“That’s right, Sheriff Nash. We’ll put out the call to the White League. Plenty out there back us up.”
Sheriff Nash? His father told his mother Sheriff Nash was locked up in Calhoun’s Sugarhouse. Nash was supposedly a prisoner, but here he is. If Noby slips away now, he has something big to tell the men in the courthouse. He begins to move himself slowly down the bank, but the grass is slick and damp. Before he can get a good foothold, he starts a fast slide down toward the bayou on his backside and stops only when he bangs against a protruding rock at the river’s edge. One of his legs is thigh-high in the chilly water, and he braces the other at an awkward angle on the bank so he won’t go all the way into the stream. The wind suddenly shifts, and a quick chill seizes him. Before he can stop himself, he sneezes, not once but twice.
Noby stops short, afraid to move a muscle, and listens hard while trying to calm his breathing. The men in the clearing have stopped their conversation. He dares not call further attention to his position. Although Noby doesn’t hear anyone approaching, he frantically looks up and down the banks of the bayou for an escape route. If they come to the water after him, he is in the open, and he will have to decide whether or not to run. He waits.
“If y’all talked less, and done your job last November to keep them from the polls, we wouldn’t have this mess to clean up now,” one of the men says.
Noby is so relieved they haven’t spotted him that he almost cries. Although he can’t seem to stop his body from shuddering, he holds himself as quiet as he is able, one leg still in the bayou.
“No need going back to what we shoulda done, Hadnot. Anybody see clear over they shoulder. If we can’t vote the Negro down, we knock him down. End result’s the same.”
“We agree, then. Put the word out to neighboring parishes, and make sure they bring guns to blast them out. As of today, we at war.”
A few of the men stay in the clearing at Summerfield Springs for another hour, talking in small groups and drinking before mounting their horses and riding away. Noby takes his leg out of the chilly water but keeps down and waits them out. What seemed an elaborate game until a few hours ago has become something very different, and he is paralyzed with the visual image of his own small body hung from the neck by a rope thrown over the nearest pecan tree. He doesn’t move for another thirty minutes after all sounds of the men have faded.
Noby climbs up the bank from the bayou and forces himself to back away through the tall grass slowly, carefully, afraid with each reverse step that a heavy white hand will clamp down on his shoulder or over his mouth, and he will disappear forever from everyone he knows.
It is an easy matter to follow the curves of Summerfield Springs Bayou and Boggy Bayou, and zigzag back toward Smithfield Quarter. Noby plays back the words of the white men at Summerfield Springs and their tone, remembering exactly who said what, without thinking too much about what they meant. It is too hard. This time Noby seeks out the dark, wooded areas with as much cover as possible, straining to hear any unfamiliar sounds of white men prowling about. Right now he wants to sit down in the middle of the soggy marsh and not think anymore. He wants someone to tell him how to get out of hostile territory and to lead him somewhere that is safe. He wants his father.
When at last he enters the familiarity of Colfax, he begins to run for the first time. He holds his head down and puts everything into the churning of his legs, his heart pounding hard against his bony chest and his lungs so raw he thinks they might burst. He runs headlong in the general direction of the center of town and the courthouse, as if he is being chased by demons, no longer cautious or carefully picking his way, no longer listening to anything other than the whizzing of wind against his face and the beating of his own heart.
Noby crashes through a small grove of pecan trees and barely feels the nick on his cheek from a low-lying branch as he continues to throw himself forward. The running consumes him, and by the time he registers the men sitting in the grove, he almost slams into one of them. His vision fills with the tiny cylindrical hole of the pistol leveled at his head.
Eli McCullen holds a 9mm sharpie, and he is as surprised as Noby. There are six armed men in the grove, one of the smaller colored patrol units. Noby runs to Eli McCullen before anyone can stop him.
“Mr. McCullen, sir, please don’t shoot me.” Noby takes big, gulping breaths, but that’s all he can get out.
“Slow down,” Eli says. “You Israel Smith’s boy? You and your mama staying at my brother’s house?”
