Orphan of Creation (3 page)

They stood erect, and had well-shaped hands (which were not so graceful or clever as those of a man, however). Their heads were quite misshapen, and they were weak-chinned, with such bulging jaws and large fierce teeth that they offered an altogether ferocious aspect that was in marked contrast to their timid behavior. Until they became used to us, the smallest child could startle them quite out of their wits.

They could not speak, but they could convey their wants and desires with astonishing clarity, by means of pantomime, hoots and grunts, grimaces and faces.

As I have observed, their heads were most strangely misshapen, with a large shelf of bone above the brow, and a sort of crest along the center of the skull, running from the highest point of the skull toward the back.

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Barbara read further, fascinated. It sounded very much like some of the local gentry had taken to importing gorillas, or perhaps chimps, as farm labor! Zebulon must have revised their appearance in his memory, made them seem to look and act more like humans. None of the great African apes were well known before the 1800s, and the gorilla wasn’t described until 1847. They would not be well known on a sleepy Southern plantation, especially to an uneducated slave.

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Their bodies were dark-skinned, and covered rather sparsely with coarse black hair. They wore no clothes willingly, and when the White men would try to force them to cover themselves decently, they would tear the rude shirts to shreds and insist upon their lewd nakedness.

These were the Creatures, the animals, that the latter-day slave traders would present to Gowrie and his friends as the equal of the Negro in all things—intelligence, ability, skill. I have said that the importation of animals to circumvent the slave import laws was a tacit admission that the Negro Slave was indeed human. How doubly d**ning then, how hypocritical and two-faced, for those same White men to expect us to live with and accept these Beasts as our equals, in huts next to our own, as if it was nothing more than housing a donkey alongside a horse. And how foolish. The Negro Slaves, needless to say, were, all of us, every man, woman and child, disgusted and horrified by these unnatural creatures, beasts in the form of men. I remember well the first time I saw them. I worked as a stableboy then, and it was as the cart brought their cage up from Gowrie Landing . . .

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Barbara suddenly felt as if she were no longer simply reading this story. Some part of it gripped her soul, as if she were seeing it,
living
it. It had happened to her a thousand times as a child. She felt again the sensation of being drawn down into the tale, the words transforming themselves into sights, smells, sounds. As the words marched in front of her eyes, with the stern countenance of the writer staring down at her, with his very blood coursing through her veins, with the wild storm chasing itself madly around the darkened landscape outside, the images of those elder days flashed before her eyes. She
knew
how it must have been . . . .

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Young Zeb looked on the beasts in outright terror. They seemed huge, monstrous, the denizens of a nightmare. They were perhaps no larger than a grownup, but their shrieking, screaming, maddened yelling, the wild way they flung themselves at the bars of their cage, the banging and clanging of all the bars and locks that set the cart to bouncing wildly about, all this made them seem far larger than they really were.

The pair of horses drawing the cart were just as fearful, snorting and whinnying, pawing the ground in their fright, the well-muscled sinews rippling beneath their perfect chestnut hides. Zeb found himself staring at the horses instead of the beasts, for at least the horses seemed real, normal, of this world.

But real or not, the horses too were terrified, and it was all the ostler could do to keep them from stampeding. The cart was backing and starting, threatening to pitch over on its side altogether. Finally, the drayman, adding to the chaos with a stream of shouted curses, brought his team to a full halt, and leapt gracefully down from the rig and stood at a respectful distance. At least the horses suffered themselves to stand still, wild-eyed, with their nostrils flared, their flanks twitching and flecked with foam. Zeb didn’t know where he got the courage to step in and hold the leads, but he did, and stood between the heads of the frightened horses, speaking soft soothing words to them as he watched the proceedings at the back end of the cart.

Gowrie himself was there, a tall, rangy man with a small black goatee and a fierce enthusiasm of expression. He was standing by the rear of the cart, grinning wildly, looking over his new chattels with great pleasure. “Joe, Will, let’s get that cage open and welcome our new friends,” he said, holding out the key to the cage and gesturing to two of his slaves.

“Massah Gowrie,” Will said in his soft plantation creole, “This ain’t no time to let them things out.” Will worked in the stables and barns, caring for the farm animals, and knew a lot about most live things. “Let ‘em set a bit, calm down a mite. They’s scared half to death from the ride, and someone sure to get hurt if they come out now—else they just go over the horizon in a flash.”

“Will, I said to open the cage!” Gowrie growled. “You fixing to get whipped?”

“No suh. But I’d druther be whipped than bitten and clawed. Them things is
fierce
right now!”

“Joe—get up there and—” Gowrie began, but Joe just shook his head. “Damn you both, then!” Gowrie shouted, and leapt up on the cart bed. He set the key in the lock—and two hairy arms reached out for him. He suddenly found himself thrown to the ground, his clothing ripped and the flesh in his arm badly scratched. He was shocked, infuriated, swore incoherently. He got up, grabbed a whip from the drayman, and lashed it savagely against the bars of the cages, setting the beasts into new paroxysms of hysteria, panicking the horses anew. Zeb was almost thrown off his feet and trampled before the drayman came to his rescue and helped calm the animals.

“To the devil with all of you!” Gowrie thundered ineffectually, flinging down the whip. “Leave them there caged up on the cart overnight, then, and see how they like it!” He stormed off, leaving the ostler to chase after him, protesting about having his cart standing idle all night.

