The Witness Who Stood

The door hangs crooked on a single hinge. Splinters catch the weak morning light filtering through dirty windows. Frances sits motionless in the small parlor, her hands folded in her lap.

Three days. Forty dead. Freedmen's homes reduced to ash and memory.

She touches the lace at her collar. The gesture is small, almost invisible. A thread connecting her to who she knows herself to be when everything else has been torn away.

Lucy stands near the broken doorframe, feet planted wide. Her shoulders are rigid, her jaw set. The rage in her eyes could burn through wood.

"They need to hear it."

Frances doesn't move. Doesn't look up.

"All of it," Lucy says. Each word hits like a hammer. "What they did."

The air smells of smoke still. Of blood scrubbed from floorboards but not forgotten. Frances breathes it in, breathes it out, breathes it in again.

She knows what Lucy means. Not just the violence. Not just the mob breaking down the door at midnight. Not just the three days of screaming and fire and bodies in the street.

The truth of who witnessed it.

Lucy crosses her arms. The gesture creates a wall, a barrier against a world that has proven itself untrustworthy. She leans forward slightly, claiming space.

"The stenographer's pen will write it down," Lucy says. "Every word. Make it real."

Or erase it, Frances thinks. Make it disappear like we were never here at all.

Lucy's mending basket sits beside the chair. Overflowing with torn fabric, ripped hems, bloodstained cotton. She's been working since dawn, trying to repair what cannot be repaired. The needle moves. The thread pulls. Nothing changes.

Frances finally looks up. Her spine straightens, vertebra by vertebra.

"They'll ask questions."

"Let them ask."

"They'll want to know... everything."

Lucy's expression doesn't soften. "Then tell them everything."

The word hangs in the air between them. Everything. Not just the massacre. Not just the violence. Everything Frances is, laid bare before men who sit in judgment, who hold pens that write history or condemnation.

She touches the lace again. The texture grounds her—delicate, real, hers.

"What if my truth costs you?" Frances asks. Her voice is barely audible. "Costs others?"

"Your silence already costs us." Lucy's words are clipped, unvarnished. "Costs everyone."

A bird calls outside. The sound is incongruously cheerful, ignorant of what this house has witnessed. Frances listens to it, lets it fill the space where fear lives.

The stenographer's record book. She pictures it, bound in leather, pages blank and waiting. A pen poised above paper. Her words—or her erasure.

She stands. The movement is slow, deliberate. When she speaks, each syllable carries weight.

"I will testify before Congress."

Lucy's posture doesn't change, but something in her eyes shifts. Relief, maybe. Or recognition of the courage it took to speak those six words.

"I will tell them what happened," Frances continues. "Who it happened to."

The lace at her collar feels suddenly significant. A small defiance. A thread of authenticity in a world that demands she not exist.

Lucy nods once. Sharp, final.

The decision is made. The door still hangs crooked. The mending basket still overflows. But something has shifted in the small parlor of The Shared House on South Street.

Frances has chosen speech over silence. Truth over safety. Herself over erasure.

Whatever the cost.