“Nice shot!” another Confederate trooper said. “He looked just like one o' them clowns in the circus, way he turned somersets there.”
“He did, didn't he?” Ward paused in reloading, though not for long-his hands knew what to do even without direction. “Let's see if I can get me another coon like that.”
“Well, it ain't like we don't have plenty to pick from,” said the other soldier in butternut.
“Yeah.” Ward brought the loaded Enfield up to his shoulder and found another target.
A colored soldier rolled past Sergeant Ben Robinson. The man was groaning and trying to clutch at his chest, but his arms and legs kept flying out every which way. “Poor bastard,” Sandy Cole said. “He ain't dead yet, he gonna be by the time he fetch up 'longside the river.
“Ain't it the truth?” Robinson said. A Mini? ball cracked past his head. A few inches lower and he would have rolled and slid all the way down to the Mississippi, too. The only difference was, nobody would have wondered if he was dead.
Aaron Fentis looked up the slope to the top of the bluff, where Bedford Forrest's troopers were taking potshots at the whites and Negroes below them. “Why the hell those officers of our'n want us to come down here?” he demanded. “Dem Secesh sojers, dey shoot us down like we was so many wild turkeys.”
“They say the gunboat keep the Rebs off us,” Robinson said.
“Dey say, dey say.” Fentis's voice went high and mocking. “I say dey don' know what dey talkin' 'bout. Dey say we hold out Forrest, too. Was dey right? How much good dat damn gunboat do us up till now? Any a-tall? I ain't seen it. You seen it, Sergeant?” Even in disaster, he remembered to stay respectful to Ben Robinson's chevrons.
He should have stayed respectful to the white officers in command at Fort Pillow, too. Robinson should have reproved him for not sounding respectful enough. He knew he should, but couldn't make himself do it. Aaron Fentis might be disrespectful, but that didn't mean he was wrong. The whites in command at Fort Pillow hadn't known what was going on. Well, maybe Major Booth had, but he got killed too soon for it to matter. Since then…
Robinson wouldn't have wanted to surrender to the Confederates, even if they did offer to treat Negroes as prisoners of war. But he'd thought, as Major Bradford had thought, that Fort Pillow could hold. That turned out to be mistaken. And now there was no talk of taking anybody prisoner, colored man or white. The Rebs kept yelling, “Black flag!” and firing away for all they were worth.
“Maybe they stop killin' people if we surrender now,” Charlie Key said.
“Who kin do it?” Robinson asked bleakly. “Major Booth, he dead. Major Bradford, he want to go on fightin'.”
“He git killed, he go on fightin' much longer,” Key said. “Then somebody else kin tell the Rebs we is givin' up.” He paused, then added, “Do Jesus, I surrender right now if I don't reckon they shoot me dead fo' tryin'.”
That was defeatism. Sergeant Robinson knew he shouldn't let anybody get away with it. In happier times, he wouldn't have. But how could you blame a man for defeatism after you were defeated? If scrambling down toward the riverbank with Confederate soldiers shooting at you from above wasn't defeat, Robinson didn't want to find out what was.
If he thought some Reb would let him give up, he supposed he would throw down his Springfield, too. He'd done everything he could reasonably do to defend the fort. But getting anyone in butternut to accept a black man's surrender wouldn't be easy-and might not be possible.
If the Federals couldn't quit, they had to go on fighting. But Robinson couldn't even do that, not now. No Confederate soldiers were within bayonet reach, and he had no cartridges for the rifle musket he'd picked up. He wondered if any of the Union soldiers going down toward the riverbank carried more than a handful of ammunition.
But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a white man below him yelled, “You need to shoot back at the stinkin' Rebs, get over here! We got us crates and crates of cartridges.”
“Major Bradford, he done thought o' somethin', anyways,” Sandy
Cole said.
“I reckon,” Robinson said. “Reckon that make once, too.”
Was he bitter? Just because everything Bradford tried turned out to be wrong? For a moment, he tried to deny it even to himself. He wondered why, when it was so plainly true. Only one thing occurred to him: that as a black man, he had no right to criticize what a white man did.
