The Good Lord Bird

by James McBride

  “Pa!” Owen cut him off. “Out with it!”

  “Hmph,” the Old Man snorted. “Jesus waited an eternity to free you of the curse of mortal sin, and you didn’t hear Him bellowing like a calf as you are now, son. But”—and here he cleared his throat—“I has studied the matter, and I will share with you here what you need to know. We are going to trouble Israel. We will raise the mill. And they will not soon forget us and our deeds.”

  With that, he turned and lifted the flap on the door of his cabin and pushed the door to go back inside. Kagi stopped him.

  “Hold on!” Kagi said. “We have tarried here, hanging kettles and banging rocks with wood swords for quite a bit. Are we not men here, with the exception of the Onion? And even she, like us, is here of our own volition. We deserve more than cursory information from you, Captain, lest we go out and fight this war on our own.”

  “You will not succeed without my plan,” the Old Man grunted.

  “Perhaps,” Kagi said. “But surely there is danger involved. And if I am to wager my life on any plan, I would like to know the manner of it.”

  “You will know it soon enough.”

  “Soon enough is now. Or I, for one, will announce my own plan, for I have been working on one. And I suspect the men here will hear it.”

  Oh, that knotted him up. The Old Man couldn’t stand it. He just plain couldn’t stand having someone else be the boss or tell a plan better than his. The men were watching close now. The wrinkles in his face knotted up and he blurted out, “All right. We’re leaving in two days.”

  “For where?” Owen said.

  The Captain, still holding the canvas door cover over his head, dropped it, and it flapped across the cabin door like a giant, dirty sheet hung out to dry in the wind. He glared at them with his hands in his pockets, jaw jutting out, disgruntled to the limit. It just plain irritated him to be talked to that way, for he listened to no council but his own. But he hadn’t no choice.

  “We plans to strike at the heart of this infernal institution,” he said. “We will attack the government itself.”

  A couple of fellers tittered, but Kagi and Owen did not. They knowed the Old Man better than the others, and knowed he was serious. My heart skipped a beat, but Kagi said calmly, “You mean Washington? We can’t attack Washington, Captain. Not with thirteen men and the Onion.”

  The Old Man snorted. “I wouldn’t plow that field with your mule, Lieutenant. Washington is where men talk. This is war. Wars is fought in the field, not where men set about eating pork and butter. In war, you strikes at the heart of the enemy. You strike his supply lines like Toussaint-Louverture struck the French on the islands around Haiti. You busts open his food chain like Schamyl the Circassian chief done against the Russians! You attacks his means like Hannibal in Europe done against the Romans! You take his weapons like Spartacus! You hives his people and arms them! You dissiminates his power to his chattel!”

  “What is you talking ’bout!” Owen said.

  “We is going to Virginia.”

  “What?”

  “Harpers Ferry in Virginia. There’s a federal armory there. They make guns. There’s a hundred thousand rifles and muskets in that place. We will break in there and, with those weapons, arm the slaves, and allow the Negro to free himself.”

  Many years later, I joined a choir in a Pentecostal church after taking a liking to a minister’s wife who slept around to save the wear and tear on her holy husband. I runned behind her several weeks till one morning the pastor gived a rousing sermon ’bout how the truth will set you free, and a feller stood up in the congregation and blurted out, “Pastor! I got Jesus in my heart! I’m confessing! Three of us in here has porked your wife!”

  Well, the silence that followed that poor man’s declaration weren’t nothing compared to the quiet that fell on them roughnecks when the Old Man dropped that bomb on ’em.

  To be clear on it, I weren’t afraid at that moment. In fact, I felt downright comfortable, ’cause for the first time, I knowed I weren’t the only person in the world who knowed the Old Man’s cheese had slid off his biscuit.

  Finally John Cook managed to speak. Cook was a chatty feller, dangerous, the Old Man declared many a time, for Cook was a loose talker. But chatty as he was, even Cook had to cough and snort and clear his throat a few times before he found his voice.

