Daniel sprang from the ground. “A ten-year-old got within two feet of your stuff and then reached into his pocket for a toy!”
Clem Pinckney laid a restraining hand on Daniel’s arm. Slowly, carefully, the clergyman pulled off his glasses, dusted the lenses with the cuff of his shirt, and returned them to his nose as the rest of them watched. “Officer Mulligan,” he addressed the older cop, then the younger: “Officer Hale. Thank you for coming so quickly.” He nodded at the guns in their holsters. “And for your restraint in not utilizing your firearms. I wonder if you two gentlemen would be good enough to attend to our friend here and what’s left of his camera.”
One hand on Daniel’s shoulder, the other taking Gabe’s hand, the clergyman steered them to the side, back toward the fountain. In angry jerks, Daniel tugged his T-shirt back over his head and wrapped Gabe tightly in a striped towel.
Kate was still trembling. “What was that?”
Daniel spun toward her, fury still sparking in his eyes and landing on her. “What was that, you want to know? What was that? I’ll tell you, Kate Drayton. That is the world I live in—the one I’m raising a son in!”
Stricken, Kate backed up a step and opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
“It’s the world you live in, too, but when you’re white and female and just popping down for a quick visit from your ivory tower, you don’t have to know that, do you?”
Kate swallowed.
Gabe spun his Rubik’s Cube frantically and kept his head down, Pastor Clem’s hand on his shoulder.
“I think . . . ,” Scudder began after a moment.
Daniel let out a long breath through his nose. “I didn’t mean to lash out at you, Kate. What I was trying to say—”
“Was that our world’s not always a fair place,” she suggested quietly. “Less fair and less safe for some people than others. And sometimes, some of us need reminding of that. Like maybe I did tonight.”
The line of his jaw softening, Daniel nodded. Then held up a fist to bump Kate’s.
Daniel walked on ahead with Gabe and Clem, Kate lingering behind as they passed the fountain, the lights of East Bay set back a block from the park.
Something was shifting around in her memory—some fact that wouldn’t yet move to the front or some pairing of thoughts that would not yet link.
Kate could see Sarah Grace bending over her little daughter’s birthday-party guest list, Kate proud of being able to spell out the names for herself in large block letters. Sarah Grace had read the list aloud in a pleasant, distracted way: “Kay, Greg, Benita, Ginger, Milton, Beth, Davey, Lib, Jason, Paula, Suzanne, James, Alan, Tiffany, Susan, Walter, Joyce . . .”
But then she’d looked up. “These are all the children in your class except T. J.”
“I’m not inviting T. J.” Kate had tossed back her braids.
Sarah Grace’s eyes had blazed. “You’re telling me you’re not inviting the only little boy in your class who is black?”
Kate had been startled by her momma’s eyes—Sarah Grace rarely got mad. But Kate crossed her arms and planted her feet. “He’s just not my friend.”
“Has he done anything mean to you?”
“Nope. He’s all right, I guess. Just not my friend. Not inviting him to my party.”
Sarah Grace’s eyes filled then—for no reason that Kate could make out.
“Did it ever occur to you, Katie, it might be your fault, his not being your friend?”
Kate flipped back her braids again. “Don’t care. Not inviting T. J. to my party.”
Hand shaking, Sarah Grace reached for the list. “Then you’re not having a party.” She ripped the list down the middle.
Sarah Grace stalked to the other side of the kitchen, then turned. And Kate was relieved, her momma likely to say she was sorry now for losing her temper for no reason at all.
Instead, Kate’s momma put her hands—which were still shaking—onto her hips. “It ever occur to you, Katie, how T. J. might feel?” she demanded—almost a shout. “And T. J.’s momma?”
Kate stormed into their tiny living room and yanked out a paper and pen to calm herself down. “Don’t know why I’m supposed to give a damn”—she shrieked that last word so her momma could hear her first grader’s fury—“about T. J.’s momma.”
It was a memory out of nowhere, not something she’d thought of for years. And even now, there was something that needed linking together.
If she could only figure out what.
