The Crescent Spy

by Michael Wallace

  Josephine’s heart sank as she imagined how it had happened. Maybe the Irishman hated free blacks, competing for low-wage labor, or maybe the soldiers paid him to stir up gossip in the laborers to see what turned out. Either way, Caleb had shown enough initiative to come spying at the forts but hadn’t been sophisticated enough to keep his mouth shut at a critical time.

  “But I still don’t understand about Hans,” she said. From the cell next door, the other man babbled something, perhaps hearing his name. “Why did they throw him in chains if you weren’t working for him, and if he’s simple?”

  “Reckon they figure a black man ain’t smart enough to do spying hisself. They was beating my feet, asking who I was working for, and I said the first name I think of. Poor Hans, he gonna get six months’ hard labor. That’s my fault; I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “But Caleb, you know what they’re doing to you tomorrow, right?”

  “I knows it.”

  Again, he hung his head.

  Josephine was thinking furiously about how she would save Caleb’s life, but first she wondered if she should try to extract any more information, especially about the Northerner who had paid the man to count the troops marching at Lafayette Square. But the private in the hall was still standing close enough to hear every word, and she didn’t want the condemned man to suddenly remember something useful that would help the Confederates track down the real spy and arrest him.

  So she asked Caleb about his family, thinking a bit of background would flesh out her article. He’d been born a house slave to a fine New Orleans family, who had freed Caleb and his younger sister when they came of age. The sister had kept working for the family for a number of years longer, while Caleb had taken up work on the docks as a stevedore. With the blockade, there wasn’t enough work there to go around, so he’d taken such jobs as he could find. He’d married a few years ago, had a daughter, but both wife and daughter had died in the yellow-fever plague of 1853. Caleb never remarried, and now he lived with his sister, who’d been badly burned when a gas lamp exploded.

  “I fear for her, Miss Breaux. I fear for her good. She can’t get work on account of a burned face, and now she need medicine for the consumption.”

  Josephine left the cells a few minutes later and walked thoughtfully through the yard. Ludd and Potterman were still puffing away and joking. No sign of the younger man, Hines from the New Orleans Bee, and she supposed he, at least, was in his chamber doing actual writing.

  Ludd and Potterman asked if she’d learned anything from the black man and the simpleton, and she shrugged and said she hadn’t, even though her column was already half-composed in her mind, save for the part about the actual hanging. Or a non-hanging, if she could manage it. Ludd and Potterman could read her story in the Crescent like anyone else.

  It took some time to find Major Dunbar. He was up top on the wall, almost exactly where Josephine had been waiting earlier. He watched boats go by, their lights blinking. A lantern glowed through a cloud of bugs from atop a flatboat, where a banjo twanged and men sang.

  Dunbar glanced at her as she came up, but it was too dark to read his expression.

  “The hanging is precisely at nine o’clock,” he said. “I won’t be moving it up so you can file your story earlier.”

  “Is that what the others are asking?” she asked.

  He grunted.

  “That wasn’t what I wanted to say,” she said. “I’m worried there has been a mistake.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “For a start, the white man is simple—he isn’t any sort of Machiavellian spy who put that other poor fellow up for it.”

  “Yes, I know,” Dunbar said. “But he’s the one Caleb Freedman fingered.”

  “Under torture.”

  “Under hard questioning, it’s true. But that doesn’t matter. A dozen men heard Caleb Freedman’s confession, and it was widely reported up and down the river. We’ll ship the German north, lock him up a few more weeks, and let him loose in Memphis or Vicksburg.”

  “But what about Caleb’s true master? The one who was paying him to count troops in the city? You know about him, right?”

  “Yes, I do. What about him?”

  “Have you caught him?”

  “Well, no,” Dunbar admitted. “But we’re searching for the man. We’ll get him.”

  “How will you manage that if you hang the black man? He’ll lay low and escape. If I were you, I’d declare leniency—or whatever term you want to use—and let Caleb go back to New Orleans. Then you can watch him, wait for the true spy to show himself, and arrest him.”

  “You are hopelessly naïve, Miss Breaux. What would your friends from the Picayune and the True Delta say if I took a confessed spy, some dumb n—”

  “But he didn’t do anything!” she interrupted. “He was counting men and guns.”

  “That’s more than enough. And in the morning, he will hang. It will serve as an example. Look around you. We’re undermanned and undergunned. We can’t afford the dregs of New Orleans rising up because they think we’re soft. Our liberty is at stake here.”

  “Our liberty,” she repeated. “What a strange term, when half the state lives in bondage.”

  His face hardened. “The laws of the land are not mine to change. My duty is to fight to make sure we are the ones to set them, not Washington and certainly not the Black Republican who occupies the Executive Mansion.”

  Josephine tried a different tack. “Be that as it may, it wouldn’t hurt to keep Caleb Freedman imprisoned for a stretch until we see what turns up. Killing is awfully permanent. And I’ve seen a hanging before, Major. It’s an ugly thing.”

  “So have I. Several hangings, in fact. But let me ask you this. Were the deaths you saw at Manassas any less ugly?”

