The Long Tattoo: The Shame & Glory Saga, #3

By Jerrold Mundis

A brutal saga of the Civil War—and a regiment of fugitive slaves that thirsted for revenge.

Scarred, branded, unchained, they were the First Southern Volunteers, a Union regiment of fugitive slaves suddenly armed and free to avenge a lifetime of pain and degradation: some with a savagery that knew no bounds and offered no mercy.

Labe’s clowning had concealed the dark passion within him, even from himself. But the war changed all that—he had the gun now. Here was power. Here was something that would make him whole. Here was godliness.

Vulture, a towering giant, was unwaveringly loyal to his men. They trusted him. Powerful, deeply intelligent, hungry to learn, he was willing to go to any length to defend them. And did.

Geoffrey Williams had been born a freeman in Massachusetts, was privileged, educated. He had long ached in his heart for his enslaved brothers and volunteered early for the First Southern. Now he was lost and confused amid their boisterous immorality, shattered by the killing, and feared for his mind and soul.

Here, too, are the women who loved them:

Rona, young, beautiful, fierce, who returned again and again to the South to guide fugitives and runaways up North to freedom. She needed no one, wanted no one, she thought—till she saw Vulture again.

Dido’s husband had been killed by a chaser’s hounds. She knew Labe’s heart, the hurt beneath his fury; he sensed the tenderness and longing in hers. They comforted one another, though she dreaded what might become of him.

And the white officers who led them: opportunists, idealists, misfits, cynics, and hardened professionals. Men like the earnest and naïve Colonel Mathew Spearing, the contemptuous Captain Thomas Ebery, and the unyielding, stoic Emory Woodson who was blind to the color of his troops and cared only that they fight well and survive.

Here is the Civil War at its most brutal and violent, from vicious early skirmishes to the liberation of slaves from plantations, from deepening camaraderie to a blood-soaked debacle, from the madness of the Southern irregulars of Bryerson’s Butchers to the final, climactic storming of the massive Confederate Fortress Blackstone.

This shattering novel—the third in his epic, sweeping Shame and Glory Saga—could only have been written by Jerrold Mundis, the bestselling author of Slave and Slave Ship.

~~

Praise for the Shame & Glory novels:

“Superior . . . but not for the squeamish. The action is quick, gory and rings with verisimilitude.”
—Publishers Weekly

“The dramatic actions snap along with sea battles, slave rebellions, and moral conflicts, all played out by thoroughly believable characters and building to a shattering climax.”
—Library Journal

“A hard, violent antidote to the Southern Romance . . . an historical anger seldom presented before.”
—Book World

OVER 4 MILLION JERROLD MUNDIS PRINT-BOOKS SOLD!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wolf River Press
• Release date: Feb 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781507021897

Book preview

Cover, The Long Tattoo

Books by Jerrold Mundis

Novels

(in The Shame & Glory Saga)

Slave Ship

Slave

The Long Tattoo

Hellbottom

Running Dogs

(Others)

Gerhardt’s Children

The Retreat

Best Offer

The Dogs

Nonfiction

(For Writers)

Break Writer’s Block Now!

(On Personal Money)

How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously

Earn What You Deserve: How to Stop Underearning and Start Thriving

Making Peace with Money

How to Create Savings (a Mini-Book)

How to Have More Money (a Mini-Book)

(General)

Teaching Kids to Act for Film and Television (with Marnie Cooper)

(Anthology)

The Dog Book

More to come, including:

The Bite

Murder, My Love

Prelude to Civil War

& others

THE LONG TATTOO

Jerrold Mundis

Copyright © 1968, 2012 by Jerrold Mundis

(originally published under the pseudonym Eric Corder)

All rights reserved. No material in this book may be copied or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without the express written consent of the author, except for brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

Publication History

Print edition: Pocket Books, New York, 1968

eBook edition: Wolf River Press, New York, 2012

Cover image from African American Soldier in the Civil War, by Mark Lardas © Osprey Publishing (part of Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd)

Cover & eBook Design: QA Productions

* * *

For David Harry Watrous Smith

delightful adversary

good friend

fine human being

Table of Contents

Book 1

Book 2

Book 3

A Note From the Author

Excerpt: Hellbottom

About the Author

Sign up for Jerrold Mundis’s Mailing List

The Long Tattoo

The Shame & Glory Saga

Jerrold Mundis

* * *

REAPERS

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones

Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones

In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,

And start their silent swinging, one by one.

Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,

And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,

His belly close to ground. I see the blade,

Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.

