Fort Pillow

IX

Matt Ward hadn't thought much of the Federals garrisoning Fort Pillow. Half renegade Tennesseans, half coons-what kind of fight could people like that put up? He figured they would throw up their hands and surrender as soon as that first terrific volley tore into them. Of course, from what he heard, Bedford Forrest had thought they would surrender when he sent in the flag of truce.

Forrest proved wrong, and so did Ward. The soldiers in blue fought with as much courage as anyone could want to see. Maybe that was the desperation of cornered rats. Whatever it was, they showed no signs of yielding even if they were badly outnumbered, even if that blast of gunfire killed or wounded quite a few of the men at the rampart.

If they wouldn't give up, they had to go down. A big colored man in a blue uniform swung his clubbed Springfield at Matt Ward's head. Ward ducked just in time. The rifle-musket butt knocked the slouch hat off his head, but didn't knock out his brains. He swore all the same; he liked that hat.

He stabbed at the Negro with his own bayonet. The black man sprang away. But then he swung again, trying to knock the Enfield out of Ward's hands. Ward wasn't an experienced bayonet fighter. He didn't think any soldiers except former U.S. Army Regulars were expert with the bayonet. But he held on to his weapon, and the black man's swipe left him hideously exposed and unable to get away. Only a sandbag on a practice field could make a more inviting target.

Like anybody who grew up on a farm, Matt Ward had slaughtered and butchered his share of livestock. He knew the soft resistance flesh gave to a knife, knew the feel of a blade grating off a rib and then sliding deeper. But there was all the difference in the world between sticking a hog and sticking a man.

The Negro's eyes opened enormously wide. “Do Jesus!” he screamed. Then he let out a bubbling, wordless shriek of pure agony. He jerked away from the blade and from Ward. An experienced bayonet fighter would have held the lunge and gone on stabbing, twisting the blade to make sure he had a killing stroke. Ward thought the black man would fall over dead. The blood pouring from his side made that seem likely.

Likely or not, it wasn't so. Once free of the bayonet, the Negro went right on fighting-not against Ward, but against a nearby Confederate trooper. That wound had to kill him sooner or later-Ward drove more than a foot of steel into his chest-but it wasn't finishing him fast. As Ward had by the barracks below the bluff, he found out how hard human beings were to kill.

Not far from him, a black soldier threw down his Springfield and fell to his knees in front of a couple of Bedford Forrest's troopers. “Don' shoot me!” he shouted. “Please don' shoot me! I surrender! Ain't gonna fight no mo'!”

“You a runaway, boy?” one of the Confederates asked. Most of the Negroes who fought for the U.S.A. were. By the way this bluebelly talked, he sure didn't come from Massachusetts or New York.

He hesitated a split second, but had to realize lying would do him no good. “Yes, suh,” he admitted. “You kin send me back to my massa. I don' care, so he'p me Jesus.”

Most of the time, the Yankees complained because the Confederates treated captured colored troops as reclaimed property, not prisoners of war. Forrest had offered to treat the blacks in Fort Pillow as prisoners like any others-he'd offered, and the U.S. commander turned him down. Now the bill for such folly came due.

“I'll send you to your master, all right,” the Confederate said. “I'll send you straight to the Devil, because you belong in hell!” He shot the black man in the head from no more than a yard away. Blood and brains and bits of the Negro's skull blew out. The black toppled and lay twitching in the dirt.

“That's telling him, Hank!” said the other C.S. trooper in butternut. “I should've bayoneted him in the guts, let him die slow,” Hank said. “Shooting's too good for a mad dog like that.”

“If you can kill 'em fast, you better do it,” Ward broke in. “I stuck one, stuck him good, and he's still on his feet, the son of a bitch.”

“Niggers is like rattlesnakes-they don't die till sundown.” Hank stirred the man he'd just shot with his foot. “Well, this here one's a goner. Bastard's dead as a stump. But Lord only knows when I'll get a chance to reload.”

If you didn't carry a repeater or a revolver, that was the rub, especially in a close-quarters fight like this. If you fired too soon, you might come to a point where you desperately needed a bullet but didn't have one. If you waited too long, somebody on the other side was liable to shoot you before you pulled the trigger.

Without a minnie in his own rifle musket, the question was as academic for Ward as it was for Hank. When the Federals mounted a counterattack, he defended himself with bayonet and butt because they were all he had. He might have been one of Julius Caesar's legionaries, except their spears were lighter and longer and less clumsy than his.