  “Captain, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, is eight hundred miles from here. And just fifty miles from Washington, D.C. It’s heavily guarded. With thousands of U.S. government troops nearby. There’s militia from Maryland and Virginia all around it. I’d guess there’d be maybe ten thousand troops mustered up against us. We wouldn’t last five minutes.”

  “The Lord will protect us from them.”

  “What’s He gonna do, cork their rifles?” Owen asked.

  The Old Man looked at Owen and shook his head. “Son, it hurts my heart that you has not taken God into your bosom in the ways I’ve taught you, but as you know, I let you go your own way in your beliefs—which is why you remains so thick after all these years. The Bible says he who thinketh not in the ways of the Redeemer knoweth not the safeness of the Lord. But I have thunk with Him and know His ways. We have thunk this matter through together for nearly thirty years, the Lord and I. I know every part and portion of this land of which I speak. The Blue Mountains runs diagonally through Virginia, Maryland, all the way up into Pennsylvania and down into Alabama. I know them mountains better than any man on earth. As a child, I ran through them. As a young man, I surveyed them for Oberlin College. And during that time, I considered this slavery question. I even made a journey to the European continent when I runned a tannery on the premise of inspecting the European sheep farms, but my real aim was to inspect the earthwork fortifications made by the chattel who fought against the rulers in that great continent.”

  “That is impressive, Captain,” Kagi said, “and I don’t doubt your word or study. But our aim has always been to steal slaves and trouble the waters so the country will see the folly of the infernal institution.”

  “Pebbles in the ocean, Lieutenant. We ain’t stealing Negroes no more. We hiving ’em to fight.”

  “If we’re gonna attack the federal government, why not take Fort Laramie in Kansas?” Kagi said. “We can control the fight in Kansas. We got friends there.”

  The Old Man raised his hand. “Our presence here on the prarie is a feint, Lieutenant. It’s meant to throw our enemy off our trail. The fight is not out west. Kansas is the tail end of the beast. If you were to kill a lion, would you chop off his tail? Virginia is the queen of the slave states. We will strike at the queen bee in order to kill the hive.”

  Well, they had caught their breath now and warm words was passed. Doubts sprung up. One by one, the men chirped out their disagreement. Even Kagi, the calmest feller among ’em and the Captain’s most solid man, disagreed. “It’s an impossible task,” he said.

  “Lieutenant Kagi, you disappoint me,” the Old Man said. “I has thought this matter through carefully. For years, I have studied the successful opposition of the Spanish chieftains when Spain was a Roman province. With ten thousand men, divided into small companies, acting simultaneously yet separately, they withstood the whole consolidated power of the Roman Empire for years! I have studied the successful warfare of the Circassian chief Schamyl against the Russians. I have lingered over the accounts of the wars of Toussaint-Louverture on the Haitian islands in the 1790s. You think I have not considered all these things? Land! Land, men! Land is fortification! In the mountains, a small group of men, trained as soldiers, in a series of delays, ambushes, escapes, and surprises, can hold off an enemy for years. They can hold off thousands. It is has been done. Many times.”

  Well, that didn’t flatten them fellers out. The warm words become hard words and rose to chirping and near shouts. No matter what he said, they weren’t listening. Several announced they wa
s leaving, and one, Richardson, a colored who just joined a few weeks previous—bellowing and trumpeting ’bout how he was itching to fight slavery—suddenly remembered he had cows to milk at a nearby farm where he was working. He hopped a horse, spurred that thing to a high trot, and was gone.

  The Old Man watched him go.

  “Anyone who wants to can leave with him,” he said.

  There was no takers, but still, they jawed at him some more for the better part of three hours. The Old Man listened to them all, standing at the doorway of his cabin with his hands in his pockets, the dirty canvas cover of the doorway flapping behind him in the breeze, giving his words extra punch as it slapped and knocked against the door while he spoke against their fears. He had practiced this in his mind for many years, he said, and for each worry they come up with, he had a response.

  “It’s an armory. It’s guarded!”

  “By two night watchmen only.”

  “How we gonna sneak out a hundred thousand guns? In a boxcar? We need ten boxcars!”

