Prologue-
"Meg!" her mother, Lois, called from the kitchen. "When do you have to turn in that report for school?"
Alone in the living room, Meg angled her head up a bit to direct her answer back while keeping her eyes locked onto the latest amateurish dreck that passed for television on the Sci-fi Channel, now simply known as Syfy.
'It should be a crime to show movies this bad,' she thought idly.
"In two weeks, Mom," she said, settling back into a more rag doll-like posture indicative of the American Couch Potato.
"Well, don't forget. The last thing we need is a New England race riot because the white kids at school didn't do their part on Black History Month."
"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that," Meg said nonplused. "History may fade, but guilt never does. I've got time to come up with something by then."
"Okay, Sweetie."
Disconsolate, Meg slumped a little lower in the couch after the lie she told. She didn't have many ideas floating in her head concerning the report. They were either half-formed or simply not there, and two weeks flew deceptively fast for the uncommitted.
"Well, I got nothing," she groused to herself. With a sigh, she knew that it wouldn't be so easy this time.
Gone were the halcyon days when she could count on George Washington Carver or Martin Luther King, Jr. to bail her out of a possible bad grade, and the oft despised mark of the teacher's red pen.
She admitted to herself that that was the easy way out back then, but today didn't make things any less easy, and that was, oddly, the point.
These days, a lazy, yet enterprising youngster could get all the information he or she wanted via Google, and might even have the temerity to write the whole article down, verbatim, and pass it off as the report.
Such blatant plagiarism didn't appeal to her as much as it might have her contemporaries. In the back of her mind and, it seemed, in the bottom of her heart, such duplicity made her feel small, and only served to cheapen her subject's memory.
What were needed now were new subjects to touch upon. To hear her classmates tell it, the only black people of any stripe besides rap stars were George, Martin, or even Michael…Jackson, Jordan or Vick, and that would have been the opinion of most of the black students.
Meg thanked her lucky stars that she didn't need to solicit the advice of any of the pop-culture addled, video game addicted students. She just mentally squared her shoulders and continued to ruminate. She knew what would happen, should she fail.
If a black kid did or didn't do the assignment, the outcome would have just been either a passing or failing mark. But something else awaited the white kid who didn't do the assignment, as damning, as it was implied.
This was, she understood, part and parcel with being a white American student in the post-Civil Rights Movement Era, to, in essence, pay tribute to the black community, by marginally learning something about its culture, as she knew the school would do.
With guilty looks being the punishment of choice for those who didn't uphold their end of this unspoken social contract, it wasn't too bad a deal, as unspoken social contracts went, but it did become a bit of a chore when one's heart wasn't in it.
And it wasn't as though Meg's heart wasn't in it, she just didn't know how not to make it look so sadly clichéd and obviously rushed, as so many others had been in the past. She was a senior now, and for her, this one had to be special, a personal best.
She blanked out in thought, almost reaching a meditative state, and so, was barely listening to the commercial that was playing just then.
"…You can find out more about your family's history with ," the friendly voiceover offered.
The spark of an idea wasn't long in coming. A corner of her mouth curled up into an embarrassed smile that she didn't think of the fact sooner. The fact that she was, for all intents and purposes, black herself, through Peter.
As told in a library book detailing their family genealogy on her father's side, the knowledge that her father was related to an African-American slave named Nathaniel, was the buzz of the family.
Out of curiosity, she had a chance to peruse another book that her father had brought from the library that day, an actual slave narrative penned by Nathaniel himself. Unfortunately, due to either egotism, forgetfulness or just plain, bad writing on the author's part, Meg, like the other family members who read from it, couldn't get anything other than cursory, basic knowledge of the ancestor.
However, what she didn't know was that Peter, in a spectacularly surprising bit of initiative and intellectual curiosity, secretly began to research more into his genealogy and actually found additional information concerning Nate and his life in the Nineteenth Century, which he later regaled to all but Meg, while she was being held captive by burglars who broke into the home one night.
As it stood, the paltry data she got from the library book was insufficient for her needs, but, as she sat up straighter in the couch with renewed sense of confidence in her success, the possibility of finding out more on her own was stoking the fires within her.