—Jean Toomer

Book 1

THEY CAME IN THE early evening, when the sky was fired by the setting sun and the smell of cooking fires, bacon and hot mush still hung heavily about the slave quarters and the murmur of conversation and quick, sharp laughter rose and fell like water sloshing in a bucket. There were two of them, one on each side of Mr. Crawford. They were dressed in dark formal suits, and they spoke familiarly with Crawford, who was sucking on his pipe and smiling and nodding, seeming quite in agreement with them.

Labe was sitting cross-legged on the ground with a knot of children. His skin was a deep brown, his features narrow and well defined, his eyes bright. There were numerous tiny scars on his hands and face—the result of working hot metal over an anvil with a sledge. Labe was delighting the children by balancing a spinning ball on the tip of his index finger. He saw the white men coming, and he sprang to his feet.

Oh, they’s fine! he said. They looks jus’ fine!

His grandmother, a dark wrinkled woman resting on a stool nearby, with the hem of her shift hoisted well above her thighs to cool herself against the heat, eyed the white men with sudden fear. She looked from them to her grandson, then back to them again. She puckered her mouth, plunged her tongue nervously into the empty tooth sockets in the front of her jaw.

Evenin’, Masta, Labe called.

Crawford and the two strange white men stopped. Evenin’, Labe, Crawford said. Come here a moment. Labe did. Crawford asked him how his hands were.

Good, Masta, good. Labe had hoped for this cue. It was a game they sometimes played with guests. Do one of you gennemens have a silvuh dolla?

The two strangers raised their eyebrows and looked questioningly at Crawford. Go ahead, Crawford said. He just wants to borrow it a spell.

The taller of the two dug into his pocket, produced a coin and handed it to Labe. Labe opened his hand to receive it. The dollar dropped into his palm—then disappeared. Labe looked at the white man as if he were still waiting.

Well? said the white man.

Suh?

You dropped my dollar.

Labe looked at him bewilderedly.

I gave you my dollar, nigger, and you dropped it.

Labe studied his open and empty palm, then turned it over and examined the back of his hand, as if he thought the coin might be stuck there.

In the dirt, the white man said with a touch of exasperation.

Labe stepped back and searched the area with his eyes. I doan see nothin’, Masta.

The three white men looked. "I know I gave it to him," the tall one insisted.

Labe snapped his head up. Whut that sound?

What sound? I don’t hear anything. What in hell is going on here?

A great grin split Labe’s face. It the dolla! It bounce off mah hand an’ go high up in the sky, an’ now it comin’ whistlin’ down. He made a leap, shot his arm out, then landed lightly on the balls of his feet and displayed the dollar he had snatched from the air.

Crawford smiled. The shorter of his two guests chuckled. The man who had given Labe the dollar first looked puzzled, then irritated.

Labe’s hand twitched. The coin vanished. Wowee! It a slipp’ry devil. He pantomimed a stalking hunt, lunging with empty hands, triumphantly showing the recaptured coin, only to have it leap from his grasp and disappear a moment later.

Crawford and the short man were laughing now, but the third man was annoyed. Labe directed the bulk of his performance to him.

When the slave plucked the coin from the top of the white man’s boot and announced it had been trying to hide there, the man aimed a kick at him. Goddam idiocy!

Labe dodged the blow with a quick step that seemed part of his routine. He was guffawing hugely, caught up in the game. He pranced around the man, picking the coin from various parts of his waistcoat, and was only partially aware that Crawford was saying something to him. He was breathing quickly, and his heart was thudding. The white man was glaring at him and working his mouth; a pair of throbbing veins had become prominent in the man’s temples.

I said stop it! Crawford snapped. That’s enough.

Labe had to exercise a strong effort of will to comply. When he stood still, he gulped loudly. Uh-oh, I done swallow that ol’ dolla. But doan worry none, I gets it back. He opened his mouth wide, jammed his finger in, then produced the coin and handed it back to its owner. Here, suh.

The white man grimaced with distaste. You got your damn black spittle all over it, nigger.

Go wash it off, Labe, Crawford commanded.

Labe trotted to a water trough, immersed the coin, dried it on his pants, then returned. He was in fine spirits. The three white men were talking, so he stood a little off to the side and waited for them to finish.

No, he’s not really, Crawford said. Actually, he’s a trifle slow-witted. Not stupid, mind you, but slow. He’s a good smith and a competent general laborer.

It appeared to me he knew precisely what he was doing, said the man whose dollar Labe had used.

Crawford shook his head. He’s childlike sometimes, that’s all.

