The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles (12 page)

Reuven Shaw wiped a hand across his mouth. “My driver tonight was Beau. You know Beau—a good nigger. I just found him by the pond. His body was lyin’ on the bank, an’ his head—his head was floatin’ in—”

Shaw stopped, looking nauseated.

Well he might, Judson thought, chilled despite the mildness of the evening. There had been occasional slave rebellions throughout the southern colonies in the past. Not many. But each one was usually disastrous, at least at first, because the white owners and overseers were numerically inferior.

“You mean to tell me niggers are loose with field knives?” Angus whispered.

Again Shaw nodded, sick-faced. “Guess that’s how they butchered Beau. Larned, he’s gone for sure. I checked.”

Judson saluted Shaw with his goblet. “Congratulations. I was told you hided him twice this afternoon.”

“Sassy bastard kept braggin’ he was gonna enlist in Dunmore’s nigger army. I shoulda castrated him last summer, ’fore this got out of hand.”

“Well, it obviously
is
out of hand,” Angus seethed. “Why haven’t I heard the bell?”

“I come to report first. There ain’t much we can do to save number two barn—”

“Go ring the goddamned bell!”
Angus screamed. “We’ve got to turn out every white man on the river before this spreads!”

The old man’s profanity indicated the depth of his fear. The house black who had been waiting on table had disappeared, Judson noticed. Angus dashed from the dining room, headed for his office. His passage made the flames of the candles jump and cast distorted shadows of Judson rising from his chair.

On his way out, the overseer gave the younger man a questioning look.

“If you’re counting on me to help slaughter the nigras—” Judson realized he was more than slightly drunk. He had trouble articulating the last word: ‘

“Don’t.”

Shaw scowled. “Like Mr. Fletcher said, we need every man—”

Judson waved. “Shit, I didn’t bring this on. I won’t help finish it.”

Reuven Shaw trembled, but not from fear. He gathered spit in his mouth and blew a gob onto the pegged floor. Then he spun and ran into the red-glaring dark.

Judson tossed off the last of his wine. He was setting the fine crystal goblet on the polished table when he heard a hideous shriek from out on the grounds.

He bolted for the window, raced down the lawn toward the rear corner of the big house. Beyond it he saw flames leaping from the curing barn, and terrified bucks, wenches and running to and fro, adding their hysteria to the din. Other male slaves were trying to round up the frightened ones with profane shouts or, in some cases, drivers’ whips.

Before Judson reached the corner of the house, his boots struck something in the neatly scythed grass. He halted, crouched down, tasted vomit in his throat—

Reuven Shaw, lying crooked as a doll. The overseer was dead. An immense gash had been cut in his throat. The distant firelight lit the still-wet blood drenching his right sleeve and the front of his coarse shirt.

Out back, the alarm bell on its great iron Y began to toll—but not before Judson heard a stirring up on his left, in the dark near the unlighted windows of the conservatory.

“Jesus God—!” he breathed, lurching to his feet as an ebony figure shot toward him from the shadowy concealment. Firelight glittered on one of the knives used to chop off the leaves at harvest.

The black man was red to the elbows. Judson’s sotted mind screamed the danger. Somehow he managed to duck as the frenzied face loomed, white teeth and eyes glaring. The long knife slashed in an arc where Judson’s head had been a moment before.

He dropped to his knees, grappled for the slave’s ragged trousers. A work-toughened hand clasped his throat, cutting off his air. He heard the guttural breathing of his attacker, then the
whissh
of the knife hacking at his throat—

Wildly, Judson wrenched free and rolled. The slave jumped after him, hacked again. The blade struck Judson’s left boot, cut through the leather but didn’t break the skin. The renegade slave’s downward stroke had thrown him off balance. Judson sprang up, used his head to butt the black in the stomach. In seconds, fright had torn the cobwebs out of his mind.

The slave pitched over backwards. He cursed Judson in West African dialect. The cursing ended in a yelp as Judson stamped on the slave’s wrist. The gory right hand opened. The field knife was loose. Judson snatched it up, leaped back, panting—

A shadow fell across the lawn from the dining room. Judson whipped his head around, saw his father with his sword buckled on and a British-made horse pistol in each hand.

“Kill him,” Angus ordered as the terrified slave struggled to rise.