  “We don’t need all of ’em. Just five thousand will do.”

  “How we gonna get out the area?”

  “We won’t. We slip into the nearby mountains. The slaves will hive with us once they know where we are. They will join and fight with us.”

  “We don’t know the routes! Are there rivers about? Roads? Trails?”

  “I know the land,” the Old Man said. “I have drawn it for you. Come inside and see.”

  They reluctantly followed him and crowded into his cabin, where he unfurled a huge, canvas map on the table, the giant map I’d seen him secreting in his jacket and scrawling at and chewing the edges on from the first day I’d met him. Atop the map, labeled Harpers Ferry, were dozens of lines which showed the armory, nearby plantations, roads, trails, mountain ranges, and even the number of slaved Negroes living on nearby plantations. He’d done a lot of work, and the men were impressed.

  He held the candle over the map so the men could see it, and after they looked at it for a few moments, he pointed to it and began to speak.

  “This,” he said, pointing with his pencil, “is the Ferry. It is guarded by a single night watchman on either end of it. With the element of surprise, we will take them easily. Once we take them, we cut the telegraph wires here, and take the guardhouse easily, right here. The railroad tracks and the gunnery factory we hold till we load our weapons. It’s that easy. We can take the whole place in the middle of the night and be done in three hours and be gone. We gather our weapons and slip into the line of mountains”—here he pointed to his map—“that surround it. These mountains pass through Maryland, Virginia, down into Tennessee and Alabama. They’re thin passes. Too narrow for cannons, too tight for wide columns of troops to pass.”

  He put the candle down.

  “I surveyed these places several times. I know them like the back of my hand. I have studied them for years, before any of you were born. Once we establish ourselves in those passes, we can easily defend against any hostile action. From there, the slaves will flock to our stead, and we can attack plantations in the plains on both sides from our mountain posts.”

  “Why would they join us?” Kagi asked.

  The Old Man looked at him as if he’d just pulled out his teeth.

  “For the same reason that this little girl”—here he pointed to me—“has risked life and limb to join us and lived out on the plains and braved battle like a man. Can’t you see, Lieutenant? If a little girl will do it, a man certainly will. They will join us ’cause we will offer them something their masters cannot: their freedom. They are thirsting for the opportunity to fight for it. They are dying to be free. To free their wives. To free their children. And the courage of one will move the next. We’ll arm the first five thousand, then move farther south, arming more Negroes as they join with the plunder and arms of the Pro Slavers we defeat as we go. As we move south, the planters will not be able to withstand their Negroes leaving. They will stand to lose everything. They will not be able to sleep at night worrying about their Negroes joining the masses that approach them from the north. They will quit this infernal institution forever.”

  He placed his pencil down.

  “That, in essence,” he said, “is the plan.”

  You had to reckon, for an insane man, he sure knowed how to cook it up, and for the first time, the looks of doubt started to fall off the men’s faces, and that put me back to feeling chickenhearted, for I knowed the Old Man’s schemes never worked out to the dot the way he drawed them up, but he was sure to do whatever they was, anyway.

  Kagi rubbed his jaw. “There are a thousand places where it can fail,” he said.

  “We have already failed, Lieutenant. Slavery is an unjustifiable, barbarous, unprovoked sin before God—”

  “Spare us the sermon, Pa,” Owen snapped. “We ain’t got to bite off the head of the whole thing.” He was nervous, and that was unsettling, for Owen was coolheaded and usually went along with his Pa’s ideas, no matter how corn-headed they was.

  “Do you prefer that we await the outcome of moral persuasion to end slavery, son?”

  “I prefers a plan that keeps me from becoming an urn in somebody’s backyard.”

  There was a fire going in the cabin, and the Old Man moved to pick up a log and place it on the dying fire. He stared at the campfire as he spoke. “You is here out of your own choice,” he said. “Every one of you, including Onion,” he said, pointing to me, “a plain and simple colored girl, which should tell you something about courage, big men that you are. But if any man here feels the plan will not work, you are welcome to leave. I bear no ill will toward any man who does so, for Lieutenant Kagi is right. It is dangerous work I propose. Once the element of surprise is done, they will come at us hard. Of that there is no doubt.”

