The Cave Dwellers by Christina McDowell (readict books TXT) 📕

initially existed, it was temporary. As the settlements expanded more and more, threatening the ten-thousand-year history of the Native American people and their land, bloody battles were soon waged against the Native Americans in a ruthless attempt at attaining power and control. Until the year 1880, it is estimated between 2 million and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved in America.III

I. Caleb Johnson’s Mayflower History (website), http://mayflowerhistory.com/voyage.

II. Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, “Squanto: The Former Slave,” History of Massachusetts (blog), https://historyofmassachusetts.org/squanto-the-former-slave/.

III. “Colonial Enslavement of Native Americans Included Those Who Surrendered Too,” Brown University website, https://www.brown.edu/news/2017-02-15/enslavement.

The Mayflower Compact:

IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, etc. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.I

I. History website, https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/mayflower-compact.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Bunny spent the majority of the Thanksgiving holiday refraining from reminding everyone about the slaughter of the Native Americans when Meredith printed out the family tree from Ancestry.com to prove that their ancestors had arrived on the Mayflower. She dispensed custom-made red, white, and blue “Indian headdresses” at the dinner table before dessert. After Bunny read that her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had had three wives (consecutively) and thirty children, she took off the headdress and smoked a joint behind the dying poplar tree. That’s what they did then, honey Bunny—they spread the seed! We had good seed.

Later that night under her covers with her mother’s stolen password, Bunny discovered their family had enslaved Native Americans. But because Bunny had never even heard of Native American slavery, she wasn’t about to put up a fight without a loaded gun. Meredith had conveniently left that detail out amidst her joy during Thanksgiving dinner. Overwhelmed with a sense of truth, Bunny felt like she was just beginning to understand the convenience of leaving the details out of history for the purposes of a narrative controlled by those who have something to hide born out of shame. What else are they hiding? Audrey’s death, the pall hanging over Bunny’s every thought, kept pushing her intense need to meet Anthony, the alleged murderer. Finding all of the paperwork for visitation online, Bunny used her fake ID, passed down from her cousin Grace Morrison on her mother’s side of the family when Grace turned twenty-one so Bunny could buy cigarettes without having to pay off a stranger every time. A common initiation from older friends or siblings—and Bunny wasn’t ever scared to use it. The Bartholomews are family friends with the United States Attoney General. Bunny is immune to arrest, to risk—living in her gilded existence of privilege, the thought wouldn’t even cross her mind.

Bunny drives east of the Capitol toward a brown cement building. She sees the sign: DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, CENTRAL DETENTION FACILITY.

She turns right toward the parking lot. Rain pounds across her windshield as she makes a wrong turn into the semicircle of what looks like an abandoned neoclassical mansion with boarded and blown-out windows and shattered glass under dead boxwoods, Corinthian columns, arched windows, a massive double limestone staircase, all having survived nearly a century of neglect. What is this? It looks like Audrey’s mansion—strange, Bunny thinks. ANNE ARCHBOLD HALL is engraved in the limestone above the rotting wood-covered doors.

Bunny parks behind the abandoned mansion and walks toward a dilapidated building next door where she sees more than a dozen women standing in a single-file line, shivering in the cold.

A female officer with SPECIAL POLICE written across her jacket smokes a cigarette while guarding the entrance. Many of the women are covered in blankets and holding brown grocery bags. Bunny approaches the officer, cutting in front of the line.

“Excuse me, Officer?” Bunny says.

The officer turns to Bunny, her hair in a high ponytail, gold rings on each finger. “Hey, honey,” she says.

Bunny notices she’s missing a front tooth. “Is this the line for the DC Jail visiting center?”

“Oh no, that’s in the trailer around the corner.” The woman points her cigarette to what’s obviously the jail surrounded with barbed wire, a tower in its center resembling an airport control tower. “It’s on the other side of that. Just walk around, you’ll come to a graveyard, make a left, then a right.”

“Thank you.… Um, what’s this line for?” Bunny can’t help but ask.

“This the women’s shelter,” the woman says.

Bunny gazes at the line of women waiting for a bed—for some kind of protection and safety, only to turn around for a view of abandonment and captivity.

“Got it, thanks again,” Bunny says.

“No problem, honey.” The officer inhales her cigarette.

Bunny walks toward the enormous wrought iron gates of a graveyard, chained with a silver lock at the center. “Redford!” a white woman yells as she chases her Labradoodle, off-leash, trampling the planted headstones with a tennis ball in its mouth. Bunny can see the trailer as she turns left, then right, on the other side of the brick wall separating the graves from the jail, a mystifying nexus between being alive and being dead.

Bunny waits in line under dry heat, which is blasting from the vents. She is, for the first time in her life, a minority. Except for the way in which the systemic world sees her—a silver dollar in a jar of