But his luck couldn’t hold. It runned out like it always done with him. In stitches. Clean out, the way it always did with him.
It begun when a chunky white feller come out to talk to the Old Man and try to smooth things. He seemed to be some kind of boss. He came into the armory a few times, said I’m coming in peace, and let’s work this out. But each time he came in, he didn’t venture too far in. Would stick his head in and scoot out. He weren’t armed, and after he poked his head and begged his way in a few times, the Old Man told his men, “Don’t shoot him,” and he hollered at the little feller, “Keep off. Keep back. We come to free the Negro.” But that feller kept fiddling with coming back and forth, sticking his head in, then going back out. He never come all the way in. I heard him out there trying to calm the men down outside the gate at one point, for they’d become a mob. Weren’t nobody in control of them. He tried that a couple of times and gave up on that and got to scooting a little farther into the armory again, just peeking in, then scampering back to safety like a little mouse. Finally he got his nerve up and come in too close. He runned behind a water tank in the yard, and when he got in there, he peeked his head out from behind that water tank, and one of the Old Man’s men in the other armory buildings—I believe Ed Coppoc done it—got a bead on him and fired twice and got him. Dropped his game. The man fell and stopped paying taxes right there. Done.
That feller’s death drove that mob outside into a frenzy. They was already spiked by then—them two saloons at the gate was doing big business—but that feller’s death drove them straight cross-eyed. Made ’em into a straight-out mob. Turns out he was the mayor of Harpers Ferry. Fontaine Beckham. Friend to the Rail Man and liked by all, white and colored. Coppoc couldn’t’a knowed it. There was a lot of confusion.
The mayor’s body lay there with the rest of the dead for a couple of hours, while the Virginians outside whooped and hollered and banged their drums and played the fife and promised the Old Man they was gonna come in there and cut him to pieces and make him eat his bloomers. They railed and promised to make his eyeballs into marshmallows. But nothing happened. Dusk come. It weren’t quite dark, but it got quiet out there, quiet as midnight. Something was happening out there in the dusk. They stopped hollering and quieted up. I couldn’t see them then, for it growed dark, but somebody must’a come there, a captain or somebody, and got them sorted out and better organized. They set there for ’bout ten minutes that way, murmuring quietly ’bout such and so and such and such, like little kids whispering, real quiet, not making a whole lot of noise.
The Old Man, watching through the window, drew back. He lit a lantern and shook his head. “That’s it,” he said. “We has them neutralized. Jesus’s grace is more powerful than what any man can do. Of that you can be certain, men.”
Just then they busted through that gate in a horde, four hundred men, the newspaper said later—so many you couldn’t see between ’em, a stampede, firing as they come, in a full-out, ass-and-hindquarters, band-beatin’, honest-to-goodness charge.
We couldn’t take it. We didn’t have the numbers and was spread too thin around the armory. Kagi and the two coloreds from Oberlin, Leary and Copeland, was at the far end in the rifle works building, and they was the first to fall. They was driven out the back windows of the building and fled into the banks of the Shenandoah, where they both got hit. Kagi took a ball to the head and dropped down dead. Leary got hit in the back and followed him. Copeland got farther into the river, managed to climb on a rock in the middle of the river, and was stranded there. A Virginian waded out there and climbed on the rock with him. Both men drawed revolvers and fired. Both guns snapped, too wet to fire. Copeland surrendered. He’d hang in a month.
Meantime, they overrun a man named Leeman in the armory. He dashed out the side door and jumped into the Potomac and tried to swim across. Militiamen spotted him from the bridges and fired. Wounded him but didn’t kill him. He drifted downstream a few feet and managed to pull himself up onto a rock. Another Virginian climbed out to him, holding his pistol out the water to keep it dry. He climbed onto the rock where Leeman lay sprawled on his back. Leeman hollered, “Don’t shoot! I surrender!” The feller smiled, leveled his gun, and blasted Leeman’s face off. Leeman lay sprawled on that rock for hours. He was used as target practice by them men. They got wasted on gut sauce and happily pumped him full of balls like he was a pillow.
