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.
The hangman tested the flap upon the scaffold—opening the lumbering gate to knock aside any lying below that hindered its workings—before beckoning the jailor to bring Kitty along. As the iron collar about Kitty’s neck was removed she swung her head around in a blessed freedom, before the rope noose that replaced it once more pinned her firm. And then she stood waiting. For this gibbet would accommodate three and could not be dropped until its full complement was trussed there.
Once all in town had gathered with eagerness to witness the punishments of the slaves who had troubled not only white people with their fire and fuss, but also the King of England in that Baptist War. Now those house slaves and those field negroes and those mongers that laboured within the market, could not be bothered to cease their haggling to worry for the souls of those that were led from the courtroom. Nor could white people be persuaded to stand in the heat to watch niggers being lashed five hundred times or hung by the neck from the gallows. For these punishments had gone on for so long—day upon day, one after the other, after the other—that all in the town, black, coloured and white, had grown weary of them.
‘You have been found guilty of the worst crimes that can be perpetrated, and must be hanged by the neck until dead.’ The two men who had just heard those words spoken to them in the courtroom were placed either side of Kitty upon the gibbet. One was being hanged for burning down his overseer’s house to a pail-full of ashes. While the other was,