A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  “Okay, and also to figure out a whole lot of things from my personal life. Like—you’re totally right—like why there’s sad behind the eyes in both of these two pictures. You’re pretty smart, you know that?”

  Receiving the compliment like an old center fielder shagging a pop fly he’s caught hundreds of times, the boy nodded. “I know.”

  Kate raised an eyebrow at him. “Really? Wow. Good for you. That’s something I’ve never been good at saying about myself.”

  The boy nodded toward the sweatshirt. “So you tell folks that’s where you’re from so other people can say it for you.”

  Kate stared at him before answering. “A little too smart maybe.”

  His brow furrowed again. “I stomp on your feelings any? Didn’t calculate to.”

  “You’re okay.” Refusing to meet his eye—Ridiculous to be called out by a kid and, worse, for the kid to be right—Kate swung back her hair. “Listen, I need to go. And you need to catch a school bus, right?” She gave his hand a quick squeeze. “Anyway, it was nice to meet you. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  The boy was inching away. “Okay if I’m your very first friend here in Charleston?”

  Already turning, Kate stopped. “You look to me like just the kind of friend I need. And you know what? I’m sorry I was a little crabby to you there at first.”

  “Real crabby’s more like it.”

  “Real crabby, then.”

  “It’s okay.” The boy leaned in. “And I got your back. No sweet-mouthin’. I mean it.”

  Impulsively, Kate gave his shoulders a hug—long enough to feel the bones beneath the flop of the shirt. “I believe you,” she said. “And I’ll return the favor someday. I promise.”

  A glib thing to say. A promise she couldn’t keep.

  And no one, she of all people knew, ought to make promises that couldn’t be kept to a child.

  Clambering down the seawall, she glanced toward the harbor, where the ship was sliding back out toward sea. And there sat the cannons, poised and waiting for whatever invasion might dare disrupt the city again. There, too, still sharing the scene with the ship and the cannons, the runner stood on the seawall, cell phone to his ear. And here came the carriage again, approaching from up East Battery, the clip-clop of the hooves, the rattle of the harness and spoked wooden wheels.

  It unsteadied her, present and past bleeding together like that, and she paused in the middle of the street to take it all in.

  The sun at the horizon was just burning through mist and spilling red out from the edge of the earth.

  Kate’s hand went to her neck. “Like blood,” she murmured aloud, glad the boy wasn’t there any longer to hear. “My God. It’s like watching blood rolling in.”

  Chapter 3

  1822

  Dawn over Charleston Harbor had always calmed him—and calm was something he could use these days. But this morning, the air felt taut and already hot, and the sun’s first rays were staining the water an eerie red.

  A clipper’s bow cut the water soundlessly as the ship sailed into port.

  Far down the harbor, stevedores and slaves swarmed the wharf, distant shouts in waves of sound, a jumble of Gullah and Ibo, Portuguese and Dutch, as the men began unloading the ship’s hold.

  Soon, suspended crates swung high above the wharf. Some of them might have held silks or laces. Fine porcelain or coffee or tea. Madeira. Or sugar, if the ship had come from a Caribbean port. Pineapples. Or mangoes.

  Dark arms and backs strained at the ship’s ropes. A white man, shouting profanities in mostly incoherent torrents of sound, swaggered through their midst with one arm raised over his head, a pistol pointing straight to the sky. Every fifty or so paces he paused to lower the pistol beside a slave’s head, the gun’s mouth pointing upward but its barrel along the slave’s ear. From this distance, Tom could not hear exactly what the white man was saying or what sort of responses he got, but those who must not have said what he wanted to hear, or those whose dark, bare backs must not have seemed bent hard enough into the work, heard the pistol’s report smack up against their ears. Howling, these men lurched to the boards of the wharf, holding the sides of their heads. Then, jerked back up to their feet, they bent again to the ropes and the crates.

  Fourteen years ago the United States had outlawed the importation of slaves by ship. So now, here in the city that saw the greatest amount of human chattel brought into its port, the most valuable of former cargo handled the incoming goods.

  All of it, all of them—all of us, Tom corrected himself—bought and sold at a whim.

