When they passed through Alexandria, Louisiana, an area populated enough to need physical laborers, Sam was struck by the town’s name, as if it were an omen. He left the boys with Polly while he went to the center of town to ask around.
“I hear Mr. Swafford taking on hands,” said one grizzled old colored man, “but he north, closer to Colfax, about a day walk.”
Sam made up his mind on the way back from town.
“Soon’s I find work, I’m stopping for good,” he said to Polly when he saw her. “This place good as any.”
Polly waited, saying nothing. She had transformed since Sam first saw her on the road in Alabama. Her clothes were still threadbare, but she took greater care to smooth back her hair with her hands each morning, tying it back with a scrap of faded cloth. The wildness in her face and her eyes was gone. Both his sons had taken to her. Jackson was so young he had accepted her presence in their lives without question, as willing to take her hand as Sam’s. Green still had memories of his mother, but Polly didn’t push herself on him, and in time he came around too.
“The boys need a mother, and I need a wife,” Sam said. “I’m a good man, willing and able to work hard. I believe in the Lord and expect my woman to do the same, and I’m gonna find a way for my boys to go further than me.”
She was too young for him, he thought, but she had a power over him that made him dizzy with longing. And although she had come to share her body with him, she refused to tell him anything about her life before, her slave life. What if the leaving of that life was more important to her than the making of a new one, at least the making of one with him? What if, unlike him, she was still running and not willing yet to be on her way toward something else?
“I got a strong back, and these children, and something else almost nobody else got. I got a name old as any you ever heard, go all the way back to Egypt,” Sam told her. “And I’m gonna own my own land here one day, and farm.”
Sam realized he was selling too hard, but he couldn’t stop talking. As soon as there were no more of his words, she would have to give him an answer, this woman who had taken up with him so quickly. Would it be just as easy for her to keep on going without him? Sam wasn’t sure he could bear it if she said no. “If you take me on and take the boys on, my name be yours too.”
“Why I want to be call Sam?” Polly asked, puzzled.
She was road-weary, ragged, her coarse hair snarled and tied back with the old kerchief, and she was everything Sam wanted. He offered up his most prized possession to her.
“Not Sam. My family name,” he said. “From Egypt. From the Nile River. From the Nile River Delta.”
Polly waited silently for him to make clear what he was trying to say.
“Ta-ta-mee,” Sam said with pride, unwrapping his gift for her approval. He was careful with the sound of it, letting it roll from his tongue as his father had long ago. “That the family name of anybody belong with me. Ta-ta-mee.”
“Ta-de-my,” Polly repeated, smiling her special smile for him, her face a reflection of the wonder he had always found in the magic of that name. “You, me, and the boys, and more children to come,” she said. “The past don’t matter no more. We gonna start up a future with that name.”
They spill out to the courthouse square in the semidarkness, joining those who camp out on the grounds and others from Smithfield Quarter who choose to come. It is Easter Sunday 1873, and regardless of the predawn hour, word spreads and their numbers grow until they are over two hundred strong. Lanterns dot the landscape, orbs of light flickering, casting shadows over the ghostly, empty breastworks and the homemade cannons and the looming courthouse building in the background. The women draw their shawls over their heads for added warmth, protect their hands in the folds of their garments, and bundle up their children; the men pull down on their hats to keep the wind out.
The Easter Sunday ceremony is brief. The crowd is restless, unable to focus on the here and now when every mind wanders to the future. Without discussion, they instinctively allow no time for speeches, political or spiritual. Everyone feels the urgency. The sun rises as they stand together, streaks of red and gold bands across the horizon, and Sam Tademy asks for the joining of hands. Neighbors, friends, family, and strangers all stand with hands clasped and eyes closed.
“Lord, we stand before You, Your faithful flock, and we praise You. Let Your will be done through us, Your humble vessels. Give us strength to face whatever come. Give us strength to accept Your will. Amen.”
Two hundred voices ascend in a slow hymn as they sing of feeble lives at an end and entering God’s Kingdom. Everyone hangs tight to each note of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”
Hoofbeats pound toward the group outside, and the singing trails off mid-hymn.
“They on the move,” a lone colored man on horseback shouts, “coming down from Summerfield Springs. Dragging a cannon on wheels. We got maybe one hour. White men already in Smithfield Quarter with guns.”
The service breaks apart in a hundred different directions as colored men rush for their weapons and women and children flood back into the courthouse, holding on to one another. Bowls and platters of food brought for an Easter Sunday feast lay out in the backs of wagons and on wooden tables, uneaten. No one moves them.
The horseman is off his mount and inside within seconds, conferring with Levi Allen. The men make no attempt to keep the conversation private. “Two or three white men for each of us, and they packing every kind of weapon,” the scout says.
All eyes turn to Levi. The military man keeps his jaw tight. “Give the signal to pull back all patrols and take your positions on the barricades,” he says calmly.
“The women and children,” Sam points out. “We got to get them out.”
Levi doesn’t alter by one muscle the combat-ready expression on his face, but his eyes soften. “Already too late for that now,” he says.
