The rebellion was bloody, but that was no surprise. Everyone who joined in the group of rebel slaves was resigned to a violent end, in answer to the cruelties that were forced upon them. For most, it was a spontaneous resignation; they saw others bold and ready to take their freedom at whatever cost, including their lives in the physical world, and even if they didn’t believe they could actually free themselves from their bondage, they were inspired enough to try. It started small, a few men determined to make it to Florida, to the sanctuary of St. Augustine where they could find freedom through Catholicism, and it snowballed into a hundred or so people motivated to bring horror to the men, women, and children who ignored their humanity and treated them worse than house pets. There was a point in the uprising when the group of rebel slaves were full of optimism. They forgot the terrifying odds stacked against them and they revelled in the opportunity to inflict a cruelty onto others that was a small measure of the cruelty that had been brought on them.
But then the momentum of the conflict shifted away from them, and the first rebels remembered their original objective, escape to St. Augustine, and they tried to flee. The few who survived were slaves again by sun up.
That was 1739, in Charleston, South Carolina, on John’s Island, near the Stono River.
Wendy was in that general vicinity nearly three hundred years later.
She was wincing at the news; another man brutally murdered with no leads. It seemed to fit a pattern of unsolved murders that had occurred near the river that Wendy jogged as often as she could motivate herself. Since late summer 2018, five middle-aged white men had been found brutally murdered in communities close to the river, beaten to death. Despite the brutality of the murders, police had no leads.
“They should be around,” Great uncle said. “I would speak to the spirits of these dead men. This is the work of something malicious that is harming the living.”
“How do you know?” Wendy asked.
“The yellow sparks,” Great uncle said. “I can see them in the background where the reporter is.”
“What are the yellow sparks?” Wendy asked, concentrating on the background of the news report. And sure enough, there were faint yellow spots floating the scenery like embers.
“I don’t know, but I have seen them along the river before. They float around then disappear.”
Wendy hadn’t ever noticed and Great uncle had never pointed it out, but she stood suddenly and headed for the river. No sparks. And then there was a flurry of them, and the man she had encountered before appeared.
“Did you murder those men?” Wendy asked, putting all the pieces together.
“I did ma’am,” the man said. He was still humbly dressed in bloody rags but he had a look of pride on his face that made him stately.
“You’re a murderer,” Wendy said blankly.
“I’m a curse ma’am,” the man said. “I do what I do since the ground shifted and let me back lose. It wasn’t no happenstance neither, ma’am. I was somewhere else and then everything was chaos, and I found myself back here. Imma see my revenge ma’am.”
Wendy thought about it and then she had the man tell her his story. She wept and he consoled her.
“But that’s not them,” Wendy said through tears. “You ain’t murdering the ones that took your freedom.”
“You think I want to be here doing this?” The man said. “Ma’am, I ain’t got no choice. Like I said to you, I’m a curse and those men died in accordance to that. Cruelty don’t just disappear because you change some laws, that energy is all over this place. And if they stop making it so hostile, then curses like me can’t form up to make ’em pay for they fathers’ worse sins.”
Wendy knew it was true. Everyone was happy to whitewash over the past without reckoning with it. It was a sad cruelty that fate locked this man in a cycle of violence, though, and Wendy wanted to help him.
“If you could stop, if I can help, will you go peacefully?”
The man smiled from ear to ear. “Send me away from this wretched world, sweet ma’am. I’ll murder again at the next full moon. It’ll be another sorry white man, but if you care, stop me before then. I knew I should speak to you when I saw you. You can give me peace again.”
I hope so, Wendy thought as the man dissipated in a faint cloud of yellow sparks.
Wendy turned for home and was startled by Great uncle.
“That went well,” he said. “The next one won’t be so easy.”
“What does that mean?” Wendy asked.
“We should consult with Ane to help your friend. She has experience with curses.”
“There’s others like him?”
“Other curses? Of course. And something has happened to bind them to spirits. We should investigate.”
Wendy was happy that her work at MUSC was going well, she had plenty of downtime to devote to the mystery unfolding with Charleston’s spirit population.
The man was called Cato, and after his beheading, he haunted the area near the Ashley river in Charleston. He appeared to slaves who had heard about the unsuccessful uprising and he told them that he did not regret losing his life in the struggle for his freedom. This inspired a second slave uprising in 1740. Cato’s spirit fought alongside the slaves until the uprising was stopped and a third of them were killed. His soul weeped over those who were enslaved again and then he departed the physical realm with the souls of the dead. He went to a place that seemed like heaven, only there were none of the markers that he expected. It was bright with light, white everywhere, and he could move without trying. He found some people there that he had known in the physical realm, but then there was the sucking that pulled some of the souls up, and when the sucking stopped, the place of light felt like it experienced the chaos of a hurricane and Cato felt that he was tossed around, until he came to rest next to a familiar river, in a familiar setting.
After a few weeks back in the physical realm, the faint yellow sparks came and he heard a voice. The voice reminded him of the pain that he had experienced, the pain he had watched his loved ones endure, and the voice told him to take his revenge. He agreed dutifully and he knew that he had become more than a spirit because even though no living person could see him, he could move physical objects or touch people.
Cato set about exacting his revenge and he did not kill indiscriminately, rather, he was guided by the faint yellow sparks that had ignited his rage and turned him into a curse. The first man that Cato killed in the late summer of 2018, was so proud of his Confederate heritage that he had a flag waving proudly at his house and two small ones on both rearview mirrors of his car. Cato didn’t recognize the iconography of the flag, it is not what brought him to the house near the river. The yellow sparks showed Cato how he treated his wife and his children, how he beat them all and used them to fuel his own laziness. He was cruel because he had learned it, it was practically heredity, and the man hadn’t tried to be better, he hadn’t asked anyone for help though he had been arrested before for his cruelty and he was told that his ways were ruinous for the ones he claimed to love. The yellow sparks showed the man deserving and Cato killed him as one of the people who had made his life a living hell.
His spree continued from there, guided by the yellow sparks and usually coinciding with a full moon.
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