If the limitations of the book were any indication, the library was out as far as she was concerned, though Meg decided that she could go back to it, if she had no other recourse. In the meantime, she knew she would have to go to more alternative sources and try her luck there.
"Mom, did Dad take the car?" Meg asked towards the kitchen.
"I think so, Meg."
Meg got up and trotted over to the solitary table that stood near the front door. A quick look over it was rewarded with a pair of car keys that she scooped and pocketed.
"I'm gonna borrow Brian's car for a sec while I look for some research material for my report."
"Okay, Sweetie," Lois called back. "I'll tell Brian when he and Peter come back from the Clam. Hurry back, now."
"Thanks, Mom," Meg said as she went to the door to open it. The voice of the announcer on TV managed to catch her attention for a fleeting moment before she crossed the threshold.
"Next on Syfy, Mega-Dino-Shark-Gator. Then it's Mega-Dino-Shark-Gator vs. Hyper-Dragon-Anaconda. After that, it's Shark-Dragon-Hyper-Dino vs. Mega-Anaconda-Gator. That's all coming up tonight-on Syfy. Imagine greater!"
"I wish they would," Meg said before closing the door.
Phil Carson, the rumpled, elderly, cigar-scented proprietor of Unique Antiques, lazily propped his pale, wrinkled head on the palm of his open, age-spotted hand, wondering if it was too late to punch his even older uncle in the face for setting him on the path of antique retail so long ago, since he hadn't made a decent sale all afternoon and he was jonesing for his Jack Daniels.
His pink, bleary eyes twitched in the direction of the front door when the little bell signaled its opening. A petite girl in a reddish cap walked almost cautiously inside and peered at the more immediate knick-knacks and gewgaws that hung and sat on shelves in the forward half of the shop.
He straightened himself up and cleared his tobacco-laced throat.
"What can I do for ya?" Phil asked. His eyes stared at her with well-aged cynicism, though he tried to look, for all the world, as though he was glad to see her, and his voice croaked with a world-weariness he couldn't conceal.
"I was wondering if you had any Black Americana?" Meg asked. "Maybe anything from the 1800's?"
Phil's eyes opened a little wider at the request. She seemed a little too young and plain to hold much of an interest in such things. But who was he to judge?
"Well, young lady," he began. "I have a pretty good collection on the premises. So, what are ya after? Slave auction posters? Bill of sales? Maybe ya want some genuine shackles from a real live slave ship?"
Meg suddenly wondered if she was in the right shop, because she suddenly felt dirty.
"Uh, no. Not really. I mean, do you have anything that's more…positive?"
Phil looked at her as though she had asked him if he sold weapons-grade plutonium.
"Hmm. Don't know if I have anything like that, but you could look around, I suppose. People come by and raise all kinds of hell about what I sell here. Not my fault that the less flattering memorabilia sells so well. I just follow the trends."
Meg wandered among the shelves, ignoring the man's defensiveness. Interspersed among the other non-related items were tiny tin Gunthermann wind-up toys depicting black minstrels and others. Wrought-iron fireplace pieces formed into the shapes of black banjo players. Glass collector cases displaying intimidating slave collars with some of its chain still attached.
Her eyes stayed fixed on the collar longer than anything else so far. Appreciation of her Jewish heritage had opened her mind to what it must have been like to live during the Holocaust for a few moments, and the connection between both oppressed peoples was hammered home. It made her stomach twist a little.
"I guess you must get that a lot," she said, trying to be both neighborly, and to dissipate the specter of the past that hung over her.
Phil sat back in his creaking chair behind the counter, deep in thought.
"Yeah, but I don't mind, y'know? It's just stuff that happened to somebody else a long time ago, am I right? I mean, don't get me wrong. The commercial art and media is really hilarious, but I just collect items like this because of their rarity. I mean you just don't come across items that are this well made anymore. Right after the Civil Rights Movement, they stopped making all that kind of stuff, so it's great when you see that it's still being collected by the Aunt Jemima/Gold Dust Twins crowd, because it's pretty hard to come by."
Meg mentally gave the man a sour face. 'I didn't think vampires ran local businesses,' she thought. "Wow, that pretty interesting. A World War II train schedule from Auschwitz's pretty hard to come by, too, but it doesn't mean I want one."
