A story told before every Richmond Survival Camp, so that those who come may understand what they are walking toward, though never quite enough to be ready for it.
A note, from whoever first wrote this down:
Every town has a story it tells about itself, and most of them are lies dressed up as history, the kind of lie that gets kinder with each retelling, until nobody remembers there was ever a sharper truth underneath. Richmond has one of those stories too. We tell it every year, a little differently, a little softer, right up until the year we don't.
This is the story as it has been pieced together, from newspaper morgues gone brittle at the edges, from testimony given to men who didn't believe a word of it, from things certain families do not discuss at their own dinner tables, and from an old woman who used to sit on her porch on Miller Street and tell it to any child who'd sit still long enough to listen, always ending the same way: "and that, sweetheart, is why we don't go near the fairground after dark."
Read it before you come to camp. It will not tell you what you're walking into. Nothing can do that. But it will tell you why, and in Richmond, the why has always mattered more than anyone wanted it to.