Robert Smalls and the Conspirator

Well, and now they say Robert Smalls a tief, and they got the Honable Congressman on trial for it. The Charleston paper say he never even stole the Planter, that he hid in the hole while another man steer the boat. Which of course I know ain't so. I stood beside Robert in the wheelhouse while we passed Fort Sumter. I watched him blow the code on the whistle. He stuck the captain's straw hat out the pilot house door and waved to the sentries on Fort Sumter in the moonlight

Were Robert really calm as he looked, while I was standing behind him in the dark sweating? It were a cool, spring night, and I were running sweat like cutting rice in the noonday sun.

Robert stood outside that wheelhouse door where they coulda shot him down with a rifle. A jet black man with curly hair, standing in Captain Relyea's uniform wearing that big straw hat. It were still darkish, but you think one of them would notice it were a black man. You think somebody woulda figure out we done stole that boat and sent some sort of signal. It done been a hour since we left the wharf, and we took all that time to steam by a merchant ship half a mile down the waterfront to pick up the women and chilren.

I were shaking like a boy in a rice field when the overseer raise the whip. A little boy, not hardly big enough to do a day's work in a field. I remember the hot piss running down my legs into the stinking, gray mud of the rice field, and the way I shook, and the way I froze there when he swung that whip.

Across the dark water, I heard the voice: “Pass the Planter!”

And then, close after, maybe when I had stopped shaking, another voice, one of those upcountry twangs: “Blow them Yankees to hell!”

I thought he meant to kill us.

But Robert just give a wave, and shout, “Aye, Aye!” He step back into the wheelhouse, took the wheel, and steered us on.

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