THEY HAILED FROM HENDERSON, ANDERSON, Freestone, and Ellis counties. They were boys, big and small, the youngest a scrappy ten-year-old and the oldest just turned seventeen, a ragtag gang making its way to Navarro.
They had been riding all summer. These boys, their number growing with the heat. At first, it had just been three or four farm boys from Henderson, ditching work to go to a hanging in Dallas. But one could say it started way before that. Back in their own counties, they each caught the bug.
In the slow winter months leading up to that long hot summer, they had begun ditching school to go to any dustup nearby, and each county had a few. Even before John Brown’s execution in December, folks had been prickly. The old preacher’s half-baked raid on Harpers Ferry was considered a joke, but the reaction to his death is what got stuck in white folks’ craw. In two short months, Brown went from being a certifiable loon and laughingstock to a saint and martyr now that he was on the verge of execution. Had people all over the North singing his praises, over his mettle, his holy conviction, his willingness to die for abolition. The day he was hanged by the state of Virginia, northward church bells were rung in his honor, guns set off in precarious salute, and preachers ministered to solemn congregations. The feeling in the North seemed to be that Brown had been crucified. The line from then on was clearly set. Anyone who didn’t boldly declare slavery a blessing was an enemy, anybody from the North was suspect, likely to be a John Brown copycat or an emissary of abolitionist causes.
When the Chapel Hill committee gathered outside the yard of old man Willis, seen talking behind closed doors with Negroes, the boys were there. They were among the crowd when the man was served his “walking papers” and run out of town.
They were there, in Marshall, when a minister accused of being an abolitionist was charged with treason and barely escaped with his life. That one was a sight to see. When the mob pursued the minister and his family and finally caught up with them twelve miles from town, the boys were among the procession that walked the man to the jailhouse. Some of the bigger boys pushed into the middle of the fray and got to lay hands on the preacher, got to pinch his arm and punch him in the back before he was stripped, whipped, and robbed, before being locked away in the calaboose.
For weeks afterward, the boys bragged about it in class, or on the farm, to all the boys who hadn’t been there, whose mothers had managed to keep them home. They rubbed it in. All the fun they’d had and how they couldn’t wait for the next one.
They were not disappointed. Come spring, there were more events to go to, and the boys blew off school, blew off chores, to travel in rollicking packs to the site of one great affair or another. In May, they rode all the way to Fannin to see the hangings of Emma, Ruben, and Jess—three slaves hanged for killing their master. The boys outshouted men twice their size in the tussle for souvenirs—a scrap of a shirt or dress, an ear, or a finger. These mementos would go in the small metal box they carried with them the entirety of that summer.
And once the fires began in July, they didn’t even bother going home. They traveled as far as Fort Worth to see another accused abolitionist tarred and hanged. And then back to Dallas, where they camped out the night before an execution to secure a good place in the clearing. That morning, the boys feasted on biscuits and ham, drank bitter coffee, and passed around a bit of whiskey, and were woozy with heat and drink by the time Patrick, Sam, and Cato were hanged—the three slaves the Dallas County mob identified as ringleaders of the fires that scorched and decimated the downtown area.
Newspapers warned Texans of a large, detailed plot of insurrection, scheduled to happen on election day in August. All-out war was on the horizon, one editor wrote, detailing a vast conspiracy of Northern abolitionists who had planted emissaries all over the South, who were working in concert with Black people.
Local papers reported of nearby towns being burned to a crisp, mobs discovering stockpiles of guns and strychnine in slave cabins, interrogations ferreting out hit lists of prominent citizens, and more lurid details of the unseemly plot. That day, while the men were out voting, Black men would poison their wells and take their wives. And a murderous few would lie in wait to slaughter the husbands once they returned home.
As hysteria increased, the boys’ attentions grew scattered. It was hard to know which events would turn into the large festive parades of the early part of the summer. They could always ride with the local patrol and see what turned up, as it wasn’t unlikely for a raid to turn into a small quiet hanging now and then. But those events happened suddenly and rarely made the papers. And often, by the time word spread of a such a hanging in progress, the boys didn’t reach the site until it was all over. Sometimes, they could still grab hold of something for the souvenir box, but it just wasn’t the same if they didn’t see it with their own eyes.
