LITMIR.BIZ

      Josiah Pelham, 49,

      Owner of Pelham’s Acres

      Returned my boy, Brossie, all bloody and beaten, his back sprung open like a deep-bit plum, stains on the split muslin of his shirt, which I bought for him not two months ago—had gall enough to say to me, Your boy wouldn’t work, so I put the whip to his hide and you ought to as well, God’s truth be known—like that was that and he’d drop the whole affair—had he hurt one of my younguns, I’d have shot him down, dog dead, and dared any man find me guilty, but Brossie is a slave who will be beaten again, yet he is a good boy—groomed and behaved, understands what I teach, and owns manners and looks to make a white man proud—I knew his mother too, gone now a dozen years, whom I’d have set free if the law had allowed—because this man had not driven his own workers—the tobacco flowers were starting to bloom, their seeds like sand soon to drop and so to sully the soil for next year’s crop—he came begging my help, so I sent him Brossie to top the tobacco—loaned him for free, no less—this simpleton thrashed the child for not working fast enough, insulting me two fold—harming my property and then my pride—so it has come to this: our left wrists bound each to each by hemp, a seven-foot length of leather in our rights, and I look him hard right square in his eyes and they drop to the dirt where I intend to bury this whelp like I would any man who’d split my mule’s frog or burned down my damn barn.

      My ears go a-ringing like funeral bells as the overseer calls the rules, though come swinging time I’ll pop his hide and tear it clean from the muscle, like scraping a scalded hog, and no matter the rules, I’ll not call quits nor hear them neither until I am satisfied.

      Luke Vanderhosen, 34,

      Foreman on the Welcome Home Plantation

      Darkie wouldn’t work, so damn straight I lashed him, same as I would any brute beast of the field and now comes riding up this great puff of smoke, nostrils flared like a thrusting bull in rut—him with his long coat in this hot heat to hide his pistol I suppose; him who’s fathered a slew of slave bastards; him come to slap my face and challenge me to a fight of first-called quits, like I ain’t never been beat before—Daddy was twice the man he is and he whipped me right as rain. There and then in front of the other foremen and slaves I answered him true—clenched my jaw and hacked and spat between his leather boots, pulled my hair back in a twist tail, stuck my hand forward, and let Overseer Reagan tie us off like you’d do any horse lathered at a drinking trough, and I gripped the bullwhip’s handle, rocked its tip dancing back and forth—its etched handle branding my palm and my knuckles a burning white—I seen in his eyes then that same hell-bent horror of the mama cow that run me down when I was but a child and me trying to doctor her sickly calf—that heifer I later shot out of spite and Daddy beat hell out of me then too—Reagan’s steady talking but all I recall is that bawling cow and the crush of her hooves against my ribs and the first release of my seed as I thought I had died, unable to breathe—of a sudden, I whiff the sweet wang of skunk spray on the wind—Lord God, I hope that ain’t the last thing I smell on Your green earth—and my damp nape goes cold.

      Pelham punches my throat and I spin and gasp and fall to a knee—flame spreads across my back and I try to scream but nothing comes—he beats my calves and he beats my neck and I can’t muster the breath to call quits, and turning, I see in his eyes that it does not matter if I ever do.

      Brossie, 14,

      Slave on Pelham’s Acres

      Standing behind Mr. Reagan, yellow stains on his white-collar shirt, I hold horse reins and move dirt with my toe till the iron and ’bacco rise up to my nose but Marse say, Don’t look away, boy, this is justice, and just this morning as I limp past him, Marse wretch down and catch my arm and heft me up on back of his horse and we thunder off—wind dries the tears and sweat from my fresh-scab skin—we get to the Welcome Home and straightaway I point out that bully foreman, and Marse, he hop down and slap fire from bully’s thin lips, and they tie theyselves with a rope long enough to bind you to a tree as they take your mama away while you cry her name on New Year’s Day—next I know that bully chokes, noise like spurs been put to his side—and when Marse steps back and lashes that whip, something deep below my belly rises—again that whip sings through the air and his shirt dances off his back and he makes a face like some catfish come ashore, with just his eyes Mr. Reagan holds back the other foremen—the black men, all funky from the fields, don’t dare watch but they listen and hunch each time that whip snaps, as if it was a snake in a tree, striking—I’ve never seen a white man beat but just then, holding them reins jelly-jar tight, my palms start to itch to hold that thicker leather, to hear it creak against my fingers, but who I got to beat—the foremen, those slaves, this bully? Myself, I reckon this thrashing’s a thing Marse gotta do but not on me—he ain’t belt me but once and even then like a father might a son—now bully’s shirt come off his skin in sopped rags—white cloth and white skin gone to a boiling red—he lay flat to the ground, still as a rock, save the skin on his back that opens like a wild weeping flower.

      I know if he could live long enough, the scars would heal like great stalks of lightning come frayed and burnt beneath his skin, but he will not survive, so the foremen start to yell the slaves back to work and they obey but tonight they will dance and sing—Mr. Reagan, silent as an undertaker, puts his hand on Marse’s sweaty shoulder, who stares at me like some raging bull, breath heaving, and me staring right back with aching palms and desires I can’t yet name.

Founding Fathers: Hamilton v. Burr

      Settling an Old Score, Weehawken, New Jersey,

       July 11, 1804

      General Alexander Hamilton, 49,

      Former Secretary of the US Treasury

      On the walls of Fame I have penned my name in a hand indelible and swift—the Federalist Papers, the Bank of New York, the US Mint—for all the good I’ve given to Country, I have been persecuted from all sides—my boots sink in the sludge of this loose shore and we slog our way up the hill to where I shall engage Burr—the ignominy of Adams’s rebuffs, that rascal Jefferson’s uphiked nose, and even my own Federalists, pitching their tents with this devil who awaits me today, patient as a spider—I must admit, I choked his bid for governor, but now as I achieve the trail head, sweat beading on my hairline, I see him again—the burr in my side, the thorn in my eye—I fear our nation will fall asunder, capitulated by shortsighted men such as this Burr and the weakboys who’d willingly give Napoleon back his Louisiana—what’s next, the whole of our country?—foreign armies sit to both the west and south and we have no standing force to fight—I shake Burr’s hand and accept the pistol offered, which is heavier than I’d presumed, and I’ll say this much for him: he’s the only man in my life as reliable as George, my Washington, who never disappointed me save when he refused to be our king, and when I’d lift my chin to see up into his blue eyes, I’d become a child again, an orphan in the West Indies whose father had abandoned him, a boy whose mother succumbed to fever, and I would stand on the cliffs of St. Croix, the water lashing far below me, shouting straight into the wind between my cupped hands, Daddy, Daddy, and the wind would blow my words to shreds and dry the tears on my boyhood cheeks—

      Now I’ve accepted Jesus Christ into my heart, though He comes and goes—so much on His mind, I suppose one cannot blame Him—how to concentrate on any single one thing—still, He’s filled my heart and I will waste my first shot but thereafter I am Christ-bound to defend myself—standing twenty-five

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