George & Rue

by George Elliott Clarke

  Rue thought—wildly—of India. He almost believed—had to believe in this sole redemption—that he had only desperately wanted to love, like breathing in fiery, milk-sweet air. If he could have interrupted India in her maternity, if he could have brought her bodily—beautifully—before him in her gold flesh and golden ways, Rue’d've said that she could take light and give it new meaning and he’d've admitted to her that when she sang out those fatal words, I love you, her heart was broken and his was not whole.

  The alarm-clock hammer berated him, announcing, “You will die, you will die. Tomorrow, July 27th, in the a.m., you will die. You will never see the p.m. of that day.” It wasn’t hardly worth Rue’s while to wake up.

  Father Bataille from St. Dunstan’s Catholic Church, across the street from the York County Gaol, was porcine, greasy, with a turpentine smell and a vile face. His sermons was worse than his hygiene. Still, the flushed, spectacled, peach-faced priest tried to preach to Rufus. He spoke of the ruins of love in some broken words, of the terror in the soul that no sermon expiates. Only Christ Jesus could help now.

  “Don’t you know the need of the Church in days like these?”

  Rufus replied, “Don’t you know the need of a man for a woman?”

  Bataille persevered. “Be yes in the eyes of God and no in the eyes of Man, not yes in the eyes of Man and no in the eyes of God.”

  “ Father, stand me on the gallows. I prefer it to lying in shit.”

  Rufus remembered those good times when he’d been alone, with half a piano, but a whole heart, creating, creating. Oh what he wouldn’t give for a taste of rum! Bataille asked Rue if he had any remorse for the murder. Rue teared up, rueful: “I stole two hundred dollars once. I tell you it required nerve. I used to complain about cockroaches and mice. Georgie and me lived in a shack, dirty, cold. Our flowerbeds were graves.”

  Bataille shrugged, crossed himself, then exited. He would play Rue’s keeper, not his liberator.

  Lion told Rufus India’d come down from Halifax, was waiting downstairs. “Want to see her?”

  Rue shook his head no. “I don’t want her to see me shut up like some slave. Tell her I wish hear … I wish her happiness.”

  What did Rufus want for his last meal? “Make it blueberry pie, Sheriff. A whole blueberry pie. I’ll wash it down with two bottles of Sussex ginger ale.”

  Outside in the hot night, Salvation Army singers fountained voices like rosewater. Tambourines rustled like rivers.

  George knew he’d never eat another Moir’s chocolate. Now he wanted to be where he could breathe endlessly and see the sun eternally. Major Pretty and other members of the Fredericton Corps of the Salvation Army visited his cell. They composed a band whose members included Brothers Olds and Hoyt on trumpet and tambourine, Mrs. Hoyt, Omar Bird (feeling sorry for Rue), Mrs. Pretty, and James Synge on tambourine. They sang songs the death-empowered Georgie chose. The inmate even joined in at times on absurdly ecstatic harmonica. Everyone kept weeping while laughing, then laughing while weeping. Even the most calloused psalmist would never forget this night. Believers sang:

  Why should Christian belief

  Shake and shiver like a leaf?

  George was so calm about his dying he was certain he wouldn’t shame himself by pissing his pants when the rope wrung his neck. The moon rent the sky with light, shivering.

  George’d been unfairly angry with Blondola for leaving the court when his cheating was exposed. But she’d still come to see him off. She’d brought Otho and Desiah. George just had tears coursing down his face and that of Blondola too. There were sobs, snuffles, flurries of the tissue paper Lion kindly provided. George told Blondola, bravely, his voice unbrave, “The Spirit of God was in my cell. I don’t care anymore about the gallows.”

  Blondola was not mollified. “What about us, Joygee, yer babies an me?”

  George just wept. “I’ll be watchin over ya from above.”

  Blondola aimed fruitlessly for calm; Otho was looking like he wanted to cry and Desiah was wailing. She sobbed, “We was happy till Rue come out the pen. Rue’s torn us down, ripped us apart. How’ll we live, Joygee? How’ll we live?”

  George sobbed, “It weren’t all Rue’s fault. I was readin bad comics and gamblin and drinkin. I was a bad husband, a poor papa.”

  Blondola cried terribly, “You were my husband and their pa. We loved you just as you was, with all your silliness an sins, Georgie.”