She meant to say that under her breath, but her sudden indignation made the sarcasm come out just loud enough for Phil to catch it. Meg waited for the counter-point and it wasn't long in coming.
Phil straightened and puffed up as best as his slightly hunched body could manage. He radiated offense, something Meg would have agreed he did so in abundance.
"What are ya talking about? I'm no racist! I've got all kinds of Americana here. Here, take a look at this.
He quickly came around to the front of the counter, leading Meg over to a wooden display table. On it lay a short stack of dusty papers. Their small words were faded with age, however, the letterhead, adorned with an eagle, was still legible due to its size and darkness.
"Genuine U.S. Government documents of land that we gave to the Indians and then reneged on," he proudly offered. "How about this?"
He went to a shelf nearby and took down a small can. When he brought it back, Meg could see that the label showed the unflattering caricature of a Newcomer, with the words, written both in English and Tenctonese, "Uncle Slaggy's Head Shine."
"A can of Newcomer head shine. This stuff's rare. Never been opened, and check this out."
Phil led Meg deeper into his shop until they reached another table that displayed a large leather-bound book. Meg couldn't make out the title of the tome because of the language, but when she saw the stylized eagle and thunderbolt double "S" below it, she understood why she suddenly felt a little numb.
Phil gestured to the cover with big arm movements, as though he were showcasing a new car.
"A book of 100 percent authentic Nazi wanted posters for Allied Jewish-American soldiers. You don't come across this every day," he told her. Then he leaned, to Meg's estimation, way too close, and added as an aside, "But if you ever do come across one of them Auschwitz train schedules, hook me up. I'll make you a good deal."
If Meg thought that the man could creep out Vincent Price before he took her on his macabre little tour of his shop, the tour assuredly confirmed it for her.
"Wow, I guess I got you all wrong, then. Hate's just good business," she concluded sarcastically.
Phil looked like a teacher who had finally gotten through to a stubborn student. "Damn right. Now let's go back up front."
Settling back into his chair, Phil asked, "Okay, now can I help you with anything?"
Meg sighed and decided that despite the ghoul's particular taste, he might just have something to offer.
"Okay. I need some material to do a report on Black History Month. Something I could use for research that's not too pricey."
Phil frowned slightly on the "not too pricey" part. "Well, in that case, you should try the library, kid. I'm not missing my stories so you can make a guilty A in school. I'm here to make some money." He picked up a newspaper he had put down earlier in disgust of another non-sale day, and buried his face in it. Not to read so much as to put an obvious anti-social barrier between Meg and himself.
Meg frowned at that. She didn't have much in the way of petty cash and wasn't really in the mood to haggle. "I understand," she conceded. "Well, could you point me to something you have that's really cheap, then?"
"Boy, you really stink at negotiating, kid," Phil sighed in boredom as he put down the newspaper. Then a thought struck him. Actually, more of a reminder struck him. "Well, there's a whole stack of those old local black newspapers from the 1800's."
Meg followed his nod to a stack of cardboard boxes standing in a lonely corner of the store.
"Haven't been able to sell 'em in all this time," he said. "So, I'll tell you what. I'll flip ya for 'em. Heads, they get recycled next week, and tails, you get 'em for free. Deal?"
Meg was caught off-guard by that. The last thing she wanted was to be fobbed off with nothing but old newsprint from when Andrew Jackson was in office.
"I guess," she sputtered. "But what can I do-"
"Too late!" he crowed, eager to punish the little snot for daring to set up her soapbox in his shop. He quickly fished in his shirt pocket for a quarter, put it into position on his thumb, and catapulted it high above the two of them.
The two watched it descend, and as he reached out to catch it, Phil missed. The coin bounced off the glass surface of the counter hard, the kinetic energy of its impact causing it to land and spin on its side. It was anyone's guess as to which side it would ultimately rest on.
Despite her reluctance to being the proud owner of ancient birdcage liners, Meg was caught up in the suspense of the coin toss, finding herself wondering if she was going to win, even with such a dubious prize.
The two contestants' attention was ripped from the spinning quarter to the front door, when it suddenly opened on its own accord from a strong breeze outside.
Phil was about to fuss that he should have had that door fixed, when the breeze swept across the countertop, knocking the now wobbling coin over to expose…its tail side.
