the river.
The river put this dead white girl in her path, and now she had to deal with it. Besides, such a fine dress as that had to have cost good money. There had to be someone wondering where it was, where she was; someone offering a handsome reward for information, even. Decided, Nina set about pulling the corpse ashore.
She probed first with her pole hook, knocking away the white river crawfish clinging to the dead girl’s collarbone. Then, she hooked her under one arm and dragged her close. When she was near enough to grab, Nina inched into the water until it crested her ankles and took hold of the girl’s stiffened limbs, pulling her carefully over the rocks onto the bank.
The corpse was heavy, but no more so than any net full of crawdads or lost anchor dredged up for scrap, and that was more the water weight than anything. Soaking wet, the dead girl weighed little more than a hundred stones. Dry, she probably weighed less. The body sank into the red mud parallel to the water, beginning to crack and dry in the rising sun.
It wasn’t until Nina turned her to face the sky that she spotted the bruises. A ring of them draped her neck with a matching black-and-blue bracelet on each wrist, another blossomed high on her pale left cheekbone.
Someone had taken hands to her before she died, though. Nina couldn’t say for sure whether she went into the water unwillingly or whether she had all the reason she needed to drown. What she could say was the dead girl had no purse or clutch of any kind. She’d lost her dancing shoes. Mud coated the bottom of her dainty white socks. Nina even checked her collar, hoping for a maker’s stitch or a name written by a concerned mother, but there was nothing—just loose twigs and leaves and that all-too-familiar smell.
The girl hadn’t been in the water long. If Nina had to guess, she’d say not more than a day. Just long enough to bloat in the arms and legs. Just long enough that the stench of death on her skin was sweet and slick instead of sticky and thick. She was lucky. Most floaters came out of the water black, rank, and stretched beyond human.
If Nina could find her people, the girl would still look herself enough for an open casket. If Nina could find them, that was, and if they cared to have her back. There was only one way to know for sure. Straightening, Nina glanced around, making sure she was alone on this stretch of muddy bankside.
This was the middle of her territory, with no other mudlarker around for miles. She was alone with a corpse, free to do what was needed, unpleasant as it was. Setting her pole hook to one side, Nina prepared for the ritual.
Neither Nina nor her aunt was sure which end of their muddied ancestry passed this strange power down. Nina’s mother had had it, and her mother before her, and so on and so on. A gift of blood, an heirloom. It’s Nina’s now, along with any trouble that came with it. It wasn’t a trouble she invited often. Most of the dead she found before were people who knew the river, lived their lives by its ebbs and flows, whose spirits already knew how to follow the current wherever it needed to take them.
Beyond that, Nina rarely saw a need to advertise the skill or paint a target on her back, but this was one of those rare occasions where asking the dead was safer than asking the living. Sure, she could report the body to the police or ask questions around town if there was any word of a missing white girl. But both options were as likely to get her a beating and a night in a cell as they were to get the girl home. Nina had no wish to go hungry or to become some wealthy family’s scapegoat.
She’d do her best to give the girl’s spirit a chance for rest, but as far as Nina was concerned, her best had nothing to do with sacrificing her safety or livelihood. A bit of blood, though, that she could spare.
Nina carefully arranged the corpse’s arms, crossing them over her chest, a hand to each shoulder. She smoothed the tangled red hair back from the girl’s pale, dead face and placed a flat river stone over each empty eye socket. Only then did Nina take off her waders and step one of her own bare feet into the cool, still shallows, keeping the other firmly planted in the wet, red mud on the bank.
Standing there, at the dead girl’s feet, facing downriver, the sun warm against her root brown skin, Nina could feel the pull of the water on her right heel and the throb of it moving through the earth in her left, the river’s lifeblood pounding, rushing past and into and through her. Earth squelched between Nina’s left toes. The scales of a largemouth bass, drawn by the body’s tempting rot, flashed as it startled away from her.
The Mississippi was alive and well, as it had been since before Nina’s great-grandfather had been brought across the sea in chains, when her great-grandmother’s Chickasaw ancestors fished the river’s depths, when its name had been something else, something older.
The power of that history built on Nina’s tongue, a taste like wet iron filling her mouth as she dipped her fingertips into the water, then the mud. She dabbed her cheeks with the makeshift paint before wiping her hands on her trousers and tightening the kerchief tied around her thickly coiled hair.
As a last step, Nina unsheathed her fishing knife and sliced the pad of her left thumb in the same spot she always did, the white star of a scar marking the point where the knife always cut deepest. She squeezed, and a thick drop of blood welled up out of the wound. Nina let it fall into the red mud next to her left foot; she smeared the next drop on each of the two stones over the girl’s eyes and finally fed the third to the rushing river at her right.