“Hell I don't,” he muttered. What that white man did was altogether too likely to get him killed. Was a damn fool any less a damn fool because he was white? Whites seemed to think so, or at least to believe a damn fool was more a damn fool if he happened to be black.
There were black damn fools. Robinson had known enough of them to have no doubts about that. But there were white damn fools, too. And if one of them wore oak leaves on his shoulders, he could be a damn fool on a scale most Negroes only dreamt of.
Robinson awkwardly made his way down toward the crates of cartridges. If he had to go on fighting, he would make the best fight he could. He was clumsy loading the Springfield, too; most of his training was as an artilleryman, not a foot soldier.
He'd just finished setting a percussion cap on the nipple when a burst of fire came from farther south along the riverbank. Panic swept through him. If the Rebs were shooting at the garrison from there as well as from the top of the bluff, the surviving Federals wouldn't last long. But not many minnies tore into the Negroes and whites in blue uniforms.
Instead, bullets clattered off the gunboat's iron sides. They sounded like hail on a tin roof. For a moment, Robinson wondered what good they would do the Rebs. Ironclads were supposed to be proof against cannonballs, let alone Mini? balls.
But then a white soldier standing not far away said, “Fuck me if I'd want to raise the gunports with the Rebs putting that much lead in the air. You do, you'll catch a bullet with your teeth.”
“They don't open them ports; they can't shoot!” Robinson exclaimed. “They can't shoot, they don't do us no good.”
“You noticed that, did you?” the white trooper said. “Nothin' gets by you, does it, boy?”
Normally, that boy would have infuriated Robinson, the more so since he outranked the white. Now he was too appalled to call the other man on it. If Major Bradford was wrong about this… We all die, the colored sergeant thought numbly.
Up on top of the bluff, a cannon boomed. It hadn't fired for some time, but now the Rebs had got it loaded again. A ball splashed into the water not far from the gunboat. That wasn't great shooting, but it didn't need to be. If the amateur gunners up there-they couldn't be anything else-kept on, sooner or later they might hit. How well armored was the gunboat against fire from above? Ben Robinson had no idea.
Maybe the gunboat's captain didn't, either. And maybe he didn't want to find out. Black smoke poured out of the stack. The gunboat began to move-not toward the riverbank to blast the Confederates and rescue Fort Pillow's embattled garrison, but north, up the Mississippi, away from danger.
“You yellow-bellied son of a bitch bastard!” the white man howled. Robinson nodded helplessly. The gunboat paid no attention to either one of them. Away she steamed, faster and faster.
X
When Bill Bradford watched the New Era steam up the Mississippi, he felt like… He didn't know what he felt like. Like a man whose intended bride jilted him at the altar? Something like that, maybe. But a jilted bridegroom didn't die at the altar. He just wished he could.
The men defending Fort Pillow, on the other hand… Captain James Marshall, the commanding officer aboard the New Era, must have decided his gunboat couldn't stand the fire from the riverbank and the cannonballs from the artillery captured up on the bluff. He saw to the safety of his own men. He saw to their safety, yes-but he left the garrison to its fate.
A panicked trooper from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry clutched at Bradford's sleeve and shouted, “What the hell do we do now, sir?” An equally panicked colored artil
leryman all but screamed the same question at him.
“Boys, save your lives,” Bradford said numbly. “I don't know what else to tell you.” He didn't know how to tell them to save their lives. He didn't know how to save his own life, either. The terror that filled the soldiers took root in his own heart, too. What to do? What to do?
From the south came the exultant whoops and jeers of the Confederate cavalrymen who'd forced the New Era to flee. “Yellowbellies!” they yelled, and “Cowards!” and “You stinking, gutless sons of bitches!” Hearing the enemy shout exactly what he was thinking was as humiliating an experience as Major Bradford had ever known.
Save your lives. It was easy to say. With Bedford Forrest's troopers already shooting down at the Federals from the top of the bluff, with those Secesh soldiers whooping and jeering by the river, it wouldn't be easy to do. He wondered if the Rebs would accept surrenders now. Part of him wished he'd taken Forrest's offer while he had the chance. Forrest was known for ploys and tricks, but he wasn't fooling this time. Bradford wished he had been.
