The Good Lord Bird (36 page)

As we cleared the bridge and the wagon turned toward the armory, I turned to O.P., who was hanging on the running board by his fingernails. I said, “Good-bye, O.P.”

“Good-bye,” he said, and he done something that just knocked me out. He dropped off that wagon to his death and rolled down the bank into the Potomac. Rolled like a potato into the water, and that was the last I seen of him. Must'a been a good twenty feet. Rolled into the water. He weren't going back to the armory to get shot up. He chose his own death. Chalk up a second colored to the Old Man's scheme. To count, I'd seen with my own eyes the first two folks deadened in the Old Man's army on account of him freeing the colored was the colored themselves.

We come to the armory gate with the Coachman hollering all the way that we had Colonel Washington, rolled right through that mob, and busted into the yard clear. The mob weren't going to stop us. The colonel was in the wagon. They knowed his coach and knowed who he was. I reckoned they parted on account of an important man being inside there, but when we come through the gate and hit the yard clean, I seen the real reason why.

That yard was dead as a cornfield. Quiet as a mouse pissing on cotton.

What I couldn't see from the bridge, I seen from the ground in front of the engine house. The Old Man had been busy. There was several dead men laying out in the open, white men and a couple of colored, too, all within shooting range of the engine house and buildings around it. The Old Man weren't fooling. That's why them militia congregated outside the armory gate and walls. They was still scared to go inside. He'd been beating 'em off.

The Coachman wheeled that wagon around a couple of chewed-up dead fellers and finally got tired of steering around them and just aimed the wagon straight for the engine house, bouncing over the heads of a couple of the dead—it didn't bother them nohow, they didn't feel nothing. He stopped dead directly in front of the engine house, those inside flung the door open, and we rushed inside, the door closing behind us.

That place stunk something ferocious. There was thirty or so hostages in there. Whites was gathered on one side of the room and the colored on another side, separated by a wall, but it weren't a continuous wall to the ceiling, so you could move between the two sides. Nar privy was on either side of the room, and if you thunk whites and coloreds was different, you ain't got a big put up to the truth when you get a whiff of their nature doings and comes to the understanding that one pea don't grow to no higher grade than the other. That place reminded me of them Kansas taverns, but worse. It was downright infernal.

The Captain stood by a window, holding a rifle and his seven-shooter, looking calm as a corn shoot, but a little beaten down, truth be to tell it. His face, old and wrinkled even in normal times, was covered in grit and powder. His white beard looked like it'd been dipped in a bag of dirt, and his jacket was flecked with holes and gunpowder burns. He'd been up thirty hours without sleep and no food. Still, compared to the rest of his men, he looked fit as a fiddle. The others, young men, Oliver, Watson—who had been flushed off the Shenandoah—Taylor, looked clean run out, their faces white, pale as ghosts. They knowed what they was looking at. Only the Emperor seemed calm. That was a bodacious Negro there. And other than O.P., a braver man I never saw.

Stevens handed the Old Man Colonel Washington's sword, which the Captain held high. “That is righteous,” he said. He turned to Colonel Washington's slaves who had just come off the wagon and entered the Engine Works and said, “In the name of the Provisional Government of the United States, I, President John Brown emeritus elected,
E pluribus unum
, with all rights and privileges hereto, selected by a Congress of your brethren, I hereby pronounces you is all
free
. Go in peace, my brother Negroes!”

Them Negroes looked downright befuddled, of course. Weren't but eight of 'em. Plus a few more lined up against the wall as hostages already, and they weren't going nowhere, so that added to their confusion. Them Negroes didn't move nor spout a blaming word between 'em.

Since nobody said nothing, the Old Man added, “Course if you want, since we is all here fighting a war against slavery. If you wants to join us in battling for your freedom, why, we is all for that, too. And for that cause, and for the cause of your freedom in the days ahead, so that no one can wrest it from you, we is going to arm you.”

“We done that,” Stevens said. “But their pikes fell off in the ride down.”

“Oh. Well, we got more. Where's O.P. and the others?”

“I don't know,” Stevens said. “I thought they was on the wagon. I reckon they're hiving more bees.”