There’d been words for this ritual once, incantations spoken in an old language her tongue would never taste, but that part of her inheritance was long lost. The blood, the stone, the water, and the earth were all she had left.
Still, it had never felt quite right to say nothing and just expect the magic to work. Felt dangerous even to let that kind of power loose without something to focus it. So, Nina had taken to addressing the river directly, even if it was only in plain, ugly English.
“You put this one in my path for a reason,” Nina said, the burr of her voice soft against the backdrop of the burbling water. “Your reasons are your own, as my will is mine. If it’s peace you seek, I’ll do my best to put her to rest. But I can’t do that without answers.” The air seemed to still as she spoke, a sudden, inexplicable quiet building. Even the bugs in the trees, the wind, were silent. The river was listening. Nina took a deep breath. “Your blood is mine and mine I give free. Return her soul for answers three.”
Nothing happened for a moment. Nina took it as the river thinking, considering her words or perhaps deciphering them. It was hard to tell.
Then the current surged around her left ankle, a chill lick like the brush of a catfish’s mouth, the shock of it sending gooseflesh down her arms and the back of her neck. Nina had a sudden sense that the shallows where she half stood had suddenly deepened, like if she stepped her left foot off land, she’d vanish into the depths without a whisper.
The current lashed the shore and jostled the dead girl’s limbs, curving her limp spine as it pushed against her. The first shiver could’ve been the water or a trick of the light: a shadow passing over the sun, a breeze stirring the branches overhead, tired eyes making out something rested ones would know wasn’t real. But the second shiver, the head-to-toe tremble as the dead girl stirred, twitched, uncrossed her folded arms—that was no trick.
Nina watched warily as the body jerked like a marionette untangling its strings before gaining confidence in its own limbs. In moments, the dead girl was sitting upright, river stones over her eyes falling away as she pulled in a ragged, wet breath through water-clogged lungs and coughed, hands fluttering up toward her chest as she struggled to pull in air with organs not fit to pump it.
“What…” The dead girl’s first word was rough and gurgled, a choked-up bit of river weed falling from her lips. Even Nina couldn’t help but wince at the sound, but the girl persevered. “What happened?”
“You died,” Nina said flatly, knowing there wasn’t time to waste softening the blow.
The dead girl lifted her head, examining Nina sightlessly. For a moment, the corpse’s features blurred in the haze rising in the humid air, and Nina saw a flicker of her face as it must’ve looked in life: fiery green eyes and full lips, high cheekbones and soft ripples of red hair. Then the image was gone, another trick of the light.
“I… fell,” the corpse said after a moment of collecting her thoughts. Her voice was clearer now, an accent to it foreign to Nina. Irish maybe? “No… he pushed me.”
“Who pushed you?”
The girl took another shuddering, unnecessary breath. “Daniel Morgan.”
Nina couldn’t help rocking back on her heels at the name. The Morgans were one of the richest, most powerful families in Missouri. They kept a big, fancy summer house in New Madrid, where her aunt worked cleaning sometimes. Daniel was the youngest son, the baby of the family.
Nina had to bite her tongue to keep from asking again, just to be sure. There wasn’t no purpose wasting a question, hoping for a better answer than what she’d already been given. Not when she only had two left. Not noticing Nina’s reaction or not caring, the dead girl continued.
“We drove out to the bridge,” she said. “To look at the sky. He kissed me sweet, like always. Then he had his hands round my neck. I scratched him and he grabbed my wrists. We fought and he let me go and I ran. I lost my shoe, and he came running up behind… and… he pushed me. Into the water. Couldn’t swim. I never learned. Couldn’t breathe. It was dark and cold and there was no up or down.”
“He killed you.” It wasn’t a question, just a statement of fact, but the girl nodded, the movement jerky and strange. There was something wrong with her neck.
Nina could’ve asked why. But why ask when she could guess?
Maybe the girl was someone he’d kept on the side, and he’d found someone else, or his family had found out about her and wanted it cleaned up before the news got out, or maybe she’d angered him somehow and the rage had bubbled over. Or maybe he hadn’t needed a reason at all. It didn’t matter, not really.
Nothing could justify what he’d done, but being rich and white and a man with power was usually enough for the world to forgive any sin. Knowing the why wouldn’t help Nina or the girl any. Not unless there was a way to prove it, or the girl had friends or family powerful enough to make him pay for it.
