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 to 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.