Labe saw Tina emerging from the large shanty in which Mama, an old crone of uncountable years, cared for the plantation’s sucklers. Tina’s frock was rolled down to her waist. She was carrying Sperry, who was working hungrily at her breast. Labe waved. Tina waved back. Labe had sired Sperry. It had been an accident, but, thankfully, Crawford had not been angry with Labe—which was only fair, Labe thought upon further consideration. After all, he never went to the wenching shed without Crawford or the overseer having told him it was all right. Usually the birth of a baby made Crawford happy, but for some reason he had never wanted Labe to father any. Although Labe never understood how or why the decisions were made, he was allowed to stay only with certain wenches at certain times. Maybe it was because he laughed so much and made the others laugh. Maybe if he did less of that, then Mr. Crawford would want him to get sucklers, too. But it really didn’t make any difference; Labe had never been able to figure out what was so good about babies—except, of course, that their arrival made the whites happy.

Mr. Crawford called him. Labe went over to the trio and returned the dollar to Crawford’s guest, who did not seem at all pleased to get his money back.

Labe, said Crawford, these gentlemen are agents of the Confederate States of America. They’re—

Howdy, Mastas.

Quiet until I’m finished, boy.

Yassum. Yas, suh.

They’re taking a few niggers from each of the plantations around here to help fight the Yankees.

To be sojers, suh? Labe asked incredulously.

To help our boys in uniform, to do work so they can fight.

Oh. Labe was silent a moment. You mean like when Henry gone wif young Masta Crawford in the spring?

In a manner of speaking, yes.

Labe nodded several times. Thass good, Masta, thass good. Masta George come home real quick then.

Crawford looked away and was silent several moments.

Your son, suh? asked the shorter agent.

Yes. He was wounded at the Second Manassas.

You have my sympathy.

Crawford straightened his posture. It was slight. He’s recovering well, he writes. I . . . I do miss him, though.

I understand. My own boy is with Jackson in Maryland.

Crawford nodded, then, brusquely, he said to Labe, You’ll be leaving in the morning, at daybreak.

"Me, suh? But, Masta, the cotton still ain’t in. The whole souf field not picked yet." It was all Labe could think to say, but he was sure it would be sufficient. No hand was taken out of the field until the last white puff had been pulled from its stalk and thrust into a gunnysack.

In the morning, Crawford said. Rafe, Malachai and four others will be going with you.

The white men walked away. Labe stared after them, head tilted to one side, mouth open. After a few moments he walked over to his grandmother and sat down at her side. She was swaying her body slowly back and forth, and she was looking out into the distance.

Several minutes of silence passed, then Labe said, I goan away. They takin’ me away. His voice threatened tears.

The old woman grinned. Away? Ha! They never give no lazy nigger like you no treat.

Labe frowned, tried to assimilate this new thought. It true. They take a passel of us tomorry. Goan carry us off t’ work wif the army.

Lord, the tales ’at rolls off your tongue! They wouldn’t take an ol’ mangy good-fo-nothin’ like you. Only big, strong special good bucks.

Well . . . thass me. They takin’ me.

You hush those lies. She rapped him smartly on the head with her knuckles. Onliest things you good fo is workin’ ovuh fire an’ iron, pickin’ cotton in the sun.

Labe laughed. I’se a better buck ’n you thinks. You jus’ wait. You see.

The old woman pushed him. Go on now. Git ovuh where them boys is rasslin’. Few knocks on yo haid unscramble yo brain.

Labe jumped up, face happy, and jogged across the dirt avenue.

The old woman watched her grandson. It was not long before his clowning shifted the center of attention from the wrestlers to him. Loud horse-whinny laughs applauded him. Two others joined in the silly dance he began.

She wondered how the whites would kill him, if he would suffer much. She hoped not. She hoped, too, that he would kill many of them before he was cut down. He deserved at least that much.

DAWN WAS BREAKING WHEN the coffle arrived at the Crawford Plantation. It was ludicrous to see fifteen white overseers shepherding an equal number of blacks, but then this was only their third stop, and by the time they were finished the group would number more than two hundred. The leave-taking was brief, simple, and not a little awkward. Most of the Negroes were already in the field, but Crawford had permitted a few—close friends and wives—to remain in the slave quarters until those who were going had left.

Each of the blacks conscripted from Crawford’s plantation had five copper pennies wrapped in a handkerchief and stuffed into the shoes he wore dangling around his neck—a gift from his master. One of the women began to cry. Crawford told her to be quiet, her husband would come back soon. Labe stood off to the side with his grandmother. The old woman was in fine fettle, and she insisted that he was one of the luckiest niggers alive and that never, never in his life had he done anything so good as to justify his selection for this adventure. Labe felt sick to his stomach, but did not let it show, knowing that the old woman would not approve.

