by Ron Shiflet
Lying in bed that night Miss Swilley thought about disturbing the woman of the house, Eleanor Tartabull, but decided that it would be more of a hassle than anything else. Poor Eleanor was a pale, sheltered woman who hardly spent any time with her own children or even out of her bedroom for that matter. Addicted to laudanam since Prentiss’s birth, she spent her days in bed, blinds drawn, just mumbling and staring. She was a constant source of worry for her husband. Mr. Sawyer himself wouldn’t be much help in this case either. He wasn’t due back for some time now and either way he gave no value to colored life and was more likely to take the side of his trusted Marlowe DuBois than he was of the children’s tutor.
Once, when she had asked Mr. Sawyer if she might give some of the older, outdated text books to the slave mothers so that they might teach their young, he had grown outraged and insulted. “The only thing you will give my niggas are orders. Is that understood Miss Swilley?” After she had nodded in the affirmative he had finished. “The nigga is a smart animal. Too smart for it’s own good. I would rather you burn a book, even an old one, than have you give it to one of them. First books, then other privileges and soon enough it will be I who is working for them. We in the South live inside a cauldron that is ready to overflow at any moment. We must grasp the upper hand and hold onto it by whatever means necessary. If that be fear and intimidation then so be it.” Miss Swilley had realized then that Mr. Sawyer not only despised the slaves but that he actually lived in constant fear of them as well.
Now fully awake due to her thoughts of the passing day, she arose from bed in her nightgown and sat at her writing desk. She couldn’t sleep at the present and sometimes organizing the children’s studies helped her relax. It was at this precise moment that she heard the hysterical scream of a woman. Up immediately, she looked from her window, high on the second floor, and stared down past some outbuildings and the barn. In an old field about a half mile from the manor house, between the pecan grove and the creek, she could make out torches. This could only mean one thing. Usually she didn’t get involved in plantation affairs but her curiosity had gotten the better of her this night and her anger was already raised. Later on she would regret her decision to investigate.
She took off across the drive and past the barn. Here she followed a path, well worn by slave feet that wound through a large wooded area to the pecan orchard. When she got to the pecans she could see the glow about a hundred yards away. The cattle on the other side of the creek, where their run began, were agitated and they created a safe background noise for her to advance to the edge of the clearing without alerting anyone.
DuBois was standing with a torch and he had the hair of a slave woman in his gripped fist trying to force her head up. Miss Swilley could see that it was the woman that he had savagely beaten this afternoon, and beyond them suspended and drifting back and forth lazily from an unfelt breeze was the body of a hung slave. The dead slave had once been a man but was now nothing more than bruises, cuts and burn marks. He had been worked over in brutal fashion prior to being strung up, and Miss Swilley could only hope that he had been dead or at least unconscious when the noose went around his neck.
Evangeline Swilley was not raised on a plantation, had never seen a lynching and had never really known evil men, but something deep within herself propelled her to action. Her heart began to take over from her brain and she rose in order to enter the clearing but instantly an anvil strong hand gripped her shoulder. Its power was immeasurable. Her body was paralyzed. It was Luther. “Beamon gone, Ma’am. You can’t do nothing for him now.”
As Miss Swilley watched, three more members of The Gang entered the clearing and they doused the hanging man’s body with kerosene and, once saturated, they lit it on fire. It swayed for a few minutes as it gave off a smell of burnt hair and barbecued meat and then the rope burned through and the smoldering heap fell back to the earth from which all men are born.
The woman could scream no more and her physical body fell over in the grass as her mind drifted between shock and despair. It was at this moment of utter helplessness that DuBois and the three other depraved enforcers ripped the clothes from her body and took turns raping the newly widowed slave in the clearing where they had murdered her husband. She never cried.
“Luther, you have to do something,” Miss Swilley whispered to her protector. “Kill them. Go get other men. You must do something.”