The Old Man nodded. “Yes, of course!” he said, looking at the flock we just brought in. He went down the line of Negroes, shaking a hand or two, welcoming them. The Negroes looked glum, which he ignored course, talking to Stevens as he shook their hands. “This is working exactly the way I figured it, Stevens. Prayer works, Stevens. Spiritualist that you is, you really ought to become a believer. Remind me to share with you a few words from our Maker when there is time, for I knows you have it in you yet to turn to the ways of our Great Humbler.”

He had plain gone off the deep end, of course. O.P. weren't hiving nothing but the bottom of the Potomac. Cook, Tidd, Merriam, and Owen, they'd taken the tall timber back at the Kennedy farm. They was gone, I was sure. I never held that against them, by the way. They valued their skin. There was weak spots in them men, and I knowed all 'bout that, for I had weak spots myself—all over. I weren't against 'em.

The Old Man suddenly noticed me standing there and said, “Stevens, why is Onion here?”

“She come back to the Ferry on her own,” Stevens said.

The Old Man didn't like it. “She ought not be here,” he said. “The fighting's gotten a bit dirty. She ought to be hiving more bees in safety.”

“She wanted to come,” Stevens said.

That was a damn lie. I hadn't said a thing 'bout going back to the Ferry. Stevens gived orders at the schoolhouse, and like usual, I done what he said.

The Old Man placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “It does my heart good to see you here, Onion, for we needs children to witness the liberation of your people and to tell stories of it to future generations of Negroes and whites alike. This day will be remembered. Besides, you is always a good omen. I have never lost a battle when you is about.”

He forgot all 'bout Osawatomie, where they deadened Frederick and sent him packing, but that was the Old Man's nature. He never remembered nothing but what he wanted to, and didn't tell himself nothing but what he only really wanted to believe.

He got downright wistful standing there. “God has blessed us, Onion, for you is a good and courageous girl. Having you with me at this moment of my greatest triumph is like having my Frederick here, who gived his life in favor of the Negro, even though he didn't know his head from his hindquarters. You has always gived him such joy. It gives me cause to thank our Redeemer and how much He hath given to all of us.” And here he closed his eyes, folded his hands across his chest, and busted into prayer, chanting his thanks to our Great Redeemer Who walked the road to Jericho and so forth, praying 'bout Fred being so lucky as to ride with the angels, and while he said it, he didn't want to forget to mention some others of his twenty-two children, the ones who'd died from sickness and those who yet had gone to glory: the ones who died first, little Fred, Marcy when she was two, William who died of fever, Ruth who got burned; then he runned down the list of the living ones, then his cousin's children, and his Pa and Ma, thanking God for accepting them on high and teaching him the Lord's way. All this with his men standing 'round and the hostages behind him, watching, and a good three hundred white fellers outside, milling around looped and shit-faced, passing ammo and gearing up to make another charge.

There weren't no Owen to bust him out of that trance—Owen's the only one had the guts to do it, to my knowledge—for the Old Man's prayers was serious business, and I seen him pull his heater out on any fool game enough to break off his conversations between him and his Maker. Even his main fellers Kagi and Stevens was scared to do it, and when they done it, they went 'bout it roundabout with no success, breaking drinking glasses at his feet, coughing, hacking, harring up spit, chopping wood, and when that didn't work, they had target practice and blowed off caps right next to his ear, and still they couldn't break him out of one his prayer spells. But my arse, or what was left of it, was on the line, and I valued it dearly, so I said, “Captain, I is thirsty! And there is some business at hand. I'm feeling Jesus.”

That snapped him out of his trance. He stood up straightaway, tossed out two or three amens, throwed his arms out wide and said, “Thank Him, Onion! Thank Him! You is on the right road. Give Onion some water, men!” Then he drawed himself up to his full height, pulled out from his belt and held up the sword from Frederick the Great, admiring it, then placed it across his chest. “May this new acceptance of the Son of Man in Onion's heart serve as a symbol of inspiration to us in our fight for justice for the Negro. May it give us even greater force. Let it inspire us to lend ourselves even more wholly to the cause, and give our enemies something to cry about. Now, men. On to it. We is not done yet!”

Well, he didn't say nothing 'bout busting out of there. Them's the words I was looking for. He didn't breathe a word of that.

