Then he was inside the house, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. That was a mad mêlée. The whites still on their feet swung muskets and shotguns club-fashion—they had no time to reload. One of them smashed a Negro’s head with a blow so hard, it broke the stock off his weapon. Another Negro bayoneted him. He squealed like a stuck pig. “Here’s another one, you fucker!” the black roared. “And another one! And another one!” A man often needed a lot of sticking before he died. That defender got every bit he needed, and more besides.
Another white man was grappling with a copperskin when Frederick bayoneted him just above the left kidney. He threw his arms out wide and went rigid. It was the pose Frederick imagined a man struck by lightning might take. He didn’t hold it long—the copperskin brained him with a hatchet. Something warm and wet splashed Frederick’s face. He wiped it away with his sleeve, which showed both red and grayish pink.
His stomach didn’t turn over, as it surely would have a couple of weeks before. He was getting hardened to the horrors of fighting.
Quite suddenly, it was over. A couple of whites still writhed on the ground, but the men of the Liberating Army finished them off, one with a bayonet in the throat, the other with a bullet through the head.
“Let’s go on upstairs,” Lorenzo said as he took the chance to ram a fresh charge of powder and a bullet down the barrel of his rifle musket. “Better make sure nobody’s hiding up there.”
Frederick nodded. “Do it.” A party of copperskins and Negroes hurried up the curving stairway. He didn’t think they would find anyone. Whatever else you could say about the white men who’d tried to defend Eb St. Clair’s plantation, they didn’t lack for courage.
But he hadn’t thought things through. The screams that rang out there were torn from women’s throats. And those screams went on and on. A few minutes later, Andrew came downstairs doing up his trousers, a sated smirk on his face. “Never reckoned I’d get even with the master
that
way,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” Frederick said uncomfortably, looking up from the place where the defenders
had
managed to smother the fire from the lantern before it took hold. He hadn’t wanted this kind of thing to happen, but he wasn’t surprised it had, even if it wasn’t his idea of sport. Whether all the men had revenge on their minds or nothing more than a brief good time, he couldn’t have said. What he did say was, “We’ve got to knock them over the head when we’re through with them. Can’t have them telling tales on us. That’d only make things worse if the white folks catch some of our people.”
Andrew nodded. Then he looked around at the ghastly aftermath of the fight. “Best thing we can do with this whole place is burn it down. Then nobody outside will know for sure what all happened here.”
Frederick remembered that he’d said he wanted to see the St. Clairs’ big house burn. He had his reasons for what he was saying now. That didn’t make them bad reasons, though. And Frederick found himself nodding back. “Yes, we’d better do that. And we’d better make sure we’re ready to fight as soon as we do. The white folks’ll figure out enough of what happened, anyways, and they’ll send a real army against us the next time, not just a little gang like this here one.”
“Always the swamp if things go wrong,” Andrew said.
“I know,” Frederick answered through the screams that still rang out from upstairs. “It’s there, but how much good will it do us?”
Andrew took pride in setting the big house alight. Frederick made sure the Liberating Army salvaged all the weapons and bullets and cartridges in the place before firing it. He had more people to arm: Ebenezer St. Clair’s slaves were eager to join his force. “We got a lot to pay back, we do,” a copperskin said. The rest of the bondsmen and -women nodded agreement.
Even as the big house’s pyre rose into the air, Frederick wondered from which direction the white folks would try to hit back. If it was an army, he guessed it would come openly. Like the small contingent that had tried to save the St. Clair plantation, the whites wouldn’t really believe their property could fight. They wouldn’t sneak through the woods to get close.
“One thing we need,” Lorenzo said. “We need to put stuff in front of us to stop bullets and keep the whites from spotting us.”
He could have put it more elegantly, which didn’t make him wrong. Some kind of barricade would be a lifesaver and a spirit lifter . . . if the Liberating Army put it in the right place. In the wrong place, it would be worse than useless.
Now if only I were sure where the right place is
, Frederick thought. He had his guesses, but that was all they were.
