The Good Lord Bird

by James McBride

  “I went to the jail as instructed,” he said. “I greeted the jailer, and he led me to the cell where Sibonia was held. She was held in the very back cell, the last one. I went inside the cell and I sat down. She greeted me warmly.

  “I said, ‘Sibonia, I come to find out everything you know about the wicked insurrection’—and she cut me off.

  “She said, ‘Reverend, you come for no such purpose. Maybe you was persuaded to come or forced to come. But would you, who taught me the word of Jesus; you, the man who taught me that Jesus suffered and died in truth; would you tell me to betray confidence secretly entrusted to me? Would you, who taught me that Jesus’s sacrifice was for me and me only, would you now ask me to forfeit the lives of others who would help me? Reverend, you know me!’”

  The old minister dropped his head. I wish I could repeat the tale as I heard the old man tell it, for even in the retelling of it, I ain’t tellin’ it the way he rendered it. He was broke in spirit. Something in him collapsed. He bent forward on the table with his head in his hands and asked for another drink. They throwed that on him. Only after he flung it down his throat could he continue.

  “For the first time in my ministerial life, I felt I had done a great sin,” he said. “I could not proceed. I accepted her rebuke. I recovered from my shock at length and said, ‘But, Sibonia, yours was a wicked plot. Had you succeeded, the streets would run red with blood. How could you plot to kill so many innocent people? To kill me? And my wife? What have my wife and I done to you?”

  “And here she looked at me sternly and said, ‘Reverend, it was you and your wife who taught me that God is no respecter of persons; it was you and your missus who taught me that in His eyes we are all equal. I was a slave. My husband was a slave. My children was slaves. But they was sold. Every one of them. And after the last child was sold, I said, ‘I will strike a blow for freedom.’ I had a plan, Reverend. But I failed. I was betrayed. But I tell you now, if I had succeeded, I would have slain you and your wife first, to show them that followed me that I could sacrifice my love, as I ordered them to sacrifice their hates, to have justice for them. I would have been miserable for the rest of my life. I could not kill any human creature and feel any less. But in my heart, God tells me I was right.’”

  The reverend sagged in the chair. “I was overpowered,” he said. “I could not answer easily. Her honesty was so sincere, I forgot everything in my sympathy for her. I didn’t know what I was doing. I lost my mind. I grasped her by the hand and said, ‘Sibby, let us pray.’ And we prayed long and earnestly. I prayed to God as our common Father. I acknowledged that He would do justice. That those deemed the worst by us might be regarded the best by Him. I prayed for God to forgive Sibby, and if we was wrong, to forgive the whites. I pressed Sibby’s hand when I was done and received the warm pressure of hers pressing mine in return. And with a joy I never experienced before, I heard her earnest, solemn ‘Amen’ as I closed.”

  He stood up. “I ain’t for this infernal institution no more,” he said. “Hang her if you want. But find someone else to minister to this town, for I am finished with it.”

  And with that he got up and left the room.

  14

  A Terrible Discovery

  They didn’t waste time roasting corn when it come to hanging Sibonia’s coloreds. The next day, they started building the scaffold. Hangings was spectacles in them days, complete with marching bands, militia, and speeches and all the rest. On account of Miss Abby losing so much money, being that four of hers was going to the scaffold, they drug the thing out longer while she fussed about it. But it was already decided. It brought plenty money to the town. Business boomed the next two days. It kept me busy running drinks and food all day long for the folks who come from miles around to watch. There was a sense of excitement in the air. Meanwhile, any master who had slaves slipped out of town taking their colored, they disappeared with their colored and stayed away. Them folks wanted to keep their money.

  News of that hanging drawed some other troubles, too, for there was a rumor that Free Staters got wind of it and was roaming around to the south. Several raids was said to have gone on. Patrols was sent out. Every settler walked around with a rifle. The town was locked up tight, with roads in and out closed off to everybody unless you was known to the townsfolk. What with the booming business, the rumors, and the sense of excitement in the air that runned everywhere, the actual thing took nearly a full week before they got to the show itself.

