1857The Last Temptation of Simon Swincegood
He kills the dogs before he runs.
Simon has heard the ignorant whispers of other slaves plotting escape. How they will wash away their trail by wading in rivers, or mask it with some stronger scent: Peppercorns. Vinegar. Turpentine. Horse piss. He knows it’s all foolishness. Even an ordinary coonhound can track a man through water, or tell a fugitive’s sweat from the staling of a horse. And Master Swincegood’s hounds aren’t ordinary. Bred from Egyptian stock, they are descendants of the hounds of Pharaoh, survivors of the debacle of the Red Sea. Nothing on foot can elude them for long.
Hecuba, the midwife, claims that she can fly. Each night she casts her soul aloft, above the reach of dogs or men. She’s been to the North many times, she says; and to the future, and the lands of the dead, and to other, stranger places. But it profits her nothing. However far she travels, she remains tethered to her body by an unbreakable cord that each morning reels her in, to wake once more a slave.
Other slaves, lacking even a temporary power of flight, have sought more earthly means of emancipation. Ezekiel, who was keeper of the hounds before Simon, tried to mail himself to freedom. He packed himself in a trunk with one of Missus Swincegood’s ball gowns that was bound for a party in Delaware. But the wagon that was to take the luggage to the train depot was late; Ezekiel began to suffocate, and prematurely pulled the stopper on the air hole he’d drilled for himself. The hounds, already suspicious about his absence, were on him in seconds.
Master Swincegood gave Ezekiel fifty lashes and sold him away south. When Master made Simon the hounds’ new keeper, he warned him not to repeat Ezekiel’s mistake. Simon took the words to heart. He cannot say how his own bid for freedom will end, but he knows how it must begin.
He enters the barn just before curfew. He finds a lantern and lights it, and goes to the pen where the dogs sleep. Four pairs of amber-colored eyes look up at his approach, watchful and curious. They’re smart animals: they know it’s not time to
be fed, and if they were needed for a hunt, a white man would be coming for them.
Simon doesn’t give them time to think about it. He opens the gate and points at Little Boy—at fifty pounds, the runt of the litter. “Follow,” Simon says.
He crosses the barn to the stall of Adolphus, the mule, and takes the shoeing hammer from its peg on the wall. He side-eyes a warning at Adolphus as he does this; the mule, adept as any slave at playing dumb, stares back vacantly. I don’t see nothing, boss.
Leaving the lantern in the barn, Simon leads Little Boy to the old well out back, the path lit by a nearly full moon. In the shadow of a tree near the path’s end, Simon pauses. “Set,” he says. Little Boy sits obediently. Simon squats beside him. He cocks his right arm and points with his left and says, “Look there.” Little Boy looks. Simon swings the hammer. The back of Little Boy’s skull gives way with a wet crack and he drops, lifeless.
Simon stands up and begins removing the boards from the mouth of the well. The well was covered after Simon’s younger brother, Luke, had his accident. Simon’s other brother, Peter, had been teasing Luke, telling him there was a tunnel at the bottom of the well that led all the way to Canada. Luke knew that was nonsense, and said so, but Peter kept insisting it was true, adding that it didn’t really matter, anyway, as Luke was too much of a coward to see for himself. It was that last part that proved fatal, for while Luke didn’t mind being thought a fool, he couldn’t bear to have his bravery questioned. So he tried to climb down, and fell, and hit his head, and drowned. Now the well is tainted.
Go on, drink, Simon thinks, tipping Little Boy headfirst into the well shaft.
When Simon goes back to the barn, Whitefoot has pushed open the gate to the dog pen and is looking out. Volunteering to be next. Simon crooks a finger at him.
After Luke died, Peter ran away. The hounds tracked him to a neighboring plantation and treed him in a hundred-year-old oak. When Peter wouldn’t come down, two white men climbed up after him. Peter climbed higher. He was eighty feet off the ground when he found the branch that wouldn’t hold his weight.