But some of his comrades still had loaded weapons. They shot a couple of white officers, after which the Union charge faltered. “Come on!” Ward said. “There ain't enough of 'em to hold us out, no matter how hard they try!”

He waded into the fight. A white Tennessean in a blue uniform tried to bayonet him. He tried to bayonet the homemade Yankee at the same time. His bayonet punched into the enemy trooper's thigh. The Federal's thrust missed him. The Tennessean who fought for the U.S.A. yowled and sat down hard, trying to hold the wound closed with his fingers. Ward never found out what happened to him, whether he bled to death, whether some other Confederate killed him, or whether he ended up getting taken prisoner.

Ward also stopped worrying about what happened to the Tennessee Tory the instant after he bayoneted him. A great cheer rose from the Confederates, a hardly smaller moan of dismay from the Union troops.

The large U.S. flag that had floated over Fort Pillow since dawn's early light was down. If that didn't mean the fort was falling, nothing ever would.

Sergeant Ben Robinson groaned when the Stars and Stripes came down. That was his flag, not any of the ones the Confederates used: not the Stars and Bars, not the Stainless Banner that replaced it because from a distance it looked too much like the flag it sought to supplant, and not the Confederate battle flag with its blue X on red. If he belonged to the United States, he had a chance to be a man, an American, a person in his own right. If he belonged to the Confederate States, what was he but a slave, a piece of property, a thing? Nothing, nothing at all.

If he wasn't very lucky, he feared he would be a dead man soon. A glance at the sky told him the sun had hardly moved since the Secesh soldiers swarmed over the rampart. He wasn't Joshua, to hold it back in its course. The hand-to-hand fighting inside the earthwork hadn't lasted long-no more than fifteen minutes, twenty at the outside. It only seemed to go on forever.

Well, no matter how it seemed, it wouldn't last much longer. The colored artillerymen and Tennessee troopers inside the fort had done everything flesh and blood could do to hold out Forrest's men, and everything flesh and blood could do wasn't enough. Some people were saying thousands and thousands of Rebs had got into Fort Pillow. Robinson wasn't so sure about that. But he was sure there were more men in butternut and gray than in blue wherever he looked.

“What is we gonna do, Sergeant?” Sandy Cole shouted. He and Robinson and a few other Company D men, Nate Hunter and Charlie Key and Aaron Fentis, formed a little knot of stubborn resistance against the oncoming Confederate tide. Key had served the twelve-pounder; the other two Negroes hadn't. They were riflemen who'd fired over the earthwork at the Confederates. With the gun useless and the earthwork lost, they were all in the same boat. Yes, they were all in that boat, all right, and it was sinking.

“We got to fight,” Robinson answered, bending to pick up a fist-sized rock and throw it at the nearest Rebel. “We don't fight, they kill us fo' sure.”

None of the other colored soldiers could argue with that. Cries of “No quarter!” and “Black flag!” still rang out. Forrest's troopers were murdering Negroes who tried to lay down their arms and surrender. They were also murdering men from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry who did the same thing. Their blood was up, and they cared about nothing but slaughter.

“Watch yourself, Aaron!” Charlie Key yelled. Aaron Fentis started to turn. He was a squat, broad-shouldered man, strong as an ox but not very fast. He didn't have a chance of knocking away the Confederate bayonet pointed straight at his midriff.

Ben Robinson did. He had a rifle musket of his own now, and swung it at the Reb's piece. The blow caught the weapon squarely and knocked it out of the enemy soldier's hands. Forrest's trooper let out a startled yelp. Aaron Fentis hit the Reb in the head with the butt of his Springfield at the same time as Robinson slammed his rifle-musket butt into the pit of the man's stomach. Down went the Confederate. Somebody stepped on him, shoving his face into the mud. He wouldn't get up soon, if he got up at all.

“We can lick' em!” Sandy Cole shouted.

The small band of Negroes had licked all the Rebs who came at them. If the other men who garrisoned Fort Pillow could have done the same, the Secesh soldiers would be running away with their tails between their legs. And if pigs had wings…

Too many Rebs. That was what it came down to. Now that they were in the fort, the men in blue couldn't drive them out. Robinson knew one reason his little band of soldiers hadn't been badly tested was that they looked and acted tough. Forrest's men were no more eager to risk getting hurt than anybody else with an ounce of brains in his head. They went after people who were hurt or acted afraid. Once all the easy marks were down, they'd deal with the tougher ones.

