The Good Lord Bird

17. Rolling into History

A blizzard set on top of us as we moved out of Pikesville with three men on horses and the rest on wagons. Snow fell for a straight day and covered the trail. It left snow nearly a foot high in every direction. A warm snap followed for a day, melting some of the snow, then a deep freeze came. Ice on trees was two inches thick. Water froze in canteens by morning. We lay out under canvases wrapped in roll blankets, with snow blowing over our faces and wolves howling nearby. The Old Man had a new army, a bigger one, and each man took turns keeping the fires going, though they didn’t help much. The outdoors never bothered the Old Man, of course. He could sense a change in the weather like an old farmer, walk through the dead of night through a dark woods without nary a light, and step through a thunderstorm like it weren’t there. But I was hitting the trail after two years of smooth, dry, easy living and shoving rotgut ale down my throat. The second day I come down with a bad case of the ague. Lucky for me, the Old Man fell ill with the ague, too, so he announced, during the middle of the third day when yet another snowstorm fell, “Men, I has word from on high that there is a slave or two that needs freeing here in Missouri. We is heading to Vernon County.”

There weren’t no arguing with him in that weather. He had changed considerably since I seen him two years hence. He was a fearsome sight. His face was wrinkled like a raisin. His gnarled old hands looked like leather claws. His face was stern as a rock. His eyes were like gray granite. His speech changed some, too. He declared he had moved to the woods alone to study the works of some feller named Cromwell, and I reckon it moved him mightily, for he sprinkled his talk with more “thees” and “thous” and “thithers” than ever. Sitting atop his horse with snow falling off his flecked wool coat, sticking to his beard, he looked even more like Moses of old. “I ought to be a general,” he remarked one morning as we trudged through the freezing woods of Vernon County, “but our Redeemer of Trinity Who controlleth the weather and is Commander of all stations deems it fit to keep me at His feet. I was enjoined with nature for nearly a year, Onion, living in the woods on my own, studying my battle plans and commingling with our great King of Kings, I come away with the understanding that I serves His will as a Captain, Onion, that is the title He has charged me with. Nothing higher.”

“Why don’t God’s Captain take us to warm shelter,” Owen grumbled.

The Old Man snorted. “God protects us in winter, Owen. No Pro Slavers will be seen in this country till the grass grows green again. That allows us to do our work.”

He was right about that, for no creature with a brain would venture out into that snow. We trudged along through southwest Missouri territory for four days that way, freezing, not finding no slaves to free, till finally the Old Man declared, “Slavery in Vernon County is vanquished. We will march east to Iowa by land.”

“Whyn’t we take the ferry?” Owen asked. “That’s the fastest way east.”

The Captain smirked. “The ferries are run by Pro Slavers, son. They don’t take Yanks.”

Owen brandished his sword and pistols, nodding at the men behind us, three on horses and the rest on wagons, all armed. “They’ll take us.”

The Old Man smirked. “Did Jesus take a chariot down Jericho Road from eight thousand feet to sea level? Did Moses circle the mountain with the scroll of the commandments on a horse? Or did he climb the swell with his own feet? We shall march to Iowa as cavalry, like David of old.” Truth is, though, he couldn’t take the ferry ’cause he was on the run. The price on the Old Man’s head had gone up considerable in the two years since I’d been in Pikesville. Owen told me both Missouri and Kansas Territory had different prices on his head, and the folks back east had been stirred up considerable by their hearing of the Old Man’s doings, which included removin’ the head of Doyle and them others, not to mention freeing slaves wherever he went. Each week the Old Man sent one of his men to the nearby town of Cuddyville to get newspapers from back east, and them accounts was filled with all kinds of debates about the slave fight, not to mention the various wonderings about the prices on his head from various pickets, both territories, and Washington, D.C. To make matters worse, a federal company picked up our trail outside Nebraska City and chased us north, away from the ferry. They hung on through the snowstorm. We tried to ride away from them, but they hung back several miles, just out of sight. Each time we thought we’d lost them, the Old Man stopped and peered back through his looking glass and spotted them a few miles distant, struggling to keep up with us in the snow. This went on for days.