One of the Thompson boys, Will, the younger one, got out the armory some kind of way and got trapped on the second floor of the Gault House hotel, across the road from the armory. They burst in on him, drug him downstairs, kept him prisoner for a few minutes, then took him to the B&O Bridge and made ready to shoot him. But a captain runned over and said, “Take this prisoner inside the hotel.”
“The lady who owns the hotel don’t want him,” they said.
“Why not?”
“She said she don’t want her carpet mussed up,” they said.
“Tell her I ordered it. He ain’t gonna muss her carpet.”
Them men didn’t pay that captain no mind. They pushed him off, stood Thompson up on the bridge, backed off him, and blistered him full of holes right there. “Now he’ll muss up her carpet,” they said.
Thompson fell into the water. It was shallow water down there, and from where we was, you could see him floating the next morning, his face staring up out the water, his eyes wide, asleep forever, as his body bobbed up and down, his boots licking the bank.
We was holding ’em off at the engine house, but it was a full-out gunfight. From a corner of the yard, the rifle works building, the last man living out there, the colored man Dangerfield Newby, seen us making a fight of it and tried to make it for us.
Newby had a wife and nine children in slavery just thirty miles off. He’d been holed up in the rifle works with Kagi and the others. When Kagi and his men made for the Shenandoah River, Newby smartly held up and let the rest chase them others. While they done that, he jumped out a window on the Potomac River side and sprinted across the armory toward the engine house on the back side of the armory. That smart nigger was making time, too. He aimed to get to us.
A white feller from the back of the water tower seen him and throwed a bead on him. Newby saw him, drawed his rifle and dropped him, and kept coming.
He had almost made it to the engine house when a feller from a house across the street leaned through an upper-story window and laid an answer on Newby with a squirrel gun loaded with a six-inch nail. That nail plugged straight into Newby’s neck like a spear. Blood burst out his neck and the ground caught him, and he was dead before he got there.
We was fully shooting out cap for cap with them when this happened, so nobody could do nothing but watch, but the mob paid attention to his dying. He was the first colored they could get a hold of, and they was thirsty for him. They grabbed him, pulled his body out the entrance and into the street. They kicked him, pummeled him. Then a man ran up to him and cut off his ears. Another pulled off his pants and cut off his private parts. Another poked sticks into the bullet wound. Then they drug him up the road to a hog pen and tossed him in there, and the hogs rooted on him, one of them pulling out something long and elastic from his stomach area, one end of it being in the hog’s mouth and the other in Newby’s body.
The sight of Newby getting rooted by them hogs seemed to incite the Old Man’s men to cussing and shooting, and they fired into the militia with deadly effect, for they had worked in right close on us in numbers, and now the Captain’s men, furious, drove them back. They done it to effect for a few minutes, but there weren’t no chance. They had us then. They closed the door. We was surrounded. Without Kagi and the others to cover us from the other end of the yard, there was no more driving them out the gate. They was at all points ’bout us, but they lingered now, stopped their charges and hung where they was, just out of rifle range. Didn’t come no closer. The Old Man’s army had stopped ’em wh
ere they was, but more flooded into the yard on both ends, and they couldn’t be driven out the gate now. They was right there, ’bout two hundred yards off. We was defeated.
