Read Online Soul Catcher by Michael C. White - Free Book Online Page A

quite so simple and unadulterated as that. Something commingled with fear and humiliation, given shape by bitterness and rage and desperation yet tempered by patience, and above all, held in check by a kind of stubborn, rocklike pride, this cool burning in the eyes like a fire enclosed in ice, waiting, biding its time, always ready to flare up and consume the thing it viewed. And he saw its complementary half in the eyes of whites, a thing that, when it surfaced, was hidden beneath a show of violence or a swaggering bluster or a contemptuous laugh, but was, at its very core, Cain suspected, a kind of fear. A fear that the docile, fawning slave would one day slough off his subservience and become a threat, something of unimaginable terror. He felt it in the impassioned voice of the minister back in his hometown of Nottoway Chase, Virginia, a Reverend Sammons, whose sermons spoke of the natural order God had intended, with whites in charge and slaves serving the role the Almighty had intended. He saw it in the disdainful spit of tobacco juice of the old men in Treacher's General Store in town, when they recollected the names of Gabriel Prosser or Denmark Vesey, rebellious slaves before Cain's time, or the slave Cain himself was alive to remember, the feared and detested Nat Turner, who'd led his uprising over in the eastern part of the state--those crazy niggers who'd had the audacity to turn that quiet anger outward into actual violence. He saw it sometimes even in his father's eyes when he'd flog a willful slave named Darius for running off yet again, a momentary hesitation--because of something he saw in the icy-hot glare of the slave.
    With some Negroes, Cain knew, punishment or its threat would make them obedient, servile and malleable to the will of the master. With others it broke their spirit and reduced them to sniveling, worthless creatures, like a dog kicked too often. But with some, like this boy, violence had the opposite effect; it would embolden them, harden and strengthen their resolve, like a piece of iron tempered in a smithy's forge. They were the Negroes not cowed by all the chastisements, by the beatings and floggings their masters or overseers could serve up, who'd witnessed ears or noses cut off, brands burned onto living flesh, who'd seen slaves chained by the neck to a post for weeks, who'd seen others lynched from a tree, their carcasses left to rot in the August sun as a reminder to the rest, who'd had their wives or sisters, daughters or mothers, raped in front of them, or sold downriver--they were the ones impervious to violence, for whom it had not only not broken them but made them all the more resilient and stubborn, all the more convinced of the unwavering legitimacy of their hatred, a thing that burned brightly in them and sustained them like air. Cain had seen it in the eyes of slaves he had captured and was returning. In the evening while sitting chained to a tree, they might look out at him from behind the silent mask of black skin. He sometimes wondered what it was they were thinking--was it the fantasy of getting their hands on him while he slept, killing the buckra, the term they used among themselves for a white devil? He could remember Darius, his father's slave who, when he was being flogged, would cry out, as slaves often did during their punishment, "Do, massa. Do it hard, massa." It was almost as if he welcomed the pain, accepted it, brought it deep into his dark and inscrutable soul, cradled it there like some precious thing, which, of course, it was.
    Cain didn't have the stomach for this business. He never resorted to torture to get information about a fugitive slave, preferring instead to use his cunning or his tracking ability. He prided himself that the profession hadn't turned him into a sadist, as it did to so many. He could kill a man if the situation required it, and had on several occasions, both black and white. He could bring a Negro back in irons to a harsh master and