“We are of the earth, Ma’am. We feel differently than you folk. DuBois and his men will get theirs but it will take some conjuring.”
“I don’t understand what you are talking about.”
“Mam, I do not impose to give orders but I feel I can trust you. If you could bring DuBois to the crossing tomorrow at nightfall he will be claimed?”
“Why not now, Luther? They killed your friend and they are raping his widow!”
“It’s not the time, Ma’am. Don’t worry about her none. She stronger than stone. We must hurry now. Can you get DuBois to the crossing tomorrow, alone?”
The crossing was on the far west side of the plantation and was used as a wading point for the cattle to cross the creek from one paddock to the next. She had only been there a few times, along with the children, and she remembered it as muddy, slippery and filthy place. The cattle had worn down the grass and soil at water’s edge until it had exposed the blood red Georgia clay so that it resembled a raw, bleeding cut in the earth’s side. She didn’t, at present, have time to question why Luther chose that specific location so she just answered, “Yes, Luther. I promise.”
“Miss Evangeline, we thank you, we surely do. Now you must leave the same way you came in. Go now, Ma’am. I‘ll keep watch”
With that command, Luther was off as silently as he had appeared and as Miss Swilley retraced her earlier passage and made her way back to the house, she wondered why Luther had said “we” as opposed to “I”. But then she was in her room, experiencing the sanctity and the comfort of her own bed and all her thoughts melted away. She pulled the covers tightly up over her head and slept through burning nightmares of charred, lipless maws and the screams of the damned.
At daybreak Miss Swilley awoke with a purpose. Her mind was made up, and had been since Luther’s proposition the night before, if truth be told. She would use DuBois’s apparent physical attraction to her and lure him to the crossing. She did not ask herself what Luther would do to him once she delivered DuBois, but she was pretty sure it would be none too pleasant. It was rare that slaves revolted or rebelled into physical action but the stories she had heard of those instances were filled with a terrible and gruesome purifying vengeance. She figured DuBois had made his choices a long time ago, maybe out of necessity but most likely out of depravity and a hunger to dominate those unable to mount a defense. He alone had chosen a pact with Mr. Sawyer, the Devil himself inside the confines of Providence Gardens, and the time was coming fast when he would be forced to sleep in the proverbial bed he had made.
DuBois was leaving the stalls when she saw him for the first time that last morning. His brow was grimy and sweaty with the perspiration from the kind of work that most white people wouldn’t perform in a week’s time but he had already performed before ten in the morning. He smiled at her, his teeth pitted and yellow like sun bleached bones, as he saw her approach. He wiped the sweat from above his eyes onto his shirt sleeve. “Mornin’, Miss Evangeline. I would like to apologize for my forwardness of yesterday.” His breath was the pure essence of death. The strong aroma of tobacco could only faintly cover the stench of a cancerous damp decay that emanated from his lungs. Maybe she was imagining things or projecting emotions but she was sure that his peculiar smell could be tied directly to his peculiar vices and life of sinful ways.
“Apology accepted, Mr. DuBois. Did you have a nice night?” she asked with a twang of Southern charm.
“I did indeed. Slept like a baby.”
Her stomach was in knots with the knowledge of his activities during the prior evening but she
bore on. “If truth be told, Marlowe, it is I who would like to apologize for my shyness. The pleasure of your offer caught me off guard and I was momentarily flushed.”
DuBois face broke into a ghastly smile. The numerous sun induced wrinkles on his cheeks looked deep enough to have been carved with a bowie knife. “Then I take it my offer was to your liking after all?” His excitement was barely contained.
“Yes sir, it was. I must say I have fancied you from a distance because of your high ranking on the plantation. Mr. Sawyer himself has told me on many occasions that your high station reflects your abilities. I was hoping your abilities in the carnal sense are just as lofty.”
DuBois looked shocked. It was the first time Miss Swilley had ever seen him this out of sorts. “Oh, yes Ma’am. I am quite capable in that regard.”
