FORT PILLOW

Somebody in front of him said, “Reckon we'll surprise the damnyankees when we hit 'em?”

“Jesus Christ, we better,” Jenkins said. “Nobody'd reckon we could

come so far so fast. Wouldn't believe it myself if I wasn't doin' it.”

“Hope that Shaw fella knows where he's goin',” the other trooper said. Jenkins had no idea who he was. He couldn't see the man at all, and made out his horse only as a vague blur. Splashes and drips and hoofbeats did a good job of disguising the other man's voice – and, no doubt, Jenkins's, too.

Not knowing who he was didn't mean disagreeing with him, not when he spoke such plain good sense. “If he doesn't, we're up the creek,” Jenkins said. In this part of western Tennessee, that might be literally true.

The Hatchie River bottoms, people called the country between Brownsville and Fort Pillow. Mississippi had some swamps and sloughs and marshes that seemed to go on forever. This country struck Jack Jenkins as being as bad as any farther south, and all the worse at black, black midnight.

“One thing,” said the talkative trooper up ahead of Jenkins. “Don't reckon we got to worry about any niggers gettin' ahead of us and warnin' the garrison.”

“I should hope not,” Jenkins agreed. “Nobody could go faster'n we are. Hell, I don't see how we're goin' as quick as we are.” As if to underscore that, a wet branch smacked him in the face.

As he spluttered, the other soldier said, “Not likely, no, but you never can tell what some crazy coon might try an' do. But I don't figure any nigger'd go around after dark in these parts. He'd be sure a hant'd get him.”

Another branch tried to yank the hat off Jenkins's head. Only a quick, desperate grab saved it. He jammed it town tighter; with luck, the next branch wouldn't be so lucky. “Weather like this, country like this, god damn if I don't halfway believe in hants myself,” he said.

Plenty of whites raised by Negro mammies and wet nurses soaked

up slaves' superstitions almost as readily as pickaninnies did. The only people who'd raised Jack Jenkins and his brothers and sisters were his father and mother and his mother's bachelor brother. They were hardscrabble farmers too poor to do anything but dream of owning slaves of their own.

That didn't mean Jenkins didn't know about hants. He heard about them from his white friends, and from the colored boys who fished in the creeks side by side with him. With kids, the lines of separation between whites and blacks weren't so sharp as they were once people grew up. If a Negro boy was more likely to wear ragged clothes and go without shoes than his white counterpart, the white might be inclined to jealousy, not to thinking he was only a slave and not worth wasting much money on.

So maybe things did haunt these woods and swamps. Jenkins couldn't swear they didn't. But he knew Bedford Forrest rode somewhere toward the rear of this column. Jenkins didn't and wouldn't believe any hant ever hatched could shift old Bedford.

Drain Lake River. Spring Lake. Big Slough. The names came out of the night as if hants wheezed them forth. Somebody said the rivers and creeks were full of bigmouthed black bass. Jack Jenkins's mouth filled with spit when he heard that. No time for fishing now, though. No time for anything but riding. Soft, marshy ground close by the countless streams. Woods wherever the land climbed a little higher.

Down by the Hatchie and the smaller streams that flowed into it, cypresses stood tall. Some of them actually grew in the water, their knees sticking up to help support them. Cypresses made Jenkins shiver. In the language of flowers, they stood for mourning and death. Maybe that was as foolish as letting fear of hants keep you inside after dark – but maybe it wasn't, too.

On higher ground, oaks and beeches supplanted the cypresses. Vines hung down from them; Jenkins got more than one wet slap in the chops. Brush and ferns crowded close to the trails. Sometimes it was hard to make out what was trail and what was undergrowth.

Without W.J. Shaw, the Confederate troopers might well have lost themselves in the swamps. Even with him, there were times during that seemingly endless night when Jenkins thought they were lost. In darkness absolute, with no moon or stars overhead, how could you tell where west lay? Shaw seemed able to, or at least was confident he could.

Had such a lean, muscular column – fifteen hundred mounted men – ever penetrated this country by night before? By the way the animals reacted, Jack Jenkins would have bet against it. Wild hogs tIed deep into the woods, grunting and squealing. The thought of roast pork made Jenkins's stomach growl. He'd eaten a couple of bites of Brunswick stew and a weevily hardtack biscuit when they rode through Brownsville, but that was quite a while ago now.