For a moment or two, neither said anything and just stood where they were, absorbing the fact that the coin toss was over and a winner had been decided by what seemed to be a suspiciously wayward gust of wind.
To an outsider, it would have been a fabulous example of an Aesop's Fable turned inside out. The Prize No One Wanted To Win.
Meg started running scenarios in her head on what to do with all of that newspaper, hoping that there was something worth writing about in them.
As for Phil, all he knew was that he lost. It didn't matter the contest or the prize, he just knew that this annoying little girl just knocked his happiness level down another microscopic notch.
Phil stared hard at her with a sour, crotchety expression.
"What've you got against recycling, anyway?" he asked her petulantly.
As she lugged the last awkward box of newspaper up the stairs, Meg could appreciate the benefits of a single story home. She also noticed how fast family members could find something else to do, whenever she asked for help in bringing her load to her bedroom.
With a soft grunt of effort, she rested the last box on top of the others that she positioned by her closet doors and marched blankly to her bed to take a breather.
The notion that "one man's trash was another man's treasure" sat prominently in her mind. She hoped that there was truth in that adage. Although it didn't cost her a dime to procure all of this material, it struck her as meaningless to hold on to it if didn't help her in some way.
One thing she didn't want to do was destroy it out of hand, like the shop owner wanted. If worse came to worse, and all she managed to find through its pages were local stories of the day, she figured that the least she could do is maybe give the whole lot to The Rhode Island Black Heritage Society. That would be better.
Pleased by her good judgment, Meg smiled wearily as she crossed her mirror. Apparently, she was so bushed, that it took a few moments for her brain to register a coherent action to the sight her peripheral vision had just caught.
Her reflection looked…odd.
At least odd was the initial description that flashed in her mind at the time. Although she didn't see it completely, Meg noticed that whatever was on the head was neither red nor her toque, the shape was unfamiliar and looked to be a faded shade of green.
The hair looked to be a shock of black curls that flowed out from under the green covering on the head, and, just as surprising, Meg thought that the reflection was…darker? Was she too close to the mirror? A shadow, perhaps? Maybe, but it was the middle of the afternoon and her bedroom was flooded with natural light coming from both of its windows.
Automatically, Meg stepped back to look at herself full on in the mirror, a little frightened by what she saw, but resolved to see the truth.
Her own image stared nervously back at her. She took a breath and closed her eyes both in gratitude and embarrassment. Too much stress over this report, obviously.
"I must be tired," Meg self-diagnosed as she went over to her dresser and turned on her radio. Then she finished her trek to the bed and flopped relievedly on it.
Meg squirmed into a better position to relax when the radio stopped playing.
With an exasperated growl, she got out of bed with the kind of tired, annoyed body English that would have made a grizzly bear proud.
She held the radio by its side and flicked its power switch, but it was still silent. She gave the back of the device a cursory check for frayed wiring, but nothing was physically amiss. Satisfied in her confirmation of the condition of the radio, and nothing else, Meg slumped back on her bed in frustration.
She sat in the disconcerting silence of the room. 'Well, I'm already in bed,' she thought. 'I was going to take a cat-nap, anyway.'
Settling into a prone position, Meg stretched and was about to relax into eventual R.E.M. sleep, when the bedroom door opened and Lois stepped into the threshold.
"Meg, Sweetie?" Lois said to her resting daughter.
"Yeah?"
"I just came up to tell you that power's out all over the neighborhood. It might take a while until we get it back."
Meg gave a sigh to that. "Good thing it's still daytime, then."
"Yeah. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know," Lois said.
"Thanks, Mom."
"You're welcome, Sweetie."
Upon her mother's departure, Meg absently wondered how did they suffer a blackout in the middle of the day.
Peter Griffin stood by the front of the smoking family station wagon that sat in the middle of the street, several blocks from where he lived, oblivious to the inconvenient destruction he wrought just moments before.
An observer would have noticed that the car had been given a new feature that didn't exactly look factory-standard.
Extending from the rear of the roof was a crudely attached metal boom, hooked at one end and laced with cables that ran down its length into a kit-bashed terminal, which was, itself, crudely plugged into the cigarette lighter on the dashboard.