She dug out the scene she’d sketched earlier from her pocket and flipped it to its backside—to the words she’d jotted down when the carriage driver was giving his tour.
“Coffins,” she read out loud. “Oh my God. Coffins.”
Just a half pace ahead, Scudder turned back. “Did I miss something?”
“A carriage driver who passed a minute ago was telling his group that in the early nineteenth century, a maker of coffins used to operate there beside a blacksmith. Coffins. Next door to the blacksmith. Just in case you had things or people or weapons, in addition to corpses, you needed to move. In secret. With your life depending on the secret.”
Chapter 17
1822
By the light of only one candle, the forge’s single window smudged with soot, Tom eased the pikes five at a time into the coffin. Here in the wee hours of morning, the sun long from up, he could afford to make no sound at all. Not while the city still slept.
Twenty-five. Thirty. Thirty-five.
Rumbling outside on East Bay. Tom’s heart stopped.
But the wagon rolled on. Firewood delivery maybe.
Forty. Forty-five. Fifty.
Fifty would be all for now. Half of the pikes Vesey had already paid for. Money that Tom had passed along to the widow Russell, with a story about a young farmer up past the Neck just starting out with ready cash but no tools. She’d been glad enough to see the unexpected income, gave him a small portion back, and asked no questions at all.
Greed, it turned out, could be made to work in one’s favor.
Carefully, Tom closed the coffin’s pine lid on the hinges he’d crafted but did not nail it shut. He paced the floor of the forge. Peered out the windows at the front of his shop.
At first, nothing.
Then, from far north on East Bay, came the sway of a single lantern in the dark.
Tom opened the door a crack to listen.
Wooden wheels across the East Bay cobbles. A thin clatter of iron on stone: a single horse, not a team.
Suddenly the lantern rose higher, then plunged downward, then left, then right in a cross.
Tom unbolted the door at the side of the forge leading into Unity Alley.
The lantern went black as the wagon reached the mouth of the alley. Tom felt the horse’s muzzle against his hand the same instant he could make out its shape.
Feeling their way, two men slid from the seat of the wagon. One of them hauled a barrel off the buckboard and pried its lid open to expose rice—that reeked. Plunging his hand down into the rice, he pulled out the limp, bloody form of a dead chicken.
Now both men slipped through the forge door behind Tom. By the light of the one candle, they circled the coffin.
Tom covered his nose and mouth with one hand and stepped back from the stench.
“Got to be done,” said the man who’d opened the barrel. Lifting the lid of the coffin a few inches, he tossed in the carcass.
Tom held his breath against the nausea that rose from his stomach up to his throat. “How long that old hen been dead?”
“Long enough to do what we need it to do.” He lifted his end of the coffin and grunted.
The second man smirked. “Few pokers too heavy for you, Mingo?”
“You wait ’til you feel it.”
The second man lifted his end of the coffin and grunted.
“What’d I tell you?”
“What’d you pack in here, Tom? Whole armory?”
“Be dayclean by the time we get this
thing to the wagon, you keep moving like that.”
With Tom hoisting the center of the box onto his left shoulder, the three of them slid the coffin onto the wagon.
The first man shook his head. “Smell it from here.”
“Mm-hmm. Lord Almighty give it a powerful stench. As a gift.”
“Some gift.”
“Shhh!”
The three men did not move as they listened for footsteps on the street. For voices too close. Anything.
The man called Mingo hissed the next words. “We either get this nag backing up this heap of a cart or our little play’s up.”
One step, then two, the horse backed up, harness straining.
The shells of the alley crunched beneath the wagon’s wheels.
Then hoofbeats on the cobbles. A trot. Brisk. Official.
A horse and rider, a lantern clutched in one hand, the other holding his reins, appeared at the corner of East Bay and Unity Alley.
Tom braced. This could be the end of their planning right here. The end of them.
“Well, now.” From his perch on the horse, the patroller spit tobacco at Tom’s feet. “I got to tell you, I don’t much like the looks of this here kind of secretlike meeting.”
Tom’s hands closed in a vise on the harness traces, every muscle in him tensed. He did not breathe.