Somebody close by was screaming for his mother. Ben Robinson couldn't tell if the cry came from a white throat or a black one, from a U.S. soldier or a Confederate. Badly hurt men all sounded pretty much the same. Maybe people should have drawn a lesson from that.

In fact, he was sure they should have. He was also sure they didn't. If they did, mad scenes like this wouldn't happen.

“Kill the niggers!” bawled somebody else much too close. Unlike the other, that cry would only come from a Confederate.

“Kill the traitors!” That might have been somebody from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry, but was much more likely also to come from a Reb. Forrest's troopers hated the men who fought under Major Bradford at least as much as they hated blacks. When Ben Robinson came to Fort Pillow, he wouldn't have believed that was possible. After listening to Bradford's troopers talk for a while, he did.

And, after listening to them, he also believed the Confederates had some pretty good reasons to hate them. Some of the things the troopers bragged about doing… Of course, they had their reasons for doing those things-they were avenging themselves for other things Forrest's men had done to them and their kind and their friends. How long would that cycle of vengeance go on? How long could it go on, before everybody killed off everybody else?

Without Ben's even noticing, Charlie Key managed to reload his Springfield. When he fired, the muzzle of the piece couldn't have been more than six inches from Robinson's left ear. “Do Jesus!” Robinson yipped, and jumped in the air. “What you shooting at?”

“Damn Secesh bastard.” Mournfully, the other colored soldier added, “I done missed the son of a bitch.”

“Almos' didn't miss me.” Robinson's head still rang. Even after he'd fired the twelve-pounder more times than he could count, that rifle musket made an appalling noise, all the worse because it was so unexpected.

“Shit,” Sandy Cole said. “They's in behind us.”

Ben Robinson swore, too. The line of soldiers in blue wasn't a line any more. It had broken down into little knots of struggling men, like the one of which he was a part. Each knot fought for itself. Not enough U.S. officers remained on their feet to make the Federals fight as a group any more. And they were going to get defeated in… What was the word? In detail, that was it. Robinson felt absurdly pleased with himself for remembering.

But how much good would remembering do him? How much good would anything do him, with the Rebs howling like wolves and his own side falling one man after another? He tried to knock the rifle musket out of another Confederate's hands. He failed-the Reb held on to it. But the man didn't seem quite so eager to gut him like a butchered hog. The way things were going, that was a triumph of sorts.

Major Bradford couldn't even mourn the loss of his brother, not unless he wanted people to be mourning him, too, and in short order. He ran now here, now there, trying to rally the Federal soldiers wherever he could. For a little while, he hoped they could hold Forrest's men out and drive them back.

For a little while, yes-but not for long.

No matter what he'd thought, Bedford Forrest was in deadly earnest when he said his troopers could take Fort Pillow. Between the sharpshooters on the high ground looking down into the fort and the swarm of Rebs coming over the earthen rampart, the garrison had no chance to hold back the tide, any more than King Canute could in days gone by.

When Bradford fired at an oncoming Confederate, he found he'd emptied Theodorick's Colt as well as his own. “Son of a bitch!” he shouted, and then, because that wasn't nearly strong enough, “Shit!”

He threw the revolver in the enemy soldier's face. Whatever the Reb was expecting, that wasn't it. The pistol caught him right in the nose. He shouted, “Shit!” too, much louder than Bradford had. Clutching both hands to the wounded member, he slowly crumpled.

Instead of reclaiming the pistol, Bradford snatched up the Springfield the Confederate had dropped. The Colt was just a lump of iron now. He'd never have the chance to load in bullets and measure out charges of black powder and affix a percussion cap for each cylinder he wanted to fire. With a bayoneted rifle, he carried a spear longer than a man was tall. That was something, anyhow.

Something, yes, but how much? The Federals' defense of Fort Pillow was coming to pieces before his eyes. Things were falling apart. The center could not hold, and the Confederates poured in on both flanks as well. The flag had fallen. In a few minutes, Forrest's men looked likely to kill or capture every Union soldier in the fort.

Biting his lip, Bradford shouted the order he'd hoped he wouldn't have to give: “Down to the river, men! Down to the Mississippi! If the Rebs come after us, the New Era will give them canister!”

