George & Rue (17 page)

T
HE GALLOWS is winsome, awesome, lonesome, lithesome, elegant, functional, classically rough, and ultramodern. Standing on the platform in the barn, Ellis feels the strong, ripe rope; he feels the cool heads of the nails that lock it into place and make it strong enough to kill. Ellis wishes to touch the Hamiltons hardly, but gently. His violence against them must be an expert matter of rope, gravity, and their own weights, their own deeds, counting heavily against them. He pulls a lever that jets two bags of flour through the trap, tumbling, hanging. All is working fine.

George and Rue, chained at the neck, felt their flesh bruise from the weighty chain and heavy padlock each time one of them stumbled. Cool hands were about to grope their necks, crush their throats, while the approaching autopsy’d splay open their bellies. Calm, methodical Frederictonians’d wield stainless steel knives and scissors and cut up the boys’ garb and nooses and hair. So only a last-minute British-inherited reserve would prevent their genitals from being sliced off and their skin stripped off for wallets and purses, as more excitable whites did to their black lynchees in the southern states.

The boys could not know that Alisha’d taken a train all the way from Three Mile Plains to Fredericton. She was the closest family of any sort they had left. She brought with her all the futile prayers—and effective prophecy—of Three and Five
Mile Plains. She camped out in the mob-filled streets in front of and around the prison, where, if it had rained, the vast numbers of bodies jostling and jockeying for the best vantage points to attempt to
feel
—for they could not witness—the imminent but closed-door execution of flesh-and-blood like themselves would’ve prevented any drop from moistening the ground.

Rufus, companioned by Bataille, and George, flanked by Pretty, walked from their cells, down stairs, and out the back of the jail to the small barn in its yard. The men now felt absurdly comfortable in the gently clanking chains on their wrists and ankles. During the brief seconds the brothers were visible to the massed, sandwich-and-pie-picnicking, beer-and-rum-guzzling hoi polloi outside the prison walls, a thunderous series of cheers erupted, punctuated by clapping and catcalls. Six local Klansmen milled about in white sheets and hoods with slits cut out for eyes.

A man’s drunken voice shouted lustily, “Hang those black bastards! Or let us do it!” The crowd surged savagely, anticipating an orgiastic lynching, but the hundred cops round the jail pushed and clubbed the ringleaders back. But neither George nor Rue heeded the tidal attentiveness of their frothing audience. They vanished into the temporary refuge of the barn.

Sheriff Lion explained the final procedures and commanded the boys to bravery. (Both George and Rue felt calm. It wasn’t hanging that was so bad, they reflected; it was the possibility of messing yourself that was disgusting.) All around the small, hay-strewn, shadow-busy barn, under a single electric light bulb, stood skull-faced police—witnesses—at attention. The atmosphere of the hanging barn was hot with hymns, muffled by the wood walls but still infiltrating the death chamber, turning it into some weird joint English-Latin, Protestant-Catholic service, with the Salvation Army band’s marching music dovetailing with the Gregorian-like chants of the Eternal Church.
Ellis was poised funereally—a Gothic demon—atop the scaffold. The tolling church bells and the liquored-up shouts from the mob outside seemed quiet and far off now.

Sheriff Lion removed the chains from the Hamiltons. Without the extra weight, they felt light enough to fly. George turned and hugged Rufus. “I forgive you.” That was Rufus speaking silently, George saying it aloud. Tears coated two fraternal faces. Then Lion tied the brothers’ hands behind their backs and escorted them, shuffling, to the gallows staircase.

They scaled the mandatory thirteen steps to the top of the scaffold. There was no flinching, no nothing. The boys were so calm that some onlookers believed they’d been injected with morphine. But, no, their eerie, disturbing calm was that of Asa and Easter under water, that of Cynthy in that final bathroom. There was no point to feeling ill used or hard done by or disrespected: they could only pray agony would end in rapture. As soon as the sun’d first shone on them, it’d been shining on their graves. They knew it. Their stars were always a ceiling of nooses.

Ellis arranged the brothers on separate traps beside two nooses, belted their legs, affixed the ropes about their necks, and dropped black hoods over their faces. He was methodical, undistressed, and would have whistled, save that he enjoyed the gravity and solemnity of
professionally
administering death.

Outside the jail, a black hearse waited. A lightning-undiminished dark sparked above that jail as grey as
settecento
maps of the New World. A worrisome citizenry milled. A voice wailed, “Let’s butcher em! Let’s work em over!”

Rufus stood on the scaffold, his back to George, and lamented and rejoiced, all at once. He’d been dispensed no merciful love; now he was being dispensed with—mercifully. George imagined he’d laze on the edge of a cliff of gold where doves lie down, eat and drink to his heart’s content.

