The Good Lord Bird

Well, the judge and the men around him stomped and hollered something grievous; they railed about how they was gonna grind her to a stump and rip her private parts off and feed her to the pigs if she didn’t tell the names of the others. Judge Fuggett promised they’d start a bonfire in the middle of the town square and throw her in it, but Sibonia said, “Go ahead. You have me, and no other one shall you git through me.”

I reckon the only reason they didn’t string her up right then and there was them not being sure who the other traitors might be, and worried that there might be bunches more of ’em. That flummoxed ’em, so they harangued some more and threatened to hang her right then and there, told her they’d pull out her teeth and so forth, but at the end of it they got nothing from her and throwed her back in jail. They spent the next few hours trying to figure matters through. They knowed her sister and seven others was involved. But there was twenty to thirty slaves that lived in the pen at various times, not to mention several that passed there every day, for the masters coming to town parked their slaves in the pen when they come to do business. That meant dozens of coloreds from near a hundred miles around might be involved in the plot.

Well, they argued into the night. It weren’t just the principle of the thing neither. Them slaves was worth big money. Slaves in them days was loaned out, borrowed against, used as collateral for this, that, or the other. Several masters whose slaves was arrested upped and declared their slaves innocent and demanded to get Sibonia back and pull her fingernails out one by one till she gived up who was in the plot with her. One of ’em even challenged the judge, saying, “How is it you knows of the plot in the first place?”

“I was told in confidence by a colored,” he said.

“Which one?”

“I ain’t telling it,” the judge said. “But it’s a colored that told me—a trusted colored. Known to many of you.”

That gived me the shivers, too, for there weren’t but one colored in town known to many of them. But I throwed that thought from my mind at the moment, for the judge declared right then and there that it was already three days since they found out about the insurrection, and they had better find a way to make Sibonia give up more names, for he feared the insurrection had already gone past Pikesville. They all agreed.

That was the monkey wrench she throwed on ’em, and they couldn’t stand it. They was determined to break her, so they thunk and thunk on it. They broke that night and met the next day and talked and thunk on it some more, and finally, late that night on the second day, the judge himself come up with a scheme.

He called on the town’s minister. This feller ministered to the coloreds in the yard every Sunday evening. Since the plot was favored to murder him and his wife, the judge decided to ask the minister to go to the jailhouse and talk to Sibonia, ’cause the coloreds knowed him as a fair man, and Sibonia was known to respect him.

It was a master idea, and the rest agreed on it.

The judge summoned the minister to the saloon. He was a solid, firm-looking man in whiskers, dressed in a button-down jacket and vest. He was clean by prairie standards, and when they brung him before Judge Fuggett, who told him of the plan, the minister nodded his head and agreed. “Sibonia will not be able to lie to me,” he announced, and he marched out the saloon and headed toward the jailhouse.

Four hours later he staggered back into the saloon exhausted. He had to be helped into a chair. He asked for a drink. A drink was poured for him. He throwed it down his throat and asked for another. He drunk that. Then he demanded another, which they brung him, before he could finally tell Judge Fuggett and the others what happened.

“I went to the jail as instructed,” he said. “I greeted the jailer, and he led me to the cell where Sibonia was held. She was held in the very back cell, the last one. I went inside the cell and I sat down. She greeted me warmly.

“I said, ‘Sibonia, I come to find out everything you know about the wicked insurrection’—and she cut me off.

“She said, ‘Reverend, you come for no such purpose. Maybe you was persuaded to come or forced to come. But would you, who taught me the word of Jesus; you, the man who taught me that Jesus suffered and died in truth; would you tell me to betray confidence secretly entrusted to me? Would you, who taught me that Jesus’s sacrifice was for me and me only, would you now ask me to forfeit the lives of others who would help me? Reverend, you know me!’”

The old minister dropped his head. I wish I could repeat the tale as I heard the old man tell it, for even in the retelling of it, I ain’t tellin’ it the way he rendered it. He was broke in spirit. Something in him collapsed. He bent forward on the table with his head in his hands and asked for another drink. They throwed that on him. Only after he flung it down his throat could he continue.