The Good Lord Bird

by James McBride

  The men around him cheered and chuckled, except, I noted, O. P. Anderson and the Emperor. They was the only two colored in the room. They looked just plain fertilized, put out, right unnerved.

  The Old Man clapped me on the back. “I see you is dressed for victory, Onion,” he said, for I still had my gunnysack with me. “You come well prepared. We is headed for the mountains shortly. Soon as the colored hives, we will be off. There is a lot of work yet ahead.” And with that he turned away and begun giving orders again, tellin’ someone to go get the three men at the farm to ready a nearby schoolhouse to gather in the colored. He was just plumb full of orders, tellin’ this one to go this way and the other one to go that way. There weren’t nothing for me to do, really, except to set tight. There was already several eight or nine prisoners in the room, and they looked downright glum. Some of them were still shaking the sleep out their eyes, for it was near two a.m. and they’d been woken in some form or fashion. To my recollection, of them that was in the room was a husband and wife seized when taking a shortcut home through the armory from the Gault tavern in town, two armory workers, two railroad workers, and a drunk who lay asleep on the floor most of the time, but woke up long enough to declare that he was the cook at the Gault House tavern.

  The Old Man ignored them, course, marching past them, giving orders, just happy as you please. He was as peachy as I’d ever seen him, and for the first time in a long while, the wrinkles in his face creaked and twisted amongst themselves and wrapped around his nose like spaghetti, and the whole conglomeration broke open into a look of—how can I say it—downright satisfaction. He weren’t capable of a smile, not a true, wide-open, get-your-drawers-out-the-window smile, showing that row of them gigantic, corn-colored front chompers of his I seen from time to time when he chewed bear or pig guts. But he was one hundred percent stretched out in terms of overall satisfaction. He had accomplished something important. You could see it in his face. It hit me heavy then. He had actually done it. He had taken Harpers Ferry.

  When I look back, it hadn’t taken him more than five hours to do the whole bit from soup to nuts. From the time they walked in there at nine o’clock until that moment the train arrived just after one a.m., was five hours total. It went off smooth as taffy till I got there. They cut the telegraph wires, overcome two old guards, walked past two saloons that was well lit full of Pro Slavers, and walked dead into the armory. That armory covered quite a bit of ground, a good ten acres, with several buildings that done various facets of the rifle-making business, barrels, muskets, ammo, hammers, and so forth. They broke open every building in the grounds that was locked and took ’em over. The main one was Hall’s Rifle Works. The Old Man stuck his best soldiers in there, Lieutenant Kagi and the colored man from Oberlin, John Copeland. A. D. Stevens, who was disagreeable but probably the best fighting soldier among his men, Brown kept with him.

  My arrival seemed to pound things up higher, for after a few minutes of tellin’ this feller to do this and that feller to do that and giving a few orders that didn’t have no sense to them, for the thing was done, the Old Man stopped and looked ’bout and said gravely, “Men! We are, for the moment, in control of a hundred thousand guns. That is more than enough for our new army, when they come.”

  The men cheered again, and when all the cheering died down, the Old Man turned around and looked for Oliver, who had come into the Engine Works with me. “Where’s Oliver?” he asked.

  “Gone back to guard the train,” Taylor said.

  “Oh, yes!” the Old Man said. He turned to me. “Did you see the Rail Man?”

  Well, I didn’t have the courage to break the bad news to him. Just couldn’t do it in a hard way. So I said, “In a fashion.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Oliver took care of him.”

  “Did the Rail Man hive the bees?”

  “Why, yes he did, Captain.”

  O. P. Anderson and the Emperor, the two Negroes, they come over when they heard me answer to the affirmative.

  “You sure?” O.P. said. “You mean the colored came?”

  “Bunches.”

