“I Know the Way” from–This is Our Rainbow: 16 Stories of Her, Him, Them, and Us

Evelyn sat in her Social Studies class and swallowed a jaw-cracking yawn. She was fighting
to stay awake in the too-warm classroom and only half listening to the never-ending lecture on early American settlers. Her teacher, Mrs. Howard, was talking about how the colonists who had settled Maryland lived, and Evelyn did not care in the least about the dusty old first Marylanders.

“I know a lot of this seems archaic and weird, but I promise it’ll make more sense once we see the settlement at Jerusalem Mill. It will be a bit more exciting when you get to see it for yourself,” Mrs. Howard said.

“We’re going on a field trip?” someone asked, and the classroom exploded in excitement, everyone talking at once.

“Jerusalem Mill sucks,” said Ashley, the girl who sat next to Evelyn. “We went there three years ago, and it’s nothing but a farm and some guy making pottery.”

“The chickens are cool, though,” Evelyn said with a small smile. She’d gone to Jerusalem Mill in fourth grade as well, and she’d liked how strange and weird it had seemed. Plus, it wasn’t that far from Gunpowder Falls, which was a really cool stream.

“Yeah, and if we go, maybe we’ll see a ghost,” said Jennifer, leaning forward to join the conversation. “You know, the bridge there is haunted.”

“Haunted?” Ashley said, her brows pulling together in a way that Evelyn liked entirely too much. She’d been watching Ashley since the beginning of the school year, and had made a mental list of her expressions that she liked. The small frown was high on the list.

“Yeah, the story is that they used to hang runaway slaves from the rafters as a warning to the other slaves in the area to not run away. And then, during the Civil War, they hung soldiers who tried to run away from the same rafters. If you go and you see the ghosts, all you see are their feet dangling.”

“That’s awful,” Evelyn said. She hated when people talked about slavery. She always felt like people expected her to feel some kind of way about it because she was one of the only Black girls in school. It mostly just made her angry, and how was that useful?

“But ghosts!” Ashley said. “I want to see that.”

“Did you girls have a question?” Mrs. Howard cut in, silencing any further speculation about ghosts and making Evelyn sink lower in her seat. Ashley gave her a goofy look, and Evelyn swallowed a laugh.

But the more Evelyn thought about it, the more she wanted to find the ghosts. And the more she wanted to find them with Ashley.