  She thought about the men crying for water, begging to be shot and put out of their misery, the young soldiers—boys, really—with missing legs. The scraping rasp of the bone saw in field hospitals. The screams.

  “They were ugly,” she said in a quiet voice.

  “And if we aren’t careful,” Dunbar said firmly, “the Yankees will see our soft underbelly. There will be death and bloodshed here, too. Is that what you want?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Then we’re agreed. The prisoner will hang in the morning, and you will have your story.”

  Josephine was smiling in the picture taken with the Colonel when she was thirteen. Her expression was cheery, her smile broad. When she looked at it, she could scarcely believe that it had been taken before one of the ugliest moments of her life. First, there was the business with the runaway slaves, followed by the trouble on the riverboat later that night, their last on the Crescent Queen.

  The Colonel had been traveling with Josephine and Claire for three months as they made a pair of lazy tours up and down the river. Because both Claire and the Colonel were up late into the night, the former dancing and singing and the latter gambling until dawn, Josephine was in the habit of getting out of her blankets on the floor and leaving the others in bed while she climbed up to the promenade to read. Sometimes, when she came back too early, she could hear them making love, and would slink away again without opening the stateroom door.

  After the Colonel had disappeared for two years when she was eight, the day of the fair, she’d refused to talk to him the next time he came, and the time after that, a few months later. He finally won her over with a treasure that had changed her life: a wooden crate full of books. By then, she knew how to read and had read whatever she could get her hands on, but these were so much more. In the box she found so many wonderful stories: Ivanhoe, Frankenstein, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, The Three Musketeers. She preferred the stories of war and adventure.

  One small book with the dry title of The Recollections of a Scots Grey Under Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo sat unread for nearly two years before she picked it up. But when she did, it inspired a curiosity about all matters military that never faded.
After that, she took note of every river fort they passed, and pestered Indian fighters and Mexican War veterans who came on board to give her exhaustive accounts of their battles and campaigns.

  One morning, she was engrossed in The Deerslayer, another well-worn favorite, as Crescent Queen slipped between two treacherous bars near the Missouri side of the river. The pilot had eased them around the lower bar while a spotter up front warned about a tree lodged below the surface that pointed upstream, like a reverse sawyer. These were called “preachers,” and, because they dipped in the current, could be difficult to spot. This time, they came around safely.

  The momentary excitement passed, and Josephine was dipping her nose into her book again when the sound of baying hounds caught her ear, followed by a gunshot. She dropped the book and sprang to her feet, searching the shoreline ahead of them, where movement caught her eye in the brush and trees lining the bank. Three black men grabbed a rowboat that had been hidden in the weeds and pushed it into the current. They were no more than two hundred yards upstream of the slowly advancing Crescent Queen, her stacks smoking as she built speed.

  The men got the boat away from shore and rowed furiously for the opposite shore, each with an oar. The dogs, the gunshot, the black men—Josephine knew exactly what was happening. This shore was Missouri, a slave state. The opposite bank was Illinois, and free.

  Slavers had legal right to cross from Missouri to recover their property, but the folk on the free side were just as likely to grab the tar and feathers as they were to help bounty hunters recover human contraband. Depended on the town.

  The baying dogs reached the Missouri shore and with them five white men with guns. They aimed, and there were flashes of light and puffs of smoke, followed an instant later by the crack of rifles. The escaping slaves hadn’t made it more than sixty yards offshore, and though they’d hunched down at the sight of their enemy, she was sure the shooters would hit their marks. Miraculously, every shot missed, and the men got up and kept rowing, even as the men on shore hurried to reload. Josephine didn’t know a thing about the drama playing out before her but what her eyes and imagination could supply, but she found herself leaning over the railing, straining anxiously, wanting the men to escape.

  The fastest two men onshore finished reloading and brought their rifles up almost simultaneously. They fired. This time, the man at the rear of the boat slumped forward without a cry, and his oar slipped from his grasp and went drifting downstream. The other two kept rowing without a pause. They were only yards in front of the steamboat by now, which was bearing down on them at increasing speed. She held her breath.

  The other three shooters had reloaded by now, but before they could bring their weapons to bear, the rowboat slipped in front of the bow of Crescent Queen with only inches to spare. The steamboat temporarily shielded them from fire.

  Josephine raced around the promenade to the other side, her heart pounding. It was early in the morning, and only a handful of passengers were out on the decks and promenade, but those who were up crowded the railing to watch the black men row past in their tiny boat. They struggled to get clear of the ship’s wake. By the time the men were downstream from Crescent Queen, the steamboat had protected them long enough to get them out of range of the riflemen on shore. And the bounty hunters did not appear to have a boat to give chase. It would seem that the men would escape to the other side.

  Some of the passengers on the deck directly below her were making disgusted comments, but a few were shaking hands and slapping each other on the back. Abolitionists, perhaps, or maybe like Josephine, they simply were rooting for the underdog. It was a hard person who could watch men fleeing for their lives from men with guns and dogs and not feel sympathy.