“You got family?” Nina kept her voice steady. She could hear the pain and fear in the girl’s voice, but she had to stay focused on the task at hand. Had to watch how she phrased things. The magic winding around them both was tangible but fragile, slippery. Nina had to fight to keep hold of it, as if she were dragging a net against the river’s flood current. She was already sweating with the effort.
“No.” The girl shook her head. “Some cousins back in Ireland, but my parents have been dead for years. I was staying with a friend in Jacksonville, but she won’t want me back. There’s no money to send me home for burial, and all I did was cause her trouble.” A hesitation. “She warned me about Daniel. I didn’t listen.”
“Friends forget the past a lot more easily when there’s no future,” Nina said. “I can let her know you’re gone, at least. See if she can get you buried up Jacksonville way.”
Even as she said the words, Nina cringed, thinking of the difficulty of getting a body all the way to Jacksonville, the questions the friend would ask, the danger still presented by the Morgan family if they were to find out their dead girl had been found and had been talking to the living.
“No,” the girl repeated. “I don’t want to drag her into my mess. But you… you can help me.”
Nina’s spine stiffened, her shoulders drawing back. “I’ve given all the help I can,” she said. “It’s time for you to rest now. If you don’t have a home or kin to miss you, I can bury you here. It’ll be peaceful, it’ll be—”
“It’ll be you covering up Daniel’s crime for him.” The girl’s sightless sockets were now locked on Nina’s eyes, a flicker of something strange glimmering in their darkness. “He doesn’t deserve your help more than I do. He can’t get away with what he did to me.”
“I’m not in the business of solving crimes or dishing out revenge,” Nina said. “If you want to waste your afterlife haunting him, go ahead. But I can’t help you with it.”
“Yes, you can,” the girl insisted, the flicker growing brighter, her body straightening and lurching as she got to her feet. “You have to. Please.”
“I don’t, and I can’t.” Nina stood her ground even as the corpse lurched toward her. Though a few hands taller than Nina, the girl was whip-thin, as if a stiff breeze might carry her away. “Think, girl. If he murdered you, I don’t imagine your sweetheart would have any issue doing the same to me. And then there wouldn’t be anyone left to pull my spirit out of the drink afterwards. Ain’t no kin of mine left with the gift but me. There’d be no one to trouble him at all.”
“Why pull me out of the water if not to help me?” The girl trembled as another chill breeze tossed the leaves of the trees overhead. “Or were you only hoping to get something out of it? If I was some rich debutante with family money, would you help me then?”
“I pulled you out ‘cause the river wanted me to.” Nina crossed her arms. “‘Cause the water don’t know you and didn’t know how to claim you. I offered to get you back to your people. Asking any more of me is your greed, not mine.”
But Nina felt greedy. She wouldn’t say so, not aloud, but yes, greed was why she was saying no. Greed for life, greed for peace. But so what? So, what if she had pulled the dead body out of the water in want of greed? So, what if she’d hoped that fine dress would lead to a fine reward? In this life, you had to take what you could, survive however you could. It wasn’t fair, not for either of them, but that was the world. Nina was too greedy to risk her neck for someone already dead and gone, and the dead girl had no right to judge her for it.
“I’m sorry for your troubles, but they aren’t mine. I won’t pay for them.”
Unable to argue with Nina’s point, the girl turned away, gazing at the trees and bankside around them, her shoulders curving downward. “I grew up next to a river back home,” she said after a moment. “It was beautiful there, too. And hard and hungry. And poor. I left chasing something better. Now, no one will ever know what happened to me. And Daniel, he’ll just get to keep on living, like my life was nothing.”
Nina’s expression softened. “He’ll get his in time,” she said. “I know it may not seem like it now, but he will. Nothing God likes to punish more than pride, and that boy and his family have more than their fair share of sins to spare beyond that.”
“That’s not enough.”
Nina shrugged. “It’s all you have.”
Breathing out a final, ragged sigh, the girl nodded. The motion was still jerky, and the grace and fire she’d found moments ago were already fading, the magic winding down. One more question and her soul would be gone, though either way, Nina didn’t think she’d be able to hold the magic for much longer than a few more minutes. She could already feel the strain—a soreness in her legs, a tightness in her chest, a burning in her arms. Soon as she let go, the river would whisk the girl’s soul away again.
Folding carefully back to the ground, movement heavy and slow, the girl lay on her back, fingers brushing over the fine beading of her dress before she crossed her arms, shoulder to shoulder again. As she did, Nina once again saw a flicker of some strange light deep in her sockets.
“He’s done this before, you know?”
Nina flinched, toes gripping the earth as her feet slid in the silt. She’d been about to ask her last question, about to get the girl’s name and then send her spirit back to the river, but the words died in her throat, another question jumping to her lips instead. “Done what before?”