Judson hesitated. Angus made a sound deep in his throat; a wordless condemnation. In two steps he reached the floundering slave, who blocked his face with his scarlet forearms, shrieking, “Mist’ Fletcher
—don’—”

Angus shoved the horse pistol against the slave’s chest and fired.

Clang
and
clang,
the Sermon Hill bell spread its message of terror through the still November night. Angus treated his son to one final glare of utter loathing, then disappeared around the corner of the house, on the run.

Judson turned his back on the grisly corpse with the huge, dripping cavity in the chest. The curing barn collapsed in a crash of burning timbers and sky-spraying sparks. The slaves were being whipped into submission by the black drivers; being formed up into bucket lines that stretched from the springhouse. He heard two more shots, new screaming—and then, off across the fields, a series of ululating yells that sent worms of horror gnawing through his mind.

The renegade slaves were loose not just at Sermon Hill, but out in the countryside
—

That made him run like a man demented.

Upstairs first, for his own horse pistol and the knife for the sheath in his boot. Then through the red confusion to the stable, where he flung a saddle on his roan, trying not to hear the pitiless crack of the whips beating the less able-bodied slaves back to their cabins.

The fire seemed under control now. It had spread to the roofs of the other curing barns, but slaves on ladders were dousing the flames with buckets of water. Judson mounted, jerked the roan’s head savagely, galloped past the cabins and down to the main road.

At a crossroads he encountered a dozen men from neighboring estates, all summoned by the bell. They reined in, shouting questions at him.

“Stand aside!”

When they didn’t, he booted the roan, jumped the roadside ditch and thundered by along the shoulder, tortured by what he saw through the trees in the distance.

Seth McLean’s house. Ablaze.

He booted the roan still harder, the wind carrying those piercing howls to him twice more before he turned into the lane leading to Seth’s property.

Riding fast toward the curving front drive, he saw that his original estimate of the situation had been wrong. Slave cabins, not the main residence, were afire. But the front door of the great house stood open. He heard terrified wails from within.

He jumped from the saddle and sped across the veranda between the tall white pillars. He heard mounted men back along the lane. He paused in the doorway, saw another eight or ten galloping toward the house, swords swinging from their hips, muskets and pistols in their hands. In the distance, the bell still clanged.

Judson wiped his sweat-blurred eyes, entered the foyer and gagged.

Hacked by a field knife, Seth McLean lay on the parquet. An ear was missing. An arm. One foot. The sickening stench of blood filled the air.

Judson heard something stir in the darkened parlor. He aimed the horse pistol at the arch—

And watched two black girls in long dresses and kerchiefs come forward out of the gloom. Both were young—and weeping. House help.

“Upstairs,” one pleaded in a feeble voice. “Love o’ God, Mist’ Fletcher—
upstairs.”

In the drive, the plantation men were dismounting. Judson swayed a moment, drunk again. But not from wine. From the slaughter; from the unavoidable truth:

This is what happens when one man chains another. God damn my father for not understanding
—

Somewhere on the upper floor, a woman screamed.

Judson climbed the stairs three at a time, maddened almost beyond sense. His heart hammered so violently his chest hurt. The memory of Seth lying butchered brought bile back to his throat. But he kept running, toward the source of that scream keening down the long corridor where two chimneyed candles flickered, islands of yellow in the darkness—

At the hall’s end, a door on the left stood open. The screaming came from that room; mindless; mortally afraid. He shouted Peggy’s name as he plunged toward the rectangle of light on the carpet, skidded to a stop outside, hate welling when he looked in.

She lay on the floor. Half of her nightgown was in shreds, the rest completely gone. A young black bent over her, his trousers around his ankles. A field knife shone in one hand.

The slave turned at the sound of Judson’s footsteps. His other hand held scraps of pastel fabric. Behind him, Peggy thrashed and wailed, her legs spread. A moment’s distorted glance showed Judson the secret place he’d thought about so often; the curling dark hair against the pale skin. He saw her small, firm breasts as well. But there was no excitement in it; only horror. Seth’s wife shielded her face with her forearms as she screamed—

Desperately, the slave lunged with the field knife. His pants at his ankles made him stumble. Judson hammered the barrel of the horse pistol on the slave’s wrist. The knife clacked to the floor.

