The Long Song (20 page)

The stranger-man put up no fight, according to Sarah, except to continue to fix his eyes upon Dewar. But the girl—oh, she did spit and claw and thump her fists upon the overseer. Until, with one blow from a hammer fist, Dewar whacked her so hard within the face that she fell to the ground. Then the overseer pointed his pistol at the man’s head and . . . boom! Sarah said that the negro’s face simply exploded—that it burst in fragments on to the air and soon, like a bloody rain, started to gently pitter-patter down.

Benjamin was sick. Nancy just ran and ran and ran.

The overseer tossed the limp remains of this negro aside, like he was a piece of spent cane just stripped through the mill. The girl, bloodstained as a butchered hog, grabbed Dewar around his ankles to plead for her salvation. He seized her by a fistful of her hair to hold her steady as he rearmed his pistol. ‘No, massa, no, massa, mercy, massa, mercy,’ she struggled savagely. Some defiant spirit within her fought to keep her life. The overseer could hardly hold her. ‘Shut up, you dead fucking nigger, shut up.’ It was as the overseer raised his hand to strike her with his pistol that Kitty flew.

‘She was ’pon deh overseer like breath of wind!’ Sarah said. But Sarah was ignorant as to why Kitty did imperil herself for this young girl. For she believed this girl to be just some lordly house slave who had never once felt the sun brand her back or the earth callous her hands hard as pig’s foot. She did not know that she was Kitty’s taken daughter.

But Benjamin did. And what he also knew was . . . ‘July was overseer Dewar’s pickney. Many times him bent Miss Kitty over—many, many times when him first come upon Amity.’ Benjamin had worked with Kitty when the baby July was strapped to her. On the second gang he had cleared the spent canes with Kitty, and sucked his teeth at the pickney-howl that came ceaseless from Kitty’s back. He knew July from her scream—he swore it. ‘If me know it, then her mama, Miss Kitty, mus’ hear it in her pickney too. So her did run to her—her did run!’

What happened next has been told in so many ways by so many people—some who were not even in the parish at the time, some who were not even born into the world yet—that it is hard for your storyteller to know which version to recount. That Kitty grabbed Tam Dewar before he could strike July once more, is one thing that is certain. That she was upon him with such force that he, startled, dropped July from his grasp, is also true. That Kitty, with anxious urgency, commanded July to run—to the cane piece, to the woods, anywhere—but run! And that July, upon seeing her lost mama again, stood so aghast that, apart from her mouth slowly gaping, all her movement ceased. Kitty had to stamp her foot to wake her daughter to start her flight, she had to shoo her—once, twice and yell out, ‘Run, July, run now!’ All this is certain truth.

But did Kitty, in the fierce struggle that commenced with Tam Dewar, hack her machete upon his ankles like he was a piece of cane to be cut? Did she grab his neck, swing him in the air, then land him back down upon the ground with a thump? Did she bash his head upon a stone until it split like a ripe coconut? Did she twist his arms up his back until she felt them snap? Did she kick him? Did she jump upon him? Reader, we will never know, for none saw. Where once all could see, despite the confusion of the moonlight and the smoke, suddenly no one did have recall. Not one soul saw Kitty assail Tam Dewar. Not one.

All that is known is that Tam Dewar was found, not yet dead, but spread upon the ground of the mill yard with a broken collarbone, a fracture in his skull, two broken ankles, two broken arms and his ribs mash up. Wounds he would die from two days later—fitting, spewing and boiling hotter than bubbling cane liquor.

And the militia-man who captured Kitty—bound, gagged and secured her that day—said the slave was sitting motionless within the yard, a little way from the lifeless corpse of a freeman negro, but next to the mangled body of the overseer of Amity. And that when she was seized, that devil nigger had a grin upon her face.

 

 

 

 

K
ITTY WAS BEARING A broad halter of blackest iron about her neck the next time July saw her mama. The chains that ran down from that collar bound her mama’s wrists so strained that her hands were forced into a devout pose. Her mama’s wounded face was bulged to the size of breadfruit—her blackened eyes swollen and closed, her cheeks puffed up with bruising, her bottom lip split and her tongue so bloated that her mouth could not close about it. The leg irons that chained her ankles hobbled her to limp and shuffle as she was compelled toward the gibbet erected within the market square.

