Read Online God'll Cut You Down by John Safran - Free Book Online Page A

chatting, all cheery. Then Earnest spotted a bottle on the shelf behind the man. The policeman took the bottle down so Earnest could take a closer look. It was a black finger floating in formaldehyde.
    “The way he expressed it,” Earnest says, “was it was the finger of a Negro.”
    “A finger of a
what
?” I say, instinctively looking at my own fingers on the wheel. “A Negro? So he was sort of, like, threatening?”
    “He was just sounding friendly. ‘Hey, look at this finger of this dead Negro that I have. What do you think about that? Ha-ha!’”
    “But he would have gotten it off someone already dead. It’s not like he would have gotten it off a live person?”
    Earnest seems annoyed I’m not keeping up.
    “What I’m saying is that the finger had come from some black man who had been lynched. The policeman was probably from the group that lynched the man and made sure that he got his souvenir.”
    “Christ,” I gasp.
    Back then Earnest also worked at a convenience store. The owner was a man named Tom. He had an arm he couldn’t use. It had been crushed and was just hanging there. Tom was high up in the White Citizens’ Council, a white supremacist group.
    “I remember seeing the white woman there, the wife of Tom. She’s sitting on the backseat of the car. I was just looking at her and she was looking at me. I’m walking toward her, toward her car.”
    In a dark homage to Emmett Till’s whistle at the white woman at the grocery store, Earnest stopped at her window, spat on the ground, and walked off.
    “I quit working for white people in the tenth grade. No more! I’d been exploited and insulted too much.”
    Young Earnest began reading about the Civil War. And a certainbattle began changing the way he thought about being black and being a Mississippian.
The Battle of Milliken’s Bend
    Milliken’s Bend is in Louisiana, opposite Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Mississippi River cuts between the two. In the middle of the Civil War, over a thousand black men guarded supply depots along Milliken’s Bend. They were ex-slaves who had pulled on the Union uniform to fight the Confederates who had owned them.
    Meanwhile, in Vicksburg, white Union soldiers were shooting and starving the Confederates. So the Confederates in Louisiana planned to capture Milliken’s Bend. They could then send supplies and men across the river to break the siege.
    One night, thousands of Confederates crept toward Milliken’s Bend. There were twice as many Confederates creeping as there were ex-slaves waiting. The ex-slaves were ill equipped and untrained, but those Confederates had them manacled not long before, so there was a certain frisson added to the air.
    When the Confederates charged the Union line, the ex-slaves shot their muskets and held them back. The Confederates regrouped and charged again, this time more successfully.
    But the ex-slaves didn’t surrender.
    In 1863, guns took a long time to reload. Even if you were losing, your opponents could only kill so many of you as they closed in. Most battles were won when one side lost its nerve and surrendered or ran away. Something unusual happened at Milliken’s Bend.
    When the Confederates came close enough, the ex-slaves launched into hand-to-hand combat, slicing with bayonets and bashing with musket butts. The Confederates bludgeoned and bayoneted back. A wreck of men, black and white, piled up on the terrain.
    The Civil War street fight ran on for ten hours. Eventually, twoUnion gunboats cut up the Mississippi, paused behind the ex-slaves, and fired. The Confederates fled, and the ex-slaves chased after them. One captured his former master. It was over. Milliken’s Bend remained in Union hands. So, black soldiers won one of the most important battles in the Civil War, Earnest tells me. The Battle of Milliken’s Bend helped win the Siege of Vicksburg, and
that
battle won the entire war! But people just don’t know their history. Or they spread lies about it.