Negroes and the Gun (28 page)

This sort of pop-psychological assessment often appears in the modern gun debate and likely will extend to assessments of the black tradition of arms. So it is useful to appreciate how the tradition of arms flourished among all kinds of different folk operating under different circumstances—how even during the worst of times, Negroes with guns cannot be fixed into any particular “type.” Although we do not always have fully developed pictures of the countless folk who owned, carried, and defended themselves with guns, it is evident that they were a diverse lot.

Ida Wells exalted the Winchester rifle and owned and probably carried a pistol. But she did more talking about guns than actual shooting. Mary Fields, whose late-nineteenth-century exploits in Montana earned her the sobriquet “Stagecoach” Mary, was exactly the opposite. Six feet tall and 200 pounds, Mary Fields worked, joked, drank, fought, cursed, and shot her way into the annals of legend in and around Cascade, Montana.

She was born around 1832, probably in Tennessee. The details of her life in slavery are contested. Her own version was different from the familiar story of victimization. Still tough, vibrant, and feared at age sixty, Mary described it this way. “I learned . . . as a slave to say yes'em, and then do as I damn well pleased.” The specifics are difficult to verify, and Mary may have embellished the story of her early life to match her growing legend.
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There is, however, agreement that she worked at the Ursuline Convent of the Sacred Heart in Toledo, Ohio, and then traveled west with some of the sisters who were taking Christianity to the Indians of Montana. Mary was the most valuable single resource at the mission, contributing skills as a carpenter, gardener, cook, and even healer, using herb and root knowledge gathered during slavery.

Montana was surely no idyll. And intuitions about the petty indignities that a dark black woman would face there at the end of the nineteenth century are confirmed by reports that for most of her time in Montana, Mary Fields was not called “Stagecoach Mary” but “Black Mary,” and she actually signed her name that way.

Mary's black skin was an undeniable fact, but it was not a handicap. One of
the first episodes in the legend of Black Mary Fields was a predictable clash along the color line. In the fall of 1892, the sisters at the mission hired John and George Mosney as laborers. The sisters paid the wages, but the daily assignments came from Mary.

The white men objected to “taking orders from a nigger.” Then George fetched a bullwhip and threatened to show Mary her place. Mary ignored his taunts, walked to her cabin, and returned shouldering a shotgun. George went from taunting to yelling for help. John answered, running up beside him, rifle in hand. Before John could test Mary's resolve, the mission foreman and Mary's growing friend, Joseph Gump, ran in and diffused the scene. He dismissed the Mosney brothers and warned them against tangling with Mary, whose gun skills he appreciated from their many practice sessions out on the prairie.

Two years later, another arrogant man who could not abide taking orders from Black Mary was not so lucky. This time, Joseph Gump was away fetching supplies and had left Mary in charge of a work group. As Mary was handing out tasks, one of the workers objected that “no white man should take orders from a nigger slave.” Mary made a brief attempt at diplomacy, telling a fellow that there were no slaves at the mission. This just provoked him, and he lunged in with a looping punch that sent her to the dirt.

The other men laughed and hooted the way that men will when they see someone get knocked off their feet. And this was the high point for the man who sucker punched Black Mary. She told him to get his gun and meet her behind the barn.

The nuns looked on in disbelief. The workmen took bets. Black Mary gave her tormentor the first move. Then she shot him twice in the chest. Those who bet the odds won money. And both winners and losers spread the legend of Black Mary Fields, who was fast, accurate, and fearless with a gun.
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In many circles, her firearms prowess gained Mary the kind of respect that was rarely accorded to women in the Montana Territory. She bragged at the end of her life that she was the only woman, not counting prostitutes, who could drink in the territory's typically all-male saloons. Of course the people at the mission were another matter, and soon after the shooting, Mary was ordered to leave.

This actually launched her into the more storied phase of her life. Needing some way to support herself, Mary secured a job driving stages for the Wells Fargo company. She closed the job interview with a warning to the young fellow who was openly hostile to hiring a black woman driver. “I'm Mary Fields,” she said—“
Black Mary
, I can outshoot, outride any man trying for this job. You don't want to try me.” It was an unlikely strategy for securing employment, and it is likely that the Wells Fargo agent only hired Mary as a favor to some of the sisters at the mission.

The Wells Fargo job fueled the legend of “Stagecoach Mary,” shotgun at her side, revolver in her belt, wearing buckskins that she tanned herself. There was nothing else like her in the territory. Her legend grew when, one winter on haul from Helena to Cascade, she was attacked by wolves. She fought off the pack with shotgun and revolver fire and delivered her load intact and on time.

Mary engaged life richly. She was generally armed while she drank, joked, gambled, and fought in the saloons of Cascade. But she did not always resort to the gun. She probably endured many insults. And legend says that she answered with fists and head butts, and once with a perfect-sized rock that turned her fist into a hammer. An admiring report in the
Great Falls Montana Examiner
said that Mary had “broken more noses” than anyone in Montana.”
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Although we are always slightly skeptical of western tales of colorful characters (Mary reportedly kept a pet eagle) and prodigious marksmanship, there comes out of the saloons, where Mary drank shots and smoked foul cigars, another seemingly reliable report of her facing down a white cowpoke with her pistol. After some sort of insult led to drawn guns, Mary taught the fellow a lesson with a shot to the earlobe. Only Mary knew for sure whether that was the target.
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Age was no obvious regulator on Mary Fields. In 1901, at age seventy-two, now making a living doing laundry, Mary was passing the afternoon in a local saloon. She looked up from her whiskey to spy a fellow whose payment for laundry services was long overdue. She pursued the deadbeat down the street, spun him around, and knocked him flat on his back. Then, figuring the punch was worth two dollars, she leaned in and told the man to forget about the bill.

