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
