Not long after dark, he came around the houses. The door to our shotgun house creaked open, waking all of us. We all knew what the midnight creak meant. Old man Chapman slipped in on more than one occasion, usually when Aunt Clara was on her monthlies. It was a roll of the bones who would be selected. I hadn’t been of age and had not aroused their attention. But now, he saw me with that look men got when they were heated up. He stood over my pallet. The other women rolled away, turning their backs and closing their eyes. Sorry for me, but relieved they hadn’t been chosen. He crawled on top of me, all pawing hands, his weight pinning me as he grabbed at me. All I could think about was the stirring in my belly. I clawed and gave him what for. He came away from the houses, like a scalded bear. Folks whispered about it all through the night. But all I could think was that, if you wounded a bear, you better kill it.
Lord Jesus, have mercy on this poor, old soul of mine.
§
Every colored in the field knew that Marse Chapman was a thunder cloud waiting to break wide open and rain anger on us all. His eyes followed me everywhere, burning worse than the noontime sun. No one dared get near me, like I carried a “whupping plague” they could catch. He waited, patient as the wily serpent he was. Lord, how cruel that man was.
One day, without warning, young Marse Chapman spat and cussed something fierce, yelling about how we coloreds have forgot who was in charge. Leaping down from that big horse of his, he went after Zias. He didn’t care that Zias wasn’t one of his own. He was property, and Marse Chapman could always settle up what he owed. All the ruckus drew Mrs. Annallynn and Aunt Clara from the house.
All I thought of was how Poppa …
… was a big man, strong and tall like an oak tree. When he took my hand, he swallowed me up like Jonah and the whale. Poppa worked leather, and, on that day, as Poppa fixed Marse Chapman’s riding harness, the heat got to him. He fell over and tore the harness beyond repair. Now, iffen Poppa had been in his right mind, he’d have known Marse Chapman would have just had him make a new one. Uncle Moses had already gotten a talking to about damaging Marse Chapman’s valuable coloreds. With his heat-addled mind, all Poppa knew was that bullwhip.
So, he ran.
Uncle Moses got out those loud, slobbering hound dogs and chased after Poppa. He caught him down by the caves, trying to lose his scent in the water. Dragging him in front of all the field coloreds, Uncle Moses took a piece of iron with little holes in it what he called the “slut.” He filled the holes up with tallow and shoved it in the fire ’til the grease got sizzling hot. Then he held it over poor Poppa’s back and let that hot grease drip on his hide. Every time I close my eyes I could still hear that scream.
After that came the whupping.
Uncle Moses brought his arm up high and held his bullwhip there. All the field coloreds gathered around. We’d recognized that delighted glint in his eyes, like a preacher caught up with the Spirit. He waited until he had our full attention, and …
… let that whip fall hard on Zias’ back. The first stroke of that whip was always the loudest, the one that made everyone jump. Lord Jesus, that first lick. He let loose a soul scream, crying out for all of us. His skin split open, a busted seam along his back, sputtering blood like a gutted hog.
Zias’ back arched, drawing away from the bite of the whip. His knuckles turned white as he gripped the air. Tears rolled down his face.
Marse Chapman whupped him with the passion of a man knowing his wife.
Some turned away, they knew how things usually went: the thirty lashes, rubbing salt over his wounds, throwing the poor colored in the stock house, maybe chain him up a couple days with nothing to eat iffen the punishment was to be more severe.
Zias stared up at him, his soft eyes fading. Only two words formed on his lips. “Pray, Marse.”
Young Marse Chapman paused when Zias murmured that. From the confused look on his face, he wasn’t sure what Zias meant.
“You coloreds have forgotten how to work, and I aims to teach you.”
Young Marse Chapman hitched Zias to a plow. Slipping a bit into his mouth and jerked him about by it, he worked poor Zias like a mule, beating him bloody and sore. Zias never ran off, neither. I read it in his eyes: he feared iffen he left, Marse Chapman would only turn on me.
Suddenly, Zias’ big body slumped. Zias was dead.