The gunboat had kept firing all through the fight, even if her shells didn't do so much as Bradford wanted. She hadn't tried lobbing rounds up onto the flat ground atop the bluff, but Bradford could scarcely blame her for that. The shells could, and surely would, fall among his command as well as among the Rebs.

Even breaking contact with Forrest's troopers was hard. The howling men in gray and butternut were mixed in with their foes in blue. Soldiers thrust at one another and swung their Springfields like base ball bats. Whenever somebody managed to load a musket, he fired at the closest soldier in the uniform of the other color. Here and there, men rolled on the ground, kicking and kneeing and choking each other in a struggle old as time.

Little by little, whites and Negroes in blue made for the steep side of the bluff and started scrambling and tumbling down toward the Mississippi far below. If some of the Negroes ran-well, some of the white troopers from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry ran, too. Who wouldn't, with sure death behind and possible salvation ahead?

Bradford wished he could do something about Theo's body. His brother lay where he had fallen. Dead men and writhing wounded lay everywhere inside the earthwork, testimony to how fierce the fighting was. If the Federals still held the fort when the battle was over, Bradford would have to bury poor Theodorick. If they didn't…

He shrugged. If we don't, chances are somebody will have to bury me. A heartbeat later, he shrugged again. Even if the Federals held Fort

Pillow, he might stop a minnie or get in the way of a Reb's bayonet. He'd worked hard to preserve the Union in western Tennessee and Kentucky. A lot of Forrest's troopers wanted to kill him not just because he was a Yankee officer. A lot of them carried personal grudges. Both as a lawyer and as an officer, he'd harried Rebs and their families as hard as he could. They had it coming, by God! But he couldn't expect Confederate soldiers to love him afterwards. He couldn't, and he didn't.

He carried the Springfield at high port: held diagonally in front of his chest, ready for a lunge or a parry. He wished he'd done more bayonet drill. Because they were cavalrymen, the troopers from the Thirteenth Tennessee had scanted that tiresome exercise, and the officers even more than the men.

The colored artillerymen seemed better at it than their white counterparts. He watched a colored sergeant keep a Reb off him with a few smooth-looking jabs and butt strokes. The coons had rhythm, no doubt about it. Who would have imagined they could go toe-to-toe with men who might have owned some of them-who might, as a matter of law, still own some of them?

Bradford shook his head. That wasn't so: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation superseded what had been the law. When it was first issued, Bradford had no use for the Emancipation Proclamation. It seemed like a sop to Northern abolitionists and nothing more, because it freed slaves only in regions beyond the reach of Union forces. What did that do, except win the President political capital?

But the answer soon became clear. Federal troops might not be able to free Negroes through most of the Confederacy, but a great many slaves were able to free themselves by running off to the closest U.S. garrison. They voted with their feet against the South's peculiar institution.

Southerners still insisted Negroes were slaves by nature, and never could match up against whites on even terms. Maybe they were right. Though a strong Union man, Bill Bradford had always believed that himself. But what the Negroes here at Fort Pillow were doing was making him change his mind.

No, they and their white comrades couldn't keep Bedford Forrest's men out of the fort. But how many more men did Forrest have? And weren't those big black bucks fighting as well as the whites beside whom they stood? Bradford couldn't see that they weren't.

He also couldn't see that he could stay up here on top of the bluff much longer, not if he wanted to go on breathing. Keeping that Springfield between himself and the enemy, he fell back toward the slope that led down to the Mississippi.

Moving a gun was work for a team of mules or horses, not for men. Like the rest of the yelling, cheering Confederates with him, Matt Ward didn't give a damn. They swarmed over the twelve-pounder, literally manhandling it toward the edge of the bluff.

“We hit that son of a bitch of a gunboat a couple times, we'll kill it deader'n a cow that gets in front of a locomotive,” somebody said.

More cheers rang out. Not one of the troopers shoving the cannon into place was an artilleryman; Forrest hadn't brought his batteries west against Fort Pillow. Considering the state of the roads the cavalry traveled, that had to be wise. But, like any soldiers, the troopers were convinced they could do anything. They had the gun. They had cannonballs. They had bags of powder. And they had a target. What more did they need?

“Look!” Ward's voice broke with excitement. “There's that stinking scow, just sitting in the water waiting for it. Let's give it to the damnyankees! “

“How?” somebody said. “Damn gun won't point so low.”

“We lift the trail up, that'll bring the barrel down,” Ward said.