  The Old Man was mirthful. “God hath mercy and delivered the fruit!” he said, and he stood up, bowed his head, and held his arms outward, palms up, got holy right there. He clasped his hands in prayer. “Didn’t He say, ‘Withhold not good from them to whom it is due,’” he near shouted, “‘when it is in the power of thine hand to do it’?” and off he went, prowling his thanks ’bout the book of Ecclesiastes and so forth. He stood there burbling and mumbling the Bible a good five minutes while O.P. and the Emperor chased me ’round the room, asking questions, for I walked away then. I just wanted to avoid the whole thing.

  “How many of ’em was it?” O.P. asked.

  “A bunch.”

  “Where they at?” the Emperor asked.

  “Up the road.”

  “They run off?” O.P. asked.

  “I wouldn’t call it running,” I said.

  “What would you call it, then?”

  “I calls it a little misunderstanding.”

  O.P. grabbed me by the neck. “Onion, you better play square here.”

  “Well, there was some confusion,” I said.

  The Old Man was standing nearby, mumbling and murmuring deep in prayer, his eyes closed, babbling on, but one of his eyes popped open when he heard that. “What kind of confusion?”

  Just as he said that, there was a loud knock on the door.

  “Who’s inside there?” a voice shouted.

  The Old Man runned to the window, followed by the rest of us. Outside, at the front door of the engine house was two white fellers, railroad workers, both of ’em looked drunk to the point of sneezing gut water, probably had just walked out the Gault House tavern on nearby Shenandoah Street.

  The Old Man cleared his throat and stuck his head through the window. “I’m Osawatomie John Brown of Kansas,” he declared. He liked to use his full Indian name when he was warring. “And I come to free the Negro people.”

  “You come to what?”

  “I come to free the Negro people.”

  The fellers laughed. “Is you the same feller that shot the Negro?” one asked.

  “What Negro?”

  “The one over yonder in the railroad yard. Doc says he’s dying. Said they saw a nigger girl shoot him. They’re plenty hot ’bout it. And where’s Williams? He’s supposed to be on duty.”

  The Old Man turned to me. “Someone shot over there?”

  “Where’s Williams?” the feller outside said again. “He’s supposed to be on duty. Open this damn door, ya fool!”

  “Check with your own people about your man,” the Old Man shouted back through the window.

  O.P. tapped the Captain on the shoulder and piped up, “Williams is in here, Captain. He’s one of the armory guards.”

  The Old Man glanced at the guard, Williams, who sat on a bench, looking glum. He leaned out the window. “Pardon me,” he said. “We got him in here.”

  “Well, let him out.”

  “When you let the Negro people go, we’ll let him out.”

  “Quit fooling, ya sawface idiot. Let him out.”

  The Old Man stuck his Sharps rifle out the window. “I’ll thank you to take your leave,” he said, “and tell your superiors that Old Osawatomie John Brown’s here at the federal armory. With hostages. And I aims to free the Negro people from their enslavement.”

  Suddenly Williams, the armory guard who was setting along the wall bench, got up and stuck his head out a window near him and hollered, “Fergus, he ain’t fooling. They got a hundred armed niggers in here, and they got me prisoner!”

  I don’t know but that them fellers saw one of their own yelping out the window, or if it was what he said ’bout them armed coloreds, or if it was the Old Man’s rifle that done it, but they scattered
in quick time.

  In ten minutes, fifteen fellers was standing out there at a safe distance, mostly drunks from the Gault House saloon across the street, haggling and arguing among themselves, for only two of ’em had weapons, and in every building they’d run to inside the armory gates to fetch a gun from, they found a rifle pointed out the window at them with someone tellin’ them to get the hell off and away. One of them broke off from the rest gathered out front, tiptoed close enough to the front door of the engine house to be heard, and shouted, “Quit fooling and let Williams the hell out, whoever you is, or we’ll fetch the deputy.”

  “Fetch him,” the Old Man said.

  “We’ll fetch him, all right. And if you so much as touch our man, you cracker-eatin’ snit, we’ll bust a hole in you big enough to drive a mule through.”

  Stevens growled, “I had enough of this.” He stuck his carbine through the window and busted off a charge over their heads. “We has come to free the Negro people,” he shouted. “Now spread the word. And if you don’t come back with some food, we’ll kill the prisoners.”