Marse Chapman told us to leave him where he lie, as an example, and, iffen we moved him, he’d do the same to someone else. So no one touched him.
§
Lord have mercy on my soul.
§
To hear Aunt Clara tell it, when the universe was created, powerful stones soaked up the magic of creation. Like lightning striking the earth, they fell, bringing with them sparks of magic. Life and spirit fused, things of power. Lord, how she’d hunch over one of her chosen stones, painting it, doting on it like it was a baby. I wanted her to help me make one not too long after Zias died. It was a way to capture a piece of a person, to always remember them. I asked, “How do you know which stones have power?”
“You’ll know. It’s like the stone chooses you,” she said.
§
Marse Chapman wasn’t through with me, especially not after he noticed the swoll of my belly. The devil was patient.
“Soon as your baby comes. I will have you. And then you’ll know The Swing.”
When it came to cruelty, he studied better than a scientist. Marse Chapman had heard tell of other farms using something like it to punish their coloreds. They stripped a body before they whupped them, always trying to find different ways to take your dignity. They wanted the world to see you naked. I knew Marse Chapman would take special joy in tearing off my clothes in front of the other field colored, leaving me plum naked and humiliated.
“And then I’ll sell that little nigger baby of yours.”
§
The midnight creak didn’t send a shiver through me. I’d snuck out like I was due to help someone across the river. Instead, I went to the big house. Aunt Clara let me in but didn’t meet my gaze. I slinked up to young Marse Chapman’s room. Marse Chapman snored lightly beneath me, undisturbed by the creak because he never had to be. He slept sound, wrapped in his privilege of being born a Chapman. He’d known birthdays, his Poppa, his Mammy. He’d never tasted a bullwhip. He might find a love and have a child and be able to know them in peace.
He was allowed to dream.
The stone grew heavy in my hand. I smashed it down on his head hard as I could. Marse Chapman raised up out of bed, his arms flailed in his sheets like a ghost flapping in the breeze. I brought the stone to bear again, but the light had gone out of his eyes. He tumbled forward, toppling off the bed, bashing his head against the night stand.
I was certain he went to hell, even though I didn’t know how the devil could stand him.
§
No, I don’t know how I felt. Sometimes you were better off not feeling. Feelings could grind you up, leaving you nothing but … I feared the hate. I feared that hate might one day eat me up. The truth had a way of coming out, no matter how long you let a lie settle into you. So, I vowed I’d always remember how easy it was to hold a life in your hand and what not cherishing life could drive a body to do.
I waited all the next day for them to come round me up. I prepared myself to cross the Jordan and meet my Lord. But no one came. Mrs. Annalynn found him. Told everyone that he had a spell and fell out of bed. She walked right by me, glanced at my belly, and moved on.
§
My spirit stone chose me, and I chose Marse Chapman. It was Zias’ grave marker since Marse Chapman wouldn’t allow no proper grave. So, now he watched over Zias.
§
Lord Jesus, it was an awful business belonging to folks body and soul. Then one day, one of them Union boys, all tired and pale, came up to us.
“You’re free,” he said.
“No, you just having fun with us,” I said. I don’t think I understood what he was trying to tell
us.
He didn’t have much patience for my foolishness. “You’re as free as I am.”
Lord, how we sang and danced. I wanted to move across the river to put the plantation behind me and explore the world. But the Chapman house was all I knew, and I was afraid to leave it behind. It broke and bowed everyone. They never walked the same, a bent to their spirit as if they’d never be quite whole. The fear would always haunt me. That fear of the night reaching out, covering my mouth and dragging me back to that life. At night, low moans and cries might snap you fully awake, each sob picking a scab on your soul. Just cause some law said we weren’t a slave no more don’t mean everyone obeyed it.
So I stayed, ministering to my spirit stone. A memory kept for safekeeping. A pain so deep, it lost all meaning. A bit of Marse Chapman’s spirit bound to it. to remind him that he was bound to me. Kept. Owned. In the cool of night, I could still feel the heat of his hate, but that was all right. I brushed the leaves from him and let him rest.