He ordered the men and the slaves to chink out the walls, and they got busy. A feller named Phil, a slave feller, got some of the slaves together—there was 'bout twenty-five colored in there in all, some who had come or been gathered thereabouts along with those we brung, plus five white masters who set tight, not movin'—and them coloreds got busy. They chinked out some expert holes with pikes and loaded up the rifles. Lined 'em up one by one so the Old Man's men could grab one after the other without having to load 'em up, and we prepared for perfect slumber.

Last Stand

T
he mob outside the gate waited a good hour or so for Colonel Washington to work whatever magic he had supposedly had, to exchange hisself and his Negroes for the white hostages. When it didn't happen by the second hour, someone hollered out, “Where's our colonel? How many hostages is you giving up for our colonel and his niggers?”

The Old Man stuck his face in the window and hollered, “None. If you want your colonel, come and get him.”

Oh, they throwed a hissy fit all over again. There was some hollerin', fussin', and huddlin' up, and after a few minutes they walked 'bout two hundred militia through the gate, in uniform, marched 'em in there in formation, turned 'em against the engine house, and told 'em, “Fire!” By God, when they cut loose, it felt like a giant monster kicked the building. The whole engine house shook. Just a roaring and banging. Bricks and mortar chinked everywhere, from the roof pillars on down. Their firing blowed big pieces of brick mortar right clear through the walls of the Engine Works, and even tore off a big piece of the timber that held up the roof, it came crashing down.

But they didn't overtake us. The Old Man's men were well trained and they held steady, firing through the holes in the brick made by the militia's firing, with him hollering, “Calm. Aim low. Make 'em pay dear.” They powered the militia with balls and drove 'em back outside the gate.

The militias gathered outside the walls again, and they was so drunk and mad now it was a pity. All that laughing and joking from the day before was gone now, replaced with full-out rage and frustration in every appearance. Some of them growed chickenhearted from that first charge, for several of their brothers had been hurt or deadened by the Captain's men, and they peeled off and hauled ass away from the group. But more was coming down to the gate, and after a few minutes, they regrouped and come through the gate again in even greater numbers, for more men had arrived outside the armory to replace those that fell. Still, the Old Man's men held them off. And that company drew back. They milled around out there by the safety of the gate, yelling and hollering, promising to string the Old Man up by his privates. Shortly after, they brung in a second company from somewhere 'bout. Different uniforms. Marched another two hundred or so into the gate, madder than the first, cussing and hooting, turned 'em on the building, and by the time they busted off their caps, the Old Man's crew had diced, sliced, and gutted out a good number of 'em, and they broke loose for the gate running faster than the first, leaving a few more gutted or dead 'bout the yard. And each time the Virginians moved to fetch one of their wounded, one of the Old Man's men poked his Sharps out the chinks in the brick wall and made 'em pay for them thoughts. That just got 'em hotter. They was burning up.

The white hostages, meantime, was dead quiet and terrified. The Old Man put the Coachman and the Emperor in charge of minding 'em, and had a good twenty-five slaves in there running 'bout busy. They wasn't bewildered no more, them coloreds was with it. And not a peep was heard out of any of them white masters.

Now we wasn't far from their saviors. We could hear the militia talking and yelling outside, screaming and cussing. That crowd growed bigger and bigger, and with that come more confusion to 'em. They'd say let's go this way, try this, and someone would shout that plan down, then someone else would holler, “My cousin Rufus is wounded in the yard. We got to get him out,” and someone would say, “You get him!” and a fight would break out among 'em, and a captain would shout more directions, and they'd have to break up the fighting among themselves. They was just discombobulated. And while they done this, the Captain was ordering his men and the colored helpers, in calm fashion, “Reload, people. Aim low. Line the rifles on the walls loaded so you can grab one after you fire the first. We are hurting the enemy.” The men and them slaves was firing and reloading so fast, so efficient, seemed like a machine. Old John Brown knowed his business when it come to fighting a war. They could have used him in the great war that was to come, I'll say that.

But his luck couldn't hold. It runned out like it always done with him. In stitches. Clean out, the way it always did with him.

