Handful
The day of retribution passed without a musket ball getting fired, without a
fuse being lit, without any of us getting free, but not one white person
would look at us ever again and think we were harmless.
I didn’t know who was arrested and who wasn’t. I didn’t know if
Denmark was safe or sorry, or both. Sarah said it was best to stay off the
streets, but by Wednesday, I couldn’t wait anymore. I found Nina and told
her I needed a pass to get some molasses. She wrote it out and said, “Be
careful.”
Denmark was in the bedroom of his house, stuffing clothes and money
in a knapsack. Susan led me back there, her eyes bloodshot with crying. I
stood in the doorway and breathed the heavy air, and thought, It all came to
nothing, but he’s still here.
There was an iron bed against the wall covered with the quilt I’d made
to hide the list of names. The black triangles were laid out perfect on the red
squares, but they looked sad to me now. Like a bird funeral.
I said to him, “So, where’re you going?”
Susan started to cry, and he said, “Woman, if you’re going to make all
that noise, do it somewhere else.”
She pushed past me through the door, sniffling, saying, “Go on to your
other wife then.”
I said, “You leaving for another wife?”
The curtain had been yanked closed on the window, leaving a crack on
the side where a piece of brightness came in. It pointed at him like a
sundial. “It’s a matter of time before they come looking for me here,” he
said. “Yesterday they picked up Ned, Rolla, and Peter. The three of them are
in the Work House, and I don’t doubt their fortitude, but they’ll be tortured
till they name names. If our plans live to see another day, I have to go.”
Dread slid down my back. I said, “What about my name? Will they say
my name for stealing the bullet mold?”
He sat down on the bed, on top of the dead blackbird wings, with his
arms dangling by his knees. When the recruits used to come to the house,
he’d shout, The Lord has spoken to me, and he’d look stern and mighty as
the Lord himself, but now he just looked cast down. “Don’t worry,” he said,
“they’re after the leader—that’s me. Nobody will say your name.”
I hated to ask him the question, but I needed to know. “What happened
to the plans?”
He shook his head. “The thing I worried about was the house slaves
who can’t tell where they end and their owners begin. We got betrayed,
that’s what happened. One of them betrayed us, and the Guard put spies out
there.”
His jaw tightened, and he pushed off the bed. “The day we were set to
strike, the troops were built up so heavy our couriers couldn’t get out of the
city to spread the call. We couldn’t light the fuses or retrieve the weapons.”
He picked up a tin plate with a candle stuck to it and hurled it at the wall.
“Goddamn them. Goddamn them to hell. God—” His face twisted.
I didn’t move till his shoulders dropped and I felt the torment leave him.
I said, “You did what you could. Nobody will forget that.”
“Yeah, they will. They’ll forget.” He peeled the quilt off the bed and
draped it in my arms. “Here, you take this with you and burn the list. Burn
it straightaway. I don’t have time.”
“Where will you be?”
“I’m a free black man. I’ll be where I’ll be,” he said, being careful in
case Rolla and them said my name after all, and the white men came to
torture me.
He picked up the knapsack and headed for the door. It wasn’t the last
time I’d see him. But those words, I’ll be where I’ll be, were the last words
he ever spoke to me.
I burned the list of names in the stove fire in the kitchen house. Then I
waited for what would be.
Denmark was caught four days later in the house of a free mulatto
woman. He had a trial with seven judges, and before it was over and done,
every person in the city, white and black, knew his name. The hearsay from
the trial flooded the streets and alleys and filled up the drawing rooms and
the work yards. The slaves said Denmark Vesey was the black Jesus and
even if they killed him, he would rise on the third day. The white folks said
he was the Frozen Serpent that struck the bosom that sheltered him. They
said he was a general who misled his own army, that he never had as many
weapons as the slaves thought he did. The Guard found a few pikes and
pistols and two bullet molds, but that was all. Maybe Gullah Jack, who
managed to stay free till August, made the rest of the arms disappear, but I
wondered if Denmark had pulled the truth like taffy the way they said.
When I opened the quilt so I could burn the list, I counted two hundred
eighty-three names on it, not six thousand like he’d said. Nowadays, I
believe he just wanted to strike a flame, thinking if he did that, every ablebody would join the fight.
On the day the verdict came, Sabe had me on my hands and knees
rolling up carpets and scrubbing floors in the main passageway. The heat
was so bad I could’ve washed the soap off the floor with the sweat pouring
down my face. I told Sabe floor-scrubbing was winter work and he said,
well good, you can do it next winter, too. I swear, I didn’t know what Minta
saw in him.
I’d just slipped out to the piazza to catch a breeze when Sarah stepped
out there and said, “. . . I thought you would want to know, Denmark
Vesey’s trial is over.”
Course, there wasn’t a way in the world the man was getting free, but
still, I reached back for the bannister, weak with hope. She came close to
me and laid her hand on my soaked-through dress. “. . . They found him
guilty.”
