Red River

by Lalita Tademy

“Leave him in there,” the man giving orders says. “Take the others outside with the rest.”

  The white men herd Israel and the five other men out of the courthouse. It takes several minutes for Israel’s eyes to adjust to the glare of the sun. The smells of smoke and charred flesh hang in the air, reminding Israel of hog-slaughtering season. It is all he can do not to stumble and give these men an excuse to shoot. His leg throbs with each step, but he doesn’t dare speak or call attention to himself. The grounds around the courthouse are awash in bodies. There are colored men in unnatural poses as far as the eye can see, shot in flight and left exactly as they fell. Israel turns his head away quickly, only to find more of the same in the opposite direction. There are at least one hundred lifeless bodies of the colored men of Colfax, their blood still seeping into the soil around the courthouse.

  One of the white men, baby-faced with bad skin, little more than a boy, really, younger than Spenser, smashes the butt of his pistol between Israel’s shoulder blades. “Move along, coon,” he says. “We got something even better planned for you.”

  It is a slow march through the ruined town of Colfax, full of detours, and the string of prisoners grows. They add four more colored survivors from just outside the courthouse, wounded but able-bodied enough to walk. Two additional men are discovered hiding in a corncrib in the white section of town, and they are pulled out, bound at the ankles so they can’t run, and thrown to the back of the elongating human queue. Most of the fight is leeched from the men gathered in this way, and the rope used to bind them is almost a formality. Their weapons have been confiscated, their friends and neighbors are dead, the fate of their families is in question.

  Once stragglers from the vicinity of the courthouse grow scarce, the group pushes on toward Smithfield Quarter. The roads are deserted of colored men, and it isn’t until the third house that the captors find anyone home. October White, a man who works at the livery and repeatedly refused to join the cause, lives there with his wife and six children. Israel waits in the middle of the dusty street with the other prisoners, bound together by rope and defeat.

  The man who struck Israel with the butt of his pistol is named Jim. “Everybody out,” he shouts into the house.

  The family exits in a cluster, fearful but obedient, October first, in his patched trousers and with his straw work hat askew. Behind him comes his wife, a pale-faced woman cradling one baby in her arm and carrying another, slightly older, on her hip. Clutching at her long skirt are a boy and a girl, with an older girl who leads her sister by the hand immediately behind.

  “We didn’t do nothing,” October protests. “I never mix in with the courthouse men.”

  The men bind October and put him with the other prisoners as his wife stands cowed and their children cling to her. October catches her eye and faintly shakes his head, but she knows better than to interfere.

  “I didn’t do nothing,” October says again, but they ignore him and yank the string of prisoners forward.

  Israel trudges with the others, his mind a jumble of escape plans, fatigue, and the throbbing pain that branches out from his ankle to his thigh. Their captors are farmers, as young as sixteen and as old as seventy-two, men of the soil, but only a few own the land they work. Israel tries to hear their conversation, tries to extract some shred of hope for the strung-together colored men of Colfax. The round-up squads don’t appear to have official leaders, only individuals taking charge.

  “I don’t belong with them,” October White says again. Baby-face Jim smashes him in the face with his pistol, hits him until October falls, blood oozing from his nose.

  Narcisse Fredieu steps forward. “That’s enough,” he says.

  “Why you here if you so soft?” Jim asks. “They try to kill us and got designs on our women. I say we string ’em up now.”

  “Round ’em up is the job,” Narcisse says. “Sheriff Nash decides what to do.”

  Jim turns from Narcisse, addressing himself to the colored prisoners instead. “No more talking,” he shouts before walking away. The colored men closest to October hoist the beaten man up from the ground and prop him between them to get him standing.

  The designated collection point is Calhoun’s Sugarhouse. By the time Israel’s group reaches the property and is thrown in with other prisoners, they number almost forty. They are herded outside to wait for night to fall, tied together by hands and feet with ropes. Israel is bound to Eli McCullen on one side and Clay Murphy on the other, and they stand in a tight clump as white men mill about.

