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had stolen a Marston pepperbox percussion pistol, and any man who was standing
in the way when those six barrels discharged was likely to be meeting his
maker that very day. So the riders held back and sent ahead a line of
expendable Ibo slaves to track Henry, with the promise of a gold coin for the
man who found their quarry.
They cornered Henry at last at the edge of the Congaree Swamp, not far from
where a bar named the Swamp Rat now stands, the bar at which Marianne Larousse
would be drinking on the night that she died, for the voice of the present
contains the echo of the past. The slave who had found Henry lay dead on the
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ground, with ragged holes in his chest where the Marston had hit him at close
range.
They took three metal rice samplers, hollow T-shaped devices with a sharp
point on the end for digging into the ground, and they crucified Henry against
a cypress tree and left him there with his balls in his mouth. But before he
died, Old Marster drew up before him in a cart, and in the back of the cart
sat Henry s three children. The last sight Henry saw before his eyes finally
closed was his youngest boy Andrew being led into the bushes by Old Marster,
and then the boy s cries commenced and Henry died.
That was how it began between the families of Larousse and Jones, masters and
slaves. The crop was wealth. The crop was history. It had to be safeguarded.
Henry s offense lived on for a time in the memory of the Larousse family and
was then largely forgotten, but the sins of the Larousses were passed down
from Jones to Jones. And the past was transported into each new present, and
it spread through generations of lives like a virus.
The light had begun to fade. The men from Georgia were gone. From the big oak
tree outside the window a bat descended, hunting mosquitoes. Some had found
their way into the house and now buzzed at my ear, waiting to bite. I swatted
at them with my hand. Elliot handed me some repellent and I smeared it across
my exposed skin.
 But there were still members of the Jones family working for the Larousses,
even after what took place? I asked.
 Uh-huh, said Elliot.  Slaves died sometimes. It happened. The folks around
them had lost parents, children too, but they didn t take it quite so
personal. There were some members of the Jones family who felt that what was
done was done, and should be left in the past. And then there were others who
maybe didn t feel that way.
The Civil War devastated the lives of the Charleston aristocracy, as it did
the structures of the city itself. The Larousses were protected somewhat by
their foresight (or perhaps by their treason, for they retained most of their
wealth in gold and had only a small fraction tied up in Confederate bonds and
currency). Still they, like many other defeated Southerners, were forced to
watch as the surviving soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts regiment, or  Shaw s
Niggers as they were known, paraded through the streets of Charleston. Among
them was Martin Jones, Atys Jones s great-great-grandfather.
Once again, the lives of these two families were about to collide violently.
The night riders move through the darkness, white against the black road. It
will be many years before an olive-skinned man with slave marks on his legs
will claim to have seen them as they will become, figures in negative, black
on white, a reversal that would sicken these men were they to know of it now
as they go about their business, their horses draped, guns and bullwhips
banging dully against saddles.
For this is the South Carolina of the 1870s, not of the turn of a new
millennium, and the night riders are the terror of these times. They roam
upcountry, visiting their version of justice on poor blacks and the
Republicans that support them, refusing to bow to the requirements of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They are a symbol of the fear felt by the
whites for the blacks, and much of the white population stands behind them.
Already, the Black Codes have been introduced as an antidote to reform,
restricting the rights of blacks to hold arms, to hold a position above farmer
or servant, even to leave their premises or entertain visitors without a
permit.
In time, Congress will fight back with the Reconstruction Amendment, the
Enforcement Act of 1870, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Governor Scott will
form a black militia to protect voters in the 1870election, further enraging
the white population. Eventually, habeas corpus will be suspended in the nine
upcountry counties, leading to the arrest of hundreds of Klan members without
due process, but for the present the law rides a draped horse and brings with
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it vengeance, and the actions of the federal goverment will be too late to
save thirty-eight lives, too late to prevent rapes and beatings, too late to
stop the burning and destruction of farms and crops and livestock.
Too late to save Missy Jones.
Her husband, Martin, had campaigned to bring out the black vote in 1870 in the
face of intimidation and violence. He had refused to repudiate the Republican
Party and had earned a whipping for his troubles. Then he had lent his support
and his savings to the nascent black militia, and had marched his men through
the town one bright Sunday afternoon, no more than one in ten of them armed
but still an act of unparalleled arrogance to those who were fighting the tide
of emancipation.
It was Missy who heard the riders approaching, Missy who told her husband to
run, that this time they would kill him if they found him. The night riders
had not yet harmed a woman in York County and Missy, although she feared the
armed men, had no reason to believe that they would commence with her.
But they did.
Four men raped Missy Jones, for if they could not harm her husband directly
then they would hurt him through his woman. The rape was without any physical
violence beyond the violation itself, devoid, it seemed to the woman, even of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]