Confederate minnies still cracked past the gunners. “They ain't quit yet, neither,” Robinson pointed out. If you forgot that-or maybe even if you didn't-you'd stop a bullet with your face.
Charlie was too excited to care. So was Sandy Cole. “So what if they ain't, Ben-uh, Sergeant Ben?” he said. “So what? You ever reckon you'd live to see the day when we had guns an' the buckra was runnin' from us? Feel so good watchin' 'em go, I reckon I done gone to heaven.”
“You keep carryin' on like a damn fool, a minnie send you straight to heaven,” Ben said gruffly. He knew what a sergeant was supposed to sound like. He'd had several fine white examples. And his own manner proved him an excellent scholar.
All the same, he knew just what Sandy was driving at. One of the reasons slavery persisted in the South was that whites intimidated blacks. Blacks had always been sure that if they got out of line, if they tried to rise up, whites would fall on them like an avalanche. Whites would be bold, whites would be fierce, whites would be fearless.
Negroes believed it, anyhow. How could they help but believe it when every sign of unrest was ruthlessly put down? Ben Robinson had believed it himself, back before the war started. Whites were so sure of their own superiority, they convinced Negroes of it, too. Didn't most colored men prefer light-skinned women to their duskier cousins? Weren't very black men, men with broad, flat noses and wide lips, reckoned uglier than those formed more in the image of their masters?
But how could you go on thinking somebody was better than you by nature when he ran away for fear that you would blow him a new asshole with your Springfield? Wasn't he a man, just like you? Wasn't he a frightened man, just like you?
It sure looked that way to Ben. Sandy Cole and Charlie Key weren't the only Negroes jeering at the Confederates as they fell back-far from it. The gun crews were fairly restrained; their officers seemed to have them well in hand. But the colored artillerymen serving as foot soldiers alongside the whites of the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry were lapping up the sutlers' whiskey as if someone would outlaw it tomorrow. Robinson didn't know if that meant they weren't shooting straight. He didn't need to be Grant or Sherman to see that they weren't thinking straight.
“'Scuse me, Cap'n, suh,” he said.
“Yes, Sergeant Robinson? What is it?” Captain Carron gave his three stripes their due.
“Suh, kin we git the sutlers to put up them whiskey barrels now?” Robinson asked. “Reckon the men done plenty 0' drinkin'. Reckon mebbe some of 'em done too much drinkin'.”
“I don't think it's harming them any, Sergeant,” the white officer answered. “It keeps their spirits up, you might say.” He smiled at his own joke. Ben Robinson didn't. Carron's head swung this way and that as he looked along the line. “The Tennesseans are drinking, too, you know.”
“Yes, suh.” Robinson's agreement was thick with disapproval. If anything, the troopers made rowdier drunks than the colored artillerymen. One of the white men yelled something at the Confederates that would have made Robinson want to kill him were it aimed his way. “They is actin' like fools their ownselves.”
Captain Carron frowned. Ben knew why: he'd called white men fools. Even in the V.S. Army, even when it was an obvious truth, a Negro wasn't supposed to do that. Ben Robinson might not have been a slave any more, but he wasn't exactly a free man, either, not even in the eyes of the power that had put a uniform on his back.
Two colored soldiers, both laughing like idiots, shouted things at the Confederates that made what the Tennessee trooper had said sound like an endearment. That was so funny, they had to hold each other up. Then they shouted something viler yet.
But they might not have said anything at all if the drunken white man didn't give them the idea. Even through the din of cannon fire and musketry, those insults carried. Out there beyond rifle range, some of Bedford Forrest's hard-bitten troopers were shaking their fists at Fort Pillow.
Ben didn't want to make Forrest's men any angrier at him than they already were. Why couldn't anybody else see the plain sense in that?
VI
Noon came and went. The firing from around Fort Pillow and from within the embattled fortress went on and on. Major William Bradford began to have its measure. Indeed, he began to think it mattered less than it did. When Bedford Forrest's men first attacked, Bradford had feared they would storm the earthwork.
They'd tried-they'd tried hard from first light of day till now. They'd tried, and they hadn't had any luck. To Bradford's eye, that meant they couldn't have any luck.
“Keep shooting, men!” he yelled. “Kill 'em all! They'll never break in! Never, you hear me?”
The V.S. soldiers, white and black, cheered raucously. They'd taken fresh courage, too. The colored men, especially, began treating war more as a game than as a serious business. They danced and sang and yelled bits of filth at the Confederates. Men from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry did the same thing.
“Sir, do we really want to tick the Rebs off like this?” Lieutenant
Leaming asked.
“What difference does it make?” Bradford said grandly. He felt like dropping his trousers and waving his backside in Forrest's face, the way that one Negro had. He didn't do it, but he felt like it.
But then a minnie snapped past just in front of his nose, so close that he could feel the wind of its passage-or at least so close that he thought he could. He'd seen a couple of men who got hit in the face. He wished he hadn't. Of itself, his hand came up to caress his handsome features. Yes, they were still intact.
Even so, the near miss made him stop thinking about what his soldiers could do to the Confederates and start worrying about what Forrest's men could do to Fort Pillow. He walked over to talk to Theodorick, who was wigwagging signals to the New Era. If that also took him away from the Rebels' fire, well, he wasn't altogether brokenhearted.
“Hello, Bill,” Theo said. “We're giving 'em hell, aren't we?” As if to prove his point, the gunboat roared out another volley.
Bradford smiled as the shells hissed through the air, and again when they burst among the Rebs. See how you like it, you bastards, he thought. But then he brought his mind back to business. “Send a question down to Captain Marshall, if you'd be so kind,” he said.
“At your service.” His brother looked attentive. “What is it?” “Ask him if the New Era can support us with canister if we have to come down by the riverside.”
If the Confederates broke into Fort Pillow, that meant. It sounded much better when he said it the way he did, though. But no matter how he said it, Theodorick understood the true meaning. “Is that likely?” the older officer asked, sudden alarm in his voice and on his face.
“No, no, no,” William Bradford said quickly, as much to reassure himself as to ease Theo's mind. “I just want to cover every possible contingency.” There was a fine, impressive-sounding word.
“All right, Bill.” Theo sounded relieved. He waved his flags to draw the New Era's notice, then started semaphoring again. His younger brother admired his speed and what looked like his precision, though semaphore signals were a closed book to the major.
“Isn't anyone paying attention down there?” he asked.
But then, down on the gunboat in the Mississippi, someone with flags of his own wigwagged from the foredeck. “They have the message,” Theo reported.
“Well, what do they say about it?” Bradford demanded. “Nothing yet,” his brother answered. “They have to pass it on to Captain Marshall and wait for his reply.”
“All right. I understand.” Bill Bradford also had to wait. He liked it no better than any other busy, important man would have-so he thought of himself. After what seemed a very long time but couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes, the sailor with the semaphore flags on the New Era started using them.