I Was a Revolutionary Read Free Page B

best part of the movie is before the raid, when Quantrill and his men gather atop Mount Oread, from which they look down at the sleeping, unsuspecting town. Quantrill, played by John Ales, passes out death lists bearing the names, ranked by importance, of the men to kill. He offers a few brief remarks, which elicit a cacophonous hodgepodge of syllables belonging to words like abolitionistfuckerswhoresniggersfreesoilers , and the men raise their hats and scarves and head down the mountain in a thunderous swirl of dust, pounding hooves, and rebel yells.
    It’s not the first film to feature Quantrill. The earliest dates back to 1914, a two-reeler called Quantrell’s Son , and there was a slew of B westerns in the forties and fifties in which Quantrill, or some incarnation of Quantrill, appears. In Dark Command , from 1940, he is Will Cantrell, played by Walter Pidgeon, a Lawrence schoolteacher who loses a local sheriff’s election and his girlfriend to John Wayne, which combine to become the impetus for his raid. In this movie, however, the raid fails, and it ends with Wayne killing Pidgeon. The film’s not alone in playing fast and loose with history, and it’s certainly not the only one to change the outcome of the raid. But even the ones that don’t do so—and I’ve seen them all—approach the raid timidly, presenting a toothless version of the event.
    I tried to tell this to the guitar player when he accompanied me to a matinee showing of Ride with the Devil . The movie had come out soon after I graduated, and I was working odd jobs around Lawrence, thanks to my history degree. I saw it eight times before it left Liberty Hall, and on the occasion I took him with me I spent most of the movie leaning over to explain the historical references and inaccuracies. God, how annoying I must have been, but he listened politely, eyes moving between the screen and me. When it was over, he said he was glad I’d brought him, and we smiled at each other. It seemed like something might happen. But when I told him that just once I wished I could see the movie the way he had, without any background knowledge, he grew defensive, distant, and said it seemed like I had enjoyed it pretty well anyway. This was around the time he was starting to get local gigs, playing that night at the Bottleneck, a big deal. He was stuck on some new girl, he said, and was writing great songs about the one who’d just left. I told him I wouldn’t be able to come but showed up later, halfway through his set, and stood in the back of the bar, nursing a beer, watching him sing songs about girls he’d left and been left by.
(10) Three Ghosts
A/ GETTA DIX
    Proprietor of a boardinghouse for local workers, Getta draws a hand to her chest when she realizes what’s happening. Her husband, her love, is over at the Johnson House with his brother. She leaves her children with a nurse and rushes into the street, knowing the raiders won’t harm her. When she reaches the house, she sees her brother-in-law stumble down the back steps, falling to the ground before her. She cups his head with her hands. He looks at her with the eyes of one who has seen God—with unflinching terror—and then his lids slide closed. She tries to remove her hands, but part of his brain has fallen out the back of his head and now rests in her palms. What she yells then, looking at her hands, is not his name but her husband’s, and she drops the bits of jellied brain into the dust and scrambles up the steps of the house, where she finds a trio of bushwhackers holding several local men at gunpoint. Her husband stands near them, and she hurries to his side, pleading for his life. She’s convincing, talking two of them out of killing her husband, but the third, the leader, is too soused to abide any talk of mercy and pushes all seven men outside to the street, where he and his compatriots unload multiple rounds into their chests.