I hadn’t mustered the nerve to talk to him. People feared Denmark Vesey. I’d started telling myself the joke was on me—maybe I’d come to the African church for the Lord, after all. What’d I think I could learn about mauma anyway?
Nobody heard the horses outside. Mr. Vesey had a new chant going—Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down. Gullah Jack, his right-hand man, was beating a drum, and we were stomping the floor. Jericho. Jericho.
Then the doors busted open, and Gullah Jack’s hands stopped pounding, and the song died away. We looked round, confused, while the City Guard spread along the walls and in the aisle, one at every window, four barring the door.
The head guard marched down front with a paper in one hand and a musket gun in the other. Denmark Vesey said with his booming voice, “What’s the meaning of this? This is the house of the Lord, you have no business here.”
The guard looked like he couldn’t believe his luck. He took the butt of the gun and rammed it in Mr. Vesey’s face. A minute ago, he’d been shouting Jericho, and now he was on the floor with a shirt full of blood.
People started screaming. One of the guards fired into the rafters, sending wood crumbs and smoke swirling down. The inside of my ears pounded, and when the head man read the warrant, he sounded like he was at the bottom of a dry well. He said the neighbors round the church found us a nuisance. We were charged with disorderly conduct.
He stuffed the paper in his pocket. “You’ll be removed to the Guard House and sentenced in the morning with due and proper punishment.”
A sob drifted from a woman on the far side, and the place came alive with fear and murmuring. We knew about the Guard House—it was where they held the lawbreakers, black and white, till they figured out what to do with them. The whites ones stayed till their hearings, and the black ones till their owners paid the fine. You just prayed to God you didn’t have a stingy master, cause if he refused to pay, you went to the Work House to work off the debt.
Outside, the moon looked weak in the sky. They gathered us in four herds and marched us down the street. A slave sang, Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? and a guard told him to hush up. It was quiet from then on except for the clopping horses and a little baby tied on its mother’s back that whimpered like a kitten. I craned my neck for Mr. Vesey, but he wasn’t anywhere to see. Then I noticed the dark wet spatter-drops on the ground, and I knew he was on up ahead.
We spent the night on the floor in a room filled with jail cells, men and women crammed in together, all of us having to pee in the same bucket in the corner. One woman coughed half through the night and two men got in a shove-fight, but mostly we sat in the dark and stared with flat eyes and dozed in and out. One time, I came awake, hearing that same little baby mewing.
At first light, a guard with hair scruffing his shoulders brought a pail of water with a dipper and we took turns drinking while our stomachs rumbled for food. After that, we were left to wonder what was coming. One man in our cell had been picked up by the Guard six times and he told us the facts and figures. The fine was five dollars, and if your master didn’t pay, you got twelve lashes at the Work House, or worse, you got the treadmill. I didn’t know what the treadmill was and he didn’t say, just told us to beg for the whip. Then he lifted his shirt, and his back was grooved like the hide of an alligator. The sight brought bile to my throat. “My massa never pay,” he said.
The morning stretched out and we waited, and then waited some more. All I could think about was the man’s back, where they’d put Mr. Vesey, how his bashed face was holding up. Heat cooked the air and the smell turned sour and the baby started bawling again. Somebody said, “Why don’t you feed the child?”
“I can’t raise no milk,” its mauma said, and another woman with stains on her dress front said, “Here, give me the baby. Mine’s back home and all this milk with nobody to suck it.” She pulled out her brown bosom, clear milk leaking from the nipple, and the baby latched on.