James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

Oh, that knotted him up. The Old Man couldn’t stand it. He just plain couldn’t stand having someone else be the boss or tell a plan better than his. The men were watching close now. The wrinkles in his face knotted up and he blurted out, “All right. We’re leaving in two days.”

“For where?” Owen said.

The Captain, still holding the canvas door cover over his head, dropped it, and it flapped across the cabin door like a giant, dirty sheet hung out to dry in the wind. He glared at them with his hands in his pockets, jaw jutting out, disgruntled to the limit. It just plain irritated him to be talked to that way, for he listened to no council but his own. But he hadn’t no choice.

“We plans to strike at the heart of this infernal institution,” he said. “We will attack the government itself.”

A couple of fellers tittered, but Kagi and Owen did not. They knowed the Old Man better than the others, and knowed he was serious. My heart skipped a beat, but Kagi said calmly, “You mean Washington? We can’t attack Washington, Captain. Not with thirteen men and the Onion.”

The Old Man snorted. “I wouldn’t plow that field with your mule, Lieutenant. Washington is where men talk. This is war. Wars is fought in the field, not where men set about eating pork and butter. In war, you strikes at the heart of the enemy. You strike his supply lines like Toussaint-Louverture struck the French on the islands around Haiti. You busts open his food chain like Schamyl the Circassian chief done against the Russians! You attacks his means like Hannibal in Europe done against the Romans! You take his weapons like Spartacus! You hives his people and arms them! You dissiminates his power to his chattel!”

“What is you talking ’bout!” Owen said.

“We is going to Virginia.”

“What?”

“Harpers Ferry in Virginia. There’s a federal armory there. They make guns. There’s a hundred thousand rifles and muskets in that place. We will break in there and, with those weapons, arm the slaves, and allow the Negro to free himself.”

Many years later, I joined a choir in a Pentecostal church after taking a liking to a minister’s wife who slept around to save the wear and tear on her holy husband. I runned behind her several weeks till one morning the pastor gived a rousing sermon ’bout how the truth will set you free, and a feller stood up in the congregation and blurted out, “Pastor! I got Jesus in my heart! I’m confessing! Three of us in here has porked your wife!”

Well, the silence that followed that poor man’s declaration weren’t nothing compared to the quiet that fell on them roughnecks when the Old Man dropped that bomb on ’em.

To be clear on it, I weren’t afraid at that moment. In fact, I felt downright comfortable, ’cause for the first time, I knowed I weren’t the only person in the world who knowed the Old Man’s cheese had slid off his biscuit.

Finally John Cook managed to speak. Cook was a chatty feller, dangerous, the Old Man declared many a time, for Cook was a loose talker. But chatty as he was, even Cook had to cough and snort and clear his throat a few times before he found his voice.

“Captain, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, is eight hundred miles from here. And just fifty miles from Washington, D.C. It’s heavily guarded. With thousands of U.S. government troops nearby. There’s militia from Maryland and Virginia all around it. I’d guess there’d be maybe ten thousand troops mustered up against us. We wouldn’t last five minutes.”

“The Lord will protect us from them.”

“What’s He gonna do, cork their rifles?” Owen asked.

The Old Man looked at Owen and shook his head. “Son, it hurts my heart that you has not taken God into your bosom in the ways I’ve taught you, but as you know, I let you go your own way in your beliefs—which is why you remains so thick after all these years. The Bible says he who thinketh not in the ways of the Redeemer knoweth not the safeness of the Lord. But I have thunk with Him and know His ways. We have thunk this matter through together for nearly thirty years, the Lord and I. I know every part and portion of this land of which I speak. The Blue Mountains runs diagonally through Virginia, Maryland, all the way up into Pennsylvania and down into Alabama. I know them mountains better than any man on earth. As a child, I ran through them. As a young man, I surveyed them for Oberlin College. And during that time, I considered this slavery question. I even made a journey to the European continent when I runned a tannery on the premise of inspecting the European sheep farms, but my real aim was to inspect the earthwork fortifications made by the chattel who fought against the rulers in that great continent.”

“That is impressive, Captain,” Kagi said, “and I don’t doubt your word or study. But our aim has always been to steal slaves and trouble the waters so the country will see the folly of the infernal institution.”

“Pebbles in the ocean, Lieutenant. We ain’t stealing Negroes no more. We hiving ’em to fight.”

“If we’re gonna attack the federal government, why not take Fort Laramie in Kansas?” Kagi said. “We can control the fight in Kansas. We got friends there.”

The Old Man raised his hand. “Our presence here on the prarie is a feint, Lieutenant. It’s meant to throw our enemy off our trail. The fight is not out west. Kansas is the tail end of the beast. If you were to kill a lion, would you chop off his tail? Virginia is the queen of the slave states. We will strike at the queen bee in order to kill the hive.”

Well, they had caught their breath now and warm words was passed. Doubts sprung up. One by one, the men chirped out their disagreement. Even Kagi, the calmest feller among ’em and the Captain’s most solid man, disagreed. “It’s an impossible task,” he said.

“Lieutenant Kagi, you disappoint me,” the Old Man said. “I has thought this matter through carefully. For years, I have studied the successful opposition of the Spanish chieftains when Spain was a Roman province. With ten thousand men, divided into small companies, acting simultaneously yet separately, they withstood the whole consolidated power of the Roman Empire for years! I have studied the successful warfare of the Circassian chief Schamyl against the Russians. I have lingered over the accounts of the wars of Toussaint-Louverture on the Haitian islands in the 1790s. You think I have not considered all these things? Land! Land, men! Land is fortification! In the mountains, a small group of men, trained as soldiers, in a series of delays, ambushes, escapes, and surprises, can hold off an enemy for years. They can hold off thousands. It is has been done. Many times.”

Well, that didn’t flatten them fellers out. The warm words become hard words and rose to chirping and near shouts. No matter what he said, they weren’t listening. Several announced they was leaving, and one, Richardson, a colored who just joined a few weeks previous—bellowing and trumpeting ’bout how he was itching to fight slavery—suddenly remembered he had cows to milk at a nearby farm where he was working. He hopped a horse, spurred that thing to a high trot, and was gone.

The Old Man watched him go.

“Anyone who wants to can leave with him,” he said.

There was no takers, but still, they jawed at him some more for the better part of three hours. The Old Man listened to them all, standing at the doorway of his cabin with his hands in his pockets, the dirty canvas cover of the doorway flapping behind him in the breeze, giving his words extra punch as it slapped and knocked against the door while he spoke against their fears. He had practiced this in his mind for many years, he said, and for each worry they come up with, he had a response.