“The choice is yours. Remain where you are, and stay with me, or step over with those other men”-Bowater pointed to the cluster by the starboard rail-“and go with them to the Yankees. What will it be?”
The silence settled down again, and every eye was on Jacob, and Jacob clearly was not happy about it. His eyes shifted between Bowater and the men at the starboard rail. At last he made some little sound-it might have been a muttered word-and with three quick steps he crossed to the starboard rail and took his place there.
Jacob shook his head. Taylor could see the sorrow in his face, his eyes. Finally he spoke. “Massah Sam’l, I’se sorry. Really, I’se sorry. But what the hell else you expect me ta do?”
Bowater looked from Jacob to Moses, to Johnny, then to Hieronymus Taylor. Then, without a word, he turned and disappeared through the door into the casement.
“All right, y’all, this here’s your chance and you best take it!” Taylor said, loud, and his voice moved the men to action. They climbed down, one after another, into the boat, faces frightened and expectant, all at once.
“Boss.” Jones stopped, as Taylor knew and feared he would. “This here, this here’s a fine thing you doin’…”
“Shut up. Think I wouldn’t rather see your black ass stop a shell before mine? Git the hell in the boat, afore I change my stupid mind.”
Moses nodded, and to Taylor’s irritation smiled and then climbed into the boat and took up an oar.
“Go on, y’all!” Taylor shouted. “Head on downriver, that’s where you’ll find them Yankees, lead ya to the Promised Land!”
The men at the thwarts dipped their oars and pulled and the boat began to fade into the night.
“Go on!” Taylor shouted. “Go work in one of them damned factories up North, see how damned good ya had it here!”
Then from the dark, from the amorphous white shape which was all he could see of the boat, Moses Jones’s voice cut though the dark like a knife.
Then all of the men in the boat together:
Then Moses again:
Hieronymus Taylor stood on the fantail and watched until first the boat and then the singing were swallowed up in the dark. He smiled despite himself, shook his head, stepped into the casement, and shut the ironclad door.
Samuel Bowater stood on top of the pilothouse roof, alone, watched the boat pull away downriver. Jones’s voice, deep and clear, floated back to them.
Jacob’s desertion had moved him in a profound way. He would never have guessed it, was certain, when he agreed to test his conviction, that Jacob would remain by his side. That he had opted instead to leave the Bowaters’ service for the uncertainties of freedom in the North shocked Samuel, changed his outlook in a fundamental way.
He toyed with these thoughts, but his mind wandered. His father, his mother, Wendy, Robley Paine, they all stepped up for consideration, vague, half-formed thoughts. He sat on the hurricane deck, leaned back against the pilothouse.
He did not know what time it was when he awoke, nor what woke him. He opened his eyes, looked into the dark. There were footsteps on the hurricane deck. He did not move.
A figure stepped past the pilothouse, stepped to the forward end of the hurricane deck. In the moonlight Bowater recognized the beaten-down frame of Robley Paine.
For a moment Paine did nothing. Then with some difficulty he knelt down on the deck, bowed his head. Clasped his hands. For a long time he remained there, in silent prayer, and Bowater was not sure what to do.
Finally Bowater rose, and his foot scraped on the deck and Paine looked up.
“Ah, Mr. Paine, I did not see you there,” Bowater said.
“Quite all right, Captain,” Paine said. He stood painfully, stepped over to Bowater. There was something different about his face. The muscles seemed less tense, the edge of madness dulled. “A fine night,” he said.
“Lovely…” Bowater said, and then, before he knew he had said it, added, “Why did you do this, sir? The ship, all of it?”
Paine looked at him with a look that seemed to peel the buffers of secret thought away. “I don’t know. I don’t know why I did most of what I did, this past year. I don’t even recall a lot of it. I did it for my boys, I suppose. Their memory. My wife was able to let herself die, but I did not have that trick. I guess I did it because I was doomed to live when I did not want to, because the Everlasting has set His canon against self-slaughter.”
His voice was stronger, more clear than Samuel had ever heard it. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “In any event, here we are. And even if what I did can do nothing for my boys, it can at least help my country, and that is something.” He turned to Bowater. “You are the only one who has ever had the grit to ask me that.”
Bowater nodded. This man before him was not the mendacious lunatic who had greeted them at the landing at Yazoo City. The transformation of the ship had somehow transformed him as well. Or maybe it was the proximity of eternal rest that revived his mind.
Then, like punctuation to the thought, the guns of Fort St. Philip opened up, two hundred yards away. Instant change, like waking from a dream, the dark and quiet blasted away as gun after gun hurled iron and fire over the water. And lit up by the muzzle flashes of the big guns, the Yankee fleet, moving slowly, line ahead, upriver, through the boom, through the crossfire of the forts.
The lead Yankee ship staggered under the hammer blow from the fort but did not stop, did not even slow. Her sides flashed with gunfire as she hit back, wooden warship against fixed fortification. Fort Jackson began to blast away, and then the next Yankee ship in line, and the next. In less than half a minute a full-scale battle had appeared, right under their bow.
Below, Bowater could hear his officers and petty officers shouting, could hear the tramp of 150 men rushing to battle stations, but he remained, transfixed. He considered sending for Jacob, having him fetch his frock coat and hat, but he rejected the idea. Too hot for that. He wondered at himself. There was a time when he would not have considered going into battle without his proper uniform, despite the heat.
And then he remembered that Jacob was no longer aboard. He wondered about him and Moses and the other Negroes, if they had made it through or were caught up in that.
No, they had had time. They would have made it through.
Robley Paine turned to him, one side of his face lit with flickering orange light. “Our time has come,” he said.
“It has indeed,” Bowater replied. “It surely has indeed.”
45
– Major General Lovell, C.S. Army, Commanding Defenses of New Orleans
There was no plan, no organized waterborne defense. There were not enough Confederate ships to warrant it, and with the River Defense Fleet doing what it wished to do in any event, it had never seemed worth trying. Sally forth and fight, that had been the only plan. Captain Bowater rang up half ahead, called down to Lieutenant Asa Quillin to slip the stern anchor which held them head downstream.
The noise of the chain running out came rattling through the deck. The bitter end went overboard and the
Risley, the pilot, climbed up to the platform beneath the pilothouse. Without a word he took the wheel, let the helmsman get his pants in order. “Heading, Captain?”
Bowater watched the battle for a moment before replying. It was as if the night had exploded, great flashes of red and orange, the concussion of the great guns making the casement of the