“There was a girl before me, a maid from his father’s house. He told me about her once. Told me she drowned.” Her voice grew softer. “There was a girl before me. There’ll be another one soon.”
Then she was gone. Nina felt the magic break. The stillness in the air shattered like thin ice. The sound and the heat of the coming day rushed back in all at once, hitting Nina like a punch in the gut. She sat down hard in the wet mud, suddenly breathless, gasping like a fish left to flounder on the rocky shore. The magic had taken its dues and then some.
Nina felt drained and tired and hot and sore. Like she’d been working a full shift at the docks. Empty, like she hadn’t slept or eaten in days. Almost as empty as the corpse still lying on the bank in front of her. Still nameless. Hollow sockets still gaping skyward.
She should bury her, Nina knew. Before the bugs came and the smell got worse, and the rotting started. If she wanted to keep her greedy peace, if she didn’t want word getting back to the Morgans about a dead White girl washing up on the colored side of town, Nina should bury her. But all she could think of was the dead girl’s last words: There was a girl before, there’ll be another soon.
Nina remembered hearing about the death of a maid who’d worked in the Morgans’ house in New Madrid. A pretty, young, black girl who’d hit her head on the dock behind the house and drowned in the river not two months after her sixteenth birthday. Her momma and daddy went to Nina’s aunt’s church.
When the praying hadn’t brought them peace, they asked Nina to summon their daughter’s soul, but the river didn’t hang onto spirits that long. Especially not the ones it knew. There’d been no calling her back at that point. No goodbyes, no answers. Just the pain of not knowing what you didn’t know.
It should’ve made Nina feel some type of way that she cared more knowing Daniel Morgan had murdered more than just the one poor, pretty White girl, that he’d murdered a colored one too. It certainly made her a bad Christian, but to be fair, Nina had never claimed to be a good one. She had felt for the nameless dead White girl sharing her riverbank. She’d just felt for her own safety more. Against one death, her life had felt more important. But against two, soon to be three? That was a harder sum.
“Shit.” Dipping her cupped hands into the Mississippi, Nina splashed water onto her face, cooling herself down and catching her breath. She could still walk away. She could bury the body and the trouble with it. Move on with her day, on with her life, leave the bones for the mudlarker after her to uncover and wonder over. But the river had put this in her path for a reason. And burying trouble was no better than trying to run from it.
When she felt stronger, Nina stood up and walked around the corpse, so she was standing at the girl’s head rather than at her feet. Remembering the spark of something bright and awful and righteous in the dead girl’s eye sockets, Nina remembered the Black girl’s parents. How little comfort she’d been able to offer them. How little justice. And there came her anger. Stronger than fear, stronger than greed, bursting its banks, overwhelming good sense.
Who was she to dish out revenge? Who was she to make a White man pay? Well, who was Daniel Morgan to take what he wanted with no thought to cost? Nina kneeled, washing the dead girl’s hair before picking up the blood-stained river stones that had fallen and tossing them into the center of the river. This time Nina would leave the corpse’s eye sockets open. She got up, stretching her aching back, wiping sweat from her brow. She had work to do.
This time, Nina stepped her left foot into the shallows and planted her right in the cracked Mississippi mud. The wet iron taste of the river filled her mouth again, stronger than before. She dipped her fingers into the water and the silt, and dabbed her forehead and upper lip, and scraped her hands through her hair, pulling it down loose around her shoulders.
Unsheathing her knife again, Nina sliced the pad of her opposite thumb, the one on her right hand. This magic would require more than a few drops of blood, though. Daniel Morgan had already spilled more than that. Blood for blood. That was always the first and highest price.
Flicking her knife clean, Nina pricked the tops of all her fingers next, right and left, and then cut across each palm. The blood welled, the pain snaking through her body like a current. Nina crouched down, pressing one bleeding hand into the mud by her right foot and plunging the palm of the other into the water at her left before lifting both and gripping either side of the corpse’s face with wet, muddied, bloodied palms.
“One more time, Ole Miss,” Nina said. “I offered peace, now I offer blood. Give me your fury and your flood.”
The river darkened, a harsh wind whipped the trees, the blood from Nina’s hands pooled in the hard angles of the dead girl’s face, and once again, the body stirred, coming back to life with a deep gasp. A hard, cold, dark red light flickered to life in the otherwise empty sockets and fixed on Nina’s face.
“Welcome back,” Nina said. “What do you say we pay a little visit to Daniel Morgan?”
Shuddering, limbs twitching, the dead girl smiled.
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