“Look there,” Simon says. Whitefoot looks; the hammer falls.
In the dog pen, Caesar and Cleo have started putting two and two together. When Simon tells Cleo to follow, she doesn’t obey; she barks at him. Simon gives her an openhanded smack on top of the head and says, “Mind.” That stops the barking, but she still doesn’t want to come with him. He has to drag her out by the scruff.
Simon’s sister, Rachel, was thirteen years old when Master Swincegood’s cousin Charlie took an interest in her. Rachel went along the first few times because she didn’t know what else to do, but finally she had enough and stole a knife from the kitchen. She got in one good slice that left a flap of cousin
Charlie’s cheek hanging off his face. Then Charlie took the knife away from her.
“Look there,” says Simon, and Cleo turns and snaps at him. Distracted by a vision of his sister lying bloody on the ground, Simon is caught off guard and drops the hammer. But he recovers quickly. He grabs the back of Cleo’s head with one hand and clamps the other around her muzzle and twists, hard. The curfew bell rings.
He returns to the barn. Caesar is backed into a corner of the dog pen with his teeth bared. Out of siblings, Simon thinks now of his father. When an overseer tried to rape Simon’s mother, Simon’s father beat the man to death. He made no attempt to run, afterwards; just waited for his punishment, which was swift and brutal. Master Swincegood tied him to a post and made the other slaves watch as he doused him in turpentine and set him on fire. Simon was barely old enough to walk at the time, but he recalls that day quite clearly. It is his earliest childhood memory.
Caesar growls. It occurs to Simon that time has come round; in this situation, he is the master. He nods in recognition of the fact and then lifts his chin up, exposing his throat. Caesar springs, and meets the hammer. The first blow only stuns him, but Simon follows him to the floor and plants a knee in his rib cage and goes to work. The hammer rises and falls in a blur.
When it’s over, Simon lets go of the handle, swipes blood from his face, and gets up slowly. He feels like his chest should be heaving from exertion, but he’s not even breathing hard. Just a little light-headed, is all. He wipes his hands on his shirt and steps back out of the dog pen.
“Nigger.”
Jeff Trumbo, the overseer who replaced the man Simon’s father killed, is standing in the barn doorway. Trumbo was never kind, but in the past couple of years, as Simon has gotten bigger, he has gone out of his way to terrorize Simon and so discourage him from following in his father’s footsteps. The conditioning works: at the first sight of the overseer Simon is gripped by a paralysis of the will. He doesn’t even think about going for the hammer in the dog pen. He just stands there, his attention evenly divided between the fury in Trumbo’s eyes and the revolver on Trumbo’s hip.
“Past curfew,” Trumbo says. “What you doing out here, nigger?” The words are slurred. Simon belatedly notes the bottle in Trumbo’s fist. Trumbo is drunk most nights, but tonight he must be blind drunk—that, plus the fact that Simon is backlit, the lantern on the floor behind him, explains why Trumbo’s gun is still in its holster.
Instinct takes over. “Caesar’s poorly,” Simon says. “Master Swincegood told me to check on him before I turned in.”
Trumbo says nothing to this, only glares, and Simon fears that the blood on his shirt is visible. But then Trumbo tilts up the bottle and drinks. His eyes lose focus and he goes off in his head, seeming to forget that Simon is even there. On any other night, Simon would be fine with that, but if Trumbo passes out
in the barn, someone more sober may come looking for him. So Simon prompts him, gently: “Master Trumbo?”
Trumbo blinks himself back to something resembling consciousness. “Get done,” he tells Simon. “I come out here again, I better not catch you.”
Simon bows his head. “Yessuh.” When he looks up, Trumbo is gone.
Now Simon’s chest heaves, as relief mixes with rage at the departed overseer.
No time for that. He finds some burlap to wrap Caesar’s remains in, dumps the body down the well with the others, and replaces the boards. Returning to the barn for a final time, he scatters fresh straw in the dog pen to cover up the blood. Before blowing out the lantern he shoots another warning glance at Adolphus, who responds with a fair imitation of Simon’s “Yessuh” nod. I still don’t see nothing, boss.