Figure 8. Photo of Melrose cannon (Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Watson Memorial Library, Cammie G. Henry Research Center: Francis Mignon Collection, bound volume #115)
Chapter
10
Israel takes up his post, one of several dozen men assigned to the east barricade, parallel to the river. He is at the farthermost end away from Red River, with a clear face-on view of Smithfield Quarter in one direction across the wide, dusty no-man’s-land, and a side view of the beginnings of Mirabeau Woods.
Levi Allen is their focal point, barking out assignments. So many men behind the barricades, so many at the three improvised cannons, so many along the path leading to the courthouse, so many inside the courthouse protecting the women and children. McCully and Sam draw duty inside. About two hundred colored men station themselves in and behind the crescent-shaped barricades around the three sides of the single-story courthouse building. They are hidden from view by the deep hollow of the trench below, and above by the mud sacks where they rest the muzzles of their weapons. The only unguarded section around the courthouse is on the west side, nearest Red River, the banks of which Levi deems too slippery and steep for a large body of attackers to gain good access.
Israel waits, looking out from the trenched ring around the courthouse. He and another man are responsible for one of the three small pipe cannons, and he makes sure he has the phosphor friction matches to light the wick in his pocket, at the ready. He has seen the cannon the white men have in Summerfield Springs; it is a heavy weapon, forged and professionally constructed, while this one is small and flimsy, cobbled together from spare parts.
He hears the steady advance of the riders, a symphony of hoofbeats and straining hard snorts of the horses, and then the staccato orders of men in charge dispatching and arranging the incoming riders on three sides of the courthouse. One set spreads out along the lip of Mirabeau Woods, another along the break line of the pecan grove to the south, and the last blocking the entry to Smithfield Quarter, creating battle lines in the open field about three quarters of a mile from Colfax. The
y outnumber the men in the courthouse and are well armed with a much wider range of weapons—six-shooters, shotguns, and Enfields—and stand or sit astride their mounts under the trees. A few tie up their horses to get down to stretch their legs.
It is surprisingly quiet for a while, with only the nervous whinny of horses breaking the stillness, until into the silence comes the squeak and groan of a heavy object on the move. From his vantage point, Israel gets his second glimpse of their cannon, a medium-size howitzer. Originally a deck cannon on a steamboat out of New Orleans, the ugly, dull brass cylinder has since been fitted out with two big-spoked metallic wheels at the rear for ground transport, and the oversize six-sectioned wheels gouge deep ruts in the soft dirt and weeds as it is dragged into position. Two horses pull the heavy gun forward, and five men surround the weapon, tending it as faithfully as a mother tends a child. They situate the howitzer beneath a tree toward the river near Mirabeau Woods.
“Save your bullets,” Levi orders. “No firing till it count. We got women and children here. That cannon still out of range, same as the rifles.”
His words don’t comfort Israel. The deck cannon rests low to the ground, flanked by buckets of metal bolts and trace chains. Two heavily bearded men, one dressed in farmer’s overalls and the other in the often-patched gray trousers that mark him as a former Confederate soldier, fiddle with the weapon, swiveling it first one way and then the other, testing. The farmer pushes down on the back of the barrel, changing the potential arc of the thin, stubby snout, positioning it at a 45-degree angle in the precursor of a practice shot. Then, thinking better of it, he tries an even steeper angle that might deliver the ball in a high curve toward the courthouse. The one in the gray rebel pants shakes his head, dissatisfied, and consults with the second man as they speculate on different trajectories that might land the most direct hit.
For over an hour, the two groups stare at each other across the barren fields between the courthouse and the tree groves, while those in charge debate what step to take next.
Who could have foreseen this deathly nothingness, Israel thinks, this jarring waiting that wears at the nerves and turns the stomach sour?
At ten o’clock there is a commotion in the ranks of the white men, and one of the leaders on horseback trots from line to line giving orders. All of the men on horses dismount to form a human wall eight hundred yards away. They count off, and every fifth man holds the horses’ reins for the others.
One man from the line of trees rimming Mirabeau Woods breaks rank and fires a shot from his musket, but he is so far out of range that the cartridge skids harmlessly in the dust in no-man’s-land. Across from Israel, Spenser McCullen squints into the sight of his Enfield, squatting down deep in the dugout of a bunker, keeping his head below the top of the stack of mud-filled bags five high along the trench’s lip. Spenser raises the rifle to chest height, pops up his head, and takes quick aim. With an explosive cloud of gray smoke, he squeezes off an answering blast in the direction of upper Mirabeau Woods, then jams his body back down into the bunker. It too is an ineffectual shot, with no result. The accuracy of the old Enfield is unpredictable at anything over six hundred yards.
“Not yet,” yells Levi as Spenser reloads.
Again they wait, but Israel watches helplessly as white men load a cannonball in the cannon and set a flame to the whiskey-soaked cotton wick. When the ball falls short, they adjust the angle and try again, but even then the weapon is too far away for either of the cannonballs to approach the courthouse or reach the outermost barricades. The white men caucus, but it is clear that if they come in closer from their position at the edge of Mirabeau Woods to make the weapon effective, they will be unprotected, without natural cover. From behind the barricades around the courthouse, despite Levi’s protests, there are occasional rifle shots from the colored men to remind them of that fact. The battle goes on this way for the better part of an hour, with the advantage to neither side and neither side willing to back down.