  Near the wharves, just behind the Custom House, a crowd had gathered around a low platform, where a white man in a battered top hat—it looked badly moth-eaten and crumpled even from here—was announcing something Tom could not make out. The man flung both arms over his head as he spoke and pointed into the crowd as white hands raised one by one in response.

  Beside him on the platform, a young woman stood trembling, her dress ripped at the neck, one hand grasping the hand of a child who could have been no more than ten. Pulling the boy’s hand to her waist, where she clutched on to it still harder, she seemed to be locking her arms, bracing herself, as if to say to the crowd of men gathered below that no earthly power could part her from her son.

  But the man in the battered hat thrust both hands overhead as he bellowed a “Sold” that carried over the water. Stepping between the mother and child, he wrenched the boy’s arm so that the boy stumbled to his knees.

  Ignoring the auctioneer’s arm blocking her way, the woman dodged past him and reached for her boy. From the back of the platform, a burly man in a stained, coarse linen shirt, reddened jowls hanging low onto his collar, leapt forward and pinioned her arms behind her back.

  Kicking and flailing, the child, panicked and sobbing, strained for his mother. “No,” he screamed. “Momma, no. Momma, don’t let them take me. Momma, help!”

  The mother lunged for her child with such force she nearly broke free.

  At the auctioneer’s nod, a third white man stepped forward, slapping the boy with the whole force of a well-muscled arm. The child staggered back, dazed.

  “Don’t you move a damn muscle, boy,” the auctioneer bellowed.

  Don’t move, Tom willed the child. Don’t do it.

  But, whimpering, the boy lifted one arm for his mother.

  And she lifted hers to him.

  For a moment, their eyes locked. For a moment, their fingertips touched. And, for a moment, the auctioneer hesitated.

  Instinctively, as if he might intervene even from this distance, Tom stepped toward what had to come next. And in the next moment, it did: a backhand to each of them with a viciousness that lifted the child’s feet from the pine boards beneath him and knocked the mother to her back. The man who delivered the blows swung the boy’s skinny frame down from the platform and onto a waiting buckboard.

  The mother’s “No, no, nooo!” as she twisted and fought swelled out over the harbor, and a flock of gulls lifted, crying, up from the seawall, as if joining in.

  The auctioneer, turning back cheerfully to the crowd, raised his voice over the mother’s screams. “Nothing but a little adjustment period needed—a day or two should do fine—and this little gal, she’ll have forgotten this here ever happened, be ready to serve any need you got. Now what am I bid?”

  Hands over her face, the mother collapsed to the platform, and Tom could feel her racking sobs as if they were surging inside him.

  “No!” she cried, lifting an arm once more in the buckboard’s direction. “No!”

  Tom squeezed his eyes shut to keep back the tears welling up fast.

  How many hundreds of times had he witnessed this same scene before?

  A routine occurrence, that’s what slave auctions were, as much a part of the fabric of this city as the unloading of silks at the wharves. Most auctioneers took a more subtle approach than this one—not for the sake of the people they sold but because bruis
es or cuts or any reprimand of defiance in public made buyers skittish. But every time, it was the cries of the mothers that pierced through Tom’s will not to see, not to hear, not to feel—their cries that made the horror of every auction brand-new.

  Behind him, he heard a crunch of footsteps on the crushed shell. Tom stiffened but did not turn his head toward the steps. “I got no reason for talking with you.”

  But the footsteps did not retreat.

  With another rough swipe at his eyes, Tom sniffed the air, red swells of water lapping the low rise of the seawall, then shook his head, scowling. “Fish, what it smell like every morning at dayclean. And mudflats at candlelighting. But all through the day when you come around, Vesey, trouble.”

  “Bom dia, Tom,” boomed a man’s voice behind him. “Goedemorgen.”

  “You can’t never be like anyone else, can you?” Tom said, still without turning. He knew without looking the figure that went with the voice: dark hair gone the color of ash these past couple of years, eyes too full of powder and spark—like they’d fire at any wrong word. “Didn’t reckon I’d have to tell you but once. But I’ll say it again if I got to.”

