CHAPTER II
THE REIGN OF TERROR BEGINS

The terror is out in Eden County. For the black serfs who once tilled the fertile soil here have within living memory been emancipated from bondage and left to their own devices. Since the ex-bondsmen constitute not less than 85 of the population of Eden County, it is only logical that they would exercise their new-found democratic freedoms to elect a black Republican government for the county. This revolution has not, however, gone entirely unopposed by the former owners of serfs.

For now the white gentry of Eden County have taken to dressing up in white sheets as if every night were Halloween, haunting the houses of the freedmen and their white friends with death, rape, torture, destruction and pillage. There is regularly every Sunday in the Eden town square a lynching of blacks (the first and third Sundays of every month) or white Republicans (the second and fourth Sundays of every month). Every Sunday thousands of North and South Carolinians and Virginians, travelling by special excursion trains organized for the occasion by the railroads, flock to the town of Eden to see the week's lynching victim, after first having his genitals cut off and served to him in his mouth by the officiating preacher, ceremonially burned at the stake under the direction of that clergyman.

One of the Eden County belles has recently held a masked ball at her "place" near the town of Eden. The date of the ball is August 24. The bal de St.-Barthélémy, as it has come to be known, starts innocently enough as the hostess, costumed as Catherine de Médicis, begins receiving her guests at around seven o'clock in the evening. These guests are all masked and costumed in the elaborate Renaissance dress of Henri III et sa cour; even the mignons, with their tight, nearly transparent braguettes on display for the world to see, have their representatives at the ball.

As harpists lightly strum and a masked chorus chants a series of Renaissance French madrigals, Catherine and her lover, dressed up for the ball as the Cardinal de Guise, together recite in the original French, and in beautiful, clear, high-pitched voices, a number of 16th century sonnets, by Pierre Ronsard, Louise Labé, Joachim du Bellay, Etienne Jodelle, André Scève and others.

Then the clock tolls twelve times in slow and sonorous succession. This is the signal for the guests, still masked and costumed, to begin their true work of the evening, which is a re-enactment of the massacre de St.-Barthélémy, with freedmen and Republicans rather than Protestants as the targets this time of the masked revellers' terror. Every historic detail is lovingly recreated. Such as the ladies of the court who poke through the heaps of bodies to jeer at the diminutive size of the white Republican members and to shriek in horror at the sight of what they imagine to be the large, blacksnake-like members hanging from the corpses of freedmen. Or the eighteen-month-old Republican baby who crows with delight as he plays with the mignon's plumed codpiece, just before the mignon interrupts the baby's laughter by skewering him to death on his bayonet.

The orgy of death and destruction ends near dawn at the Eden County courthouse, where the Republican government has huddled in fear all night long. The revellers force the government at gunpoint to abdicate in favor of a lily-white Democratic slate. The Cardinal would be satisfied at this point to let the Republicans go home unharmed. But Catherine insists on shooting personally in the neck every one of the 331 functionaries of the established Republican government of Eden County.

There is no Seine in Eden County into which the masked revellers can conveniently dump the bodies of the thousands of freedmen and Republicans whom they have slain in this recreation of the nuit de St.-Barthélémy. But the creek called Straight, which runs behind Lady Dedlock's "place" in Eden County, is so dammed up with human remains that a red-brown lake forms and laps up to within ten feet of the terrace at the back of the Dedlock mansion, called, from old time, the Ghost's Walk, until finally after a few months the wild hogs finish devouring the bodies, allowing the bloody waters of the creek called Straight to break free and go rushing madly downstream towards the nearby Neuse River.

As a final product of the bal de St.-Barthélémy, and in response to a specific request by Catherine de Médicis ("N'est-ce-pas qu'il serait drôle, mon Cardinal, de voir toutes les deux semaines un pauvre prisonnier, nu, blanc et Républicain, subir le supplice de Ravaillac et de Damiens?"), the lynchage ordinaire, to which the freedmen are subjected on Sundays in the Eden town square, alternates every other Sunday with a series of more refined and elegant tortures for the white Republican patients, who, after having their hands burned off in a sulfur fire, their body torn at the nipples, legs and arms with fiery hot pincers, with molten pitch poured into the resulting wounds, are, like Ravaillac and Damiens before them, torn apart by four pure white Arabian steeds, after which their still living torsos are tossed into the fire to be incinerated in the center of the Eden town square.

My Lady Dedlock has amid all this excitement been quite "bored to death." Therefore she has come away from Eden County, and has left it to the murderers, and the rapists, and the lynchers, and the Klansmen, and the torturers and the Catherines and the Cardinals.

And come instead to her house in New York, preparatory to her departure by private Concorde for Paris.

In the 20th century, of course.