“Sir, the Confederates are attacking the fort,” Leaming answered. “What? Have you gone clean round the bend?” Bradford yelped. “There's no Secesh soldiers within seventy miles of this place.”
“I thought the same thing, sir,” Leaming said. “But listen.”
Major Bradford did. Even in the pale, uncertain light of first dawn, Leaming watched the color drain from his face. How? Bradford's lips silently shaped the word. “How could they get here without anybody knowing?” he managed aloud. “Maybe Forrest really did sell his soul to the Devil, the way the niggers say.”
“What are we going to do, sir?” Lieutenant Leaming asked.
“I don't know,” Bradford said, which struck his adjutant as a fundamentally honest response, but not what he wanted to hear from the regimental commander. Bradford gathered himself, or tried to: “I don't see how we can surrender, though. Lord only knows what Forrest's men would do to us, let alone to the niggers here.”
“Didn't Major Booth say we could hold this fort against anybody and anything for a couple of days?” Leaming asked, perhaps incautiously.
“He said it, yes. How old were you, Lieutenant, before you found out what people say isn't necessarily so?” Major Bradford loaded his words with all the scorn his courtroom training could pile onto them. Mack Leaming's cheeks and ears heated. He hoped the light was still too dim to let Bradford notice him flush. He was in luck — the regimental commander had stopped paying attention to him. Bradford was looking toward the tents that housed the newly arrived colored troops and their white superiors. “Where in tarnation is Major Booth, anyway?”
Booth chose that moment to pop out of his tent like a jack-in-the-box. The senior officer's tunic had several buttons undone. He wore no hat. His hair was all awry. But his eyes flashed fire even in the gray light before sunrise. “So the Rebs have shown up, have they?” he shouted, a fierce and unmistakable joy in his voice. “Well, good! “
“Good?” Major Bradford might have been looking around for a judge with whom he could lodge an objection.
“Good!” Major Booth shouted again. Mack Leaming inclined toward Bradford's opinion; no visit from Bedford Forrest was good news for anyone who followed the Stars and Stripes. But Booth went on, “We'll give the bastards a bloody nose and a black eye, and we'll send 'em back to Mama with their tail between their legs! Isn't that right, boys?”
The Negro soldiers spilling out of their tents screeched and capered and carried on. But the screeches were defiance hurled at the Confederates. Many of the capers the black men cut were lewd, but also showed they intended to fight. And the way the colored troops carried on brought smiles to the faces of the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry's troopers, many of whom had seemed as uncertain and afraid as Major Bradford and Mack Leaming himself.
“Are we going to fight those Secesh bastards?” Major Booth bellowed.
“Yes, suh!” the colored artillerymen yelled back.
“Are we going to whip those Secesh bastards?” Booth bellowed, even louder than before.
“Yes, suh!” The Negroes got louder, too. Lieutenant Leaming hadn't imagined they could.
Eyes still blazing, Booth peered this way and that. “Bradford!” he shouted. “Where in God's name are you, Bradford?”
“I'm here, sir,” Major Bradford answered. He had to say it again before he could make Major Booth hear him. “What do you require of me?”
“We don't want to let Forrest's men drive our pickets back into the fort right away, do we?” Booth demanded.
Bradford hesitated. Mack Leaming didn't think the Federal garrison wanted to do any such thing. Some of the ground within the large perimeter Gideon Pillow first laid out was higher than the position at the juncture of Coal Creek and the Mississippi the garrison now held. If the Confederates got sharpshooters on that high ground, they could fire down on the U.S. soldiers inside the present small earthwork. That wouldn't be good at all.
“Do we?” Major Booth repeated, more sharply than before. He knew the right answer, whether Bill Bradford did or not.
“Uh, no, sir.” Major Bradford might not know the answer, but he could take a hint.
“All right, then, goddammit,” Booth said. “Get some skirmishers out to help the pickets.” He cocked his head to one side, listening to the gunfire out beyond the breastwork. “Don't send a boy to do a man's job, either, Major. The Confederates sound like they're here in numbers. “
“Very well, major,” Bradford said, and turned to Mack Leaming.
“Order Companies B and C out to the picket line.”
“Companies Band C. Yes, sir.” Leaming dashed away, shouting, “Company B forward to the picket line! Company C forward to the picket line! We have to hold off the Rebs at long range!”
The men inside Fort Pillow were running around like ants after their hill is kicked. The colored troops' white officers screamed for gun crews to man the half — dozen cannon that had come north from Memphis with them. Negroes not serving the guns took their places along the earthwork with the whites from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry. They started banging away at whatever was out there.
They didn't just shoot at the Confederates, either. To show their scorn for the men who might have owned them in the not — too — distant past, they shouted filthy obscenities out toward the enemy, and backed them up with more lewd gestures.
“Don't you act like those niggers!” Leaming shouted to his white troopers. “Forrest's men are bad enough any which way. You see any sense to ticking 'em off worse?” He spotted one of the officers in Company C. “Logan! Get your men moving faster!”
“Yes, sir!” the young lieutenant answered. “We're doing our best, sir! “
“Never mind your best, dammit,” Leaming said. “Just do what you've got to do.”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Logan said again — what else could he say? Before long, about fifty men carrying rifle muskets and cartridge boxes stumbled out through the mud toward the rifle pits beyond the two rows of disused barracks outside the perimeter.
As Major Booth had before him, Mack Leaming paused to listen to the gunfire out there. Booth had it straight — the Confederates were putting a lot of lead in the air. How many men had Bedford Forrest brought through the swamps east of Fort Pillow, anyhow?
Too many, Leaming thought worriedly. That had hardly gone through his mind before one of the troopers going out to the picket line caught a bullet in the face and crumpled, his Springfield falling from his fingers. Another soldier also fell, grabbing at his leg. His howl of pain pierced the gravel- on-a-tin-roof rattle of musketry.
How many men have they got out there? Leaming wondered, and shivered. One way or another, the garrison would find out.
“Fire!” Captain Carron shouted.
Sergeant Mike Clark pulled the lanyard — the white man was in charge of the gun. A friction primer already stood in the touchhole: a goose quill filled with gunpowder and topped with shredded match. A looped steel pin was fixed in the primer, and the lanyard hooked to the loop. When Clark yanked it out, the match caught and set off the powder below. There was a hiss when the finely ground powder in the friction primer caught, then a roar as the main charge went off. Fire and smoke belched from the twelve — pounder's muzzle. Away flew a shrapnel round, to come down — with luck — on the advancing Confederates' heads.
Sergeant Ben Robinson watched for the burst along with Carron and Clark and with the rest of the colored artillerymen who served the gun. “Long!” the captain said, and then something more pungent. “Robinson! Bring the range down fifty yards!”
“Down fifty yards! Yes, suh!” Robinson said. Fifty yards was two turns of the altitude screw. He had to make sure he turned it the one way and not the other. He didn't want to raise the gun's muzzle instead of lowering it.
Meanwhile, the rest of the crew got the twelve — pounder ready to fire again. One Negro soldier used the worm — a giant two — pronged corkscrew on the end of a pole — to bring smoldering bits of wadding and cartridge bag out of the barrel. Another shoved a dripping sponge down the gun's iron throat to douse any bits of fire that remained. When the sponge was withdrawn, yet another black man shoved in the cartridge full of black powder. While he was loading the next round of shrapnel and the wadding that helped give it a tight seal, Sergeant Clark jabbed a sharp awl through the touchhole and punctured the cartridge bag again and again.
The whole colored gun crew manhandled the piece back into its proper position; even in the mud, recoil had
