Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom. How do they learn it? They fall, and falling, they’re given wings.
-Rumi, 1262
Chapter Two
‘Smart nigger. Readin’ nigger. Dead nigger.’
A pistol cracks.
The bullet shrieks, careens off the garroted iron round my neck. Shouts seethe above me in a tempest of fury, roiling in the shack’s murk.
A bottle shatters.
Sharp pain scythes across my temple. Blunt gun stock on skull. Crash backwards. Hands bound. They crush beneath the chair under my flailing weight.
Boots sledge against my ribs. Side buckles.
I cradle. Clenched eyes. Paroxysms of panic.
Somewhere, cackled laughter.
‘Patterollers,’ a slave patrol of men armed with shotguns, keep vigil over plantations in the area. They hunt runaways, disperse large groups, and flush negros from their secret hush-harbor meetings, punishing any hint of subversion. Sometimes, they appear cloaked in hoods. Hoods heighten horror. Slaves torment over such nocturnal predators. The lashing and beating I endure befalls me for my duplicity, a secret crime so heinous as to alarm every white in the county.
They discovered I could read and write.
The imbroglio of power in the middle years of the Civil War in 1863 meant fear of slave insurrection and literate slaves were incendiaries. Backed by the full extent of Missouri state law, the court appointed slave patrols were commissioned to quell potential revolt. In time, they became ruthless, particularly now that the war has raged for two years and the Union soldiers encamp mere miles away. Though the formal proclamation would not be delivered until January, Lincoln warned the states two months prior: emancipation of all slaves in the rebellion states was imminent.
The South reels. Reverberating shocks trembles the foundation of border states like Missouri. Schisms between pro-Confederate and pro-Union loyalties erupt into new hostilities.
The patterollers, freshly venomed, exact their vengeance by terror.
Hot liquid streams over my head. Shock at the unknown startles me in new affright. I jerk my head violently to avoid the sting. Deep-throated laughter follows, and one, the man in the gray hat, curses, ‘A smart nigger’s a dead nigger. We don’t want no smart niggers’.
Hate and fear commingle into one malignant vapor. I sense it, like the fictive animal they purport me to be. It leaps from their hearts, lurching from their mouths, spilling. It creeps toward me, a noxious fog, encroaching, consuming. It invades my beleaguered city and combusts against the stony, flint heart in my chest.
A small flame alights. An incense of eternal fury rises within me.
We don’t want. No smart niggers. Gushing font of ignorance, spat. The words thrust into my consciousness. Singe. The heavy imprint sears a bright, permanent red.
I fight involuntary heaves of panic, drawing sharp pain through cracked ribs, convulsing chest. Coppery warmth of blood flushes from my mouth, the mordant stench of urine stifling. Something swings past my periphery. A large boot. The heel lowers, crushes my jaw.
Body writhes; soul screams, this was not to be my fate.
Before the world pitches black, through thin slits of swollen sight I see them: ephemeral messengers shimmering through the shack’s broken rooftop. My eyes shutter, collecting that eternal backdrop. Cold stars carpeted in darkness. Such stellar winking of startling serenity. The incongruity towering over this terror jars my senses. I sober to a mindful wit. This will be the final time that canopy reigns over me. Keats words emanate from within, my eyes lift to the constellation: ‘Bright star! Were I as steadfast as thou art’.
The sky whorls. My mind grasps desperately for some hold, reaching only the tattered remnant of fear. At the last moment, a bird, a flash of red vermillion wings its way across my fading mind. The engram, my omen. Its portent fades with me into fiction. I tilt my head back toward the broken rooftop to plead an inquisition to the stars: my freedom … to be found … only in death?
Darkness falls.