  A shout sounded from the front deck, and she looked up to see a skiff shoving off from Crescent Queen. It was the rowboat the captain sent ashore for supplies when they were in the bayou and couldn’t find a mooring. Now it was rowed by several firemen from the boiler room, burly fellows with powerful forearms and shoulders earned from throwing cord after cord of wood into the furnaces. They rowed after the two runaways. The passengers who’d been pleased by the escape now fell silent, while others cheered.

  The side-wheel on Crescent Queen stopped churning, and they began to drift back downstream, which shortly brought them close to the drama playing out in the middle of the river. The pursuers kept up with the two fleeing men and their slumped-over companion but drew no closer. Josephine’s knuckles turned white from clenching the rail. People on the deck of the riverboat shouted encouragement to one side or the other. This brought arguments and jeers among the two sides. One man threw a punch. Another man went down from the blow. A woman screamed. Soon, it was a brawl.

  The rowboat from Crescent Queen began to gain as the runaways tired. When the pursuing boat pulled alongside, two of the firemen jumped into the other boat, where they beat at the two men to subdue them. The runaways fought back. One of the black men went over the side and into the water. He came up flailing, drifting downstream, seemingly unable to swim, and struggling to keep his head above water.

  The final man gave up, and the remaining men in the rowboat now went after the drowning man in the river. He came up one last time, then went under. By the time the rowboat reached him, there was nothing left but swirling eddies, with the men from Crescent Queen poking around helplessly with their paddles. The brawling on the steamboat stopped, and people stared out, subdued.

  “Some men are dealt the ace in life,” the Colonel said from over Josephine’s shoulder. “And others draw nothing but the deuce.”

  He had pulled on his trousers, but his frilled shirt was unbuttoned at the collar and the wrists, as if he’d tossed it on to hurry out and see what the commotion was about. He had picked up her copy of The Deerslayer where she’d dropped it, and now handed it to her.

  “Have you ever seen a hanging?” he asked as men from the deck of Crescent Queen threw out ropes to bring in the two rowboats.

  Josephine shook her head. Her guts felt loose and sloshy. “Is that what’s going to happen?”

  The Colonel gave a grim nod toward the near bank, where the initial pursuers still waited with their baying hounds. They’d tossed a rope over a tree branch, and one of the men was fashioning a noose. The steamboat nudged toward shore.

  Claire and the Colonel wanted Josephine to stay in her room, but they didn’t forbid her from going ashore with the bulk of the passengers from Crescent Queen. She had a morbid, sickly fascination with the thought of a hanging, something she’d read about many times but never witnessed. Lately she’d taken to writing down the bizarre and curious things she observed in a leather-bound notebook the Colonel had won in a game of faro. Without knowing how, she thought this experience might be important to record.

  Hundreds of passengers came to shore in skiffs and milled around in the marshy woods on the natural levee thrown up by the Mississippi. The bounty hunters hung the wounded man first, throwing him groaning across the saddle of a horse and fitting the noose around his neck. When they drove off the horse, Josephine looked away. The crowd fell silent, and there was no sound but the creak of rope and the smooth sighing of the river itself at their rear.

  They tossed the dead, bloody slave to one side and wrestled the final man onto the horse. He struggled, pleading, cursing, jabbering something about there having been a mistake. He tried to throw himself off the horse. The others held him up and tried to get the noose over his head.

  Josephine was determined to look this time, deciding that she’d been cowardly the first time. The musketeers from her Dumas novel would never look away. She had already picked up enough conversation from the men with the hounds to know that the black men had struck and perhaps killed a white man while escaping their master. It was not the sort of crime that required a judge or jury, but there was still something . . . unjust about the situation that she couldn’t pinpoint.

  Suddenly, the Colonel stiffened and let out a hiss.
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  “What is it?” Claire asked.

  He gave Josephine’s mother a pinched, worried look. “I know that man. He was Leroy de Camp’s cook.”

  “De Camp?”

  “A planter from Baton Rouge. More money than skill with cards. Had to sell his land to pay his debts.”

  “Keep quiet,” Claire said. “This is not the time.”

  Somehow, the condemned man had squirmed out of the noose again, bobbing and dipping his head. The bounty hunters cursed and struck him with rifle butts.

  “But de Camp told me he’d freed his house slaves when he sold out. This fellow must be a freedman. He can’t be a runaway.”

  “Say something,” Josephine urged.

  “Should I?” the Colonel asked Claire, not the girl.

  “I-I don’t know,” Claire said nervously. “Maybe de Camp lied to you. Or maybe he sold this one first to help settle the debts. Why were they fleeing if they’re not runaways?”

  “Nobody has asked the black man,” Josephine pointed out. “Maybe he can explain.”

  “They say he killed a man,” Claire said.

  None of the passengers were looking at them. Instead, they were watching the drama play out as the black man got free of the noose again. People laughed. Others jeered at the red-faced, cursing bounty hunters.

  “Of course they’d say that,” the Colonel told Claire. He was wringing his hands. “If only we were in a free state. Where is that fellow from Boston? As good as admitted he’s an abolitionist. I’d like him with me if things get ugly.”

  “You’re going to do it, aren’t you?” Claire said. She shot a glance at her daughter. “Josie, go back to the rowboat and wait. Hurry, now. It’s a mob, and we’re about to do something foolhardy, heaven help us.”