The Good Lord Bird полностью

I didn’t make much of it at first. There was a lot of discombobulation, for it was a troublesome time anyway, for colored and whites. They had hung nine coloreds, and that’s a lot of folks—even for coloreds, that’s a lot of folks. A colored was a lowly dog during slave time, but he was a valuable dog. Several owners whose slaves hung fought against the hanging till the end, for it weren’t never clear who did what and who planned what and what Sibonia’s real plan was and who told who. There was just plain fear and confusion. Some of them Negroes that was hung confessed one way before they died, then turned around confessed another, but their stories banged up against each other, so no one ever knew who to believe, for the ringleader never told it. Sibonia and her sister Libby never sung their song, and left the place more of a mess than it was when they was living, which I reckon was their intent. The upshot was that several slave traders showed up and done a little business for a few days after the hanging, but not much, for slave traders was generally despised. Even Pro Slavers didn’t favor them much, for men who traded cash for blood wasn’t considered working people, but more like thieves or traders in souls and your basic superstitious pioneer didn’t take to them types. Besides, no busy slave trader wanted to journey all the way to Missouri Territory to get a troublesome slave, then run them all the way to the Deep South and sell them, for that troublesome Negro could start an insurrection down south in New Orleans just as easy as he could up here, and word would get back, and that slave trader had a reputation to keep. Them colored from Pikesville was marked as bad goods. Their trading price gone down, for nobody knowed who among them was in the insurrection and who weren’t. That was Sibonia’s gift to them, I reckon. For otherwise, every one of them would’a been gone south. Instead, they stuck where they was, nobody wanting them, and the slave traders left.

But the stink of the thing lingered. Especially with Pie. She had wanted the hanging, but now seemed put out by it. I knowed what she done, or suspected it, tellin’ the judge of the insurrection, but truth is, I didn’t blame her for it. Colored turned tables on one another all the time in them days, just like white folks. What difference does it make? One treachery ain’t no bigger than the other. The white man put his treachery on paper. Niggers put theirs in their mouth. It’s still the same evil. Someone from the pen must’ve told Pie that Sibonia was planning a breakout, and Pie told it to the judge for some kind of favor, and when the stew got boiled down and shared out, why, it weren’t a breakout at all, but rather murder. Them’s two different things. Pie had opened a shit bag, I reckon, and didn’t know it till it was too late. The way I figure it, looking back, Judge Fuggett had his own interests. He didn’t have no slaves, but wanted some. He had everything to gain by Miss Abby going broke, for I’d heard him say later on that he wanted to open his own saloon, and like most white men in town, he was scared and jealous of Miss Abby. The loss of them slaves cost her big time.

I don’t think Pie figured on all that. She wanted to get out. I reckon the judge had made some kind of promise to her to escape, is the way I figure it, and never owned up to it. She never said it, but that’s what you do when you in bondage and aiming on getting out. You make deals. You do what you got to. You turn on who you got to. And if the fish flips out the bucket and on you and jumps back in the lake, well, that’s too bad. Pie had that jar of money under her bed and was learning her letters from me, and turned on Sibonia and them who hated her guts for being yellow and pretty. I didn’t blame her. I was sporting life as a girl myself. Every colored did what they had to do to make it. But the web of slavery is sticky business. And at the end of the day, ain’t nobody clear of it. It whipped back on my poor Pie something terrible.