Free The Presence by T. Davis Bunn

said the only way they would harm one blossom was by spilling his own blood first.
    TJ’s great-grandfather had been born a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. When the Civil War ended, he was a boy of thirteen who had already spent five years of servitude in the fields of a white master. His family banded together with twenty-three others, a total of ninety-nine souls, and headed north, where life was supposed to be better. They had no specific goal nor a firm grasp of geography beyond the borders of the next few farms down the road. All their worldly goods were carried in two battered wheelbarrows, a pushcart, and on their backs.
    The journey lasted over a year. When the band could not beg or forage enough food, they stopped to seek work. Steady labor was as scarce as money in those early Reconstruction days, and this, as much as anything, kept them heading north—always north.
    Miraculously, they all survived, including one toothless old grandmother of seventy-some years. And just at the point where they were ready to give up, when the bonding force of hope was no longer enough to keep the group from drifting apart, they happened upon a ramshackle Carolina community with more land than it could farm.
    It was a story repeated a thousand times throughout the South: All the white menfolk went off to fight, leaving the women to survive as best they could. With defeat came destitution, so the ladies sought out the shreds of other families with whom they could struggle for survival. Whole communities became ghost towns, leaving empty homes and untilled fields as the only legacy of what once had been.
    The band of travelers had chanced upon a small farming community that had lost every male over the age of fourteen. Every single one. Four hundred acres of prime tobacco land were going begging. And despite their best efforts, the white women were slowly starving.
    TJ’s great-grandfather had been one of the five men sent over to talk to the white women. They wanted to live there, they told the women. They would farm the land and tend the women’s homes as long as they could have enough land to build houses and plant gardens of their own. The white women made the men stand out in the pouring rain and kept three ancient bird guns trained on them. The women were clearly terrified of the newcomers. Only desperation made them listen. Finally they said that ten of the families could stay.
    The men refused. They had come too far together, been through too much, to split up now. Well, the eldest of the women demanded, what was to keep them from sneaking in one night and slitting all their throats?
    It was TJ’s great-grandfather who replied. “The first house we want to build is God’s house,” he told the women. “All we want is a place to live as free men, like the Lord wants us to be.”
    The white women waited for the old lady to reply. She spent a long moment searching the black man’s face, then lowered her rifle and turned away.
    â€œLet them stay,” she said.
    They were home.
    The community stood on the outskirts of a tiny village called Zebulon, thirty miles, or one solid day on horseback, from the state capital. But the new arrivals didn’t know this. Nor did they care.
    A few among them knew how to read, and they were told to search the Scriptures for a name for their new home. The answer was found in the sixty-second chapter of Isaiah: “The Lord has made proclamation to the ends of the earth: ‘Say to the Daughter of Zion, “See, your Savior comes! See, his reward is with him, and his recompense accompanies him.” ‘ They will be called The Holy People, The Redeemed of the Lord; and you will be called Sought After, The City No Longer Deserted.”
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    The old Praise Hall of the Church of New Zion rang with joy.
    â€œThis is truly a day the Lord has made!” A pair of hands waved in the air, soon to be joined by a hundred others, swaying from