Robert Smalls, the Planter and the Sentry

The Sentry

There are dark secrets a man carries. I suppose we all got to carry secrets to keep going, just to go on living. But they eat at you. They come up in the night when you're trying to drift off. They come to you in the broad day when something somebody says, some situation that pops up, shines a light into that secret nobody else knows is there. Then you can't hardly think of nothing else but the secret, that shame, and you drift away from the conversation or the business you was in, and you can't get your head back around to it.

It wasn't even the conversation, really. It was just the look on that man's face, when Sully handed him the bill for the work we done, after six months of him a-adding this and that to the plans, and having us tear this out and redo that, and having us see the way his wife was a-henpecking him, and him not being man enough to stand up to it.

And then Sully handed him that bill, and he puffed his fat neck up like a rich man'll do when he's been caught out. And I knowed right then we wouldn't get paid. He got all red in the face and started getting the “I'm so damn much better than you trash” look in his eyes. I could almost guess what he was going to say next, but by that time, he had, without knowing it, shined a light right down into that shame and secret in my heart, and I wasn't even there in Walhalla no more. I was down in Charleston, on that waterfront, the morning after that thief stole the steamship thirty years ago.

I remember them officers when they walked out on that wharf in the early dawn light, and they looked at that empty opening on the wharf. The short, skinny one, the one that was the captain, seen the ship was gone. He looked like he'd been kicked in the head by a mule. He started turning red in the face and puffing up, and he started looking around for the one he was going to shift the blame to, and there I was.

I warn't nothing much more than a boy, walking that wharf in my uniform, which was still sharp and spiffy in them days of the war, with my rifle over my shoulder. I was too young and too green, I guess, to put the pieces together and calculate what had happened. I done seen the ship making steam. I done walked past it four times on my rounds in the early morning, as they was stoking the boiler and making steam. I could see the glow rising from her stacks. The coal smoke stank and burned my eyes as the breeze blowed it down along the wharf. I could see the niggers scuttling around on deck.

And I swear. I swear, I seen that captain standing in the wheelhouse twicet, leaning out the window, signaling them deckhands. He was wearing his uniform coat and a broad straw hat. I looked right at him and didn't see the truth. The truth that everyone knew by the end of that day, and don't a decent man in South Carolina want to admit to.

It was that nigger boat thief acting like the captain.

I seen it all happen. I walked past that ship four times before they got ready to cast off. My rounds was to walk all the way down to the point of the Battery and look out at the harbor and walk back down to Vanderhorst's wharf and then walk back. Down at Vanderhorst's wharf was the guardhouse. That dumbass boy lieutenant was sitting inside playing poker with four other officers, and every now and then, I guess when he won a hand and wanted to puff himself up a bit, he'd come outside when I got down there and take my report. I don't remember. I really don't remember, truth be told, if I ever told him about that ship making steam.

Then the deckhands cast the lines off the bollocks and was pulling them back on board. They got underway, and the captain (or the one I thought was the captain) gave the whistle signal. I was not a hundred yards away and seen all this in the darkness. I was coming back from the point of the battery. I seen the guardhouse door open in the distance, and that lieutenant step out and look down the wharf. And I seen him look for a while out into the darkness.

I heard the ship's wheels churning the water, and the steam blowing out from the pistons. Kaaachoof! Then a splashing. Kaaachooof!

They say the nigger learned all the secret codes, is how he got out. I don't know. They didn't never tell me no codes. But the lieutenant, I seen him looking down the street and along those wharfs, and he warn't no more interested in what was going on than he had been in my reports all night, so I done always assumed the stories was right, and the whistle signal the thief give was the right one.

And I done took my lead from that lieutenant, when he ducked back into the guardhouse to get back to his poker game, with no more interest than if he had checked the weather outside. So, since I walked on down to where the Planter used to be tied up by that time, I stood with my rifle on my shoulder, in my spanking grey corporal's uniform, and watched as Robert Smalls and a band of runaways steamed away from the wharf in a stolen Confederate ship. That steamer was long and big as any six or seven houses. I watched it back slowly out from the wharf, and turn into the wind once it got clear out into the open water, and turn and head back up the Cooper River, which, as we learned later, was where they went to pick up their wenches and the little pickaninnies that went with them.

It's a shame a man can't hardly live with. To be a traitor almost. Or a coward. To know what a fool and a failure he was, when the chips was down, and his country was depending on him.

Of course, that was what that captain, the real captain of the Planter, was feeling when he was standing on that wharf in the early morning light, and his ship was gone. And that's when he turned and caught sight of me, and the memory of his look, that panicked look from the man who would be a laughingstock for the rest of his life, that look of a fool and coward looking at another fool and coward, dug up the secret one more time that morning in Walhalla thirty years later.

I couldn't even hear the cussing that man gave Sully that morning. I just watched Sully take it, red-faced and near murderous, the way I took that disgraced captain's cussing that morning thirty years ago on the wharf in Charleston.

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