Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Save your lives!” Bradford shouted, without making any suggestion how his men were to do it.

  “Let us fight yet,” cried a lieutenant—he was commanding black artillerymen who still served the cannon—but Bradford howled, “It is no more use,” and threw himself over the bluff toward the river. One of the black gunners stood up calmly away from his piece, with no more weapon than his ramrod, which he held at his side like a staff. Henri remembered his face from the other side of the parapet, one of the sober, serious ones, and he was still looking at Henri now, ignoring Nolan, who walked up to him slowly and shot him pointblank between the eyes. Others were on their knees holding up their hands for mercy now but they were shot down just the same, by the partisans who’d entered over the bluff or equally by Forrest’s men coming over the wall. He had seen Forrest blood-maddened often enough but never had it affected so many; every man who came over the wall had murder blazing in his eyes. “Kill every last one of the varmints,” somebody cried. “That’s Forrest’s word!” Others were toasting the slaughter from the whiskey keg. The Union flag still snapped on its pole and Henri thought of cutting the lanyard but there was too much fighting there by the flagstaff and it would be better to go and go quickly—

  He scrambled back the way he had come, half-falling down the steep slope to the spot where the jenny grace à Bon Dieu was still tethered; not bothering with the knot but breaking the dry-rotted reins with a snap of his wrist. He rode, wondering what help to expect. Forrest at least saw the value in a slave. He wouldn’t go slaughter so many of them any more than he would the same number of horses or mules. Wasn’t that right? Not quite a year back, in May ’63, some of Forrest’s scouts had captured a handful of black Federals and quietly sold them down the river. They hadn’t exactly told the Old Man about that one, but they had lived high for a while on the money. Then again, when they entered the town of Purdy a few weeks ago, Forrest had set a guard from his own escort to protect the wife and family of Colonel Fielding Hurst—not only from Confederate soldiers but from the rage of ordinary citizens all around, for Hurst was a Union man who’d just burned down half his own hometown, and was generally thought responsible for horrors on the order of the torture and murder of Dobbs. Forrest had promised to wipe Hurst off the face of the earth if he could catch him, but he normally shielded even Union sympathizers, so long as they didn’t have arms in their hands. The truth of it was, Henri had no notion if Forrest would stop this killing or not but he knew Forrest was the only man who could stop it.

  He jumped off the jenny while she was still trotting. Forrest leaned against a tree, twirling the coin on its thong as he looked toward the battle, or sometimes cupping it in his palm to study more closely. That old Spanish doubloon that Jeffrey Forrest had plowed up somewhere in Mississippi and ever after worn around his neck. Forrest had carried it since his brother was killed, and it wasn’t an especially good sign when he commenced studying it this way.

  “General,” Henri gasped. “You must come.”

  Forrest looked up at him half-unseeing. “Come whar?”

  “The fort—” Henri leaned forward, braced hands on his knees in hope of relieving a stitch in his side. “They’re killing, down there—just killing.”

  Forrest pointed, the coin swinging from the heel of his hand. “Without they strike that goddamn flag they can good goddamn well expect to get kilt.”

  “They’ve surrendered!” Henri said. “There’s no fight left in them anyhow. There’s men being killed with empty hands.”

  Forrest put the coin away in his pocket, and looked more sharply toward the powder smoke rising from the fort. The cannon were quiet now and no more was heard from the gunboat on the river.

  “General.” Henri pulled himself straight. “You are not the man to let this go on.”

  They reached the fort in half the time it had taken Henri to get to Forrest’s post, Henri lagging a little behind, since his jenny couldn’t have kept pace with Forrest’s horse even if she’d wanted to. Forrest cantered to the flagpole and cut down the flag with his saber, then jumped from the saddle to the ground.

  “Hold your fire, boys,” he said. “I never ordered no goddamn massacree! You’ll see me settle with any man as says I did—”

  What was left of the garrison was going over the bluff like a waterfall to the riverbank below, but the Confederates were still killing stragglers in the enclosure of the fort, strewn now with bodies crossways over each other wherever they’d fallen. Henri got a glimpse of Lieutenant Walker tumbling down among the remnants of his command. Forrest had jumped down from his horse and was going between the Confederates and the Federals, knocking down gun barrels with his saber, his Navy six cocked in his left hand.

