Authors: Madison Smartt Bell
Henri, who had just stretched out on the green springy earth, raised up on onto his elbows.
“I want ye to go too,” Forrest said.
Why
, Henri thought, but there was no telling.
They rode up along the top of the ridge south of the inner fort’s horseshoe, bearing a borrowed white shirt raised on a musket barrel. At the sight of the truce flag the guns all fell silent; to fill that vacuum, Henri’s ears began to ring. From the height they had reached he could see well enough that Forrest was really not bluffing this time. The ammunition wagons had in fact arrived from Brownsville long before. McCulloch, from the position he’d taken among the cabins of the cove, had completely silenced three cannon of the fort and the others were much troubled by sharpshooters Forrest had moved up from the hills to the east. There was more than one Federal boat on the river, but Anderson was just now marching three companies into trenches dug at the foot of the bluff, to forestall any attempt at a landing. On the north side of the fort, Henri could just make out Nolan’s buckskin jacket creeping forward through the ravine beside Coal Creek. A couple of his raiders were visible crawling along after him and all his men were probably there somewhere. It was Nolan who had shown Forrest this weak spot and got his leave to be first to exploit it. Henri couldn’t quite fix on what about this situation troubled him so.
With the cease-fire, the heads of black soldiers had begun to pop up above the parapet. Soon enough they got the confidence to show all of themselves, and the parapet was lined with them like birds alit on a rail. They looked very well in their blue uniforms, which mostly had not yet seen hard use. A half-dozen or so stood easily, their arms at parade rest almost, looking at Henri with a calm curiosity. He could feel the force that was latent in them. Where were you in 1859? he thought. Or the year after that. Or the year after that. They
were here now, anyway. He thought suddenly that Forrest might have attached him to this party so that he could be seen by these black men. And yet, he merely puzzled them. In Louisiana, New Orleans especially, anyone who looked at Henri would form a notion of what he was, but these men, whose African strain was more pure, hardly knew what to make of him. In these western states he was taken for a half-breed Indian half the time anyway. It would have made more sense to send Jerry, or Ben. If Forrest had even had such a purpose.
Some of the other black men on the parapet had begun to call insults to the Confederate soldiers below—not a good idea, Henri thought. There had been black Federals at Paducah too, two weeks before, and he’d seen the knuckles of Forrest’s men go white on the grips of their weapons then. All over West Tennessee there was a dumb rage among white people at the very idea of black Federal troops—astonishment even, as if their own mules and oxen had somehow thought to take up arms against them. A few months earlier General Cleburne had suggested the South muster slaves into its dwindling armies, but no one wanted to hear that, even now.
Not all of the blacks on the parapet were in uniform. Indeed, the loudest among them were not. Runaways had been migrating to this place ever since the Federals had first captured it. There had never been troops enough to man the three-mile-long outer earthworks, but blacks who wandered in from wherever had made themselves at home within this defense. Some carried on trade from up and downriver, dealing whiskey and other contraband. And they were called “contraband” themselves, by whites in the region. The black runaways were not alone there either. The cabins McCulloch had just occupied had over several months filled up with a queer mix of ex-slaves and white renegades of one kind or another: deserters from either army alongside men who’d profited from the unsettled times to turn bandit. Fort Pillow had the name of a vipers’ nest, and no doubt some of the tales of rape and robbery were true.
Things had turned ugly in West Tennessee since their last gallop through here in 1863. From the war’s beginning the land had been combed over too many times for supplies and recruits. And from one farm to the next it was split between Confederate and Union sympathizers. The confusion opened all kinds of chances to settle
scores that had nothing to do with the war. Not three weeks earlier, they’d come across the carcass of their own Lieutenant Dobbs, who’d gone home to Henderson County to raise a few men he knew there, with his face skinned out and his nose cut off and other mutilations too dreadful for Henri’s mind to dwell upon. They had to go through his pockets to guess who he was. In Jackson a committee had come to Forrest to claim that Fort Pillow was nothing but a hideout for marauders who did such ugly things as that, and what did he mean to do about it? Fort Pillow had become such a plague on the region that Forrest had trouble keeping his West Tennessee men riding with him, for all wanted to stay home to defend their own families.