I found the Lord full out then. It’s true I found Him earlier that day, but I never full out accepted Him in total until that time, being that my Pa was thickly scandalous in the preaching department and the Old Man bored me to tears with the Word, but God works like He wants to. He outright laid on me full-out then, for He’d given me a warning before that He was coming into my heart in full, and He came right then on me full blast. If you think looking at three hundred boiling-mad, half-cocked Virginians holding every kind of breechloader under God’s sun staring back at you with murder in their eyes is a ticket to redemption, you is on the dot. I seen what they done to Newby, and every colored in that engine house knowed whatever devilment Newby got, we was two trips short of, for Newby was lucky. He got his while he was dead, and the rest of us was conjured to get it wide awake and alive, if we lived long enough to get it in that fashion. I found the Lord surely. I called on Jesus outright. A feeling come over me. I sat in a corner, covered my head, pulled out from my bonnet my Good Lord Bird feather, and held that thing tight, just a-praying, and saying, “Lord, let me be Your angel.”
The Old Man didn’t hear me, though. He was busy conjuring up ideas, for the men in the room had dropped away from the walls and windows to surround him, as he backed off from his window and wiped his beard thoughtfully. “We has them where we wants them,” he announced cheerfully. He turned to Stevens and said, “Take Watson out with a prisoner and tell them we will begin exchanging our men for Negroes. By now Cook and the others has hived some more bees at the schoolhouse and the farm. On our signal, they will begin their attack from the rear with the Negroes, thus provoking our escape. It is time to move into the mountains.”
Stevens didn’t want to do it. “The time to move into the mountains was about noon,” he said. “Yesterday.”
“Have faith, Lieutenant. The game is not up yet.”
Stevens grumbled and roughly grabbed a hostage and nodded at young Watson, who dutifully followed. The engine house door was actually three double doors, and they had roped them all shut. They unwrapped the rope from the center door, slowly pushed it open, and walked out.
The Old Man put his face to the window. “We is negotiating hostages in exchange for safe passage of my Negro army,” he shouted. Then he added, “In good faith.”
He was answered by a blast of grape that drove him back from the window and knocked him clear onto the floor. The Frederick the Great sword which he’d stuck in his belt, the one we’d captured from Colonel Washington, clattered away.
The Old Man weren’t badly wounded nor dead, but by the time he dusted himself off and got his sword back in his belt and went back to look out the window, Stevens lay on the ground outside badly wounded, and Watson was gut shot, banging desperately on the door of the engine house with a death wound.
The men opened the door for Watson, who came tumbling in there, spilling blood and guts. He lay on the floor, and the Old Man went over to him. He looked at his son, gut shot and moaning, just stood over him. It hurt him. You could see it. He shook his head.
“They just don’t understand,” he said.
He knelt over his son and felt his head, then his neck pulse. Watson’s eyes was shut, but he was still breathing.
“You done your duty well, son.”
“Thank you, Father,” Watson said.
“Die like a man,” he said.
“Yes, Father.”
It would take Watson ten hours, but he done just as his Father asked him to.
32
Getting Gone
Night came. The militia had retreated again, this time with their wounded and with Stevens, who was still living. They lit lanterns outside and it got deathly quiet. All the shouts and hollering outside was pushed across the street and gone. The mob was moved away from the armory gates. Some kind of new order had come over out there. Something else was going on. The Old Man ordered the Emperor to climb up to the hole in the roof blowed out by the fallen timber to take a look, which he done.
He came back down and said, “The federals is out there, from Washington, D.C. I seen their flag and their uniforms.” The Old Man shrugged.
They sent over a man, who walked over to one of those wooden doors that was lashed shut. He stuck his eye in a chink hole in the door and knocked. He called out, “I want Mr. Smith.” That was the name the Old Man used at the Kennedy farm when he went around in disguise at the Ferry.
The Old Man came to the door but didn’t open it. “What is it?”
The big eye peered inside. “I am Lieutenant Jeb Stuart of the United States Cavalry. I have orders here from my commander, Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee. Colonel Lee is outside the gates and demands your surrender.”
“I demands freedom for the Negro race of people that is living in bondage in this land.”
Stuart might as well have been singing to a dead hog. “What is it you want at this direct moment, sir, in addition to that demand?” he asked.
“Nothing else. If you can cede that immediately, we will withdraw. But I don’t think it’s in your power to do so.”
