The driver, Mason Jackson, later swore that he did not run away. He knew Dewar’s horse, he declared, for it had a white patch upon its nose that glowed within moonlight. He watched as Tam Dewar, using his horse to coop them, backed those two strangers up against the stone wall of the mill. The girl, still holding up the limp man, could not move beyond the beast’s tramping hooves. She was caught. Then, the driver declared, he saw no more as he walked away.
But Miss Nancy, who was secreted within a nearby bush, said the girl was pleading, pleading, pleading with Tam Dewar, ‘Him no kill massa, him no kill massa!’ over and over she said it. At once imploring, then crying, then shouting, then jumping this way, then skipping that way, before falling once more to begging.
Benjamin Brown—a cattle-man watching this torment from within the mill—knew that the young girl’s pleas would be no more troubling to that dog-driver overseer than the screech of a bat. Once Tam Dewar had them ensnared, he dismounted, and seized the man from her in one move. And then the overseer, holding the negro-man up before him like some stinking rag, started to shake him fierce, as if all the dirt of the world resided within this black-man’s bones. And he shouted upon him, ‘Don’t look at me, nigger. Don’t look at me!’
The stranger-man put up no fight, according to Sarah, except to continue to fix his eyes upon Dewar. But the girl—oh, she did spit and claw and thump her fists upon the overseer. Until, with one blow from a hammer fist, Dewar whacked her so hard within the face that she fell to the ground. Then the overseer pointed his pistol at the man’s head and . . . boom! Sarah said that the negro’s face simply exploded—that it burst in fragments on to the air and soon, like a bloody rain, started to gently pitter-patter down.
Benjamin was sick. Nancy just ran and ran and ran.
The overseer tossed the limp remains of this negro aside, like he was a piece of spent cane just stripped through the mill. The girl, bloodstained as a butchered hog, grabbed Dewar around his ankles to plead for her salvation. He seized her by a fistful of her hair to hold her steady as he rearmed his pistol. ‘No, massa, no, massa, mercy, massa, mercy,’ she struggled savagely. Some defiant spirit within her fought to keep her life. The overseer could hardly hold her. ‘Shut up, you dead fucking nigger, shut up.’ It was as the overseer raised his hand to strike her with his pistol that Kitty flew.
‘She was ’pon deh overseer like breath of wind!’ Sarah said. But Sarah was ignorant as to why Kitty did imperil herself for this young girl. For she believed this girl to be just some lordly house slave who had never once felt the sun brand her back or the earth callous her hands hard as pig’s foot. She did not know that she was Kitty’s taken daughter.
But Benjamin did. And what he also knew was . . . ‘July was overseer Dewar’s pickney. Many times him bent Miss Kitty over—many, many times when him first come upon Amity.’ Benjamin had worked with Kitty when the baby July was strapped to her. On the second gang he had cleared the spent canes with Kitty, and sucked his teeth at the pickney-howl that came ceaseless from Kitty’s back. He knew July from her scream—he swore it. ‘If me know it, then her mama, Miss Kitty, mus’ hear it in her pickney too. So her did run to her—her did run!’
What happened next has been told in so many ways by so many people—some who were not even in the parish at the time, some who were not even born into the world yet—that it is hard for your storyteller to know which version to recount. That Kitty grabbed Tam Dewar before he could strike July once more, is one thing that is certain. That she was upon him with such force that he, startled, dropped July from his grasp, is also true. That Kitty, with anxious urgency, commanded July to run—to the cane piece, to the woods, anywhere—but run! And that July, upon seeing her lost mama again, stood so aghast that, apart from her mouth slowly gaping, all her movement ceased. Kitty had to stamp her foot to wake her daughter to start her flight, she had to shoo her—once, twice and yell out, ‘Run, July, run now!’ All this is certain truth.
But did Kitty, in the fierce struggle that commenced with Tam Dewar, hack her machete upon his ankles like he was a piece of cane to be cut? Did she grab his neck, swing him in the air, then land him back down upon the ground with a thump? Did she bash his head upon a stone until it split like a ripe coconut? Did she twist his arms up his back until she felt them snap? Did she kick him? Did she jump upon him? Reader, we will never know, for none saw. Where once all could see, despite the confusion of the moonlight and the smoke, suddenly no one did have recall. Not one soul saw Kitty assail Tam Dewar. Not one.
All that is known is that Tam Dewar was found, not yet dead, but spread upon the ground of the mill yard with a broken collarbone, a fracture in his skull, two broken ankles, two broken arms and his ribs mash up. Wounds he would die from two days later—fitting, spewing and boiling hotter than bubbling cane liquor.
And the militia-man who captured Kitty—bound, gagged and secured her that day—said the slave was sitting motionless within the yard, a little way from the lifeless corpse of a freeman negro, but next to the mangled body of the overseer of Amity. And that when she was seized, that devil nigger had a grin upon her face.
CHAPTER 15
KITTY WAS BEARING A broad halter of blackest iron about her neck the next time July saw her mama. The chains that ran down from that collar bound her mama’s wrists so strained that her hands were forced into a devout pose. Her mama’s wounded face was bulged to the size of breadfruit—her blackened eyes swollen and closed, her cheeks puffed up with bruising, her bottom lip split and her tongue so bloated that her mouth could not close about it. The leg irons that chained her ankles hobbled her to limp and shuffle as she was compelled toward the gibbet erected within the market square.
Although favouring more beast than woman, Kitty’s beaten face still managed to carry a look of puzzlement. For she did not realise that the trial for her crime against Tam Dewar had already been heard and judged. She believed that she had merely walked through the courtroom. That the brief glimpse of white people she saw—sitting in rows, fanning themselves in the courthouse heat and yelling, ‘Devil, devil!’ upon her—was just the beginning of the ordeal. Yet her chains were tugged to leave the room before any solemn pronouncements demanded that she struggle to lift her head.
So when she was once more outside the courthouse building she asked of the jailer who was driving her along, ‘What you do with me?’
The white man pulled on her hair to wrench up her head so she could see the three stiffened corpses swinging upon the gibbet before her. ‘You want freedom, don’t you?’ he said. ‘This is the sort of freedom we’ll give you, every last devil of you. Sabbie dat, murdering nigger?’
Bacchaus, the dull-eyed negro hangman, leaned a ladder up against the gallows, then wearily climbed its wooden struts to cut down those who had finished their turn. The three dangling human fruits of that gibbet fell on to the heap of rotting bodies left below. So many had been hanged that day that the pile was interfering with the drop. But it would be evening before the workhouse negroes were shuffled in to remove the corpses of those once hopeful ‘fight-for-free’ negroes that now festered in a pile of bared teeth and broken limbs beneath those fatal beams.