Liberating Atlantis (12 page)

A Negro trotted back to Frederick with a big grin on his face. “We got us a new eight-shooter, jus’ like the ones the cavalry soldiers use,” he said proudly. “An’ that fella was ridin’ a mighty fine horse.”

“Well, good,” Frederick said, hoping it was. By the nature of things, you couldn’t keep an uprising secret very long. He made up his mind: “We go after the Menand plantation next. We move out tomorrow morning—
early
tomorrow morning. And, between now and then, we post extra-strong watches all around this place.”

Lorenzo nodded. He understood what was going on. Davey would have, too. Frederick worried about how much he’d miss the chief cook in the days ahead. But the field hand who’d brought word of the visitor’s demise scratched his head. “How come?”

Frederick sighed quietly. You liked to think the people on your side, the people you were leading into the sunlight of freedom, were all clever and filled with natural nobility. You liked to think so, yes, but they would disappoint you in a hurry if you did. They were people, no better and no worse than any others. For too long, masters had judged them worse than others. That would have to change. But they were no better, either.

And so Frederick had to explain: “Somebody’s gonna miss the fellow you shot. Somebody’ll come and try to find out what happened to him.”

“Oh.” The other Negro contemplated that. He didn’t need long to find an answer that satisfied him: “Then we plug that son of a bitch, too.”

That could work . . . for a little while. “They won’t keep coming one at a time, you know,” Frederick said gently. “They may not even come one at a time when this poor, sorry bastard doesn’t ride home.”

“Oh,” the field hand said again. He nodded, with luck in wisdom. “Reckon you’re right. I didn’t think of that.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Frederick murmured. Lorenzo’s shoulders shook with suppressed mirth. The field hand didn’t get it. Frederick wasn’t surprised at that, either. A swallowed sigh almost gave him the hiccups.

He gave his orders. One of the new recruits to the Liberating Army, a copperskin from the Barker plantation, said, “I don’t want to do no more fighting. Long as I’m rid of the dirty snake who was crackin’ the whip on us, I’d just as soon take it easy for a while.”

Several others, copperskins and Negroes, made it plain they felt the same way. No, not everybody in the uprising was as bright as he might have been. “Well, you can do that,” Frederick said.

“I can? All right!” The new recruit sounded amazed and delighted. He hadn’t expected things to be so easy.

And they weren’t. “Yeah, you can do that,” Frederick repeated. Then he went on, “You can do that if you don’t mind the white folks catching you tomorrow—if you’re real lucky, maybe the day after. Don’t you get it, you God-damned fool?
We’ve killed masters
. White folks grab us now, they’ll kill us as slow and filthy as they know how. Only way we can stay alive is to keep on fightin’ and keep on winnin’.
Only
way. You got that through your thick head?”

Were the just-freed slave white himself, would he have turned pale from rage or red with anger? Since he was not much lighter than Frederick, he didn’t show what he was feeling that way. His scowl said he was angry. “I got it,” he answered. “But who d’you think you are, to play the white man talkin’ to me like that?”

“I ain’t playin’ the white man. I’m playin’ the general,” Frederick said. “Liberating Army’s just like any other kind—it needs somebody in charge. Right now, that’s me.”

“If I’m in this here army, I’m still a slave, then,” the copperskin said.

“If you ain’t in this here army, you’re a dead man walkin’,” Frederick said.

Behind him, Lorenzo cocked his revolver. The click of the hammer going back sounded much louder than it really was. “If you ain’t in this here army, you’re a dead man—period,” he declared.

The man who’d been complaining gave back a sickly grin. “I was just funnin’, like,” he said. “Can’t you take a joke?”

“It’s like Frederick said—this here
is
an army. When the general tells you to do somethin’, you don’t make no shitty jokes,” Lorenzo growled. “You do it right away, no matter what the hell it is. Some other stuff you don’t know nothin’ about may depend on it. And somebody may blow your fuckin’ head off if you fart around. Me, for instance. Understand what I’m talkin’ about?”

“Uh-huh. Sure do,” the younger copperskin said. He took the prospect of getting shot by his own people seriously, anyhow, even if he didn’t have the brains to imagine that white folks might do it. Copperskins were supposed to be fierce and savage. Lorenzo used that to his own advantage, even against one of his own kind. And who could say for sure? He might have shot the new recruit as a lesson for the others. Frederick almost asked him, then decided not to. Some things he didn’t need to know.

