But Ezra said Kitty was felled, like someone chopped the back of her knees. That she landed her backside upon the ground so hard that every chicken around them took to flight. While Tilly—whose furious running from hut to hut saw that the words ‘massa dead’ were spread so far and away that slaves in London Town were soon chatting it—said Kitty started to fret, ‘Me pickney, me pickney,’ as soon as she heard that a quarrel was raging within the mill yard over whether to hide these ‘badwind’ strangers or tell bakkra of them.
But upon one thing these three did agree; when Kitty—smelling renk as a dung hill in the sun—left them to find July that day, she walked out with such singular purpose and so little care that she trod her bare foot upon the fire, yet was insensible to the burn of it.
Cornet Jump’s house was along the route Kitty strode that evening and he was convinced that it was Kitty’s passing footfall that had shaken his house to trembling. But his wife, Peggy, swore that the rumbling of the earth that had so rocked their feeble dwelling that night was started as the militia began advancing upon them. It was those white men upon horseback charging upon the negro village—ten, twenty, thirty—how many, she did not know. But the throb of those galloping horses tipped her jug of milk from off the table to shatter the pot upon the dirt floor.
It was then that Bessy burst in upon them screaming, ‘Run, run, Miss Peggy. White man come. Bakkra gon’ mash us!’
Peggy insisted that Bessy flew through the door of their hut with such force that it broke it back to sticks. She said the useless door was under her foot when Bessy had told her that the militia were seeking those two blow-in strangers, for they had killed the massa. Peggy remembers then rushing over the ruins of that door to grab Kitty from going to the mill yard—to turn her and get her to flee to the cane pieces with her. But Miss Kitty did shake her off so she might carry on her march to the mill.
Yet Cornet declared that his hut door was ruined when the driver, Mason Jackson, kicked it down while blowing the conch for everyone to gather in the yard; for that driver had wanted to bust down his door from first Cornet had dared to put a lock upon it.
Like a boy swirling a birch within a red ant’s nest, the negro village soon erupted into furious motion. According to Giles Millar, the militia rode in amongst them with great speed. That tempest of white men galloping in upon horses besieged the dirt lanes. Flailing with whips, branches, cutlasses, they slashed from side to side, striking at anyone—man, woman, child or beast—caught fleeing within their sweep. The hooves of their rampaging horses collapsed the mud-and-stick walls of homes easy as a bite taken from a dry biscuit.
After a rattle and a crash, Mary Ellis found herself no longer hiding under the corner shelf in her hut, but helplessly choking upon debris and staring upon the moon. Everyone, Mary said, caught with no shelter to shield them, screamed on to the lanes for escape. They all ran frantic alongside the squealing hogs, flapping chickens and crazed dogs.
A fire with a large pot of scalding water was overturned by a bucking goat on to two naked children. Crying out for their mama, they slipped within the boiling liquid and were danced upon by the harried goat. And an old woman, cowering with her arms over her head, was slashed with a sword; her severed hand flew off to land, open palmed, before her.
The fires were started, so said James Richards, by a young, hatless, white man, who rode in holding a blazing, tar-tipped torch high-high. He hurled this firestick on to the thatch of James’s kitchen. Whoosh! The kitchen and house were gone. Those flames then jumped to raze all the huts that lay within their greedy lick.
Dublin Hilton agreed that the rider was white and hatless, but he insisted that this bakkra used the flame from the torch to burn several houses in one galloping sweep—like this white man was lighting a row of stubble upon a cane piece.
Miss Kitty? Dublin Hilton could not remember seeing Kitty, but James Richards could. He recalls her pulling a white man from his horse; the bakkra