And that created another issue, with the boys being spread so thin. They fought over the box more and more. Who got to keep it and for how long? It got so the boys didn’t even want to share what they obtained with the rest of the group.
By the time they heard about an event in Navarro, it was tacitly understood that any boy who wanted a souvenir would have to secure it himself. That morning, they got on the road at first light, in hopes they’d get a good spot before the festivities happened around noon.
* * *
WHEN THE LOOM WENT up in flames, we didn’t wait to be questioned. Some of us tried to disappear, but there was nowhere to disappear to. The woods were scorched and barren, most of the trees undressed, as if in the midst of a harsh northern winter. The creek was a memory, dry as bone.
The patrols were everywhere. One of their number seemed to be posted every hundred yards. We wondered if these white men even pretended to work anymore, if they had livestock to tend to, crops to water.
We knew about Dallas and Pilot Point and Denton. We knew they’d look to us and ask about the origin of the loom fire, but only one answer would be accepted. Monroe made his claim early. He zipped around, helping Mr. Lucy put the fire out, kept it from spreading, in hopes that his presence would alleviate any question of guilt. A foolish strategy, we thought, but it seemed to work.
They only looked at us. They only sought us. And when they’d caught and penned us all, we saw Mrs. Lucy up ahead, her face a hot red streak, her mouth a twisted spoon. “I know it was them. Those wenches have been plotting against me since creation.”
Any other time, we might have been tickled by her turn of phrase, to hear her channel us this way, but the horrible men surrounding us, their wide faces, and grubby roaming hands, made it hard to hear clearly. Without them, maybe we would have realized what she was saying, what she believed was the true crime, the fire itself merely a ruse of her own making.
We were harried and confused while Junie stood still as the trees, locking her eyes on Lizzie.
Lizzie stared back, her face flushed. She pointed a crooked finger at Junie. “No, just her! She’s the ringleader!”
The men seized Junie first, before tightening their grip on the rest of us.
“She the ringleader?” they asked us.
Some of us shook our heads no, others remained frozen.
“Just what I thought.” One of the men sniffed. He pushed his face close to Patience’s. “You look like the ringleader to me.”
“Nah, I think it’s the old woman,” another man answered.
“I said I’m dealing with the rest of them. Just take her!” Lizzie screeched.
“Now, ma’am, the Navarro Vigilance Committee has the authority to handle these threats as we see fit,” a redheaded man said. “We’re taking these wenches to jail. If Charles wants to file a motion, he can do so down there.”
The vise around us tightened. We fought, but there were many.
A loud gunshot startled us all. One round, then two. We all turned and saw Harlow firing into the sky. He lowered his revolver and moved slowly toward us. “Paul, you son of a bitch, release my property,” he yelled. “Now, goddamit, or this next ball will be in your throat! You, too, Wendell.”
Several of the committee men raised their rifles in Harlow’s direction. “You step back,” a bearded man barked. “You don’t like it, you take it up with the council.”
“Yep, you agreed just like everybody else, Harlow. Arsonists will be dealt with no matter who they belong to,” the redheaded man added.
The bearded man moved close to Harlow until his rifle was inches from Harlow’s chest. “You hang back and collect yourself,” the man said quietly. “And once we’re gone, you go see Reynolds.”
“Charles, you bastard,” screamed Lizzie. “Are you just going to let them take everything?”
“Shut it, Lizzie,” he yelled back.
The bearded man kept his rifle aimed at Harlow’s chest, while the rest of the men hauled us away.
They took us to jail, with gleeful words on their lips. We heard ourselves condemned. Damned. However one considers going over, this felt different. Who among us hadn’t considered self-destruction? Who hadn’t washed clothes at the edge of a river and one day found herself walking deeper and deeper into the throat of it? Who hadn’t considered the bottom of a well or any of the other numerous possibilities that might present themselves in a single day?
On the way to the jail, Serah was separated from us. Her pregnant belly deemed her capable of being reformed, and if not reformed, then just valuable enough to be spared.