Noby nods, still winded.
“We don’t shoot our own, son.”
“I got to go to the courthouse,” Noby says. “The old sheriff loose, and they calling for more men to take the courthouse back. It’s a war.”
“Where this news from?” Eli McCullen asks.
“At Summerfield Springs, they talking about bringing white men from Sicily Island. And other parishes too.”
The other men press closer to Noby and Eli. “I thought they had Sheriff Nash in the sugarhouse,” says one colored man. “Sheriff Nash never been one to turn the other cheek.”
“What else you hear, boy?”
Noby feels damp through and through. “Said they gonna run the carpetbaggers out. They gonna hang the black radicals. They say they calling in the White League.” The men grow deathly quiet. “Can I go to the courthouse now?” Noby finally asks.
“This news got to get to the top quick.” Eli McCullen looks to the rest of the patrol, but each has retreated into his own thoughts. “I take him myself.”
Noby follows blindly behind Eli McCullen on the way to the courthouse. They cut through an overgrown part of Mirabeau Woods where low-hanging branches from the trees push at Noby. Thankfully, Eli doesn’t talk to him or expect him to talk, stopping only to lift Noby over a fallen trunk or hold open twisting vines for him to squeeze through. Noby follows, stumbling more than once, unaware, glad to have someone else in charge. Eventually, they come to the courthouse and see Mr. McCullen climbing down the ladder from the roof.
“What you doing here?” McCully says. “Why you got the boy, looking like a crazy man?”
“Sheriff Shaw inside?” asks Eli.
“They all in there. Something big going on. They got some letter.”
“Had to bring this boy in. Sheriff Nash escape up to Summerfield Springs, and white men getting ready to attack the courthouse.”
McCully addresses himself to Noby. “How you come by this?”
“I go to Summerfield Springs this morning and hear the white men talking. Sheriff Nash there. He say this a war.”
“How you get all the way up to Summerfield Springs? Who go with you?”
“Walk, by myself,” Noby says.
McCully furrows his forehead, studying Noby. “You full of surprises, son. You done a fine job.”
“The sheriff gotta hear this. You gonna take him inside?” Eli asks his brother.
McCully nods, places his big hand at Noby’s back.
“Please, Mr. McCullen, can I see my papa?” Noby asks.
“Run and get Israel Smith,” McCully says to Eli. “He on the last patrol toward Smithfield Quarter.”
McCully leads Noby inside the courthouse.
The politicians and leadership inside the courthouse huddle together in one of the anterooms. Twelve men, four white and eight colored, hunch over a table, reading and arguing about the two-page letter in front of them. They barely look up when McCully barges in, annoyed at the interruption by the big man and the small boy at his side.
“This a private meeting,” snaps Cap’n Ward, the most vocal of the colored politicians. He is a round, dark man with unforgiving features, dressed in a hodgepodge of leftover Union Army uniform pieces, boots, shirt, cap, and jacket. Although shabby, they exude, if not authority, at least a certain official feeling.
McCully isn’t cowed. “This boy got news you want to listen to. Go on, Noby,” he prods, “tell these men what you just hear.”
“Sher
iff Nash at Summerfield Springs,” says Noby. He repeats his story.
“We know Nash escaped,” says Sheriff Shaw. “Now we know where, for all the good that does. They lost him from the sugarhouse this morning. Eight men busted him out. It’s too late to do anything about that. Right now we got a peace proposal from the constable and J. W. Hadnot in Montgomery to answer.”
Noby recognized the name. “Smokin’ Jimmy Hadnot at Summerfield Springs too,” he offers. “He the one say they gonna blast the courthouse and hang the radicals.”
Cap’n Ward snatches up the piece of paper the men have been studying and throws it to the floor. “Hadnot sends in a peace proposal while he plots to attack?” he says. “I told you not to trust them.”
“We still gotta answer,” says Levi Allen. “Hadnot don’t speak for everybody. This proposal sound like a reasonable place to start.” He retrieves the paper from the floor.
