The Good Lord Bird

Wilmington, Del. (AP) June 14, 1966—A fire that destroyed the city’s oldest Negro church has led to the discovery of a wild slave narrative that highlights a little-known era of American history.

The First United Negro Baptist Church of the Abyssinia at 4th and Bainbridge Streets was destroyed by fire last night. Fire officials blamed a faulty gas heater. No one was injured in the blaze. But among the scorched remains were several charred notebooks belonging to a late church deacon that have attracted national academic interest.

Charles D. Higgins, a congregation member since 1921, died last May. Higgins was a cook, but also an amateur historian who apparently recorded the account of another elderly United Baptist congregation member, Henry “the Onion” Shackleford, who claimed to have been the only Negro to survive the American outlaw John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859. Brown, a white abolitionist, attempted to capture the nation’s largest arsenal to start a war on slavery. The failed raid caused a national panic and prompted the start of America’s Civil War. It led to Brown’s hanging, as well as the deaths of most of his 19 accomplices, including four Negroes.

Until now, no full account of Brown or of his men has ever been found or known to exist.

The account was contained in a metal fireproof box hidden under the floorboards of the deacon’s chair behind the pulpit, where Higgins held court faithfully every Sunday for more than 43 years. Also in the box was an envelope containing 12 Confederate dollars, a rare feather from an ivory-billed woodpecker, a nearly extinct bird species, and a note from Mr. Higgins’s late wife which read, “If I ever see you again, I’ll send your ass hooting and hollering out my damn door.”

Mr. Higgins had no children. He worked as a cook for Mrs. Arlene Ellis of Chadds Ford, Pa., for 29 years. He was the eldest member of the First United Baptist, where he was known affectionately to congregation members as “Mr. Whopper” and “Deacon Shimmy Wimmy.” His exact age at his death was unknown, but congregation members guessed it at close to 100. He was also something of an attraction at local city council meetings, where he often attended sessions dressed in Civil War regalia and petitioned the council to rename the Dupont Highway the “John Brown Road.”

His neatly bound notebooks claim that he gathered the facts of Mr. Shackleford’s life in a series of interviews conducted in 1942. According to Mr. Higgins, he first made the acquaintance of Mr. Shackleford when they both served as Sunday school teachers at First United in the early ’40s, until Shackleford was tossed from the church in 1947 for what Mr. Higgins writes as “scoundreling and funny-touching a fast li’l something named Peaches... .”

Apparently, according to Mr. Higgins’s papers, the church members believed Mr. Shackleford was a woman before that incident. He was apparently a small man, according to Mr. Higgins, “with girly features, curly hair ... and the heart of a rascal.”

Mr. Higgins claims Mr. Shackleford was 103 years old when the account was recorded, though he writes, “It could be more. Onion had me by at least 30 years.”

While Mr. Shackleford is listed in the 1942 church registry, which survived the fire, no one in the current congregation is old enough to recall him.

The congregation has announced plans to pass the account of Mr. Shackleford to a Negro history expert for verification, and later sell the notebooks for publication, with the proceeds going toward the purchase of a new church van.