“What happens to him now?”
“. . . He’ll be put to death. I’m sorry.”
I didn’t let on anything inside me, the way sorrow was already singing
again in the hollow of my bones.
It didn’t cross my mind yet to wonder why Sarah sought me out with the
news. She and Nina both knew I left the premises sometimes for reasons of
my own, but they didn’t know I went to his house. They didn’t know he
called me daughter. They didn’t know he was anything special to me.
“. . . When they gave the verdict, they also issued an edict,” she said.
“. . . A kind of order from the judges.”
I studied her face, her red freckles burning bright in the sun and worry
gathered tight in her eyes, and I knew why she was out here on the piazza
with me—it was about this edict.
“. . . Any black person, man or woman, who mourns Denmark Vesey in
public will be arrested and whipped.”
I looked away from her into the ornament garden where Goodis had left
the rake and hoe and the watering pot. Every green thing was bowed down
thirsty. Everything withering.
“. . . Handful, please, listen to me now, according to the order, you
cannot wear black on the streets, or cry, or say his name, or do anything to
mark him. Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t understand. I won’t never understand,” I said, and went on
back inside to the scrub brush.
On July 2 before the sun rose, I wriggled through the window in my room,
braced my back against the house and my good leg against the wall, and
shimmied up and over the fence the way I used to do. To hell with begging
for a pass. White people signing their names so I could walk down the
street. Hell with it.
I hurried through the city while I still had the darkness for cover. When
I got to Magazine Street, the light broke wide open. Spying the Work
House, I stopped dead in my tracks, and for a minute my body felt like it
was back inside there. I could hear the treadmill groaning, could smell the
fear. In my head, I saw the cowhide slap the baby on its mauma’s back, and
I felt myself falling. The only way I kept from turning back was thinking
about Denmark, how any minute they’d bring him and his lieutenants out
through the Work House gate.
The judges had picked July 2 for the execution day, a secret everybody
in the world knew. They said Denmark and five others would be put to
death early in the morning at Blake’s Lands, a marshy place with a stand of
oaks where they hung pirates and criminals. Every slave who could figure a
way to get there would show up, and white people, too, I reckoned, but
something told me to come to the Work House first and follow Denmark to
Blake’s Lands. Maybe he’d catch sight of me and know he didn’t travel the
last mile of his life alone.
I crouched by the animal sheds near the gate, and soon enough four
horse-drawn wagons came rolling out with the doomed men shackled in
back, sitting on top of their own burial boxes. They were a swollen, beat-up
lot—Rolla and Ned in the first wagon, Peter in the second, and two men I
never had seen in the third. The last one held Denmark. He sat tall with his
face grim. He didn’t see me get to my feet and limp along behind them on
the side of the road. The Guard was heavy in the wagons, so I had to stay
well back.
The horses plodded along slow. I trailed them a good ways with my foot
aching inside my shoe, working hard to keep up, wishing he’d look at me,
and then a strange thing happened. The first three wagons turned down the
road toward Blake’s Lands, but the fourth one with Denmark turned in the
opposite direction. Denmark looked confused and tried to stand, but a guard
pushed him down.
He watched his lieutenants rumble away. He yelled, “Die like men!” He
kept on yelling it while the distance grew between them and the dust from
the wheels churned, and Rolla and Peter shouted it back. Die like men. Die
like men.
I didn’t know where Denmark’s wagon was headed, but I hurried behind
it with their cries in the air. Then his eyes fell on me, and he turned quiet.
The rest of the way, he watched me come along behind, lagging way back.
They hung him from an oak tree on an empty stretch along Ashley
Road. Nobody was there but the four guards, the horse, and me. All I could
do was squat far off in the palmetto scrub and watch. Denmark stepped
quiet onto the high bench and didn’t move when they tugged the noose over
his head. He went like he shouted to the others, like a man. Up till they
kicked the bench out from under his legs, he stared at the palm leaves where
I hid.
I looked away when he dropped. I kept my eyes on the ground, listening
to the gasps that drifted from the tree. All round, the hermit crabs skittered,
looking at me with their tiny stupid eyes, sliding in and out of holes in the
black dirt.
When I looked again, Denmark was swaying on the limb with the
hanging moss.
They took him down, put him in the wood coffin, and nailed the lid.
After the wagon disappeared down the road, I eased out from my hiding
place and walked to the tree. It was almost peaceful under there in the
shade. Like nothing had happened. Just the scuff marks in the dust where
the bench had fallen over.
There was a potter’s field nearby. I knew they’d bury him there and
nobody would know where he was laid. The edict from the judges said we
couldn’t cry, or say his name, or do anything to mark him, but I took a little
piece of red thread from my neck pouch and tied it round one of the twigs
on a low, dipping branch to mark the spot. Then I cried my tears and said
his name.
PART FIVE
November 1826–November 1829