Out into the night. The route back to the slave cabins takes Simon past the main house. He keeps his head down and walks quickly, staying in the shadows as much as possible, but as he comes in view of the front porch another voice calls out to him: “Simon!”
It is young Master Daniel, Master Swincegood’s six-year-old son. Up past his bedtime, alone and bored. He is delighted to see Simon, whom he regards as both playmate and plaything.
Simon turns towards the boy, conscious once more of the blood on his shirt. Conscious, too, of the hammer, which he has brought with him. The handle lies flush against the inside of his forearm; the head, still sticky with blood and dog fur, is cupped in his hand. As he contemplates the deadly weight of it, his rage comes bubbling up, bringing with it a dreadful temptation.
He meant to run away. But there is another way this night could end.
A dozen strides will bring him onto the porch, where a swing of the hammer will crack the boy’s skull as easily as any dog’s. Then in through the front door, turning right off the hall into the parlor where Missus Swincegood and her daughter, Patsy, will be sewing or reading. A hammer blow for each of them, and another for the house slave, Elsbeth, if she dares to interfere.
Then up the stairs, on a collision course with Master Swincegood, who, alerted by his family’s screams, will come running from his study, wielding the pistol that he always has with him. He’ll probably shoot Simon dead before Simon even makes it to the top of the staircase. But maybe not. Maybe, carried along by bloodlust, Simon will shrug off the first bullet and resist the urge to freeze up in the face of a man more terrible than any overseer. Maybe he’ll do unto Master as he did unto Caesar.
He’ll still die, afterwards. Trumbo will come with the other white hands, bringing more guns, and Simon’s choice will be to surrender and perish slowly by torture or to resist and be shot down instantly. Either way, his life will end.
And it is this, more than any desire for revenge, that tempts him. Simon is only fifteen, but already he is old and careworn, unable to recall a time when he was not afraid. Even if he escapes, he knows he will never truly be safe. A fugitive’s existence must be better than a slave’s—it cannot be worse—but fear and uncertainty will dog him all the rest of his days.
To end it all now; to join the rest of his family underground, and feel nothing anymore—that is a powerful temptation, more seductive than anything the devil offered Christ on the mountaintop. It tugs at Simon’s soul and he wavers, teetering on the brink, while away up in the future all the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren he has yet to engender wait to see if their existence will be sacrificed, forfeit to a moment’s weakness.
His body decides before his conscious mind does. Simon’s left hand—the one without the hammer in it—comes up, and waves. Whatever facial expression accompanies this gesture starts the little master laughing. Daniel waves back. “Simon,” he says, “come here!”
But Simon doesn’t come. He turns away and walks on without a word. If Daniel were even a year or two older, he would never tolerate such a thing—a slave turning his back—but the boy is still young enough, just, to be unsure of his power. He stamps his foot but he lets Simon go.
At the slave cabins all is quiet. No lights burn in the windows. Simon has told no one what he is planning, but tonight the others have all decided to turn in promptly at curfew anyhow. He senses them lying awake in the dark, rehearsing their alibis for tomorrow. I didn’t see nothing, boss.
He enters the cabin that he shared until recently with his mother. From its hiding place he retrieves a sack, already filled with supplies for his journey: Food. Some rope. A knife. Other items and bits of contraband. He adds the hammer and slings the sack over his shoulder.
When he goes back outside, Hecuba is standing in the moonlight waiting for him. She cannot be mistaken for any other slave. Her left leg is shorter than her right, and her left foot is twisted out to the side. She stands at a lean, perpetually on the verge of tipping over.
Simon approaches her warily, wondering whether this is Hecuba in the flesh or merely her soul on its nightly peramble. Up close, she looks solid enough: a white-haired, crippled old woman. “What you want?” he asks, keeping his voice low.
She pivots. Slung over her shoulder is a sack like his. “Coming with you.”
