SLAVE PIT

SLAVE PIT Friday, December 27, 2019 By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman Rich plantation owners in the South used to fight their dogs, roosters, and slaves against each other, from time to time, place to place, for sport, while gambling. Winning brought prestige, fame, wealth. These pastimes led to special training, diets, privileges for the combatants, man and beast, to boost the chances of winning. Some owners would go to extremes to win, like cutting off ears of fighting slave men, filing their teeth, doing whatever promoted an aspect of terror, to kill the spirit of any competitors. One fighting slave was so ferocious that his owner would travel with him to distant states to “pit” him—literally—against other trained fighting slaves. The slave men fought in a muddy pit to frustrate escapes. News of the arrival of traveling fighting slaves brought out area sporting-life gaming crowds, frisk betting, whiskey drinking, tumultuous clamor, drama of all kinds as part of the atmosphere. Death was a routine possibility. Broken bones, dislodged teeth, bashed skulls were par for the course. Like gladiators in Rome, fighters’ lives might be saved or destroyed at “Caesar’s” discretion: thumbs up, thumbs down. One slave fighter had heard accounts of a ferocious fighting slave, a true barbarian, with no ear lobes, filed teeth, vicious mien, bald head. He had killed a number of slaves in the pit with hands, limbs, teeth. His master had decided to pit him—of local renown, but of very few fights-- against this monstrous man. In his heart of hearts, the local fighter knew that something had to be done to save his neck, his own miserable fighting life. But what could be done? He prayed for an answer, for deliverance, but nothing availed. Finally, the day of the fight came. He was oiled up and led to the pit, where he saw a gleaming, leering, monstrous, fighting slave eyeing him with fervent glee, as though he were an appetizing meal. Standing beside the ferocious fighting slave, a killer of other fighting-slaves, stood his pipsqueak master, beaming, taking bets, bragging. After preliminaries, he ordered his slave into the 6-foot deep muddy pit. Jumping in, his slave smeared himself with mud. The local fighter looked down onto the spectacle in the pit; then, he looked over the pit at the spectacle’s pallid owner. Wordlessly, the local slave leaped in an instant, clear across the 6-foot deep pit. In the same inspired motion, he knocked to the ground, the swaggering, ferocious slave’s owner clean-old out with one mighty right-handed fist’s blow to the jaw! It all happened so fast, in such a blurry burst of energy, that the startled slave in the pit was stupefied! The very thought of another black slave striking his white man was so fantastic, was so phantasmagoric, that the pitted-slave was benumbed, dumbfounded! Not only had this slave-opponent knocked his owner unconscious, but he was standing over him to boot, making threatening gestures down to him in the pit, while his irrepressible master lay sprawled on the ground. The shock of this unfathomable, utterly unimaginable occurrence, fortuitous turn of events, stroked him out! In fact, it killed him! Any slave striking a white slave-owner was automatically instant death in his feverish enslaved mind! Conversely, the mind of the local slave, who had overcome the spirit of fear, had intuitively found a neat solution to his multiple compounding dilemmas, by acting. His sagacious actions presented with far less danger to himself, to personal safety, than certain destruction in the bottom of a muddy slave pit. Needless to say, the unconscious slave-owner was later revived to learn that his ferocious fighting slave had died of fright in the pit. He angrily paid off his bets, demanded the death of the local slave, which his enriched owner refused. So, the dead ferocious slave’s former owner left town shaken and deflated. #30