Orphan of Creation Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Roger MacBride Allen
it!” He stormed off, leaving the ostler to chase after him, protesting about having his cart standing idle all night.
Will, Joe, and Zeb chocked up the cart and gingerly got the horses out of harness and into the stable to be fed and watered.
The beasts they left to themselves, and the air that night was filled with an endless, terrifying hooting and calling.
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The lightning flickered again, and Barbara came back to herself with a start. She had a vivid imagination, and had always managed to scare herself gleefully half to death by reading ghost stories. She read on, trying to keep her imagination in check if she could.
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Gowrie had had a slave hut newly fitted with stout bars and a locking door, though none of the other Negro huts had a door of any kind—an irony that was hard to miss. The night in the open seemed to soothe the beasts somewhat, and Gowrie managed to get them out of their cage and into their new quarters without much incident.
In the days that followed Gowrie started to work teaching them their duties. New shipments of the creatures arrived, every other day or so over the space of a fortnight, a pair at a time. Gowrie worked them all as hard he could, but in spite of all his efforts, all his coaxing and cajoling and threatening and whippings, he still could get but little work out of them, and that only after such endless training that it would have been less bother to do the job himself.
And, after all that effort, the creatures did not last long. Three were dead in a month, of influenza.
Gowrie House Plantation had (and still has, for that matter) a small plot of ground that served as a graveyard for the Slaves. Of course, not a grave there had a proper headstone, but the survivors would fashion a wooden cross out of picket fence staves and place it over their loved one’s grave, and perhaps add a smooth, round, whitewashed stone. The place was most carefully tended and maintained, and if any one thing on Earth could be said to belong to Gowrie’s Slaves, it was that graveyard, held as joint and common property by all of us, the final resting place of those who had finally died under the lash.
And it was here that Colonel Ambrose Gowrie proposed to inter those three dumb beasts, laying them beside the honored and ancient bones of our grandparents and the remains of children lost in infancy. If Mississippi had ever been close to a slave revolt, it was on that day. . . .
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Almost unwillingly, Barbara let the story steal over her again. She could see the Colonel in the midst of his predicament—the fear in his heart, the anger of the mob around him.
<>
Ambrose Gowrie himself stood with the reins in his hands, the cart stopped dead right where the main plantation road intersected the path to the slaves’ burying ground. None of the white overseers had been willing to do the job, and even his own sons felt it was foolhardy to try this thing. Behind him, on the bed of the wagon, lay the three wooden boxes, packing crates renamed as coffins for their final service. Black men and women, his own slaves, surrounded the flat-bed wagon, a straining, silent, surly, dangerous mob. Gowrie thought of the lash, the bullet, and realized with a sudden, sick feeling in his gut that such things would be worse than useless.
The sky was steel, a flat sheet of sullen grey that murmured with the rumblings of a nascent storm. The wind tossed the cotton plants about and lashed at the trees surrounding the plantation house, and a loose shutter on an upstairs window banged angrily.
Behind him, silent in their boxes, lay the causes of all his troubles. His slaves had hardly ever offered a bit of difficulty, but they had been close to open revolt from the first moment those accursed creatures had arrived. This now-dead trio of beasts had done nothing for him but cost him money, effort, and pride.
Gowrie did not dare to so much as glance back at his cargo as he thought about the dead creatures. He could not risk looking
Will, Joe, and Zeb chocked up the cart and gingerly got the horses out of harness and into the stable to be fed and watered.
The beasts they left to themselves, and the air that night was filled with an endless, terrifying hooting and calling.
<>
The lightning flickered again, and Barbara came back to herself with a start. She had a vivid imagination, and had always managed to scare herself gleefully half to death by reading ghost stories. She read on, trying to keep her imagination in check if she could.
<>
Gowrie had had a slave hut newly fitted with stout bars and a locking door, though none of the other Negro huts had a door of any kind—an irony that was hard to miss. The night in the open seemed to soothe the beasts somewhat, and Gowrie managed to get them out of their cage and into their new quarters without much incident.
In the days that followed Gowrie started to work teaching them their duties. New shipments of the creatures arrived, every other day or so over the space of a fortnight, a pair at a time. Gowrie worked them all as hard he could, but in spite of all his efforts, all his coaxing and cajoling and threatening and whippings, he still could get but little work out of them, and that only after such endless training that it would have been less bother to do the job himself.
And, after all that effort, the creatures did not last long. Three were dead in a month, of influenza.
Gowrie House Plantation had (and still has, for that matter) a small plot of ground that served as a graveyard for the Slaves. Of course, not a grave there had a proper headstone, but the survivors would fashion a wooden cross out of picket fence staves and place it over their loved one’s grave, and perhaps add a smooth, round, whitewashed stone. The place was most carefully tended and maintained, and if any one thing on Earth could be said to belong to Gowrie’s Slaves, it was that graveyard, held as joint and common property by all of us, the final resting place of those who had finally died under the lash.
And it was here that Colonel Ambrose Gowrie proposed to inter those three dumb beasts, laying them beside the honored and ancient bones of our grandparents and the remains of children lost in infancy. If Mississippi had ever been close to a slave revolt, it was on that day. . . .
<>
Almost unwillingly, Barbara let the story steal over her again. She could see the Colonel in the midst of his predicament—the fear in his heart, the anger of the mob around him.
<>
Ambrose Gowrie himself stood with the reins in his hands, the cart stopped dead right where the main plantation road intersected the path to the slaves’ burying ground. None of the white overseers had been willing to do the job, and even his own sons felt it was foolhardy to try this thing. Behind him, on the bed of the wagon, lay the three wooden boxes, packing crates renamed as coffins for their final service. Black men and women, his own slaves, surrounded the flat-bed wagon, a straining, silent, surly, dangerous mob. Gowrie thought of the lash, the bullet, and realized with a sudden, sick feeling in his gut that such things would be worse than useless.
The sky was steel, a flat sheet of sullen grey that murmured with the rumblings of a nascent storm. The wind tossed the cotton plants about and lashed at the trees surrounding the plantation house, and a loose shutter on an upstairs window banged angrily.
Behind him, silent in their boxes, lay the causes of all his troubles. His slaves had hardly ever offered a bit of difficulty, but they had been close to open revolt from the first moment those accursed creatures had arrived. This now-dead trio of beasts had done nothing for him but cost him money, effort, and pride.
Gowrie did not dare to so much as glance back at his cargo as he thought about the dead creatures. He could not risk looking