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On a grey morning in March 1850, a colored slave named Liz Spocott dreamed of the future. And it was not pleasant.

She dreamed of Negroes driving horseless carriages on shiny rubber wheels with music booming throughout, and fat black children who smoked odd-smelling cigars and walked around with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes. She dreamed of Negro women appearing as flickering images in powerfully lighted boxes that could be seen in sitting rooms far distant, and colored men dressed in garish costumes like children, playing odd sporting games and bragging like drunkards --- every bit of pride, decency, and morality squeezed clean out of them.

Liz had this dream in captivity, just as the flickering light of her own life was disappearing, and when she awoke from it realized with a gasp that it was some kind of apparition and she had to find its true meaning in this world before she died. This brought her more grief than her condition at the time, which was not pleasant, in that she’d been lying for three weeks, badly wounded, imprisoned in an attic on Maryland’s eastern shore.

She had taken a musket ball to the head at Ewells Creek, just west of New Market. It was five a.m. when she was hit, running full stride on a brisk March morning behind three other slave women who had made a desperate dash for freedom after two days of keeping a hairsbreadth from two determined slave catchers who had chased them, ragged and exhausted, in a zigzag pattern through the foggy swamps and marshland that ran from Bishops Head Island up through Dor ches ter County. They were nearly caught twice, the last by inches, the four saved by a white farmer’s wife who warned them at the last minute that a party with horses, dogs, and rifles awaited them nearby. They had thanked the woman profusely and then, inexplicably, she demanded a dime. They could not produce one, and she screamed at them, the noise attracting the slave catchers, who charged the front of the house while the women leaped out the back windows and sprinted for Ewells Creek.

Liz never even heard the shot, just felt a rush of air around her face, then felt the cool waters of the creek surrounding her and working their way down her throat. She tried to rise, could not, and was hastily dragged to shallow water by the other women, who took one look at the blood gushing out near her temple and said, Good- bye, chile, you free now. They gently laid her head on the bank of the muddy creek and ran on, the sound of barking dogs and splashing feet echoing into the empty forest, the treetops of which she could just make out as the fog lifted its hand over the dripping swamp and the sun began its long journey over the Maryland sky.

Not two minutes later the first dog arrived.

He was a small white and brown mongrel who ran up howling, his tail stiff, and ran right past her, then glanced at her and skidded to a stop, as if he’d stumbled upon her by accident. If Liz weren’t shot and panicked, she would have remembered to laugh, but as it was, sitting in water up to her waist, she felt her face folding into the blank expression of nothingness she had spent the better part of her nineteen years shaping; that timeworn, empty Negro expression she had perfected over the years whereby everything, especially laughter, was halted and checked, double- checked for leaks, triple- checked for quality control, all haughtiness, arrogance, independence, sexuality excised, stamped out, and vanquished so that no human emotion could emerge. A closed face is how you survive, her uncle Hewitt told her. The heart can heal, but a closed face is a shield, he’d said. But he’d died badly too. Besides, what was the point? She was caught.

The hound approached and she felt her lips curl into a smile, her face folding into submission and thought bitterly: This is how I’m gonna die --- smiling and kowtowing to a damn dog.

The dog ruff- ruffed a couple of times, sniffed, and edged closer. She guessed he couldn’t be a Cuban hunting dog, the type the slave hunters favored. A Cuban hunting dog, she knew, would have already ripped her face off.

“C’mon boy, she said. C’mere. You hungry? You ain’t no hunting dog, is you?”

She reached into her pocket and produced a piece of wet bread, her last. The dog edged forward. Sitting in water up to her hips, she propped herself up and gently leaned towards him, her hand extended. She stroked him gently as he ate, then wrapped her fingers around his collar, ignoring the blinding pain in her face.

“You shy of water?” she asked gently.

He sniffed for more bread as she calmly stroked him and tenderly pulled him into the water until he was up to his chest. She tasted warm fluid in her mouth, realized it was blood, and spat it out, edging him deeper in. A surge of dizziness came and passed. With great effort, she slowly slid backwards into deeper water, easing him in, the sound of the busy current filling her ears as it reached her neck.