Although favouring more beast than woman, Kitty’s beaten face still managed to carry a look of puzzlement. For she did not realise that the trial for her crime against Tam Dewar had already been heard and judged. She believed that she had merely walked through the courtroom. That the brief glimpse of white people she saw—sitting in rows, fanning themselves in the courthouse heat and yelling, ‘Devil, devil!’ upon her—was just the beginning of the ordeal. Yet her chains were tugged to leave the room before any solemn pronouncements demanded that she struggle to lift her head.

So when she was once more outside the courthouse building she asked of the jailer who was driving her along, ‘What you do with me?’

The white man pulled on her hair to wrench up her head so she could see the three stiffened corpses swinging upon the gibbet before her. ‘You want freedom, don’t you?’ he said. ‘This is the sort of freedom we’ll give you, every last devil of you. Sabbie dat, murdering nigger?’

Bacchaus, the dull-eyed negro hangman, leaned a ladder up against the gallows, then wearily climbed its wooden struts to cut down those who had finished their turn. The three dangling human fruits of that gibbet fell on to the heap of rotting bodies left below. So many had been hanged that day that the pile was interfering with the drop. But it would be evening before the workhouse negroes were shuffled in to remove the corpses of those once hopeful ‘fight-for-free’ negroes that now festered in a pile of bared teeth and broken limbs beneath those fatal beams.

The hangman tested the flap upon the scaffold—opening the lumbering gate to knock aside any lying below that hindered its workings—before beckoning the jailor to bring Kitty along. As the iron collar about Kitty’s neck was removed she swung her head around in a blessed freedom, before the rope noose that replaced it once more pinned her firm. And then she stood waiting. For this gibbet would accommodate three and could not be dropped until its full complement was trussed there.

Once all in town had gathered with eagerness to witness the punishments of the slaves who had troubled not only white people with their fire and fuss, but also the King of England in that Baptist War. Now those house slaves and those field negroes and those mongers that laboured within the market, could not be bothered to cease their haggling to worry for the souls of those that were led from the courtroom. Nor could white people be persuaded to stand in the heat to watch niggers being lashed five hundred times or hung by the neck from the gallows. For these punishments had gone on for so long—day upon day, one after the other, after the other—that all in the town, black, coloured and white, had grown weary of them.

‘You have been found guilty of the worst crimes that can be perpetrated, and must be hanged by the neck until dead.’ The two men who had just heard those words spoken to them in the courtroom were placed either side of Kitty upon the gibbet. One was being hanged for burning down his overseer’s house to a pail-full of ashes. While the other was, alas, losing his life for merely staring open-mouthed, upon the flames.

When the flap finally dropped on that straining scaffold July, hidden within a corner of the square, watched as Kitty, kicking and convulsing at the end of her rope, elbowed and banged into the two men that dangled lifeless as butchered meat beside her. Her mama struggled. Her mama choked. Until, at last stilled, her mama hung small and black as a ripened pod upon a tree.

 

 

 

 

T
HE COFFIN WAS BORNE through Falmouth, high upon the shoulders of six men. July and Molly walked within this procession in the company of black negroes and fair-faced coloureds—the ragged, the coarsened, the garish, the dressy, the gaudy, the haggard, the tattered and the careworn of the parish. This motley crowd were led in muffled solemnity by a white Baptist minister and his family. At the chapel yard all came to a stop as the minister raised his pointed finger to the moon, then let out a grave and strident cry of, ‘The hour is at hand. The monster is dying.’

Some in this congregation fell upon their knees, others mumbled prayers on halting breath, or rocked within the rhythm of a softly sung hymn. Until suddenly, the minister raising both arms heavenward shouted, ‘The monster is dead. The negro is free!’

Although the hour was midnight, the elation that rose from all glowed like a sunrise to light this splendid occasion. As the coffin with the words, ‘Colonial slavery died July 31, 1838, aged 276 years’, was lowered into the ground, a joyous breeze blew. It was whipped up from the gasps of cheering that erupted unbounded. When the handcuffs, chains and iron collars were thrown into that long-awaited grave to clatter on top of slavery’s ruin, the earth did tremor. For at that moment every slave upon this island did shake off the burden of their bondage as one.

As the minister bid that the thanks to almighty God for this deliverance be raised louder than the trumpets of Jericho, and that the ‘hoorah’ for the new Queen of England who had freed them, should shake the buildings in London Town, Molly did do the strangest thing; she threw her arms about July and hugged her fiercely. And then . . .

 

 

 

 

I
CAN GO NO further! Reader, my story is at an end. Close up this book and go about your day. You have heard all that I have to tell of a life lived upon this sugar island. This wretched pen will blot and splutter with ink no more in pursuance of our character July. I now lay it down in its final rest.