The black swayed forward, afraid now. Judson used his free hand to catch the sweaty chin, prop the slave up. The weight put great strain on his arm and shoulder. His right knee buckled. But he needed only a moment more—

The young slave saw what was coming. His mouth opened like some ivory-lined chasm. Judson shoved the muzzle of the horse pistol between the black’s teeth and pulled the trigger.

The black’s body seemed to leap upward, then landed half on top of Peggy McLean. She recoiled from the weight she couldn’t identify, tore at it with maniacal hands and kept on screaming. Judson tried not to look at the reddened gobbets of brain matter and bone the pistol ball had deposited on the rumpled bed and the wall behind.

He kicked the dead slave’s body aside, laid the still-smoking pistol on the carpet, bent over the flailing woman. He started to speak, noticed something else: a few glistening drops of milky fluid in the black tangle between her legs. And drying stains inside her thighs.

He closed his eyes, bent his head, jammed one palm over his face until he was able to control himself.

Then, as gently as possible, he touched her hair.

“Peggy?” he whispered. “Peggy, look here. It’s Judson.”

The backs of his fingers accidentally brushed her cheek. She shrieked again, trying to hitch her bare body away from whoever was touching her.

“Peggy, you’re all right. For God’s sake look at me,” Judson pleaded, unaware of the tears on his cheeks. He repeated it:

“Look at me!”

She opened her eyes; those beautiful, luminous dark eyes he’d coveted for so long. Her gaze was unfocused; opaque.

She lifted one hand, as if on the threshold of recognition. Then something quenched it. She recoiled, hand whipping over to shield her face as the screaming started again, louder and shriller than before. She bent her knees, hitched her hips away from the terror in her own mind—

Dry-eyed now, Judson ran downstairs and found the two shivering house girls. From behind the main building came the familiar crack of whips and discharging pistols.

“Go up to her,” Judson ordered. “Lock yourselves in with her and take care of her. Don’t open the door unless it’s someone you know personally. A white man. If anything happens to her, I’ll come back and kill you both.”

They obeyed without hesitation as Judson ran out into the darkness.

Some forty men answered the summons of Sermon Hill’s alarm bell that night. Mounted, they stormed through the tobacco fields, youths with torches in the van. They shot, sabered or whipped any black they found running loose. Judson traveled with one group and did his part, short of actually firing his pistol. He rode like a man half dead, only marginally conscious of details of what was going on.

Though not completely like the vividly remembered outbreaks of past years, the one that had ignited at Sermon Hill, McLean’s and one other plantation further downriver resembled earlier uprisings in at least one way. It was fueled and given momentum by rage more than reason. Poorly organized and planned, it began to weaken as soon as the planters took to the saddle with their superior weapons and jangling shackles. It crumbled further as whites rode in leading chained slaves in twos and threes. It dissolved completely about midnight, when another group arrived at Sermon Hill with the corpse of big, blue-muscled Larned dragging on the ground, pulled by a rope around one ankle.

Larned had been shot in the back with a musket ball while attempting to swim the Rappahannock. His noisy thrashing attracted a passing party of whites. Down on the river bank, they killed him.

“Poor dumb nigger,” remarked one of the party, without any real pity. “He was trying to swim across to the other side. Didn’t have one damn idea of the way to Williamsburg.”

Angus Fletcher ordered Larned’s head cut off and exhibited on a pole in front of the cottage belonging to the dead overseer.

More and more slaves were rounded up in the hours after midnight. Most wailed for mercy, claiming that they had only done what they thought was right: “S’posed to go fight with Gummer Dunmo.” To start the outbreak, Larned and a few co-conspirators had circulated word of Dunmore’s outrageous offer.

Judson listened to the fearful, unlettered pleas and shook his head sadly. At minimum, each runaway would receive a murderous lashing that might cripple him for life.

One pocket of resistance remained. Half a dozen slaves, male and female, hadn’t surrendered, yet hadn’t been quick enough to escape from Sermon Hill after the diversionary fire was discovered. The slaves had thoughtlessly holed up in the smokehouse. Angus Fletcher issued orders for brushwood to be piled around the building. He had been informed that Larned’s woman, Dicey, was one of those inside.