Deciding to end this nauseating conversation, but wanting to get the intended result, she gazed into his milky, hazel eyes and spoke in her lowest most comely voice. “Meet me at the crossing, Marlowe. Just you and me, alone by the water’s edge. Come tonight at dusk and I will be there waiting for you. Let not a soul find out nor follow you, fore I have a job and you have a family that I trust we both would like to keep.” With those words and the vapid wink of a harlot, Miss Swilley turned heel and headed back to the library to prepare the children’s morning studies.
Throughout the day she prayed desperately that her plan had worked and though she could recall no God, in the numerous religious texts she had comes across in her studies, that would willingly lead a man, even one as heinous as DuBois, to an unknowingly grisly fate, she had a pretty strong sense that DuBois would meet her that night at the crossing. She was right.
DuBois was standing by the water’s edge and, as she had feared, he was not alone. The Gang was represented by the same comrades in arms that had participated in the previous night’s atrocities. When she walked into the crossing, all four men turned to her and stared with a hunger in their eyes at the expected and longed for sexual pleasure that they would all experience. They didn’t stare long.
No sooner had Miss Swilley come into The Gang’s sight, did the surrounding periphery of the woods came to life in human forMiss They seemed to form from the shadows. An uncountable number of black faces emerged from the darkening tree line and approached the four men. Spread out, organized in the shape of a horseshoe, the slaves trapped The Gang with their backs to the swollen creek. DuBois and his boys would have to swim for it if they wanted to evade a fight that they had no chance of winning. But this was Georgia. This was the last bastion of a white haven where niggers and slaves and spooks would never dare to cross the unspoken line. No, DuBois would not run for it. Here he was king.
Cross the line they did however, and Luther was first, followed closely by a familiar female face. She had been beaten. She had seen her husband tortured, lynched and burned. She had then been beaten again and raped but still she was here standing proud and ominous in the dusk.
DuBois stepped up with a fool‘s courage and began to bark orders when Luther’s hand shot out and grasped him around the throat. DuBois’s voice died in a rattle and his face began to turn red as the blood rushed up into his skull.
“Don’t scream yet, suh. They’ll be time for that soon enough.”
It was over quickly. The slaves encircled, beat down and subdued all three men in a matter of seconds. The three men, along with DuBois who was now regaining some color to his face, were hogtied with twine that, evidently, one of the slaves had brought along for that very purpose. Miss Swilley had still not moved from her spot. She was stuck in place, a recorder of an event that was both bizarre and fascinating.
The three younger Gang members seemed to be in shock. They had not expected anything close to this scenario when DuBois had told them his plan for a night of fun and rape. Because they had believed that his plan was actually something to get excited about and because of their involvement in last night’s butchery, they were now doomed as sure as poor Beamon had been,
The widow approached and pulled a long ornate dagger from her waist. It didn’t look like something that may have been lying around the plantation. Miss Swilley figured it was some relic or keepsake smuggled from whatever foreign land she had been taken from. She used it proficiently to slit the throats on the three youngest men. None of them tried to fight her. When she was done, a small slave boy, one who often played tag with the Tartabulls, brought her an onyx colored bowl in which she collected some of their blood. At this sight, DuBois began to shake hysterically in his bindings.
Miss Swilley was repulsed at the scene playing out in front of her but it held her captive nonetheless. She had read about voodoo and juju and gris-gris women but it had all seemed like fiction at the time. She shouldn’t have been surprised. These slaves, these people, had come from their far away homes on something quite the opposite of their own free will. They had been wrenched violently from a homeland far more ancient than the United States, a homeland where voodoo, the world’s oldest religion, and others like it, were practiced openly and had been for ten thousand years. This was some kind of black magic or ceremony and she could not turn away no matter the horrors.