The dog was eager to follow at first, wagging his tail. When the water reached his throat he began to pull back; however, it was too late. She had him now. Holding his collar, she desperately tried to yank his head into the water to drown him, but the dog resisted and she felt her strength suddenly vanish.

Over his shoulder, through the dim fog and low overhanging trees of the nearby bog, she could see the horses now, two of them, thundering through the swamp, the riders ducking through the low overhanging juniper and black gum trees, their coats flying outward, horses splashing forward. She heard a man shout.

The dog, hearing the shouting of his master, seemed to remember he was a hunter of humans and attempted a clumsy, snarling lunge at her, his teeth bared. With her last ounce of strength, she shoved his head into the water, drowning him, then pushed him away and let the current take him.

She clambered up the steep embankment on the other side and felt hooves slam into the muddy earth near her face. She looked over her shoulder and expected to see a white face twisted in fury. Instead she saw the calm, handsome face of a Negro boy of no more than sixteen, a gorgeous, beautiful chocolate face of calm and resolve.

“Who are you?” she asked, stunned.

The beautiful Negro boy smiled, showing a row of sparkling white teeth.

“I’m Little George, he said. He raised the barrel of his rifle high, then lowered it towards her face. Merciful blackness followed.

They laid her in a corner of the attic and waited for her to die, but her body stubbornly refused. For days she dissolved into and out of consciousness, moaning, her nightmares filled with garish images of the future of the colored race --- long lines of girls dressed as boys in farmers’ clothing, young men standing before thousands delivering songs of rage that were neither sung nor played but rather preached over a metallic bang- bang that pounded out of tiny boxes. Meanwhile, as if responding to the litany of odd images, the swelling in her head increased, then changed color from red to brown to purple to an off orange. As the days dissolved into nights and melted into days again, her head and the musket ball seemed to come together in a kind of conspiracy, each trying to outwit the other: Her face swelled here. The musket ball moved there. The face bulged there. The musket ball moved here, neither capitulating, each doing a kind of death dance, with her soul as the anxious partner in waiting, until the musket ball quit the game, pushing its way out to the surface, where it bulged just above her left eye, a grotesque, grape- sized lump. One night, lying on her back, she reached up to her left temple and felt it, just beneath the skin, and dug her fingers into the gouging mound of pus and blood until the awful gurgling mass of flesh popped open and the ball landed on the floor with a sharp ping as she passed out.

She’d awakened to find herself vastly improved, deathly thirsty, and able to see clearly for the first time in weeks. The constant headaches had receded, and she noticed the overwhelming stench in the room. She took it to be a sign that she would live, for which she felt decidedly ambiguous.

The next time she woke she raised her head off the floor and looked about. She counted at least twelve souls in the room, all asleep, most dressed in rags. She was chained next to a thin, white-haired, old woman, a cocoa-colored soul with a deeply wrinkled face, who woke up coughing and hacking, then sang softly:

Way down yonder in the graveyard walk
Me and my Jesus going to meet and talk
On my knees when the light pass’d by
Thought my soul would rise and fly . . .

The words blew about like raindrops in the wind, floating into the attic’s rafters and beams and settling on Liz’s ears like balm. The old woman noticed Liz watching and stopped singing.

“Lord,” the woman said. “I’d give a smooth twenty dollars for a sip of that water there.”

She eyed a pot of rancid- looking water behind Liz’s head.

Liz, feeling dizzy, clenched her teeth, grimly propped herself up on her elbows, and reached for the grimy bowl of filthy water. With trembling hands, she held it to the old woman’s lips. The woman sipped gratefully, then reached over and laid a wrinkled hand across Liz’s chest.

“Feel that,” she said.

Liz reached up and felt it. Cold and clammy.

“I’m hurt inside,” the woman said. “ Ain’t seen a drop of my own water, though.”

“Where am I?” Liz asked.

“You in Joe’s Tavern. This is Patty Cannon’s house.”

“Who’s she?”

“She’s a trader of souls.”

“Who’s Little George?” Liz asked.

