There are dozens of bodies, faces frozen in finality, some with mouths open and eyes shut, some the reverse. The bodies are already stiffened into their awkward poses. Unlike the white men outside Calhoun’s Sugarhouse, drunk on alcohol and sleeping off the day’s terrors, these men won’t wake in the morning. Sam rushes from one to another. Cold, cold, cold. He draws his hand back and tucks it protectively within his jacket. He doesn’t want to touch anyone. These are men he knows, men he recognizes, men he stood with shoulder-to-shoulder in the courthouse. Can it be just this morning they took breath, worried about their families, celebrated Easter Sunday, stood firm on principle? Meredity Elzy, Shuck White, Eli McCullen: men sighted along with Israel in the string of prisoners bound for Calhoun’s Sugarhouse. Their wives and children are in the swamp, waiting for them to come home.
Sam fights the rising revulsion and lifts his eyes heavenward for an answer. Hanging from the lower branches of the town’s Pecan Tree, three limp forms are outlined by the moon, as if their heads are lowered in prayer. Grisly southern trophies. Three puffy, inert bodies swing from different branches, their pants pulled down around their ankles, clotted blood at the groin. Sam forces himself closer, circling the stout tree trunk, identifying each one before he eases them down, one by one. The bodies are deadweight, bloated and swollen, and he handles them as gently as he can, laying them down on the ground at the base of the tree. Their limbs are too stiff to arrange, but he pulls their trousers up to their waists, covers them up. Clay Murphy, Nick Cotton, Lank Pitman. It will fall to him to give an accounting to the families.
Sam listens for noises, any sign that the men who did this are still around. When all he hears is the croaking of frogs by the river, he begins his gruesome work.
He passes among the men on the ground like a shadowy ghoul, turns their faces upward if necessary, enough for a positive identification. For the most part, they are sprawled out and left where they dropped, but there are others stacked on top of one another in some crazy attempt at efficiency. Sam throws up twice as he sorts through the carnage, careful to wipe himself clean with a rag from his jacket pocket so as not to profane the dead. He fights his need to flee, staying to finish his morbid inventory, the dead men’s grimaced faces etched in his brain.
He moves from body to body, steeling himself in between each one, pausing to listen for the white men’s return. His muscles are taut, prepared to run, but he holds steady, continuing the accounting. He has almost come to the last when he hears a liquid, choking gurgle at his feet. It flashes through his mind that the white men have discovered him. Without looking back, he sprints with all his strength toward the river. Before he reaches the bank, his brain catches up to his reflexes.
The gurgling sound came from one of the bodies. Someone within that mass of death is still alive. Sam is slow to reverse course, needing time to shift his focus from escape to rescue, but he forces himself forward, stumbling in his rush back toward the Pecan Tree. He stoops over the body for a closer look.
It is Israel Smith, and he is alive.
Sam doesn’t know how to get Israel from the Pecan Tree all the way back to the swamp. The man is barely conscious, and it isn’t clear how close to death he is.
“It’s Sam. Sam Tademy,” Sam whispers into Israel’s ear.
“Sam?” Israel fights to make himself understood. “They cut them before hanging,” he says. He sounds like he is drowning, his voice, thick and raspy, surfacing from under bubbles of blood in his throat, strangling on words.
Sam turns away and tries to sort out the magnitude of Israel’s wounds in the dim half-light. Israel’s right pants leg is stiff with dried blood, but the most severe of the wounds is around his face. A bullet piece has caught him at the throat, and he gasps for breath every few minutes, a terrifying sound. Sam wonders how he possibly managed to stay quiet for so long. Israel’s right eye is gone. Nothing remains but a huge swelling of flesh around a socket where the eyeball used to be.
“I think they dead,” Israel says, his wheezing words loud and flat in the still air. “The moaning been stopped.”
Sam wants Israel to stop talking. For each gurgling sound that comes from his mouth, Sam is beginning to match it with a swelling fear of his own. Soon he will lose the ability to keep himself moving.
“Lucy, my boys?” Israel stumbles over the words, but Sam understands.