It begun when a chunky white feller come out to talk to the Old Man and try to smooth things. He seemed to be some kind of boss. He came into the armory a few times, said I'm coming in peace, and let's work this out. But each time he came in, he didn't venture too far in. Would stick his head in and scoot out. He weren't armed, and after he poked his head and begged his way in a few times, the Old Man told his men, “Don't shoot him,” and he hollered at the little feller, “Keep off. Keep back. We come to free the Negro.” But that feller kept fiddling with coming back and forth, sticking his head in, then going back out. He never come all the way in. I heard him out there trying to calm the men down outside the gate at one point, for they'd become a mob. Weren't nobody in control of them. He tried that a couple of times and gave up on that and got to scooting a little farther into the armory again, just peeking in, then scampering back to safety like a little mouse. Finally he got his nerve up and come in too close. He runned behind a water tank in the yard, and when he got in there, he peeked his head out from behind that water tank, and one of the Old Man's men in the other armory buildings—I believe Ed Coppoc done it—got a bead on him and fired twice and got him. Dropped his game. The man fell and stopped paying taxes right there. Done.

That feller's death drove that mob outside into a frenzy. They was already spiked by then—them two saloons at the gate was doing big business—but that feller's death drove them straight cross-eyed. Made 'em into a straight-out mob. Turns out he was the mayor of Harpers Ferry. Fontaine Beckham. Friend to the Rail Man and liked by all, white and colored. Coppoc couldn't'a knowed it. There was a lot of confusion.

The mayor's body lay there with the rest of the dead for a couple of hours, while the Virginians outside whooped and hollered and banged their drums and played the fife and promised the Old Man they was gonna come in there and cut him to pieces and make him eat his bloomers. They railed and promised to make his eyeballs into marshmallows. But nothing happened. Dusk come. It weren't quite dark, but it got quiet out there, quiet as midnight. Something was happening out there in the dusk. They stopped hollering and quieted up. I couldn't see them then, for it growed dark, but somebody must'a come there, a captain or somebody, and got them sorted out and better organized. They set there for 'bout ten minutes that way, murmuring quietly 'bout such and so and such and such, like little kids whispering, real quiet, not making a whole lot of noise.

The Old Man, watching through the window, drew back. He lit a lantern and shook his head. “That's it,” he said. “We has them neutralized. Jesus's grace is more powerful than what any man can do. Of that you can be certain, men.”

Just then they busted through that gate in a horde, four hundred men, the newspaper said later—so many you couldn't see between 'em, a stampede, firing as they come, in a full-out, ass-and-hindquarters, band-beatin', honest-to-goodness charge.

We couldn't take it. We didn't have the numbers and was spread too thin around the armory. Kagi and the two coloreds from Oberlin, Leary and Copeland, was at the far end in the rifle works building, and they was the first to fall. They was driven out the back windows of the building and fled into the banks of the Shenandoah, where they both got hit. Kagi took a ball to the head and dropped down dead. Leary got hit in the back and followed him. Copeland got farther into the river, managed to climb on a rock in the middle of the river, and was stranded there. A Virginian waded out there and climbed on the rock with him. Both men drawed revolvers and fired. Both guns snapped, too wet to fire. Copeland surrendered. He'd hang in a month.

Meantime, they overrun a man named Leeman in the armory. He dashed out the side door and jumped into the Potomac and tried to swim across. Militiamen spotted him from the bridges and fired. Wounded him but didn't kill him. He drifted downstream a few feet and managed to pull himself up onto a rock. Another Virginian climbed out to him, holding his pistol out the water to keep it dry. He climbed onto the rock where Leeman lay sprawled on his back. Leeman hollered, “Don't shoot! I surrender!” The feller smiled, leveled his gun, and blasted Leeman's face off. Leeman lay sprawled on that rock for hours. He was used as target practice by them men. They got wasted on gut sauce and happily pumped him full of balls like he was a pillow.

One of the Thompson boys, Will, the younger one, got out the armory some kind of way and got trapped on the second floor of the Gault House hotel, across the road from the armory. They burst in on him, drug him downstairs, kept him prisoner for a few minutes, then took him to the B&O Bridge and made ready to shoot him. But a captain runned over and said, “Take this prisoner inside the hotel.”

“The lady who owns the hotel don't want him,” they said.

“Why not?”

“She said she don't want her carpet mussed up,” they said.

