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

scared of losing power not just for power’s sake, but because of what might be done to you if you were no longer protected by it.”

Meredith lifts her hand and smacks Bunny hard across the face. Bunny stumbles sideways, tripping over the vintage trunk; more loose pages of Etiquette go flying into the air, swaying between them, before reaching the kitchen floor.

“You do not have a monopoly on truth, you ungrateful child. Your place doesn’t exist in this world without a social and economic hierarchy, your privileges, your education, the neighborhood and home in which you grew up—your grandparents would be ashamed of your uncalled-for juvenile behavior. Would you rather I cut you off? Dump you on a street corner downtown? Because I am goddamn close to doing it.” Meredith’s hands begin to shake as she reaches for her pack of cigarettes on the counter behind her.

Bunny holds her cheek and fumbles to put her shoes on with her other hand. “This is why they died, always some justification,” she mumbles, on the verge of tears, “all those innocent people. And Anthony is next.…”

“That’s it, I’m calling Georgetown Hospital’s psychiatric department. This is not normal. You should have never been in contact with that psychopath; you could have been killed going down to that jail! When your father finds out, he’s going to sue the whole goddamn city!” Meredith says, overcompensating for her own ugly truth—the lawsuits, the covering up, that Chuck in these very moments is meeting with attorneys in glass high-rises, blocking testimony by families riddled with cancer who can’t pay their medical bills, whose minimum wage is so far behind inflation they can’t eat three meals a day. That she is happy—relieved!—to be in negotiations to take over the Banks business assets, to stay forever planted as they were, as they are: legacy pioneers in the creation of social and economic hierarchy.

“Killed going down to that jail?” Bunny laughs. “Call the psychiatric hospital for yourself. I’m leaving.” She runs down the hall and out the front door, slamming it behind her.

Mount Zion Cemetery

Clement Morgan was the first Black man to graduate from both Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is buried “somewhere in the Mount Zion Graveyard” in Georgetown. “Somewhere,” because the graves are cracked and crumbling in clustered piles; faded inscriptions and muddy land make reading any names nearly impossible. The cemetery, owned by Mount Zion Church, which was the first Black congregation of Georgetown, marks the burial ground of hundreds of the formerly enslaved and freemen. Unlike Oak Hill Cemetery, the “white graveyard” next door, there are no wrought iron gates protecting it from intruders, no immaculate cenotaphs and tombs, no gardeners watering its boxwoods every Saturday. Ravaged by neglect, it sits behind a run-down apartment building and beside an alley full of trash cans, dumpsters, and rats.

The eroding land remains a stark reminder of the racial and economic injustices as well as the gentrification that Georgetown has endured for over a century.I The graveyard may also have served as a hiding spot on the Underground Railroad. Those in the process of fleeing the terror of slavery were believed to have hidden in an eight-by-eight-foot windowless brick structure on the side of the hill that was used to store frozen corpses during winter.II

I. “Death of a Cemetery: Mt. Zion’s Disrepair,” The Georgetowner, March 26, 2015, https://georgetowner.com/articles/2015/03/26/death-cemetery-mt-zions-disrepair/.

II. “Mount Zion Cemetery’s Underground Railroad Shelter,” Atlas Obscura, https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mount-zion-cemeterys-underground-railroad-shelter.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Bunny sits on a bench in a deserted graveyard. She looks out at the opposite hill beyond the deep valley of Rock Creek Park, where she can see the lights of Billy’s towering mansion through the cold and leafless woods. In the shadows, as the cloudy winter night hovers over crumbling graves, Bunny hears the sound of crunching snow. She turns her head to the right and sees two sinewy figures approaching her. Spooked, she pops up from the bench and ducks behind a tipping cenotaph; pulling down on her pink beanie, she squints to see who it is as one of the figures trips and slams into a headstone.

“Dude, are you okay?”

The sound of laughter.

“Fucking buzzzz killll,” the other one says.

Bunny moves closer, shines her cell phone light straight into their eyes. “Marty?”

Marty, wearing a red beanie, puts his right hand up, squinting, holding a joint with his left. He jumps back.

“It’s Bunny. It’s Bunny!” she says. She moves her flashlight over. “Chase? What are you guys doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” Marty asks.

Chase swings a glass bottle of Russian vodka by his side. “Bunny Foo Foo hoppin’ through the forest!” he laughs to himself.

“Don’t fucking call me that,” Bunny says, eerie echoes of Audrey teasing her in middle school. She looks at Marty. “I asked you first.”

“We got kicked out of school,” Chase blurts out, then takes another swig of vodka, sweat forming along his greasy hairline.

“What?”

“We didn’t get kicked out of school,” Marty corrects him, pushing his glasses up his nose as he moves closer to Bunny. “Harvard rescinded my acceptance letter.”

“Oh, shit, no,” Bunny says.

“Yep, me toooo.” Chase chucks the bottle of vodka into a bush. He stumbles over toward Marty and wraps him in a drunken bear hug. “But we have each other.”

“Shut up, Chase, you got into Rollins, not Harvard,” Bunny quips.

“Harvard, Schmarvard!” Chase sings out, staggering. “It’s all the fuckin’ same if you’re a rich man in AMERRRIIICCAAAA!!!!” He pounds his chest.

“Go home, dude,” Marty says, “it’s your bedtime.”

“Nah, man,” Chase says, “my dad is gonna hook me up to his lie detector again.”

“So don’t lie,” Marty says.

“You’re no fun, lame-ass.” Chase pulls his cell phone from his parka pocket and calls an Uber. “I miss Stan-the-man!” He wobbles off toward the brick path, then shouts, “Texting Billy you two are alone in the graveyard!”

“Fuck you!” Marty yells back.

They watch Chase stagger off. Bunny greets Marty on the other side of a headstone. “Can I?”

Marty passes Bunny the joint.

“I’m sorry