  Three white men come from the sugarhouse and jerry-rig a six-foot wooden plank, placing it lengthwise across the windowsill in front of where the colored men stand. One end of the plank is inside the building and the other outside, suspended four feet above the ground under an old oak tree.

  “Ready,” one of the men calls.

  About thirty white men empty out into the sugarhouse yard, jostling one another near the end of the board, as if angling for front-row seats. Baby-face Jim produces a thick length of rope, one end coiled and knotted into a noose, and throws the other end over a low hanging branch, leaving the loop to dangle free above the plank’s end.

  “You-all boys pay close attention,” Jim says to the prisoners.

  Israel turns his mind inward to calm himself and prays for deliverance. There are too many colored men to hang them all from one rope. This is symbolic. This is sport.

  Two white men continue to fiddle with the plank, positioning the end of the wide board more directly under the tree branch. Scuffling noises come from inside the sugarhouse as someone is forcibly hoisted onto the flat piece of wood. It has to be an important prisoner. Israel wonders if they captured Levi Allen, if their commander will be first to take the board walk.

  A white man emerges on the plank with his hands tied behind his back, blinking into the direct light of the setting sun. It is Sheriff Shaw, his clothes so filthy he looks as though he has rolled in mud, his already ruddy face red and constricted. Someone behind forces his head down so he can duck under the upper sill, and the sheriff crouches to fit himself through the window opening. He walks one small step and stands upright on the plank into the rapidly falling dusk. He pauses, disbelieving, until a man behind nudges him at the small of his back with the barrel of his Colt pistol. Prodded, Shaw takes another tentative step forward onto the plank.

  Israel has not seen Shaw since Saturday—he’d assumed their sheriff had slipped to safety like the others—but it appears Nash’s men captured him before he could get away. Here is their sheriff, a white man, as much a prisoner as the colored men tethered together outside. If the captors will do this to a white man, what is in store for them?

  Again Sheriff Shaw is pushed from behind, and he takes two more small steps forward, the unsupported plank sagging under his weight. Inside, a burly white man holds down the anchoring portion of the flat timber, waiting for the rope to be looped around Sheriff Shaw’s neck and the signal to let loose the board and release Sheriff Shaw to a tightened noose and a broken neck.

  “Don’t do this,” Sheriff Shaw pleads. He turns to one man in particular. “Bob. Bob Whittington. You know you can’t let them do this to me.”

  The man behind pushes the sheriff farther toward the end of the plank. A horseman fits the collar of the noose around Sheriff Shaw’s neck.

  “I’m white,” Sheriff Shaw says to Bob Whittington.

  “You betrayed your race,” Bob spits back at the sheriff.

  “Bob, wait,” Sheriff Shaw says. “You have to step in.”

  Abruptly, Sheriff Shaw reaches forward and flashes an intricate hand gesture to Bob Whittington. For a long moment, the two men just look at each other, staring each other down. The board stays steady under Sheriff Shaw’s feet.

  Finally, Bob Whittington speaks. “This man’s a Freemason,” he says. “Let him go.”

  Reluctantly, Sheriff Nash nods, and they set Sheriff Shaw free.

  Israel and the others outside the sugarho
use watch silently as Sheriff Shaw has his hands untied. Narcisse Fredieu loosens the noose from around his neck and helps him down from the plank. Israel has heard of the Freemasons, a white man’s secret society pledged to help one another out under duress, but he can’t believe the power that allows the sheriff to go free now. Such is the brotherhood of white men, he thinks.

  “Move out,” Bob Whittington says to Sheriff Shaw. He is angry, a warning in his tone that suggests he is capable of changing his mind at any minute.

  Sheriff Shaw gives a nervous backward glance in the direction of the terrified, filthy, injured, hungry, thirsty group of colored prisoners standing outside Calhoun’s Sugarhouse, men who risked everything so he could hold office for three weeks, but he doesn’t allow his gaze to connect with any of theirs before taking off from the sugarhouse toward the woods, first in a fast walk, then at a run. Israel watches the sheriff’s retreating form, but his mind has already skipped ahead to figure out who will be next.