Then he realized he could make those guesses more likely to come true. He talked for a while with one of the young women who’d seemed most zealous about getting her own back against everything and everyone that had conspired to make her a slave. Her name was Jane.
“What happens to me afterwards?” she asked when he got done—also the first question he would have thought of.
“Chance you take,” he answered honestly. “Maybe you can find some way to slip off, or maybe they’ll reckon you were a poor dumb nigger who didn’t know any better. But maybe not, too. I can’t make you go tell ’em lies. All I can do is ask.”
“I’ll do it,” Jane said at once. “Don’t think I’ll ever get a better chance to give ’em one in the teeth.”
The story she would tell the local whites was calculated to make them move even faster than they would have anyway. That meant the Liberating Army had to move fast, too. Like Lorenzo, Frederick wanted that barricade so badly he could taste it. The Negroes and copperskins he set to work building it promptly started complaining. “I’m workin’ harder here than I did in the cotton fields,” one man said.
“Everything you did there went straight into your master’s pocket,” Frederick told him. “Everything you’re doin’ here sets the white folks up for a kick in the balls. Which one you like better?”
“Huh,” the fellow said, and went back to work.
Slaves from all over the countryside kept coming into the Liberating Army’s encampment. “You got the white folks jumpin’ like fleas on a hot griddle,” one of them said. “They’re bellowin’ like bulls. Everybody’s speechifyin’, goin’ on about what a mess they’ll make out o’ you.”
“Well, they can try,” Frederick answered. It was what he wanted to hear, which didn’t mean he trusted it. If he could send lies out to the white folks, nothing stopped them from sending lies in to him.
When he explained that to Helen, her eyes widened. “It’s a wonder you trust a living soul,” she said.
“I trust you. I trust Lorenzo. I’d trust Davey, if he didn’t stop that shotgun charge with his chest,” he said. “Past that . . . Past that, I make sure I cut the cards. Twice. Wouldn’t you?”
He had no reason to doubt that the local militia had been called up. The only reason the militia existed was to crush slave uprisings. If the whites
didn’t
call it up, they were fools.
And then word came that they were moving on the St. Clairs’ plantation. Frederick imagined a straggling file of men singing marching songs left over from the war where their grandfathers—and his own—beat the English. Maybe it wasn’t really like that, but that was how he saw it.
His own men—and the occasional woman who carried a rifle musket or one of the old-style guns the Liberating Army had taken from the plantations they’d overrun—started to grumble about staying close to the barricade. “You didn’t want to build it, and now you don’t want to use it?” he said. “Where’s the sense in that?”
And then, early the next morning, a big cloud of dust rising from the road that went by the St. Clairs’ place warned that the white militiamen were getting close. After that, Frederick had no more trouble getting his fighters to take their places. He wondered if any of them would leg it for the friendly swamp. He didn’t catch anybody doing that, anyhow.
He could see the militiamen pretty soon. They were coming the way he wanted them to. Maybe they would have anyhow, or maybe they’d listened to brave Jane. Some of them wore gray uniforms like Atlantean regular soldiers. Others had on ordinary farm and town clothes. They showed no better order than his own followers—worse, if anything. But he gulped when he saw them manhandling along a small fieldpiece. He didn’t have anything that could answer a cannon.
“Let them start shooting first,” he told his troops. “They think they can scare us away.” He hoped the whites were wrong. If they were as overconfident as he thought, they would get too close before they opened up. That would make them easier targets. “And . . .” He told off a handful of his best marksmen. “Shoot the fellows serving that cannon. The faster you kill ’em, the less harm it’ll do.”
“Right,” one of them said tightly. They were nervous. Well, so was he, but he had to do his best not to show it.
A white man with a flag of truce stepped out in front of the militia’s ragged battle line. “You slaves better give up now!” he bawled. “You do, and we’ll let some of you live—the ones who ain’t leaders or anything. You fight, though, and there’ll be no quarter for you.”
The Negroes and copperskins crouched behind their barricade looked toward Frederick. If answering was up to him, he’d make things as plain as he could. “Go fuck yourself!” he shouted back.
