The leather whip stripped another
layer of flesh away with each sickening
slap across the African's back. Rivulets
of blood soaked the coarse shirt that
hung in tatters around his waist. His
teeth clenched and he looked heavenward
in anticipaton of the next stinging
blow. When it came his body tensed
momentarily, his eyes rolled back in his
head and his muscular frame slumped
against the post; the ropes cut into his
wrists as he hung limply from the
crossbar above. Blood continued to run
from his flayed back, mixed with the
sweat already there, while the man with
the whip accepted congratulations from
the assembled witnesses. Finally, he was
cut loose and allowed to fall heavily to
the bloodsoaked ground.
"Thet
nigger'll never run agin'," declared Tom
Colter, boss of the plantation. "Thet
there whip damn sure speaks their
language!"
"My whip speaks louder'n
any man and in ev'ry language on God's
earth!" Henry Cheever, owner of the
plantation and wielder of the whip
boasted with a proud grin as he
reflected on the many poor souls who'd
felt its lash. Henry Cheever knew what
it was to be hunted down as he'd hunted
runaway slaves. He'd come from his
native Virginia twelve years earlier,
barely dodging the hangman's noose by no
more than the width of a whisker
sprouted on his stern chin. Hardly a day
went by when he wasn't reminded of the
man he'd killed in a fight over a woman,
a woman whose name he never knew and
whose face was as cold and dead in his
memory as the man he'd laid in his
grave.
"Throw him in the cell," he
barked to a pair of hired hands. "We'll
send this one south t'morrow mornin'
with the others."
Part Two
The country was embroiled
in a
brutalizing civil war. Slavery, the lifeblood
of the south, was in danger of being denied
the confederacy by unseen bureaucrats in
Washington. To the confederates slavery
wasn't a civil or human rights issue, it was
an economic issue. Without it there wouldn't
be enough hands to work the fields, without
hands many of the large plantations would
fail; loyal southerners Henry Cheever and Tom
Colter sought to keep them supplied.
Henry
and Tom were reclaimers, men who kidnapped
freed or runaway slaves from neighboring free
states like Illinois and Kansas and brought
them through a reverse underground railroad
to the Cheever farm. It was a way station on
a distribution network that returned them to
slave states further south. The house had
been specially built for the traffic in
slaves. Its third floor was entirely taken
over with small cells, each containing two
bunks. At ground level the house was divided
through its heart by a driveway, slaves could
be brought into it without ever being
seen. Acres of corn surrounded the house,
keeping strangers at a distance and providing
a steadier income than slave
trafficking.
...to be continued...