“Read it again,” says Cap’n Ward reluctantly.
McCully mutters to himself as Levi reads the proposal out loud.
Figure 4. Letter to commanders of the force at Colfax, from Montgomery
“‘Restore quietude to the people,’” McCully says. “Ask us to lay down like a whipped dog, more like it.”
Noby just wants to go home to The Bottom, back where the most important thing is squabbling with his older brother or punishment for not doing chores.
The light of day has already crossed over to the dim of evening by the time Israel arrives at the courthouse. He bursts through the front door, a man on fire. Noby runs to him and throws himself on his father.
Israel holds Noby away from his body and crouches down to get at eye level. “They say you hear the white men’s plans in Summerfield Springs,” he says.
Noby nods.
“Don’t you dare put yourself in harm’s way like this again.” Israel takes Noby by the shoulders and shakes him. “You hear me, son?”
Noby nods again.
His father places his arm on Noby’s shoulder, lightly rests it there.
“Those white men gonna kill you, Papa?” Noby asks.
“We both gonna make your tenth birthday,” says Israel. “Once Federal troops get here, I come on home, home to you and your mama.”
Within the hour, the men in charge draft their response to the peace letter. Each signs his name to the return document, and they fetch someone to deliver it to the Montgomery men.
Figure 5. Response from Colfax commanders to Montgomery
Chapter
5
O n Saturday, Colfax cautiously flirts with the fragile hope that goings-on inside the courthouse will end the standoff. A swelling crowd of men mills around the grounds, on break from patrol, sticking close to await word of progress. Messages have been delivered back and forth for two days between the white Democrats of Montgomery and the colored and white Republicans of Colfax. Despite stubborn posturing by both camps, the two sides have finally arranged a face-to-face meeting to talk out their issues. Now men with decision-making power sit across the table from one another inside the courthouse. They have been at it for two hours.
A colored man emerges at a gallop from the thick foliage of Mirabeau Woods, past the Pecan Tree on the river side. He holds on to the reins with one hand and waves his slouch hat in a high arc above his head with the other, hollering into the wind.
“Here come Eli McCullen,” someone shouts. “Riding like the devil hisself chasing him.”
“They shot Jessie McCullen through the head,” Eli yells. He reins in the dark gray mare, in full lather, snorting and heaving. “At his farm, shot through the head.”
Everyone pushes and shoves to gather around Eli, forming a tight circle. Pressing him for details, they barely give him time to dismount or catch his breath.
McCully scrambles down the wooden ladder from the courthouse roof at high speed, hand under fist, two rungs at a time, and forces his way through the throng of men to get to the front, shoving without apology. He grabs Eli’s arm, spinning him around until they face each other.
“What happened?” McCully asks.
“You know Jessie’s place, down Bayou Darrow,” Eli says. “His wife say Jessie mending the fence, patching where the cow push through. White men come on horses, five, maybe six. They ask what he think about coloreds at the courthouse don’t know their place.”
“Jessie say, ‘I don’t know nothing about that mess. I tend my fence, mind my business.’ His wife tell me he say it three or four times, but they keep asking, pushing him back and forth between them, one to another.”
“Jessie dead?” McCully asks. His dark face is ashen, drained.
Eli puts his hand on McCully’s arm, his own grief plain. “Gone from this life.”
McCully flinches as if the touch burns, and shakes Eli’s hand away. “His wife and children?” he asks.
“They hole up on Mirabeau plantation. His wife and a neighbor put Jessie’s body in a wagon and carry it over to her stepfather. Mr. Calhoun let them keep the body on his place for now, and he let the kin stay too, till it safe to go back home.”
“Who done it? She know the men?”
McCully’s features arrange themselves in a peculiar way. There’s a moment when a man goes a certain way in his mind, and his body follows. A moment when anger has the power to transform itself and its vessel into something else entirely. A man can explode into rage or retreat into madness. A man can break. Those in front of the Colfax courthouse stay quiet, waiting for what McCully will do.
