Sara Tidwell

Sara Tidwell, known as Sara Laughs, was a Black singer and guitarist who performed with the Red-Top Boys and left a musical legacy despite never recording. Her family and fellow musicians settled for a time at Tidwell's Meadow on Dark Score Lake, where the community’s history was later reduced to partial records and local stories. In the novel’s present, Sara’s unresolved murder and the death of her child return as a haunting force: her music is heard again, her presence confronts Michael Noonan, and the truth of what happened to her becomes inseparable from the lake’s buried past.

Identity and Historical Record

At the turn of the twentieth century, more than forty Black people settled at Tidwell's Meadow, having bought the land from Douglas Day with money saved over ten years. Most were related, and many were musicians in a changing ensemble first called The Red-Top Boys and later Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops. The group played around western Maine for more than a year, perhaps closer to two, and remained locally remembered through old posters and stories even though Sara never made a record.

The surviving picture of Sara offers an arresting but incomplete likeness: she stands with her guitar, her expression difficult to read, and her image carries more historical weight than the surviving written accounts. Michael notes that the labels applied to her changed across eras, while the language used in contemporary newspaper reviews exposes the racism through which white audiences framed her. Those reviews call the band “our Southern blackbirds” and describe Sara through racialized stereotypes, even as they praise her performance. The records preserve evidence that she was seen and heard, but they also show how readily her individuality was filtered through the prejudices of the people writing about her.

Music, Community, and Departure

The Red-Tops’ musical life was not fixed to a single lineup or style. Membership shifted between performances, and the group played blues on Friday and Saturday nights and gospel on Sunday mornings; accounts that classify them simply as a Dixieland octet miss that breadth. Sara’s songs circulated without recordings. “Fishin Blues,” identified as her composition, was performed by Sara and the Red-Top Boys and later covered by musicians including Ma Rainey and the Lovin' Spoonful. Its double meanings also establish the raunchy comic register associated with some of her writing.

The band and its community initially found a place at Tidwell's Meadow despite a public protest against their arrival. Rather than the shantytown locals had anticipated, the settlement consisted of neat white cabins around a larger building that may have served as a meeting place, rehearsal space, or performance hall. Sara and the Red-Tops played across the region and lived on the TR for a period, but after performing at county fairs in late summer 1901 the group moved on. Their cabins later provided summer rental income to the Day family until they burned in the 1933 fires. The settlement ended, but its music and the stories attached to it did not.

Sara in the Present and the Past

Sara’s history reaches Michael through different kinds of evidence: photographs, local testimony, newspaper clippings, remembered stories, and supernatural experience. A local account recalls the boy belonging to one of the Red-Tops who died after being caught in an animal trap; later research identifies the child as Reg Tidwell, Junior, and ties his death to the band’s departure. Michael studies a photograph of Sara and wonders about the relationships among her, Son Tidwell, and the boy, but the image does not settle those questions. The historical record remains fragmentary, and the narrative distinguishes between what can be established and what Michael can only infer.

That uncertainty is part of Sara’s narrative presence. Michael compares his encounter with Sara’s image to the way the past can remain alluring precisely because no one can fully confirm its stories. The novel also links her to Robert Johnson through their musical afterlives and legends of a bargain with the Devil, an analogy that emphasizes how an artist may become mythologized where the record is incomplete. Yet Sara is not only an object of speculation: in the supernatural scenes, she is a voice and presence with force and intention.

Haunting and Conflict

During a strange, dreamlike episode at Sara Laughs, Michael hears a band with guitars, harmonica, bass, and percussion, followed by a woman’s urgent contralto. He recognizes the singer as Sara, despite knowing that she never recorded. The music accompanies a vision of a past performance at the lodge, making sound the means by which Sara’s erased history re-enters the present. The scene culminates in Michael’s descent toward the lake, where the music fades and another presence waits at The Street.

Sara’s appearances become more threatening as Michael’s connection to the buried history deepens. In a later vision at the Fryeburg Fair, he sees her alive and performing with the band; her presence then overwhelms him, and she sings a verse promising not to harm the little girl. The episode links Sara’s animosity to Kyra Devore and to the history behind the haunting. Sara also appears to Michael in bed during a storm, telling him she is almost back, before vanishing with the next flash of lightning. These encounters bring together attraction, menace, and the sense that her past is approaching a final reckoning.

The haunting is not confined to visions. When Michael hears Jo Noonan scream, the sound recedes as if it is being carried away, and later supernatural violence in Jo’s studio reveals Sara in direct conflict with Jo. Sara’s voice accuses Jo of intruding, while the room’s moving air and objects register their struggle. Michael understands that Sara is punishing Jo for interfering with her purpose. The scene makes the haunting an active confrontation, not merely a residue of old events.

Murder, Motive, and Release

The full account disclosed near the end is that Sara was raped and murdered, while her child was drowned as she lay dying. Her rage is directed at the descendants of the man she considers most culpable: Sara says that the worst man’s blood runs in Kyra and that she will not rest until it is removed. This motive turns the family’s present danger into a consequence of historical violence, while making clear that Sara’s grievance does not excuse her threat to a child.

Michael and Jo’s accumulated knowledge helps them act against the haunting. Jo’s message, “Lye stille,” points Michael to lye, and he pours it over the bones of Sara and her son. As the remains are destroyed, Sara’s supernatural hold is broken. The act brings her story to a terrible close, but not to a simple moral resolution: Michael says he would have protected Kyra at any cost, yet he also recognizes that Sara was herself the victim of rape and murder and that her child was killed. Her final significance lies in that unresolved conjunction. She is an artist whose work survived the limits imposed on her historical record, a victim whose story was concealed, and a vengeful presence whose return forces the living to confront what their community had left buried.