by Ron Carter
They stopped at sunset and ate roasted sweet potatoes dug by Primus. With dusk upon them, fearful of being seen by a roving British patrol, or Tories looking for rebels, Caleb scattered the small fire and stepped on the glowing embers until they were dead. Then the two men sat quietly in the growing darkness, listening for sounds other than the frogs and the insects, but there were none. The evening star came on, and then the moon and the endless scatter of stars overhead, and Caleb spoke quietly.
“You said you were on a plantation. A big one. Where?”
“Williamsburg. Nearby the Santee.”
“Santee?”
“River.”
“Far from here?”
“Don’t know ’zackly where we is. But it can’t be far. We movin’ into the sun each mornin’ an’ away from the sun each evenin’ so we goin’ the right direction. The Pee Dee north of the Santee. Maybe we find Massa Marion there somewhere. I hope so. I surely do.”
“What was grown on the plantation?”
“Rice first. Then when rice was poor they come with indigo.”
“Indigo?”
“Make color for clothes. No good to eat. Jus’ make clothes red.”
“Your family? You said you never knew your father.”
“Father sold off somewhere ’fore I come. Momma die birthin’ me. Never saw either one.”
“Who raised you?”
Primus shrugged in the darkness. “The others. Slaves. Toadie nurse me ’til one day she die. Us younguns without no momma or daddy sit in the corner and they give us scraps to eat. Workin’ in the rice when I was seven, wadin’ in the swamps settin’ sprouts in the spring, wadin’ in the swamps to gather it in the fall. Then they come with indigo, an’ I was swingin’ a hoe choppin’ holes in the fields to plant in the spring an pullin’ weeds through the sickly season an’ swingin’ a knife to gather it when it was growed full.”
A sense of sadness, then anger, rose inside Caleb. “How old are you?”
Primus shook his head. “Don’t know. Nobody keep writin’ of when animals is birthed.”
“Can you read?”
There was pride in the answer. “Some. I kin write some letters, too. Write my name. Read some of the Bible.”
“The Bible?”
“The Gulah Bible.”
“Gulah?”
“Bible wrote by slaves.”
“You said once you ran away from the plantation.”
“Twice. Caught me the firs’ time. Beat me good.”
“Whipped you?”
“With iron nails in the end. Long time healin’.”
“Why did you try it again?”
For a time Primus did not answer, and Caleb was afraid he had not heard the question, or that he was refusing to answer.
“Seem like the Almighty mean his children be free. So I pray like in the Bible and somethin’ inside says be free. So I run again. But not like before. This time I run in the swamp with the cottonmouth an’ the copperheads an’ the ’gators. Stay for long time. White folk don’t like the swamp. They give up on me an’ I come out. Learned they was a war to be free, an’ I join with Massa Marion. He fightin’ to be free. Don’t matter to him we black or we white. Only we want to be free. That all he care about.”
“Who is Massa Marion?”
“Francis Marion. White man. Small. Sick when he a chile, so he go into the swamp to die but he live instead. Learn all about the swamp. He kin charm the cottonmouth and talk to the ’gator and not no creature in the swamp hurt Massa Marion. He eat anything there, live as long as he want in the swamp. He know to fight, too. Take ten men, surprise the soldiers in the red coats, hurt ’em bad, then go in the swamp and no one find him.”
“When I escaped back at Charleston, why did you come?”
“I seen the las’ of bein’ a slave, an’ bein’ a prisoner is like bein’ a slave. I be free, or I be dead. Whichever come first. Don’t matter to me no more.”
“You married? Children?”
“White folk don’t let animals git married, and we animals jus’ like a horse or a cow or a pig. I made promises like in the Bible with Callie, an’ she made promises back, an’ we had a little boychild. When he was five they sold Callie off to someone in Charleston an’ the boy—Morro—he was sold to someone down by Savannah. They gone. Never seen either one since.”
Caleb fell silent and his thoughts ran. Never had he known the sense of outrage and sickness that came into his heart as he listened. Slowly he realized that by accident, or design, Boston Town, and New England, had turned its back on an entire race whose sufferings, on American soil, were evil and inhuman beyond anything he could have imagined. He wondered why he hadn’t known about it, why nothing was ever said, then concluded that it is much easier and infinitely less troubling to turn your back and delude yourself with the lie, than face and resolve the ugliness. He shook his head, knowing in his heart that if life laid it at his feet to do, he would strike a blow against slavery no matter the cost.
In the heat of the night and the sound of frogs and night insects, the two men laid down on the forest floor and slept. They were up and moving with the morning star, always southeast with the flow of the river. At noon Primus pointed to an opossum sitting on a tree branch fifteen feet above the forest floor, studying them as they walked. He stripped off his shirt and climbed up to snare the animal with it and bring it down tied inside. As Primus knelt, working with the shirt, Caleb saw the black man’s bare back, and he stiffened. The skin was a crosshatched mass of ugly welts and scars that went to the bone. Caleb said nothing, but went about gathering small sticks for a cooking fire, jaw clenched, eyes flashing.