Some men were rightly afraid of Mary Fields, and some surely despised the powerful black woman in their midst. But many people in Cascade, Montana, apparently loved her. She was caretaker for many kids around Cascade and was an ardent fan of the local baseball team. When her house burned down in 1912, townsfolk got together and built her a new one. One of the people who knew and admired her at the end of her life was Hollywood legend Gary Cooper, who quipped that Mary Fields was “one of the freest souls to ever draw breath . . . or a .38.”
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So what to make of this black woman who, at the low point of Negro life in America, strapped on a gun and rose to legend, fighting and beating white men in raw contests of violence. It is intriguing that her gunplay never provoked mobbing or backlash. Maybe she was so unusual that she is only some kind of exception that proves some general rule. Perhaps it is some version of the respect paid to those isolated souls who stand up under circumstances where there is no broader political threat. Maybe Mary Fields is like the Lumbee Indians, who routed Catfish Cole's Klan rally in 1958, to the chuckles of the white establishment—no threat to the existing order so no need for the lynch mob.

Fig. 4.9. Mary Fields in Cascade, Montana.

Consider, too, how within our broader matrix, the story of Black Mary fits against Martin Luther King's assessment of individual self-defense. King said that standing up in self-defense might actually gain Negroes some level of respect and admiration for the courage it shows. And that is one way to understand the legend of Black Mary, who stood up alone against angry, violent men and bested them in fair fights. In that sense, it suggests something uplifting about America and signals some truth in the ideal of the American west, where personal courage and character mattered above all else.

All of this is contestable. But at the very least, Mary Fields demonstrates the complexity and diversity of the black experience and adds texture to our understanding of the black tradition of arms. Despite the overhanging threats of the era, black folk did not just wallow in despair, clutching guns. Within diverse constraints, they managed to live their lives. They raised and loved their children, worshiped God, feasted on Sunday; and many of them, on Saturday night, celebrated their pleasures with an intensity that rivaled the privileged classes.

For some Negroes more than others it was possible to coexist peacefully, building friendships and allies at the edges of white society. For the right kind of Negro, under the right circumstances, white folk might even take their part against a white man. Even where that white man ended up dead. Shadrack “Buddie” Shang and Moses Fleetwood Walker were such men.

Moses Fleetwood Walker of the Syracuse Stars can be explained by the appeal
of celebrity. He was a baseball player, a catcher, good enough to play in the early professional leagues. So when he killed a white man in 1891, fighting back against a violent attack, it was not startling when he was acquitted by a jury of white men who admired his prowess on the diamond.
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But how to explain Buddie Shang, fully named Shadrach Meshach Abed-Neo White? Born into slavery in Virginia around 1815, it is unclear how and when he picked up all the pieces of his prodigious appellation or when he began answering to the more easily navigated “Buddie Shang.”

Even before a Shelby County, Ohio, jury exonerated him in the shotgun killing of a white man, Buddie Shang had already completed a remarkable journey. Shang and his people walked free out of Virginia, well ahead of the Emancipation Proclamation, released from bondage in the will of their master, John Randolph. Legal squabbling cost them an extra thirteen years in slavery, as Randolph's heirs contested the will. It occurred to no one that they might deserve compensation for those additional years under the yoke. When the courts finally upheld Randolph's wishes, a bedraggled band of them struck out for Ohio, and the black settlement of Rumley.

Buddie eventually gravitated to nearby Sidney, where he took up residence in the black shantytown of Lacyburg. By the 1880s, he was a fixture in Sidney, operating a shoe-shine stand outside one of the local taverns. Within the boundaries of the time, he was more than tolerated. The tavern owner was generous with daily bonuses of spirits that Buddie carried home in an ever-present metal bucket.

In the fall of 1889, Buddie was traveling along a canal bank with his bucket, fishing pole, and shotgun, when a local delinquent started to harass him. Buddie fired a warning shot that scared him off. But as the shot pattern spread in the distance, some of the pellets hit the house of Lewis “Soapstick” Nichols, one of the few downtrodden whites who lived in Lacyburg.

Nichols stormed from his house, picked up a stack of bricks, and charged. Buddie ducked the first assault, and backed away with a contrite, “I was just foolin'.” Nichols was undeterred and launched another brick that barely missed. Figuring that his luck was about to run out, Buddie Shang fired another round from his shotgun, knocking Soapstick Nichols to the ground.

In January 1890, the seventy-four-year-old bootblack stood on trial for his life, charged with the murder of Lewis Nichols. He was represented by a young court-appointed lawyer and judged by a jury of twelve white men. With the evidence in, the jury deliberated for just three minutes. Quick deliberations were familiar in these sorts of cases, often signaling results that reflect the worst tribal impulses. But for Buddie Shang, it took only three minutes for twelve white men to vote not guilty.

Buddy Shang lived on in Lacyburg until 1917, when he died at age ninety-seven. He was revered to the point that his image survives on a period postcard over his stock phrase “Dry as a Hoss,” an evident reference to his pail being empty.
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