The old woman stared at the ceiling silently. Her sweaty face, almost waxen in the growing light, hardened, and Liz saw a grimace settle into her lips.

“I never lived --- God hears me speak it --- a sinning life,” the old lady said. “But if I ever get these chains off, I’ll send that nigger to his milk.”

“Be quiet,” someone hissed, “’fore you wake him downstairs.”

The woman turned to Liz, staring intently.

“You know the code?”

“What code?”

“We will rise at sunrise and rest at midnight. All that sort of thing.”

Liz looked blank.

“I reckon not,” the woman said. “You was moaning so much while you slept, I reckon the Devil was throwing dirt in your face.”

“I been dreaming,” Liz said.

“’Bout what?”

Liz hesitated. In a room full of trapped runaways, where an informant would give away another’s life for a piece of bread, there was no trust.

“You ain’t got to fret ’bout nobody here,” the woman said. Her hand lifted from Liz’s chest and scratched a line in the dust of the floor, drawing a line between them.

“What’s that?” Liz asked.

“When you want trust, scratch a crooked line in the dirt. Can’t no slave break that line and live to tell it.”

“But I ain’t a slave,” Liz said.

Around the room, she heard laughing.

“Me neither,” said a man lying in a corner.

More laughter and tittering.

“Pay them no mind,” the old woman said. “ I’ll tell you what: You tell me your dream, I’ll tell you the code.”

“What I need the code for?”

“You can’t go no place without it.”

“I ain’t no place now.”

“Suit yourself. You think you gonna write yourself a pass and frolic up the highway outta here? Life ain’t that simple, and the white man ain’t that stupid. ’Course you need the code. You here for a purpose. Little George done shot you and gived you medicine and washed you. You corn on the cob to him, chocolate and pretty as you is. Death’d be a relief to you, once he’s done. He’s a thirsty camel fly when it come to women. Every woman in here knows it,” she said.

She looked away a moment.

“Including myself,” she said softly. “Old as I is.”

She looked at Liz again.

“ I’d say you need the code more’n anybody here.”

“What is it, then?”

“It can’t be told. It got to be lived.”

“How so?”

“You got to speak low. And don’t mind the song, mind the singer of it. Especially the singer of the second part. Don’t nobody know that part yet.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means what it say. If you see wickedness and snares, you got to be a watchman to the good. You got to own to your part of wrongness. That’s some it.”

“Why you talking in circles?”

“Ain’t no circle, child. You wanna know the straight way outta here? I’m telling it! But first, tell me your dreams.”

“Why?”

“You tell me your dreams, I’ll tell you how to get out.”

Liz lay back and stared at the ceiling. It seemed a fair bargain.

“I dreamed of tomorrow,” Liz said, carefully choosing her words.

The room lay silent. Liz felt them listening. She saw no reason to hold back. She told the woman her dream: about black men in garish costumes playing sport games for more money than any white man could imagine; about Negro girls trading their black eyes in for blue ones; about men dressing as boys their entire lives; about long lines of Negroes marching as dogs charged and bit them; and colored children who ran from books like they were poison.

“And the children’s music, “Liz said. “It teaches murder.”

The woman listened silently. Then she stretched her arms as far as her chains would allow, raised her head off the floor, and spoke to the room.

“I knowed it was true,” she said. “I told y’all, didn’t I? She’s two- headed. She can tell tomorrow.”

Liz heard murmurs of assent.

It was nearly daylight now. Through the slivers of light that peeked through the slats of the leaky roof, Liz noticed in a darkened far corner of the room, two gigantic human feet, the largest feet she had ever seen. The immense toes spread apart like oversized grapes, each toe pointed towards the ceiling. The man connected to those feet, Liz thought with alarm, was a giant.

The woman stared at Liz.

“Tell me about yourself” the woman said.

Liz began to tell the woman about the web of relationships she’d left behind, the torrent of tears and abuse, the plotting and planning, the hardship of running through an unknown land to an unknown world, but the woman cut her off.

--- “Don’t tell me ’bout the cross every colored got to bear,” she said. “I want to know how you come to dreaming.”

“I don’t know. I got struck as a child and I fall asleep sometimes on no account.”