“All right, nigger,” the militiamen’s herald said in a voice like iron. “If that’s how you want it, that’s how it’ll be.” He turned on his heel and walked back to his men. He evidently trusted his foes not to violate a flag of truce, anyhow. Frederick wondered why. The white man pointed toward the barricade. “Fire!” he roared.
His men delivered a rippling volley. The cannon thundered. The men tending it plainly had little expertise. The ball flew high over the barricade and smashed into the St. Clairs’ barn on the fly. A few musket balls struck people who’d been peering over the barricade at the militiamen. Howls of pain rose into the humid air. The Liberating Army had no surgeons. They would have to learn battlefield medicine on the fly or do without.
The militiamen stood there in the open while they reloaded. Were they begging to get killed? If they were, Frederick was happy to oblige them. “Fire!” he yelled, and drew a bead on the enemy commander, whose coat was splendid with gold epaulets and buttons.
He missed. The man stayed on his feet, waving and shouting orders. What those orders were soon grew plain: he wanted his troops to charge the slaves’ barricade. Did he really believe the sight of white men advancing on them—most of the militiamen didn’t even have bayonets—would make the copperskins and Negroes crouching there break and run? If he did, he was too stupid to live, even if Frederick hadn’t knocked him down at the first try.
Boom!
The cannon fired again. This time, the ball flew just over the heads of the Liberating Army. The men at the piece could be deadly dangerous if they got the chance to figure out what they were doing. But Frederick’s sharpshooters were making sure they wouldn’t last long enough. In the whites’ wrath and inexperience, they’d pushed the gun too far forward—it sat within easy rifle-musket range. One after another, the artillerymen went down. Wounded or dead hardly mattered here. As long as they couldn’t aim and fire the field gun, one would do as well as the other.
Frederick looked for the enemy commander again. He didn’t see him—somebody else must have shot him. The whites advancing on the barricade leaned forward, as if into a heavy rainstorm. But rain wasn’t hitting them; bullets were. Most of their foes had longarms better than the ones they carried themselves. The copperskins and Negroes weren’t great shots, but they didn’t have to be to do what they were doing.
A white man in a gray uniform tunic and wool homespun pants stopped to shake his fist at the rough wall from which fire and death spat. “You shitasses don’t fight fair!” he cried, as if the Liberating Army’s fighters were supposed to. No one stood up to answer him, which might have proved his point. He gathered himself and kept coming.
He got shot a few paces closer to the barricade. Maybe
that
proved his point. Frederick didn’t care one way or the other. Fighting fair wasn’t his biggest worry. Fighting to win was.
A couple of militiamen who seemed to know what they were up to remained at the cannon. The men who tried to help them plainly had no idea what they were supposed to do. The experienced artillerists shouted and gestured, which made them more obvious targets for Frederick’s marksmen. They went down one after the other. The cannon kept firing after that, but wildly.
Some of the whites actually reached the barricade. It did them less good than they’d thought it would. The Negroes and copperskins on the other side didn’t run away. They went right on shooting. At close quarters, they used the bayonet. As Frederick had seen inside Ebenezer St. Clair’s house, it gave them a big reach advantage on men trying to fight with clubbed muskets.
“Godalmightydamn!” That was Lorenzo’s joyful shout. “We really can lick these sorry sons of bitches!” Some wonder was mixed with the delight. Had he doubted it before? Frederick sure had, though it would have taken hot pincers to tear the admission from him.
The whites—those of them still on their feet—took longer to reach the same conclusion. When they did, it seemed to suck the spirit out of them. Fear swallowed fury. They turned and ran back the way they had come. Some of them threw away their muskets and shotguns to run faster.
None of them, Frederick noted, tried to surrender. That was just as well. He had no idea how he would have tended to prisoners of war. His men were as happy to shoot their enemies in the back as they had been to shoot them in the chest. Happier: now the whites weren’t shooting back.
A few militiamen escaped. It took a lot of bullets to hit a man, especially in the heat of battle, when fighters weren’t aiming so carefully as they might have. But only a few got away. “Lord Jesus!” Frederick said in wondering tones. “We just shot down most of the white men for miles around.”