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EXT. BATTLEFIELD, JENKINS’ FERRY, ARKANSAS - DAY

Heavy grey skies hang over a flooded field, the water two

feet deep. Cannons and carts, half-submerged and tilted,

their wheels trapped in the mud below the surface, are still

yoked to dead and dying horses and oxen.

A terrible battle is taking place; two infantry companies,

Negro Union soldiers and white Confederate soldiers, knee-

deep in the water, staggering because of the mud beneath,

fight each other hand-to-hand, with rifles, bayonets,

pistols, knives and fists. There’s no discipline or strategy,

nothing depersonalized: it’s mayhem and each side intensely

hates the other. Both have resolved to take no prisoners.

HAROLD GREEN (V.O.)

Some of us was in the Second Kansas

Colored. We fought the rebs at

Jenkins’ Ferry last April, just

after they’d killed every Negro

soldier they captured at Poison

Springs.

EXT. PARADE GROUNDS ADJACENT TO THE WASHINGTON NAVY YARD,

ANACOSTIA RIVER - NIGHT

Rain and fog. Union Army companies are camped out across the

grounds. Preparations are being made for the impending

assault on the Confederate port of Wilmington, North

Carolina.

Two black soldiers stand before a bivouacked Negro unit:

HAROLD GREEN, an infantryman in his late thirties, and IRA

CLARK, a cavalryman in his early twenties. ABRAHAM LINCOLN

sits on a bench facing Harold and Ira; his stovepipe hat is

at his side.

HAROLD GREEN:

So at Jenkins’ Ferry, we decided

warn’t taking no reb prisoners.

And we didn’t leave a one of ‘em

alive. The ones of us that didn’t

die that day, we joined up with the

116th U.S. Colored, sir. From Camp

Nelson Kentucky.

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