Come August, Come Freedom (16 page)

HE HAD
ordered his men to stay away on Saturday night. For most of their lives, they had all worked in the rain and mud whenever required, but no one could recall having lived through a storm like this one.

The boys would have braved a rain.

Some did try to reach Brook Bridge. Some drowned in the night. Others stole away to the woods to wait, but even those who escaped the flood would not escape the fate of this day.

By Sunday morning, a day as clean as the night was cruel brought the people out from the quarter to watch the water recede. By Sunday morning, the patrollers knew all about Gabriel’s plan. On Sunday morning, a few recruits ran deep into the forest, and a few chose to face the patrollers and fight.

Solomon’s voice trembled when he told Gabriel, “They’re arresting the boys from Price’s, from Mr. Young’s. The patrol hunted Michael into the woods. You’d be proud, Brother. He drew his sword, but they were too many. Michael will hang.”

Gabriel needed a new plan, yet on this day there was no time to make fire or sound the anvil beat. He knew even more men would soon be overtaken and soon tried and executed.

Solomon looked to his younger brother for reassurance. “Will we all hang, Gabriel?”

“No. Not all of us,” Gabriel promised.

Solomon covered his face and wept. Gabriel did nothing but watch Nanny set sweet potatoes in the fire. He looked out at the Sunday-morning sky. The storm had left behind low, luminous, and steep white clouds, seemingly within reach, just there at the canopy. “Almost makes you think we already won. We’re looking hard at the bacon, but we can’t get to it,” Gabriel said.

He watched Nanny turn the potatoes over and nudge them deeper into the heat. When she stretched her back — low, middling, and high up — he wondered,
How much sleep has she already lost? How many meals did she skip to save up this food?

He gathered what weapons he could easily carry — a pistol and a homemade bayonet. He took bullets, a scythe-sword, and his papers — the letters from Quersey, the list of names. Nanny handed him a blanket and a kerchief tied off to hold two days’ worth of food. He didn’t have to tell her where he would be or that he would lie out in the marsh and wait. They both knew the fate awaiting those men caught at Brookfield or nearby. Virginia would demand their lives.

“I’ll send word to the Frenchman. If I can get to Norfolk, I’ll join our boys there,” he told her.

“And Solomon?” Nanny asked.

Gabriel shook his head. “He’s not thinking right. Solomon will stay here.”

“I’m comin’ with you,” Nanny said.

I would give up my own life for the business of liberty,
he thought.
Can I send my own wife to the gallows?

“Stay here,” Gabriel told her. “Be my eyes. Be my ears. Bring food to me and the men and bring us news.”

He contemplated whether the summer had all been a great mistake.
How could I ever think any freedom, whether in life or death, would be worth any price if I could not have Nanny?

But he knew his campaign was not only about their love. They were fighting for Nanny’s sisters, her parents, whom she could not even remember, Venus and Isaac and their children, and Dolly and Joseph, too. He knew Nanny understood all of this.

She raised Gabriel’s hand. “Death or liberty! I’ll find out what I can and then come find you in the swamp.”

A delicate trace of regret constricted around his heart. Gabriel held his wife close and admitted, “The boys call me General Gabriel. I’m scared, Nan.”

“I know.” Nanny kissed his left palm, his hammer hand, so much larger than the other. “I won’t ever leave you.” Then she brought his hand to her stomach. “I know for sure our child is growing here,” Nanny said.

Gabriel sank to his knees and pressed his face to Nan’s dress.
How can I leave Nan?

Yet, even knowing Nanny was carrying their child, Gabriel did not change his course. All along, he had been fighting for Nanny and for the son or daughter whose reflection they first saw in the creek. Certain his child was protected in the darkest, safest place of all and sure that remaining at Brookfield would mean certain condemnation to the gallows, Gabriel mustered all his courage to forge on with the business.

Nanny stirred the embers of his belief. “You are my Toussaint, our black general. You are my Gabriel, our freedom fighter.” She pressed the sack into his hands, though these supplies would not last long in the marsh. “I promise your son will know. Your son and his daughter and her children will know this: Gabriel did not give up. They
will
know.”

“We will see what the day brings,” he told her. He told himself,
If I can get to Norfolk, hundreds of soldiers will be waiting, and the Frenchman will be there, too. Our freedom still has a chance.

Local patrollers descended on Brookfield by horse and by foot. They took Ben and Watt and Peter. They captured Martin and Solomon, too. At Wilkinson’s they found Jupiter. And from Burton’s place they dragged poor Isaac through the field, down the road, and all the way into the city. But Gabriel escaped to the swamp. The plot had been discovered. Had the business yet failed?

E
XECUTIVE
C
OMMUNICATION
,
C
OMMONWEALTH
of
V
IRGINIA
,
S
EPTEMBER
4, 1800

On further consideration of the conspiracy & Insurrection among the Negroes, it is advised that a party of sixty men be ordered from the militia to patrol for the general safety of the county and particularly about the plantations of Messrs. Wilkinson & Prosser, where it is suggested the conspiracy originated, and that they be instructed to make diligent search for the arms of the conspirators. It is also advised that the Magistrates be permitted to commit witnesses or informers of the plot to the Penitentiary for their security.

