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 looking at three hundred boiling-mad, half-cocked Virginians holding every kind of breechloader under God’s sun staring back at you with murder in their eyes is a ticket to redemption, you is on the dot. I seen what they done to Newby, and every colored in that engine house knowed whatever devilment Newby got, we was two trips short of, for Newby was lucky. He got his while he was dead, and the rest of us was conjured to get it wide awake and alive, if we lived long enough to get it in that fashion. I found the Lord surely. I called on Jesus outright. A feeling come over me. I sat in a corner, covered my head, pulled out from my bonnet my Good Lord Bird feather, and held that thing tight, just a-praying, and saying, “Lord, let me be Your angel.”
The Old Man didn’t hear me, though. He was busy conjuring up ideas, for the men in the room had dropped away from the walls and windows to surround him, as he backed off from his window and wiped his beard thoughtfully. “We has them where we wants them,” he announced cheerfully. He turned to Stevens and said, “Take Watson out with a prisoner and tell them we will begin exchanging our men for Negroes. By now Cook and the others has hived some more bees at the schoolhouse and the farm. On our signal, they will begin their attack from the rear with the Negroes, thus provoking our escape. It is time to move into the mountains.”