I gobbled it down and in that instant knew I had never truly experienced hunger until my time down in that pit. However long I had gone without food, it had been long enough that the pangs of famish had faded from me, like a visitor who ceases to knock upon realizing no one is home. But the morsel of bread revived my hunger. I seized up and convulsed and then, looking at the table, I saw more packages and something more essential—a jar of water.
I did not even ask. I scampered over and drank and let the water wash down my throat and around the side of my mouth, down my neck and onto my long shirt and overcoat, which I now caught the pungent odor of. The world of feeling began to come back to me. I was hungry and terribly cold. I unwrapped another piece of bread, quickly devoured it, and then another and was going for another when this ordinary man quietly said, “That will be enough.”
I turned and saw that he was seated not too far from me, and though it was dusk, it was already too dark for me to get the full features of his face. The ordinary man sat there in his chair, saying nothing. I waited there, shivering against the cold. Then I saw a light in the distance growing larger and approaching us. I heard wagon wheels crunching against the road until a large covered car and horse stood before us. A man next to the driver held a lantern. The driver stepped off and nodded to the ordinary man, who then beckoned me to board the wagon. I climbed up and saw now that there were several other colored men in the car. And then we were off, rumbling down the road, the wagon shifting and creaking under us. I examined the other men gathered there, and wondered what depredations might now greet us. And there were no chains, who would need them? For had you seen the bowed heads around me, you would have known that these men were more than bound, they were broken. And I was one of them, so tumbled into the pit of despair that all my disparate motives had been reduced to survival. I had been reduced to an animal. Now came the hunt.
* * *
—
We rode for an hour or so, and then were ushered back out of the wagon, placed into file. And we stood there in ungainly ranks, the ordinary man surveying us as a general might review a fresh round of recruits. And though it was darker now, I found that the darkness suited my eyes, as though the time below had somehow changed me so that the moonlight proved enough for me to now take the measure of this ordinary man—his hair hanging long and ungainly beneath his wide-brimmed hat, and a long gray beard, raw and untamed, sprouting out from his face. There were more of us than him at that moment, however beaten down and demoralized we were, but we knew he wasn’t alone. Because white men in Virginia are never really alone.
And then the others arrived, announcing themselves by lantern-light in the distance and the approaching clomp and clack of horse hooves and wheels creaking up the road. And now I saw three carriages pulling to a stop before us and from them white men disembarked, holding the lanterns in their hands. The light cast a yellow pall upon them and they seemed otherworldly creatures of another age—demons, gorgons, specters—summoned back to wreak the vengeance of Quality upon our persons. But then I heard them talk, and I heard a particular cadence that told me that I was still in Virginia, and these “creatures” were no conjuration, but a pack of low whites. Their talk was rough. Their coats were worn. Now my heart dropped, and a new wave of fear overtook me. The monsters of myth would have been preferable to these men I knew too well. The low whites enjoyed only a toehold in the craggy face of society, an insecure position, which only augmented the brutal spirit they so often visited upon the coloreds of Virginia. This brutality was the offering Quality made to the low whites, the payment that united them. And it struck me now that this was the point of our evening—a ritual of brutality, in which we, the captured, were to be the sacrifice.