A Perilous Proposal (2 page)

“But you can't do this!” she cried in a pleading voice. She ran toward them. “He's done nothing wrong!”

Rude hands restrained her and yanked her back. A surge of fury filled the white man where he stood a few yards away. He took several steps forward. But there was nothing he could do against so many. The young woman ran to his side in desperation.

“Let's go, Dwight,” yelled one of the men, “—we got him!”

The last of the riders remounted. The rest began to swing their horses around.

Out of the house now flew another woman, this one black. She ran straight for the captive. Before the riders could stop her she threw herself against the horse where he was bound and clung to one of his legs. He looked down and tried to reassure her with a smile. The light from the surrounding torches danced in her eyes, wet with tears of terror that she would never see him again.

The eyes of the two former slaves met but for a moment. Though the noose had already begun to choke his neck, the young man tried to speak.

“I love . . . we'll—” he began.

A rude slap across the mouth from the nearest of the horsemen silenced him. At the same instant, a booted foot from another shoved the girl away.

“Get away from him, nigger girl!” he yelled as she stumbled back and fell to the ground. “Otherwise we'll string you up beside him! We got plenty of rope for the two of you.”

A few shouts and slashes from whips and reins, and the mob galloped away. On the ground, the girl picked herself up
and ran a few steps toward them.

“
No!
” she wailed. The forlorn cry was lost in the night. Her horrified protests soon gave way to sobs. She hardly felt the arms of the man and her friend as they approached and tried to comfort her. Slowly they led her back to the house.

“
But why . . . why?
” was all she could whimper in her grief. Neither of the other two had an answer. There was no “why” to hatred.

S
LAVE
B
OY

2

L
IFE WAS SIMPLER BACK WHEN
N
EGROES WERE
slaves.

White masters controlled life. Every bit of it. There was nothing to do, nothing to think, nothing to plan, nothing to hope for . . . nothing to do anything about except do what you were told.

But was freedom from such drudgery worth life itself?

That was the question on the mind of the young black man now riding through the darkness with a noose of death around his neck. He was terrified—that was for sure. But even more than his own fate, his sickened heart was filled with the wail of love that had sounded behind him as he had been taken away. It was a dreadful sound. He would never forget it.

As he jostled along in the saddle, his past life flitted through his memory. He recalled where he had come from. It had been a long search that had brought him here three years before. Now it seemed the quest hadn't been such a good idea after all.

He had found family. He had discovered love. But what would either matter if his life ended tonight with his body dangling from the end of a white man's rope?

All he could think was that he should never have left Alabama, where he was born.

Back then as long as he obeyed his white master and kept his eyes to the ground, all went on day by day in relative peace.

That hadn't prevented the whippings. But at least the simplicity of life had kept him alive.

Alive . . . but angry.

He had hoped the smoldering demon of anger had left him for good. But the white man hated soft-spoken free Negroes no less than brash and belligerent slaves. What made him think life would ever be different?

What did any of it matter now?

A quiet anger had been his silent companion almost longer than he could remember. Perhaps it was destined to be a curse that accompanied the newfound freedom of his race.

The day he first felt it rise up within him was also the day his own whippings had begun. Years later, by the age of fourteen when the Emancipation Proclamation had come, he had countless scars on his back. The marks of the whip were plain enough evidence that keeping his mouth shut hadn't been easy.

And all the while a silent rage seethed inside him to accompany the scars. It was not an anger directed merely at his white master or his men, but also against the man who had given him life. Scars on his back were not in themselves a burden. No scar could keep a man from becoming anything he wanted to be. But anger like his was a different thing. It could keep a man in an unseen bondage from which no one else could free him. Or a woman too, though women weren't quite so prone to it as men. Not even Abraham Lincoln could free the young man called Jake from the anger in his own heart. He would have to fight his own personal war to win that freedom.

The battle would not be an easy one.

Jake's youngest years playing with the other slave children and the master's son hadn't been so bad. There had been enough to eat. Though the work for grown-up slaves was hard, life had pattern and predictability. He came from a people who took happiness where they could find it. Laughter and song were never far away, ready to brighten any day when the master's whip was silent.

But Master Clarkson was a shrewd one. He knew how to control his slaves with more than just the whip. He instilled fear early in life. He didn't want his black youngsters growing up too comfortable.

Jake never forgot the day the master came out and gathered all the slave children, then looked at them sternly. Jake was probably four or five, but there were some as young as three in the little group.

“Just look here,” said the master, nodding toward the dog beside him. He was holding it by a leash as it strained and growled to get at the children. “This here's what's called a nigger dog,” he said. “I got it to ketch niggers when they run away.”

He looked around, making sure his eyes probed straight into every child's face. He wanted them to understand that he was talking to each one of them.

“He's a mighty strong dog,” said Clarkson. “He can run faster'n any man alive. Look at them teeth—they'd just snap a nigger's leg right off. This dog likes the taste of nigger blood, he does. He's just waiting every day, hoping I'll say the word and send him after some nigger trying to run away. Might be your daddy, might be your mama . . . it might even be
you
, 'cause this dog don't care if it's a grown-up or what. He likes nigger blood wherever it comes from.”

Again he stopped and stared every little boy and girl in the eyes. Most of them, just like young Jake's, were by this time wide as round white saucers in the middle of their black faces. If Master Clarkson wanted them to be afraid, he had
already succeeded. But he wasn't done yet.

“Just look how strong his jaws are,” he went on. “When a nigger don't behave, all I got to do is just say the word and this here dog'll grab hold of him and pull him to the ground and then he'll just snap a nigger's head right off as easy as I'd whack off a chicken's head with an ax. He likes the taste of nigger young'uns best.”
[1]

By the time the master was finished, Jake and all the other children were scared to death. The master's speech had exactly the effect he wanted. Fear of disobedience was the earliest and most important lesson he wanted to teach every slave. And white masters like Massa Clarkson had a thousand ways to teach it.

The very thought of escape always brought to the minds of boys and girls like Jake reminders of the fangs of “Massa's houn' dog.” None of them had ever seen a dog take off a man's leg, much less a head. But most had seen enough to know that a dog's teeth could draw blood and leave a vicious scar on the calf. Half the men on the Clarkson plantation could pull up a ragged trouser leg to show proof of it.

For generations before that time, since their ancestors had first been brought as captives from their African homeland, not too many slaves ever thought about trying to escape. A thousand men like Master Clarkson, with five thousand overseers and ten thousand whips and more ornery “nigger dogs” than you could count, had seen to that.

But young Jake was growing up in the turbulent 1850s. Times were changing. Even in the Deep South of Alabama.

Sounds of freedom were in the air.

Those sounds of freedom took many forms. The white masters learned to recognize them and tried to stamp them out whenever they saw signs of them. But that wasn't so easy.
Once a people who have been oppressed get a notion of what freedom is like, they want it more and more. That's how it was for the black slaves in America's South. They started thinking about Moses and the children of Israel in their slavery in Egypt. They realized that they might someday have a Moses to deliver them too, or lots of Moseses working together. And they started talking and singing about their own promised land, and the day when they'd be free just like the Israelites.

Though the white masters and their white families all went to their white churches all prim and proper every Sunday, when their Negro slaves started talking and singing about Israel and Moses and the Promised Land, they started to get nervous. They didn't like their slaves getting
too
familiar with the white man's religion because that could lead to only one thing—talk of freedom. That's what salvation was, after all—freedom from sin . . . and maybe other kinds of freedom too.