The Red-Tops

The Red-Tops were a Black musical group who stayed at Dark Score Lake with Sara Tidwell and performed there. Their history reaches the present in two forms: as music that can be heard again in a supernatural manifestation, and as a damaged, partial record of a family tragedy that local memory and written histories have failed to preserve fully. The group’s presence therefore makes the past audible while exposing how little the surrounding community has acknowledged about what happened to them.

Identity and Musical Style

The surviving descriptions distinguish the Red-Tops from a conventional Dixieland band. A historical account by Osteen calls them a Dixie-Land octet, but the narrator judges that label inaccurate: although the group may have played some Dixieland, it was primarily a blues group on Friday and Saturday nights and a gospel group on Sunday mornings. The label compresses a varied musical life into a convenient category, and the account itself proves unreliable as a complete record of the band.

In one manifestation at Sara Laughs, the music begins with a primitive, reeling sound reminiscent of Dixieland but without horns. Three or four acoustic guitars, harmonica, and two upright basses form the ensemble; the lively percussion sounds as though it comes from someone striking boxes rather than from a conventional drum. Sara’s rough contralto joins the instruments, and the narrator recognizes her as the singer, despite her never having made a record. The performance makes a lost musical history present without turning it into a recording or a written archive.

The group’s instrumental character becomes especially distinct in the basses’ barnyard shuffle and the guitar solo by Son Tidwell, whose playing is described as a chickenscratch style. These details resist the generalized Dixie-Land label: the music is remembered through particular sounds and performers, not simply through a borrowed genre name.

Sara Tidwell and the Group’s Performances

Sara sings with the Red-Tops, and their shared performance at Sara Laughs is bound to the property’s physical setting. The group has set up its bandstand in the driveway by the sound, near the place where George Footman later parked to serve the narrator with a subpoena. As the narrator descends the railroad-tie steps toward the lake, the band’s music recedes behind him. Japanese lanterns hang above the path, casting red, blue, and green circles of light; night-blooming roses in flower boxes appear blue beneath them.

Sara’s song at the scene is identified with the Manderley song. Its bridge carries an exuberant, bawdy lyric, while the singer laughs through the nonsense rhymes. The song first comes across as a vivid performance, then fades until its words can no longer be made out. At that point, the lake’s sounds become clearer: water against the rocks, a hollow clunk from the canisters beneath the swimming float, and a loon calling from the dark. The transition from band music to lakeside sounds places the group’s performance within the same landscape that holds the story’s unresolved history.

The song and the lanterns recur later as remembered elements of the Red-Tops’ former presence. At the edge of Tidwell’s Meadow, the narrator imagines the group’s cabins, guitars, voices, laughter, and lanterns as if the band were nearly there again. This is not a new, independently documented performance but part of his sense that time has grown thin: the past can feel adjacent to the present, and the group’s music becomes one of the means by which that adjacency is expressed.

The Child’s Death and the Departure

A local account connects the group’s history to the death of Son Tidwell’s only child. The boy was injured in an animal trap and later died of blood poisoning. The account given to the narrator says the trap wound held him for much of a day before he was found; although the foot was saved, infection followed. The incident is dated to the summer of 1901, and the child is remembered as a boy who remained, in ghostly form, on the TR after the band left.

Osteen’s account supplies a separate, imperfect confirmation: it says that a child died of blood poisoning from a trap wound and identifies him as Son Tidwell’s only child. It also reports that the guitar player’s given name was Reginald and that the Tidwells had supposedly come north from Storyville, the New Orleans district known around the turn of the century for its clubs and brothels. The accounts overlap on the child’s death but do not make the group’s history complete; in particular, the narrator notes that the boy is unnamed in Osteen’s account.

The group’s departure is associated with the tragedy. In the local recollection, the Red-Tops left because the loss made it too sad to stay. The family and band are thus remembered not simply as people who passed through the region, but as people whose departure followed a death that remained attached to the place. The account that the boy’s ghost stayed on the TR extends that attachment beyond the band’s physical presence.

Incomplete Records and Racial Silence

The Red-Tops’ history is difficult to recover from the written sources the narrator consults. Osteen’s two-page summary is colorful but thin, and its description of the group as a Dixie-Land octet does not match the narrator’s understanding of their blues and gospel performances. A more formal history of Castle County does not mention Sara and the Red-Tops at all. Neither book mentions Kenny Auster’s drowned younger brother, another absence that underscores the incompleteness of the local record.

The narrator also confronts Bill Dean about what earlier generations did to Sara Tidwell and her family. Bill denies that they were driven away, saying they moved on themselves; he repeats his father’s racist generalization about Black people as a way of explaining their departure. Asked whether his father or Fred set the trap that killed Son Tidwell’s boy, Bill says he does not know what the narrator means. The exchange does not establish who set the trap, and Bill’s denial does not resolve the question. It does show how a community account can convert an unresolved history into a dismissive explanation while leaving responsibility unspoken.

The Red-Tops consequently occupy an uneasy position in the novel’s memory: their music returns with specificity, but the documentary record reduces or omits them, and the surviving recollections preserve the child’s death without identifying who caused it. Their performances and the spectral persistence associated with the TR counter that erasure. The group’s presence binds sound, place, and historical silence together, making the past perceptible without pretending that its missing facts have been recovered.