GABRIEL SAT
in the bough of an old, low oak. His legs rested against a hairy vine that made him itch. Open blisters oozed yellow and green down his arms, but now he hardly noticed. The hoecakes and potatoes Nanny had given him were long ago devoured. He thought he had been awake for days, and with the lapping of the swamp against the oak’s great roots, he started to fade. A familiar howl woke Gabriel.

“Ah-oo-oo-oo.”

Gabriel leaned against the tree trunk. He wanted to hear the mournful call again. He could not see Dog but heard her moving closer through the water.

“Ah-oo-oo-oo.” The hound sounded like she might give up, so desperate her call. To comfort her, Gabriel called back, “Ah-ah-oo-oo.”
I’m here, old friend; I’m here.

“Gabriel?” Nanny appeared beneath the oak in the gleam of the moon.

He dropped from the limb to his wife. Nanny wrapped her arms around Gabriel’s neck and burrowed her head into his chest. The news poured out of her. “Patrollers are out along the James, west to Cartersville, and all along the road north to Fredericksburg. Already seven have been hanged at the gallows in Caroline. Some boys were hanged in Hanover, too.

“They took Isaac to Richmond. Tied him to a horse and dragged him away.” She could not stop the news from pouring out of her. “Ben, Sam Byrd, Frank, Gilbert, George, poor Jupiter, too —”

“My brothers?”

“Richmond.”

Nanny held out a new sack with more food.

Gabriel closed his eyes.
Who will watch over Solomon? He will fall.

He pulled Nanny’s head closer with his chin. “Keep still, Nan. Just like this,” he said.
So solid in my arms. Strong enough to live here forever with me in this old swamp,
Gabriel thought. He knew they couldn’t return to Brookfield or the colonel’s, but they could make a life in the bog.

If she pleads with me to quit the business, I will.

Gabriel wanted only her. More than he wanted his own smith shop or a place to live in town, he wanted to feel Nanny’s foot push against his calf every night. He wanted to teach her how to make the letters into even more words and show her how together they could spell any dream a man and wife could imagine. Others had escaped their bondage and lived off the marsh or the forest. For a false minute, Gabriel thought,
We might find our freedom here.

“I want to make love to my free wife. I want to look into the walnut eyes of our first son and ask him,
Where’re you off to, my strappin’ boy?
” he said aloud.

In his heart, he heard the words of his older brother Martin, who had said, at the spring, “I have borne all I can bear.” He remembered how, when he was a boy, he watched slaves build the city he loved and the capitol itself, where freedom and justice were the business. He looked at his hands that forged such prosperity for Mr. Prosser and Thomas Henry. And he looked at his wife, but a slave who would hang with him if they were ever caught.

Gabriel held his wife close and heaved a great sigh. “Many arrests and, no doubt, more coming. The betrayal begins. What’s next?” he asked.

He thought he heard baying dogs and snorting horses, trained to hunt men and game, snaking around the swamp. Shouting and shooting would come next. Whether the arrival of militia was imminent or an audible mirage conjectured by his tired mind, it didn’t matter now. The only quiet he heard was the silence from Ma’s God, the one who had yet to let His voice be heard or His power be known. Gabriel prayed for a better God.

“I can bear no more,” Gabriel finally said to Nanny.

“Then you must go and keep goin’. Find the Frenchman. Sail to Saint Domingue to meet your brother Toussaint and bring back many men,” Nanny implored him. She held his hand to her belly. “We are united here — Gabriel and Nanny. Half you and half me.”

Gabriel held tight to his wife and their unborn child. The only place he felt true and belonging and free was with Nanny, yet he had not even himself to offer her. His plan to free her had failed; his plan to gain all their liberty was coming undone.

Nanny kissed him. “Remember what you told me?”

“Tell me what.”

“You said there’s a place inside me that’s always been free and will always be. You said there’s a place where God lives in me. You said that’s where you live, too.”

“Yes.”

“I believe you,” Nanny said.

He shook his head. “My men. The boys will be murdered.”

“You delivered them back to the free place, to the untouched, free place. You let each man decide for himself, and they refused to ever forget. Now, what will you do?”

“You know what will happen.”

Her tone turned sharp. “No, I don’t.”

He wavered. “Nan, I will hang.”

“If you have no hope, go on and turn yourself in. Die with your men now, before they’re all killed. Hang with Solomon and Martin. But if some part of you still believes, if any part of you needs even a single free breath, then you cannot turn back.”

Gabriel knew Nanny spoke the truth. He stood in the moonlight wishing he could spirit her away from the days ahead, wishing he could deliver her to a safe place where she could wait for him to come home to her.

“I have to get to Jacob Kent; he can get me to Norfolk,” Gabriel said. “First I need to disappear — away from Brookfield, away from the city. If I can get word to you, I will. If you hear nothing more from me, Nanny, you know, I —. You know, don’t you?”

“Shhh . . . I will always hear your voice in my heart, in the creek, in these trees.” She cradled his head, and when he turned his face to her, she traced his scars, his eyes, his nose, and his lips one last time. “Go. March ahead to Norfolk and bring back an army.”

Then Gabriel vanished. He forged no pass and no freedom papers. Would he make Norfolk, find the Frenchman, or, perhaps, reach Saint Domingue?