  He looked ’bout. There was silence. The Old Man spoke softly now, comforting. “Don’t worry. I thought it clean through. We will make our business known to the struggling Negroes in the surrounding areas beforehand, and they will hive to us. Once that is done, we can attack the armory with even greater numbers. We will seize it in minutes, hold it long enough to load our weapons, then slip out into the mountains and be gone by the time the militia get wind of it. I has it on good word that the slaves from the surrounding counties and plantations will hive to us like bees.”

  “On whose word?”

  “On good word,” he said. “There are twelve hundred coloreds living at the Ferry. There’s thirty thousand coloreds within fifty miles of the Ferry, if you include Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Virginia. They will hear of our revolt, flock to us, and demand that we arm them. The Negro is primed and ready. He need only the chance. This is what we are giving him.”

  “Negroes are not trained soldiers,” Owen said. “They can’t handle weapons.”

  “No man needs training to fight for his freedom, son. I have prepared for that eventuality. I have ordered two thousand pikes, simple broadswords that can be wielded by any man or woman for the purpose of destroying an enemy combatant. They are stored in various warehouses and safe houses that we will pick up along route. Others we will have sent to us in Maryland. That is why I let John and Jason quit. To prepare those weapons for us before they went home.”

  “It sounds easy as grazing oats the way you sell it,” Cook said, “though I am not sure I am for it.”

  “If God wills it that you should stay back while the rest of us ride into history, I am not against it.”

  Cook growled, “I didn’t say I was staying back.”

  “I gived you an out, Mr. Cook. With full redemption for your service and no hard feelings. But should you stay, I will guard your life with as much jealousy as if it were my own. And I will do that for every man here.”

  That calmed them down some, for he was still Old John Brown, and he was still fearsome. One by one, the Old Man checked th
eir doubts. He had studied the question. He insisted the Ferry weren’t closely guarded. It weren’t a fort, but rather a factory. Weren’t but two night watchmen to take out to get into it. Should the plan fail, the place was built where two rivers, the Potomac and Shenandoah, met. Both were getaways for a quick escape. The town was remote, in the mountains, with less than 2,500 people—workers, not soldiers—living there. We’d cut the telegraph wires, and without a telegraph, it would be impossible for word of our attack to pass. The two rail lines that ran through it had a train scheduled to stop there during our attack. We’d stop that train, hold it, and if necessary use it as an extra escape route if trapped. The Negroes would help us. They were there in numbers. He had suitcases full of government numbers on Negroes. They lived in the town. They lived ’bout on plantations. They had already gotten word. Thousands would flock to our stead. In three hours it would be done. In twenty-four hours we would be gone in the mountains and safe. In and out. Easy as pie.

  He was as good a salesman as you could find when he wanted to be, and by the time he was done, he rosied it up so nicely you’d’a thunk the Harpers Ferry armory was just a bunch of pesters waiting to be squashed by his big, toeless old boot; the whole thing sounded easy as picking apples out an orchard. Truth is, though, it was a bold plan, outrageously stupid, and for his men, young, adventurous roughnecks who liked a cause, just the kind of adventure they signed up for. The more he sold it, the more they warmed to it. He just beat ’em down with it, till finally he yawned and said, “I am going to sleep. We are leaving in two days. If you are still here then, we ride together. If not, I understand.”

  A few, including Kagi, seemed to cotton to the idea. A few others did not. Kagi murmured, “We will think on it, Captain.”

  The Old Man looked at them, all young men, gathered around him in the firelight, big, rough, smart fellers standing around looking at him like he was Moses of old, his beard flowing down to his chest, his gray eyes sure and steady. “Sleep on it. If you wakes up tomorrow with doubts, ride out with my blessing. I only ask that those who depart to watch your tongue. To forget what you have heard here. Forget us. And remember that if you have a busy tongue, we will not forget you.”