I later heard tell that his real name was Haywood Shepherd. The white folks at Harpers Ferry gived him a military funeral when the whole thing was done. They buried him like a hero, for he was one of their niggers. He died with thirty-five hundred dollars in the bank. They never did figure out how he got that much money, being a baggage handler, and what he planned to use it for. But I knowed.
If the Old Man hadn’t changed dates on him, making it so the Rail Man gived his password to the wrong person, he’d’a lived another day to spend all that money he saved on freeing his kin. But he brung his words to the wrong man, and the wrong movement.
It was an honest mistake, made in the heat of that moment. And I don’t beat myself over the head with it. Fact is, it weren’t me who blowed out the Rail Man’s lantern and dropped it that night. It was the Rail Man himself that done it. Had he calmed down and waited another second he would’a seen me and waved that thing up and down. But it was hard buying that whole bit deep inside, truth be to tell it, for a lot was wasted.
I told Oliver standing there, “It’s my fault.”
“There’ll be time enough to count lost chickens later,” he said. “We got to move.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Understand later, Onion. We got to roll!”
But I couldn’t move, for a sight over Oliver’s shoulder froze me in my tracks. I was standing before him, looking down the track behind him, and what I seen made my two little walnuts, packed inside my dress, shrivel up in panic.
In the dim light of the tavern that lit the track, dozens of coloreds, maybe sixty or seventy, poured out of two baggage cars. It was Monday morning in the wee hours, and some was still dressed in Sunday church clothes, for I reckon they’d gone to church the day before. Men in white shirts, and women in dresses. Men, women, children, some in their Sunday best, and others with no shoes, some holding sticks and pikes and even an old rifle or two. They jumped out of them baggage cars like they was on fire, the whole herd of ’em, turning and running off on foot, making tracks back toward Baltimore and Washington, D.C., as fast as their feet could go. They was waiting on the Rail Man to wave that lamp. And when he didn’t, they took the tall timber and went home. It didn’t take much for a colored to think he’d been tricked by anyone, white or colored, in them days.
Oliver turned and looked back there just as the last of them leaped out the baggage car and hit the tracks running, then turned back to me, puzzled, and said, “What’s going on?”
I watched the last of them disappear, dodging in and out of the trees, jumping into the thickets, a few sprinting down the tracks, and said, “We is doomed.”
I slunk behind Oliver and Taylor as they left the bridge in a hurry with the engineer and coal slinger as prisoners. They marched the two them past the Gault House on Shenandoah Street and straight into the gates of the armory inside the ferry gate, which was unguarded. On the way there, Oliver explained that the cat was out the bag. Cook and Tidd had already cut the town’s telegraph wires, his older brother Watson, another one of the Captain’s sons, and one of the Thompson boys was guarding the Shenandoah Bridge. The rest had overcome the two watchmen, stolen into the armory buildings, and seized them. Two fellers took up in the arsenal, where the guns was guarded. The train was held up. Kagi and John Copeland, the colored soldier, had the rifle works—that’s where the guns was made. The rest of the Old Man’s army of seventeen men was scattered ’bout in various buildings across the grounds.
“There weren’t but two guards,” Oliver said. “We took them by surprise. We sprung the trap perfect.”
We brung the prisoners into the Engine Works Building, the entrance guarded by two of the Old Man’s soldiers, and when we walked in, the Captain was busy giving orders. When he turned and seen me walk in, I thought he’d be disappointed and angry that I disobeyed his orders. But he was used to crazy conglomerations and things going cockeyed. Instead of being angry, the expression on his face was one of joy. “I knowed it. The Lord of Hosts foresees our victory!” he declared. “Our war is won, for our good omen the Onion has returned! As the book of Isaiah says, ‘Woe to the wicked. And say ye to the righteous that it shall be well with him!’”
The men around him cheered and chuckled, except, I noted, O. P. Anderson and the Emperor. They was the only two colored in the room. They looked just plain fertilized, put out, right unnerved.