A torn section of high-tension power line trailed from the hooked end of the boom and ran to one end of the street. Sputtering and flashing dangerously close to where Peter stood, was the other end of the power line, still being fed electricity and still connected to its jury-rigged place, far lower on the telephone pole than it should have been.
How Peter had managed to find the time and dubious expertise to run a line from one side of the street to the other in a perilous reenactment to a key scene from Back To The Future was a mystery for the ages.
In any event, he now stood outside the car while his dog, Brian, did his level best to hide his large muzzled face from the incriminating looks and uproar his friend's asinine decision would soon reap.
Peter looked thoughtfully resolute into the horizon, the leading man in the movie in his mind, and said, to no one in particular, "Today, sadly, the miracle of time travel has eluded mankind."
He then turned to where Brian sat and said to him, "Brian, you push and I'll steer."
Peter, still in his belief that he was close to something akin to a scientific breakthrough, then began running nonsensical equations in his already nonsensical mind on his way to the driver's side of the car.
Unfortunately, he was also blissfully unaware that his foot was about to come down on the end of the still live wire…
Meg just shrugged it off as one of those unexplainable things that just happened, when another seemingly unexplainable thing happened.
From the side of the room where her closet was, the top cardboard box had fallen with a thump, on its side, its contents of neatly folded, age-discolored copies of The Quahog Key, Quahog's first black newspaper, spilling across the floor.
Meg jumped and got up off the bed with a start. What was going on here?
She walked slowly towards the pile and looked over at the other boxes that supported the one that fell. There was no damage to them. No dents or deformations that would cause the lower boxes to sag and not hold up the uppermost one. No physical reason she could see for the top box to fall.
She kneeled to the folded papers to put them back into their container, pondering if maybe there was a mouse in her room, or worse, that caused the spill.
Then she noticed that one of the newspapers, probably the first in that pile, had slid away from the others upon impact and sat off to the side, its pages opened.
After setting the box upright, Meg reached over to grab the stray and fold it closed again, when she noticed something in its sepia interior.
A dark photograph sat in the upper left corner of a page, beside a title written in a large ornate Victorian font, "My Quahog Days."
Meg thought nothing of it for the first few seconds of seeing the photo, but when she slowed down in her need to clean up long enough to really get a good look at the face in the picture, she was, in a word, thunderstruck.
The face was her own. Or rather, it was her impossible dark mirrored reflection upon startling recollection. Frozen, Meg just stared and studied the woman's features. Although the authoress was black, she could have easily had been her double.
Here, this young woman, who looked to be about Meg's age, more or less, wore a different outfit then what she thought she saw in the mirror, a stately blouse of the era. Though the image was faded, the look of contentment was clearly evident in her doppelganger's smile.
Scanning down the page, Meg saw that other writers didn't break up the entire page into separate articles. Whoever she was, this page's entirety was devoted to her words alone.
Sitting in a more comfortable position, Meg picked up the paper to see more clearly the words that appeared under the grainy photograph.
"Article by May Griffin," she read to herself.
May Griffin? It sounded like she said her own name, but that very fact hit her like a rabbit punch. The similarityof appearance and name. Of everything…
Meg was stunned at the impossibility of it. At the sheer improbability of it. "She's a Griffin!" she squeaked. "Oh, my God! Could she be related to me? This is…so cool!"
She stood up and ran back to her bed, newspaper in hand, eager to find out more about this lost gem of the family that she just discovered.
As she settled in to read every word and absorb every passage of this precious, precious link to her past, the anxiety of doing the report fled from her like fog before the sun. She was going to enjoy this.
Her heart hammered with every question she wished she could ask her, well, great-great-great grand…aunt? Meg couldn't fathom what May's genealogical status was, and couldn't care less. How was school like for her? Did she have trouble getting boys to like her? What were her dreams? What was her family like?
Some questions were easier to answer than others, like did she ever try to fit in with the popular crowd? Meg could see that not being popular because she might have appeared plain to others would seem rather petty when held up to the stark fact that May wouldn't have been considered popular at all,purely because she was black.
No matter what humiliating experiences Meg might have went through in herlife, no one ever considered lynching her simply because she was a Plain Jane.
But such questions would hopefully be answered in the fullness of time with the reading of May's unearthed missive.
And so Meg relaxed, valiantly tried to suppressed all expectations, and read…