Half a dozen Confederates suited action to work, grabbing the trail and, grunting with effort, lifting it into the air. Then a sergeant said, “That won't work, boys.”

“Why not, goddammit?” one of them demanded irately.

“On account of you can't fire steady that way, and on account of the recoil'll run the gun carriage right on over you and squash you like a bunch of bugs,” the sergeant answered. “Jesus God, you got to be dumber'n a nigger if you can't see stuff like that.”

The trooper remained irate, but he couldn't very well argue because the sergeant was obviously right. “What'll we do, then?” he asked.

“Put stuff under the trail till it stays up and the barrel goes down,” Ward said. He wouldn't have insulted the other Confederate the way the sergeant did, but the fellow wasn't what you'd call smart.

Enough “stuff” lay scattered across the grounds of Fort Pillow: boards, barrels, sandbags, what have you. Ward would have used bluebellies' bodies to prop up the trail, but nobody else seemed to want to do that. Even without bodies, they found plenty to depress the gun barrel.

They loaded a sack of powder into the muzzle of the gun. They didn't bother sponging it out first; if any bits of wadding, were still smoldering, they might have been very sorry, but luck stayed with them. Somebody shoved a twelve-pound iron ball into the muzzle and rammed it down toward the end of the bore. And someone else, ignorant of friction primers, stuck a burning splinter in the touch-hole… Matt Ward wasn't the only one who jammed his fingers in his ears. But nothing happened.

“Hang on,” the sergeant said. “You got to prick the bag so the powder's loose and the flame can get at it.”

Artillerymen, no doubt, had a special iron tool to do just that. Forrest's troopers had to improvise-and they did. Several of them carried horseshoe nails and hoof picks in their pockets. One of those proved long enough and straight enough to do the job. Then Matt Ward put a percussion cap over the vent. “Somebody whack it with a rock!” he said. “If that won't set the blamed thing off, I'm a nigger.”

“I'll do it,” the sergeant said. “We aimed at that son of a bitch?” He looked down the barrel of the gun, then nodded. “Oh, yeah.” He smacked the cap not with a rock but with a hammer he'd picked up God knew where.

Boom! The twelve-pounder's roar was a truly impressive noise. Flame and a great, choking cloud of smoke belched from the muzzle of the gun. Cannon, carriage, and all jerked backward, knocking down the ramshackle support the troopers built under the trail. The sergeant had to spring to one side to keep from getting run over, just as he'd warned the men who wanted to hold the trail up by hand.

They missed the Yankee gunboat. The cannonball kicked up a truly impressive splash about fifty feet behind it and well to its left. There were probably fancy nautical terms to describe that better, but Ward neither knew them nor cared about them. All he knew was, the miserable gunboat still floated.

Several troopers cussed. “We shot the stinking gun once,” Ward said. “We can damn well do it again, right?”

“That's the spirit!” the sergeant said. “And even if we did miss, we let those damnyankee bastards down there know this here fort's got it some new owners, right?”

“Right!” the troopers shouted. Maybe they really were heartened. Maybe they just knew better than to argue with anybody who wore three stripes on his sleeve. Under his profane direction, they shoved the twelve-pounder back to the very edge of the bluff. Getting it ready to fire again didn't take so long. Now they had some idea of what they were doing.

They thought so, anyhow. The colored artillerymen whose captured gun they served would have laughed themselves silly. Those colored artillerymen never once entered Ward's mind. Like the rest of the cavalry troopers at the gun, he was intent on the gunboat down in the river.

The sergeant walloped another percussion cap. Again, the cannon bellowed. A gust blew some of the smoke into Ward's face. He coughed and wiped his streaming eyes on his sleeve. More curses erupted from his comrades. This cannonball went into the Mississippi about as far ahead of its intended target as the other one was behind it. “Well, we scared 'em, by God,” Ward said.

“We can still hit that damn thing.” The sergeant had no quit in him. “All we've got to do is split the difference between those two. We do that, we put a cannonball right through the blamed boat's brisket. “

He seemed to think his makeshift gun crew had the skill to split the difference. Real artillerymen would have, no doubt about it. The Negroes who'd been driven from the gun would have. This swarm of Forrest's troopers? They had enthusiasm and very little else.

They did load the twelve-pounder again. Jostling one another to peer down the barrel, they tried their best to aim the field piece at the gunboat-and to hold it on target with that flimsy pile of stuff raising the trail and depressing the muzzle.