  From a heap of the dead a black man stood up shakily, catching Henri’s elbow for support. One of Nolan’s partisans drew a bead on him with his pistol.

  “Stop where you are,” Forrest told him.

  Nolan’s man turned to look at him blankly, then renewed his aim on the man who clung to Henri’s elbow. He cocked his pistol with his thumb. Most of the blacks who lay dead all around had been shot at about this point-blank range. But the explosion came from Forrest’s pistol this time. Nolan’s man fell over sideways, his pistol discharging its round into a heap of corpses.

  “There’s an end to it,” Forrest said. With that, the firing stopped in the fort, though at the foot of the bluff it was livelier than ever.

  “Lawd,” said the man at Henri’s side. “Lawd.”

  Henri could feel his trembling, if it wasn’t maybe his own trembling. “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Green,” the man said. “Sam Green. I needs to set down.”

  Under the splintered catwalk was an ammunition crate where Green could sit without drenching the seat of his trousers in the blood that pooled everywhere in the fort’s enclosure. Henri led him there and left him. The blood smell, mixed with fumes of spilled whiskey, was chokingly strong. He went down the bluff, skidding when his boot heels tore out clay from under the thin stubble of weed. He finished the descent sliding on his tailbone.

  The New Era had steamed away out of range—the Federal gunboat had fired some rounds at the very beginning of the engagement but the sharpshooters with Anderson knew how to strike down the artillerymen by firing into the gun ports, and soon enough she’d been driven back. Anderson and Barteau had converged on the riverbank and caught the fleeing Federals in a crossfire. They were still firing too, mostly into the water now. Henri stood up and picked his way over corpses to the water’s edge. He saw Lieutenant Hunter fling himself into the stream, among a pack of his panicked black soldiers, but the lowering sun glared off the water so that he couldn’t see what happened to the lieutenant after that.

  Some of the Federals were trying to pull themselves up onto a barge that drifted near the bank, but sharpshooters picked most of them off before they could gain cover. The stream was dotted with the dark heads of swimmers picked out hard black against the red reflection on the water, and every few seconds one exploded when a sharpshooter popped a ball into it. Then the body would roll up and float downriver in the sluggish stream. That slaughterhouse smell was thicker than ever in the back of Henri’s throat. He raised a hand to shade his eyes and saw that it wasn’t only the sun that reddened the river. Thick and viscous as molasses, the Mississippi was running blood as far he could see.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  IN LIFE Jeffrey Forrest was a gay lighthearted young fellow, and Bedford Forrest loved him better than all save his own son Willie—who was often Jeffrey’s companion in frolics and pranks. But Willie and Bedford were not here now, and Jeffrey wandered the crown of the knoll by himself, apart from the others who’d gathered there.

  “Did I hear you was fixing real biscuit?” Little said. Jerry, scraping coals over the lid of his iron skillet, answered with no more than a grunt. Rumor was that he had salvaged a sack of white flour from the supplies Smith’s Yankees had been toting.
r />   Little and Nath Boone and the Reverend Kelley sat in a row on the gray fallen log, like birds on a rail waiting the right moment to swoop down on a field of ripening corn. Only Jeffrey, as he circled the bare crown of the knoll, seemed to hear the piping of the Old Ones. Presently he shook a leg and commenced to dance. Not all of the Old Ones appeared so old, and soon a couple of the most lively women had joined the Rebel cavalier. Henri saw them in grass skirts and strings of cowries and not much else, but Jeffrey may have perceived his partner in some other guise: a ball gown, say, which his sweetheart might have worn for him in Memphis before he went to war and died.

  Ghost fiddlers (when had they been slain?), sawed out the opening notes of “Devil’s Dream.” Little was staring into the dance, not altogether as if he could see it but more like he was somewhat aware of something from which he desired to be distracted.

