The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
impudent, indifferent, and chewing tobacco, and spitting it out upon the
pillory floor.
As Clayton and Custis saw this scene on their way to the tavern, an egg,
thrown from a window of the debtor's jail, whether meant for Mrs. Hudson
or not, struck her in the face, and its corrupt contents streamed down
her white and shivering breast.
"Shame! shame!" cried the people, as they saw the woman cry, and, gazing
up to the jail window, another female face appearing there, turned
their cries to curses:
"Hang her! hang her!"
For the last time in life Patty Cannon's bold and comely face swelled
again with passionate blood to the roots of the glossy black hair, and
the few who saw her rich, dark eyes, inflamed with anger, say their
pupils were dilated like the wild-cat's. She was gone in a moment, and
the sheriff had wiped Mrs. Hudson's face and breast with a handkerchief
passed up by a colored woman.
Two men were now actively going around the crowd, hat in hand,
soliciting contributions to buy the woman, the first a blind man, whose
eyes were bandaged, and a white man led him, calling loudly:
"The abolitionists have raised three hundred dollars to buy this woman's
freedom. We want a hundred more, as some mean people may bid her up
high. This man, her husband, stole her pass, to slip a friend away. We
couldn't git the evidence in, but it's God's truth, gentlemen! The
woman's nursed my wife, an' done a heap of good; and she come here, of
her own free will, out of Maryland, to nurse the Chancellor."
Little money was raised in that crowd, since there was little to give,
and, addressing the two distinguished strangers, Sorden, the crier,
exclaimed:
"What, gentlemen, will you let the Hunn brothers and Tommy Garrett and
the Motts give three hundred dollars for a woman they never saw, and we,
who see her always doing good, give nothing?"
"Pity! pity!" sobbed the blind man. "I'm burned so bad nobody will buy
_me_, but I stole her pass to help a slave off that I fell in love
with."
Judge Custis left Clayton's side, and waited till the hour in the
pillory was done, and, after a fierce contest, saw Sorden come off
victorious at the sale, though it took every dollar the Judge could
raise in Georgetown on his private credit.
"What is the name of the girl you gave her pass to?" asked the Judge of
the blind mulatto.
"Virgie, marster."
"My heart told me so," exclaimed the Judge. "Your crime has been
punished enough. I will send you to your wife."[15]
* * * * *
John Randel, Jr., observed, that evening:
"Devil Jim Clark has taken example from Patty Cannon, and squared the
circle."
"Not dead?" asked Clayton.
"Yes, dead and buried. He was cleaning up his contract on the canal, and
mistook the white Irish laborers there for kidnapped niggers. They set
on him, and beat him and scared him together, so that he never
recovered. They say he was 'converted' on his death-bed; or, as the
saying is, 'he died triumphantly;' but the darkeys report that the devil
came straight down with a chariot and drove him off."
"That fellow, Whitecar, I'm reserving," said Clayton, "to punish when I
can use him to sustain an argument in favor of admitting negro testimony
in kidnapping cases.[16] Without that admission, these kidnappers cannot
be convicted: even Patty Cannon here may escape us, though she has
killed white men."
Sorden spoke up, he being of the party:
"A disease called leprosy has broke out in ole Derrick Molleston's
cabin; Sam Ogg has got it, too, and they say he fetched it up from the
breakwater. Nobody will go near them. Black Dave is dead; he said he
killed a man at Prencess Anne: the young wife of Levin Dennis, who
turns out to be a lady, stayed and prayed with him to the last, and he
went off humble and happy. But, my skin! another kidnapper has rented
Johnson's tavern a'ready."
"The railroad will clear all these evils out," exclaimed Randel. "I've
put it into poetry," and he began to recite:
"To dark Naswaddox forest fled
The murderer from the main,
And with the otter laid his head
Amid the swamp and cane:
'Here nothing can pursue my ear,
From travelled paths astray;
I shall forget, from year to year,
The world beyond the bay!'
"The hunted man one morning heard
A whistle near and strong,
And in the night a fiery light
The thickets flashed among:
The demon of the engine rushed
Along on blazing beams--
The hound the murderer had flushed,
The outlaw's path was Steam's!"
* * * * *
The cry of hate from the crowd around the whipping-post, as it awoke
Patty Cannon's last anger, also determined her last crime.
Fear was relative in her: she had neither the fear of men nor of shame,
and only of death as it involved a hereafter. Whether that hereafter was
a latent conviction in her mind, or the vivid admonition of guilt and
dead men's eyes peering over her dreams and into the silent, lonely
watches of haunted midnights, who shall tell? There is no analysis of a
native and ancient depravity: it was sown in the marrow, it strengthens
in the bone, and, with a cunning, daring self-assertion, gambles upon
the faith of living and of dying not. Its very fears push it onward in
crime, and make it cruelly tantalize its own fate, as cowards lean over
graveyard walls, and shout, with an inner trembling, "Come forth--I dare
you!"
So had this woman, conscious of her deserts, bullied eternal justice
through its long postponements, never doubting, while ever vexing, the
Spirit of God, until the number of her crimes crowded the tablet of her
memory, and out of the hideous gulf of her past life gazed faces without
names and deeds without memoranda; a procession the longer that
strangers were in it, and, shrinking from her, yet pressing on,
exclaimed her name or only shrieked "'Tis she!" as if her name was
nothing to her curse.
