Come August, Come Freedom (19 page)

Authors: Gigi Amateau

Let them tie five ropes.
This was how Nanny prayed to see Gabriel.
If this is to be our end, let them tie for five men. Let me stand in witness. Lord, let him hear my voice.

All the people from all the quarters gathered in the field by the tavern; their owners encouraged them to go and watch, gave them time free from work so that they could witness the state exacting its price.

When the patrollers tied but four ropes, Nanny knew. The fifth rope was being tied in Richmond. Her husband would hang alone at the Fifteenth Street gallows. They would put his body in the side of the hill, where they laid all the dead slaves of Richmond. She would never find him.

They will build the city over him,
she thought, and then the idea seized upon Nanny that if she ran, she could reach Gabriel.
I will get to him within the hour. I will reach through the bars of the cart and run along beside him through the streets and not let go his hand until they peel me away. I’ll climb up the scaffold and take hold of his feet. Let them bury me and our child with him in the hill.

But Nanny carried no remit pass, and the road to Richmond swarmed with militia. No one from the countryside dared leave now without a pass, especially those known to have been involved in the business, and though the hangings were said to be coming to an end, Nanny had been implicated by the testimony of her dear, and now dead, friend Isaac.

When the cart came with Sam and George and Frank and Gilbert but without Gabriel to the hanging trees near Prosser’s Tavern, Nanny stepped into the crowd and made her way to the front. She was sure from where she stood, she could hear the roar of another crowd six miles away.

In town at the gallows, they are cheering him! The people are cheering General Gabriel,
Nanny imagined.

The hangman’s cart drove away, leaving the boys of the business to dangle from the live-oak limbs. Nanny raised her fist to heaven. “Death or liberty!” she cried out.
Let them take me and my child, too,
Nanny thought, but no one did.

As Nanny witnessed the four men fall, she witnessed Gabriel fall four times over.
Whether his name is Sam or George or Gilbert or Frank, his name is also Gabriel.

She would not turn away when Sam’s feet jerked up or when George’s body spun in tight circles. Once the people left, Nanny remained. “Cut them loose. I will care for them.” She pointed to Gilbert, the youngest and smallest of the four bodies hanging, then climbed into the cart driven by Pleasant Younghusband.

The coroner started to protest, but the old colonel nodded his permission for Nanny to tend the bodies. Nanny was determined that if she could not wash Gabriel and sing to him and draw his face, she would do so for Sam, George, Gilbert, and Frank. She would not abandon the business; she could not abandon these boys.

In the days immediately following the hangings, Nanny didn’t remember seeing four soldiers die. She stored the memory of execution day, watching Gabriel die over and over and over and over. Her mind’s eye let repeat how Gabriel’s body had twirled round and round. Long after he should have swayed to a stop, the early autumn wind kept him moving.

Nanny had thought she might lose the child from her grief. At night when she rolled over in the bed and went to drape her leg across Gabriel’s, finding him gone, the ache in Nanny’s chest moved up to her throat, then down to her womb.

The thought of letting go, going home, and falling forever into the crater left by Gabriel’s absence brought Nanny some relief. She imagined her surrender to someplace far away from Richmond and beyond even the trees, into the great opening that she was certain would reunite her with her husband. She longed to go there, to the good and right world where Gabriel had by now arrived and where their child still waited — the place of all beginnings and all endings. Nanny imagined how she might release herself from this life.

Yet the seductive ease, the rush of release, that might come of a quick death by her own hand frightened Nanny. So she went to the still side of the hill near the spring, where she and Gabriel used to sit. She invited the wind to move through her womb. The child pushed an elbow into Nanny’s side, and this kept her alive.

NANNY COULD
never forget Gabriel’s face or his voice or the way his hand felt around her waist. After the hangings, after dozens of men died for liberty, the state had made its practice to banish those involved in the business. Many men were sent away from Virginia, far away south, to Georgia, Kentucky, and South Carolina, places Nan did not wish to go. Her child grew and stirred and made ready to come, but still Nanny could not say,
It’s all right, it’s all right.

When she needed to find some part of her husband, she would stop to sit beneath Gabriel’s apple tree on her way to worship or after her work was done for the night. There, she dug a new space in the ground — not deep or wide, like the place near the market in the city that claimed Gabriel’s decaying body and bones. Not eternally empty, like the space left in her heart. She reached into her pocket for the apple seeds. She placed them, a bunch of three, together into the earth and patted down the dirt. The ground here was good now, and the weather very fine, like summer.

Again Nanny slipped her hand into her apron. She pulled her husband’s paper and inkwell and pen from her other pocket. The scent of Gabriel still lingered in the fibers of the cotton-rag paper. She wrote her name and Gabriel’s side by side. She touched the written-down truth in her hand:
Nanny and Gabriel.

There on the hill, while the baby waited for his day and the April breeze pledged sweetness by August, Nanny sat beneath the tree that knew and remembered him. Wafting up from Young’s orchard, the wind delivered the promise of persimmon and apple and plum and pear. The yellow warblers at meadow’s edge revealed to her the invisible trace that would lead her to him whenever she needed him most.

Isaac, Venus, Jupiter. Solomon, Martin, Ma.
They carried Nanny to Gabriel, to the place where she could hear Gabriel’s true and free spirit singing the songs of his beautiful people, urging them on, firing their courage, steeling their resolve. She could hear her husband awakening his beautiful people with his steady anvil beat.

Ping, ping, ping.
Gabriel, forging together their spirits.
Ping, ping, ping.
Gabriel, making freedom.

From all the earth and in all the trees, from the creek and on the wind, all the people who had passed back over and all those waiting to come in joined their voices with Gabriel’s. They sang and cried. Made praise, made promise.

Beneath their tree, Nanny heard him.
Come freedom, come freedom. Freedom go on and come.

G
IGI
A
MATEAU
is the author of
A Certain Strain of Peculiar, Chancey of the Maury River,
and
Claiming Georgia Tate.
About this book, she says, “I love learning about people who lived during the Early Republic era. Gabriel’s story illustrates how one individual’s pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness can intersect with a nation’s pursuit of a more perfect union. Gabriel went all in for freedom. To me, he is one of America’s greatest patriots.” Gigi Amateau lives in Bon Air, Virginia.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

First electronic edition 2012

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Amateau, Gigi, date.
Come August, come freedom : the bellows, the gallows, and the black general Gabriel / Gigi Amateau. — 1st ed.
p.   cm.
Summary: Imagines the childhood and youth of “Prosser’s Gabriel,” a courageous and intelligent blacksmith in post-Revolutionary Richmond, Virginia, who roused thousands of African-American slaves like himself to rebel.
ISBN 978-0-7636-4792-6 (hardcover)
1. Prosser, Gabriel, ca. 1775–1800 — Juvenile fiction. [1. Prosser, Gabriel, ca. 1775–1800 — Fiction. 2. Slavery — Fiction. 3. African Americans — Virginia — Fiction. 4. Slave insurrections — Fiction. 5. Virginia — History — 1775–1865 — Fiction.]   I. Title.
PZ7.A49157Com 2012
[Fic] — dc23     2011048342

ISBN 978-0-7636-5658-4 (electronic)

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Chapter One: March 1777

Chapter Two: March 1786

Chapter Three: July 1786

Chapter Four: August 1786

Chapter Five: September 1786

Chapter Six: September 1786

Chapter Seven: September 1786