He introduced himself as Jamison, though every soul in the park was aware of his identity. “Each Friday I awake full of vigor,” he said, “knowing that in a few hours we’ll gather here again and celebrate our good fortune. Sleep used to come so hard to me, in the days before our regulators secured the darkness.” He gestured to the formidable band, fifty-strong, who had assembled at the side of the bandstand. The town cheered when the men waved and nodded at Jamison’s acknowledgment.
Jamison caught the crowd up. God had given one regulator the gift of a newborn son, and two others had observed their birthdays. “We have a new recruit with us tonight,” Jamison continued, “a young man from a fine family who joined the ranks of the night riders this week. Come on up, Richard, and let them have a look at you.”
The slender red-haired boy advanced tentatively. Like his fellows, he wore his uniform of black trousers and white shirt of thick cloth, his neck swimming in the collar. The boy mumbled. From Jamison’s side of the conversation, Cora gathered that the recruit had been making the rounds of the county, learning the protocols of his squad.
“And you had an auspicious start, didn’t you, son?”
The lanky boy bobbed his head. His youth and slight frame reminded Cora of the engineer of her last train trip, inducted by circumstance into the work of men. His freckled skin was lighter-hued, but they shared the same fragile eagerness. Born the same day, perhaps, then steered by codes and circumstances to serve disparate agencies.
“It’s not every rider who makes a catch his first week out,” Jamison said. “Let’s see what young Richard has for us.”
Two night riders dragged a colored girl onstage. She had a house girl’s tender physique and shrank further in her simpering. Her gray tunic was torn and smeared with blood and filth, and her head had been crudely shaved. “Richard was searching the hold of a steamship bound for Tennessee when he found this rascal hiding below,” Jamison said. “Louisa is her name. She absconded from her plantation in the confusion of the reorganization and hid in the woods these many months. Believing she had escaped the logic of our system.”
Louisa rolled over to survey the crowd, lifted her head briefly, and was still. It would have been difficult to make out her tormentors with all the blood in her eyes.
Jamison raised his fists in the air, as if daring something in the sky. The night was his opponent, Cora decided, the night and the phantoms he filled it with. In the dark, he said, colored miscreants lurked to violate the citizens’ wives and daughters. In the deathless dark, their southern heritage lay defenseless and imperiled. The riders kept them safe. “We have each of us made sacrifices for this new North Carolina and its rights,” Jamison said. “For this separate nation we have forged, free from northern interference and the contamination of a lesser race. The black horde has been beaten back, correcting the mistake made years ago at this nation’s nativity. Some, like our brothers just over the state line, have embraced the absurd notion of nigger uplift. Easier to teach a donkey arithmetic.” He bent down to rub Louisa’s head. “When we find the odd rascal, our duty is clear.”
The crowd separated, tutored by routine. With Jamison leading the procession, the night riders dragged the girl to the great oak in the middle of the park. Cora had seen the wheeled platform in the corner of the park that day; children climbed and jumped on it all afternoon. At some point in the evening it had been pushed beneath the oak tree. Jamison called for volunteers, and people of all ages rushed to their places on either side of the platform. The noose lowered around Louisa’s neck and she was led up the stairs. With the precision born of practice, a night rider threw the rope over the thick, sturdy branch with a single toss.
One of those who had gathered to push the ramp away was ejected — he’d already taken his turn at a previous festival. A young brunette in a pink polka-dot dress rushed to take his place.
Cora turned away before the girl swung. She crawled to the opposite side of the nook, in the corner of her latest cage. Over the next several months, on nights when it was not too suffocating, she preferred that corner for sleeping. It was as far from the park, the miserable thumping heart of the town, as she could get.
The town hushed. Jamison gave the word.
~ ~ ~
To explain why he and his wife kept Cora imprisoned in their attic, Martin had to go back a ways. As with everything in the south, it started with cotton. The ruthless engine of cotton required its fuel of African bodies. Crisscrossing the ocean, ships brought bodies to work the land and to breed more bodies.
The pistons of this engine moved without relent. More slaves led to more cotton, which led to more money to buy more land to farm more cotton. Even with the termination of the slave trade, in less than a generation the numbers were untenable: all those niggers. Whites outnumbered slaves two to one in North Carolina, but in Louisiana and Georgia the populations neared parity. Just over the border in South Carolina, the number of blacks surpassed that of whites by more than a hundred thousand. It was not difficult to imagine the sequence when the slave cast off his chains in pursuit of freedom — and retribution.
In Georgia and Kentucky, South America and the Caribbean Isles, the Africans turned on their masters in short but disturbing encounters. Before the Southampton rebellion was smothered, Turner and his band murdered sixty-five men, women, and children. Civilian militias and patrollers lynched three times that in response — conspirators, sympathizers, and innocents — to set an example. To clarify the terms. But the numbers remained, declaring a truth unclouded by prejudice.
“Around here, the closest thing to a constable was the patroller,” Martin said.
“Most places,” Cora said. “Patroller will harass you anytime they feel like.” It was after midnight, her first Monday. Martin’s daughter and her family had returned home, as had Fiona, who lived down the road in Irishtown. Martin perched on a crate in the attic, fanning himself. Cora paced and stretched her sore limbs. She had not stood in days. Ethel declined to appear. Dark blue drapes hid the windows and the small candle licked at the gloom.
Despite the hour, Martin spoke in a whisper. His next-door neighbor’s son was a night rider.
As the slave owners’ enforcers, the patrollers were the law: white, crooked, and merciless. Drawn from the lowest and most vicious segment, too witless to even become overseers. (Cora nodded in agreement.) The patroller required no reason to stop a person apart from color. Slaves caught off the plantation need passes, unless they wanted a licking and a visit to the county jail. Free blacks carried proof of manumission or risked being conveyed into the clutches of slavery; sometimes they were smuggled to the auction block anyway. Rogue blacks who did not surrender could be shot. They searched slave villages at will and took liberties as they ransacked the homes of freemen, stealing hard-earned linens or making licentious advances.
In war — and to put down a slave rebellion was the most glorious call to arms — the patrollers transcended their origins to become a true army. Cora pictured the insurrections as great, bloody battles, unfurling beneath a night sky lit by vast fires. From Martin’s accounts, the actual uprisings were small and chaotic. The slaves walked the roads between towns with their scavenged weapons: hatchets and scythes, knives and bricks. Tipped by colored turncoats, the white enforcers organized elaborate ambushes, decimating the insurgents with gunfire and running them down on horseback, reinforced by the might of the United States Army. At the first alarms, civilian volunteers joined the patrollers to quell the disturbance, invading the quarters and putting freemen’s homes to the torch. Suspects and bystanders crammed the jails. They strung up the guilty and, in the interest of prevention, a robust percentage of the innocent. Once the slain had been avenged — and more important, the insult to white order repaid with interest — the civilians returned to their farms and factories and stores, and the patrollers resumed their rounds.