Gold, Fire & Refinement

Chapter Twenty-Five

"People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." ~James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

It was hard for Zarah to contain her excitement the next day when she met with all twelve members of The Keepers on location. Thurgood's crew had already set up a makeshift outdoor set at a park in Chester County, near East Goshen Township. Throngs of spectators had gathered at the park and that meant, along with the studio audience, around eleven hundred people were there. Zarah's guests, The Keepers, believed the park was near the place where the runaway slaves hid, and where they dug up the gold bricks the Confederate soldiers buried. 

As host of the show, after introducing her guests to a live audience, Zarah readjusted herself in her chair. The first question she had for them that day was critical. "Would you tell us?" she asked, "why the runaways chose the name they chose? The Keepers?"

Mr. Irving spoke first. At sixty-seven, he was one of the younger members of the group. "My grandfather said they came up with a lot of names before they chose that one."

In the same moment, another eager member of the group spoke up. It was Mr. Harris, a tall, good-looking man of seventy. He was one of those Zarah hadn't interviewed. "This is the journal I told you about," he said. He stood up and handed her a rugged-looking bound book with a gray leather cover. This is what my mom inherited from her great-grandfather. In this journal, he wrote about how they chose that name. You asked if we had any written history, and this is the only written history I have."

Accepting the journal, Zarah looked around at the group. "Does anyone else have a journal, papers, or something else?" She watched as different members of the group looked at each other before speaking.

"I don't have a journal ... but I do have some papers," Mrs. Arrington said. "Some I found in my grandmother's bureau after she passed. It's something you might want to look at. I'll bring them tomorrow."

"Please do. And if anyone else has anything—anything at all with any connection to The Keepers, please share it with me. We'll have your papers examined by document experts, and that will help us confirm what you're telling me. I promise I'll make sure you get everything back." She started looking through the journal as Mr. Harris talked.

"In that journal," he said, "my mom's great-grandfather said his daddy told her 'The Keepers' was the one name all the runaways liked. Said the man who thought of it felt like they had all been chosen to keep King Solomon's talents. You know, like the Bible talks about. There was so much gold," he continued, "the runaways thought it came to them from God Almighty. No matter who he used to bury it in the ground, they felt like it came to them directly from God."

Mrs. Arrington raised her hand and Zarah nodded for her to speak.

"Try to imagine being a slave," she said. "You are someone's property, and you've worked on a plantation all your life, like you were a mule or some other kind of beast of burden. You've been mistreated, half-clothed, not even half fed. Then, one day you see your chance at freedom. What you gone do? You gone take it. So you run and you run until one day you're so close to freedom you can feel it, smell it, and taste it. Then, on the way to freedom, you see some white men burying bricks of gold in the ground, just like they're planting seeds. What would you have done if you were a runaway slave?"

"Being truthful? I know what I would have done," said Mr. Clinton. "I would'a done the same thing my ancestor did. The Keepers felt like God was giving them gold at the end of their suffering. They thought he put them in these woods, at the right place and the right time, so they could see what they saw, and so he could give them what he gave them."

Mrs. Arrington spoke again. "The Bible speaks a lot about gold. It says the Ark of the Covenant was made of pure gold. And King David put up a hundred thousand talents of gold for the building of Solomon's Temple. I learned long time ago that a talent is around seventy-five pounds. Those gold bricks? Every one of 'em weighed exactly fifty pounds each."