The Great Negro Plot by Mat Johnson

Author:Mat Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

FOR YOUR LIFE AND SOUL

THE KING AGAINST CAESAR and Prince, Negroes." This was the introduction to the trial, but, in fact, it wasn't actually a trial. It was a ritual. A formality. Mere practice for what was to come. Caesar and Prince stood, doomed. They were black, and came precondemned. The evidence was circumstantial and hearsay but, for the likes of these men, no more was needed. Nothing was refuted—there was nothing they could say on their own behalf, because Africans were not even allowed to testify. The jury was called without challenge. The theft of Hogg's merchandise repeated. The additional charge of entering the property of Abraham Meyers Cohen to rob him was added for good measure.

If you stand as a black man in a room to be judged by white fear and ignorance, there is no point in looking up. There is no point in noting the words that Europeans use to sanction their bigotry, no matter how much worth they themselves think log they are putting into them. That Mary Burton yapped to the court, or that Peggy Kerry was brought into the room only to prolong her silence, mattered little. It was an exercise. It was a play. The conclusion was already written, and no two people were more sure of that than the Africans who were meant to await their fate.

"Not guilty," the two men declared, and it would be the only words the Europeans would extract from them. Two words contradicted by the thirteen witnesses for the King, a baker's dozen who swore otherwise. Caesar and Prince had three character witnesses for their own cause, but it was just so much air, so much filler. The evidence was summed and the jury returned from their deliberation quickly. The verdict was never in question, they just removed the first word of the slaves' plea and bounced it back at them.

"Guilty!" and that was all the court needed or wanted at the moment. Guilty of theft, guilty of robbery, guilty of disposal of stolen property. There was no need yet to press the slaves for information about the fires. For slaves, robbery alone stood as capital offense. So the two men's lives were already forfeit in the eyes of the law.

The two Africans. The notorious, Caesar and Prince, now survived solely at the judges' whim, and the whites would (and could) do whatever they wanted with them. That would be to wring free of them any juicy information they had, and then dispose of them in the end like so much pulp.

* * *

Arthur Price was a lowlife. What random act places him in our story is that he had already gotten himself locked up for thievery. Really, the crime Price was incarcerated for was not much more resounding than were the misadventures of Hughson's rogues: A white servant of the well-respected Captain Vincent Pearse, he had been busted nicking some of the property the captain was storing for the lieutenant governor since the governor's fire. A crime of opportunity, not the kind the likes of Price could walk away from easily.

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