Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [82]
Some of the other black men on the parapet had begun to call insults to the Confederate soldiers below—not a good idea, Henri thought. There had been black Federals at Paducah too, two weeks before, and he’d seen the knuckles of Forrest’s men go white on the grips of their weapons then. All over West Tennessee there was a dumb rage among white people at the very idea of black Federal troops—astonishment even, as if their own mules and oxen had somehow thought to take up arms against them. A few months earlier General Cleburne had suggested the South muster slaves into its dwindling armies, but no one wanted to hear that, even now.
Not all of the blacks on the parapet were in uniform. Indeed, the loudest among them were not. Runaways had been migrating to this place ever since the Federals had first captured it. There had never been troops enough to man the three-mile-long outer earthworks, but blacks who wandered in from wherever had made themselves at home within this defense. Some carried on trade from up and downriver, dealing whiskey and other contraband. And they were called “contraband” themselves, by whites in the region. The black runaways were not alone there either. The cabins McCulloch had just occupied had over several months filled up with a queer mix of ex-slaves and white renegades of one kind or another: deserters from either army alongside men who’d profited from the unsettled times to turn bandit. Fort Pillow had the name of a vipers’ nest, and no doubt some of the tales of rape and robbery were true.
Things had turned ugly in West Tennessee since their last gallop through here in 1863. From the war’s beginning the land had been combed over too many times for supplies and recruits. And from one farm to the next it was split between Confederate and Union sympathizers. The confusion opened all kinds of chances to settle scores that had nothing to do with the war. Not three weeks earlier, they’d come across the carcass of their own Lieutenant Dobbs, who’d gone home to Henderson County to raise a few men he knew there, with his face skinned out and his nose cut off and other mutilations too dreadful for Henri’s mind to dwell upon. They had to go through his pockets to guess who he was. In Jackson a committee had come to Forrest to claim that Fort Pillow was nothing but a hideout for marauders who did such ugly things as that, and what did he mean to do about it? Fort Pillow had become such a plague on the region that Forrest had trouble keeping his West Tennessee men riding with him, for all wanted to stay home to defend their own families.
Forrest was riding out toward them now, forking his third horse of that day, pulling where the truce flag whipped from the gun barrel at the same time a messenger arrived from the fort: Lieutenant Alexander Hunter, commanding a detachment of the Second U.S. Colored Light Artillery, and with him Captain Young of the Twenty-fourth Missouri Cavalry. Young raised his hat to Forrest, for he had seen him in the field before today. Lieutenant Hunter showed the note that Anderson had written.
“Can you assure me that my Negro soldiers will be treated as prisoners of war?” he said.
“That’s jest what it says thar on that paper don’t it?” Forrest said shortly. “They’ll be prisoners of war if you surrender right this red-hot minute. Dawdle, and they’re subject to be treated like dead folks.”
Lieutenant Hunter looked a young man, his face the color of cold biscuit dough. There was a crack in the corner of his mouth, and a dark furrow in between his eyebrows. “Your Confederate Congress has put it out that Negro soldiers will be sent back to slavery if captured. Their