Again, the Liberating Army advanced on a new plantation cross-country. Surprise still mattered, even if it wouldn’t for much longer. The rifle muskets and their accouterments all fit in one wagon now. It also went cross-country. If the whites in the neighborhood were alerted to the rising, Frederick didn’t want them taking back a big chunk of his weaponry all at once.

Whether the whites were alerted to the rising or not, the slaves on the Menand plantation knew something was up. “You gonna set us free?” they asked eagerly when they met the fighters from the Liberating Army in their cotton fields.

“Not exactly,” Frederick answered. Their faces fell till he explained: “You’re gonna set yourselves free.”

He and Jacques Menand’s slaves had been talking in low voices. When they heard that, they let out whoops of delight. Not nearly far enough away, a white man demanded, “What’s that stupid commotion all about?”

“Your overseer?” Frederick whispered.

“That’s right,” answered a man who looked to be of mixed copperskin and Negro blood. “Sooner that God-damned son of a whore gets what’s coming to him, happier we’ll all be.”

“Amen!” added a man who looked like a pure-blooded copperskin.

“I don’t reckon you’ve got long to wait,” Frederick said. “Can you lure him here?”

They didn’t even need to do that. The overseer came forward of his own accord, to see what was going on. Rifle-musket butts, bayonets, and knives soon finished him off—though perhaps not soon enough to suit him. His screams rose up into the uncaring air. Frederick didn’t worry about that. They wouldn’t reach the big house, where gunfire might have.

Menand’s slaves proved hot to join the Liberating Army. “First we kill this bastard here who’s been fucking us,” the copperskin said savagely. “Then we kill all the other white bastards, too.” The rest of the field hands nodded.

The men who’d got the rifle muskets to the plantation passed them out. By now, they seemed as attached to the guns as any ordnance sergeants in the Atlantean army. “You take care of this piece, keep it clean, or we’ll take it away from you and shove it up your ass,” one of them warned the wide-eyed copperskin to whom he gave the weapon. “You got that?”

“You bet,” the man answered. “I’ll do whatever I have to do, long as I get the chance to kill me some white folks.”

“Oh, I reckon we can take care of
that
,” the Negro said grandly, as if he were personally responsible for it.

Drill sergeants would have despaired at the way the Liberating Army advanced on the Menands’ house. The copperskins and Negroes kept no kind of order.
One of these days, we’ll have to fight real soldiers
, Frederick thought.
We’d better learn how to do those things, or they’ll murder us
. But that day wasn’t here yet. At least the men advanced with high spirits. As long as they kept doing that, anything was possible.

No one fired at them from inside the big house. Everything was quiet—too quiet to suit Frederick. “What’s wrong with them?” he said. “They must’ve seen us coming. They reckon we’re here for a dance?”

Then one of the house slaves came out. He was wearing a boiled shirt, black jacket, and cravat like the ones Frederick had put on every day for so many years. “Menands done run off,” he said. “You ain’t gonna catch ’em now.”

“How’d they know in time to do that?” Frederick answered his own question: “Somebody came and told them!”

“You’re a clever fellow, ain’t you?” the house slave said. “A field hand, he came runnin’ back here an’ palavered with Master Jacques. When they hightailed it, he went with ’em.”

“I bet he did!” Frederick said. “Stinking Judas must know what we’d do to him if we got our hands on him. Who was the son of a bitch?”

“His name is Jerome. He’s a copperskin.” The house slave didn’t try to hide his distaste. Frederick understood every bit of it. House slaves always sneered at field hands. And Negroes and copperskins sneered at each other. Masters exploited all those differences. If this uprising was going to get anywhere, Frederick would have to find a way to plaster them over.

“Menands tell you why they were going?” he asked the house slave.

“Master Jacques said he didn’t aim to wait around and get killed,” the other Negro answered. “He asked if I wanted to go along, but I told him no. I reckoned I’d be safe enough.” He brushed two fingers over the back of his other wrist, showing off his own dark skin.

“But they got away,” Lorenzo said. “That ain’t so good. That ain’t even a little bit good.”