  The Old Man frowned at Stevens. “Why’d you say that?”

  Stevens shrugged. “I’m hungry,” he said.

  We watched the men scramble out the gate, busting off in every direction, running up the hill into the village and the heights of jumbling, mashed-up houses that set beyond it, hollering as they went.

  —

  Well, it started slow and seemed to stay slow. Morning come, and outside the armory walls by the dawn’s light, you could see the town waking up, and despite all that yelling from the night before, not a soul among them seemed to know what to do. People walked back and forth up and down the street to work like it weren’t nothing, but at the train station, there was some growing activity. Several gathered there, I reckon, wondering where the engineer and coal man was, for the B&O locomotive engine sat there dead in the water, the engine quit, dried up, for it was plumb out of water and the engineer was gone from it, being that he and the coal man was our prisoners. Next to the Gault House, there was general confusion, and at the Wager House next to that—that was a saloon and hotel just like the Gault—there was some milling around as well. Several of those ’bout was passengers who got off the train and wandered up to the station, wondering what had happened. Several passengers held their luggage, motioning and gesturing and so forth, and I reckon they was tellin’ different stories, and I heard tell that several had murmured they seen a bunch of Negroes running off out the baggage car. But there was a festive atmosphere to the whole thing, to be honest. Folks standing ’round, gossiping. In fact, several workmen walked past the crowd, straight into the armory gate that morning to go to work, thinking nothing of it, and walked right into the barrels of the Captain’s men, who said, “We has come to free the Negro. And you is our prisoner.”

  Several didn’t believe it, but they was hustled into the engine house sure enough, and by ten a.m. we had damn near fifty people in there, milling around. They weren’t disbelieving so much like the others from the night before, for the Captain put the Emperor to watch them, and the Emperor was dreadful serious to look at. He was a dark-skinned, proud-looking Negro with a thick chest and wore a dead-serious expression, sporting that Sharps rifle. He was all business.

  By eleven a.m. the Old Man begun making one mistake after another. I say that now, looking back. But at the time it didn’t seem so bad. He was delaying, see, waiting for the Negro. Many a fool has done that, waiting for the Negro to do something, including the Negro himself. And that’s gone on a hundred years. But the Old Man didn’t have a hundred years. He had but a few hours, and it cost him.

  He stared out the window at the train and the angry passengers spilling off it, more and more of ’em, huffing and puffing, mad ’bout their delay, not knowing what was going on. He turned to Taylor and said, “I sees no reason to hold up all them people from doing their business and their travels, for they has paid for those train tickets. Turn loose the engineer and the coal man.”

  Taylor done as he was told, cut the train engineer and coal man loose, following behind them to the train so as to give word to Oliver, who was holding the train at the bridge, to let the train roll on.

  In doing so, in letting that train go, the Old Man released ’bout two hundred hostages.

  The engineer and coal man didn’t stop at the gate, not with Taylor following behind them, for he hustled them ’round the other side of the trestle bridge out the back entrance of the armory, direct to the steam engine. They got the steam up in thirty minutes, the passengers clattered on board, and they had that train rolling to Wheeling, Virginia, full out in record time.

  “They’ll stop at the first town and telegraph the news out,” Stevens said.

  “I see no reason to hold up the U.S. Mail,” the Old Man said. “Besides, we wants the world to know what we’re doing here.”

  Well, the world did know by noon, for what begun as a festive event that morning with fellers taking shots of rotgut and chatting amongst themselves with gossip, had now wheedled down to disbelief, to irritation to finally cursing and gathering near the armory walls. We could hear them hollering rumors and guesses to one another ’bout the cause of the Old Man’s holding up the engine house. One man said a crazed group of robbers was trying to bust open the armory’s vault. Another hollered that a doctor killed his wife and was hiding there. Another ventured that a nigger girl lost her mind and killed her master and run into the engine house for protection. Another said the B&O train was sabotaged by a baggage handler over a love affair. Everything but what the Old Man had declared. The notion that a group of white fellers had taken over the country’s biggest armory to help free the colored race was just too much for ’em to handle, I reckon.