  The white men in the sugarhouse are restless, as if they don’t know quite what to do with themselves now that Sheriff Shaw is out of reach. They break into smaller groups, disgusted by his release. Jugs of hard liquor are plentiful, and the white men share them freely, each man taking a long swig before passing the container to the next, their voices coarsening and growing louder. Before long, they eye the prisoners.

  “Let’s do one of them,” someone says.

  “Enough,” says Sheriff Nash. “We cleared the courthouse. We done enough for one day.”

  “What’s the harm?” says Baby-face Jim, joining his voice to the men from Sicily Island. “We all know they got to pay.”

  “This is my town, and I decide in the morning,” Sheriff Nash says. “They’re mine.”

  Israel’s leg throbs with pain, but it seems of little consequence now.

  Chapter

  17

  T hey huddle in small groups, dew-dampened quilts suspended overhead in the makeshift tent town along the banks of Boggy Bayou swamp, lost in individual grief. Waves of eyewitness reports pour in about the death or maiming of friend or acquaintance, family or neighbor. The swamp dwellers are spent, as if they have been swept overboard into a violent sea at the height of a storm and washed up at last onto shore, without further reserve.

  By late afternoon, eerie quiet cuts the swamp like a chill wind. All the dwellers can do is wait, helpless. The barrage of cannon fire from the direction of Colfax ends, fades to frenzied gunfire, and finally becomes silent sounds of rebellion’s end. Fresh accounts of carnage reach those safely outside center city. New stories are added, told and retold as the camp’s numbers swell with courthouse escapees and fleeing townspeople.

  Each colored straggler, either led or stumbling onto the encampment grounds, adds a different shading to the tapestry of unfolding tragedy, and testifies how the devastation has reached out to touch them. The swamp dwellers, starved for the smallest crumb of new information, refuse to allow any eyewitness rest until he recites a complete list of who he knows for certain has been saved, who he knows to be dead. By the time the sun is on the wane, all of those shivering in the swamp have offered up prayers too numerous to count, some for the souls of their lost men, others with desperate hope for their men’s escape.

  Almost all of the McCullen men have been sighted, their lifeless bodies identified beyond doubt, felled within the courthouse walls or outside in the no-man’s-land that is now a mass graveyard. There are several accounts from different sources of McCully’s end, the details similar enough to convince Sam of the story’s truth. McCully died trying to put out the fire on the roof, and his son Spenser was the first casualty when men attempting to escape the burning building tried to surrender. With each new version of the same events, Sam almost feels the sting of the bullets and the scorch of the flames. If not for McCully’s insistence that Sam take away the women and children, it would have been him. Maybe it should have been him.

  Accounts of Israel Smith’s whereabouts trickle in, but unlike the reports on McCully, these aren’t clear on whether Israel is dead or alive. One eyewitness reports seeing Israel take a bullet in the leg outside the courthouse in the first cannon blast.

  “We don’t know nothing for sure till we sees it with our own eyes,” Polly says to Lucy. All afternoon Polly stays close to Lucy and her two oldest sons, David and Noby. Together the two women busy themselves with food preparation and general cleanup, sending their sons off on small chores to gather kindling or bury refuse, but never outside of their line of sight.

  Late afternoon, a young man in his twenties limps into camp and recounts seeing Israel alive inside the courthouse, one of several pulling McCully’s body in from a window. The young man was also trapped in the courthouse but jumped out of a side window as the building burned. Despite the waiting cannon, rifles, fire, and smoke, he ran toward the woods, not daring to stop even after he was struck four times by bullets in his thighs and back. He is one of the lucky ones, surviving his flight attempt.

  “If this man make it out the building after the fire, why not Israel?” asks Polly. “We got to keep hope,” she tells Lucy.

  “I pray on it,” Lucy says, gathering her boys closer to her on either side, her stomach a conspicuous jutting that will soon enough be her ninth child.

  In due course, as the sun grows colder and the news more disheartening, the two women abandon their tasks and sit together by one of the campfires, waiting. Polly gives up her shawl and drapes it around Lucy’s shoulders, and Green takes the blanket he and Jackson share and gives it to David and Noby.