  “Buenos días.”

  “Stay the hell away from me, Vesey.”

  “And bonjour.”

  “You speaking a whole ocean of languages might impress a pack of ignorant field hands that you and those lunatic lieutenants of yours go out to recruit.” Tom dropped his voice to a harsh whisper. “But not me.”

  Glancing quickly over both shoulders, Denmark Vesey cocked his head back as he spoke. “Nine thousand we’re counting now, Tom. Nine thousand recruits. An army, that’s what we got, and it’s building day by day. Got some weapons already from the outlying farms. Some been disappearing real quiet from owners too old or too gone from town or too stupid to notice anything much, like their daddy’s old musket gone missing or, say, a sack of paper and cartridge just disappeared. But we’re needing more. Fast.”

  Frantic, Tom turned toward him. “Can’t you understand what would happen if someone—anyone—even start in to hear you? My question’s not whether you’re smart. It’s whether you lost your damn mind.”

  Vesey stepped closer, his mouth nearly to Tom’s ear. “There’s only one thing we need to make this the day that changes the whole course of this country. Wanna know what that is? The finest blacksmith in Charleston.”

  “I can’t be bought with your flattery, Vesey. You know why I didn’t stay at that splintered woodpile of a church to meet you and that Peter Poyas? Because I knew what you’d be wanting to say. Knew any man who signs on is a damn fool that can’t count who in this city got all the”—Tom glanced behind him and lowered his voice—“guns. All the powder. All the cannons. All the balls. And us? Let’s see, we got us some shackles and a whole lot of hoes.”

  Unfazed, Vesey nodded. “Which is how we chose the date: half the city sailed to Newport or Europe by summer to miss the yellow fever and heat. What we need . . .”

  Tom kept his face rigidly fixed on the harbor. If passersby glanced toward the seawall, they did not need to see rage contorting a slave’s features. “The word’s spread already, Vesey, all this you been planning: You trying to enlist Haiti. You ghosting around Bulkley’s Farm and the river plantations, getting hope stirred up to a frenzy. You”—this last he dropped to just the slip of a sound—“needing weapons made.”

  Vesey opened his mouth to speak, but Tom’s fury was not finished. “You think for one single minute, just one, the word’s not gonna find its way to somewhere it shouldn’t? My God, Vesey! What do you see when you look around in this city, huh? Here’s what I see: no way out except playing by the buckruh’s rules. Lay low. Work hard. Don’t let on the hunger you got to get loose. Everyone got to look for they own chance: every man for himself.” He turned his back.

  “Every woman, too, Tom? I’d value hearing your answer to that.”

  Tom’s head snapped toward Vesey. His words, though, came slowly, measured out and examined. “Here’s what I say: Leave my business to me. And go find yourself some free man to recruit.”

  Vesey sauntered a few steps down the seawall, as if to show his indifference, then strolled back to stand close beside Tom. “Free black’s the last person I’d trust, that whole Brown Fellowship crowd licking the boots of whoever they figure they got to.” He spit to one side. “Last person I’d trust next to a house slave. Both got too much to lose to the whites. Too much reason to grovel. And tell what they know.”

  “Exactly my point. Someone will tell what they know. And the graves will start getting dug.”

  “But a man, a craftsman like you, well now, he’d be different.”

  “You don’t listen real good, do you?”

  “No point getting worked into a vex, Tom. Reckon I know you better than your customers do—the ones call you docile and sweet. Been watching you, and here’s what I know: you’re a man believes in what we’re planning.”

  “What I believe is no horde of field hands”—Tom’s voice had risen to nearly a shout, and, glancing both ways, he dropped it again to a whisper—“with nothing but rice sickles and big sticks can raid a city arsenal in the Neck or a gun shop across from St. Michael’s while the guards ask real polite just how they can help: Here now, Mr. Vesey, sir, you take yourself another armful of muskets, how ’bout? Don’t go forgetting them bayonets you’ll be wanting to fit on the ends.” Tom shook his head. “What I believe in is facing the truth—and not getting strung up by the neck for a cause bound to fail.”