Chapter
11
Increasingly annoyed with the standoff and the lack of progress, Sheriff Christopher Columbus Nash and several of his men advance into Smithfield Quarter shortly before eleven. The streets are empty, except for a few stray dogs and a couple of advance scouts. Sheriff Nash chooses one of the houses at random, a two-room shanty at the edge of colored town.
“This the sheriff,” he calls from outside, authority embedded in the brittle tone of his voice. “Send out your man.”
There is whispering inside. Two minutes pass, and then three, and finally, a wiry man in his mid-fifties with a ragged black cap pokes his head outside.
“Go to the courthouse and bring back Levi Allen,” demands Sheriff Nash.
The colored man hangs back, but only for a few seconds. He accepts the white truce flag they press into his hands, and he begins a lonely walk across the stretch of dusty ground between Smithfield Quarter and the courthouse.
“Stop shooting,” someone calls from the courthouse side. When the colored man gets to the barricades, they let him through the line and lead him to Levi Allen.
“Sheriff Nash say meet him in Smithfield Quarter,” the man relays.
Levi picks up his blue greatcoat and slowly drapes it around his shoulders. “You go tell Sheriff Nash we meet him halfway, in open field,” he says. “No more than two other men with him, and we do the same. No shooting.”
The colored man starts his walk back to Smithfield Quarter with the message, and the courthouse men bring around three horses so their contingent can ride out to confront Sheriff C. C. Nash under their own white flag of truce. The two groups of men meet in the middle, guns trained on them from every direction.
“What do you intend on doing?” asks Nash.
“Nothing more than before,” Levi replies. “Standing. And we are going to stand where we are until we get United States troops or some assistance.”
“We got warrants,” Nash says. “Give up now.”
“Your local warrants ain’t no good,” says Levi.
“You don’t have a chance.”
“We got women and children in there. Let them go, and then we settle this.”
“Stand down and return the courthouse to us white men who know what to do with it,” says Sheriff Nash.
“So you pick us off one by one the way you done Jessie McCullen?” Levi asks. “We do better holding out for the Federals. These men armed and ready to fight. Time’s passed when a handful of whites frighten a regiment of colored men.”
“Look around,” says Sheriff Nash. “Our men come from every parish. We won’t never stand for Negro rule, but nobody want to hurt women and children. Give up.”
“We got the law,” says Levi. “We staying. Let women and children pass.”
The two men sit erect in the saddle, brittle. Both sides wait for some small sign of compromise, but there is only silence. The horses fidget, swishing their tails to swat at the flies that bite at their flesh, but the men remain still.
“I give you thirty minutes to get your Negro women and children and any Negroes don’t want to fight out of town,” says Sheriff Nash finally. “As for the rest of the black devils in there who decide to stay, we are going to get ’em.”
“I’ll be at the front, so I guess I’ll see you when you get ’em,” Levi says. He turns his black stallion around and digs his heels into the horse’s sides, then trots back beyond the barricade just two hundred yards away.
“Women and children out,” Levi shouts as he enters the courthouse. “Hurry.”
McCully positions himself directly in Levi’s path. “Sam Tademy the man to lead ’em out,” he says. He pushes Sam forward.
Sam shakes off McCully’s arm. “My place here,” he protests, “not escorting women.”
“You know the swamps, Sam,” McCully says. “Take the women and children and get them hid. They be too busy with us for a while to care, but somebody got to get them a good head start away from here.”
&n
bsp; “I won’t leave now,” Sam insists. “Somebody else can do it.”
Polly comes to stand next to Sam. She hangs on to their two boys, her face a grim reminder of all the families trapped inside the courthouse.
“Our women and children’s bodies not all that need protection,” McCully says. His face is hard. “We out of time, Sam. Take them out. Don’t never let them forget what we done here, why we come, why we stay. If one of us get through, all of us lift our head just a little. Promise me you look after my wife. And promise Amy be one of the first in your colored school.”
“Come out with me, then,” Sam says.
“You and me, we both race men, but you on a different path, Sam. Pull as many through with you as you able. I belong here. The days of tipping my hat for the white man over.” As if to emphasize his point, McCully removes his trademark fedora from his head and gives the battered brown hat to Sam. “That hat done brought me luck when wasn’t no luck to be had. You hang on to it now.”
There is no more time for arguing. Sam accepts the fedora. “I give it back when I see you again,” he says.
“We got to move, Sam,” says Polly, insistent. As frightened as she clearly is, she nods toward McCully, a gesture of gratitude and a trace of pride, and he nods back, but then she is all motion, gone. She and Lucy gather up the children whose fathers remain at the courthouse and herd all those who will leave into a cluster by the front door, cutting short their painful goodbyes.
One woman, forty and childless, refuses to vacate with the others. She takes up a shotgun and stands shoulder to shoulder with her husband at the east courthouse window, while all the rest of the escapees quickly load up the wagons and head out directly toward the line of white men to the north end of town.
Red River Page 12