“Tell us another dream, then“

“I can’t think of none.”

“Sleep on it, then.”

“What about the code?” Liz asked.

“In due time. Sleep, child.”

“How can I sleep, knowing Little George might have at me now that I’m better?” Liz said.

“ Don’t you fret about him,” the old woman said. “Go back to sleep and wake up and tell me what you got.”

She turned to the others in the room and said, This two- headed girl’s gonna bust us out. Big Linus, is you ready?

From the darkened corner of the room, the enormous nostrils of a large nose barely discernible in the darkness could be seen as the huge head pivoted to one side, the face still unseen in the dark shadows of the attic’s rafters. Liz heard a deep, baritone voice rumble:

“I been ready,” the voice said. “I been ready.”

Two days passed. No dreams came. But, true to her word, the old woman, in fading health, told Liz different parts of the code.

“Chance is an instrument of God,” she said.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means God rules the world. And the coach wrench turns the wagon wheel.”

“What’s a coach wrench?”

“ Don’t think, child. Just remember. Scratch a line in the dirt to make a friend. Always a crooked line, ’cause evil travels in straight lines. Use double wedding rings when you marry. Tie the wedding knot five times. And remember, it’s not the song but the singer of it. You got to sing the second part twice --- if you know it. Don’t nobody know it yet, by the way. And find the blacksmith if you’re gonna marry. He’s doing marriages these days.”

“Who’s he?”

“Don’t matter who he is. It’s what he is.”

“And what’s that?”

“He’s part of the five points.”

“What’s the five points?”

“North, south, east, west, and free. That’s the fifth point.”

“How you get to that?”

“Gotta go through the first four --- to get to the five. Five knots. Five directions. If a knot’s missing, check the collar. It’ll tell you the direction the soul is missing from.”

“I’m more confused than ever,” Liz said.

“Hush up, dammit!” someone said frantically. “Now y’all woke him up.”

Liz heard the creaking of heavy feet climbing the stairs and turned on her side, waiting, trembling. A cone of silence enveloped the room. The trapdoor opened and Little George climbed up.

Liz turned to face the wall. A familiar inertia draped over her mind, covering her like a blanket, clamping over her more securely than the ankle chains that pressed against her flesh. She stared at a crack in the wooden floor beneath her nose, just where the wall met the roof. Between the wooden slats and the rafter, she could make out the head of a large, exposed straight pike, several inches long, that some long- forgotten carpenter had attached improperly, probably secure in the knowledge that no one would ever have their face close enough to the floor in that tiny, sweltering attic to notice it. She stared at the pike, blinking, not sure if, or even why, she was actually seeing it. She decided she was going mad, and guessed that it wasn’t gnawing hunger or physical pain that was driving her to insanity but rather the uncertainly of not knowing where her next round of suffering was going to come from. She laid her head against the floor, closed her eyes, and instantly fell asleep, dreaming of a story her uncle Hewitt told her long ago about a boy and his master.

Marse Goodsnake bought a slave boy home. He taught the boy all he knew. But the boy got smart and slipped off from Marse Goodsnake and found his ma again.

Marse Goodsnake came to the mother and said, I know your boy’s hiding round here, and tomorrow I’m gonna come for him.

The boy told his ma, Don’t worry. He ain’t never gonna catch me.

The next day the boy saw Marse Goodsnake coming, and he flipped a somersault and became a rooster. His mother threw him in the chicken pen with the other roosters. Marse Goodsnake became a fox and chased the roosters. The boy flipped a somersault and became a horse. Marse Goodsnake flipped a somersault and became a halter atop the horse. He drove the horse home, but when he stopped to let it drink from a creek, the horse flipped a somersault, leaped into the water, became a catfish, and swam off. Marse Goodsnake flipped and turned into a big fat crocodile and chased him all around. The boy turned into a hummingbird. Marse Goodsnake turned into an eagle and chased him all over the sky. The boy turned into a wedding ring. Marse Goodsnake turned into a groom who talked the bride out of her ring. Finally the boy flew up in the air, became a box of mustard seeds, and busted into a hundred seeds that covered the ground. Marse Goodsnake jumped up and turned into an old hen with a hundred chickens that ate every seed but the last. They dug and dug for that last mustard seed, dug clear through to the other side of the earth, looking for that last mustard seed . . .

