VII

Black vigilantes were not unknown in the South during Reconstruction. Somebody had to stand up for all the brothers and sisters. Guster Ledbetter learned long before that it ain’t gonna be a white man who does that for them. He’d been under their thumb all his life and he found them all untrustworthy and duplicitous. If human bondage hadn’t reinforced this impression enough, service in the Union Army had.

A fugitive of Cowford Plantation, he enlisted with the 55th Colored Infantry at the Strangetown contraband camp in the Spring of ’63. They shipped him out to Corinth where he and his brothers were trained by white drill sergeants who called them n*****s to their faces. Despite all this, they gave them guns anyway, which no brother could believe until it happened. White people giving us guns? This war must be some serious s**t. And so, it was. But whatever it meant to white people, it meant one thing for certain for the brothers… they weren’t going back to slavery now that they had guns in their hands.

He and the brothers of D Company, 55th Colored were shuttled up and down a series of camps along the Memphis and Charleston protecting the vital railroad. They engaged in tough guerilla fighting with an elusive rebel enemy, who came out at night to launch hit-and-run attacks on isolated outposts. They’d go out themselves to poke around a countryside devastated by war looking for Johnny Reb. Sometimes they’d find him, and a firefight would erupt and somebody would get hit and a brother would go down. And they’d grab him by the collar and drag him back behind cover as the bullets went whizzing all by. It seemed like none of the white officers knew what they were doing. When his unit got orders to ship to Memphis, they marched off the train to crowds of white people who threw bottles and spit at them and hurled slurs at them. It was hate that would make you cry.

When he returned to Limestone County he took to professional vigilantism. It was the only work he could do well. Besides, Royal Bill was one of those duplicitious Republicans who may have freed the slave, but forgot the negro. His greed and hunger for fame was too entangled in Strangetown to care for all the little freedman hamlets in the County. That’s where Guster Ledbetter made his legend.

He grew better with the pistol, but his preferred first shot came from afar using a Lorenz Model 1854 musket. He knew it best. Most anyone shot by Guster Ledbetter never knew what hit them. That made it easy if the job only called for one kill. But if more than one man needed killing, Guster could rely on his pistol and his knife. On occasion of having to use a pistol on a Klansman he had run down, he pointed his Colt Walker at the man’s face and asked “so what do you think about a n****r with a gun?” For a black man with a gun was the stuff of nightmares to white people back then. Just about everyone who heard this query quivered and wet themselves before they were shot… everyone but an Adelphon Kuklos.