“Tell me about it,” Frederick said. “Word’s gonna be out. And that means the white folks’ll come after us. No more surprises, not now.”

“What are we gonna do?” Lorenzo asked.

“I’ve said it before—we could try splitting up and disappearing into the woods and the swamps, but you’d best believe they’ll come after us,” Frederick replied. “Slaves start killin’ masters, the white folks don’t forget about it. Only other choice—only one—we’ve got is fighting ’em and whipping ’em.”

“We do that?” Three or four anxious slaves, Negroes and copperskins both, said the same thing at the same time.

“Damned right we can.” Frederick didn’t say they would, only that they could. He hoped they wouldn’t notice the distinction. They didn’t seem to. “Damned right we can,” he repeated, sounding more confident than he felt. “First thing is, we know what happens if we lose.”

He waited. Men’s and women’s heads bobbed up and down. They knew, all right. It wouldn’t be pretty. It would be as ugly as vengeful whites could make it. Masters had to be harsh with slaves who rebelled, or they’d face uprisings every day of the week. They understood that as well as the slaves did.

Frederick held up a hand to show he hadn’t finished. “Other thing is, with a little luck they won’t know we got our hands on these fine guns. They’ll come along like we’re a bunch of no-accounts. They’ll figure they can lick us easy as you please. Are they right?”

“No!” the copperskins and Negroes shouted.

“I can’t hear you.” Frederick cupped a hand behind his ear, the way he’d seen preachers do when they were riling up their flocks. “Tell me again, people—are they right?”

“
No!
” the men and women of the Liberating Army howled.

“That’s right. They’re gonna stub their toes. They’re gonna fall on their faces. We are free niggers. We are free mudfaces. And we don’t aim to let anybody take that away from us, not ever again,” Frederick said.

They shouted loud enough to make sure the trees and the rocks heard. Frederick’s ears rang. They had the spirit, all right. Whether they would keep it once the white men started shooting at them . . .

“Reckon we can win one fight the way you said—we’ll take ’em by surprise, like,” Lorenzo said quietly. “But what do we do after that?”

“If we win one fight, we get us more guns and more bullets,” Frederick said. “That’ll make us stronger. It’ll give the white folks somethin’ to worry about. And if word of the uprising spreads amongst ’em, it’ll spread amongst the slaves, too. What you want to bet this won’t be the only hot spot the whites got to pour water on?”

“Hmm.” Lorenzo contemplated that. “Well, maybe,” he said at last. “It better not be, or we’re all as dead as honkers.”

“They say some of them big dumb things’re still alive, way off in the back country,” Frederick said.

“
They say
all kinds of stupid things,” Lorenzo replied. “And even if it’s true, not enough of ’em are left to do anybody any good—not even themselves.”

“Anybody who doesn’t want to stay here can run off on his own. I’ve told folks that before,” Frederick said.

“I want to be here. I want to win,” Lorenzo said.

“Good,” Frederick answered. “So do I.”

VI

The Liberating Army could draw on three plantations for livestock and supplies. That went a long way toward making sure the soldiers in that army didn’t go hungry right away. Frederick had enough other things to worry about. Adding hunger to the list would have been . . . part of what a general was supposed to take care of.

He’d never thought he would be a general. He wondered whether his grandfather had expected the job. He supposed Victor Radcliff must have. The white man had been a prominent officer in the earlier war, the war where English Atlantis and the mother country fought against France. When it came time for Atlantis to rise up against England, who else would the Atlantean Assembly choose to lead its forces? No one else. And who but France would aid Atlantis in her fight against the mother country? Politics could be a crazy business.

Frederick wondered what his grandfather would think of his own rising. Neither Victor Radcliff nor Isaac Fenner, the other First Consul, had done anything against slavery. Maybe they’d thought southern Atlantis would promptly part company with the United States of Atlantis if they tried. Or maybe they hadn’t cared—a much more disheartening prospect.

Well, why should they have cared?
Frederick thought.
The lash never came down on their backs
. It had come down on his. The strokes had healed well enough, but he could still feel them if he twisted the wrong way. He would bear the marks till the day he died. And he would remember the humiliation of being shackled to the whipping post—and the terror of each
snap!-crack!
—till they shoveled dirt over him, too.