Two of the overseers had ridden in to the Great House where Crawford met them and led them around back to the slave quarters. He obtained receipts for the seven slaves, then said a quick general good-bye. There were final claps on the backs, embraces, urgings to whup them Yankees good.

The old woman seized Labe by the shoulders; her clawed fingers dug painfully into his flesh. You keep laughin’, hear? You laugh good an’ hard. When you come back, you goan tickle us all daid wif yo story-tales.

Labe bobbed his head and tried to grin back at her. He was only partially successful.

All right, all right, cried one of the overseers. Move now, jump there. It a long way to South Carolina. He wheeled his mount around. The slaves fell in behind him, were followed by the second overseer, and they walked away from the Great House.

They merged with the coffle. Most of the white men were baggy-eyed and sleepy-looking; a few were dozing in their saddles. Although some of the slaves were marked with brands and others had large wales from past whippings, they were all healthy. There were no amputees, no cripples, no thin and coughing men among them. Some were frightened, some were excited, some didn’t seem to care at all: one way or another it was all the same.

The overseer riding point touched his heels to his horse, and the group shuffled forward. Labe took a few steps, then he shouted:

"Ten-shun!"

The slaves nearest him recoiled. Overseers snapped their eyes to him. Two reached for the wide leather straps hanging from their saddles and unlimbered them. Labe felt giddy. The cry had come unbidden from his throat when the quasi-martial formation had brought to his mind a picture of the units of musket-bearing men in gray uniforms he’d seen drilling.

One! he hollered. Hoo! Free! Fo! He lifted himself lightly on the balls of his feet and threw his body into a loose and prancing march step. One-hoo-free-fo! One-hoo-free-fo! One-hoo . . . FREE-FO!

He flipped his head from side to side as he called the cadence. A few of the blacks swung happily into step with him. The two overseers with straps in hand waited a minute without striking to see what would develop. When blows were not forthcoming from the whites, more and more slaves took up Labe’s call, and within a dozen paces they were all laughing and marching. The whites relaxed and settled down to an easy job: laughing niggers don’t cause trouble.

The old woman watched her grandson cavorting at the head of the column as it moved down the road. Her arms were folded tightly across her belly and her shoulders were hunched forward, as if she were feeling a sharp pain. Tears blurred her vision, spilled over her eyelids and ran slickly down her lined cheeks. God had never answered a single prayer for her, and so she had stopped praying more years ago than she could remember. Now she overcame her distaste long enough to beg Him to save her grandson. But a moment later she felt even emptier than she had before; God couldn’t, or if he could, then he wouldn’t lift his hand on Labe’s behalf; he was a White God; the old woman was ashamed that in the weakness of the moment she had dirtied herself with Him.

CRAWFORD HAD BOUGHT THE old woman and Labe and a dozen others in a lot from a Mississippian whose rice plantation had been ruined by three successive seasons of a tenacious and lethal blight. The old woman’s memory failed her now on occasion and this annoyed her. But she had little difficulty summoning up images of what her life had been like at Gull’s Roost, the rice plantation. These had been burned into her mind as if with an iron, and they would never, never leave her—no matter how much she wished them to. The teeth that remained in her mouth were pitted and yellowed, but stubborn; those that were gone had been knocked out by the butt of her old master’s fowling gun. Vulture, Labe’s freakishly huge half-brother who had been sold young, had gone to his new master with only half his left ear, the cartilaginous cup having been cut off with a tin-shears.

Labe, though—he was the one for whom she feared. A fat little baby, slow to walk, slow to speak and easily confused. And given to bursts of anger as he grew. Not vicious, not cruel, but quick to expose his teeth in a tight downward pull of his mouth and quick to lash out with his chubby fists. That had worried the old woman, and she spent time with him, tickling him, holding him, playing with him, making funny faces, teaching him how to make them back.

They snaked his mother—stripped her naked and bound her wrists to the iron ring at the top of the post, then turned her back and buttocks into red wet meat with a long thick bullwhip—when the top of his head came no higher than his grandmother’s waist. He had watched with dropped jaw and swollen eyes, beginning to tremble with the first cracking stroke and, by the time the bloodied whip had been thrown aside, shaking like a dried leaf caught in a fall gale. At a signal from the heavy-breathing master of Gull’s Roost, a slave stepped forward and splashed a bucket of brine over the mutilated back of Labe’s mother—more girl than woman. She had been unconscious for the last ten strokes. Now her head snapped up, her body jerked and writhed and a high, seemingly endless shriek ripped from her throat. At this sound the boy, Labe, seized a curved sharp sickle from the ground and hurled himself against the blacks who had tried to block the sight of the snaking from him. He clawed to get at the master of Gull’s Roost, and he screamed.