The priest and the preacher opened their respective Bibles to speak final words of comfort and promise. They found it, strangely, hard.

Lion shouted “Uncover!” A dozen policemen-witnesses doffed their caps ceremoniously. Unceremoniously, Ellis yanked the lever that sent the trembling Hamiltons crashing down into eternity. George was in the middle of Psalm 23; Rufus was saying “Hail Mary” over and over again. The trap went
blam!
Just like that. As they fell, all the world swooped upwards like flowers. The brothers saw Asa, Cynthy, both forgiven, waiting for them just outside the barn. Rue could feel Easter next to him; George imagined he was holding Otho and Desiah and smiling at Blondola.

The masses in the hot, choking streets felt a collective spasm, a frisson, that made them gasp, quiver, vibrate in their genitals when they heard the trap violently clap, clatter, open. They felt emotionally alive now, but spent.

Was there a rich tremble, the double downslap of feet, a shaking of air and flesh? Two bodies braced like quail; they snapped to a stop, two feet off the floor. Then the stars were hanging, the heads of sunflowers were hanging, the ripening apples were hanging, and two minor Negroes were hanging where the Saint John River was drifting, drifting, drifting.

The Negro hands of night moulded stars into immemorial, memorial pearls.
Finis the “Black Acadian” Tragedy of “George and Rue.”

The boys on the gully bridge Rufus, George …

—LORNA GOODISON

J
ULY 27, 1949,
Anno Domini:
the Hamiltons fell like dominoes. They merit no poetry, no laurels, no ballads, no statues, no headstones, no memory, no existence. They go the way of cats’ and fishes’ and horses’ eyes.

The offspring of Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia, is dry dust mixed in unmarked corners of two Fredericton cemeteries. The killers are better off as dirt. They be two crumbly chassis, two slushy torsos, all micked up with soil.

The Hamiltons sink in a damp cemetery, their sulking skeletons just blossoming along in soil laundered constantly by worms. They vegetate into carbon passing to oil before it crystallizes as diamonds. They’ll be there always, springing snakes and ants and mushrooms and dead leaves and worms and weeds and soda pop bottles and cigarette lighters and marbles and soft, ripped-up newspapers.

I
N DECEMBER 1949, just outside of Montreal, two men—Kenneth Bevin, seventeen, and Girvin Patenaude, nineteen—called a taxi driver, directed him out to the sticks, and, after driving about seven miles, hammered his head five times—making that indescribable sound that striking a hammer against a skull makes. They threw his corpse off a bridge into a murky river. The teens used the slain man’s money to buy two boxes of shells, then they drove to a small town and robbed a bank with two. 45 pistols that looked like bazookas. They took $5,000, and the cops found them the next night, asleep in a barn. They were sentenced to die. Ninety minutes before their hangings, word came their sentences’d been commuted to life in prison. George and Rue—black—had no such white luck.

India received Rue’s letters three months after his death. She read and reread em. She wondered, “Can any word of Rue’s live? Is a thought a body part?”

Barker’s Point was demonized as Hammertown. Another nasty shenanigan exercised by downtown Fredericton society.

In Three Mile Plains, those who’d known the Hamiltons agreed to forget they’d ever been born, and to pour ink over their names in the registers where they’d been christened. Their only trace: yellowed, brittle newsprint.

Did history really repeat itself? Or only family history?

—BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD

T
HIS NOVEL recapitulates bleakly truthful circumstances, but it is fiction, and I have taken prodigious and relentless liberties with “facts,” so that psychologies, identities, genealogies, and even some place descriptions are purely imaginary. (But
History
is the truth, if you remember.)

Admittedly, the Hamiltons were my matrilineal first cousins once removed; they died before I was born. I was innocent of their existence—and their destruction—until May 1994, when my mother commented, abruptly and briefly, on their homicide and their hangings.

Though repelled by the Hamiltons’ crime, I embrace them as my kin. They were born where I was born—in the Africadian settlement of Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia—and George Hamilton and I were named for the same gentleman, his grandfather and my great-grandfather, George Johnson. (In naming me as she did, my mother salvaged the memory of that perished cousin—and recuperated the regal name of her grandfather.) Too, the Hamiltons were—like so many of us from Three Mile Plains, Five Mile Plains, Windsor Plains (all the same community, really)—part Mi’kmaq and part African.

Every heritage is coruscatingly complex. My other relatives include contralto Portia White (1911–1968), filmmaker Sylvia Hamilton (1950—), journalist William Clarke (1962—), and poet Kirk Johnson (1973—). Ultimately, this novel conducts a tryst
with biography. Perhaps the dual impulse to creativity and violence in my own genealogy serves to illustrate the Manichaean dilemmas of the African odyssey in this strange American world.