“Lucy and your children fine, hid in Boggy Bayou with the others. But you gotta stay quiet now, Israel. They might come back.” Sam doesn’t know which way to look. There is horror everywhere, no way to escape it. “We got to get outa here.”
Sam stares at the blood on Israel’s pants, speculating. Did they cut him too, and shoot him instead of hanging? Is he still a man, or did they take his manhood along with his eye? Sam wills himself to stoop down and put Israel’s arm around his neck to get him standing, reluctant to be this close, to touch him, as if it is worse to be alive and gelded than dead, as if Sam might catch what the rigid corpses from the tree have. He is shamed by his squeamishness, his selfishness, and sloughs it off. It is up to him to get Israel away and back to his family. If Israel can’t walk, Sam will carry him away from this field of death on his back.
“We gotta chance Smithfield Quarter,” says Sam.
“Too many white men,” Israel says. “They make camp.”
“I scout it out, then come back for you.”
“Don’t leave me here.” Israel is insistent, clutching at the cloth of Sam’s jacket. The puffy brown flesh around his one remaining eye sags.
The Hanging Tree looms overhead, the dead men’s bodies on the ground grown cold and still. Once Sam leaves this place, he isn’t sure he will have the courage to return, for Israel or anyone else. The unstoppable stink of death will be worse with the coming of the light.
“Mirabeau Woods, then. McCully got kin there.”
“McCully gone,” Israel says. “Spenser gone, trying to surrender. They set fire to the courthouse.”
Sam doesn’t let on how much he already knows. For now it is enough he and Israel place as much distance between themselves and the Pecan Tree as possible. Levi was right. First priority for the survivors is to live to fight another day.
Once they enter the lip of the woods, Sam stops to draw in a cautious breath. They have a long way to go, but at least they are no longer out in the open field, and now there is a cover of trees and bush to shield them. Every fifty feet or so, Israel spits out blood, leaning against Sam when his body shakes with uncontrollable muscle spasms, but they make their way forward, one step after another. Israel Smith provides Sam with more help than he expected on their journey away from the Pecan Tree and toward Mirabeau Woods. They sit down to rest only once, and Sam braces Israel’s back against the broad trunk of a sycamore tree.
“Best go,” Israel says after a few minutes. “Else I’m done for.”
They walk for over two hours through the dark woods, Israel leaning on Sam and dragging one leg, Sam taking on most of his weight. By the time they reach Jessie McCullen’s cabin in the woods, step after halting step, Israel no longer talks, concentrating on the bare mechanics of movement. Sam raps hard on the front door of the cabin, waking Jessie McCullen’s widow. She answers the door cautiously and takes in Israel’s condition in a glance. In the moonlight, Sam thinks he sees a bald instant of either disgust or defeat register on her face, but just as quickly, whatever it was is gone, and she briskly helps Sam get Israel inside.
Without question, the widow takes charge of her patient, improvising a convalescent area in the corner of her front room, cleaning his wounds, making him as comfortable as possible. Israel falls into a deep sleep immediately, and Sam leaves him in her hands, stopping just long enough to accept a cold biscuit and several deep drinks of water from the well. It will be a long walk back to Boggy Bayou. He needs to report what he has witnessed and get early word to as many of the waiting families as possible. Before he can sleep, he will retrieve Israel’s family from the sw
amp and bring them back to the broken man in Mirabeau Woods.
Alone in the sobering darkness on the journey back to Boggy Bayou swamp, Sam wearily retraces his steps. By sunup, there are others on the roads and in the countryside, and the mood has changed from the long night before. A heavy fatigue has settled over Colfax, like a summer morning’s thick mist over Red River. Close to town, Sam meets two colored men carrying a dead body between them on a large piece of burlap.
“First light, we went into Colfax. They letting the families claim their men,” they tell him.
As repulsed as he is by the idea, Sam decides to detour through the center of Colfax. He considers it his responsibility to report back as much detail as possible to those in his care. He approaches the area around the Pecan Tree, afraid to see the carnage, but already the scene looks different in the light of day.
There are still many of the splayed bodies he walked among last night, but now mounted white men patrol the grounds of the courthouse, watching neutrally, almost indulgently, as colored men and women collect the dead and the lucky few who appeared dead but were only wounded. Relatives and friends jerry-rig litters to cart bodies away for burial, or to tend to survivors’ injuries and patch them up.