As soon as the bowl was halfway full, more or less, Luther stepped forward from the mass of his fellow slaves and removed his clothing. He stood nude in front of his brethren and the only thing more shocking than the bright pink colored whip marks that crisscrossed the immense girth of his chest and upper back, a brutal contrast to his midnight black skin pigmentation, was the enormous size of his manhood which dangled down limply lower than his knees. He took the dark bowl from the widow and drank of its contents. Then the chanting started. It was a rhythmic chanting of people existing on a communal level. It was an old language and in a way, a beautiful one. The adults sang and so did the children, like they hadn’t just witnessed the execution of three men, and they danced and waived their arms in frenetic gesticulations. What happened next Miss Swilley would never understand and she would try to erase it from her memory for eternity.
Luther trod to the creek side where the Georgia red clay had been exposed by the cattle’s hooves and he began to wallow in it like a hog. He rubbed the clay on his face and his chest and his loins. And as he rubbed and wallowed and immersed his behemoth body in the earth’s ichor, the chanting remained constant. It was then that Miss Swilley realized that he was growing. The clay was sticking to Luther’s body in some unnatural way and his body was mutating and changing. After about five minutes Luther had disappeared and some sort of elemental monstrosity of gargantuan proportions rose up in his place. The form was enormous, perhaps twelve feet tall, Miss Swilley estimated, and it was featureless but definitely humanoid in shape. For no reason maybe except that the correlating factor was clay, she remembered the old Jewish tale of the golem and a passage stuck in her mind.
“Know you, clod of clay, that you have been fashioned from the dust of the earth so that you may protect our people against its enemies and shelter it from the misery and suffering to which we are subjected.”
But this was no golem. Judaism and voodoo were not related at all and while the golem had been fashioned out of clay, this thing in front of her had once been a man. But still, just maybe, there was a similar legend in whatever ancient religion these slaves practiced.
The creature approached DuBois, who was screaming and shaking in terror. It raised him, on outstretched arms, up to eye level and it stared at him. Well, in truth, Miss Swilley could see no eyes, but it appeared to be staring nonetheless. Then it sort of gave a hitch, torqued its shoulders and with the sound of an old oak tree splintering in the woods, it ripped Marlowe DuBois in half, separating his body below the rib cage. DuBois stuttered for a moment before going limp, his legs trying to kick free of the twine and his lips mouthing words that nobody would ever hear, nobody that is except the thing. The thing knew what DuBois uttered as he died or it had an idea of them anyway. It and other creatures like it, had always been born and conjured fr
om the horrors and pains of generations past and they carried an intrinsic knowledge of sorrow and fear and desperation.
It threw DuBois’s ruined body in the vicinity of the other three dead Gang members. The torso landed in the grass and the trunk landed atop the other bodies, a small eight inch piece of spinal chord protruding from DuBois’s bloody pants. Then it turned towards Miss Swilley. It was then that she collapsed and feinted.
She awoke in her own bed at the same time as usual. When she got out of bed she noticed that all of her bags had been packed and her school supplies were loaded into her trunk. Confused, and with the events of last night still fresh in her mind, she dressed and went downstairs. Walking out onto the covered porch area it seemed that the activities of Providence Gardens were going along as normal. The slaves that she could see were working at their stations and the horses were out loose in the pen trotting around and swatting flies with their groomed tails.
She also noticed that the carriage was set up, outfitted and sitting at the front of the drive. Someone was going for a trip. It was then that Luther appeared behind her, in the doorway, with her trunk propped up on his shoulder.
“Some of us folk did the duty of packing your belongings, Miss Evangeline. And we gots the carriage all ready to take you back to Atlanta or Biloxi or wherever you be heading now. Don’t say nothing, Ma’am. I can see in your eyes that you be worried. Don’t give it no thought now Ma’am. Ain’t nobody ever been harmed that a didn’t have it comin’. And I know you gots lots of questions in your head but there be some things that you be best not knowing. Us folk, we appreciate your compassion and your help but you gots to go now. Run along to the carriage and have yourself a nice life.”