  But they finally got to it on a sunny afternoon, and no sooner did the people assemble in the town square and the last militia arrive did they drag Sibonia and the rest of them out. They come out the jailhouse in a line, all nine of them, escorted on both sides by rebels and militia. It was a mighty crowd that came to witness it, and if them coloreds had any notions of being rescued by Free Staters at the last minute, all they had to do was look around to see it weren’t going to happen. There was three hundred rebels armed to the teeth at formation around the scaffold, about a hundred of ’em being militia in uniform with bright bayonets, red shirts, and fancy trousers, even a real drummer boy. The colored from all the surrounding areas was brought in too—men, women, and children. They lined ’em up right in front of the scaffold, to let them witness the hanging. To let them see what would happen if they tried to revolt.

  It weren’t a long distance from the jailhouse to the scaffold that Sibonia and them walked, but for some of ’em, I reckon it must’ve felt like miles. Sibonia, the one they’d all come to see hang, she come last in line. As the line walked to the steps leading to the scaffold, the feller in front of Sibonia, a young feller, he got timid and collapsed at the bottom of the scaffold stairs as they were led up to the hanging platform. He fell down on his face and sobbed. Sibonia grabbed him by his collar and pulled him to his feet. “Be a man,” she said. He got hisself together and climbed up the stairs.

  When all of ’em got to the top and was gathered there, the hangman asked which of them would go first. Sibonia turned to her sister, Libby, and said, “Come on, sister.” She turned to the others and said, “We’ll give you an example, then obey.” She stepped up to the noose to let the rope get drawed around her neck first, and Libby followed.

  I wish I could express for you the tension. It seemed like a rope had knotted itself around the sunlight in the sky to keep every leaf and fig in place, for not a soul moved nor did a breeze stir. Not a word was spoken in the crowd. The hangman weren’t pushy nor rude, but rather polite. He let a few more words pass between Sibonia and her sister, then asked if they was ready. They nodded. He turned to reach for the hood to place over their heads. He moved to cover Sibonia’s head first, and as he done so, Sibonia suddenly sprung away from him, jumped high as she could, and fell heavily through the galley hole.

  But she only went halfway through. The knotted rope weren’t adjusted right to make her drop all the way. It checked her fall. Instantly her frame, which was halfway down the opening, was convulsed. In her writhing, her feet kicked and instinctively tried to reach back for the landing where she had stood. Her sister, Libby, her face turned toward the rest of the coloreds, put her hand on Sibonia’s side and, leaning forward, held Sibonia’s wriggling body clear of the landing with her arm, and said to the rest, “Let us die like her.” And after a few shaking, quivering moments, it was done.

  By God, I would’a passed out, had not the thing gone in the wrong direction entirely, which made the whole of it a lot more interesting right away. Several rebels in the crowd started muttering they didn’t like the business at all, others said it was a damn shame to hang them nine people in the first place, since one colored’ll lie on another just as easily as you can snap your trousers, and nobody knows who done what, and it’s better to hang them all. Still others said the Negroes hadn’t done nothing, and it was all just a bunch of malarkey, ’cause the judge wanted to take over Miss Abby’s businesses, and others said slavery ought t
o be done with, since it was so much trouble. What’s worse, the colored watching the whole thing become so agitated after seeing Sibonia’s courage that the military rushed up on them to cool them down, which caused even more of a stir. It just didn’t go the way nobody expected it.

  The judge seen the thing winging out of control, so they hung the rest of the convicted Negroes fast as they could, and in a few minutes Libby and all the rest was asleep on the ground together.

  —

  Afterward I stole off to seek a word of consolation on it. Since Pie hadn’t seen it, I reckoned she’d want to know about it. She stayed in her room during the past few days, for the business of selling tail went on day and night, and in fact increased during times of trouble. But now that the thing was over, it gived me a chance to get back in her graces, passing the news to her, for she always enjoyed hearing gossip, and this was a hot one.

