A Fire Bell in the Night! 1

A Fire Bell in the Night! 1 The black whip whistled through the air and slashed the naked back with such force that it sent out a spray of blood. The victim's body arched taut, her wrists straining at the thongs that bound her to the post. But not a sound passed her lips. Furious, her mistress, standing beside the overseer, whispered for him to make her beg for mercy, for by her silence, her personal slave was wining again. The overseer scarcely bothered to acknowledge the request. She would cry out soon enough; he had seen them try to hold back the screams before. But after four or five of his best strokes, her will would start to crumble, and she would be shrieking for mercy loud enough to be heard halfway across the county. In the meantime, as long as she was determined not to give them the satisfaction of hearing her cry out, he would enjoy the contest. He aimed his second lash lower, where she would not expect it. From long experience he had learned that slaves who had not been whipped before invariably assumed that the lightning would strike in the same place, like spanking a child, and they would steel themselves to receive a second blow directly on top of the first. So the overseer liked to surprise them. If there were to be more than a dozen or so lashes, he would open fresh wounds wherever possible. Such was his skill that he could not only make the whip either cut or merely raise welts, but he could lay a pattern of a dozen stripes without ever repeating. Between each blow—especially in the beginning, when the game was fresh, before it became tedious—he would pause between strokes, to build the suspense and let the victim have a little extra time to think about the next searing fire and try to anticipate where it would fall. After eight or nine lashes on untouched flesh, the earliest wounds would have begun to calm down and start to close. Suddenly he would return to them and reopen them one by one, and the shock and pain would feel worse than anything which had gone before. Such accuracy took exceptional aim, and the overseer prided himself on that. After four lashes, the slave girl's body began to tremble, in spite of her iron determination that it should not, and the overseer could see her biting her lip to keep from crying out. It would not be long now. He glanced to his left, at the other slaves who had been assembled to witness this punishment, especially at the girl's brother. Now that was one slave whom he had been looking forward to humbling for a long time. But because he was the brother of the mistress's favorite slave, the overseer had been prohibited from whipping him and had had to endure the boy's silent contempt for many months. But soon his sister would become hysterical, and then the boy would lose control and would try something. The overseer would blow him to kingdom come. He smiled and fingered the butt of the pistol that protruded from his belt. Where aim was concerned, he was as deadly with a pistol or rifle as he was with a whip. The brother stood still, hands clenched into fists at his side. He knew the overseer's thought, knew he would be dead before he took three steps towards him, let alone got his hands around that throat. Still, it was the hardest thing he ever had to do in his fife—not to do anything. So he stood there, shaking with the effort, as the whip fell again and again. The slave girl proved tougher than the overseer had anticipated. Nine strokes fell before the first involuntary moan escaped her lips. But that sound had the effect of a breach in a tidal dike. A Fire Bell in the Night! 2 Her resolve collapsed, and with it caved in the last vestiges of pride and self-respect. She was screaming now and pleading with her brother to save her. Yet he stood without moving, tears coursing down his own cheeks. The overseer watched him closely now; there was one more thing he could do to get him to break. And aiming carefully, he reopened the lowest slash. At that, her brother screamed louder than she did, and his left foot came forward. The mistress unwittingly saved them both. Clapping a hand over her mouth hi a vain effort to keep from bringing up her breakfast, she waved to the overseer to stop, and turned from them, running toward the mansion. The incident we have just dramatized is not fiction; it comes from the testimony of a former slave, Austin Stewart, and it is frighteningly similar to hundreds of other recorded accounts. Reading them, one becomes increasingly appalled at the magnitude of this dark specter that had crept across the land. One's horror is amplified by the uniformly straightforward, unadorned, and almost dispassionate quality of these testimonies. The authors (and. their publishers) obviously felt that their ordeals spoke for themselves—which they most movingly did. Yet after the fourteenth or twenty-seventh account, one's senses begin to numb; we start to lose the capacity to react with the moral outrage that such atrocities deserve. As with the modern horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau and Treblinka, we acknowledge gruesome reality and know that it is wrong to feel the slightest degree of indifference, but.... Confronted with the full enormity of the Holocaust or the torture in Communist prison camps or slavery, it is understandable that our senses would shut down; it is a defense mechanism of the psyche. Yet we should accept the reminders. It happened in America. The wake-up horn sounded between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning, depending on the season, to get the slaves into the fields by the first predawn light. Groaning, the six men and four women who occupied cabin 14 rolled off of their straw pallets and groped in the darkness for their field clothes. Several yawned widely, as if somehow that might dispel the bone-deep fatigue that dragged at their bodies. One, on whom the rest depended for his gift of humor, commented, "This old back is convinced that it is still yesterday!" They chuckled at the old joke, grateful for anything to laugh at. In the darkness of the cabin, they fumbled with shoes—those who still had them—and the women grabbed up hoecakes they had baked the night before, tied them into bandannas, and filled drinking gourds with water. For whatever they ate that day—and there would be only one meal before finishing their work that night—would be their own responsibility. The eastern sky already showed streaks of pinks and grays when the last of them ran to the field, frantically tucking in the shirt he had been unable to find. The overseer waited, slapping the butt of his whip in his hand. "Jethro," he said wearily, "You're late again. Step forward." The slave did as he was bidden, and the overseer gave him about a couple dozen lashes—hard enough to make it worth his while not to be late again, but not hard enough so that he could not do a full day's work. As the lash fell, the boy hollered at the top of his lungs, but he and the overseer and the other slaves all knew that he exaggerated. It did not change the degree of punishment, but it made him feel better. A Fire Bell in the Night! 3 At this same hour, thousands of plantations large and small throughout the Deep South reenacted this scene. On older plantations, their huts were of frame and clapboard, yet had no windows or floors. They measured either eight feet by ten or ten by twelve, with anywhere from seven to twelve people in each and no thought of family relationships or separating people of the opposite sex. The beds were little more than boxes of straw along the walls, and some had not even that. On the newer plantations to the south, thatched palmetto leaves made up the huts, and farther west they were of logs, but the dimensions and the overcrowding remained the same. When it came to letting smoke out, ventilation was almost nonexistent, although come winter, there seemed to be plenty of chinks to let in fresh snow and icy wind. As for clothing, slaves were annually issued "a pair of tow and linen pants, and two shirts of the same material. For winter, they would receive a pair of shoes, a pair of woolsey pants and a round jacket." An Englishman figured up the cost of this clothing to the planter at one pound, three shillings. Add another seven shillings for a blanket and two caps, and the total cost of outfitting a slave for a year was one pound, ten. Add to that the cost of victualing him with thirteen bushels of cornmeal and a hundred pounds of pork, and the amount the owner spent a year became two pounds, six. This Englishman valued the average slave's labor at around twenty pounds a year (a substantial sum in those days), which meant that the owner recompensed the slave a little over a tenth of what he deserved, had he worked for pay. That, he observed, did not square too well with Jeremiah 22:13 (RSV), "Woe unto him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; who makes his neighbor serve him for nothing, and does not give him his wages." And he went on to cite James 5:4 (RSV), "Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts." As soon as it was light enough to see by, the work began, and with the exception of a fifteen- minute break to eat what they had brought with them, it continued until there was no more light.

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