  Then George handed Blondola a gift for the grown-up Otho: the silver-buckled belt Rue’d received from Easter. They hugged a last time. George asked, tenderly, “Blondola, how’d ya get that name? You’ve never said.”

  Blondola smiled through her tears. “Ma loved her blond Jesus, and she loved her dark Coca-Cola.”

  XIV

  THE GALLOWS is winsome, awesome, lonesome, lithesome, elegant, functional, classically rough, and ultramodern. Standing on the platform in the barn, Ellis feels the strong, ripe rope; he feels the cool heads of the nails that lock it into place and make it strong enough to kill. Ellis wishes to touch the Hamiltons hardly, but gently. His violence against them must be an expert matter of rope, gravity, and their own weights, their own deeds, counting heavily against them. He pulls a lever that jets two bags of flour through the trap, tumbling, hanging. All is working fine.

  George and Rue, chained at the neck, felt their flesh bruise from the weighty chain and heavy padlock each time one of them stumbled. Cool hands were about to grope their necks, crush their throats, while the approaching autopsy’d splay open their bellies. Calm, methodical Frederictonians’d wield stainless steel knives and scissors and cut up the boys’ garb and nooses and hair. So only a last-minute British-inherited reserve would prevent their genitals from being sliced off and their skin stripped off for wallets and purses, as more excitable whites did to their black lynchees in the southern states.

  The boys could not know that Alisha’d taken a train all the way from Three Mile Plains to Fredericton. She was the closest family of any sort they had left. She brought with her all the futile prayers—and effective prophecy—of Three and Five Mile Plains. She camped out in the mob-filled streets in front of and around the prison, where, if it had rained, the vast numbers of bodies jostling and jockeying for the best vantage points to attempt to feel—for they could not witness—the imminent but closed-door execution of flesh-and-blood like themselves would’ve prevented any drop from moistening the ground.

  Rufus, companioned by Bataille, and George, flanked by Pretty, walked from their cells, down stairs, and out the back of the jail to the small barn in its yard. The men now felt absurdly comfortable in the gently clanking chains on their wrists and ankles. During the brief seconds the brothers were visible to the massed, sandwich-and-pie-picnicking, beer-and-rum-guzzling hoi polloi outside the prison walls, a thunderous series of cheers erupted, punctuated by clapping and catcalls. Six local Klansmen milled about in white sheets and hoods with slits cut out for eyes.

  A man’s drunken voice shouted lustily, “Hang those black bastards! Or let us do it!” The crowd surged savagely, anticipating an orgiastic lynching, but the hundred cops round the jail pushed and clubbed the ringleaders back. But neither George nor Rue heeded the tidal attentiveness of their frothing audience. They vanished into the temporary refuge of the barn.

  Sheriff Lion explained the final procedures and commanded the boys to bravery. (Both George and Rue felt calm. It wasn’t hanging that was so bad, they reflected; it was the possibility of messing yourself that was disgusting.) All around the small, hay-strewn, shadow-busy barn, under a single electric light bulb, stood skull-faced police—witnesses—at attention. The atmosphere of the hanging barn was hot with hymns, muffled by the wood walls but still infiltrating the death chamber, turning it into some weird joint English-Latin, Protestant-Catholic service, with the Salvation Army band’s marching music dovetailing with the Gregorian-like chants of the Eternal Church. Ellis was poised funereally—a Gothic demon—atop the scaffold.
The tolling church bells and the liquored-up shouts from the mob outside seemed quiet and far off now.

  Sheriff Lion removed the chains from the Hamiltons. Without the extra weight, they felt light enough to fly. George turned and hugged Rufus. “I forgive you.” That was Rufus speaking silently, George saying it aloud. Tears coated two fraternal faces. Then Lion tied the brothers’ hands behind their backs and escorted them, shuffling, to the gallows staircase.

  They scaled the mandatory thirteen steps to the top of the scaffold. There was no flinching, no nothing. The boys were so calm that some onlookers believed they’d been injected with morphine. But, no, their eerie, disturbing calm was that of Asa and Easter under water, that of Cynthy in that final bathroom. There was no point to feeling ill used or hard done by or disrespected: they could only pray agony would end in rapture. As soon as the sun’d first shone on them, it’d been shining on their graves. They knew it. Their stars were always a ceiling of nooses.