  But she got strange on me. I come to the room and knocked. She opened the door, cussed me out a bit, told me to get lost, then slammed the door in my face.

  I didn’t think too much of it at first, but I ought to say here while I weren’t for the hanging, I weren’t totally against it neither. Truth is, I didn’t care too much either way. I got plenty chips from it in the way of food and tips for it was a spectacle. That was fine. But the upshot was Miss Abby had lost a great deal of money. Even before the insurrection, she had come to hinting that I could make more money on my back than on my feet. She was preoccupied with the hanging, course, but now that it was done, I should have been worried about her next intentions for me. But they didn’t bother me in the least. I weren’t worried about the hanging, nor Sibonia, nor the whoring, not Bob neither, who didn’t get hanged. My heart was aching only for Pie. She wouldn’t have nothing to do with me. She cut me off.

  I didn’t make much of it at first. There was a lot of discombobulation, for it was a troublesome time anyway, for colored and whites. They had hung nine coloreds, and that’s a lot of folks—even for coloreds, that’s a lot of folks. A colored was a lowly dog during slave time, but he was a valuable dog. Several owners whose slaves hung fought against the hanging till the end, for it weren’t never clear who did what and who planned what and what Sibonia’s real plan was and who told who. There was just plain fear and confusion. Some of them Negroes that was hung confessed one way before they died, then turned around confessed another, but their stories banged up against each other, so no one ever knew who to believe, for the ringleader never told it. Sibonia and her sister Libby never sung their song, and left the place more of a mess than it was when they was living, which I reckon was their intent. The upshot was that several slave traders showed up and done a little business for a few days after the hanging, but not much, for slave traders was generally despised. Even Pro Slavers didn’t favor them much, for men who traded cash for blood wasn’t considered working people, but more like thieves or traders in souls and your basic superstitious pioneer didn’t take to them types. Besides, no busy slave trader wanted to journey all the way to Missouri Territory to get a troublesome slave, then run them all the way to the Deep South and sell them, for that troublesome Negro could start an insurrection down south in New Orleans just as easy as he could up here, and word would get back, and that slave trader had a reputation to keep. Them colored from Pikesville was marked as bad goods. Their trading price gone down, for nobody knowed who among them was in the insurrection and who weren’t. That was Sibonia’s gift to them, I reckon. For otherwise, every one of them would’a been gone south. Instead, they stuck where they was, nobody wanting them, and the slave traders left.

  But the stink of the thing lingered. Especially with Pie. She had wanted the hanging, but now seemed put out by it. I knowed what she done, or suspected it, tellin’ the judge of the insurrection, but truth is, I didn’t blame her for it. Colored turned tables on one another all the time in them days, just like white folks. What difference does it make? One treachery ain’t no bigger than the other. The white man put his treachery on paper. Niggers put theirs in their mouth. It’s still the same evil. Someone from the pen must’ve told Pie that Sibonia was planning a breakout, and Pie told it to the judge for some kind of favor, and when the stew got boiled down and shared out, why, it weren’t a breakout at all, but rather murder. Them’s two different things. Pie had opened a shit bag, I reckon, and didn’t know it till it was too late. The way I figure it, looking back, Judge Fuggett had his own interests. He didn’t have no slaves, but wanted some. He had everything to gain by Miss Abby going broke, for I’d heard him say later on that he wanted to open his own saloon, and like most white men in town, he was scared and jealous of Miss Abby. The loss of them slaves cost her big time.

  I don’t think Pie figured on all that. She wanted to get out. I reckon the judge had made some kind of promise to her to escape, is the way I figure it, and never owned up to it. She never said it, but that’s what you do when you in bondage and aiming on getting out. You make deals. You do what you got to. You turn on who you got to. And if the fish flips out the bucket and on you and jumps back in the lake, well, that’s too bad. Pie had that jar of money under her bed and was learning her letters from me, and turned on Sibonia and them who hated her guts for being yellow and pretty. I didn’t blame her. I was sporting life as a girl myself. Every colored did what they had to do to make it. But the web of slavery is sticky business. And at the end of the day, ain’t nobody clear of it. It whipped back on my poor Pie something terrible.