Sleeping in her chains, there were children's eyes watching her from
far-off corners, as if to say, "Give us the whole life we would have
lived but for you!"
As her swollen limbs festered to the irons, there were babies' cries
floating in the air, that seemed to draw near her breasts, as if for
food, and suddenly convulse there in screams of pain, and move away with
the sounds of suffocation she had heard as they expired.
All night there were callers on her, and whom they were no one could
tell; but the jailer's family saw her lips moving and her eyes consult
the air, as if she was faintly trying bravado upon certain
business-speaking ghosts who had come with bills long overdue and
demanded payment, and went out only to come again and again.
Some of these mystic visitors she would jeer at and defy, and stamp her
feet, as if they had no rights in equity against her soul, having been
on vicious errands when they met their ends, and bankrupts in the court
of pity; but suddenly a helpless something would appear, and paralyze
her with its little wail, like a babeless mother or a motherless babe,
and, with her forehead wet with sweat of agony, she would affect to
chuckle, and would whisper, "Nothin' but niggers! nothin' more!"
Day brought her some relief, but also other cares, and of these the
chief was the care of money. She had been a spendthrift all her life,
and robbed mankind of life and liberty to enjoy the selfish dissipation
of spending their blood-money; and what had she bought with it? Nothing,
nothing. To spend it, only, she had wrecked her sex and her soul; to
spend it for such trifles as children want--candy and common ornaments,
a dance and a treat, a gift for some boor or forester or even negro she
was misleading, or to establish a silly reputation for generosity:
generous at the expense of human happiness, and of robbing people of
liberty and life, merely for spending-money!
Now she had none to appease the all-devouring greeds of habit
intensified by real necessity: no money to buy dainties or even liquor;
no money to spend upon the jailer's family and keep the reputation of
kindness alive; no money for decent apparel to appear in court; none to
corrupt the law or to hire witnesses and attorneys.
The two demons she had created alternately seized the day and the night:
the demon of money plagued her all day, the demon of murder pursued her
all night.
Every morning she had insatiate wants; all night she had remorseless
visitors; and, close before, the gallows filled the view, with the Devil
tying the noose.
That Devil she plainly saw, so busy on the gallows, fitting his ropes
and shrouds and long death-caps, and he evaded her, as if he had no
commerce with her now.
He was a cool and wistful man, perfectly happy in the prospect of
getting her, and not anxious about it, so sure was he of her soon and
complete possession.
He was always out in the jail-yard when she looked there, fixing his
ropes, sliding the nooses, examining the gallows, like a conscientious
carpenter; and in his complacent smile was an awful terror that froze
her dumb: he seemed so impersonal, so joyous, so industrious, as if he
had waited for her like a long creditor, and compounded the interest on
her sins till the infernal sum made him a millionaire in torments.
A Devil it was, real as a man--a slavemaster to whose quiet love of
cruelty eternal death was not enough; a man whose unscarred age, old as
the rising sun, still came and went in immortal youthfulness and
satisfaction, but for the nonce forgetting other debtors in the grip he
had on her, as his majestic expiation for his own shortcomings.
He looked like a storekeeper, a man of accounts, a cosmopolitan
kidnapper, who knew a good article and had it now. She was so terrified
that she wanted to cry to him, and see if he would not remit that
business method and become more human, and sauce her back.
But no; the longer she watched, the less he looked towards her, though
she knew his smile meant no one else. To hang upon his cord was very
little; to go with him after it was stretched, down the burning grates
of hell, and see him all so cool and busy in her misery, was the gnawing
vulture at her heart.
In vain she tried to throw responsibility for her sins upon a vague,
false parentage and fatherhood, and say that she was bred to robbery and
vice; a something in her heart responded: "No, you had beauty and health
and chaste lovers whom you rejected or tempted, and a mind that was ever
clear and knew right from wrong. Conscience never gave you up, though
drenched in innocent blood. The often-murdered monitor revived and cried
aloud like the striking of a clock, but never was obeyed!"
Thus haunted, deserted, peeped in upon from the hereafter, racked with
vain needs, her outlets closed to every escape or subterfuge, revenge
itself dead, and disease assisting conscience to banish sleep, the
wretched woman crawled to her window one day and saw the helpless
effigy of her sex exposed there for doing an act of humanity; and
instantly an instinct she immediately obeyed exacted from her one last
familiar, heartless deed, to show the crowd that even she, Patty Cannon
the murderess, had "no respect for a nigger."
That doctrine long survived her, though she found it old when she came
among them.
She aimed an egg at the breast of her sex, and, with a barefaced grin,
she saw it strike and burst. The next moment the crowd had recognized
and defied her.
In the exasperation of their shout, and of being no longer praised even
for insulting a negro, a convulsion of desperate rage overcame the
murderess.
Too helpless to retort in any other way, yet in uncontrollable
recklessness, she exclaimed, "They never shall see me hang, then!" and
swallowed the arsenic she had concealed in her bosom.