James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

“Well, let him out.”

“When you let the Negro people go, we’ll let him out.”

“Quit fooling, ya sawface idiot. Let him out.”

The Old Man stuck his Sharps rifle out the window. “I’ll thank you to take your leave,” he said, “and tell your superiors that Old Osawatomie John Brown’s here at the federal armory. With hostages. And I aims to free the Negro people from their enslavement.”

Suddenly Williams, the armory guard who was setting along the wall bench, got up and stuck his head out a window near him and hollered, “Fergus, he ain’t fooling. They got a hundred armed niggers in here, and they got me prisoner!”

I don’t know but that them fellers saw one of their own yelping out the window, or if it was what he said ’bout them armed coloreds, or if it was the Old Man’s rifle that done it, but they scattered in quick time.

In ten minutes, fifteen fellers was standing out there at a safe distance, mostly drunks from the Gault House saloon across the street, haggling and arguing among themselves, for only two of ’em had weapons, and in every building they’d run to inside the armory gates to fetch a gun from, they found a rifle pointed out the window at them with someone tellin’ them to get the hell off and away. One of them broke off from the rest gathered out front, tiptoed close enough to the front door of the engine house to be heard, and shouted, “Quit fooling and let Williams the hell out, whoever you is, or we’ll fetch the deputy.”

“Fetch him,” the Old Man said.

“We’ll fetch him, all right. And if you so much as touch our man, you cracker-eatin’ snit, we’ll bust a hole in you big enough to drive a mule through.”

Stevens growled, “I had enough of this.” He stuck his carbine through the window and busted off a charge over their heads. “We has come to free the Negro people,” he shouted. “Now spread the word. And if you don’t come back with some food, we’ll kill the prisoners.”

The Old Man frowned at Stevens. “Why’d you say that?”

Stevens shrugged. “I’m hungry,” he said.

We watched the men scramble out the gate, busting off in every direction, running up the hill into the village and the heights of jumbling, mashed-up houses that set beyond it, hollering as they went.

Well, it started slow and seemed to stay slow. Morning come, and outside the armory walls by the dawn’s light, you could see the town waking up, and despite all that yelling from the night before, not a soul among them seemed to know what to do. People walked back and forth up and down the street to work like it weren’t nothing, but at the train station, there was some growing activity. Several gathered there, I reckon, wondering where the engineer and coal man was, for the B&O locomotive engine sat there dead in the water, the engine quit, dried up, for it was plumb out of water and the engineer was gone from it, being that he and the coal man was our prisoners. Next to the Gault House, there was general confusion, and at the Wager House next to that—that was a saloon and hotel just like the Gault—there was some milling around as well. Several of those ’bout was passengers who got off the train and wandered up to the station, wondering what had happened. Several passengers held their luggage, motioning and gesturing and so forth, and I reckon they was tellin’ different stories, and I heard tell that several had murmured they seen a bunch of Negroes running off out the baggage car. But there was a festive atmosphere to the whole thing, to be honest. Folks standing ’round, gossiping. In fact, several workmen walked past the crowd, straight into the armory gate that morning to go to work, thinking nothing of it, and walked right into the barrels of the Captain’s men, who said, “We has come to free the Negro. And you is our prisoner.”

Several didn’t believe it, but they was hustled into the engine house sure enough, and by ten a.m. we had damn near fifty people in there, milling around. They weren’t disbelieving so much like the others from the night before, for the Captain put the Emperor to watch them, and the Emperor was dreadful serious to look at. He was a dark-skinned, proud-looking Negro with a thick chest and wore a dead-serious expression, sporting that Sharps rifle. He was all business.

By eleven a.m. the Old Man begun making one mistake after another. I say that now, looking back. But at the time it didn’t seem so bad. He was delaying, see, waiting for the Negro. Many a fool has done that, waiting for the Negro to do something, including the Negro himself. And that’s gone on a hundred years. But the Old Man didn’t have a hundred years. He had but a few hours, and it cost him.

He stared out the window at the train and the angry passengers spilling off it, more and more of ’em, huffing and puffing, mad ’bout their delay, not knowing what was going on. He turned to Taylor and said, “I sees no reason to hold up all them people from doing their business and their travels, for they has paid for those train tickets. Turn loose the engineer and the coal man.”

Taylor done as he was told, cut the train engineer and coal man loose, following behind them to the train so as to give word to Oliver, who was holding the train at the bridge, to let the train roll on.

In doing so, in letting that train go, the Old Man released ’bout two hundred hostages.

The engineer and coal man didn’t stop at the gate, not with Taylor following behind them, for he hustled them ’round the other side of the trestle bridge out the back entrance of the armory, direct to the steam engine. They got the steam up in thirty minutes, the passengers clattered on board, and they had that train rolling to Wheeling, Virginia, full out in record time.

“They’ll stop at the first town and telegraph the news out,” Stevens said.

“I see no reason to hold up the U.S. Mail,” the Old Man said. “Besides, we wants the world to know what we’re doing here.”

Well, the world did know by noon, for what begun as a festive event that morning with fellers taking shots of rotgut and chatting amongst themselves with gossip, had now wheedled down to disbelief, to irritation to finally cursing and gathering near the armory walls. We could hear them hollering rumors and guesses to one another ’bout the cause of the Old Man’s holding up the engine house. One man said a crazed group of robbers was trying to bust open the armory’s vault. Another hollered that a doctor killed his wife and was hiding there. Another ventured that a nigger girl lost her mind and killed her master and run into the engine house for protection. Another said the B&O train was sabotaged by a baggage handler over a love affair. Everything but what the Old Man had declared. The notion that a group of white fellers had taken over the country’s biggest armory to help free the colored race was just too much for ’em to handle, I reckon.

Finally, they sent an emissary to talk to the Old Man, an important-looking feller in a linen suit and bowler hat, likely a politician of sorts. He marched a few feet into the gate, shouted out at the Old Man to cut out the fooling and stop being a sot, and was met by a rifle shot over his head. That drummer whistled out the gate so fast his hat pulled off his head, and he was back across the road before that thing hit the ground.

Finally around one o’clock, a very old man, dressed like a common worker, broke from the crowd of mumblers and ruffled bystanders standing at the gate at a safe distance across the road in front of the Gault House, shuffled slowly across Shenandoah Street, walked dead into the armory, strode to the front of the engine house door, and knocked. The Old Man peeked at him through the window, his Sharps at the ready. It was full daylight now, and nobody had slept. The Old Man’s face was lined and tight.