Full of Eyes by Paul A. Barra

Author:Paul A. Barra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barracuda Books
Published: 2021-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

T

he Devil’s Hole was the common appellation for a place without a formal name. It was named after a roadhouse hard by Town Creek on the upper outskirts of Charleston itself. The Charleston peninsula continues a long way inland beyond the creek that slithers in past Drum Island, but populations were thin after one left the district that housed the eponymous Devil’s Hole. Many citizens of Charleston, especially the white minority, hardly considered the Devil’s Hole locality as part of civilization. It was a dirty complex of mud-daubed shacks with open sewage ditches draining into the creek. The smell was bad as I rode in, though conditions were not nearly as fierce as they would be in a few more months when the air turned thick with heat. Mosquitoes, sand fleas and bluebottle flies would add to the misery of the hellish place in the summer months. When a serious outbreak of yellow fever hit the people there in 1859, not one white doctor would go to minister to the sick and dying. They claimed there was nothing to be done for the disease victims anyway, and there was no use carrying the sickness into other areas or endangering their own lives. Everyone knew the haze of odors that emanated from the wetlands that fed off Town Creek were carriers of all sorts of diseases, including typhoid, break-bone fever, and the dreaded smallpox.

The yellow fever epidemic nearly wiped out the residents of the area around the Devil’s Hole bar. The population soon rebounded though, made up, reputedly, of runaway slaves and destitute freedmen. A colored man could virtually disappear in this jumble of hovels and distrust. If Uncle Williams wanted to disappear for some reason, this was the place to do that.

I hoped that my clerics and the Negro’s normal respect for clergymen might help me in my search for Uncle Williams. I stopped first at the roadhouse inside the entrance to the Devil’s Hole, thinking that it might not be too crowded yet this early in the day. A man with skin the color of cafe au lait dozed in the sun on a plank bench out front of the unpainted building. It was a tall-sided place with small windows. The upper ones were mostly broken out. The railing around the porch was also mostly broken, the posts canting up here and there like rotted teeth. The growth out front was untended. I left Jasper tied to a tree with his bit out, hoping he’d find something edible in the mess of weeds.

There were a dozen or so people in the dark, dank interior. It smelled of the beer that had spilled and dried in the moldering sawdust on the floor. Most of the patrons were hunched over glasses or bottles at tables, even though it was not yet noon. One man sat talking to a standing woman at the bar. No one was behind it. I walked up to the couple.

“ Moanin’, Reverend. You lost or somethin’?”

The woman smiled broadly as she greeted me.

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