The buggy creaked as someone stepped down from it in the dark. “Yes, sir.” It was Ned, adopting his most lowly, servile tone, the role he played to reassure nervous whites. “That’s surely right now. But course, we do got the allowance of burying. And a real faithful servant of Governor Bennett—you know how faithful us in Governor Bennett’s house is—he cross over three days done gone. Lord say it time to bury.” A scuffling of feet on the crushed shell.
“Hold it right there, boy. Can’t you people tell time?”
Ned’s voice became still softer, gentler, his Gullah accent deepening. “Us working people most ways. Up before dayclean and past candlelighting. Can’t be grave-burying just any time we’d be wanting.”
Tom Russell understood why Vesey had picked this Ned. Not for his physical strength, which wasn’t impressive, but for his theatrical skills, his ability to manipulate his accent, his word choice—no doubt his face, too, if Tom could see it. The man was a born actor.
The patroller shifted in his saddle, its leather creaking, and he spit. “At three thirty in the damn morning?”
“Got buckruh to serve breakfast. Got firewood for delivering. Got to bury them what cross over on we own time.”
“Hell, let the dead bury their own dead.” The rider snorted at his own joke. No one else spoke. “Any of you boys heard of what gets called the African Methodist Episcopal Church?” The rider exaggerated his pronunciation of these last words, like a language that was foreign and strange but amused him.
A pause. Then Ned’s voice again. “Reverend Morris Brown be a fine, God-fearin’ man of the cloth.”
“Mm-hmm. Well, I don’t much care for his church. Hotbed of trouble, you and your type”—he spit tobacco to one side—“off there in the Neck with nobody overseeing.”
Nobody white, Tom thought. That’s what the patroller meant.
“Ain’t allowed’s what I’m saying. This preacher Brown, he the one leading this funeral of yours? ’Cause I know you ain’t holdin’ no funeral without no preacher man.”
“Reverend Morris, he don’t know our friend here’s died yet.”
“Thought you’d said it’d been three days.”
“Oh, yes, sir. It has. But Reverend Morris, he didn’t know. Old hen”—Ned cleared his throat—“Old Henry here, he wasn’t the most churchgoing creature you ever met.”
With a great heaving noise, the patroller spit again. “Well, then, I reckon you boys’d be on your way to wake up the preacher man for this funeral of yours.”
“Oh, yes, sir. That’s right where we’s headed.”
“Then you won’t mind if I come along to watch, now, will you?”
“Well, now. Glad to have you.”
Tom’s blood surged inside his chest, his neck throbbing.
The light from the marshal’s lantern suddenly swung in a broad half circle. “You. Blacksmith. I never heard you was part of Brown’s church. I keep an eye on who is and who ain’t. Nothin’ but a tinderbox waitin’ to blow, you people thinking you can meet separate.”
Ned spoke up quickly, a hand on Tom’s shoulder. “Tom Russell here, he’s what you might call under conviction. We been welcoming him into our fellowship just lately.”
A pause. “How come you ain’t got no more people’n these here for this funeral?” the patroller demanded.
Mingo’s voice lacked the soothing molasses of Ned’s. “How many folk you reckon come to your funeral?”
“Boy, I sure would hate anything real tragic to happen to you. Built a whole workhouse in the city for just that kind of uppity attitude.”
Ned’s voice eased in again, the Gullah accent he’d put on thicker than ever and soothingly soft. “You got to excuse Mingo here, him agonize he bone—terrible weary. When Old Henry cross over, it ’bout broke Mingo’s heart. Now we got to tend to the dead ’fore the buckruh crack they teeth.”
“Reckon Mingo here’d appreciate me coming along then. Wouldn’t you, Mingo, boy? Add to the number of mourners. Let’s go wake us up a preacher man. Reckon I’d like to see for myself how you people bury one of your own kind.”
A slap of the buggy reins on the horse’s hide. The creak and jangle and clank of the buggy rolling forward.
Heart pounding, allowing himself to think of nothing but the road directly ahead, Tom fell into step with Mingo behind the wagon, its jangle and clank jolting the stillness.
