Bull Run (2 page)

Though my skin is quite light, I'm a Negro, I'm proud of it, and I wept with joy along with my brethren at President Lincoln's call for men. How we yearned to strike a blow in the battle! Though the state of Ohio refused us the vote and discouraged us from settling, we rose to her aid just the same. No less than Cincinnati's whites, we organized meetings, heard ringing speeches, sang “Hail Columbia” and “John Brown's Body.” All recognized that Cincinnati was vulnerable to capture. We therefore proposed to ready a company of Home Guards, its numbers, training, and equipment to be provided by the black citizens of the city and its services offered to her defense. At last the nation's eyes would behold the Negro's energy and courage!

We set up two recruiting stations. They were filled at once with scores of volunteers. Cheered by this magnificent response, we planned a second meeting at a schoolhouse. Arriving, I found the building all but ringed by a crowd of clamoring whites. Many had clubs. Several were drunk. “It's a white man's war!” one addressed me point-blank. “You'll do no damn parading about with guns!” I've tried to forget the coarser things said. I inserted the key in the door's padlock, but a police captain roughly drew it out. He announced that our meeting was canceled and our entire enterprise with it, on the grounds of inviting mob violence. “Go back to your miserable homes!” he ordered us, rather than the whites. “And stay there!”

I vowed that I would do otherwise.

Lupine and honeysuckle bloomed as before, the oaks put out leaves, whippoorwills called. Outside it might have been any spring. But within the walls of the house it was the spring Virginia left the Union, a season separate from all before it. My three daughters came, with their families, and didn't their needles swoop like swallows, stitching up uniforms for their husbands. All the talk was of war, and all the singing. Each night we set candles in every window, proclaiming our joy at joining the Confederacy. “Nonilluminators” were suspect.

We remarked the train whistles coming from Manassas Junction while we sewed. The day arrived when we drove our men there to send them off to war. Each daughter held up her husband's sword and consecrated it with a kiss. Then they took their tearful farewells, and our brave knights boarded the train for Richmond, each followed by his servant. Banners flapped. A band played. Women cut buttons off their clothes and handed them through the windows as keepsakes. The church society gave the men Bibles, each inscribed with “Fight the good fight.” Girls whose beaus hadn't joined shamed them by giving out flowers to soldiers. Finally the whistle blew. The cars moved, drawing taut and then snapping dozens of parting conversations. “Stain your sword to the hilt!” shouted the waving woman beside me. Susannah, my eldest, scurried after the train. She'd supplied her husband with razor, mirror, hairbrush, nail file, calfskin slippers, and a fine suit of clothes to be saved for his triumphant entry into Washington. “Do
try
not to soil the coat!” she called out.

Never was there such a send-off as that given the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, the first to leave for Washington. Thousands saw the trains off from Boston, the cheering loud enough to stir the saints. Great geysers were shot into the air by fire trucks when the cars passed through Worcester and Springfield. In New York, the regiment marched down thronged Broadway to an elegant breakfast at the Astor House. Their gunstocks were oiled, their bayonets bright. I was traveling with them as sketch artist for the
New York Illustrated News
and was similarly fitted out for the conflict, armed with paper and three dozen pencils. I was to send back drawings that would let readers stand where I stood and view the war as if there, lacking naught but the singing of bullets past their ears. I'd no notion I'd hear that sound so soon.

We reached Philadelphia that night and Baltimore the following noon. We'd been warned that Baltimore was no Boston. Taking horsecars from one station to another, we were startled to see men and women wearing Confederate ribbons and rosettes. In place of cheers, we were greeted with insults. Plug-ugly toughs, spoiling for a fight, were drawn our way like moths to a light. The crowd about us thickened, grew bolder, then brazenly halted the horses. We disembarked and attempted to march. Vulgarities and vegetables were hurled. Rocks followed. Then deadly paving blocks. A Cambridge lad to my left was struck and sank upon one knee. A spectator tried to steal his musket. Then a shot rang out and a soldier just beside me fell to the ground. I'm a Boston man myself, and I snatched up the martyr's gun, hot for revenge. The company was ordered to fire on the mob. I joined them. There were screams, and further shots. We quick-stepped through a hailstorm of stones, finally reached the Camden Street station, then had to wait for a locomotive. Three valiant volunteers were dead. Many others were injured. I burned to put upon paper the faces of the taunting traitors and the fallen heroes, took up a pencil, tried to draw—but couldn't. My hands were shaking, with fury.

I was eleven years old and desperate to kill a Yankee before the supply ran out. It seemed that all Georgia had joined except me. I knew I'd never pass for eighteen. You can't very well lie about your height. Then I heard that musicians were needed to play for the soldiers, any age at all. I hotfooted it fifteen miles to the courthouse and took my place in line. The recruiter scowled when I reached the front. “You're a knee baby yet,” he said. “Go on home.” I told him I meant to join the band. “And what would your instrument be?” he asked. My thinking hadn't traveled that far. “The fife,” I spoke out. Which was a monstrous lie. He smiled at me and I felt limp with relief. Then he stood up and ambled out the door. Across from the courthouse a band had begun playing. We all heard the music stop of a sudden. A few minutes later the recruiter returned. He held out a fife. “Give us ‘Dixie,'” he said. I felt hot all over. Everyone waited. The fife seemed to burn and writhe in my hand like the Devil's own tail. I heard Grandpap saying, as he had heaps of times, “A lie is a weed in the Lord's flower garden.” Then that left my mind and I recollected him saying “Faith sows miracles.” I found what seemed to be the mouth hole. “‘Dixie,'” I announced. I closed my eyes. Then I commenced to blow and wag my fingers, singing out the song strong in my head. I believed it was coming from the fife as well, until I saw the faces around me. One man had his jacket over his head. The room echoed a considerable time after I'd finished playing. The recruiter's eyes opened slow as a frog's. I was surprised at his expression. “You've got spirit,” he said at last. “And boldness. And pluck enough, I judge, to practice almighty hard,
starting today
.” It was the first miracle I'd ever seen.

The next day four of us marched to a recruiting tent to join the infantry. I happened to be the first in line. The enlisting officer had just asked me to sign when he noticed the hair curling out from my cap, saw for the first time that I was a Negro, and informed me in the most impolite terms that I could not be admitted as a soldier.

We left, despairing of ever fighting the South. Some of the men I knew put their pride in their pockets and joined as ditchdiggers. Some signed on as cooks or teamsters. Some stayed home, to hear once more that Negroes were cowardly, lazy, disloyal. I, however, refused to resign myself to serving with shovel or spoon. I would stand at the front of the fray, not the rear, and would hold a rifle in my hand. That recruiter had shown me the way.

I clipped my hair short that very night. The next day, I bought a bigger cap, one with a chin strap to hold it in place. Then I walked to a different recruiting station. The enlisting officer asked me my name. I foolishly feared he might recognize it. I looked up at a banner that read “One Thousand Able-Bodied Patriots Wanted,” and gave him “Able” in place of “Adams.” His brows furrowed at my fumbling reply. He asked me my age, then whether I'd any physical infirmities. He then asked what manner of service I intended. “Infantry soldier,” I firmly replied. Perhaps I'd spoken too firmly. He studied me. I wondered if my cap had slipped. He said I'd be paid thirteen dollars a month and that the regiment would serve ninety days, time enough to whip the Rebels three times over, he assured me. He put his finger on a line in his roll book. I nearly signed my real name, and clumsily corrected myself. I stared at the letters. I was no longer who I was. The recruiter told me to return the next morning. I left in a daze, glancing at the white men around me, who thought me one of them. The dread of discovery streaked through my veins. I gave my chin strap a tightening tug.