Inside the calaboose, some women tried bargaining with the guard, how they could pick more cotton or drive a plow better than any full hand in the county. They were super women, they promised. If their lives were spared, they could do it all. Split rails, have babies, pick a hundred bushels by their lonesome, and cook up a fantastic plentiful meal with nothing but corn, lard, and whatever scraps one could muster.
Junie may have been the only one who didn’t bother with any of the above strategies. All her energy was set upon one thing, speaking to her children on this plane. And if it went the way it appeared to be going, maybe at the critical moment, she could fling herself beyond. Her soul could leap toward Georgia and bypass the otherworld altogether.
The march from the jail to the site couldn’t have been more than half a mile, but it felt much longer. The sun was high, its furious glare singeing our skin. We walked single file, bounded together by the wrists, past a graveyard of desiccated trees, out to where a large oak towered above.
A cheer went up in the crowd. A sweaty mass of pink swollen faces. They taunted and heckled us.
Together, we sang. “I know moon-rise, I know star-rise. I’ll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms. Lay this body down.”
Two limbs of the tree were already roped, made to do the crowd’s bidding. Those of us who could talk to trees tried to reason with it, accuse it of complicity.
“I’ll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms. Lay this body down.”
Past those horrible faces, there was a high fluttering in the trees north of us. The dry branches clacked, the dead leaves rustled, our song now stuck in their boughs. “I go to the Judgment in the evening of the day, when I lay this body down.”
“Shut up that racket!”
“They singing in code!”
The song rose higher. “And my soul and your soul will meet in the day, when I lay this body down.”
Junie. Lulu. Patience. Nan. Each one adding to the song. The melody then breaks, breaking open, rising higher, before adhering itself to the slow movement of clouds passing over.
* * *
TWO OF THE BOYS secured souvenirs, which included: a scrap of Junie’s gingham trousers, a lock of Patience’s braid, and one toe, but from which woman they cannot remember.
Come September, after the hysteria has died out, a couple of newspapers will run retractions, noting fires reported that never actually happened, wells declared poisoned that were in fact untainted, and substances thought to be strychnine that turned out to be harmless. Some people will begin to wonder if there was ever a plot of insurrection at all. The box of souvenirs will then lose its luster and later be forgotten about, when Texas joins South Carolina and the rest of the South in the call for secession.
* * *
SERAH COULD HEAR THE women’s song from the yard of the auction house, where she remained alone. The small building was only a few paces from the jail, as people were often moved between the two structures.
From where she paced, she tried her best to ignore the lower half of her body, cramping in pain, and focused on the sound of the song starting up, then stopping, taken up by the next pair of women, until there was no song at all.
She squatted in the dirt and was surprised that the baby slipped out easy, as if it had been waiting on her to just stop pacing long enough for it to descend.
The child was alive, a wrinkled baby girl, not much bigger than her hand. She cleared its mouth, as she had seen Nan do, and the baby began to cry. She ripped off a portion of her skirt and wrapped the baby inside it.
Something else was coming. With the child in one arm, she squatted and watched the slimy afterbirth fall into the dirt. She searched around for something to wrap it in. She didn’t want her child to be anchored here, not in the yard of a trader’s house, or in Navarro County itself. She wanted no link between her family line and this terrible place. She let it dry out in the sun; the husk of the thing would have to go with them. She had nothing to cut the cord and it seemed most reasonable to her to never cut it, to never be more than an arm’s length from each other.
A decade or so later, when Serah will give birth for the third and final time, in the white clapboard house she shares with her family, her oldest daughter, born in the trader’s yard, will be the one person she wants bedside. Though the midwife will frown at the child’s presence and send the little girl off to fetch one thing or another, Serah will remain steadfast in this one request. Outside, Noah will pull the plow slow within earshot, tracking the rise and fall of sounds coming out of the small pulsing house. If it’s a girl, he’ll burn a piece of tobacco and indigo, and if a boy, tobacco and corn. When the pain thickens, Serah will summon the little girl by her bedside once more and tighten her swollen fingers around the child’s tiny hand. And it’ll be hard to say which one is the anchor affixing them to this new world, lest they be suddenly wrenched back into the old one.
Back in the trader’s yard, the newborn hollers, taking up the women’s dirge. Serah can hear the women singing again, a chorus embedded inside the baby’s sharp cries.