Ch. 1: Behold, Mercy, O God

These here mountain lands — Father’s damaged goods.
See them Northerners, born to the servitude of manufactured things. Ye don’t understand. Them factories pushed us out, far across the land, past that border. We never owned a plantation — slaves was too dear for the likes of us; Pops and Mams never had that kind of money.

They’d say, “The Lord hath given the land to me, / To sow, to reap, His victory.”

But it burns Northern. We gathered cotton and grain that fed the looms in New York and Lowell, and got back little more than season and sorrow.

You wonder? We were born Northern, but our songs’d been Southern. We’d bleed Southern gospel. We raised the cotton, prayed the hymn, and preached the preacher’s word for the Sunday plate. We built them rich boys’ factories with our sweat — and preached their gospel the same.

But we got abused. Tariffs and city law favored the factory men; a man with no purse is a man trampled. Long ago, them predestination folk said some o’ us was born for Hell.

Pops and Mams held to covenant minds. Vary from reformist mindest, Puritan blood ran in their veins.

I envy them Protestants — all that print-press certainty.

Because I am what they deserved. I am who they have chosen.

Because — though I, I deserved Heaven.
By God, they’d say.

All I got was Hell.

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“Pointin’ iron at our Black neighbors and callin’ it self-defense? Not here. Redridge holds its own — Black folk have kin and claim, and this valley answers to law and neighbor, not the rope. You raise that piece and you’ll find the marshal, or you’ll find yourself ridin’ out with no hand to help.”

The shadow wound through the feathered leaves like tar — faces half-hidden in beard and brim. They wear grown-up masks to cover child mouths, trying to seem bigger, older, more fearsome. They want to be gods, vigilantes; John Brown, in their own eyes. Blasphemy, every which way. Redridge holds Black folk close and its own claim for statehood. It also remembers what happens when men make themselves kings. Never again. I won’t forgive that.

That slipknot rope swings in my head — a memory, not a command — warning me of the cost of power and pride.

That sheriff, dress-up boy, speaks, "We are the sovereignty scum. As civil duty prevails, we will limit the spread of disease; your sickness." 

He commands my hands, my enchanted body, but to what virtue? Speaks of sickness, yet fails to see his own infected hands. This hypocrisy, we acknowledge thy natives as barbarians; thy acknowledge natives as slaves; as property. 

My divine righteousness speaks for me,
“Civil duty? That died long ago — what you want’s agreement to your gospel. Don’t question my hand, when your kings devour and burn the Native’s earth.”

A face of disgust,
then a kick on the back,
dangling with oxygen bubbling away.

Lights turn dim,
my neck tightens.
Suddenly, it's only silhouettes; but I forgive thy neighbor.
For God, will smite them.