"I kill ’im! I kill ’im!"

Because of his mother’s shriek, his cry went unnoticed by any save those quite close to him. A tall buck wrenched the sickle from his hand and flung it aside. The old woman clapped one hand over the boy’s mouth, then dragged him, while he squirmed and kicked, away from the whipping area and into her shanty, where she flung him across the single, narrow room and shot home the bolt on the door.

His mother died two days later, burned out by a fever that no amount of quinine could stop. The boy rushed from the shack the instant her breath stopped, and no one could find him. Half an hour later a frightened black came and got the old woman and took her to the stables. There, tied and gagged under a flour sack, was Labe. The buck had found the boy in an incoherent rage slashing the upholstery and the canopies and the hand-tooled leather harness gear of the two surreys so highly prized by the master of Gull’s Roost. He subdued the boy and went for his grandmother. The old woman told the buck to get out, to forget everything.

A short time after that a sudden fire raged through part of the stables. The slaves of Gull’s Roost extinguished it quickly, but not, to the master’s great sorrow before the two surreys had been consumed. That was in the second year of the blight.

Funny faces, funny dances, endless pranks, day after day of buffoonery. That is what she had taught him, that is what she had pressed upon him, and slowly her fear began to recede. Being purchased by Crawford had been a boon. He was not a harsh master, and her task had been much the easier.

The coffle was moving out of sight now. The old woman wiped the backs of her wrinkled hands over her eyes and sighed. In her life she had seen an untold number of slaves younger than she take sick and die or simply wear out and die. Why, she wondered, did she have to be shackled to life?

BY MIDAFTERNOON THE SLAVES, who were being taken north to work on fortifications against an anticipated Federal attack, numbered in the seventies. Many of them removed their sweat-soaked shirts and tied bandanas around their foreheads. The pace alternated between a brisk walk and a trot. The whites grew irritable under the relentless glaring sun, and they swung their broad leather straps hard against the backs and legs of slaves at the slightest provocation—and at times without any provocation. The coffle stopped now and then at creeks and small streams where the slaves went down eagerly on their hands and knees and drank, then splashed their shoulders while the white men dismounted and filled their canteens. They sang for a while, waving at blacks who were working in fields and canebrakes, and they pressed far to the side of the road when gigs and surreys and riders passed, bobbing their heads and grinning and bidding the whites good afternoon. But as the day lengthened, they were more and more silent.

Labe turned his head often, hoping for a glimpse of his home even though he knew it was already far behind him. He felt as if the nameless thing that bound him to the Crawford Plantation were being stretched thinner and thinner, and he very much dreaded the moment it would snap. He pushed the feeling sharply away, refusing it, as a child might his first encounter with death.

He told a few jokes and did three or four animal imitations, but the slaves nearest him did not laugh. Neither did he. They camped in a meadow for the night outside a small town. Two wagons with double mule teams driven by black teamsters rumbled out of the town to meet them. Their dinner was in the wagons, barrels of lukewarm mush which was scooped out in capacious bowls. The slaves ate with their fingers, four and five to a bowl. It was dark by the time they finished their meal, and they stretched out with content upon the soft, thick grass. It was a bright night. The moon was nearly full, and the stars were brilliant. A few harmonicas sounded; small knots of Negroes began to sing.

Labe lay on his back with his hands cupped under his head and wondered what Igor and Spivy and Horly and the others were doing this moment at the Crawford Plantation. He got to his hands and knees, crawled for a while picking up and discarding stones until he found one that was small, roughly circular and fairly thin. Then, whistling, he stood up, walked to a spot nearby where a dozen or so blacks were seated in a circle talking. He paused a few feet beyond their perimeter, then took four running steps, went up into the air and dove over the back of the man directly in front of him. He tucked his chin to his chest, struck the ground with the flat of his hands and his shoulders, did a quick backward somersault and gained his feet. Then he dropped into a crouch, bared his teeth and roared.

The blacks into whose midst he’d catapulted cried out in fear and scrambled to get away. Labe laughed.

I the Debil! he announced. I come to carry all yo black no-good souls down t’ mah roastin’ fires. I goan spit you all on pitchforks an’ cook you in yo own juices!

Nigger, said a petulant voice, whut you do that fo? How come you give us the scaries?

That mah job, Labe answered soberly. I the Debil.

The scattered blacks were moving back to their original positions. Someone pelted Labe with a handful of dirt and pebbles. Go on wif that talk! You moonstruck.

It true, Labe insisted. Git in close here an’ I show you some o’ mah magic.

The slaves pressed in, but not without a little reluctance.

See this here stone? Labe kept his hand close to their faces so all that he did was plainly visible. He did not want