“Maybe Daniel shoulda shot the nigger instead,” was usually the word around those parts. Eyes wide open, as tobacco dripped out of their dropped mouths; they never saw it coming. The howling screams pierced their eardrums. The clear creek began to slowly run crimson. The neighing and snorting of the ink-black horse did not detract the eyes of those standing at the horrific sight. A thick muscular arm, detached from its body, was dragged every so slowly through the mud by it’s leader, a black and beautiful horse that turned to see the wake of tragedy behind it. Tethered to a rope, loose ligaments collected little granules of dirt and miniscule clods of mud. The man’s ear-searing screaming continued. A woman’s cries shrieked out into the atmosphere. All she could see was the arm, knowing very well as to who it belonged. Her master took a step outwards and ceased obstructing her view. She could now see her fellow man writhing with a bloody stump of shoulder where his arm used to be. The surrounding men kept their shotguns raised to the blue expanse of sky above them, ready to dispose of the slave when ordered. The rivulets of blood embedded in the puffed gashes of whip wounds on the black man’s back paled in comparison to the absence of his limb. The female slave continued to weep in futility.
“I ain’t ne’er seen a nigger so tough in my whole damned life. Most o’ em’ woulda passed out from the devilish agony alone,” hissed one of the men.
The slave master marched back with two red hot branding irons. One of the men standing over walked up to the slave master, holding a hand up to halt him.
“We ain’t gotta kill him so slow, Daniel.”
“Johnny; if you ever wanna see yerself workin’ on this farm, ever again, get the hell out of my way,” said Daniel.
Barely conscious, the slave attempted to pull his body up by his remaining arm, sloshing in the mud at the edge of the pond, sliding his feet through the loose, slimy clay trying to gain some footing, but it was all for not. The horse that the young slave was still attached to, turned around and began to bite and pull at the rope, appearing almost as if to aid him. A sharp whistle caused the horse to stop as Daniel trudged through the mud and bent over the slave; branding irons in hand. Daniel gave the horse a horrified stare. His most loyal animal, never once even flashed him a defiant look. Always the superstitious type, Daniel was always first to put some kind of sorcery, devilry or blessing on things that never quite went his way.
“Young nigger, I ain’t nevar seen one like ya. My horse hates niggers. Once stomped a young nigger child to death. But this one seems to take a likin’ to yer’ armless exterior here. I’d say that the good Lord works in mysterious ways, don’t ya think?”
The raggedy, stone cold taskmaster lowered the fiery brands onto the soft, blood-soaked open shoulder. The blood hissed and spattered as his wound was brutally cauterized. The ungodly noises that came from the young slave sent shivers down the spines of his fellow slaves who watched with the whites of their eyes focused on the scene like lanterns. Even Daniel’s company put their handkerchiefs over their mouths and groaned like the children around the farm who just witnessed a chicken beheaded for the first time.
“I’d like to think o’ mahself as a merciful man young Ezekiel. When a nigger don’t die under my watch, I take it the good Lord don’t want him dead. You know what you’re name means, boy?”
Ezekiel was barely conscious. He replied with the most pitiful shaking of his head, which appeared more like a wobble than anything.
“Ezekiel means ‘God will strengthen.’ I took your arm, but you’re better for it. A nigger with one arm’s got a story to tell. Don’t you think? Think of it as my gift to you. If you live through this, I won’t kill you, so long as you don’t ever be given me that attitude again, ya hear? Need a little more humility around this here plantation. Might be a good way to put the... Fear o’ God in these niggers.”
Daniel looked around at his companions and over at his wife who was also in the audience. He gave her a wink that even frightened her, despite her familiarity with his evil tirades.
Daniel walked away from that scene, with victory flowing through his arteries, and death snapping at his tail. If he wanted to live free of any sort of accountability or retribution, he should have killed the horse. Probably should have taken Ezekiel’s other arm too.
That remaining limb, would tremble in shock for hours as Ezekiel tried his hardest to sleep some nights. The pathetic pawing at the air as he tried to quell phantom pains would haunt the poor slave. Some of the younger slaves would be ordered to help Ezekiel; sometimes, just to watch him. Daniel would see it as a “reckoning for the young.” It was like the disciple Thomas seeing the wounds of Christ, although Ezekiel would stomp the chest of any man who put his hands where that arm used to be. Daniel was convinced that the fear of God was brought into those young slaves; and maybe that was the opposite of what the plantation needed. Ten young slaves, feared God and no one else. Watch a man without an arm have more bravery and fortitude than a man with two, and foolish fantasies of freedom were only inevitable.
Sometimes Daniel would catch his wife, Emily, staring out through the windows as Ezekiel walked around doing whatever tasks one could do as an amputee. Sometimes she would say a prayer under her breath as she watched him out there. Daniel saw a tinge of guilt in his wife’s heart. He eyed the eerie wooden crucifix that hung on the wall by the window. It was given to them by his grandfather, and he was disgusted by the idea that she could possibly be questioning Sovereignty. But Emily, was a bit of a religious paranoid, with lot’s of questions that Daniel dared not pay mind to. She looked up from the window and made eye contact with Daniel, who walked out of the room.