Forrest was riding out toward them now, forking his third horse of that day, pulling where the truce flag whipped from the gun barrel at the same time a messenger arrived from the fort: Lieutenant Alexander Hunter, commanding a detachment of the Second U.S. Colored Light Artillery, and with him Captain Young of the Twenty-fourth Missouri Cavalry. Young raised his hat to Forrest, for he had seen him in the field before today. Lieutenant Hunter showed the note that Anderson had written.
“Can you assure me that my Negro soldiers will be treated as prisoners of war?” he said.
“That’s jest what it says thar on that paper don’t it?” Forrest said shortly. “They’ll be prisoners of war if you surrender
right this red-hot minute
. Dawdle, and they’re subject to be treated like dead folks.”
Lieutenant Hunter looked a young man, his face the color of cold biscuit dough. There was a crack in the corner of his mouth, and a dark furrow in between his eyebrows. “Your Confederate Congress has put it out that Negro soldiers will be sent back to slavery if captured. Their officers executed.” He tried a thin smile. “And that would be me.”
“Confederate Congress ain’t here so they don’t git no say,” Forrest told him. “Ye’ll be treated fair if ye strike yore flag. Don’t and ye’re like as the next man to get kilt in the fight.”
“Major Booth asks for more time,” Young told him.
“He damn well caint have it,” Forrest snapped. “Pussyfoot around and I won’t be responsible. I need me an answer and I need it right quick.”
The two Federal officers nodded and rode back to the fort. Why were they dealing in a dead man’s name, Henri wondered. But maybe he knew … Bradford was a West Tennessean himself but he’d made a bad reputation since he came to Fort Pillow. His orders were to live off the land and he’d followed them to the point of pillage. Old scores of his own to settle, perhaps. And there were insults to women on Bradford’s watch, the kind that can only be washed out in blood. Major Booth had arrived at the fort so recently he’d not had the time to make himself hated.
“They hopen to get some he’p out of them gunboats,” Forrest muttered, reaching under his coat to finger a bruise where his ribs had slammed a stone in his fall. “Well, we ain’t got all goddamn day to set around and let that happen.”
Captain Young appeared on the parapet among the black soldiers there. He pointed and said something to one of the more excitable troopers, who capered and kicked out a leg. “Wooo, thas Ole Bedford sho’ nuff. We knows him! Yes we do.” And then the man jumped behind the wall to shelter himself from Forrest’s baleful stare. But Forrest didn’t look altogether displeased. He’d come out here to be recognized, Henri realized, or at least that would be part of his reason. A little while back Colonel Duckworth had bluffed a garrison in Union City to give itself up with surrender-or-die threats written over Forrest’s name—when Forrest himself was on his way to Paducah. Fort Pillow’s commanders would be more likely to take those warnings seriously if they knew Forrest really was here in person, and there were apt to be others besides Captain Young who had run up against him somewhere before.
Lieutenant Hunter returned to them, alone this time, his features more drawn than they had been before. He passed Forrest a scrap of paper with the name of Major Booth forged to it, then turned to Goodman and said something to him in a low voice.
“Your note does not produce the desired effect,”
Forrest spelled out slowly. He looked up at the envoy. “I don’t know whoever in there is setten down this horseshit but tell him if the next one ain’t wrote in plain English I’ll come in there and poke it down his throat with a ramrod.”
“I’ll do what I can to satisfy you,” Hunter said. He nodded to Forrest and returned toward the fort.
“That man smelt of whiskey, I swan,” Forrest said. He crumpled the note and threw it down. “Even this goddamn paper stinks of whiskey.”
Henri looked again at the walls of the parapet, where some of the capering, catcalling blacks did appear to be a little tipsy. Maybe Bradford would be drinking too, to keep his courage up. Through one of those queer windows in his mind he could see men standing with tin cups and gourds around a keg.
“We will have this place come hell or high water,” Forrest said. “If everbody up there has done drunk hisself senseless it’s jest gone be too bad.”