“Whyn’t they just come on and make a fight of it,” Owen murmured.

“They ain’t gonna do that,” the Captain said. “For Gideon told the people, ‘I will not rule over you. My son will not rule over you. The Lord will rule over you.’ Our Savior won’t let ’em fight us.”

After another three days of snow and freezing weather, the federals got tired of the game. They sent a horseman over to our camp bearing a white flag to speak to the Old Man. He was a rangy feller, with his uniform tucked neatly into his boots and his face beet-red from the cold. “I’m Lieutenant Beers,” he announced. “I brings words from my commander, Captain Haywood. He says if you was to come in quietly and not resist, we will take you to Lawrence for a fair trial and leave your men alone.”

The Old Man snorted. “Tell Captain Haywood to come and get me.”

“He’ll have to arrest you.”

“For what?”

“I ain’t certain of the charges, Captain,” the lieutenant said, “but the governor of Kansas Territory throwed a three-thousand-dollar price for your capture. President Buchanan has offered another two hundred fifty. You’d be safer with us than riding these parts with all that money hanging on your head.”

Sitting on his horse in the falling snow, the Old Man laughed. He had the oddest laugh of any man I ever saw. He didn’t make a sound, but rather crinkled his face and sucked in his breath. His shoulders heaved, he sucked in air, his face tightened up, and the wrinkles in his forehead would collapse around his eyes till they disappeared and all you could see was his yellow teeth, about to whoosh air out at you from what seemed like just about every hole in his head—his eyes, ears, and mouth. The overall effect was terrifying if you didn’t know him. The lieutenant got right unsettled watching it, and at that particular moment the Old Man sneezed, which flipped his body off his saddle for a moment and sent his frock coat tails flipping up, showing the handles of one of them great, big seven-shooters he carried in holsters on either side.

“That’s an insult,” the Old Man finally snorted when he was done. “I am fighting the cause in the name of our Holy Redeemer, who can expunge the word of any nation with a mere cough. I ain’t ruled by him. Deuteronomy thirty-two, thirty-five, says, ‘Their foot shall slide in due time.’”

He turned around and said to his men, “I herebys offer any man in this here army two dollars and fifty cents for President Buchanan’s head. He is presiding over a barbaric institution that does not answer to the throne of our most Holy Martyr.”

The soldier turned around and rode back to his company in a hurry. After a day, the federals rode off, tumbling through the deep snowdrifts and long ridges of the prairie. “A wise move,” the Old Man murmured, watching them leave through his peering glass. “They knows I have friends in high places.”

“Where?” snorted Owen.

“Our most high God, son, whose call you’d do well to heed yourself.”

Owen shrugged and didn’t pay him no mind. He and his brothers was used to the Old Man’s proclamations. Most weren’t nearly as religious as their Pa. In fact, when the Old Man was out of earshot, his sons gived full lip service to quitting the slave-fighting game altogether and returning to their homesteads. A couple of ’em, Jason and John, had already went and done it; they had enough living on the prairie the two years I was gone and quit and gone home, back to upstate New York, and most of his original crew from Kansas went home or was deadened. But he still had four sons with him, Watson, Oliver, Salmon, and Owen, plus he’d picked up some new men in his travels, and these fellers weren’t like his earlier crew, which was mostly Kansas farmers, homesteaders, and Indians. This new batch of fellers was young gunfighters, rough adventurers, teachers and scholars, serious business, and would shoot the hair off your head. The most serious of ’em was Kagi, a smooth-faced drummer out of Nebraska City who’d come to Pikesville with Owen. Kagi fought at Black Jack with the Old Man, but I hadn’t seen him there, being that my head was in the sand at the time. He was a schoolteacher by trade, and carried lectures and readings in a rolled-up paper bunch in his pocket, which he referred to from time to time. He seemed temperate enough, but he was wanted in Tecumseh for pulling out his Colt and throwing enough lead at a Pro Slavery judge to knock his face off and put the feller to sleep forever. The judge shot Kagi in the heart before Kagi deadened him. Kagi claimed the judge’s ball was stopped from piercing his heart by a notebook he carried in his breast pocket. He kept that ragged notebook on his person for the rest of his life, which it turned out weren’t very long. Next to him was John Cook, Richard Hinton, Richard Realf, a colored named Richard Richardson, and Aaron Stevens. The last was a tall, hulking grouse, a bad-tempered feller, well over six hands tall, dangerous business, always spoiling for a fight. He weren’t religious in the least. These fellers weren’t like the Old Man’s earlier crew of farmers fighting for their land. They didn’t smoke nor drink nor chew tobacco. They mostly read books and argued about politics and spiritual matters. The Old Man referred to ’em as “Mister This” and “Mister That,” and had the aim of converting ’em to the Holy Word. He overthrowed ’em with God every chance he got, saying, “Mister So and So, you’re doing the devil’s work making light of God’s salvation,” but they’d become used to ignoring him on that affair. Slavery was the question. That’s what bonded ’em. And they wasn’t fooling.

