Orphan of Creation Read Online Free PDF

away from this roiling mob. He felt a trickle of sweat slide down his face, and suddenly realized his armpits and back were soaked with the perspiration of fear, his hands clammy in the reins of the cart.
With a conscious effort, he drew himself up and shouted, almost screamed at the crowd. “The corpses must be buried! Make way and let me into the graveyard, damn you! Make way or you’ll live to regret it!”
The crowd did not move. Fearful and uncertain, he sat down in the driver’s seat and swallowed hard. From the rear came quiet mutterings, the briefest flickerings of movement. The press of bodies inched forward slowly, quietly, until the closest of the myriad solemn faces were only a foot or two from his own. Gowrie suddenly found himself making calculations of how far he could get if he ran.
But he had to do this thing, get those bodies below ground before they began to rot . . . and yet that was impossible. He might drive the cart into the graveyard, but how could he possibly dig the graves and move the heavy crate-coffins into the earth by himself, with this mob about him? He realized with a wrenching knot in his stomach that they weren’t afraid of him. What were they capable of if they weren’t afraid?
The rear of the cart suddenly bucked and swayed, and Gowrie let out a wild yelp. They were overturning the cart! They were going to tear him—
He looked behind to see a number of the burliest black men pulling the packing crates off the cart. Shovels and picks appeared from somewhere. The earth sprouted holes by the crossroads. Shallow graves suddenly gaped open.
Gowrie sat in the cart, powerless, speechless. Will came up to him, and that little stable boy Zeb trailed behind. “Them dead will rot and smell same’s any other, Massah Gowrie,” Will said solemnly, “and they mus’ be buried—but not in our place. Not in our place.”
Gowrie watched in silent, fearful awe as his slaves openly, willfully, jointly disobeyed him. Even if their revolt was in the form of a compromise, burying the corpses near their graveyard, and even though all his slaves quietly returned to their tasks the moment the last shovel of dirt was atop the graves, he had witnessed the beginnings of something—the primordial act of peaceful, determined defiance.
He had seen how fragile his control was. And he saw the changes coming, saw that his world would never be quite the same again. This moment would be at the back of his mind every time he gave an order.
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So the first of the creatures died and were buried. The rest soon followed. Some number more were lain to rest in that small crossroads. A few escaped and terrified the vicinity until they collapsed from illness, privation, or the gun. The remainder died, in secret and quiet, at the Negro’s hand, the bodies never to be found. They were animals, we were not, and we did not suffer lightly being equated with them.
Colonel Gowrie was much affected as well, and from that time on, he would never willingly speak of the creatures that had cost him so much. As the town’s leading citizen—and the owner of most of it—he also saw to it that few others spoke of them again. The Negroes who traveled to town on errands reported to the rest of us that what should have been the grandest story and scandal of the day was scarce ever mentioned.
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    Barbara closed the book and sat there for a long moment. Even then, no one had known. Today, the secret of those unmarked graves was as dead as the corpses within them. The secrets of that story had waited a long time for her. She rose and looked out through the flickering lightning toward the slaves’ old burial ground. The creatures, the gorillas, were still waiting out there, bones moldering in the ground, proof of a brief, peculiar, and never chronicled sub-chapter in American history.
    She looked to the sky, and saw a star or two flicker to life on the horizon as the storm clouds retreated. Tomorrow would be clear.
    Those bones would not