Will, Joe, and Zeb chocked up the cart and gingerly got the horses out of harness and into the stable to be fed and watered.

The beasts they left to themselves, and the air that night was filled with an endless, terrifying hooting and calling.

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The lightning flickered again, and Barbara came back to herself with a start. She had a vivid imagination, and had always managed to scare herself gleefully half to death by reading ghost stories. She read on, trying to keep her imagination in check if she could.

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Gowrie had had a slave hut newly fitted with stout bars and a locking door, though none of the other Negro huts had a door of any kind—an irony that was hard to miss. The night in the open seemed to soothe the beasts somewhat, and Gowrie managed to get them out of their cage and into their new quarters without much incident.

In the days that followed Gowrie started to work teaching them their duties. New shipments of the creatures arrived, every other day or so over the space of a fortnight, a pair at a time. Gowrie worked them all as hard he could, but in spite of all his efforts, all his coaxing and cajoling and threatening and whippings, he still could get but little work out of them, and that only after such endless training that it would have been less bother to do the job himself.

And, after all that effort, the creatures did not last long. Three were dead in a month, of influenza.

Gowrie House Plantation had (and still has, for that matter) a small plot of ground that served as a graveyard for the Slaves. Of course, not a grave there had a proper headstone, but the survivors would fashion a wooden cross out of picket fence staves and place it over their loved one’s grave, and perhaps add a smooth, round, whitewashed stone. The place was most carefully tended and maintained, and if any one thing on Earth could be said to belong to Gowrie’s Slaves, it was that graveyard, held as joint and common property by all of us, the final resting place of those who had finally died under the lash.

And it was here that Colonel Ambrose Gowrie proposed to inter those three dumb beasts, laying them beside the honored and ancient bones of our grandparents and the remains of children lost in infancy. If Mississippi had ever been close to a slave revolt, it was on that day. . . .

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Almost unwillingly, Barbara let the story steal over her again. She could
see
the Colonel in the midst of his predicament—the fear in his heart, the anger of the mob around him.

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Ambrose Gowrie himself stood with the reins in his hands, the cart stopped dead right where the main plantation road intersected the path to the slaves’ burying ground. None of the white overseers had been willing to do the job, and even his own sons felt it was foolhardy to try this thing. Behind him, on the bed of the wagon, lay the three wooden boxes, packing crates renamed as coffins for their final service. Black men and women, his own slaves, surrounded the flat-bed wagon, a straining, silent, surly, dangerous mob. Gowrie thought of the lash, the bullet, and realized with a sudden, sick feeling in his gut that such things would be worse than useless.

The sky was steel, a flat sheet of sullen grey that murmured with the rumblings of a nascent storm. The wind tossed the cotton plants about and lashed at the trees surrounding the plantation house, and a loose shutter on an upstairs window banged angrily.

Behind him, silent in their boxes, lay the causes of all his troubles. His slaves had hardly ever offered a bit of difficulty, but they had been close to open revolt from the first moment those accursed creatures had arrived. This now-dead trio of beasts had done nothing for him but cost him money, effort, and pride.

Gowrie did not dare to so much as glance back at his cargo as he thought about the dead creatures. He could not risk looking away from this roiling mob. He felt a trickle of sweat slide down his face, and suddenly realized his armpits and back were soaked with the perspiration of fear, his hands clammy in the reins of the cart.

With a conscious effort, he drew himself up and shouted, almost screamed at the crowd. “The corpses must be buried! Make way and let me into the graveyard, damn you! Make way or you’ll live to regret it!”

The crowd did not move. Fearful and uncertain, he sat down in the driver’s seat and swallowed hard. From the rear came quiet mutterings, the briefest flickerings of movement. The press of bodies inched forward slowly, quietly, until the closest of the myriad solemn faces were only a foot or two from his own. Gowrie suddenly found himself making calculations of how far he could get if he ran.

But he had to do this thing, get those bodies below ground before they began to rot . . . and yet that was impossible. He might drive the cart into the graveyard, but how could he possibly dig the graves and move the heavy crate-coffins into the earth by himself, with this mob about him? He realized with a wrenching knot in his stomach that they weren’t afraid of him. What were they capable of if they weren’t afraid?

The rear of the cart suddenly bucked and swayed, and Gowrie let out a wild yelp. They were overturning the cart! They were going to tear him—

He looked behind to see a number of the burliest black men pulling the packing crates off the cart. Shovels and picks appeared from somewhere. The earth sprouted holes by the crossroads. Shallow graves suddenly gaped open.

Gowrie sat in the cart, powerless, speechless. Will came up to him, and that little stable boy Zeb trailed behind. “Them dead will rot and smell same’s any other, Massah Gowrie,” Will said solemnly, “and they mus’ be buried—but not in our place. Not in
our
place.”

Gowrie watched in silent, fearful awe as his slaves openly, willfully, jointly disobeyed him. Even if their revolt was in the form of a compromise, burying the corpses near their graveyard, and even though all his slaves quietly returned to their tasks the moment the last shovel of dirt was atop the graves, he had witnessed the beginnings of something—the primordial act of peaceful, determined defiance.

He had seen how fragile his control was. And he saw the changes coming, saw that his world would never be quite the same again. This moment would be at the back of his mind every time he gave an order.