A loud creak snapped Liz awake. She realized she was chewing the hard floor around the heavy pike beneath her face. She had gnawed all around the outside of it and left the head exposed. She quickly grabbed the pike with her front teeth. With great effort, she pulled it from the floor, stuck it in her closed jaw, and flipped onto her back just as Little George stepped past the old lady next to her and arrived at her feet.

A deep bank of silence seemed to press the air out of the room. In the slivers of light that cut through the attic roof, she saw Little George standing before her --- his torn shirt, his muscled arms, and the profile of his beautiful nose and eyebrows beneath a straw hat. His head swiveled in a large circle, taking in the room. His head stopped when it reached her. He stepped aside her and knelt.

“Brother,” she said, “I am not well.”

“ Don’t call me brother,” Little George said.

His frame blocked her view of the rafters above. He was so tall he had to crouch to reach her in the corner. On his hips she saw the glint of several keys.

He gently ran his huge hand over her face.

“I knowed there was a pretty woman under all that pus,” he said.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“Don’t you worry,” he said. “You in the right place. Miss Patty’s gone out to find new customers. You got plenty time to say hi to Little George.”

He reached his hand into the pot of water behind her and withdrew it. She heard herself gasping and felt soap rubbing over her face, stinging, cleansing, then her face wiped dry. She heard the soap fall back into the water, and heard him sigh.

The arc of the attic roof caused him to bend over awkwardly as he leaned over to run his huge hands over her. He ran his hand from neck to foot, pawing her through her tattered dress, then stopping at her ankle chains. She tried to wiggle away and he shoved her into place.

“You ain’t gonna need these for a minute, “ he said. He leaned over with his hands to unfasten her ankle chains. He undid the first, which was closest to him, and left the second fastened to the old woman next to her.

Liz immediately sat halfway up.

“Let my hands a loose at least,” she said.

“Be quiet,” he grunted, and that was all, for quick as he had said it, she sat up and in one motion placed her chained arms around his neck. Holding the pike between her front teeth, she drove her head into his beautiful neck full force, drilling the pike deep in, striking the Adam’s apple from the side.

His roar was muffled by the awful spurt of air and blood hissing out his exposed esophagus. With one violent thrust he pushed her off and tried to rise, but the very chains that limited her movements to his purpose now clasped her to him, and her weight pulled him down to one knee. He shoved her away again violently, but she was pushing forward so hard her head rebounded as if on a rubber string and, still bearing the pike between her gritted teeth, she jammed into his neck a second time, so hard that she felt her teeth loosen up and felt one give way, the pike disappearing from her mouth into the folds of his wriggling neck.

Suddenly she felt the weight of another body slam against her. She saw the tattered white dress of the old woman to whom she was fastened stick her mouth to George’s ear and bite. There was a muffled roar from Little George, who dropped to both knees now, flinging the old woman away from him with a huge wrist.

Liz tried to pull away from him now, panicked, but it was too late. She felt bodies slamming against her as the others, all of them, women, men, and children, descended into a desperate, pounding, biting, silent, resolute mass of animalistic fury. With grunts, squeaks, and heavy breath, they descended on the sole caretaker of Patty Cannon’s house, beautiful Little George, drove him to the floor, and squeezed the life out of him.

Still, Little George was a powerful young man and did not warm to death easily. They were all walking skeletons, weak from hunger, and he flung them off like butterflies. He managed to regain himself for a moment and stood, gasping in desperate rage, air whooshing out his mouth and the hole in his neck. Liz was still clasped to him like an appendage when she suddenly felt the two of them being lifted from the floor and saw the huge face of Big Linus near hers. She heard an awful cracking sound, and as she was gently lowered to the floor, her chained arms still embracing Little George, she felt the horrid sensation of life drain from him. The others swarmed him again with renewed vigor now, as if by beating his dead body as it made its way to the cooling board they could vanquish the killer within themselves, for they were murderers now and knew it; that knowledge seemed to drive them to even further rage, so that even as they collapsed into a tangle of kicking, punching arms and legs around the lifeless body of Little George, they turned and fought each other, fighting out of shame, fighting out of humiliation, fighting for his keys, and, mostly, fighting to get clear of each other.

