Not all the bluebellies going down the slope and already at the bottom had given up. A soldier down there fired at Ward. He didn't know how to gauge such a steep uphill shot, and the minnie slapped into the mud about ten feet below the Confederate.
If I don't kill' em, they'll kill me, Ward thought. He aimed at a Negro. This time, nothing stayed his trigger finger. The ball caught the black in the short ribs. Although the runaway slave-for what else could he be? — was halfway down toward the Mississippi, the howl he let out reached Ward up on the bluff. The black rolled and tumbled all the way down to the riverbank.
“Nice shot!” another Confederate trooper said. “He looked just like one o' them clowns in the circus, way he turned somersets there.”
“He did, didn't he?” Ward paused in reloading, though not for long-his hands knew what to do even without direction. “Let's see if I can get me another coon like that.”
“Well, it ain't like we don't have plenty to pick from,” said the other soldier in butternut.
“Yeah.” Ward brought the loaded Enfield up to his shoulder and found another target.
A colored soldier rolled past Sergeant Ben Robinson. The man was groaning and trying to clutch at his chest, but his arms and legs kept flying out every which way. “Poor bastard,” Sandy Cole said. “He ain't dead yet, he gonna be by the time he fetch up 'longside the river.
“Ain't it the truth?” Robinson said. A Mini? ball cracked past his head. A few inches lower and he would have rolled and slid all the way down to the Mississippi, too. The only difference was, nobody would have wondered if he was dead.
Aaron Fentis looked up the slope to the top of the bluff, where Bedford Forrest's troopers were taking potshots at the whites and Negroes below them. “Why the hell those officers of our'n want us to come down here?” he demanded. “Dem Secesh sojers, dey shoot us down like we was so many wild turkeys.”
“They say the gunboat keep the Rebs off us,” Robinson said.
“Dey say, dey say.” Fentis's voice went high and mocking. “I say dey don' know what dey talkin' 'bout. Dey say we hold out Forrest, too. Was dey right? How much good dat damn gunboat do us up till now? Any a-tall? I ain't seen it. You seen it, Sergeant?” Even in disaster, he remembered to stay respectful to Ben Robinson's chevrons.
He should have stayed respectful to the white officers in command at Fort Pillow, too. Robinson should have reproved him for not sounding respectful enough. He knew he should, but couldn't make himself do it. Aaron Fentis might be disrespectful, but that didn't mean he was wrong. The whites in command at Fort Pillow hadn't known what was going on. Well, maybe Major Booth had, but he got killed too soon for it to matter. Since then…
Robinson wouldn't have wanted to surrender to the Confederates, even if they did offer to treat Negroes as prisoners of war. But he'd thought, as Major Bradford had thought, that Fort Pillow could hold. That turned out to be mistaken. And now there was no talk of taking anybody prisoner, colored man or white. The Rebs kept yelling, “Black flag!” and firing away for all they were worth.
“Maybe they stop killin' people if we surrender now,” Charlie Key said.
“Who kin do it?” Robinson asked bleakly. “Major Booth, he dead. Major Bradford, he want to go on fightin'.”
“He git killed, he go on fightin' much longer,” Key said. “Then somebody else kin tell the Rebs we is givin' up.” He paused, then added, “Do Jesus, I surrender right now if I don't reckon they shoot me dead fo' tryin'.”
That was defeatism. Sergeant Robinson knew he shouldn't let anybody get away with it. In happier times, he wouldn't have. But how could you blame a man for defeatism after you were defeated? If scrambling down toward the riverbank with Confederate soldiers shooting at you from above wasn't defeat, Robinson didn't want to find out what was.
If he thought some Reb would let him give up, he supposed he would throw down his Springfield, too. He'd done everything he could reasonably do to defend the fort. But getting anyone in butternut to accept a black man's surrender wouldn't be easy-and might not be possible.
If the Federals couldn't quit, they had to go on fighting. But Robinson couldn't even do that, not now. No Confederate soldiers were within bayonet reach, and he had no cartridges for the rifle musket he'd picked up. He wondered if any of the Union soldiers going down toward the riverbank carried more than a handful of ammunition.
But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a white man below him yelled, “You need to shoot back at the stinkin' Rebs, get over here! We got us crates and crates of cartridges.”
“Major Bradford, he done thought o' somethin', anyways,” Sandy
Cole said.
“I reckon,” Robinson said. “Reckon that make once, too.”
Was he bitter? Just because everything Bradford tried turned out to be wrong? For a moment, he tried to deny it even to himself. He wondered why, when it was so plainly true. Only one thing occurred to him: that as a black man, he had no right to criticize what a white man did.
“Hell I don't,” he muttered. What that white man did was altogether too likely to get him killed. Was a damn fool any less a damn fool because he was white? Whites seemed to think so, or at least to believe a damn fool was more a damn fool if he happened to be black.
There were black damn fools. Robinson had known enough of them to have no doubts about that. But there were white damn fools, too. And if one of them wore oak leaves on his shoulders, he could be a damn fool on a scale most Negroes only dreamt of.
Robinson awkwardly made his way down toward the crates of cartridges. If he had to go on fighting, he would make the best fight he could. He was clumsy loading the Springfield, too; most of his training was as an artilleryman, not a foot soldier.
He'd just finished setting a percussion cap on the nipple when a burst of fire came from farther south along the riverbank. Panic swept through him. If the Rebs were shooting at the garrison from there as well as from the top of the bluff, the surviving Federals wouldn't last long. But not many minnies tore into the Negroes and whites in blue uniforms.
Instead, bullets clattered off the gunboat's iron sides. They sounded like hail on a tin roof. For a moment, Robinson wondered what good they would do the Rebs. Ironclads were supposed to be proof against cannonballs, let alone Mini? balls.
But then a white soldier standing not far away said, “Fuck me if I'd want to raise the gunports with the Rebs putting that much lead in the air. You do, you'll catch a bullet with your teeth.”
“They don't open them ports; they can't shoot!” Robinson exclaimed. “They can't shoot, they don't do us no good.”
“You noticed that, did you?” the white trooper said. “Nothin' gets by you, does it, boy?”
Normally, that boy would have infuriated Robinson, the more so since he outranked the white. Now he was too appalled to call the other man on it. If Major Bradford was wrong about this… We all die, the colored sergeant thought numbly.
Up on top of the bluff, a cannon boomed. It hadn't fired for some time, but now the Rebs had got it loaded again. A ball splashed into the water not far from the gunboat. That wasn't great shooting, but it didn't need to be. If the amateur gunners up there-they couldn't be anything else-kept on, sooner or later they might hit. How well armored was the gunboat against fire from above? Ben Robinson had no idea.
Maybe the gunboat's captain didn't, either. And maybe he didn't want to find out. Black smoke poured out of the stack. The gunboat began to move-not toward the riverbank to blast the Confederates and rescue Fort Pillow's embattled garrison, but north, up the Mississippi, away from danger.
“You yellow-bellied son of a bitch bastard!” the white man howled. Robinson nodded helplessly. The gunboat paid no attention to either one of them. Away she steamed, faster and faster.
X
When Bill Bradford watched the New Era steam up the Mississippi, he felt like… He didn't know what he felt like. Like a man whose intended bride jilted him at the altar? Something like that, maybe. But a jilted bridegroom
