Turn of the 20th century (1900–1901)

Turn of the 20th century (1900–1901) is the historical period in which Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops established a settlement beside Dark Score Lake, performed across western Maine, and eventually left the area. Its decisive significance lies in the contrast between the community the group made for itself and the white town’s conditional tolerance: the settlers acquired land, built orderly cabins, and became popular performers, yet their acceptance was framed by racial hostility, social distance, and the local ideal of refusing charity. Their music endured after the people themselves disappeared from the region, while the reason they left remained unknown.

Settlement and Local Opposition

According to local historian Marie Hingerman and a county history published in 1977, more than forty Black people settled in the area around the turn of the century, though the account notes that their stay was temporary. Most were related, and many belonged to a musical group that had first been called the Red-Top Boys and later Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops. They bought Tidwell's Meadow and a substantial stretch of lakeside land from Douglas Day. Sonny Tidwell, who negotiated the purchase and played what was then called chickenscratch guitar, said the money had been saved over ten years.

The purchase provoked a public uproar. Residents held a meeting to protest what they called the arrival of Black people “in a Horde.” The feared shantytown never materialized: instead, the settlers built neat white cabins around a larger structure that may have served as a meeting place, rehearsal room, or performance hall. The physical settlement answered the town’s expectations with visible order, but did not erase the prejudice that had accompanied the newcomers’ arrival.

The local account describes accommodation as a miserly peace rather than an embrace. The group’s neighbors might point to bills paid, dogs left alone, or the settlers keeping to themselves, and treat these as sufficient grounds for toleration. The supposed virtue that completed this reckoning was that they did not take charity. In that formulation, inclusion depended on self-sufficiency and social separation: the community could accept the settlers so long as they did not make claims on its resources or intimacy.

Music, Reputation, and Sara’s Name

The band’s membership was fluid, changing from performance to performance and sometimes including a Red-Top Girl. Sara and the Red-Tops played around western Maine for more than a year, perhaps closer to two, appearing in towns including Farmington, Skowhegan, Bridgton, Gates Falls, Castle Rock, Morton, and Fryeburg. Their old posters continued to surface at barn bazaars and junk shops, evidence that their popularity outlasted their residence at the lake.

At some point Sara became known as Sara Laughs. The name links her to the laughter that became a lasting feature of her reputation, but the historical record presented in the novel is incomplete: her songs were never recorded. Their survival instead takes the form of memory, stories, and later musical echoes. One song, “Walk Me Baby,” is said to bear a remarkable resemblance to Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.” The music thus persists without an authoritative recording or a settled account of its origins.

The narrator’s encounter with a hand-tinted photograph gives this history a face but also emphasizes the distance between the image and the person. Sara appears smiling, eyes half closed, with a guitar string over one shoulder; a musician in a sharply angled derby and a washtub bass stand behind her. The photograph is not a color document from Sara’s time but a later reconstruction. Its carefully colored surface cannot settle what Sara looked like in life, just as the stories attached to her cannot be verified with certainty.

Racialized Memory and Historical Silence

The surviving descriptions of the group carry the language of the white society that recorded them. Newspaper clippings call the performers “our Southern blackbirds” and “our rhythmic darkies,” and praise Sara as a “marvelous figure of a Negro woman” whose “animal high spirits” fascinated local audiences. The apparent compliments remain expressions of racial stereotyping: the performers are presented as exotic objects for white readers rather than as artists whose own accounts of their lives survive. The clippings are reviews, but their genial tone does not make their contempt less visible.

Later recollection preserves the same contradiction between public familiarity and social othering. A story passed down by the owner of the local garage claimed that his father won a teddy bear at the Castle County Fair and gave it to Sara, who rewarded him with a kiss. The narrator doubts that the kiss happened publicly as described, while acknowledging that no witness can now confirm or disprove it. The tale turns Sara into a figure of local legend, but its uncertainty also exposes how little reliable testimony remains about her encounters with white residents.

The narrator explicitly contrasts the labels used for Sara across historical periods, from later terms for Black identity to the slurs common in her own time. That shifting vocabulary makes the act of remembrance itself part of the subject: the past is not recovered in neutral language, but filtered through the racial assumptions of each era and through a present-day effort to recognize those assumptions. The community could celebrate Sara’s performance and circulate stories about her while keeping her outside its social center.

Departure and Afterlife

After playing one or two county fairs in the late summer of 1901, the extended family left the TR. The account gives no reason for the departure. Their cabins remained after they were gone and provided summer-rental income for the Day family until 1933, when fires charred the eastern and northern sides of the lake and burned the buildings. The settlement’s visible traces were therefore temporary twice over: first abandoned by its residents, then erased by fire.

The departure is narrated as an apparent ending, but the music refuses that closure. The songs lived on in local memory even though the performers disappeared from the area and no recordings fixed their sound. Much later, the narrator hears Sara and the Red-Tops in a vision of the past, where her singing laughter seems to shade into a snarl. The return of the music makes the period more than background history: it is a buried presence that reaches into the novel’s present, carrying both cultural memory and the unresolved violence that the town’s respectable accounts leave unspoken.