Yellowbellied coward, Bradford thought furiously. Stinking son of a bitch. He stared across the muddy waters of the Mississippi at the receding New Era. If he ever met Captain Marshall again, he didn't think God Himself could keep him from punching the gunboat's skipper in the nose. And if Marshall felt inclined to resent that, Bradford was ready to go as much further as the Navy man cared to.
Bradford laughed a bitter laugh. He knew he wasn't a particularly brave man. He did his best to hide that, from others and perhaps most of all from himself, but he knew it. All the same, the prospect of a fight, or even a duel, with James Marshall worried him not a bit. He knew why, too. It was what he would have called a hypothetical question in the courtroom. A lot of things would have to happen for him to face Marshall again. Chief among them was his living through the combat here. And the chances of that didn't look good.
Some of the men still had fight in them. They grabbed cartridges from the crates Bradford had ordered brought here and fired at the closest Confederates. Major Bradford would have expected his white cavalry troopers to show more spirit than the colored artillerymen. The colored soldiers were only niggers in uniform, after all. He would have expected that, but he would have been wrong. Some blacks were terrified and despairing, yes, but so were some whites. The proportions seemed about the same in men of both races.
What that meant… was as hypothetical as punching James Marshall in the nose. If Bradford got out of this, he could worry about it later. If he didn't get out of this, he wouldn't worry about anything later.
“Ain't gonna give up to no Secesh sojers,” said a colored sergeant ramming a Mini? ball down the muzzle of his Springfield. “Even if them fuckers don't shoot me fo' the fun of it, reckon they sell me later. Ain't gonna be no slave again.”
Not many of the troopers from Bradford's own regiment showed anything close to that kind of spirit. The white major stared at the black underofficer. Bradford's own opinion of Negroes wasn't that far from Nathan Bedford Forrest's or any other Confederate's. He thought they made good slaves, bad freemen, and worse soldiers. He favored the U.S.A. because he didn't want to see the country broken in two-and because several prominent men in west Tennessee with whom he didn't get along well went all-out for secession. He'd paid them back ten times over. But he was worse than indifferent toward Negro rights; he was downright hostile, and didn't care who knew it.
Or he hadn't cared who knew it. He didn't think he would be smart to go on about niggers and coons where that grimly determined sergeant could hear him. The way the blacks in Fort Pillow fought had surprised him. The way the colored sergeant was ready to go on fighting no matter how bad things looked astonished him.
If we were wrong all along about what Negroes can do, then it doesn't matter if the Confederates win this fight, he thought. It doesn't even matter if they win this war. Sooner or later, their cause is doomed, and it will fall to pieces. It has to, because it rests on lies.
On a cosmic level, that might well be so. Back here in the mud by the edge of the Mississippi, who won and who lost mattered very much, because it told who lived and who died. Some of the Federals started south along the riverbank, perhaps hoping to get past the Confederate troopers who'd helped drive off the New Era.
A couple of them looked back at him, as if wondering if he would try to stop them. He didn't. For one thing, he wasn't sure they would obey him. Why should they, when his orders had led them to their present sorry state? For another, he wasn't sure they were wrong. What were they supposed to do, wait here for Bedford Forrest's troopers to shoot them to pieces? Certain disaster lay down that road. Maybe, if they pushed hard…
And maybe not, too. Every choice Bill Bradford made that day, even keeping his mouth shut, proved wrong. The men in blue fired a few shots-hardly enough to dignify with the name of volley-at the Confederates. The roar of musketry that answered sent them reeling back in dismay. Some bled. Some limped. Some didn't even reel, but lay dead or badly wounded by the river.
“They're coming!” a white Federal screamed. “They're on our tails! “
“Dey gwine kill all 0' we!” shrieked a Negro beside him. The black's terror and his thick accent made the words almost incomprehensible. But no one could misunderstand the fear that made him push through the crowd of soldiers, that made him throwaway his Springfield to run the faster.
