James McBride: The Good Lord Bird

It growed quiet now.

Up to that point there was so much going on in the engine house, there weren’t no time to think of what it all meant. But now that darkness fell and it was quiet outside the armory and inside it too, there was time to think of consequences. There was ’bout twenty-five colored in that room. Of that number I reckon at least nine, ten, maybe more, was gonna hang surely and knowed it: Phil, the Coachman, three Negro women, and four Negro men, all of them was enthusiastic helping the Old Man’s army, loading weapons, chinking out holes, organizing ammunition. The white hostages in that room would squeal on them surely. Only God knows what their names was, but their masters knowed ’em. They was in trouble, for they got right busy fighting for their freedom once they figured what the game was. They was doomed. Weren’t no bargaining left for them. Of the rest, I’d say maybe half of that number, five or six, helped but was less enthusiastic ’bout fighting. They done it but had to be ordered to do it. They knowed their masters was watching and was never enthusiastic. And then the last of them, that last five, they wouldn’t hang, for they sucked up to their masters to the limit. They didn’t do nothing but what they was forced to do. A couple even fell asleep during the fighting.

Now that the thing was swinging the other way, them last five was setting pretty. But the ones in the middle, them that was on the fence and had half a chance to live, they swung back toward their masters something terrible. They sucked up to ’em full stride, angling to get back to their good graces. One of ’em, a feller named Otis, said, “Marse, this is a bad dream.” His marse ignored him. Didn’t say a word to him. I can’t blame that Negro for sucking up the way he done. He knowed he was dead up a hog’s ass if his master put a bad word out on him, and the master weren’t playing his hold card. Not yet. They wasn’t out the woods yet.

The rest of the Negroes that was doomed, they watched the Emperor. He come to be kind of the leader to them, for they’d seen his courage through the night, and their eyes followed him after the Old Man spoke to him. He stood at the window, staring out, thinking. It was pitch-black in there, you couldn’t see a thing ’cept what little light the moon let into the portholes, for the Old Man wouldn’t let anyone light a lantern. The Emperor just stared out, then he paced a little, then stared out some more. Coachman, Phil, and the other Negroes who was sure to hang followed him with their eyes. They all followed him, for they believed in his courage.

After a little while the Emperor called them over to his corner, and they bunched around him. I came, too, for I knowed whatever punishment awaited them was mine’s, too. You could feel their despair as they gathered around him close and listened, for he spoke in a whisper.

“Just before light, the Old Man’s gonna start a shoot-up out front and let the colored out the back window. If you want out, you can climb out the back window when the shooting starts, make for the river, and be gone.”

“What ’bout my wife?” the Coachman asked. “She’s still in bondage at the colonel’s house.”

“I can’t tell you what to do ’bout that,” the Emperor said. “But if you is caught, make up a lie. Say you was a hostage. You gonna swing for sure otherwise.”

He was silent, letting this sink in.

“The Old Man’s giving us an out,” he said. “Take it or not. He and those that’s left got some tow balls dipped in oil which he’ll fire. He’ll throw them out into the yard to make a lot of smoke, then shoot behind it. You can do your best to get gone out the back window and over the back wall when that happens. Whoever here wants to try it can do it.”

“Is you gonna try it?” the Coachman asked.

The Emperor didn’t answer. “Y’all oughta sleep some,” he said.

They all reckoned they would, and retired to sleep for a couple of hours, for no one had slept in more than forty hours hence. That raid started on a Sunday. It was now Monday night going to Tuesday.

Most of the room slept, but I couldn’t, for I knowed what was coming, too. The Emperor didn’t sleep, neither. He stood by the window, staring out, listening to Watson groaning his death moans. Of all the coloreds in the Old Man’s army, the Emperor weren’t my favorite. I didn’t know him that well, but he weren’t short on courage. I went over to him.

“You gonna make a try for freedom, Emperor?”

“I am free,” he said.

“You mean you a free Negro?”

He smiled in the dark light. I could see his white teeth, but he didn’t say more.

“I’m wondering,” I said, “if there’s some way I can’t swing.”

He looked at me and smirked. I could see his face by the light of the moon through the porthole window. He was a dark man, chocolate skinned, with wide lips, curly hair, and a smooth face. I could see his silhouette. His head stood still in the window, and the breeze that blowed off his face seemed cool and refreshing. It was like the wind seemed to part around his face. He leaned over to me and said softly, “You don’t get it, do ya?”

“I get it.”

“Then why you asking questions to answers you already know? They gonna hang every colored in here. Hell, if you even looked at them white hostages funny you’ll hang—and you done more than that, surely.”

“They don’t know me,” I said.

“They know you sure as God’s standing over the world. They know you just as well as they know me. You ought to take it standing up.”

I swallowed hard. I had to do it. Couldn’t stand it, but I had to do it.

“What if one of us is different from what they know?” I whispered.

“Ain’t no difference between us when it come to the white man.”

“Yes, there is,” I said. I grabbed his hand and stuck it right on my privates in the dark. Just to let him touch my secrets. I felt him take in his breath, then he snatched his hand back.

“They don’t know me,” I said.

There was a long pause. Then the Emperor chuckled. “Good God. That ain’t hardly a conflageration,” he said.

“A what?” For the Emperor couldn’t read, and he come up with words that didn’t make no sense.

“A conflageration. A parade. You ain’t got enough fruit there to squeeze,” he snorted. “You’d have to work all night just to find them peanuts,” and he chortled in the dark some more. He just couldn’t stop chuckling.

That weren’t funny to me. But I’d already thunk it through. I needed some boy clothes. There was but two in the engine house whose clothes I could take, and no one would notice. A colored slave who got shot and died that previous afternoon, and Watson, the Old Man’s boy, who was not quite dead but almost there. The slave was too big for me, plus he was hit by a ball in the chest and his clothes was soiled with his blood. But they was nice clothes—he was obviously an inside slave—and they would have to do. Blood or not.

“I wonder if you do me a favor,” I said. “If I could just get a pair of pantaloons and shirt off that feller there,” I whispered, nodding at the slave, whose silhouette could be seen in the moonlight. “Maybe with your help, I could slip them on and move out with the rest of the colored. When the Old Man lets us out.”

The Emperor thought ’bout it a long moment.

“Don’t you wanna die like a man?”

“That’s just it,” I said. “I’m but fourteen. How can I die like a man if I ain’t lived like one yet? I ain’t had nature’s way with a girl once. I ain’t yet kissed a girl. I think a feller ought to have the chance to be himself at least one time in this world, ’fore he moves on to the next. If not just to praise His name as his own self, rather than as somebody else. For I done found the Lord.”