Deep eyes. The scooped bone at the back of the orbits was dark with shadow; even by tilting the skull to the side, I couldn’t get light to illuminate the whole cavity. The skull felt light in my hands, the bone fragile. I stroked her brow and my hand ran upward, and down behind the occiput, my fingers seeking the dark hole at the base, the foremen magnum, where all the messages of the nervous system pass to and from the busy brain.
Then I held it close against my stomach, eyes closed, and felt the shifting sadness, filling the cavity of the skull like running water. And an odd faint sense—of surprise?
“Someone killed her,” I said. “She didn’t want to die.” I opened my eyes to find Horace Thompson staring at me, his own eyes wide in his round, pale face. I handed him the skull, very gingerly. “Where did you find her?” I asked.
Mr. Thompson exchanged glances with Joe, then looked back at me, both eyebrows still high.
“She’s from a cave in the Caribbean,” he said. “There were a lot of artifacts with her. We think she’s maybe between a hundred-fifty and two hundred years old.”
“She’s
Joe was grinning broadly, enjoying his joke.
“Our friend Mr. Thompson here is from the anthropology department at Harvard,” he said. “His friend Wicklow knows me; asked me would I have a look at this skeleton, to tell them what I could about it.”
“The nerve of you!” I said indignantly. “I thought she was some unidentified body the coroner’s office dragged in.”
“Well, she’s unidentified,” Joe pointed out. “And certainly liable to stay that way.” He rooted about in the cardboard box like a terrier. The end flap said PICT-SWEET CORN.
“Now what have we got here?” he said, and very carefully drew out a plastic sack containing a jumble of vertebrae.
“She was in pieces when we got her,” Horace explained.
“Oh, de headbone connected to de…neckbone,” Joe sang softly, laying out the vertebrae along the edge of the desk. His stubby fingers darted skillfully among the bones, nudging them into alignment. “De neckbone connected to de…backbone…”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” I told Horace. “You’ll just encourage him.”
“Now hear…de word…of de Lawd!” he finished triumphantly. “Jesus Christ, L. J., you’re somethin’ else! Look here.” Horace Thompson and I bent obediently over the line of spiky vertebral bones. The wide body of the axis had a deep gouge; the posterior zygapophysis had broken clean off, and the fracture plane went completely through the centrum of the bone.
“A broken neck?” Thompson asked, peering interestedly.
“Yeah, but more than that, I think.” Joe’s finger moved over the line of the fracture plane. “See here? The bone’s not just cracked, it’s
Horace Thompson was looking at me queerly. “How did you know she’d been killed, Dr. Randall?” he asked.
I could feel the blood rising in my face. “I don’t know,” I said. “I—she—
“Really?” He blinked a few times, but didn’t press me further. “How odd.”
“She does it all the time,” Joe informed him, squinting at the femur he was measuring with a pair of calipers. “Mostly on live people, though. Best diagnostician I ever saw.” He set down the calipers and picked up a small plastic ruler. “A
“We think it was a…er, secret slave burial,” Mr. Thompson explained, blushing, and I suddenly realized why he had seemed so abashed when he realized which of us was the Dr. Abernathy he had been sent to see. Joe shot him a sudden sharp glance, but then bent back to his work. He kept humming “Dem Dry Bones” faintly to himself as he measured the pelvic inlet, then went back to the legs, this time concentrating on the tibia. Finally he straightened up, shaking his head.
“Not a slave,” he said.
Horace blinked. “But she must have been,” he said. “The things we found with her…a clear African influence…”
“No,” Joe said flatly. He tapped the long femur, where it rested on his desk. His fingernail clicked on the dry bone. “She wasn’t black.”
“You can tell that? From bones?” Horace Thompson was visibly agitated. “But I thought—that paper by Jensen, I mean—theories about racial physical differences—largely exploded—” He blushed scarlet, unable to finish.
“Oh, they’re there,” said Joe, very dryly indeed. “If you want to think blacks and whites are equal under the skin, be my guest, but it ain’t scientifically so.” He turned and pulled a book from the shelf behind him.
“Take a look at this,” Joe invited. “You can see the differences in a lot of bones, but especially in the leg bones. Blacks have a completely different femur-to-tibia ratio than whites do. And that lady”—he pointed to the skeleton on his desk—“was white. Caucasian. No question about it.”
