When the long-hair guard came back, he said, “Listen for your name. If I call it out, you’re free to leave and go home to whatever awaits you.”
We all got to our feet. I said to myself, Never has been a Grimké slave sent to the Work House. Never has.
“Seth Ball, Ben Pringle, Tinnie Alston, Jane Brewton, Apollo Rutledge . . .” He read the names till it was just me and the scarred man and the mauma with the baby and a handful of others. “If you’re still here,” he said, “your owner has decided the Work House will put you in a wholesome frame of mind.”
A man said, “I’m a free black, I don’t have an owner.”
“If you’ve got the papers that say that, then you can pay the fine yourself,” the guard told him. “If you can’t pay it on the spot, then you’re going to the Work House with the rest.”
I felt genuine confused. I said, “Mister. Mister? You left off my name. It’s Hetty. Hetty Grimké.”
He answered me with the thud of the door.
The treadmill was chomping and grinding its teeth—you could hear it before you got in the room. The Work House man led twelve of us to the upper gallery, poking us along with a stick. Denmark Vesey came behind me with the side of his face swollen so bad his eye was shut. He was the only one of us with shackles on his hands and feet. He took shuffle-steps, and the chain dragged and rattled.
When he tripped on the stairs, I said over my shoulder, “Be careful now.” Then I whispered, “How come you didn’t pay the fine? Ain’t you supposed to have money?”
“Whatever they do to the least of them, they do it unto me,” he said.
I thought to myself, Mr. Vesey fancies himself like Jesus carrying the cross, and that’s probably cause he doesn’t have five dollars on him for the fine. Knowing him, though, he could’ve been throwing his lot with the rest of us. The man was big-headed and proud, but he had a heart.
When we got to the gallery and looked over the rail at the torment waiting for us, we just folded up and sat down on the floor.
One of the overseers fastened Mr. Vesey’s chain to an iron ring and told us to watch the wheel careful so we’d know what to do. The mauma with the baby on her back said to him, “Who gon watch my baby while I down there?”
He said, “You think we got people to tend your baby?”
I had to turn from her, the way her head dropped, the baby looking wide-eye over her shoulder.
The treadmill was a spinning drum, twice as tall as a man, with steps on it. Twelve scrambling people were climbing it fast as they could go, making the wheel turn. They clung to a handrail over the top of it, their wrists lashed to it in case their grip slipped. The mill groaned and the corn cracked underneath. Two black-skin overseers paced with cowhides—cat o’nine tails, they called them—and when the wheel slowed, they hit the backs and legs of those poor people till you saw pink flesh ripple.
Mr. Vesey’s good eye studied me. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
“From the church.”
“No, somewhere else.”
I could’ve spit the truth out, but we were both in Daniel’s lion’s den, and God had left us to it. I said, “Where’s all that delivering God’s supposed to do?”
He snorted. “You’re right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn’t have any hands and feet but ours.”
“That doesn’t say much for the Lord.”