Lord have mercy on my soul.
A Soldier’s Story
July 23, 1895 – Parsons, Indiana
“There are things …” he started to say, but how do you begin such a horrific tale to one so young? “Once upon a time, there was a town under the spell of …” Of what? Unsettling madness?
He casually stroked her downy, blonde hair, as if appreciating her beauty for the first time. Her small wood hewn bed framed her like an idyllic picture, just as he always imagined it would. Though it was the dream from a different life, he mentally pictured this very scene a hundred times. It inspired him to labor on when he hand-crafted each piece. He knew the nine months would pass too quickly when he started working the wood, and he wanted it to be perfect. Whittling away long, devoted hours on the headboard alone, he lamented that his skill didn’t match his passion. Translating what he imagined into what he carved: a broad willow tree in a field of blooming flowers. Where better for his child to lay her slumbering head? She slept, innocent against the backdrop of violence, mayhem, and blood. It always came back to blood, so much of it on his own, still trembling hands. A miasma of despair, grief, and guilt, he only distantly recognized the hollow sounding voice as his own. He pressed on with the telling of the tale anyway.
“I’ve committed some awful things. Deeds of which I am not proud. Things a child ought not to hear. But things which I must tell you anyway.
“It hurts to remember, like a dull headache you get when someone wakes you too quickly from a nightmare. The story begins with Holten Owensby. That opportunistic devil.”
She grimaced in her sleep, furtive sounds escaping as she jostled her blanket. Only then did he realize how sharp his words had become. No matter how many generations down the line she may be, she was still kin.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered as he brushed her head with his hand, “but I have known the truth about that demon in men’s flesh for far too long and kept silent. He couldn’t wait for his father, a good man, mind you, to die before he started spending his money. A few financial setbacks had put him in a state most foul. He was one of the investors in the railroad endeavor through Parsons that slowly proved itself to be a Pyrrhic race. You knew, for those who wanted to know or cared to look, from the leer in his eyes that he had killed in his time. And that kill was still on his mind. Deep-set grey eyes, like murky reflecting pools hidden by shadow. His spare silver hair combed back to vainly disguise his bald top. His face swirled of shadows and distrust, helped in no part by his overgrown mustache that gave him the appearance of a character from a dime store western.
“Parsons was a sleepy little hollow, with aspirations of being a city. The last shot from the Civil War still echoed in the air as people moved there. It was the perfect place for a man with a history he wished to forget to lose himself in. Free Negroes and escaped slaves settled the area just outside of the town. A few log cabins and meager shanties, more of an encampment than a town, but it was theirs. As Parsons boomed, so did the Scott settlement. That was all they wanted. We should’ve seen that. And they knew their place. Most of the time they contented themselves doing the jobs that no white man wanted to do. It was not as if they did not know that the Sheriff and his boys could come in and settle any disputes any way they saw fit. Such was the relationship between Parsons and the Scott settlement, like a town and her shadow. With the arrival of the trains, Parsons expected its growth spurt to continue.
“But there were only so many train jobs.”
She slept, undisturbed in the glow of pale moonlight. Angelic. An ideal worth protecting.
“I was not worried about myself. I kept to myself, never wanting to draw too much attention. You live a life as long as I have, you learn a few things. I was tired of wars, whether they were revolutionary or civil. It was on such a field of battle where I was changed. It was easy to hide and feed among such death. Soldiering was all I knew. No, that wasn’t true. Mine was the business of death and I was tiring of it. I tried to change, and I returned home. Folks didn’t care about my peculiarities of habit and hours kept because I was the best furniture maker in these parts, ’cept’n maybe them folks in Amish country. Plenty of call for me, too, with all the newfound money people were making, not to mention the old monied families desiring to expand their interests. My neighbors, my friends, however, they worried for their jobs, their futures, and how they would take care of their families. People only grumbled, as they were wont to do, when jostled on the street, feelin’ too pressed in by the Scott settlement. But that fear always simmered underneath. That ‘it could all be taken away’ fear; and just cause times were good and no one was goin’ hungry don’t mean that fear had gone. Fear that Holten preyed on.