And the panic from the men who'd taken that blast of musket fire-and the whoops and Rebel yells from the Confederates who were indeed on their tails-stampeded the rest of the Union troops into motion. What point waiting here for the massacre they all saw ahead? The New Era wouldn't rescue them now-they all saw that, too. And so, more a mob, a herd, than anything resembling soldiery, they pelted north, toward where Coal Creek ran into the Mississippi.
One more spooked steer, Bill Bradford ran along with the rest.
A few of the men in Colonel Barteau's regiment along Coal Creek fired at the Federal gunboat as it steamed away from the fight. “No, goddammit! Don't waste your ammunition!” Corporal Jack Jenkins roared, along with other underofficers and officers. “Jesus Christ!” he went on. “You can't hit the son of a bitch at this range, and even if you could, so what? She's iron-plated, for cryin' out loud.”
“Have a heart, Corporal,” a trooper said. “Damn boat's been shootin' at us all day long. Least we can do is pay her back a little.”
“Blow 'em a kiss. Wave bye-bye.” Jenkins suited action to word. “Bastard's gone. That's all we've got to worry about. Now reload your damn piece, and don't go shooting at anything till you got somethin' to shoot at. “
The private scowled. He muttered. But not only did Jenkins have two stripes on his sleeve, he was also taller and wider through the shoulders and, without a doubt, meaner. If the soldier tried to give trouble, he'd end up getting it instead. He might be a grumbler, but he wasn't a fool. He could see that for himself. And he did need to reload, regardless of whether he needed somebody to tell him to do it. He went right on muttering, but he followed Jenkins's order.
And Jenkins was happy enough to leave it right there. Getting troopers to do what you told them was a never-ending pain in the neck. They always thought they had a better idea, and they were bound and determined to go ahead with it no matter what.
He wondered if he was such a pest before he got promoted. A reminiscent smile stole over his face. He was. Not a chance anyone ever set over him would say anything different. He wondered how sergeants and officers ever put up with him. But the answer to that wasn't hard to find. No matter how big a nuisance he'd been, without even trying he could think of a dozen men who were worse.
“What do we do now?” somebody asked.
“There's damnyankees round the bend of the bluff, down by the
Mississippi. You can hear the bastards,” somebody else said. “Let's go kill 'em. Them bastards what went up into the fort, they've had all the fun.”
Jenkins felt the same way. But a nea
rby lieutenant shook his head. “We'll just sit tight for a little while, is what we'll do. Aren't a whole hell of a lot of us. We might bite off a bigger chaw than we can get in our cheek.”
“Aw, hell sir.” Jenkins was still a pain in the neck, whether he realized it or not. “They ain't real Yankee soldiers, not hardly. Nothin' but Tennessee Tories and niggers in blue shirts. One of us has to be worth… well, a bunch of 'em, anyways.”
“I said no.” The officer got stuffy, the way officers have since the beginning of time. “If they get through us, it's liable to give them an escape route. Do you want to see that happen?”
“No, sir,” Jenkins allowed. He knew how things worked. As long as he kept saying si1; he could get away with saying anything else he pleased, near enough. “But they ain't gonna get through us, sir. No way on God's green earth they can do that. You reckon niggers can fight better'n us… sir?” If the lieutenant said yes to that, he'd have a fight on his hands even if he did wear two bars on each side of his collar.
But the lieutenant shook his head. “No, no, no-of course not, “ he said impatiently. “Up till this combat, I wouldn't've reckoned niggers could fight at all: fight like soldiers, I mean.” He sounded faintly, or maybe more than faintly, troubled at having to admit even that much, and more troubled as he went on, “They've done better than anybody imagined they could, I'm afraid.”
“Well, I'm not afraid, sir. To hell with 'em. To hell with 'em all, and with the homemade Yankees, too,” Jenkins said. “Way they were scornin' us and cursin' us during the truce, they must've thought they were somethin' special. They ain't special enough, by Jesus, and they don't fight good enough, neither.”
“That's the spirit, Corporal,” the lieutenant said. “Don't let anything bother you, do you?”
“Not if I can help it, sir,” Jenkins said. “Anything in a blue uniform does bother me, reckon I've got an answer, too.” He held up his rifle musket.
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