  It deadened her. She’d let me into her room to clean and tidy and give her water and empty bedpans and so forth. But soon as I was done, out I went. She wouldn’t say more than a few words to me. Seemed like she was emptied out, like a glass of water poured onto the ground. Her window looked over the slave yard—you could just see the edge of it, and it gradually filled back up—and many an afternoon I’d walk in on her and find her staring down there, cussing. “They ruined everything,” she said. “God-damn niggers.” She complained the hanging throwed her business off, though the lines of customers outside her room was still long. She’d stand at the window, cussing about the whole business, and would throw me out on one pretext or another, leaving me to sleep in the hallway. She kept her door closed always. When I come by offering to teach her letters, she weren’t interested. She simply stayed inside that room and humped them fellers dry, and some of ’em even took to complaining she fell asleep right in the middle of the action, which wouldn’t do.

  I was lost. And also—and I ought to say it here—I growed so desperate for her, I gived some thought to stop playing a girl. I didn’t want it no more. Watching Sibonia changed me some. The remembrance of her picking that feller up at the scaffold, saying, “Be a man,” why, that just stuck in my craw. I weren’t sorry she was dead. That’s the life she chose to get rid of, in her own form and fashion. But it come to me that if Sibonia could stand up like a man and take it, even if she was a woman, well, by God, I could stand up like a man, even if I weren’t acting like one, to declare myself for the woman I loved. The whole damn thing was jippity in my head, but there was a practical side, too. Miss Abby had lost four slaves to that hanging—Libby, Sibonia, and two men, fellers named Nate and Jefferson. And while she’d been hinting my time on my back was coming, I figured she could use another man or two to replace them that was hung. I figured I would fit the bill. At age twelve, I weren’t quite a man, and I never was a big man, but I was a man still, and now that she had lost a lot of money, Miss Abby might see things my way and take me as a man, since I was a hard worker no matter how the cut comes or goes. I reckon I decided I didn’t want to play like a girl no more.

  This is what happens when a boy becomes a man. You get stupider. I was working against myself. I risked being sold south and losing everything ’cause I wanted to be a man. Not for myself. But for Pie. I loved her. I was hoping she would understand me. Accept me. Accept my courage about throwing off my disguise and being myself. I wanted her
to know I weren’t going to play girl no more, and for that reason, I was expecting she’d love me. Even though she weren’t being good to me, she never turned me away outright. She never said, “Don’t come back.” She always let me in her room to clean up and tidy a little bit, and I took that to be encouragement.

  I had them thoughts in my head one afternoon and decided I was done with the whole charade. I went up to her room with the words ready in my mouth to say ’em. I opened the door, closed it tight, for I knowed her chair sat behind the dressing partition, which set by the window, so that she could look out, for you could set there and see the slave pen and past the alley outside, and she favored setting in that chair, looking out into the alley.

  When I come into the room I couldn’t see her from the door, but I knowed she was there. I couldn’t quite face her, but my mind was set, so I spoke to the partition and declared what was in my heart. “Pie,” I said, “no matter how the cut goes or comes, I’m gonna face it. I’m a man! And I’m gonna tell Miss Abby and everybody else in this tavern who I am. I’ll explain everything to ’em.”

  It was quiet. I looked behind the partition. She weren’t there. That was unusual. Pie hardly ever left her room, ’specially since she had that money hidden under her bed.

  I checked the closet. The back stairs. Under the bed. She was gone.

  I stole around to the kitchen to look for her, but she weren’t there, either. I went to the saloon. The outhouse. Gone. I went back to the slave pen and didn’t find her there, neither. It was empty, for the few slaves that was held out there spent most days loaned out or working elsewhere. I looked up and down the alley by the pen. Not a soul. I turned and was about to head back inside the hotel when I heard a noise from Darg’s hut, on the other side of the alley, directly across from the slave yard. It sounded like struggling and fighting, and I thought I heard Pie squawking in there, in pain. I whipped over there quick.