Smoke from the cannon hangs heavy in the air. Men shout to one another, hooves thunder, and the smell of gunpowder is so strong it brings tears to Israel’s eyes. He has yet to fire his rifle. Out of the noise and smoke, he hears his name.
“Israel. Fire the cannon,” McCully shouts. “Towards the river side. Light the fuse.”
Israel runs back to the trench. The man he shared the trench with has already fled, and Israel is alone in the dugout with the homemade pipe cannon. He points the mouth of the pipe toward the men advancing river side and, on the second friction match, manages to get the cord alight, waiting for what seems an eternity for the slithering flame to sputter slowly down toward the powder. The smoke is so heavy he can barely see more than a few feet in front of his face, but he is sure the weapon is pointed in the right direction, toward the river. He girds himself for the upcoming blast, when gunpowder will propel the deadly ball toward the attackers. Instead, the cannon shakes apart in a harsh rattle of sticky, spreading black powder. He stares at the defective cannon and then pops his head up cautiously. He is enveloped in the invasive blackness of gunpowder residue. He stumbles as he climbs out of the trench into the open field. Colored men surround him, shouting and running in every direction. His vision blurs, and when he puts his hand to his eyes, he discovers blood trickling down one side of his face. His leg throbs. He is hit.
There is chaos on the battlefield. Dozens of colored men fall in the next few minutes, not only those from the north barricade but men pouring out of all the trenches and running toward the woods. Men behind the embankments scatter in all directions, giving up their position, running blindly for any shelter they can. A mounted horseman chases one of the running men, cutting him off before he reaches the woods and shooting him at close range. A clutch of white men cheer, waving their hats and celebrating their surprise attack, and the south barricade collapses after the next blast from the white men’s cannon. Colored men run in all directions, faces frozen in confusion, terror, or astonishment. Exposed wounded litter the flat landscape.
White men on horseback, in small groups and singly, take off after the men running toward Mirabeau Woods, picking off the slowest or the late starters. Some of the fleeing men are lucky, reaching the edge of the tree line and disappearing into the thicket beyond. The white men don’t follow them into the woods, as if an invisible line has been defined that they won’t cross.
Out of range of long-gun fire, small groups of white men approach the no-man’s-land cautiously, starting with the open field farthest away. With a nudge of a boot or the muzzle of a rifle, they turn over bodies to check whether the fallen men are alive or dead. About a hundred yards from Israel, a tall white man with a bayoneted rifle finds a colored man lying on the ground, unable to run but still breathing. The white man finishes him off as methodically as if he is gutting a fish for supper. By the fourth blast of the cannon, dense white smoke clouds Israel’s vision as he stumbles and falls, aimless. His leg won’t support him. He has no plan.
A cluster of white men slowly advance in his direction, careful to keep out of rifle range of the living. A shot from somewhere kicks up dust between Israel and the advancing men. They pause but come toward Israel again from a different angle. Once more he hears the sharp ping of a warning shot. The men head off after easier pickings, but Israel knows they will be back. He wonders how much time he has left, how long the roof spotters can take aim and keep the attackers at bay.
On the river side, they turn the cannon toward a new target. Israel hears another earsplitting blast, this time toward the courthouse, and the skittering, protective bullets from the rooftop are silenced.
Chapter
14
It is irrational, and Sam more than anyone else knows it even as he issues the order for the women and children to move to a new location. The cannon blasts are down at the courthouse, not here in Boggy Bayou swamp, but by changing camps, at least they will be doing something. At least they will join their futures, whatever those might be, to the others in the Colfax community. As the grating sounds continue, the group gets to their feet, grabs their few belongings, stomps out the fires, and goes on the move again. Sam doesn’t stop to reassure anyone, as he usually would. It is all he can manage to keep himself functioning. The newcomers have packed up once already in the last couple of hours and wordlessly do so again, following Sam’s lead.