“No you ain’t.”
Hecuba lowers the sack to the ground. Then, to Simon’s astonishment, she reaches up and tugs down her top, exposing a pair of sagging and wrinkled breasts. Her other hand shoots out, catching Simon’s wrist and drawing it forward until his palm is pressed firm against her bosom. He hisses in disgust and snatches his hand back, but not before he feels the lump underneath the skin.
He knows what it is. His mother had a lump like that, on her lower back; for months she had Simon track the progress of its growth, all the while swearing him to secrecy. Cancer is a death sentence, but white people are always experimenting with cures, and Simon’s mother was terrified that if Master Swincegood found out, he’d sell her to a doctor. So she suffered in silence, and when the pain got too bad she had Simon gather ingredients for a special tea. Now she lies in the earth with Simon’s father and his brothers and his sister.
Hecuba covers herself up again. “It’s all through me,” she tells him. “I can feel it in my marrow and my gut. I ain’t got long.” She looks up. “This my last full moon in this body.”
Simon stands back, rubbing his palm furiously on his shirt. “So why run, then?”
“Because it’s time,” Hecuba says. “I tried when I was your age, more than once. Last time I got caught, that’s when they did my leg like this. Told me if it happened again, it’d be my neck got twisted. So I had to decide, stay or die, and I wasn’t ready to die, not then. But now . . .” She nods in the direction of the main house. “They stole my life. They won’t have my bones. When I lie down, it’s gonna be in a place of my own choosing.”
Not my problem, Simon thinks. He tries to say it aloud, but his tongue won’t cooperate, the paralysis this time caused not by fear but sudden shame, his mother admonishing him from the grave to respect old age and the horrors endured to reach it.
“You pick your free name yet?” Hecuba asks him.
Simon feels himself nod.
“Well?”
“Turner,” Simon says. “I get free, I’m gonna be Nat Turner.”
Hecuba grins in the moonlight. Nat Turner! The great boogeyman, leader of a failed slave rebellion that a quarter century later still gives white people nightmares. The story goes that after Turner was hanged, they cut up his body and buried the pieces in separate graves, just to be sure. “Nat Turner,” says Hecuba. “Hah! You’ll need to do some mighty deeds, to be worthy of that name.”
“You don’t need to worry yourself about me,” Simon assures her. “I—”
A train whistle interrupts him. It’s a faint sound, carried for what must be many miles on the night air, but Simon reacts as if a siren had gone off in his ear. He looks past Hecuba towards the moonlit horizon. When the whistle comes again, a slight change in the sound’s bearing tells him that the train is southbound.
Southbound. But they go north, too. That’s how he’s getting out.
“It’s not that easy,” Hecuba says. “It’s farther than you think, and there’s patrols up and down those tracks. But I know the way to go. I been over it many times.”
“Yeah? What you need me for, then?”
“I don’t, to get to the train. But to get on it . . .” She touches the thigh of her twisted leg. “For that, I’m gonna need help.
You do that for me, I’ll see you get your new name.”
Sure you will, Simon thinks. Rather than waste more time arguing, he takes the path of least resistance. “You tag along if you like,” he says. “But don’t expect me to go slow for you. You fall behind, I’ll leave you.”
The old woman laughs. “You be careful you don’t fall behind,” she says. Then she picks up her sack and takes off.
Hecuba’s gait is as peculiar as her resting stance. She pitches and weaves like a scarecrow teaching itself to walk. She stays upright, though, and she’s faster than she has any right to be. By the time Simon gets moving, he actually has to run to catch up to her.
A north-south carriage road marks the edge of the Swincegood property. On the far side is a line of trees, bright moonlight on top, dark shadow underneath. Simon has been in those woods before, but tonight he feels like he’s racing towards terra incognita; if the ground were suddenly to fall away beneath his feet it would scarcely surprise him.
No longer Simon Swincegood, not yet Nat Turner, he steps off the edge of the world and follows Hecuba into the trees.
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