It was early afternoon when Caleb’s head swung around, probing for what caused the whisper of sound that had come from their right, away from the river. He dropped to his haunches as Primus came to his side, crouched, head swiveling as he also listened, probing the dense woods, searching for what had stopped Caleb.
Caleb made the slightest head gesture, and Primus froze, concentrating. Large green fronds moved where there should have been no movement, and then a man rose to a crouched running position and moved away from them. Two seconds later another followed. Neither wore a uniform. Both were clad in ragged, worn homespun, barefooted, bearded, hair wild, faces dirty. Both carried muskets and wore belt knives.
For one full minute neither Caleb or Primus moved. Then slowly they followed the two men, silent, listening, watching everything ahead. The birds had fallen silent with men in the forest. Nothing moved, and there was no sound as the two men crept forward. Through the trees and undergrowth, they saw a clearing ahead with a white, two-storied house and outbuildings, and cultivated fields on three sides. Caleb went to one knee, puzzled, unsure, clutching the saber. Then Primus was beside him, musket at the ready, eyes narrowed as he studied the farm through the trees.
The sound of trotting horses reached them, and they dropped to the ground, invisible in the dense growth. The sound grew louder, and for an instant they thought the horses were going to overrun them as they came cantering on an unseen trail less than ten feet away. The two hidden men watched them pass—two bays, one gray, one sorrel, and they saw the riders, grim, booted, spurs, tricorns, swords, muskets, oiled bridles, riding oiled saddles. None wore uniforms.
The four riders passed without speaking, and as the sounds dwindled, Caleb whispered, “Something’s wrong.”
Primus’s eyes were wide. “Po’ whites on foot up ahead. Rich whites on good horses followin’. Somethin’ bad happenin’.”
Hunched low, saber in hand, Caleb moved ahead, short running steps, stop, listen, move again, with Primus six feet behind. They had covered fifty feet and had the mounted riders in sight forty yards ahead when the silence was shattered by the blasting of muskets and the shouts of voices thick with bloodlust, and clouds of white gun smoke erupted from both sides of the dim trail. All four mounted riders threw their hands in the air, weapons flying, and pitched from their horses. Dirty, baref
ooted men were on top of them before they hit the ground, knives flashing, and in less than ten seconds, four men lay dead.
Grinning, cursing, the attackers seized the reins of the rearing horses and pulled them to a standstill, and four of the murderers swung up onto their backs. They spun the mounts and kicked them to a gallop toward the house, one-hundred-fifty yards distant, with the other three running after them on foot. While Caleb and Primus stared in stunned disbelief, the four men smashed open the front door and twenty seconds later roughly pushed two women and three children out into the yard, laughing, waiting until those on foot stopped before them, chests heaving, panting. While the seven men reloaded their muskets, the women seized the children and forced them to the ground and fell on them, then turned to their attackers, pleading, begging.
The moment the muskets were loaded, the seven men pointed them at point-blank range and fired. The heavy musketballs struck, and all five on the ground collapsed. One woman and one child moved, and the men seized them with one hand, their knives in the other.
Caleb stood white-faced, scarcely breathing, shocked beyond word or movement. Primus bowed his head and closed his eyes, and neither of them moved as the seven men scattered, two to the house, five to the outbuildings. Two slaves ran out the back door of the house toward the woods, and three others leaped from a barn window to run for their lives. The seven men disappeared into the buildings, and within two minutes smoke was coming from the doors and windows. Within five minutes the roofs were ablaze. Black smoke rose straight into the still, hot, humid air to stain the clear blue of the sky as the seven men gathered again in the yard, laughing and pointing, eyes glittering. Then they mounted the four dancing horses, three of them carrying double, and rode east into the forest and were gone.
Without a word Caleb broke into a run toward the bodies in the yard. He slowed as he approached, sickened by the awful sight of what the knives had done. He went to his knees beside them and felt at their throats. They were all dead: an older woman with gray hair; a younger woman, pretty. A boy with curly blond hair who looked like his mother, just beginning his growth to manhood; a dark-haired girl with two large front teeth grown halfway in; and a younger girl, brown hair, blue eyes wide open. Caleb turned to look at Primus, standing behind him, head down.
They got a cart from the toolshed and pulled it by hand to the woods and brought the four dead men back to the yard, where they straightened the bodies and laid them in a row. They looked for something to cover them, but there was nothing. When they could, they entered the smoking remains of the burned barn and found shovels with partially burned handles, and in the gathering darkness dug nine graves inside the fenced family cemetery plot behind the house, where, with sparks rising from the glowing embers of the collapsed house, they buried the dead.
Sweat-soaked, they stood at the head of the mounded graves, and Caleb repeated words he had heard Reverend Silas Olmsted recite at the funerals in the little white church near his home in Boston, in a time that seemed long, long ago. He finished, and Primus said some words that Caleb did not understand, and they walked in the dark to the horse trough at the well. While they washed, Caleb spoke.
“Who were they? Why were they killed?”
Primus’s words came slowly. “They rich white folk. Kilt by po’ white folk. The hate between ’em is strong. I seen it afore but not never like this. Somethin’ happened. Somethin’ wrong.”