  “Hey Ornery!” he called, too loud and too rough, so that Henri refused to answer or turn his head that way. He was looking into the cold mists that roiled around the brow of the knoll and there he seemed to see some shapes from Thompson Station.

  “Monty,” Nath Boone said. “You know he don’t answer to that from you.”

  “Henry, then,” Little kept on. “You never did finish telling that story. Where you come from, and niggers rising up to kill white folks and all.”

  Jerry leaned forward to try the heat of his improvised Dutch oven with his palm. Nodding, he sat back over his heels again, then began to slap a lump of grayish dough flat onto a scrap of board.

  “All right,” Henri said. “Which did you want me to tell you first?”

  Little shot him a suspicious look. “Ain’t but one right way to tell a story.”

  “Fine,” Henri said. “I’ll tell it backward then.”

  I’d been to Louisville already the day you crossed me on the road, he said. I knew the guns were there and meant to have them for my people. I was looking to meet Frank Merriam there, and Osborne Anderson, and Owen Brown. They never showed up. I don’t know where they are to this day. I couldn’t take those pistols on my own. We didn’t have money to buy them you know. I stayed around that town too long, hoping the others were going to come. After four days I crossed Israel Green in the street. What he was doing there I don’t know. He didn’t make out that he knew me then, but I know he must have for that very night they broke in the door where I was sleeping and the best I could do was jump out the window. I had my shirt and my britches and a knife I kept in the bed with me. No time to get my boots or my gun. They had more men waiting for me down in the street but I climbed up and went over the rooftop and then I ran for the river and floated down.

  “Owen Brown!” Kelley said, eyes widening.

  You know that name. The son of old Osawatomie Brown, out of Bloody Kansas. I was with them there at Harpers Ferry. I got away with Owen, and Osborne and Merriam, a few others too. There was supposed to be a thousand slaves rise up to take the guns that we had captured. But it looks like all that came was two.

  “Why …” Little’s eyes widened. “That’s the same goddamned murdering abolitionist John Brown the Yankees sings about whilst they march. You ought to been hanged right along with him.”

  “If you say so,” Henri said. “But then I’d have missed being here with you.”

  “Be quiet, Monty,” Nath Boone said. “Let the man tell his story.”

  But Henri was watching Jerry cut cat-head biscuits with the rim of his dented tin cup. He lifted the lid of his Dutch oven and slicked the iron with a fingerful of lard. The hot smell of molten hog fat made Henri’s back teeth hurt.

  Nath Boone raised his head to Henri. “Was you to Kansas with the Browns?” he said.

  “No,” Henri said. “Not Kansas.”

  “So, then?” Boone said.

  “So then before,” Henri said. “I’m going backward, am I not? There’s always something behind the thing you saw before.”

  All present then watched reverently as Jerry laid rounds of dough on the floor of his skillet and scraped up coals to cover the lid. All save Jeffrey Forrest, who continued to dance with the shade of his belle.

  New Orleans, Henri said. La Louisiane. I came to Louisville from there and I came from there to Harpers Ferry before that. I meant to raise black men along the way both times. Raise them to fight their way free of slavery. But most of them, they wouldn’t be raised.

  “Niggers,” Little said. “What do you expect?”

  “Mr. Little,” Henri said. “There’s times I’d like to thread a meat hook through your tongue and hang you from it.”

  Little stared at him balefully, his jaws clenched tight.

  “Don’t think it’s never happened,” Henri said. “I’ve seen it done to nice little white men very much the same as yourself. You wouldn’t believe how much tongue you’ve got, once it all pulls out. You can’t see how it ever fit in your head in the first place.”

  “Let up, Monty,” Nath Boone said. “You don’t quit rubben the man the wrong way, he won’t never get this story told.”

  Mister Little has a point. This country did teach me something I’d have never thought before. There is such a thing as nigger after all. Something a little less than a man. Born a slave. Dies a slave. Being a slave is built into him. I’ll leave you white gentlemen to consider who it was did that building.