  Within the hour comes another report that Israel was sighted again, alive, part of a group of captured colored prisoners marched to Calhoun’s Sugarhouse by a large covey of white men.

  Sam can’t make himself sit still. Of all the gruesome accounts he has heard through the day, Israel’s saga upsets him most. His mind refuses to release the image of his friend and neighbor repeatedly one half-step away from death. He drinks in every detail of Israel’s ordeal, every nuance, a thin tonic to keep him hopeful as he prays for Israel from his privileged post in the swamp. When Sam looks into Noby’s face, he sees Israel instead, and it torments him to think of this young boy without a father, the pregnant wife without a husband, Israel’s small-woods church in The Bottom without its pastor.

  Hiding safely in the woods during and after so many have died leaves Sam no peace. He revels in the fact that he is still alive, so steeped in his relief that it feeds his guilt. He begins to shape the notion of going to look for Israel. His link to Israel feels unfinished, as if there is some action he must personally take.

  Near dusk, Levi Allen appears in the swamp camp with a bedraggled collection of eleven armed colored men, some badly wounded. He describes what he has seen from his staked-out position at an entrance into Mirabeau Woods. For over two hours, in the role of gatekeeper and sentry, Levi made sure no white men pursued any colored man managing to cross over into the wooded area. “Giving ours a fighting chance to make it out,” Levi tells Sam. “Come a point wasn’t nobody else to save but us.”

  Levi stays just long enough for darkness to fall, and leaves the most injured men at the campsite. Sam leads the military man south to point him toward Boyce, where he can follow the bayou, cross the river, sneak aboard a boat after dark, and slip out of the parish.

  “I’m going back into Colfax to find Israel,” Sam shares with Levi when they come to the last cross point in the woods.

  “White man’s blood still running too hot,” says Levi. “You likely get caught yourself. What good that do anybody?”

  “What if he alive?”

  “What if he is?” replies Levi. “Nobody getting them out the hands of the mob tonight. We got to live to fight another day.”

  Sam gives Levi final directions. “Good luck,” he says.

  The two men make their farewells, Levi on his black stallion headed south, Sam on foot headed back to Boggy Bayou. He comes across two more courthouse
escapees and takes them to the camp as he listens to their testimony.

  At Boggy Bayou, Sam checks the perimeters for hostile intruders, watches the women comfort the wounded, and listens again to variations of the same grisly stories of carnage until he thinks he can’t stand one more minute of raw human suffering, of unrelieved despair.

  “We going hunting,” he announces to Green and Jackson, and his sons jump up from their place beside Polly around the fire to join him.

  Noby Smith sits off on a log by himself, separate from everyone. He looks small and hunched, lost.

  “You too, son,” Sam calls to Noby, and the boy looks up, gratitude flooding his face. He runs to catch up to the Tademys, already on the move.

  They rarely speak in the woods, and then only small talk having to do with the mechanics of hunting. The boys are like ducklings, with Green in the lead. Jackson falls in behind Green, and Noby, younger still, attaches himself to Jackson. By the time they return to camp with two large possums, there are multiple fires lit, and several communal cooking pots presided over by Polly, Lucy, and the other women. Sam sets Green to the task of skinning the possums, and again he makes his rounds. The possum meat is split among kettles, flavored with roots and wild greens gathered earlier. The women throw themselves into the chore of feeding their families, an escape into the obligations of everyday chores. They are all hungry, despite the circumstances, and share the food as far as it will go, not sure how long they’ll have to stay in this place.

  “I’m going to Colfax to look around,” Sam announces when he finishes the greasy stew Polly has dished up for him.

  Anger pinches at Polly’s face, but it is the fear in Jackson’s eyes, so naked as to be contagious, that causes Sam to waver.

  “Please, Sam,” Polly begs. “What good it gonna do? Stay here with us.”

  “Might be somebody need help,” Sam says.

  “Things settle down some by tomorrow,” Polly bargains. “Go in the daylight. Too many white men liquored up tonight.”