PART I

The house sat on a hill above the Mississippi River like a dying king on a broken throne. It had been beautiful once—white columns, wide verandas, gardens of jasmine and magnolia. Now the columns were cracked, the verandas sagged, and the gardens had grown wild, the jasmine choking the magnolia in a slow, green war that neither would win.

William Beauregard stood on the front porch and looked at the house he had inherited and the debt he had inherited with it, and he felt the weight of three hundred years of Beauregard men pressing down on his shoulders like a physical thing.

His father had died three months ago, and with him had died the last pretense that the Beauregard family was anything other than what they were: ruined. The cotton market had been bad for five years running. The river had flooded twice, washing away topsoil and hope in equal measure. And the men who had owed his father money had died or gone bankrupt or simply stopped answering his letters, which in the South was considered a form of violence.

William had been in New Orleans when his father died. He had come home to find the house in disarray—furniture sold to pay for the funeral, slaves who had been promised freedom in the will now trapped in legal limbo, and a ledger full of numbers that made no arithmetic sense.

But the worst thing was not the debt or the house or the slaves. The worst thing was the dreams.

They had started the week after the funeral. William would close his eyes and see things—great armies marching, cities burning, men with machines that could kill by the thousands. He saw a country divided in two, fighting over something that had nothing to do with cotton and everything to do with the color of a person's skin.

He saw the South lose.

He woke from these dreams sweating and shaking, his heart beating like a trapped bird. He told himself they were just dreams. He told himself they were just the fever of a mind struggling to process grief and failure and the slow, certain knowledge that everything he had been taught to believe was wrong.

PART II

Julien, his older brother, ran the plantation with a ruthlessness that William respected and feared. Julien had no dreams. He had only numbers and ledgers and the cold calculus of survival. He sold two slaves to pay the interest on the mortgage. He reduced the rations for the remaining workers. He hired white laborers to replace the slaves who had left, paying them in scrip that could only be spent at the company store.

"You're killing it," William said one evening, watching Julien count coins by the light of a kerosene lamp.

"I'm keeping it alive," Julien corrected. "There's a difference."

"Is there?"

Julien didn't answer. He never did when the conversation turned toward things he couldn't quantify.

Miss Adeline came to the house on a Sunday afternoon. She was William's cousin, twenty-six years old, and the only person in the family who had ever questioned the system that was slowly strangling them. She taught at a girls' school in New Orleans, where she learned to read and write and think questions she was not supposed to think.

She brought books—novels by northern writers, newspapers that spoke of abolition and equality and a future that the South refused to imagine. She sat with William on the porch and read to him in a voice that was calm and clear and full of a certainty that William found both comforting and terrifying.

"Do you believe in omens?" she asked him one afternoon, closing a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

"I used to," William said. "Before I started having the dreams."

"What kind of dreams?"

He told her. He told her about the armies and the fires and the machines and the divided country. He told her about seeing the South lose, losing everything, losing the world he had been born into.

She listened without interrupting, and when he finished, she was quiet for a long time.

"Marie Laveau wants to see you," she said finally.

PART III

Marie Laveau lived in the French Quarter, in a house that smelled of herbs and smoke and something older than either of those. She was forty years old, mixed-race, powerful in a way that had nothing to do with money or property or the kind of power that could be measured and counted.

She looked at William with eyes that had seen too much and understood too much, and she smiled a smile that was both kind and sad.

"You carry the blood of the seen-ones," she said. "Your grandmother was one. Her mother was one. Going back, all the way to the beginning, when the first Beauregard came to this land and sat down on this river and decided he was going to make it his."

"What does that mean?" William asked. "These dreams—are they real?"

"They are what they are," Marie said. "Not magic. Not madness. Something in between. Your family has always been able to see—sometimes clearly, sometimes in fragments. It is not a gift. It is not a curse. It is simply what your blood does."

"Can it stop?"

"No. But you can choose what to do with what you see."

William thought about this. He thought about Julien and the plantation and the ledger and the cold calculus of survival. He thought about Adeline and her books and her certainty that the world could be different. He thought about the dreams of armies and fires and machines and a country torn apart by something deeper than cotton or money or politics.

He thought about the people on the plantation—the slaves who worked the fields and the white laborers who fed the company store and the women who raised children in a world that told them they were less than human.

"What do you think I should do?" he asked Marie.

She shook her head. "I am not here to tell you what to do. I am here to tell you that what you see is real, and that you are not crazy, and that you are not alone. The rest is up to you."

PART IV

The war came in 1861, exactly as William had seen it in his dreams. The South seceded. The armies gathered. The machines began to kill.

Julien joined the Confederate army, taking with him three of the plantation's able-bodied slaves, whom he promised freedom if they carried supplies and ammunition to the front lines. William stayed home. He could not bring himself to fight for a system he had come to believe was wrong, and he could not bring himself to fight against a home that had been his only identity for twenty-eight years.

So he stayed. He tended the plantation in Julien's absence. He watched the cotton wither. He watched the slaves leave one by one, slipping into the swamp at night and following the river north. He watched the house decay, the columns crack further, the verandas sag lower, until one day a storm came and took the entire west wing, and William stood on the porch and watched it fall into the river and knew that this was what endings felt like.

Adeline left in 1862, before the war turned bad, before the Union armies came closer and closer and the Confederate defeats became more frequent and more humiliating. She went north to teach, and she wrote William letters that he answered with increasing brevity as the months passed and the world shrank around him.

The last letter she sent him read: "You saw this coming, didn't you? You saw it and you couldn't stop it. But you stayed. You stayed and you tended the land and you cared for the people who were left. That is something. That is more than most men would do."

William burned the letter after he read it. Not out of anger, but out of a shame so deep it had no language. He had seen the future and he had done nothing. He had known the South would lose and he had done nothing. He had watched his brother fight for a cause that was wrong and he had done nothing.

The war ended in 1865. The slaves were freed. The plantation was gone. Julien did not come home. William stood in the fields where the cotton had once grown and felt nothing except the wind and the sun and the weight of a future he had not seen and could not imagine.

He wrote in his father's ledger, on the last blank page: "I saw what was coming. I told no one, because no one would have listened. I did nothing, because I did not know what to do. But I am still here, and the river still flows, and the land is still here, waiting for whoever comes next to decide what to do with it."

He closed the ledger. He walked back to the house, or what was left of it. He sat on the remaining porch and watched the Mississippi flow south, toward the sea, toward the future, toward whatever came after the end of the world he had known.

The jazz music began in the French Quarter that year, born from grief and joy and the impossible human ability to create beauty from ruin. William heard it on the wind, carried up the river on a night that was warm and still and full of the sound of a new world being born.

He closed his eyes and listened. And for the first time in fifteen years, he did not dream.