  Finally, they sent an emissary to talk to the Old Man, an important-looking feller in a linen suit and bowler hat, likely a politician of sorts. He marched a few feet into the gate, shouted out at the Old Man to cut out the fooling and stop being a sot, and was met by a rifle shot over his head. That drummer whistled out the gate so fast his hat pulled off his head, and he was back across the road before that thing hit the ground.

  Finally around one o’clock, a very old man, dressed like a common worker, broke from the crowd of mumblers and ruffled bystanders standing at the gate at a safe distance across the road in front of the Gault House, shuffled slowly across Shenandoah Street, walked dead into the armory, strode to the front of the engine house door, and knocked. The Old Man peeked at him through the window, his Sharps at the ready. It was full daylight now, and nobody had slept. The Old Man’s face was lined and tight.

  “We understands you is Old John Brown of Osawatomie, Kansas,” the old man said politely. “Is that right?”

  “That be me.”

  “Well, seeing you close, you is old all right,” the feller said.

  “I’m fifty-nine,” the Old Man said. “How old are you?”

  “I has got you by eight years, sir. I’m sixty-seven. Now, you has got my younger brother in there. He’s sixty-two. And I’d appreciate if you’d let him out, for he is ill.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Odgin Hayes.”

  The Old Man turned to the room. “Who here’s Odgin Hayes?”

  Three old fellers raised their hands and stood up.

  The Captain frowned. “That won’t work,” he said. And he commenced to giving all three a lecture on the Bible and the book of Kings, ’bout how Solomon had two women each claiming the same baby, till the king said, I’ll cut the baby in two and give you both half, and one woman said, give it to the other mother, for I can’t stand to see my baby cut in two, so the king gived it to her, for he knowed she was the real mother.

  That shamed ’em, or maybe it was the part ’bout being cut in two, or maybe him giving the lecture using his broadsword to make points in this way and that. Whatever it was, two of ’e
m confessed outright they was lying and sat down, and the real Odgin stayed standing up, and the Old Man let him out.

  The old feller outside appreciated the gesture and said so, but as he walked across the armory back out to Shenandoah Street, the crowd had growed now, and several fellers in militia uniforms could be seen milling around, waving swords and guns. The Gault House and the Wager House, both saloons, was doing booming business, and the crowd was full-out drunk, boisterous and unruly, cursing and so forth.

  Meanwhile, the prisoners inside, not to mention Stevens, was getting hungry and begun bellowing ’bout food. The Old Man seen this and said, “Hold on.” He hollered out the window at the gate. “Gentlemen. The people here is hungry. I got fifty prisoners here who has not ate since last night, and neither has my men. I’ll exchange one of my prisoners for breakfast.”

  “Who you sending out?” someone hollered.

  The Old Man named a feller, the drunk who had staggered in the night before and been captured and announced he was the cook at the Gault House.

  “Don’t send that souse,” somebody shouted. “He can’t cook to save his life. Keep him in there.”

  There was laughing, but then more grumbling and cursing, and finally they agreed on letting the feller out. The cook shuffled over to the Gault House, and in a couple of hours come back with three men carrying plates of food, which he gived out to the prisoners, and a bottle of whiskey. Then he took a drink and went to sleep again. He forgot all ’bout going free.

  By now it was near four p.m. The sun was high overhead, and the crowd outside was hot. Apparently the doctor who had treated the Rail Man spread word to the town that the Rail Man was dying. Several men on horseback was seen galloping up through Bolivar Heights—you could see them running up the roads to the houses tucked up there just above the armory, and you could hear them yelling rumors that echoed down the hill: shouts that the armory was taken by a Negro insurrection. That made the thing electric. All the fun went out of it then. The drunk cursing turned to ranting and full-out cussing and swearing and talking ’bout people’s mothers and the raping of white women, and several rifles and guns could be seen brandished among the crowd, but there weren’t no firing from them yet.