“Here we go! This time for sure!” the sergeant shouted, and brought the hammer down on a third percussion cap.

Fire. Smoke. Thunder. The iron shot splashed into the Mississippi at least as far from its target as either of the earlier two. “Hell's bells!” somebody said in disgust. “We can see the son of a bitch down there. Why in blazes can't we hit it?”

“She,” said somebody who fancied himself an expert on things that had to do with ships. “Boats are always she. “

“She's a god damn bitch, is what she is. She don't hold still for no body,” another trooper said.

“Sounds like a woman, all right,” Ward said. His own experience in such things was limited-he'd been kissed twice, not counting cousins-but he got a laugh.

“Let's try again, boys.” Yes, the sergeant who'd taken charge of the twelve-pounder was as stubborn as they came.

No matter how stubborn he was, three misses made his crew start melting away. “Hell with it,” a trooper said as he stooped to pick up his carbine. “I'm gonna go shoot me some niggers and Tennessee Tories. I can damn well hit them bastards.”

“That's right.” Ward grabbed his Enfield, too. “I know how to aim this critter.”

The sergeant squawked, but they all went farther along the edge of the cliff till they looked down on the soldiers in blue scrambling down toward the riverbank. Ward raised the rifle musket and aimed at a white man descending feet first. The homemade Yankee saw him and waved desperately. “Don't shoot!” he cried. “I ain't done nothin' to you!”

Killing a man in the heat of battle was one thing. Killing a man in cold blood, killing a man begging for his life, killing a defenseless man-for the trooper in blue had dropped his piece-proved something else again. With a swallowed obscenity, Matt swung the Enfield away from the other man.

Not all the bluebellies going down the slope and already at the bottom had given up. A soldier down there fired at Ward. He didn't know how to gauge such a steep uphill shot, and the minnie slapped into the mud about ten feet below the Confederate.

If I don't kill' em, they'll kill me, Ward thought. He aimed at a Negro. This time, nothing stayed his trigger finger. The ball caught the black in the short ribs. Although the runaway slave-for what else could he be? — was halfway down toward the Mississippi, the howl he let out reached Ward up on the bluff. The black rolled and tumbled all the way down to the riverbank.

“Nice shot!” another Confederate trooper said. “He looked just like one o' them clowns in the circus, way he turned somersets there.”

“He did, didn't he?” Ward paused in reloading, though not for long-his hands knew what to do even without direction. “Let's see if I can get me another coon like that.”

“Well, it ain't like we don't have plenty to pick from,” said the other soldier in butternut.

“Yeah.” Ward brought the loaded Enfield up to his shoulder and found another target.

A colored soldier rolled past Sergeant Ben Robinson. The man was groaning and trying to clutch at his chest, but his arms and legs kept flying out every which way. “Poor bastard,” Sandy Cole said. “He ain't dead yet, he gonna be by the time he fetch up 'longside the river.

“Ain't it the truth?” Robinson said. A Mini? ball cracked past his head. A few inches lower and he would have rolled and slid all the way down to the Mississippi, too. The only difference was, nobody would have wondered if he was dead.

Aaron Fentis looked up the slope to the top of the bluff, where Bedford Forrest's troopers were taking potshots at the whites and Negroes below them. “Why the hell those officers of our'n want us to come down here?” he demanded. “Dem Secesh sojers, dey shoot us down like we was so many wild turkeys.”

“They say the gunboat keep the Rebs off us,” Robinson said.

“Dey say, dey say.” Fentis's voice went high and mocking. “I say dey don' know what dey talkin' 'bout. Dey say we hold out Forrest, too. Was dey right? How much good dat damn gunboat do us up till now? Any a-tall? I ain't seen it. You seen it, Sergeant?” Even in disaster, he remembered to stay respectful to Ben Robinson's chevrons.

He should have stayed respectful to the white officers in command at Fort Pillow, too. Robinson should have reproved him for not sounding respectful enough. He knew he should, but couldn't make himself do it. Aaron Fentis might be disrespectful, but that didn't mean he was wrong. The whites in command at Fort Pillow hadn't known what was going on. Well, maybe Major Booth had, but he got killed too soon for it to matter. Since then…

Robinson wouldn't have wanted to surrender to the Confederates, even if they did offer to treat Negroes as prisoners of war. But he'd thought, as Major Bradford had thought, that Fort Pillow could hold. That turned out to be mistaken. And now there was no talk of taking anybody prisoner, colored man or white. The Rebs kept yelling, “Black flag!” and firing away for all they were worth.

