Two white men flung open the door and drug him in just as I reached Oliver. He turned to me and said, “Onion! What you doing here?”
“He was with us!” I gasped. “He was flocking the colored!”
“He should’a said it. You seen it. I told him to halt! He didn’t say a blamed word!”
There weren’t no use in tellin’ him now. It was my mistake and I planned to keep it. The Rail Man was dead anyway. He was the first man killed at Harpers Ferry. A colored.
The white folks runned with that later on. They laughed ’bout it. Said, “Oh, John Brown’s first shot to free the niggers at Harpers Ferry killed a nigger.” But the fact is, the Rail Man didn’t die right off. He lived for twenty-four hours more. Lived longer than Oliver did, it turns out. He had a whole day to tell his story after he was shot, for he bled to death and was conscious before he died, and his wife and children and even his friend the mayor called on him, and he spoke to them all, but he never did tell a soul what he done or who he really was.
I later heard tell that his real name was Haywood Shepherd. The white folks at Harpers Ferry gived him a military funeral when the whole thing was done. They buried him like a hero, for he was one of their niggers. He died with thirty-five hundred dollars in the bank. They never did figure out how he got that much money, being a baggage handler, and what he planned to use it for. But I knowed.
If the Old Man hadn’t changed dates on him, making it so the Rail Man gived his password to the wrong person, he’d’a lived another day to spend all that money he saved on freeing his kin. But he brung his words to the wrong man, and the wrong movement.
It was an honest mistake, made in the heat of that moment. And I don’t beat myself over the head with it. Fact is, it weren’t me who blowed out the Rail Man’s lantern and dropped it that night. It was the Rail Man himself that done it. Had he calmed down and waited another second he would’a seen me and waved that thing up and down. But it was hard buying that whole bit deep inside, truth be to tell it, for a lot was wasted.
I told Oliver standing there, “It’s my fault.”
“There’ll be time enough to count lost chickens later,” he said. “We got to move.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Understand later, Onion. We got to roll!”
But I couldn’t move, for a sight over Oliver’s shoulder froze me in my tracks. I was standing before him, looking down the track behind him, and what I seen made my two little walnuts, packed inside my dress, shrivel up in panic.
In the dim light of the tavern that lit the track, dozens of coloreds, maybe sixty or seventy, poured out of two baggage cars. It was Monday morning in the wee hours, and some was still dressed in Sunday church clothes, for I reckon they’d gone to church the day before. Men in white shirts, and women in dresses. Men, women, children, some in their Sunday best, and others with no shoes, some holding sticks and pikes and even an old rifle or two. They jumped out of them baggage cars like they was on fire, the whole herd of ’em, turning and running off on foot, making tracks back toward Baltimore and Washington, D.C., as fast as their feet could go. They was waiting on the Rail Man to wave that lamp. And when he didn’t, they took the tall timber and went home. It didn’t take much for a colored to think he’d been tricked by anyone, white or colored, in them days.
Oliver turned and looked back there just as the last of them leaped out the baggage car and hit the tracks running, then turned back to me, puzzled, and said, “What’s going on?”
I watched the last of them disappear, dodging in and out of the trees, jumping into the thickets, a few sprinting down the tracks, and said, “We is doomed.”
29.
A Bowl of Confusion
I slunk behind Oliver and Taylor as they left the bridge in a hurry with the engineer and coal slinger as prisoners. They marched the two them past the Gault House on Shenandoah Street and straight into the gates of the armory inside the ferry gate, which was unguarded. On the way there, Oliver explained that the cat was out the bag. Cook and Tidd had already cut the town’s telegraph wires, his older brother Watson, another one of the Captain’s sons, and one of the Thompson boys was guarding the Shenandoah Bridge. The rest had overcome the two watchmen, stolen into the armory buildings, and seized them. Two fellers took up in the arsenal, where the guns was guarded. The train was held up. Kagi and John Copeland, the colored soldier, had the rifle works—that’s where the guns was made. The rest of the Old Man’s army of seventeen men was scattered ’bout in various buildings across the grounds.
“There weren’t but two guards,” Oliver said. “We took them by surprise. We sprung the trap perfect.”
We brung the prisoners into the Engine Works Building, the entrance guarded by two of the Old Man’s soldiers, and when we walked in, the Captain was busy giving orders. When he turned and seen me walk in, I thought he’d be disappointed and angry that I disobeyed his orders. But he was used to crazy conglomerations and things going cockeyed. Instead of being angry, the expression on his face was one of joy. “I knowed it. The Lord of Hosts foresees our victory!” he declared. “Our war is won, for our good omen the Onion has returned! As the book of Isaiah says, ‘Woe to the wicked. And say ye to the righteous that it shall be well with him!’”
The men around him cheered and chuckled, except, I noted, O. P. Anderson and the Emperor. They was the only two colored in the room. They looked just plain fertilized, put out, right unnerved.
The Old Man clapped me on the back. “I see you is dressed for victory, Onion,” he said, for I still had my gunnysack with me. “You come well prepared. We is headed for the mountains shortly. Soon as the colored hives, we will be off. There is a lot of work yet ahead.” And with that he turned away and begun giving orders again, tellin’ someone to go get the three men at the farm to ready a nearby schoolhouse to gather in the colored. He was just plumb full of orders, tellin’ this one to go this way and the other one to go that way. There weren’t nothing for me to do, really, except to set tight. There was already several eight or nine prisoners in the room, and they looked downright glum. Some of them were still shaking the sleep out their eyes, for it was near two a.m. and they’d been woken in some form or fashion. To my recollection, of them that was in the room was a husband and wife seized when taking a shortcut home through the armory from the Gault tavern in town, two armory workers, two railroad workers, and a drunk who lay asleep on the floor most of the time, but woke up long enough to declare that he was the cook at the Gault House tavern.
The Old Man ignored them, course, marching past them, giving orders, just happy as you please. He was as peachy as I’d ever seen him, and for the first time in a long while, the wrinkles in his face creaked and twisted amongst themselves and wrapped around his nose like spaghetti, and the whole conglomeration broke open into a look of—how can I say it—downright satisfaction. He weren’t capable of a smile, not a true, wide-open, get-your-drawers-out-the-window smile, showing that row of them gigantic, corn-colored front chompers of his I seen from time to time when he chewed bear or pig guts. But he was one hundred percent stretched out in terms of overall satisfaction. He had accomplished something important. You could see it in his face. It hit me heavy then. He had actually done it. He had taken Harpers Ferry.
When I look back, it hadn’t taken him more than five hours to do the whole bit from soup to nuts. From the time they walked in there at nine o’clock until that moment the train arrived just after one a.m., was five hours total. It went off smooth as taffy till I got there. They cut the telegraph wires, overcome two old guards, walked past two saloons that was well lit full of Pro Slavers, and walked dead into the armory. That armory covered quite a bit of ground, a good ten acres, with several buildings that done various facets of the rifle-making business, barrels, muskets, ammo, hammers, and so forth. They broke open every building in the grounds that was locked and took ’em over. The main one was Hall’s Rifle Works. The Old Man stuck his best soldiers in there, Lieutenant Kagi and the colored man from Oberlin, John Copeland. A. D. Stevens, who was disagreeable but probably the best fighting soldier among his men, Brown kept with him.