Chapter 6 #2
Since the one cook served both their households and the other slaves were useless in the kitchen, this left Marguerite and Jeanne to puzzle out meals in the sweltering outbuilding. One morning toward the end of July, young Joseph appeared in a daze.
Marguerite scowled, glancing up from the receipt book. “What’s the matter now?”
The boy hovered on the threshold. “I was at Grandpapa’s shop. Men came and took Jemmy.”
“Took who?”
Beside her, Jeanne stopped kneading. “The boy we hired from Mrs. Clement, to help with the cleaning and deliveries.” She spoke low, as if to herself. “They must think he knows something.”
Marguerite raised her chin, vindicated at last. “Or that he was one of the conspirators.”
Joseph blinked at her. “He was so polite.”
“They do that to fool you!” Was Marguerite the only person in this city who understood negroes?
“I’m glad Mama isn’t here,” Joseph murmured, drifting away like a lost buoy. “This would make her worry.”
Fifty-three negroes were actually released.
Jemmy Clement was not among them. He would hang alongside twenty-one more slaves.
Gérard had lost only Jemmy’s rent for the rest of the year and the use of his cook for a few days.
Marguerite wished the cut had been deeper.
Perhaps Gérard had not learned his lesson; but she would ensure that the children did.
As soon as the Saint-Clairs left for their clock shop that morning, Marguerite hurried Joseph, Catherine, and Hélène into their grandparents’ open landau.
She wanted to secure a good spot, though it would mean missing the procession of the condemned from the Work House.
She smacked the floor of the carriage with her cane.
“Drive!” she commanded the coachman, who was, of course, a slave.
For insurance, she carried the pistol in her reticule.
As the horses carried them northward, people turned at the sound of the landau, peering at them from sidewalks, piazzas, and windows, expecting the criminals.
Then the buildings thinned, the fields began, and finally they reached the crumbling walls called the Lines.
These had been erected during the War of 1812 as a fortification to protect Charleston from the British.
But even then, the greatest enemy had been within.
Their carriage was not the first to arrive.
Without anything yet to watch, already an audience was gathering.
The people around them displayed the usual spectrum of skin, from alabaster to pitch and everything in-between.
The Saint-Clairs would soon realize their foolishness; they would have no customers today. All of Charleston would be here.
With twenty-two negroes to execute in one day, Marguerite had expected the city to hang a few at a time.
Instead, Charleston chose spectacle. For gallows, long benches had been constructed just in front of the Lines, with the old wall used to support scaffolding above.
From these beams dangled all twenty-two waiting nooses.
Their coachman found a place so close, the wall’s shadow fell across them—a welcome respite, as the late July sun began to climb.
Marguerite returned her attention to the children, only to discover that they were signing to each other.
“Stop that!” She slapped Joseph’s hand, since he sat beside her.
“You know I don’t understand what those mean!
What is this?” Marguerite mimicked his last gesture, tapping her chin with her crooked index finger.
The boy glowered at his shoes and mumbled: “Nothing.”
Marguerite glared at the girls, but they offered no translation either. “I’ve told you not to do that in public—you look like idiots. Speak properly! English is bad enough.” She sighed and changed the subject. “You know they’re hanging your grandfather’s shop boy today?”
The children did not respond. Even their hands were still.
“Will you point him out to me?”
Hélène’s chin trembled. “Jemmy wouldn’t have hurt us, right, Cathy?”
“Of course not,” Catherine told her. “We’re too little.”
“Don’t lie to her!” Marguerite ordered. “They’ve been planning to murder you since you were a baby!”
In spite of the heat, the girls huddled together on the seat across from her.
“Do you know what Denmark Vesey had to say about white children?” Marguerite continued.
“He said: ‘What is the use of killing the lice and leaving the nits?’ You would have been lucky if they killed you. I heard they were planning to sell some of us as slaves. You don’t want to know what they would have done to little girls. ”
After that, the children behaved themselves.
Marguerite kept watch with a pair of opera glasses.
At last the criminals appeared in carts, sitting atop their coffins.
Most looked solemn, but one had clearly lost his few brains.
He was waving, chattering to the crowd, and laughing.
Perhaps he thought this behavior would earn him clemency. Marguerite hoped not.
The City Guard had to force a way through the throng so the condemned could reach their nooses.
The wave of people following them crashed into the mass already waiting.
Only with difficulty did their own coachman keep their horses from bolting.
Nearby, Marguerite heard screaming and caught enough words to surmise that at least one person had been trampled.
“Can’t we go now, bisa?eule?” Joseph begged beside her.
“It hasn’t even started!” Marguerite snapped. At the thought of leaving, palpitations seized her heart again. She had waited thirty years for this.
The negroes descended from their coffins.
“I want to go home!” Hélène wailed.
Marguerite yanked on the girl’s bonnet ribbon and forced Hélène to look at her. “Act like a lady!”
Joseph muttered, “There are no other ladies here.”
Marguerite released Hélène and glanced around them.
The crowd was full of snivelling colored women, and a few white women of low character.
The rest were all men and boys. Fools. Everyone in this city should bear witness, so no one would forget their negroes’ intentions. They were not “like family.”
Awkwardly, with their hands bound behind their backs, the criminals mounted the benches, and the guardsmen looped the ropes around their necks.
“You’re going to remember this day,” Marguerite told her great-grandchildren in a voice low and fierce.
“You’re going to remember it for the rest of your lives, every time someone asks why your children don’t have a black nurse.
And you!” She jabbed a finger at Joseph.
“Don’t you ever trust a negro with your shaving razor! Do you hear me?”
Without ceremony, a guardsman kicked away the first bench, and then the second.
The criminals dropped—except, they did not drop far or fast enough.
They only began to strangle. Some of the men’s feet scraped the ground.
They dangled, kicking but not dying. They were so close, Marguerite could hear the gagging distinctly.
Nearby, one negro tried to keep his legs lifted long enough to choke himself.
Marguerite smirked. What an inept hangman. Or perhaps a wise one. Let them suffer. They had planned to burn children alive. They had mutilated her children. They had left her with a fool for a grandson and weaklings for heirs.
Across from Marguerite, both girls were blubbering now. Without a word, Joseph left the seat beside her and tucked himself between them. His sisters buried their faces against his shoulders and clung to him. He cooed at them but glared at Marguerite. She barely noticed.
Wobbling on their toes like children’s tops, many of the hanged men could still speak, a chorus of hoarse voices begging for mercy among the gasps and shrieks of the crowd.
With a curse, the captain of the City Guard succumbed. He drew his gun and began shooting the criminals, one by one. The impact spun their bodies anew.
Marguerite remembered the pistol tucked into her reticule and laughed. She withdrew it, cocked it, and aimed at the nearest negro. His head burst like a mushroom. One of the guardsmen wrested the pistol from her, as if she had more than one shot.
They couldn’t stop her from admiring what she’d done to her target. It was not an impertinent mulatresse, but it was something.
The next morning, when Joseph came to give his great-grandmother a letter from his father, he found she had passed away in her sleep.
In the July heat, she already smelled horrible, and she was already attracting flies.
But before he ran to tell his grandfather, Joseph said a quick prayer for Marguerite’s soul.
He knew she needed it. He closed his eyes tightly, because there was a very strange smile on her face.