George Elliott Clarke
(X. States)
Toronto, Ontario
Nisan
IV

T
HIS history of George and Rue was bred from original, monstrous truths. Still, I imbibed several works for atmosphere and accuracy: C. R. K. Allen,
A Naturalists Notebook
(1987); Frank W. Anderson,
A Dance with Death
(1996); Robert L. Armstrong, ed.,
Good Old Barker’s Point
(1981); Velma Carter and Wanda Leffler Akili,
The Window of Our Memories
(1981), and Velma Carter and Leah Suzanne Carter,
The Window of Our Memories, Volume II
(1989); Dean Jobb,
Shades of Justice
(1988); and John Neal Phillips,
Running with Bonnie and Clyde
(1996). One passage in the novel adapts Basil Bunting’s poem “The Orotava Road” (1935, 1950); another revisits Robert Browning’s poem “How It Strikes a Contemporary” (1855).

The trial transcripts for George and Rufus Hamilton, as well as the letters both men wrote, are at the National Archives of Canada. Donald Harris gave me a typescript of
The Journal of George Hamilton
(1949) and copies of the Canadian Army medical and psychological assessments of George Hamilton.

This novel would not exist without the generosity of Harris, who met me at the Waterloo Hotel, in Waterloo, Ontario, on June 17, 1999, and shared with me his feelings and thoughts about the Hamiltons, their crime, and their executions. I am also indebted to the researches of my cousin and genealogist David “Skip” States. I thank Francis Nowacyznski for his dossier of
bizarre crimes. At the National Archives, I also consulted the capital case records pertaining to the execution of Frank Rough-mond, for murder, in Stratford, Ontario, in 1905, as well as those respecting the 1950 murder trials of Kenneth Bevin and Girvin Patenaude in Quebec. At the New Brunswick Provincial Archives, I accessed stories carried by the Saint John
Telegraph-Journal
and the Fredericton
Daily Gleaner.
The Legislative Library of New Brunswick housed helpful press and Hansard records, and the Public Archives of New Brunswick furnished a host of photos. I benefited irreducibly from conversations or correspondence with Joe Blades, Hazen and Corinne Calabrese, Jerry Carty, Nancy Claybourne, James Elgee, Ruth Goodine, Sterling and Ann Gosman, Joan Harmon, Angus “Sock” Johnson, Cecil Johnson, Betty Lacey, Harley McGee, Bernice McIntyre, Lisa McLean, Bruce Oliver, Donald Parent, Jerome Peterson, Sarah Petite, Sue Rickards, Bill Scott, Patrick Toner, Thelma Walker, and Harold Wright. Michael Edwards of Science East in Fredericton guided me on an exhaustive tour of the former York County Gaol. Eric J. Swinaker of the Legislative Library in Fredericton was unfailingly kind.

My editor, Iris Tupholme, was a steadfast seeker of excellence and, also, a paragon of patience. I would need to write another book to furnish adequate thanks and appreciation for her guidance. Copyeditor Shaun Oakey distinguished the peccadilloes from the peculiarities. My agent, Denise Bukowski, insisted,
for four years,
that I write—and finish—this novel! David Odhiambo eyed faults with forensic insight. Leilah Nadir’s insistent enthusiasm for this story was uplifting. John Fraser was, as usual, irrefutably right about my wrongs. I also thank Noelle Zitzer for her positivist guidance. Kudos to Katie Hearn for her dextrous network management.

Austin Clarke, Alistair MacLeod, and Howard Norman, three great writers, granted me the charity of a hearing and the
blessing of their endorsement. I thank them heartily—and with humility.

I accept total guilt for all errors and faults herein—as well as for my usage of Blackened English. These capital crimes are my own.

Thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the University of Toronto (especially Massey College) for financial—and time and space—aid.

I thank Geeta, my wife, for tolerating the time I put into this book. My art—despite its limitations—would not exist at all without Geeta’s generous and instructive love.

Photo Credits:
Public Archives of New Brunswick: overgrown shed (p. 3); car in flood (p. 113); and Mi’kmaq men with baskets (p. 153). Courtesy of George Elliott Clarke: Venetian grave (p. 211). National Archives of Canada: George Hamilton and Rufus Hamilton (p. 217).

George & Rue
was written in Halifax, Nova Scotia; Ottawa, Ontario; Durham, North Carolina; Bellagio, Italy; Banff, Alberta; Toronto, Ontario; Venice, Italy; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Paris, France; 1994–2004.