“Tell her I ordered it. He ain't gonna muss her carpet.”

Them men didn't pay that captain no mind. They pushed him off, stood Thompson up on the bridge, backed off him, and blistered him full of holes right there. “Now he'll muss up her carpet,” they said.

Thompson fell into the water. It was shallow water down there, and from where we was, you could see him floating the next morning, his face staring up out the water, his eyes wide, asleep forever, as his body bobbed up and down, his boots licking the bank.

We was holding 'em off at the engine house, but it was a full-out gunfight. From a corner of the yard, the rifle works building, the last man living out there, the colored man Dangerfield Newby, seen us making a fight of it and tried to make it for us.

Newby had a wife and nine children in slavery just thirty miles off. He'd been holed up in the rifle works with Kagi and the others. When Kagi and his men made for the Shenandoah River, Newby smartly held up and let the rest chase them others. While they done that, he jumped out a window on the Potomac River side and sprinted across the armory toward the engine house on the back side of the armory. That smart nigger was making time, too. He aimed to get to us.

A white feller from the back of the water tower seen him and throwed a bead on him. Newby saw him, drawed his rifle and dropped him, and kept coming.

He had almost made it to the engine house when a feller from a house across the street leaned through an upper-story window and laid an answer on Newby with a squirrel gun loaded with a six-inch nail. That nail plugged straight into Newby's neck like a spear. Blood burst out his neck and the ground caught him, and he was dead before he got there.

We was fully shooting out cap for cap with them when this happened, so nobody could do nothing but watch, but the mob paid attention to his dying. He was the first colored they could get a hold of, and they was thirsty for him. They grabbed him, pulled his body out the entrance and into the street. They kicked him, pummeled him. Then a man ran up to him and cut off his ears. Another pulled off his pants and cut off his private parts. Another poked sticks into the bullet wound. Then they drug him up the road to a hog pen and tossed him in there, and the hogs rooted on him, one of them pulling out something long and elastic from his stomach area, one end of it being in the hog's mouth and the other in Newby's body.

The sight of Newby getting rooted by them hogs seemed to incite the Old Man's men to cussing and shooting, and they fired into the militia with deadly effect, for they had worked in right close on us in numbers, and now the Captain's men, furious, drove them back. They done it to effect for a few minutes, but there weren't no chance. They had us then. They closed the door. We was surrounded. Without Kagi and the others to cover us from the other end of the yard, there was no more driving them out the gate. They was at all points 'bout us, but they lingered now, stopped their charges and hung where they was, just out of rifle range. Didn't come no closer. The Old Man's army had stopped 'em where they was, but more flooded into the yard on both ends, and they couldn't be driven out the gate now. They was right there, 'bout two hundred yards off. We was defeated.

I found the Lord full out then. It's true I found Him earlier that day, but I never full out accepted Him in total until that time, being that my Pa was thickly scandalous in the preaching department and the Old Man bored me to tears with the Word, but God works like He wants to. He outright laid on me full-out then, for He'd given me a warning before that He was coming into my heart in full, and He came right then on me full blast. If you think looking at three hundred boiling-mad, half-cocked Virginians holding every kind of breechloader under God's sun staring back at you with murder in their eyes is a ticket to redemption, you is on the dot. I seen what they done to Newby, and every colored in that engine house knowed whatever devilment Newby got, we was two trips short of, for Newby was lucky. He got his while he was dead, and the rest of us was conjured to get it wide awake and alive, if we lived long enough to get it in that fashion. I found the Lord surely. I called on Jesus outright. A feeling come over me. I sat in a corner, covered my head, pulled out from my bonnet my Good Lord Bird feather, and held that thing tight, just a-praying, and saying, “Lord, let me be Your angel.”

The Old Man didn't hear me, though. He was busy conjuring up ideas, for the men in the room had dropped away from the walls and windows to surround him, as he backed off from his window and wiped his beard thoughtfully. “We has them where we wants them,” he announced cheerfully. He turned to Stevens and said, “Take Watson out with a prisoner and tell them we will begin exchanging our men for Negroes. By now Cook and the others has hived some more bees at the schoolhouse and the farm. On our signal, they will begin their attack from the rear with the Negroes, thus provoking our escape. It is time to move into the mountains.”