Work House, I stopped dead in my tracks, and for a minute my body felt like it was back inside there. I could hear the treadmill groaning, could smell the fear. In my head, I saw the cowhide slap the baby on its mauma’s back, and I felt myself falling. The only way I kept from turning back was thinking about Denmark, how any minute they’d bring him and his lieutenants out through the Work House gate.
The judges had picked July 2 for the execution day, a secret everybody in the world knew. They said Denmark and five others would be put to death early in the morning at Blake’s Lands, a marshy place with a stand of oaks where they hung pirates and criminals. Every slave who could figure a way to get there would show up, and white people, too, I reckoned, but something told me to come to the Work House first and follow Denmark to Blake’s Lands. Maybe he’d catch sight of me and know he didn’t travel the last mile of his life alone.
I crouched by the animal sheds near the gate, and soon enough four horse-drawn wagons came rolling out with the doomed men shackled in back, sitting on top of their own burial boxes. They were a swollen, beat-up lot—Rolla and Ned in the first wagon, Peter in the second, and two men I never had seen in the third. The last one held Denmark. He sat tall with his face grim. He didn’t see me get to my feet and limp along behind them on the side of the road. The Guard was heavy in the wagons, so I had to stay well back.
The horses plodded along slow. I trailed them a good ways with my foot aching inside my shoe, working hard to keep up, wishing he’d look at me, and then a strange thing happened. The first three wagons turned down the road toward Blake’s Lands, but the fourth one with Denmark turned in the opposite direction. Denmark looked confused and tried to stand, but a guard pushed him down.
He watched his lieutenants rumble away. He yelled, “Die like men!” He kept on yelling it while the distance grew between them and the dust from the wheels churned, and Rolla and Peter shouted it back. Die like men. Die like men.
I didn’t know where Denmark’s wagon was headed, but I hurried behind it with their cries in the air. Then his eyes fell on me, and he turned quiet. The rest of the way, he watched me come along behind, lagging way back.
They hung him from an oak tree on an empty stretch along Ashley Road. Nobody was there but the four guards, the horse, and me. All I could do was squat far off in the palmetto scrub and watch. Denmark stepped quiet onto the high bench and didn’t move when they tugged the noose over his head. He went like he shouted to the others, like a man. Up till they kicked the bench out from under his legs, he stared at the palm leaves where I hid.
I looked away when he dropped. I kept my eyes on the ground, listening to the gasps that drifted from the tree. All round, the hermit crabs skittered, looking at me with their tiny stupid eyes, sliding in and out of holes in the black dirt.
When I looked again, Denmark was swaying on the limb with the hanging moss.
They took him down, put him in the wood coffin, and nailed the lid. After the wagon disappeared down the road, I eased out from my hiding place and walked to the tree. It was almost peaceful under there in the shade. Like nothing had happened. Just the scuff marks in the dust where the bench had fallen over.
There was a potter’s field nearby. I knew they’d bury him there and nobody would know where he was laid. The edict from the judges said we couldn’t cry, or say his name, or do anything to mark him, but I took a little piece of red thread from my neck pouch and tied it round one of the twigs on a low, dipping branch to mark the spot. Then I cried my tears and said his name.
PART FIVE
November 1826–November 1829
Handful
It was long about November when Goodis caught a chest cough and I headed to the stable with some horehound and brown sugar for his throat, thinking it’s another dull-luster day in the