Sam overhears two of the mounted men remark loudly about the shame of the Colfax Riot, how the colored men who took over the courthouse were radicals and got what they deserved. Sam can’t linger any longer. He heads north out of town toward the swamp, tentacles of resentment squeezing in on him, hard.
He reenters their camp in Boggy Bayou swamp on foot, exhausted and full of his loathsome news. Polly and Lucy are still up with a few of the others, haven’t slept at all by the looks of it, passing the time in a grim circle around the dregs of the fire. Polly is the first to see Sam and runs to him, almost knocks him over, sobbing so hard she can’t collect herself to speak. He holds her close, but she doesn’t stop trembling, only able to touch him repeatedly in reassurance that he has come back. Groups of others emerge, swarm to him, including Lucy, flanked by David and Noby. Lucy catches his eye and approaches slowly and calmly, waiting at a respectful distance.
“I found Israel,” Sam says to Lucy. “He’s hurt bad, but alive, in Mirabeau Woods, being tended by Widow McCullen.”
“Praise be,” says Lucy. And then again, “Praise be.”
Polly disentangles herself from Sam and embraces Lucy, gently this time. The two women sway wordlessly, arms wrapped around each other, until Lucy recovers enough to ask, “Can you take us to him?”
“Of course,” says Sam. “I take you directly, but I got a few things to do first.”
“Only first is get food and drink into you,” says Polly. Already she is up and doing, disappears for only a minute and produces a dipper of fresh water as if from thin air. “And rest for a bit. Look like last night don’t include sleep.”
“Bless you, Sam Tademy,” Lucy says. She takes Sam’s hands in her own, squeezes tight. “Me and the boys be ready whenever you is.” Lucy straightens up, gathers her sons. “I fix him up some breakfast, Polly.” She takes her boys back to the fire to give Polly time with Sam.
“Rest now,” says Polly to Sam. She sits on a fallen trunk in the swamp, pats a place beside her for Sam.
As tired as he is, Sam can’t bear the thought of sitting. “No time for rest, woman. Too much got to get done.”
Polly nods, stands up, and positions herself by his side. “I’m here, whatever you need,” she says. “Sam, what you see out there?”
“They already back in charge, calling what happen yesterday a riot,” Sam says. “Colfax Riot, my foot. Words matter in how people see, how they gonna remember. Easter Sunday 1873 be the Colfax Massacre, not the Colfax Riot, and the only shame be we didn’t get the parish power to the hands of the Republicans.”
“Sam, Colfax no place for us no more. Reconstruction nothing but a promise and a test, and now come the sour end.”
“White League and their kind always be wherever we is. It up to us, Polly, up to us to stay put and rise again.” Sam looks around him at the defeat of their sorry squatters’ camp in the swamp, the leaden movements by everyone around him. “McCully and the rest can’t be for nothing. We got to make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks.”
Polly, unblinking, nods. “Where you go, I go, Sam,” she says. “Where you stay, I stay.”
Sam is already thinking ahead to the future. This morning he must inform the families of the dead, deliver Lucy to Mirabeau Woods to reunite with Israel, help friends and neighbors retrieve and bury their relations, all before he returns to The Bottom for good. But first, before anything else, Sam Tademy will have his sons shout out their name, Tademy, right here in the godforsaken swamp, for everyone to hear.
They daren’t forget.
Figure 10. Gathering the dead and wounded, Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873
Figure 11. List of killed and wounded, 44th Congress Congressional Record, including Isaac McCullough [sic], Spencer McCullough [sic], and Eli McCullough, all dead (Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Watson Memorial Library, Cammie G. Henry Research Center)
Figure 12. New-York Times, Daily Picayune, and New Orleans Republican 1873 headlines
Part Two
After
Polly
1936
They carry off a handful of the white men what led the shooting on the Colfax courthouse. Took Mr. Hadnot and the old sheriff and some others all the way to New Orleans, but nothing much come of it. The courts down there had colored testify alongside white, telling what they know about that Easter Sunday 1873. Israel Smith get called down and he tole what happen to him since he seen so much, from inside the courthouse and down by the river both. No matter his body broke, half blind and only able to hobble along with a cane, he force hisself to bear witness so his voice be heard and it go to the record. But the more time pass and nothing happen to the white men they charge, Israel end up even more broke in spirit than body.