  Henri stopped speaking because he could feel Matthew’s eyes boring into him, from where the boy sat with his long legs folded like a grasshopper.

  I don’t mean you. I don’t mean me. Nor Denmark Vesey nor Nat Turner nor Gabriel Prosser nor Charles Deslandes. There are black men in this country who walk with a warrior spirit. But just some is not enough. It needs to be all and so far it’s not. Not one time when I went up and down the Mississippi River. They won’t rise. Not yet they won’t.

  “I’d admire to see New Orleans,” Nath Boone said. “My uncle went there oncet on a flatboat. ’Course after that he had to walk back.”

  La Louisiane. It was safe for me there. In a manner of speaking. I speak the languages. Spanish and French and the old tongue too. There’s not so much a mystery about what I am in that place. I’ll tell you what, Mathieu mon cher, down in La Nouvelle Orléans you’d be a man of color. Up here they count me as a nigger just like you.

  Henri stopped, or was stopped, rather, by the bitterness he heard in his own laughter. He’d meant to take a straight line backward, but his story was beginning to slip sideways. Nath Boone called him back.

  “You ain’t from Loosiana either in the first place, is that right?”

  No. I come from Ayiti.

  “Well, I never heard of any such a place—” Little began, but it was Kelley who stopped him this time.

  “He means Haiti,” Kelley said. “The Black Republic.”

  “What do you mean the Black Republic?” Little said. “That don’t make no sense.”

  “It means the niggers are in charge,” Kelley said. “They run the plantations. They run the government. They run the whole country. They speak French too! The bottom rail’s on top is what that means.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Little said. “What happened to the white folks, then?”

  “They died,” Henri told him.

  “That can’t be,” Little said. “Niggers running everything. It ain’t right. It ain’t natural. I don’t see how God could allow it.”

  “I don’t see how God allows you,” Henri said. “As a matter of fact you’ve been disallowed already and just don’t know it yet.”

  “But,” Kelley said, “why didn’t you stay in Haiti? I mean, I don’t understand why you would leave there and come over here to fight with Nathan Bedford Forrest for the Confederacy.”

  “It’s a fair question,” Henri said. “I’ll admit that wasn’t exactly my plan.”

  “Y’all hush,” said Nath Boone. “Let the man tell it.”

  In Haiti is an emperor, a black man named Soulouque. I served in his army, but he took against me. Because of
my skin, and the blood underneath it. I saw that if I remained in Ayiti, Soulouque would have me killed.

  “So then you came to Louisiana,” Kelley prompted.

  I’m going backward. His eyes still heavily lidded, Henri rocked slightly from the waist.

  “The blood, then,” Kelley said. “This blood of yours that scared your black King so.”

  Ah. Henri rocked in place. His eyes popped open. Yes. There is always something more behind the thing you see. There is for example Dessalines. Who spilled the blood of every white person he could catch. Hundreds. Thousands. At Jérémie a river of blood five feet across dried up and stayed until the summer rains. The nègres of that zone walked miles out of their way so that they would not have to cross it. But the blood of Dessalines is not my blood. No. I have the blood that made the first rising and sent the white men screaming into the sea. From the man without whom Dessalines would be nothing. Sé fils Toussaint Louvti mwen yé.

  “Toussaint Louverture?” Kelley said. “You’re the son of Toussaint Louverture?”

  Henri did not appear to hear him.

  Et deye sa? Et deye sa? There’s always another thing behind the thing you see. Behind Toussaint is Gaou-Ginou, and all the kings in Dahomey since the jaguar spirit made Arada and flew up into the night sky on his burning wings.

  “Stop it,” Little cried, as if in pain. “Stop all that wild nigger jabber. It’s nothing but superstition and savagery anyhow.”

  Listen, Henri said furiously. There’s something else behind the jaguar too. When God made the first man he was black as the night with no stars in it. You people got that sick color of yours from a sorcerer’s curse or some kind of disease. From hiding in caves for five or ten centuries because you don’t have the spirit to stand in the sun. I’d like to see you call God’s first man a nigger.