  Ellis arranged the brothers on separate traps beside two nooses, belted their legs, affixed the ropes about their necks, and dropped black hoods over their faces. He was methodical, undistressed, and would have whistled, save that he enjoyed the gravity and solemnity of professionally administering death.

  Outside the jail, a black hearse waited. A lightning-undiminished dark sparked above that jail as grey as settecento maps of the New World. A worrisome citizenry milled. A voice wailed, “Let’s butcher em! Let’s work em over!”

  Rufus stood on the scaffold, his back to George, and lamented and rejoiced, all at once. He’d been dispensed no merciful love; now he was being dispensed with—mercifully. George imagined he’d laze on the edge of a cliff of gold where doves lie down, eat and drink to his heart’s content.

  The priest and the preacher opened their respective Bibles to speak final words of comfort and promise. They found it, strangely, hard.

  Lion shouted “Uncover!” A dozen policemen-witnesses doffed their caps ceremoniously. Unceremoniously, Ellis yanked the lever that sent the trembling Hamiltons crashing down into eternity. George was in the middle of Psalm 23; Rufus was saying “Hail Mary” over and over again. The trap went blam! Just like that. As they fell, all the world swooped upwards like flowers. The brothers saw Asa, Cynthy, both forgiven, waiting for them just outside the barn. Rue could feel Easter next to him; George imagined he was holding Otho and Desiah and smiling at Blondola.

  The masses in the hot, choking streets felt a collective spasm, a frisson, that made them gasp, quiver, vibrate in their genitals when they heard the trap violently clap, clatter, open. They felt emotionally alive now, but spent.

  Was there a rich tremble, the double downslap of feet, a shaking of air and flesh? Two bodies braced like quail; they snapped to a stop, two feet off the floor. Then the stars were hanging, the heads of sunflowers were hanging, the ripening apples were hanging, and two minor Negroes were hanging where the Saint John River was drifting, drifting, drifting.

  The boys were not hanged; they were felled.

  They were not conquered; they were quelled.

  Their deaths will last as long as life itself.

  The Negro hands of night moulded stars into immemorial, memorial pearls. Finis the “Black Acadian” Tragedy of “George and Rue.”

  CRYPT

  The boys on the gully bridge Rufus, George …

  —LORNA GOODISON

  I

  JULY 27, 1949, Anno Domini: the Hamiltons fell like dominoes. They merit no poetry, no laurels, no ballads, no statues, no headstones, no memory, no existence. They go the way of cats’ and fishes’ and horses’ eyes.

  The offspring of Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia, is dry dust mixed in unmarked corners of two Fredericton cemeteries. The killers are better off as dirt. They be two crumbly chassis, two slushy torsos, all micked up with soil.

  The Hamiltons sink in a damp cemetery, their sulking skeletons just blossoming along in soil laundered constantly by worms. They vegetate into carbon passing to oil before it crystallizes as diamonds. They’ll be there always, springing snakes and ants and mushrooms and dead leaves and worms and weeds and soda pop bottles and cigarette lighters and marbles and soft, ripped-up newspapers.

  II

  IN DECEMBER 1949, just outside of Montreal, two men—Kenneth Bevin, seventeen, and Girvin Patenaude, nineteen—called a taxi driver, directed him out to the sticks, and, after driving about seven miles, hammered his head five times—making that indescribable sound that striking a hammer against a skull makes. They threw his corpse off a bridge into a murky river. The teens used the slain man’s money to buy two boxes of shells, then they drove to a small town and robbed a bank with two. 45 pistols that looked like bazookas. They took $5,000, and the cops found them the next night, asleep in a barn. They were sentenced to die. Ninety minutes before their hangings, word came their sentences’d been commuted to life in prison. George and Rue—black—had no such white luck.

  India received Rue’s letters three months after his death. She read and reread em. She wondered, “Can any word of Rue’s live? Is a thought a body part?”

  Barker’s Point was demonized as Hammertown. Another nasty shenanigan exercised by downtown Fredericton society.

  In Three Mile Plains, those who’d known the Hamiltons agreed to forget they’d ever been born, and to pour ink over their names in the registers where they’d been christened. Their only trace: yellowed, brittle newsprint.