We heared from Israel each witness sweared on a Bible and tell they story. The stories contrary to one another, keeping with whether told by colored or white, where they was when the shooting start and such, but no matter which way you come at it, couldn’t get around the one hundred fifty colored men under the ground, dead and gone. For a little while, we think maybe somebody be brought to justice for all that killing. Them trials and retrials limp on for years, go to the highest court in the nation, the Supreme Court. We get news each time the court say let this one or that one walk away free, till wasn’t no one left to put the blame on. Shooting colored didn’t have no price, worse than before, ’cause this time, the gov’ment outside Louisiana say it all right. We all knowed Reconstruction was over then, fast in Colfax after that Easter Sunday, and slower but just as sure everyplace else in the South after a while. The White League start calling theyself Ku Kluxers and ride the land without no threat of a lifted hand against them, more bold than ever. Sheriff Nash and Hadnot come back to town heroes, and the whites was mostly happy now they back in charge without needing to worry about the gov’ment looking over they shoulder.
We colored was too busy burying our dead and propping up our living to pay too much never mind. Life keep on, one day to the next. Everybody, but the men ’specially, we got to pull back and walk soft, avoiding relations with white when we was able, and doing the meek down-eye when we wasn’t. Don’t give them no chance to say we insolent and come down hard again. Didn’t nobody talk loud about 1873 in Colfax ’cept the whites crowing about the end of Negro rule. How I sees it, more like we had a slippery hold on the promise of Negro rule, not the rule itself. Anybody what poke they head up too far after that get a visit from the Ku Kluxers, to remind us all what happen if we try to better ourself too much.
Us colored was raw and tender after the massacre, even with each other, and we was scared about the future. Sam Tademy gather his family close and we burrow into The Bottom like we was whistle pigs gone to ground. Anything we was able to do on ou
r own without outside help, we done. We growed our own food and ginned our cotton and Sam rigged up his own gristmill. He build a windmill for us for power. We already had our own well. ’Course that only go so far. They’s crops to sell and odd cash jobs to save enough to buy the land Sam so hell-bent on seeing the Tademy name on. Impossible not to rub elbows with white sometime, but we try hard to do much as we can on our own.
Sam Tademy a determined man. He don’t say nothing out loud, but I knowed how much he hurt when Israel Smith pass less than three years after the massacre. Some say was as much Israel’s spirit as his body what give out, that he just let go. It take a lot to kill a man. A bullet do its dirty damage, but a man learn to live with wounds to the body, learn to live with the loss of a eye, a game leg, pain. Take more time and effort to kill his spirit. A man find it hard to go forward when hope die. Some courthouse men look like the whites what come back after the War Between the States. Shot up, ragged, hurt inside in a place nobody know. You gets what I’m talking? Like they lose they fix on how to live in this world and give in.
Whilst we women watch, some of our colored men disappear. No, you still seed them with the eye, working the field, praying in church, fishing on the bayou, swinging a child, sleeping next to us on the cabin bed, but some other part of them gone for good. The massacre gnaw at who they want to be.
After McCully killed at the courthouse and then his wife die of the fever not one year later, Sam and me bring his daughter, Amy, down to The Bottom to live under our roof, to finish up her raising. But when Israel die, Sam really fix his gaze on the boy children. He sniff after Israel’s sons almost much as our own, trying to help them be a credit to they race, get them full of reading and writing to go alongside farming to earn they living. Noby Smith sit around our supper table much as his own sometime. Sam work like three men, but after Israel pass, his talk always come back to building a colored school. He like a dog with a bone about that school. In those days, easy to get beat or kilt over a idea like that, but that don’t stop Sam Tademy. He a man always keep his eye fixed on the possible. He never say nothing when they call him a race man, but I know inside he proud as he can be. He call the way he think a duty to his race.