He rode west along the bluff, peered out at the river, rode back. Rarely had Henri seen him so fidgety. This fort was about as stout as the one at Paducah. There they had sacked the town with no trouble, commandeered a few hundred horses, captured all manner of supplies and destroyed whatever they couldn’t carry. They’d had the pleasure of burning a steamboat, and the dock where it was moored. The fort, however, they failed to take. “If I have to storm your works, expect no quarter,” Forrest had written when he demanded surrender. The Federal commander called the bluff and when Forrest’s men charged they were thrown back, and their leader, A. P. Thompson, killed. Forrest gave up and went away, with his men feeling rightly enough they’d been whipped by niggers, though none of them said anything out loud.
It wasn’t going to go like that this time. It would be different, and in the worst way.
Not all of the blacks in the horseshoe fort were drunk. The handful of men who had been studying Henri from the beginning were still sober and serious, and someone had just handed them up a very long rifle with an octagon barrel.
“You ought to go back, General,” Captain Goodman said, motioning toward the long rifle. “I think they are marking you out as a target.”
“Ain’t no man can kill me and live,” Forrest said. “Hit’s a flag of truce besides.”
“Yes, but they claim that we’re moving up men through ravines under the truce.”
“I ain’t moven men through the goddamn ravines any more than
they tryen to land men off of their goddamn gunboats—” Forrest broke off. “Yonder he comes.”
It wasn’t Hunter this time but some other junior officer. The note read,
General, I will not surrender. Very respectfully yours, L. F. Booth …
“It’s a plain answer anyway,” Forrest said. “Goddamn their eyes! I’m goen up on that hill yonder—and I’ll be a-watchen for the first men over that wall. We got Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee all here. Let’s see who can git there first. And git after’m—
keep
after’m, boys, until that flag comes down.”
A gust from the river teased out the cloth of the Union flag above the battlement. It seemed that all of them were looking at it for a second. The darkness rising in Henri’s mind suddenly took on a definite form.
“General,” he said.
Forrest, interrupted, turned on him hotly.
“General—” He saw it plain now, why couldn’t he say it? “Mister Nolan is out in advance of Barteau. In the ravine by Coal Creek.”
Forrest looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “Why wouldn’t he be? Them’s local boys thar with him and they know the lay of the land.”
They have the local-most grudges too, Henri thought, and they mean to be the first ones in there. He was looking for a safe way to say it when Forrest spoke again.
“All right then. Go see about him. If it’s a-worryen ye so.” With a grimace Forrest pressed his sore ribs once more, then wheeled his horse toward the rear.
Henri squeezed his heels to the flanks of his jenny and rushed down toward the Coal Creek ravine. Behind him came the high silver tone of Gaus’s bugle, then the hair-raising keen of the Rebel yell. The crash of artillery replaced the ringing in his ears. Barteau’s men looked up at him as he whipped by, thinking he might be bringing orders as he sometimes did. But Nolan and his followers were already darting up the slope toward the earthworks. Henri jumped down, tied his jenny to a stub of a fallen tree and went after them.
The charging Confederates had thrown themselves into the six-foot ditch at the front of the horseshoe and were climbing all on top of each other in a mad leapfrog to scale the earthen wall. All the defenders’ attention was now concentrated there, and though the
angle was too steep for the cannon to be of any use, small arms fire was doing considerable damage.
Nolan’s men meanwhile were making for a point where the earthwork met the bluff on the north side. There the buckskin jacket disappeared, over the bluff itself as it looked. Nolan’s men went over after him … and more than Nolan had with him when he joined their force. As many as fifty West Tennessee guerrillas were going over, and they weren’t flinging themselves into the river either, as Henri saw when he reached the edge. The last of the partisans stretched back a hand to help him, and by scrabbling and clutching at a root sticking out of the clay of the cliff he was able to scramble around the corner of the wall as Nolan and his crowd had done before—each man beginning to fire as he entered the fort. A keg of whiskey had indeed been broached, and more than one of Nolan’s men paused there to dip himself a measure.
The Federals might have seen and stopped them easily enough were they not facing the frontal assault—new riflemen stepping up onto the catwalk behind the battlement to relieve those who stepped down to reload, and all in good order until Nolan and his men disrupted it by shooting the defenders in the back. At once the top of the battlement was covered with a wave of Forrest’s men breaking over it, the wild bone-chilling yell still skirling as they jumped down into the enclosure, slaying every fish that swirled in the barrel.