They march through the woods in a ragged line, men, women, and children carrying blankets, supplies, and cooking pots not yet cool from noon dinner. The squatter swamp city toward which they propel themselves is a community in shock. The colored people in the larger camp sit stupefied around the fire, not speaking, listening to what they believe must be hell come to earth. They make places around the fire for their new campmates.
For an hour, no one moves beyond the perimeter of the camp. They decide against sending scouts, agreeing instead to cluster the women and children in the center of a human circle with the men ringing the outside, holding on tightly to the few weapons they have. For an hour, they wait, muscles tensed and minds numb, nerves stretched to snapping.
From the south, suddenly, a tall, hatless black man crashes through the trees at a run, without caution, wild-eyed, his cotton shirt soaked completely through with sweat, his face contorted with straining effort and exhaustion. Once the man registers that he has stumbled into a large campsite, that he is surrounded by his own kind in the squatter swamp city, he doubles over, hands on his thighs, and takes in frantic gulps of air. Polly brings him a dipper of fresh water, which he guzzles, then asks for more.
Sam recognizes Lawson McCullen. He is a neighbor and McCully’s cousin, one of the few colored men who owns his own farm down in The Bottom.
Lawson catches his breath. “They killing every colored man from the courthouse they catch,” he says.
A woman in the circle begins to keen, her voice unearthly and unmoored, a vibrating sound that rivals the terror of the cannon fire. As if it is contagious, several more in the camp start to weep and moan.
“We got to keep quiet,” Sam cautions, and members of the camp rearrange themselves to try to comfort the more vocal among them. “No government troops?” Sam asks Lawson.
Lawson shakes his head. “Just angry white men,” he says. “The cannon turn everything around. After that, anybody could, run. Colored men fall right and left, going toward the courthouse, breaking for the woods. White men circle the courthouse, closing in. I barely make Mirabeau Woods, no stopping, set my eye on the line of trees, keep running. Cannon go off again, earth shaking, more smoke.
“My legs get me to the tree line. Others run too, every which way. Three of us on the barricade take off the same time. Me, Kindred Harvey, Bully Ellis. Kindred, he the fastest, he ahead the whole way. He make the tree line just ahead of me, and the woods swallow him up. I heared him crash through the thicket, breathing hard. I was that close behind, hearing him, but I couldn’t see him no more. Just steps from the woods line. Then a bullet come so close, sound like a mosquito. To my left be Bully Ellis.”
Lawson locks eyes with Sam. “You know Bully,” he says. “Tall farmer down Bayou Darrow?”
Sam nods.
“One minute Bully running, the next he on the ground. Musta took a bullet. On the ground, clutching his side. I only got a few feet more. I keep running. I never seen the white man chasing me, but the horse so close when I cross the tree line, that horse blowing his spit down my neck. Them woods was dark, but I never been so glad to feel pine needles under my feet. Figure we got a chance in the woods.
“One horseback man call out, ‘Don’t follow. We don’t know what they got in there.’”
Lawson stops to compose himself, his big arms trembling. Polly offers him another dipper of water, but he refuses.
“I look back where I just come from. Other colored men breaking through too. No one on horses follow past the trees. I stop and hide behind a tree.
“Bully on the ground still outside the woods. I hear Bully beg, and
he lift up his hands to the men on the horses.
“‘Don’t shoot me again, Mr. Charlie. I bad hurt.’ I can’t make myself move, watching. I know I got to get going, but can’t break free.
“A white man get off his horse. Another hold the reins. He take his rifle by the stock and ram the bayonet into Bully’s chest. The white man don’t say nothing, not to Bully, not to the other men. Just get back on his horse like it a day’s work.”
The group gathered around Lawson listens in silence. None of the mothers move to take their children out of earshot. No one asks questions.
“I start to run again. Don’t stop or turn around till I get here,” Lawson finishes.