They waited until the eastern sky was changing from black to purple, but none of the slaves returned. They took their bearings from the approaching sunrise, and they walked away. They did not look back.
Notes
Caleb Dunson and Primus are fictional characters. However, the creation of the slave trade, the treatment of slaves, the price and use of slaves, and the fact that suicide was common among the older slaves, as well as other shocking facts are well-chronicled. The principal crops handled by slaves during the revolutionary period were rice and indigo (Edgar, South Carolina: A Short History, pp. 62–81).
The ambush and killing of well-to-do white men and their families is accurate and included herein to demonstrate that the British triggered a war within the Revolutionary War, wherein old hatreds erupted between rich and poor Americans (Wallace, South Carolina, A Short History, p. 300–01; Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, p. 360).
The massacre of Americans by Banastre Tarleton’s cavalry is factual as described (see Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783, pp. 342–43).
The Pee Dee River, South Carolina
Late May 1780
CHAPTER XIX
* * *
In the afterglow of a sun already set, the frogs in the marshes and swamps of the Pee Dee River had begun their nightly belching, and the nighthawks were doing their ballet, taking small flying things in the air. Caleb and Primus swatted at the clouds of mosquitoes that rose to plague them as they worked their way southeast on a faint deer trace, following the fall of the river to the sea. They moved slowly, peering downward into the ferns and fauna for the dreaded color and shape of the cottonmouth, or the copperhead, or the rattler. They moved silently, fearful of who might be in the forest lying in ambush.
One moment they were alone in the silence, and the next moment there were six men about them, less than six feet away, one in front, one in back, two on each side, muskets cocked and leveled. They had appeared like apparitions from a netherworld, without sound, without a movement, dressed in worn homespun and deerskin hunting shirts. Bearded, lean, eyes like embers, long hair tied back with buckhide string, each carried a Deckhard long rifle, powder horn, and shot pouch, and a hatchet and belt knife at his waist. Tied on their backs was a blanket, rolled tight. In the instant of seeing them it flashed in Caleb’s mind—no redcoats—not British—either loyalists or rebels—which?—be careful be careful.
The two cornered men stood still, feet spread, ready, Caleb clutching the sword belt high, Primus with the musket cocked. Neither dared move their weapons in the dead, tense silence.
Then the man in front raised his hand and without a word, pointed to his right, away from the river, and the five men with him moved Caleb and Primus away from the deer trace into the forest. They had covered twenty feet when the leader stopped and dropped to his knees, and they all went down with him. No one had spoken a word.
One minute became five, then ten, with the sounds of dusk in the South Carolina swamp country gaining. Caleb glanced at Primus, whose face was a study in unspoken questions—who are they—are we prisoners—hiding from what?
Then the frogs quieted to the southeast, and they sensed the first faint sounds of men and horses and wagons moving in the woods, and they faded five yards farther back, blending into the fronds and fallen, decayed trees to become invisible to anyone following the river northwest, upstream. All cocked their rifles and opened their mouths to breathe silently, eyes narrowed as they listened, judging from the sound the number of horses and wagons that were coming.
Movement came in the shadows of the forest, and the hidden men moved their heads only far enough to see glimpses of the column as it came, marching men and mounted cavalry escorting heavy freight wagons. The leaders wore the crimson tunics and gold-edged tricorns of British regulars, and the mounted soldiers had the gold braid of officers on their shoulders and hats.
No one moved as the column came on, forcing its way through the thick growth, sword scabbard and bridle bit chains jingling, wagons rumbling. Through the trees the invisible men counted carefully—infantry, cavalry, officers, wagons, horses, as they passed, less than twenty feet away, sweating men and weary, lathered animals. The last of the column moved past them, and the eight hidden men waited until the frogs again began their raucous clamor before they cautiously stood to look and listen for a company of men bringing up the rear of the distant column. There were none.
The leader, tall, rangy, bearded, spoke quietly in the soft dialect of the South. “Sixty infantry. Twelve officers. Ten wagons. Fifty-two hors
es.”
Two nodded agreement.
“Gunpowder in at least four wagons. Muskets and balls and roundshot for cannon in four more. Two with food supplies.”
Others nodded.
“I calculate they’re headed for Camden. The big depot.”
There was agreement. “Camden.”
He turned to Caleb.
“Who are you?”
Caleb hesitated for a moment. “Americans.” He was aware of the contrast between his New England speech and that of the man facing him.
“I see that. I also see a British sword and musket. Tories or rebels?”
Caleb’s mouth was dry as he made his answer. “Looking for Francis Marion.”
The man’s beard cracked with a smile. “With one sword and one musket? You figure to stab him, or shoot him, or join him?”
“Join.”
“You’re not a Southerner. Where you from?”
“Boston.”
The man started. “What’s your name? What are you doing down here?”
“Caleb Dunson. Came to join the rebels to fight.”
“There’s rebels fighting up there. Why did you come here?”
“I was sent.”
“By who?”
“Regimental captain.”
“Why?”
“My business.”
The man stared hard at Caleb for several seconds. “We’ll see.” He turned to Primus. “You? What’s your name?”
“Primus. I run away. Been with Massa Marion onct. Tryin’ to find him agin to fight.”