“Get off me,” Liz said. “God help me, y’all, get off. I can’t breathe.”

Yet, even she continued to strike Little George, punching and slapping him.

“Easy,” the old woman hissed. “Let ’em go, y’all. Let ’em go, children.”

Her words had the desired effect. After a few more kicks and slaps, they rose away from him and, working quickly, grabbed his keys and freed Liz’s hands and feet.

She lay on the floor, dazed, as a tall man with trembling hands silently worked the keys to free the others. The mechanisms to open the chains were clumsy and unyielding. Several did not come off at all, and four prisoners left the room with iron ankles still clamped to one foot. But the job was done quickly, and by the time the mob rose up to depart, Little George lay on the floor shoeless and naked, gaping at the ceiling, his pants, socks, pipe, jacket, and straw hat now the property of others. Several of them took a few extra kicks and punches at him as they departed, though he was beyond feeling.

Liz lay on the floor, dazed.

“I can’t get up,” Liz said. “Help me, somebody.”

But they were already gone, stepping over her and disappearing down the trapdoor. Only Big Linus and the old woman remained.

The old woman lay near the trapdoor, bent awkwardly, twisted in an odd shape. Big Linus gently reached over, grabbed her by the waist, and hoisted her on his wide shoulders like a sack of potatoes.

“Leave me, Big Linus,” the old woman said, her face twisted in agony. “I can’t stand it.”

Big Linus ignored her, swinging her around and descending down through the trapdoor.

The thought of being alone with Little George drove Liz to action. She rose on trembling legs, gingerly stepped over Little George, and followed the giant Negro down the steps, stumbling through the maze of the tavern’s dim rooms and outside into the backyard.

The glare of the rising sun jeered its greeting across the Maryland sky so forcefully that it seemed to suck the air out of her body, and Liz nearly collapsed from the sudden vacuum she felt. She saw the backs of the others fanning out across the high grass behind the tavern, running in different directions towards a nearby creek, men, women, and children, splashing across. She stumbled after the huge Negro, who carried the old woman towards the creek.

“Put me down,” the old woman said. “Put me down, Linus. I can’t go no more.”

The giant Negro laid the old woman on the bank of the creek, turned around, gave Liz a long, angry look, then took off after the others, his huge frame slowly sloshing across the creek.

Liz approached the old woman who lay on the bank. In the daylight her face looked grey and streaked. Her eyes had bolts of red across each pupil.

“ Good- bye, then, miss. I don’t even know your name,” Liz said.

“I got no name,” the woman said. “Whatever name was gived me was not mine. Whatever I knowed about is what I been told. All the truths I been told is lies, and the lies is truths.”

“What’s that mean?” Liz asked.

The woman smiled grimly.

“I told you you was two- headed,” she said.

Liz glanced at the others, whose backs were disappearing into the woods across the creek.

“Remember the code,” the woman said. “The coach wrench turns the wagon wheel. The turkey buzzard flies a short distance. And he’s hidden in plain sight. The blacksmith is handling marriage these days. Don’t forget the double wedding rings and the five points. And it ain’t the song, it’s the singer of it. It’s got to be sung twice, y’know, the song. That’s the song yet sung.”

“I can’t remember it all,” Liz said.

“Keep dreaming, two- headed girl. There’s a tomorrow in it. Tell ’em the woman with no name sent you.”

“Tell who?”

“G’wan,” she said. “Git.”

“What you gonna do?”

The old woman smiled grimly again.

“I’m gonna wait till y’all run off,” she said. “Then I’m gonna climb down this bank on my own time and lie in that water till my name comes to me. One way or the other,” she said, “I ain’t coming this way again.”

Excerpted from Song Yet Sung © Copyright 2012 by James McBride. Reprinted with permission by Riverhead. All rights reserved.

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