In the background, everyone hears the barrage of cannon fire, one round after another, and those in the camp try their best not to let images form around what those fearful noises signify. Denial is one of the tools that allow many of them to get through that day. Sam can only listen to the terrifying rap and chatter of metal on metal each time they fire the cannon, as if they have set loose the demons of hell to come after the trapped men’s souls in the courthouse.
Chapter
15
The open field between Smithfield Quarter and the courthouse is dotted with the lifeless bodies of colored men strewn haphazardly around the grounds, but there are just as many if not more wounded. Relentless rifle fire discourages rescue attempts. Some of the injured attempt to drag themselves to the courthouse as the cannon’s blasts fill the air with deadly missiles. Desperate men, not yet quite dead, inch their way to nowhere.
In the short distance between the ruined east barricade and the courthouse, Israel steps over more bodies than he can count. He keeps low to the ground, unable to run, hobbling as he clutches his injured leg. An object passes close to his face—a bullet or pellet, or some of the other miscellaneous flying debris that chokes the sky. He has to hurry before the white men load the deadly cannon again. He can’t put his full weight on his leg, and when he trips over another body, he falls in an awkward heap onto the dirt, his weapon lost somewhere in the stampede of bodies trying to escape the cannon. Without the use of his rifle as a cane, Israel can’t get himself back up. The hopelessness of his plight begins to sink in.
Still Israel struggles, ineffectively, until he feels a pair of arms in a bear hug around his shoulders, tugging him upward.
“We got to get inside the courthouse,” McCully yells into Israel’s ear. The noise around them is deafening, coming from every direction.
“Help me to my feet,” Israel shouts back, slapping at his leg as if it were a reluctant child that just needs coaxing.
McCully hoists him up, and Israel tests his weight on the un-reliable leg. His trousers are wet with blood.
“Can you walk?” McCully shouts.
“I can make it,” Israel says. He begins to limp toward the brick building, but in two steps, his leg buckles and he falls again. “No good,” he says.
McCully pulls Israel up once more, this time by his wrists, and drapes Israel’s arm around his shoulder.
“Faster if you lean,” McCully says. He breaks into a trot, Israel able to do no more than trail his bad leg behind them, using his good leg and foot to help propel them forward. McCully half drags, half pulls Israel, propping him up, and Israel holds on tight with his left arm.
Colored men at each window of the courthouse cover their approach, firing on the white men outside, and they make it inside the building. The double doors barely slam shut before the next cannon blast. In some ways, being inside is worse than being out in the open. The sounds of impact from the explosions reverberate within the walls while metal ricochets off tin and brick, endlessly repeating, as if the world is ending, as if the pounding detonations tunnel in through their eardrums and burrow under their flesh.
Pandemonium reigns within the claustrophobic tightness of the courthouse. Men yell, men stand or sit in a stupor, succumbing to shock. It is a Babel of voices, the volume shrill by necessity to be heard over the conflagration. The men try to reconstruct the events of the last hour from different vantage points. Shouting at the top of their lungs, they debrief one another, disjointed reports of their individual experiences at the east barricade, the southern bunker, the courthouse rooftop. Together, they construct an assessment of their current circumstances. Two hundred colored men of Colfax with forty rifles among them are trapped in the one-story courthouse, surrounded by at least three hundred white men with heavy artillery. None of their official leaders are inside with them. At least twenty colored men lay dead or dying outside in the courthouse square.
Although Israel is in pain, he makes a quick calculation of the scene in the courthouse. Their numbers are split in half, and any man still outside is on his own. Hopefully some can escape by foot to the fields or scatter into the woods. Outside belongs to the white men. Without the check of the barricades, they can set their cannon just out of rifle range anywhere. Instead of cannon balls, they fill the barrel with buckets of metal bolts, nails, and trace chains. Israel listens to the heavy, unpredictable rap and throttle of metallic debris shot from the white men’s cannon, ricocheting on the ground and striking the courthouse, an echoing rattle of death. Each time they fire, the chaotic backwash of sound rattles through Israel as if he has been mortally struck.
