The assault and murder of Sara Tidwell

The assault and murder of Sara Tidwell is the historical crime at the heart of the haunting connected to Sara Laughs: Jared Devore and other white men assault Sara, and Kito is drowned when he comes upon the attack. The scene’s later recovery turns a history treated as distant local rumor into a specific account of racial violence, communal complicity, and the cost of silence.

The community Sara entered

At the turn of the twentieth century, more than forty Black people had settled near Dark Score Lake. Most were related, many were musicians, and the group included members of The Red-Tops, later known as Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops. Son Tidwell negotiated the purchase of the meadow and adjoining lakeside land from Douglas Day, using money the group had saved over ten years. Their settlement was not an encampment but a community of neat white cabins around a larger building that may have served as a meeting place, rehearsal room, or performance hall.

The settlement had met open resistance. Townspeople held a protest meeting against what they called the arrival of Black people in a horde, although the cabins that followed did not match the feared image of a shantytown. The group performed around western Maine for more than a year, perhaps close to two, and its members were popular on the local circuit. At home, however, the terms of acceptance remained conditional: residents praised Black neighbors for paying bills, keeping to themselves, and not accepting charity. That formula of grudging tolerance offered no protection when racial hostility became violence.

Sara walked along The Street despite being warned away. The account of Jared’s resentment makes clear that her presence and her refusal to act as though she had no right to be there provoked him. Yet the town’s social boundary was less absolute than its racist rules pretended: people spoke with Sara about crops, women showed her their babies and asked her advice, and men watched her. The assault emerges from that contradiction—some everyday contact and attraction coexist with a racial order that treats Sara’s equal presence as an offense.

The attack on The Street

Jared Devore is the central instigator. When he falls and splits his trousers, Sara laughs; he responds by striking her, and the men with him join in. Ben Merrill and Oren Peebles help restrain her, while Harry Auster and others participate in the assault. Jared gives orders and directs the group, including telling the others to move Sara farther from the path. The men’s conduct is not an isolated confrontation: they use their numbers and the authority Jared assumes to control a Black woman who is alone on a public route.

Sara resists and tries to call for help. Jared threatens her, and when she laughs again at his inability to sexually assault her, he strikes her once more. Her laughter, a defining part of how she is remembered, persists even under threat; it is at once a response that enrages Jared and a refusal to let his power dictate her perception. The narrative frames that laughter as the point at which Jared’s violence escalates, not as a cause that excuses or diminishes the attackers’ responsibility.

Kito arrives while the assault is underway. He is eight years old, carrying a bucket after picking berries, and calls out to his mother. Sara urges him to run and seek help. Jared chokes her while Harry Auster takes hold of Kito; the other men hesitate briefly, but Harry ultimately carries the child into the lake and drowns him. The attack thus becomes a double murder: Sara is assaulted and killed, and her son is killed for witnessing the crime and being present to help her.

Memory, concealment, and belated disclosure

The crime enters the later narrative through more than one kind of evidence. Newspaper clippings about Sara and the Red-Tops preserve public descriptions of the performers, but those descriptions are shaped by racist caricature. Sara is presented as an exotic figure for white audiences, while the group is praised in language that turns prejudice into seemingly genial entertainment. The clippings do not explain why the group left the area, leaving the central violence outside the public account.

The gap matters because local memory is neither absent nor openly shared. Bill Dean says that Jo could have investigated Sara and the others without offending people, then admits that he never saw anything she wrote and is unsure whether she wrote at all. His account distinguishes Sara’s story from the local tragedy of Kerry Auster: the former is treated as the story of outsiders, while the latter touches residents who could still be hurt. In the narrator’s interpretation, Bill’s hesitation also reveals the racial insult he avoids saying aloud. The crime is therefore preserved unevenly: the town can remember enough to fear reopening the past while leaving its most damaging facts unspoken.

The account of the attack is finally recovered during a supernatural struggle in the present. As the narrator works to expose what has been buried, Sara’s history unfolds alongside Jo’s effort to hold back a threatening presence. The remembered murder and the immediate danger are intercut, binding the earlier crime to the haunting rather than treating it as a self-contained historical episode. Sara’s voice and Kito’s death become evidence against the story the community allowed to stand in their place.

Aftermath and significance

The evidence establishes that Sara and Kito’s fate remained bound to the community’s racial hierarchy and its habit of protecting local reputation. The surviving newspaper material records performances and condescending praise, not the circumstances behind the group’s departure. Bill’s distinction between local victims and wanderers from away similarly reproduces a boundary that makes some suffering easier to dismiss. The silence is not simply a lack of records; it is shaped by whose injuries the town regards as its own concern.

Sara and the Red-Tops left after playing county fairs in the late summer of 1901. Their cabins later provided rental income for the Day family until they burned in the fires of 1933. That later loss closes the physical trace of the settlement, but it does not resolve the suppressed history. The assault and murder remain the moral and narrative origin of Sara Laughs’ haunting: the remembered violence forces the present to confront what the town’s polite talk of peace, privacy, and self-reliance had helped conceal.