Morris Brown was still buttoning his shirt as the buggy’s lanterns rocked wildly, its wheels bumping into the pitted terrain of Potter’s Field.
Ned adjusted the reins. “Sorry we had to go dragging you out of bed for this funeral, Reverend.”
“You did right. I’m sorry I cannot say I recollect this Henry you’ve described. I thought I knew my flock better. It’s worrisome to have one whose name I don’t even recall.”
Ned Bennett cleared his throat. Lowered his voice. “Didn’t much darken the door of your church. But sure thought highly of you. Dying words was ‘Get me that remarkable Reverend Brown. There’s a man acquainted with mercy.’”
Morris Brown studied Ned’s face by the jumping light of the lanterns. “I see. This Henry was an articulate man, was he?”
The patroller riding alongside them reined in his horse. “Damn well better get a move on.”
Mingo Harth skirted the front of the wagon. Snatched a lantern from its hook and two shovels from its bed.
By the lantern light, Tom saw Morris Brown’s gaze rest on him.
“Tom here,” Ned offered, “was especial close to the deceased.”
Morris Brown held out his hand. “You are most welcome, Tom Russell,” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for the blacksmith to be there.
But Tom took his hand and was grateful for the steady calm in Morris Brown’s eyes.
The patroller spit tobacco at Morris Brown’s feet. “How about we get movin’ here, Preacher? I got me better things to be doing with my time than listen to you jabber to thin air.”
Ned in the lead, they marched ten paces through the field infested with weeds toward a scrub pine, where Mingo set the lantern down. “Right here’s good as any. Best dig it shallow, or we’ll be here, all us, slam to sun-lean.”
The patroller slumped deeper into his saddle, his jawbone swallowed in fat. “Just get it done.”
The four men, including Tom and the reverend, took turns digging the grave, a cloud of white dust rising from the desiccated ground—and Tom’s pulse rising with the dust. Moment by moment, they were growing closer to having to bury the coffin—and with it, the weapons.
Ned placed a hand on Morris Brown’s, which was gripping the shovel. “You co
mmence preaching, Reverend. We’ll finish the hole.”
Dusting off his shirtsleeves, Morris Brown glanced toward the mounted patrolman a few yards away. “O Lord of mercy as broad as the sea. And of justice that rolls down like rivers.”
The deep current of the clergyman’s voice swept on, eddies of sound forming themselves into words.
“We grieve this night, Lord, the loss of our brother.”
The patroller’s eyelids were beginning to drop.
“But let us not grieve as those who have no comfort. Let us not grieve as those without hope.”
The patroller’s chin sank toward his chest.
“For it’s not death, Lord, you say we ought to be fearing.”
Mingo and Ned, their eyes on the patroller, lowered the coffin slowly, slowly into the hole, both of them straining to keep their grip.
Suddenly slipping from Mingo’s hands, one end of the coffin fell.
With a heavy metallic crash.
The patroller snapped his head up.
And thrust the mouth of his gun toward Tom’s gut.
Chapter 18
2015
Checking her watch to be sure there was still time to read on before appearing at Rose Pinckney’s, Kate scanned the archives’ inventory of the Russell household’s belongings, written sometime before 1820, the year Nathaniel Russell died: the delftware, the sideboards and armoires and dining table and sterling, the rugs and commissioned portraits and two carriages . . . and name after name of women and children and men.
There was Tom Russell’s name. Bottom of the second page. In elaborate handwriting more appropriate for an invitation to a grand ball than a household property list.
Tom, capable, docile, quiet, in good health, not yet twenty-five years, already a skilled blacksmith.
Kate’s pulse sped up. Something about seeing his name handwritten there made him seem more real somehow than merely reading it in a published history. Here, someone, probably Nathaniel but possibly Sarah Russell, had penned his name. Would have added the “docile, quiet” with no inkling of what the young Tom was actually feeling—that by the spring of 1822, he would be crafting weapons for a slave revolt that, if all plans went well, would be the most far-reaching in American history.
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