Arc d'X

1

ON AN APRIL NIGHT ALMOST midpoint in the Eighteenth Century, in the county of Orange and the colony of Virginia, Jacob Pollroot tasted his death a moment before swallowing it. He had, then, a moment to spit it out and save himself. This moment was lost not because he was slow-witted but because he’d become a monster of appetites; his had not been a life of spitting out things. The taste was sweet, slyly familiar. He’d tasted it before, in some Indian campaign of his youth or some night with one of his black women. But he had only the time now to look up from the stew that was his dinner, gaze at the house around him, and see through the steam of the poison his slave Evelyn standing in the doorway of the kitchen.

He raised his hands to his throat. The pain began almost immediately in the pit of his stomach, widening in a circle to his bowels below and his brain above. He pushed away from the table and lurched across the room; Evelyn watched without glee or concern. “Jesus you’ve killed me,” Jacob wailed, crashing into a wall of dishes. For a moment he lay shuddering on the floor. Some would later say his hideous noises were the leakage of a black life hissing out of every orifice.

Evelyn walked up to the body. She stood over it long enough that she might have been contemplating giving it a good kick. She looked up to the faces of the other slaves in the windows, who were staring in stupefaction not, she knew, simply at Jacob Pollroot’s death, but her own.

At Evelyn’s trial there was a thorough recounting of Jacob’s barbarities, and testimony as to Evelyn’s constant debasement at Jacob’s hands and his savage treatment of his slaves in general. All this was accepted not as reasons that might justify Jacob’s murder, but rather as the motives that proved Evelyn had done the deed. Evelyn herself said nothing. She sat throughout the trial as impassively as she’d watched Jacob topple across his dinner. She wasn’t invited to speak; her trial wasn’t seen as a legal right extended to a person to defend herself — since by Virginia law Evelyn wasn’t a person — but as an object lesson for a system that occasionally needed one. The case certainly created alarm throughout the county. The court found Evelyn guilty and sentenced her to be burned at the stake, once the spring rains stopped and the town could find wood dry enough for it.

The rest of Jacob Pollroot’s slaves would later create the legend that on the first of May when Evelyn was torched alive, she received the inferno’s lust with the same stoic self-possession as she’d received Jacob’s so many nights. But it was a difficult legend to maintain in the face of Evelyn’s screams, so terrible they stunned even those who had witnessed such executions before. For days afterward the pale and shaken townspeople still remembered the screams, transparent portholes in the flames through which could be seen Evelyn’s aghast face. Her ashes smoked for hours in the twilight. The smell of them carried in people’s hair and clothes, and the cloud of smoke rose high into the Virginia sky, visible for miles around.

It was visible in the next county. A Virginia squire driving his wagon down the muddy road toward his plantation looked up to watch it rise above the mountain. A dark knowing murmur swept through his own slaves riding in the wagon and walking alongside; on the hills and in the fields slaves stopped their work to look up at the smoke. At that moment the squire, hearing the dangerous din of their black prayers, wanted nothing more than a strong wind that would scatter the smoke, though a full gale force would not disperse its memory. Next to him on the wagon seat the squire’s five-year-old son watched the smoke too. Into the night the little boy smelled it. He smelled it in his food and his bath. In the air outside his bedroom window that should have been ripe with the scent of spring rain, he smelled nothing but the burning body of the black female slave. He woke in the middle of the night vomiting; and lying in bed the next day, depleted and delirious, his five-year-old head was filled with excruciating visions: staring into the nothingness above him, he waited for the woman’s ashes to fall from the sky, to clot the branches of the trees and hang from the rafters of the house like black snow. The boy’s name was Thomas.