The Letter Writer by Ann Rinaldi Page B

sister of yours, who's always flirting with me. I want to rip off her blouse and cut her throat. I want that turncoat playmate of yours, that Violet, that half caste who's forgotten she's negro and panders to y'all, just to make life easy for herself. I want that Mother Whitehead with all the rings on her fingers, whose husband left her and who thinks she can buy me at just the blink of one of her blind eyes. I want to give them all their just due."
    A catbird cried. The air felt like lead. He was carrying a broadax, not a gun.
    "Mother Whitehead's husband died, he didn't run off," I said for lack of anything better to say.
    His yellow brown eyes went over me in sadness. "Whatever you want to believe," he said, "before you die."
    "Are you going to kill me?"
    "I want Richard," he said again. "Where is he?"
    One of his men on horseback had ridden a circle around the house and barn and came back to report. "He's in the cotton field with his slaves, boss."
    "Well, that's a good place for him to be." Nat started around the barn and his men followed. "I want nobody in the house. Yet," he said. "Hark, grab that little girl and bring her along. I don't want her warning anybody inside. But don't hurt her."
    So this was a slave uprising. I'd heard about them all my life, enough to know that plantation owners feared them above flood and fire and insects attacking their crops.
    The slave named Hark looked as if he'd lived through ten of them. He personified the very word riffraff, which I'd heard Mother Whitehead use so often, not only about coloreds but about some whites as well.
    Hark dragged me along to the cotton field behind the barn and there, sure enough, was Richard, picking cotton with about a dozen slaves. You had to give him
that. When there was work to be done, he'd pitch right in and work with the help.
    Oh, why hadn't I seen the good things about him before this, and not only the bad?
    He looked up as we approached, saw Nat at the head of this devilish tableau, saw me dragged along by Hark, and stopped what he was doing. "What is this?" he said.
    Nat stepped forward, at the same time reaching out a muscular arm for one of the pine-knot torches. One man passed it down the line. Nat held it.
    "I'm making calls this morning," he told Richard. "We've already visited five plantations and been successfully received. You are number six."
    "What do you want?" Richard demanded in his most commanding voice. "And I'll thank you to have that fellow there unhand my sister."
    My heart quivered.
    "In just a moment," Nat said. "I want her to witness something first."
    "What?" Richard said.
    Nat handed him the pine-knot torch. "Fire the field," he said.
    "What?" Richard was dumbfounded. "Do you know the worth of the cotton in this field?"
    "Exactly. And that, preacher man, is why I want you to fire it. Now. Unless you want to see something terrible happen to your sister."
    Richard took one look at me and did not hesitate. He accepted the torch, turned, and lighted the cotton. In a minute there was a blaze so high that his servants had to get out of the way.
    For me,
I thought.
He did it for me.
    Dear God, have I been wrong about everything?
    "And now, you spoilt little white girl back there," Nat yelled, "watch this."
    And so fast that I did not know what I was supposed to be watching, one of his lieutenants swung his broadax and cut off the top of Richard's head.
    I screamed. There was fire and blood everywhere. I pulled away from Hark, screaming and screaming. I picked up my skirts and ran. I expected to be pursued, but no one came.
    No one followed. All that followed me was the maniacal laughter from Nat Turner.
    Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nat Turner's men whipping out the fire in the cotton field. I thought,
Of course, he doesn't want any neighbors to see the smoke, or they'll come running.
    Then my mental state became tangled again and I couldn't reason.
    What had happened? I did not know. I had slept late and Owen was waking me