“It was an election year, and, of course, there had been some lively electioneering going on in these parts during Cleveland’s campaign. Folks knew that all of those Republican-voting Negroes were going to turn out in hordes come election day. That didn’t sit well with many folks, especially those who already believed that with all the Negroes migrating here, they were going to vote away jobs from the local people. People thought they were going to lose their jobs. They thought … what was said about their women and children … terrible things. It was no excuse, I just wanted you to understand. You would think they had enough to fear with the things that moved in the night. The creatures they whispered about around the hearth fires. But fear blinds men to their reality. Fear snakes through them, takes hold of their heart and drives them to do dark things in its name. That was the nature of humanity.
“The sun, bold and bright, made for only a cool, sad day. We crammed into the courthouse, miserably hot because so many concerned citizens showed up. We had people at the door that only allowed Parsons locals in. Labor leaders fine-tuned the organ of resentment for Holten to soon come play. Rumors tore through the town presenting problems only politicians promised to fix. Rumors that more Negroes were due to be imported in from others states, to steal men’s jobs. The mood became more hostile as the sun squat in the sky.
“Then that devil Holten stood up.
“‘Parsons has changed,’ he said, ‘and is no longer safe for good folk. Right now, in our jail, sits an animal guilty of murder.’
“‘Murder?’ ‘Who?’ The whispers scattered like crickets in the night.
“Holten paused, letting the weight of his words carry, his fingers deftly dancing along the organ. He slowly revealed how earlier that day, Samuel Demory, an ax buried in his neck, was found dead. The blade did not match the savagery of the wound, the veins almost mutilated in the frenzy, but that didn’t matter. The ax belonged to his long time workman, Ezekiel Walker. The same man guilty of … deeds most vile against Samuel’s daughter, Rebecca. She still rested in shock, being treated by her mother at the Demory place. Rebecca Demory. She had spark,, that girl did. Her aristocratic manner she used to try and put on never once hid the gentle soul that did not hesitate to reach out to people. She stirred things within any who saw her. Made it difficult for
them to keep their hungers at bay, no matter how God-fearing or disciplined they were.
“‘Our women, our daughters, are not safe. How long will the good folks of Parsons suffer this?’ Holten asked. ‘Our women desire protection, and this is the only way we’ll get it.’”
The man paused, stroking the curls of the sleeping girl. The rise and fall of her chest came in regular, even breaths. The way the moonlight fell on her face, swathing her like a shroud, only made her seem more winsome. More vital.
“If it hadn’t have been this, it would have been something else. I know it in my soul. When you have a room full of blasting powder, the kind of spark doesn’t matter. By late afternoon, the paper ran an editorial: ‘Nab Negro for Attacking Girl.’ The fact that he was already ‘nabbed’ and in jail eluded everyone. The article demanded—without actually calling for—the lynching of the Negro that very night. It ran beside a cartoon of Negroes bribed with beer, chicken, and watermelons carted in to be new voters to the area and steal jobs.
“Because apparently the flames apparently needed a little more fuel.
“Holten deputized everyone. It didn’t seem to matter that he couldn’t deputize his big toe much less anyone else. ‘Niggers were guilty of crimes against whites,’ he shouted to any doubters, ‘that was all the authority I need.’ The women, in their Sunday dresses—all calico and sunbonnets—paraded alongside us as if on their way to a show. A town full of good people, decent people, now overwhelmed by the sudden conviction of the rightness of their actions.
“My convictions, I thought, were unshakeable. I lived by a simple code which kept me alive for so long. To hear people murmur, there was no doubt that, come the next morning, they would be able to stand by what they did to that ‘rabid beast,’ Ezekiel. No one felt any sorrow over righting that wrong. But their shame was soon coming.
The Voices of Martyrs Page 5