  NOTES

  Did history really repeat itself? Or only family history?

  —BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD

  VERDICT

  THIS NOVEL recapitulates bleakly truthful circumstances, but it is fiction, and I have taken prodigious and relentless liberties with “facts,” so that psychologies, identities, genealogies, and even some place descriptions are purely imaginary. (But History is the truth, if you remember.)

  Admittedly, the Hamiltons were my matrilineal first cousins once removed; they died before I was born. I was innocent of their existence—and their destruction—until May 1994, when my mother commented, abruptly and briefly, on their homicide and their hangings.

  Though repelled by the Hamiltons’ crime, I embrace them as my kin. They were born where I was born—in the Africadian settlement of Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia—and George Hamilton and I were named for the same gentleman, his grandfather and my great-grandfather, George Johnson. (In naming me as she did, my mother salvaged the memory of that perished cousin—and recuperated the regal name of her grandfather.) Too, the Hamiltons were—like so many of us from Three Mile Plains, Five Mile Plains, Windsor Plains (all the same community, really)—part Mi’kmaq and part African.

  Every heritage is coruscatingly complex. My other relatives include contralto Portia White (1911–1968), filmmaker Sylvia Hamilton (1950—), journalist William Clarke (1962—), and poet Kirk Johnson (1973—). Ultimately, this novel conducts a tryst with biography. Perhaps the dual impulse to creativity and violence in my own genealogy serves to illustrate the Manichaean dilemmas of the African odyssey in this strange American world.

  George Elliott Clarke

  (X. States)

  Toronto, Ontario

  Nisan IV

  AFTER WORDS

  THIS history of George and Rue was bred from original, monstrous truths. Still, I imbibed several works for atmosphere and accuracy: C. R. K. Allen, A Naturalists Notebook (1987); Frank W. Anderson, A Dance with Death (1996); Robert L. Armstrong, ed., Good Old Barker’s Point (1981); Velma Carter and Wanda Leffler Akili, The Window of Our Memories (1981), and Velma Carter and Leah Suzanne Carter, The Window of Our Memories, Volume II (1989); Dean Jobb, Shades of Justice (1988); and John Neal Phillips, Running with Bonnie and Clyde (1996). One passage in the novel adapts Basil Bunting’s poem “The Orotava Road” (1935, 1950); another revisits Robert Browning’s poem “How It Strikes a Contemporary” (1855).

  The trial transcripts for George and Rufus Hamilton, as well as the letters both men wrote, are at the Nat
ional Archives of Canada. Donald Harris gave me a typescript of The Journal of George Hamilton (1949) and copies of the Canadian Army medical and psychological assessments of George Hamilton.

  This novel would not exist without the generosity of Harris, who met me at the Waterloo Hotel, in Waterloo, Ontario, on June 17, 1999, and shared with me his feelings and thoughts about the Hamiltons, their crime, and their executions. I am also indebted to the researches of my cousin and genealogist David “Skip” States. I thank Francis Nowacyznski for his dossier of bizarre crimes. At the National Archives, I also consulted the capital case records pertaining to the execution of Frank Rough-mond, for murder, in Stratford, Ontario, in 1905, as well as those respecting the 1950 murder trials of Kenneth Bevin and Girvin Patenaude in Quebec. At the New Brunswick Provincial Archives, I accessed stories carried by the Saint John Telegraph-Journal and the Fredericton Daily Gleaner. The Legislative Library of New Brunswick housed helpful press and Hansard records, and the Public Archives of New Brunswick furnished a host of photos. I benefited irreducibly from conversations or correspondence with Joe Blades, Hazen and Corinne Calabrese, Jerry Carty, Nancy Claybourne, James Elgee, Ruth Goodine, Sterling and Ann Gosman, Joan Harmon, Angus “Sock” Johnson, Cecil Johnson, Betty Lacey, Harley McGee, Bernice McIntyre, Lisa McLean, Bruce Oliver, Donald Parent, Jerome Peterson, Sarah Petite, Sue Rickards, Bill Scott, Patrick Toner, Thelma Walker, and Harold Wright. Michael Edwards of Science East in Fredericton guided me on an exhaustive tour of the former York County Gaol. Eric J. Swinaker of the Legislative Library in Fredericton was unfailingly kind.