“Don’t matter who done it, McCully,” says Eli. “Just white men sending a message. Anybody serve the purpose, long as they colored.”
“We going after them what done this,” McCully says. “Colfax our town. We got the numbers. We got guns and men. We ready to fight back this time.”
Israel, usually mute in a crowd, comes forward. “What more we can do? They own the stores and farms, run the politics.”
McCully pulls himself from his own thoughts. Color has flooded back into his face, and he seems massive. “Ain’t you tired yet of living like a whimpering stray dog, Israel?” McCully asks. His voice quivers. “Is begging scraps at the white man’s table enough for you?
“Is we men?” McCully shouts, and he holds his rifle out in front of his body. A small, slick bead slides down the side of his face and all the way down onto his grimy shirtfront. He doesn’t bother to wipe it away. “Is we men?” he says again. He drops to his knees and raises both arms over his head, cradling the rifle in his palms, as if in offering. “Has You forgot us?” he whispers. “When can we be men?”
Israel Smith melts back into the crowd, and the other men wait, unsure.
Sam Tademy steps forward and takes hold of McCully around both shoulders. He unlocks McCully’s grip on the Enfield, transferring the rifle to his own hands, and urges him up from the dust.
“The Lord with you in your time of darkness, Brother McCully,” says Sam softly as he helps him stand upright. “So is we.”
McCully looks at Sam as if they are the only two standing outside the courthouse, as if the crowd doesn’t exist.
“Jessie the baby,” McCully whispers. He shakes his head, disbelieving, as if in checking, he will find it all a mistake and his little brother is still alive. “He the only one of us refuse to take the courthouse, and they cut him down noway,” he says to Sam. In his grief, stooped, he looks like an old man, tired of the struggle. “Why He not take me instead?”
“Wasn’t your time,” replies Sam, his tone both soothing and assured. “The Lord work in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.”
McCully shakes Sam off and storms toward the courthouse, disappearing between the double doors.
“What’s going on in there?” Eli McCullen asks, finally registering the half-dozen saddle horses tied up at the east side of the building.
“Montgomery men in there two hours, trying to hammer out peace,” says Sam.
“Peace?” Eli snorts an ugly laugh with no hum
or in it. “They talk peace in there but murder us out here?”
Eli strides toward the courthouse, only a few steps behind his brother.
Within minutes, all six of the white men from Montgomery spill outside on the run, faces tight as they make a beeline for their horses. A phalanx of colored men gives chase, close at their heels, like sheepdogs herding an errant flock. One of the white men loses his hat, but he doesn’t retrieve it, racing for his mount. McCully appears at the courthouse door, struggling against two colored men holding him, just as the last white man swings into his saddle. They pin McCully’s arms back, blocking his access to his gun.
“How dare you act like you talking peace while you shoot my brother,” McCully yells after the men. “We coming after you next.”
The white men gallop toward Mirabeau Woods, trailed by two colored horsemen assigned to ensure they don’t stop until they are beyond the town limits.
The murder of Jessie McCullen jolts the colored populace. Sketchy but disturbing reports fan outward to more remote parts of the parish, from Smithfield Quarter, Bayou Darrow, and The Bottom, up to Boggy Bayou and Montgomery to the north, and as far as Pineville to the southeast. Another colored farmer is taken from his home in Mirabeau Woods and is feared dead too. Every colored citizen of Colfax immediately understands the real meaning of the stories, the implications, without the need for exact details. Many who stayed their ground earlier in the week abandon their homes and flock into Colfax.
The roads around Colfax and the surrounding woods choke on the desperation of entire families on the run. There is barely a nod, friendly or hostile, between the nervous sets of people crossing paths in opposite directions, whether on foot, on horseback, or in wagons or boats. On the roads there is practiced avoidance, deferred glances, studied nonconfrontation, even by the children, as if the situation is too peculiar and unpredictable to risk upsetting a delicate balance. All the people flowing into town are colored, and all fleeing out are white.