An old man lived alone in a shack near our land. He claimed when he was a boy my age he hid under the stone foundations of his house as the slaves of Turner’s rebellion set it alight. They had murdered his parents inside. He said the slaves spoke in tongues he had never heard and their eyes gleamed red in the firelight. I listened, slapping at mosquitoes, breathless.
People said the old man was daft. He seemed to pass his hours in a world of dreams and phantasms, muttering to himself like a mad actor on the stage. People living nearby sometimes heard blood-curdling shrieks at night, and claimed he was a drunk, addled by bad whiskey. But never once did I see him imbibe, or smell spirits on his breath, or discover tell-tale jugs hidden in his hovel. Though he scared me, I loved to hear his talk. My mother never discouraged my visits. She would wrap a meal of cornbread and bacon for him, usually with beans or chickpeas.
The walk home after one of my visits was a torture of shadows and crickets and rustling marsh grass. Sometimes the old man would show me an artifact he kept wrapped with canvas and twine in his wood box. He said it was a leg bone from Nat Turner’s skeleton, given him by a doctor said to have assembled it after the slave was mutilated. The old man let me touch it with my fingertips, gazing wide-eyed on it himself as if he held a relic from the holy land.
The bone might simply have been carried in by one of the old man’s hounds. The story of it could have been imagined from beginning to end. But as he spun his tale, sitting on his haunches like a wild creature, his eyes gleaming, his unkempt beard flecked with spit, terror sprang up in the Southampton fields beyond his cabin walls. Rainwater in puddles after a storm was thick with blood. Birdsong echoed with the screams of dying women and children. Scythes and axe blades glinted in moonlit pastures. Or so it seemed to me as a boy.
Nat Turner could recite whole books of scripture from memory. His intelligence was a wonder to local white clergy and a miracle to the Negroes who heard him preach in the open fields. When he was executed, he claimed an angel had visited him. The angel had told Turner he would see a sign when it was God’s will for him to massacre the people who enslaved him. The summer of the insurrection an eclipse blotted out the sun. After the rebellion colored people could not congregate to worship unless supervised by a white pastor. Laws prohibited teaching a slave to read or giving a slave a book, even the Bible, anywhere in Virginia.
Some evenings after supper Mother would sit with me in the parlor and read the scriptures.
“From the Gospel of Matthew, Charles,” she said, her glasses perched at the tip of her nose. “‘Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’”
“Mother, what is ‘an hungred?’” I asked.
“A person who’s starving,” she said.
“And ‘the least of these’?”
“The helpless.”
“I want to help,” I said. I was six years old.
“You’re a good boy, Charles,” my mother said.
When I was ten she passed away. I was taken in by her maiden aunt. When I matriculated at the College of William & Mary, I was so pious the other boys called me “Preacher.” I led Bible classes at the college chapter of the YMCA and a Temperance prayer group for young men on Saturday nights. Not one Sunday did I miss service at the Methodist church by campus. But in our yearbook my classmates named me “most likely to bum tobacco.”
Often my friend Fitzhugh Scott and I would sit on the steps of our boarding house, gazing across the green to the old Colonial Governor’s mansion, where Thomas Jefferson sometimes dined as a student. We liked to talk poetry or religion. Fitz leaned against the steps, legs akimbo, while I smoked.
“Well, you have a point, Preacher,” he said, loosening his collar. His sunburned cowlick bristled through a coat of pomade. “Transcendentalism is not Christianity. But it’s hardly pagan. Wouldn’t you say Walt Whitman voiced Christian ideals? And lived them?”
“I suppose,” I said.
Soon after, my friend died. Studies and devotions seemed trivial then. I felt Death was stalking me, staring at me from the pages of books. I left college, taking a job at a newspaper in Hampton. In the daily tramp of events I believed I might rejoin the living.
That’s how I came to report on the trial and execution of Virginia Christian. What follows is my account of what happened, then and after. I like to believe I’m telling the truth. But I’ve learned the truth hides somewhere in the shadows of what happens.
2.
Black Woman Held
Poindexter was a good man to talk to. He was the telegraph operator at the C&O depot. Say he helped somebody with a message, or noticed somebody come into town on the afternoon train, or overheard somebody talking on the platform—Poindexter would let you know if something was up.
Late afternoon March 18, 1912, I was heading for the depot. It was a Monday and all the news was from the mountains. The wires were humming with stories about the Allen gang. They’d killed a sitting judge, Commonwealth’s attorney, sheriff, and a witness up at the Hillsville courthouse. Wanted posters were tacked up at the depot and the sheriff’s office. The governor had called Baldwin-Felts detectives into Hillsville. They were manhunters. I thought I’d have a smoke with Poindexter, see if he’d heard anything, and walk back to the office.
A colored boy ran by me like the brick sidewalk was burning coals, grabbed an iron gate to stop himself at a stoop, and hollered up the steps.
“Jeff, come quick! Woman got killed over on Washington. Best come on, you want to see it!” Another boy dashed out the door and down the steps. The two of them ran up the street.
I set off at a trot and saw the two boys turn the corner. A little over a block away, white and colored people were congregating. The address was 809 Washington Street. There was a trellis gate with climbing roses starting to bud. Standing just outside a group of colored women on the walk was a tall white man in a bowler. He was chewing a cigar stub.
“Sir, what happened here?”
“Widow woman got killed. Say her washwoman done it. Somebody at the C&O seen the girl coming and going from the house.”
About fifty feet down the street was a sleek chestnut mare hooked to a buggy. I recognized her. She nibbled at a patch of new grass at the edge of a yard. One of the buggy wheels was up on the curb.
A tall man with thick brown hair parted in the middle and a Vandyke emerged from the house, heading for the street. He was carrying a small black bag. That was Dr. George Vanderslice, coroner for the city of Hampton, the owner of the mare. He walked to the trellis gate and stopped, casting his eyes about until he saw the buggy.
“Phoebe!” he called. The mare lifted her head and nickered, but didn’t move. He opened the gate and started toward the buggy. The people on the sidewalk made a little room for him, but they still blocked my way.
“Dr. Vanderslice!” I shouted. “Can you give me any information?”
“Go to the sheriff’s office, Charlie. Get a statement there.”
“Has