because they were worried they were going to be sold to someone even more mud-minded if he died.
As for me, I was hoping real hard that he was as dead as a headless catfish, and I was squeezing my eyelids so tight I might have drawn blood.
Whether my wishes had anything to do with it or not, Big Master Henry was gone as gone can be. Since his drinking glass was empty and had fallen on the floor from out of his big cold hand, I might have been suspected of poisoning him and would likely have been hanged that very night, but there was also a wood-handled knife buried in the side of his neck. That blade saved me from swinging from a tree, I’m happy to say. And Lily too, since she mixed the lemonade. Not that we poisoned him. Lily believed in God’s retribution and wouldn’t have risked His vengeance. As for me, I confess I wanted to. I’d thought of it every time he stuck his broken glass up inside me.
How the killer had stabbed Big Master Henry and escaped through a locked door was the mystery everybody wanted to get to the bottom of. It was a twenty-four-foot drop to the ground from Big Master Henry’s window, so nobody could climb up or jump down without using a ladder.
As for the two keys to the room, one was found by Mr. Johnson in a pocket of Big Master Henry’s dress coat, which was folded on a chair in his bedroom. The other had been in Mistress Holly’s night-table drawer. She’d been playing solitaire on her bed for two hours previous to finding her husband’s body. If the killer had taken the key earlier, then how did he — or she — return it to the night table where Mistress Holly had found it?
The ladder was found safely locked away in the First Barn. There was no blood on it. And none of the field slaves had seen anyone climbing up the side of the house. So Mr. Johnson had the foremen tie Crow over the whipping barrel. Then he raised his cat and let it fall, because “that damn careless nigger” had been the Master’s personal slave and ought to have protected him.
Crow wept like a baby under his ten lashes, since the skin that had been flayed from his back years earlier had grown over the bones with thick scars that were sensitive as burns. Mr. Johnson kept spitting out tobacco juice onto the black man’s legs to humiliate him.
The next day Crow told me, “Ya know, Morri, I was so ashamed to let go like that, but it was like I was bein’ cut open with a rusty saw.”
I hugged him and said we were all proud of him. I promised myself I’d see them all pay one day. I just didn’t know how yet.
We all kept our mouths shut during the whipping except to count the strokes and pray for Crow. The overseer then picked out Lily’s grandson Backbend from our line. He was only eleven and his mamma was dead. He had big dark eyes and the softest lips of anyone at River Bend.
“I’m gonna whip this boy ten good strokes too,” Mr. Johnson said, “unless you niggers tell me what happened last night. And I’m gonna keep pickin’ out your children till one of you speaks the truth.”
Lily shrieked and fell to her knees and begged him to be kind to her boy.
Most likely any one of us would have stopped his suffering by calling out the name of the culprit if we had truly seen him.
“Shame, shame, shame!” I yelled. “You is payin’ yer toll to hell right here, right now, Mr. Johnson.”
“You next, Morri!” he hollered back. “I ain’t gonna suffer your big mouth. And you’re getting twenty strokes!”
I was too angry to be scared. And too lightheaded with the truth of the Master being dead. I figured that the worst had happened to me already.
My papa then said he would not let anyone hurt me, but Mr. Johnson said, “Shut up, nigger, or I’ll give her thirty!”
“Thank you, Mr. Johnson, sir,” Papa replied real nice. “But if you whip my daughter, I can promise you some very, very serious consequences that you are not going to find agreeable,” he added, smiling.
“You can, can you?”
“Indeed, I can. Mistress Holly will need me should either of her children take ill. And I shall need Morri with me. And healthy. Just as I need Backbend in one piece as well.”
“Shut that big mouth of yours, nigger!”
Mr. Johnson turned to Backbend and raised the lash above his head.
After the third stripe across the boy’s back, when his tears were rolling down his cheeks and he’d already filthied himself, Papa limped forward and said, “I did it. I killed Big Master Henry.”
“Done it how?” Mr. Johnson demanded.
“I took the ladder and I climbed up quietry-quietly. Big Master Henry was asleep and I stabbed him.”
“You, with that gimp of yours? Climbin’ up the ladder would be near impossible.”
“Yet that is just what I did, sir.”
“Why would you?” said Mr. Johnson, squinting.
“He cut my heel-strings, sir.”
“That was more than ten years ago.”
“Still, that is the reason.”
“So how d’you kill him without getting blood on you?”
“I wore gloves.”
Mr. Johnson spit. “Where are the gloves now?”
“Christmas Creek.”
“And how did you get the damned ladder out of the barn?”
Papa couldn’t answer that, since everyone knew only Mr. Johnson had the key.
“Not another word from you, Samuel!” he warned.
He was about to start whipping Backbend again, and then it would be my turn, but Weaver stepped forward and said that he had done it.
“And how did
“Wid da key, Mistuh Johnson.”
“My key?”
“Yessuh.”
“But I had my key with me all evenin’. I’m sure of it.”
“I duhn used mah root bayag,” Weaver confessed.
“What bag was that, nigger?”
“De condrin’ bayag.”
“What in God’s name are you talkin’ ’bout now?”
“His conjuring bag,” Papa repeated, because Mr. Johnson sometimes pretended that he was plain unable to understand Weaver and some of the other slaves.
“Weaver,” the overseer spat, “get your ragged black hide back in line now!”
Papa stepped forward again and said, “Nobody knows who killed Big Master Henry, Mr. Johnson. So take me instead of my Morri or I promise I’ll put an arrow in your heart.”
His words made me shake. Papa was just over five feet tall, with tight peppercorns of gray hair growing a bit thin on top, but he was more than Mr. Johnson’s equal, and we all knew it. Now that my papa had threatened him, the overseer was finally getting the idea that he was losing this wrestling match with us. Because if my father was willing to risk being lynched for speaking the way he did, then he could be pretty damned sure that we weren’t lying and that no one knew the identity of the killer.
“You niggers get back to work. I’ve had enough of your lies for one day,” he shouted.
After that, he cut Backbend free, and the boy ran off.
The crime was never solved, though I was pretty sure I knew who’d done it — Little Master Henry. He’d been out at a party, but he could have walked the last few hundred yards of his way home and snuck back into the house without being seen. Or maybe he
Little Master Henry had everything to gain from his papa’s death. With the blade of one small knife, he