  On the wharf, bales of Sea Island cotton twined together were lofted up and out toward a waiting ship, stevedores on the wharf throwing their weight against the ropes, dark hand over hand, the cotton swinging now side to side like a clock’s pendulum.

  “We ain’t got much time, Tom Russell. You know that. Not much time at all before the whole powder keg of this city explodes.”

  Shouts from the wharf. A crack, echoing over the water, of splitting wood. The arm of the structure holding the pulley crashed to the wharf, the cotton bale plummeting thirty feet from the sky. Screams. Stevedores and sailors and slaves all running.

  A thundering smash.

  Then silence.

  A pair of dark legs jutting out from below the fallen bale.

  Tom turned away, stomach roiling.

  But Vesey looked on. “Bound to be pieces of Negro all over them planks. Take upwards of hours to clean good.”

  “You make a poor fist of man, Vesey. You know that?”

  “On the contrary, I got a heart as full up of feeling as the next man, including a brute of a blacksmith like you.”

  Tom’s right arm cocked back. Released.

  A white man driving a phaeton up East Battery reined in his trotter. “You there! Boy!”

  Tom checked his swing just before it made contact. “Mayor Hamilton.”

  Vesey waved to the mayor. “Bon matin!” he called cheerfully. “My friend here’s just showing off the right jab he’s practiced.”

  “Get on off there, hear? And don’t ever let me catch your type back up on that seawall again!” Mayor Hamilton gave the reins a sharp snap and drove on.

  Jaw clenched, Tom dropped himself off the wall to street level.

  Vesey waved again to the phaeton as it rounded the corner and slowly, pointedly taking his time, swung down. “Thought cocky ole James Hamilton’d fix your flint good—slave like you fighting in public.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Vesey. Man like Hamilton’s looking for any reason to get himself better known. The man gonna keep climbing—if he’s got to use you or me or Governor Bennett or the whole city here to help him to more power, he’ll do it and never look back. But are you careful around him? Do you so much as keep your voice down? No. You got to be the strong man that take chances, and to hell with whoever get hurt.”

  But Vesey, one hand snatching at the coarse cotton sleeve of Tom’s arm, held a newspaper up with the other. “You read, Tom Rus
sell, blacksmith?”

  Tom shook him off. “Damn it, Vesey! Will you put that thing away?” Tom swatted at Vesey’s arm.

  Shrugging, Vesey slowly folded the paper, but rather than tuck it under his arm again, he let the rectangle of it rest in his hands, held in front of his waist.

  Tom glanced both ways up and down East Bay. “If I could read, you think I’d be fool enough to be caught doing it on a public street? It’s different for you—free man don’t got to hide what he know.”

  Vesey shook his head here, his mock-jovial smile gone hard now. “Don’t be deluding yourself that free for the black man in Charleston means actually free.”

  “So if it’s risky for you, how long you think it’d take for somebody to haul me into the workhouse? Five minutes? Ten? Been sent to that place just once in my life. Took me four months, four months just to stand up straight again at my own forge.”

  “Your forge, Tom?”

  Tom’s shoulders squared, the muscles in his neck pulsing. “There’s not a soul in this city old enough to open a gate can’t point out my work.”

  “Mm-hmm, that’s right. I agree. Don’t nobody twirl iron like you, make it bend to some grand design you got in your head. But here you are, straining and sweating all the day long, making some of the best wrought iron this city ever saw—ever will see—then handing over your whole pay to that Sarah Russell, and her all fat and fine.”

  “She give me back part, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Part. A tiny, pitiful part. For day after day of swinging that hammer over your fire, you sweating blood to line an old white woman’s purse. And for what?”

  “Same as you did.”

  “Buying your freedom?” Vesey scoffed, then spit to one side. “When I won the lottery—you should’ve seen the kind of riled that clerk got when he had to hand that stack of bills to a slave—the captain and missus sold me to myself ’cause I’d always been more trouble than help. Made sure of that. But you . . .” Vesey leaned in. “Kind of work you do? No chance in the world old Widow Russell’d be letting a gold mine like you get out of her grasp.”