Once again they are stalemated, the men on the outside and the men on the inside. Over an hour has passed since the first cannon blast, but the white men still aren’t close enough to put an end to the siege.
Israel’s face is black with the spread of gunpowder caked layer upon layer around his mouth, from biting the paper off rifle cartridges; his teeth are no longer white, his tongue is no longer pink. He smells nothing but gunpowder, tastes nothing but gunpowder, breathes nothing but gunpowder. The McCullens—McCully, Spenser, and Eli—managed to hang on to their rifles, and they take up positions at the windows, firing periodically to prevent the white men from advancing the cannon or making a run on the courthouse.
Israel sits off to the side in a scavenged chair and makes himself useful, unclogging jammed weapons, reloading for men at the windows. Earlier, he pulled out the metal bolt fragment embedded in his leg, then wrapped his thigh in cloth torn from his shirt. The blood was substantial, but the wound could heal with time, barring infection. Already he is able to hobble around the courthouse.
It is impossible to ignore the bone-hackling racket of the cannon blasts, but in the last hour, Israel has found a way to make his peace with the constant clamor. He once knew a man more afraid of the sound of thunder than of the electric sliver of light that could actually kill him, and Israel had thought the man a fool, and there was a lesson to be learned there. As terrifying as the cannon noises are, the damage from the burning, crashing metal objects can’t reach them through the protection of the brick walls. The White League outside can prevent anyone from getting out of the courthouse, but they can’t root them out. As long as the colored Colfax men have enough firepower inside, they can continue to keep the men outside at a distance.
Kitty-corner to the east side of the courthouse, two men roll the cannon forward by several feet, trying a different angle. McCully and Spenser both take aim and fire on them repeatedly, until the men pull the cannon back to its previous position. With the same dogged determination he demonstrated on his roof watches, McCully stays by his post at the front window facing east, keeping a close eye out for anyone trying to approach.
Israel Smith limps over to stand beside McCully. “Thanks. For out there,” Israel says.
“I wore out my welcome on that roof,” McCully says. “I was coming down one way or the other. This way we both get cover.”
Israel nods. He shuffles off and comes back dragging his chair. “Sitting’s better on the leg,” he says.
McCully rests the muzzle of his gun against the sill, alert for outside movement, but he steals a quick look at the wide, bloodied cloth wrapped around Israel’s thigh.
“What you think the white men g
onna do with us?” Israel asks.
McCully stares out the window toward the tree line. Bullets slap the air, much like the extended skirmish before the first cannon fire of the early afternoon. It is close to three o’clock. McCully doesn’t answer.
“Maybe troops show up now,” Israel says.
“No troops coming.” McCully doesn’t take his eyes away from the window.
“They could be on their way,” Israel insists.
“They had plenty time to get here.” McCully is angry now. “Look around you, Brother Israel. Go one room to the next. You see the men start this fight? Where the politicians? Where the sheriff? Where Levi Allen?”
Sheriff Shaw has made himself scarce in the last week, and no one in the courthouse has seen him at all for the last two days. The last Israel saw of Levi was on the back of his fine horse, riding at full gallop into Mirabeau Woods just after the first cannon blast.
“They bringing help.”
“They gone.”
“What you think those white men out there going to do with us?” Israel asks again.
“Same they always do. Beat us down. Kill us off one by one,” says McCully. “If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow, next year. They keep at us. But we still free men till our time on earth done.”
“They can’t kill us all,” says Israel.
“I hope you right, Brother Israel. A death untold is a death forgot,” says McCully. “Some got to make it out and bear witness. A truly righteous man can’t look at Colfax and call what happen here right.”
There is a subtle change in the sounds of battle. Instead of occasional rounds of fire from rifles and shotguns, interspersed with the thumping, crashing sound of the cannon, it is as if all of the white men on the east side are discharging their guns at once. Spenser, Eli, and McCully fire back, shooting as quickly as they can reload, dodging the hail of incoming metal. Smoky-white residue lingering in the air makes it difficult to see.