Daniel had his eye on a young female slave for the past six months. One evening he sauntered his way through the plantation, with one objective in mind, romantic intimacy having nothing to do with it. He tipped his hat to a newly hired farmhand as he made his way across the plantation.
Emily, however, had a good bead on her husbands wandering eyes. His malicious nature turned her stomach into knots. She didn’t know what was beginning to possess her, but suddenly life as she had known it wasn’t agreeing with her so. A week prior, she wouldn’t have cared for the slaves, of whom she felt her husband was domesticating. She was taught that shackles and whips were exorcising the pagan demons of their ancestors. She believed that Daniel was man of honor, a harsh man, but a man who deserved every ounce of respect, even when he was harming her. She got the worst of it from Daniel on nights when she didn’t feel quite so sensual and he felt a little too liquored up. She kept peaceful for the sake of their two children, Caroline and Jacob, fraternal twins with beautiful blue shining eyes.
The farmhand never saw it coming that fateful night as Ezekiel found him alone in the barn, driving his tree trunk of an arm into the farmhand’s neck, and tearing out his jugular. It felt like crushing a soft peach between those strong fingers of his. The farmhand’s face was frozen in horrifying agony as no scream could be produced from his throat-less body. Quickly paling over, he fell limp. Ezekiel began to examine the various contents of the body stealing his rifle, and finding any thing else other than a few rounds of ammunition completely useless. One of the slaves walked over to Daniel’s ink-black horse. The horse began to neigh, making compromising noises of distress. The young slave began to panic, certain they were about to be found out until Ezekiel slowly approached the horse, blood dripping from his hand. Raising the scarlet hand, he signaled for the animal to calm its nerves. The horse never took its eyes off of Ezekiel’s. Step by step he inched closer to the animal, with the horse slowly backing up with each advance. When in range, Ezekiel finally grabbed the reigns with his arm. The animal froze, with shallow breaths making the only sound in the deafening silence. The young slave helped Ezekiel with mounting the horse. The other nine slaves scrambled, adrenaline and fear coursing through their veins as they stole whatever weapons they could, slitting as many white throats as possible and trying their best to make their way out of perdition. Daniel heaved and and sweated and degraded the poor woman in a rickety shed where the moonlight shown through. Lord knows the various justifications he would bring to his wife when she would witness female slaves walking around pregnant and giving birth to children that had less melanin than their mothers.
He heard the heavy plodding of a horse. Ignoring the side of caution, he continued to violate her, refusing to listen to what was going on, as if invincibility was his God-given gift. Ezekiel, mounted on horse back, waited outside the shed. He was aware that Daniel made one of those beautiful women pregnant once, or twice. He remembered the child, the poor child; son of one who hated the black blood that flowed in his veins, the young “nigger child” Daniel spoke of, trampled on by the very horse Ezekiel rode. Pulling the rifle up as it hung around his neck, Ezekiel yelled out.
“God will strengthen! Damned right, Daniel! God will strengthen me! You damned right!”
The moans, whimpers and sounds of fornication sharply ceased as Daniel busted out of the shed, pants halfway up, revolver in one hand. There was no chance to even ask what, why, or how. Everything erupted in a rifle shot, an explosion of blood, a dying masa’ and a one armed nigger on a horse. Ezekiel grasped onto the reign of that horse and was ready to ride into the night, maybe he would survive, maybe he wouldn’t, but for the first time in his days as a slave, he couldn’t have cared less what a man could do to him. Daniel laid there bleeding a river, sticking two fingers into the bullet wound trying to stop the flow, the keyhole to perdition. He heard the sound of another horse coming closer. It was the sound of his trusted farm hands. A shot rang out, and the sound of the one armed slave’s body hitting the ground was a resounding thud. The horse was also shot, and went down with a sickening neigh. Daniel let out one last laugh between clenched teeth before it all went dark.
Emily watched from her usual window, as the muzzle flashes of firearms went out, like lighting strikes in the night, ending the lives of the resisting slaves. A flash of illumination coupled with the eruption of gunpowder, and the grunts of souls being snuffed out. Once again, she muttered a prayer under her breath, and turned towards the crucifix on the wall. She reached up and unhooked it from the nail on the wall, not realizing how heavy it was. She marveled at the sculpted body of Christ, made from a softer wood. It was sculpted in such a way the the body could be unhooked from the cross, exposing the vulnerability of his body. She stared at it and caressed it from head to chest. Tears began to fill her eyes as she slammed it on a table underneath the place where it hung, and viciously snapped off the right arm of Christ. A tear feel from Emily’s eye as she hooked the body back on the cross, walked over to the nail in the wall and nodded in somber satisfaction.