“Maybe they stop killin' people if we surrender now,” Charlie Key said.

“Who kin do it?” Robinson asked bleakly. “Major Booth, he dead. Major Bradford, he want to go on fightin'.”

“He git killed, he go on fightin' much longer,” Key said. “Then somebody else kin tell the Rebs we is givin' up.” He paused, then added, “Do Jesus, I surrender right now if I don't reckon they shoot me dead fo' tryin'.”

That was defeatism. Sergeant Robinson knew he shouldn't let anybody get away with it. In happier times, he wouldn't have. But how could you blame a man for defeatism after you were defeated? If scrambling down toward the riverbank with Confederate soldiers shooting at you from above wasn't defeat, Robinson didn't want to find out what was.

If he thought some Reb would let him give up, he supposed he would throw down his Springfield, too. He'd done everything he could reasonably do to defend the fort. But getting anyone in butternut to accept a black man's surrender wouldn't be easy-and might not be possible.

If the Federals couldn't quit, they had to go on fighting. But Robinson couldn't even do that, not now. No Confederate soldiers were within bayonet reach, and he had no cartridges for the rifle musket he'd picked up. He wondered if any of the Union soldiers going down toward the riverbank carried more than a handful of ammunition.

But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a white man below him yelled, “You need to shoot back at the stinkin' Rebs, get over here! We got us crates and crates of cartridges.”

“Major Bradford, he done thought o' somethin', anyways,” Sandy

Cole said.

“I reckon,” Robinson said. “Reckon that make once, too.”

Was he bitter? Just because everything Bradford tried turned out to be wrong? For a moment, he tried to deny it even to himself. He wondered why, when it was so plainly true. Only one thing occurred to him: that as a black man, he had no right to criticize what a white man did.

“Hell I don't,” he muttered. What that white man did was altogether too likely to get him killed. Was a damn fool any less a damn fool because he was white? Whites seemed to think so, or at least to believe a damn fool was more a damn fool if he happened to be black.

There were black damn fools. Robinson had known enough of them to have no doubts about that. But there were white damn fools, too. And if one of them wore oak leaves on his shoulders, he could be a damn fool on a scale most Negroes only dreamt of.

Robinson awkwardly made his way down toward the crates of cartridges. If he had to go on fighting, he would make the best fight he could. He was clumsy loading the Springfield, too; most of his training was as an artilleryman, not a foot soldier.

He'd just finished setting a percussion cap on the nipple when a burst of fire came from farther south along the riverbank. Panic swept through him. If the Rebs were shooting at the garrison from there as well as from the top of the bluff, the surviving Federals wouldn't last long. But not many minnies tore into the Negroes and whites in blue uniforms.

Instead, bullets clattered off the gunboat's iron sides. They sounded like hail on a tin roof. For a moment, Robinson wondered what good they would do the Rebs. Ironclads were supposed to be proof against cannonballs, let alone Mini? balls.

But then a white soldier standing not far away said, “Fuck me if I'd want to raise the gunports with the Rebs putting that much lead in the air. You do, you'll catch a bullet with your teeth.”

“They don't open them ports; they can't shoot!” Robinson exclaimed. “They can't shoot, they don't do us no good.”

“You noticed that, did you?” the white trooper said. “Nothin' gets by you, does it, boy?”

Normally, that boy would have infuriated Robinson, the more so since he outranked the white. Now he was too appalled to call the other man on it. If Major Bradford was wrong about this… We all die, the colored sergeant thought numbly.

Up on top of the bluff, a cannon boomed. It hadn't fired for some time, but now the Rebs had got it loaded again. A ball splashed into the water not far from the gunboat. That wasn't great shooting, but it didn't need to be. If the amateur gunners up there-they couldn't be anything else-kept on, sooner or later they might hit. How well armored was the gunboat against fire from above? Ben Robinson had no idea.

Maybe the gunboat's captain didn't, either. And maybe he didn't want to find out. Black smoke poured out of the stack. The gunboat began to move-not toward the riverbank to blast the Confederates and rescue Fort Pillow's embattled garrison, but north, up the Mississippi, away from danger.

“You yellow-bellied son of a bitch bastard!” the white man howled. Robinson nodded helplessly. The gunboat paid no attention to either one of them. Away she steamed, faster and faster.