“Who am I speaking with? Can you show your face?”
The wood door had a panel in it for seeing. The Old Man slid it back. Stuart blinked a moment in surprise, then stood back and scratched his head. “Why, ain’t you Old Osawatomie Brown? Who gived us so much trouble in Kansas Territory?”
“I am.”
“You are surrounded by twelve hundred federal troops. You have to surrender.”
“I will not. I will exchange the prisoners I have in return for the safe passage of me and my men across the B&O Bridge. That is a possibility.”
“That cannot be arranged,” Stuart said.
“Then our business is done.”
Stuart stood there a moment, disbelieving.
“Well, go on, then,” the Old Man said. “Our business is finished, unless you yourself can free the Negro from bondage.” He slammed the porthole shut.
Stuart went back to the gate and disappeared. But inside the engine house, the hostages begun to sense the change in things. The bottom rail had been on top the whole night, but the minute they got a sense the Old Man was doomed, them slave owners started chirping out their views. There was five of ’em setting along the wall together, including Colonel Washington, and he started chirping at the Captain, which gived the rest courage to start in on him also.
“You’re committing treason,” he said.
“You’ll hang, old man,” said another.
“You ought to give yourself up. You’ll get a fair trial,” said another.
The Emperor strode over to them. “Shut up,” he barked.
They shrank back, except for Colonel Washington. He was snippy to the end. “You’re gonna look good ducking through a hangman’s noose, you impudent nigger.”
“If that’s the case, then I’ll spot you,” the Emperor said, “and blast you now in spite of redemption.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” the Old Man said. The Captain stood by the window, alone, staring out thoughtfully. He spoke to the Emperor without looking at him. “Emperor, come over here.”
The Emperor came over to the corner and the Old Man placed his arms around the colored man’s shoulders and whispered to him. Whispered to him quite a long time. From the back, I saw the Emperor’s shoulders bunch up and he shook his head several times in “no” fashion. The Old Man whispered to him some more, in a firm fashion, then left him to watch the window again, leaving the Emperor to himself.
The Emperor suddenly seemed spent. He drifted away from the Old Man and stopped in the farthest corner of the engine house, away from the prisoners. He seemed, for the first time, downright glum. The wind gone right out of hi
m at that moment, and he stared out the window into the night.
It growed quiet now.
Up to that point there was so much going on in the engine house, there weren’t no time to think of what it all meant. But now that darkness fell and it was quiet outside the armory and inside it too, there was time to think of consequences. There was ’bout twenty-five colored in that room. Of that number I reckon at least nine, ten, maybe more, was gonna hang surely and knowed it: Phil, the Coachman, three Negro women, and four Negro men, all of them was enthusiastic helping the Old Man’s army, loading weapons, chinking out holes, organizing ammunition. The white hostages in that room would squeal on them surely. Only God knows what their names was, but their masters knowed ’em. They was in trouble, for they got right busy fighting for their freedom once they figured what the game was. They was doomed. Weren’t no bargaining left for them. Of the rest, I’d say maybe half of that number, five or six, helped but was less enthusiastic ’bout fighting. They done it but had to be ordered to do it. They knowed their masters was watching and was never enthusiastic. And then the last of them, that last five, they wouldn’t hang, for they sucked up to their masters to the limit. They didn’t do nothing but what they was forced to do. A couple even fell asleep during the fighting.
Now that the thing was swinging the other way, them last five was setting pretty. But the ones in the middle, them that was on the fence and had half a chance to live, they swung back toward their masters something terrible. They sucked up to ’em full stride, angling to get back to their good graces. One of ’em, a feller named Otis, said, “Marse, this is a bad dream.” His marse ignored him. Didn’t say a word to him. I can’t blame that Negro for sucking up the way he done. He knowed he was dead up a hog’s ass if his master put a bad word out on him, and the master weren’t playing his hold card. Not yet. They wasn’t out the woods yet.