They followed him like sheep, though. Smart as they was, nary a one of ’em challenged him on his orders or even knowed where we was going from day to day. The Old Man was stone-cold silent on his plans, and they trusted his word. Only thing he allowed was, “We going east, men. We are going east to fight the war against slavery.”

Well, there is a lot of east. And there is a lot of slavery. And it is one thing to say you is gonna fight slavery and ride east to do it and take the war all the way to Africa and so forth. It is another to keep riding day after day in the cold to do it.

We drug and slung along one hundred fifty miles toward Tabor, Iowa—it took two months—freeing coloreds as we went. Tabor was free country in them days, but it was winter and tough going, in twelve degree weather, on a trail caked with six inches of ice, and the Old Man praying over burnt squirrel and old johnnycake the whole time. Luckily we had stolen a bunch of booty from Pikesville and a few slave owners along the way: ammo, guns, two Conestoga wagons, four horses, two mules, one ox, bedding, frying pans, tins, some trousers and hats, coats, even a sewing table and apple barrel, but game on the prairie in winter is scarce, and we was plumb out of food in no time, so we traded with whomever we come across as we plodded along, and survived that way. In that manner I was also able to secret me a pair of trousers and a hat and underwear with nobody giving a hoot’s notice, for it was too cold to care what a person wore out there. By the time we hit Tabor, Iowa, we was exhausted and hungry—except for the Captain, who sprang up every morning bright as a bird, ready to go. It seemed like he didn’t need sleep. And food didn’t interest him in the least, ’specially anything revolving around butter. He’d quit the living game altogether if it meant eating butter. Something about that delicacy just throwed him. But if it was turtle soup or roasted bear, why, he’d rustle through a pigsty in his drawers in the dead of winter just to get a whiff of that kind of game. He was queer that way. An outdoor man to the limit.

He was all but enthusiastic the moment we hit town, which was strangely quiet when we plodded into the village square. He looked about and breathed deeply. “I am thankful we is in abolitionist territory,” he crowed as he sat atop his horse, gazing about. “Even the air seems clearer. Freedom lives here, men. We are home. We shall rest here through the winter months.”

We stood there for an hour and that town stayed quiet as a mouse fart. Not a door opened. Not a shutter moved. The town folks was panicked. They wouldn’t have nothing to do with us. After a while we was so cold we knocked on doors looking for shelter, but no homestead nor tavern wanted us. “Murderer,” a woman chirped, slamming the door. “Crazy old man,” said another. “Keep out.” One man told him, “I am against slavery, Captain, but I’m against killing. You and your men can’t stay here.” It went like that all through town. Tabor was free country in them days, and he was known to every abolitionist east of Missouri, but they was just stone chickenhearted about the whole business. Course the Old Man was hot, too, a wanted man with a price on his head. Every newspaper in the country crowed about how he knocked a few heads off back in Kansas Territory, so I guess that made ’em shy, too.

We went to just about every door in town, a parade of freezing, ragged men, beaten mules and starving horses, and when the last was slammed in his face, the Old Man was irritated but not downtrodden. “Talk, talk, talk,” he muttered. “All the Christian can do is talk. And that, men,” he said, as he stood in the middle of the deserted town, wiping the snow off his whiskers, “is our true battle. Your basic slave needs freedom, not talk. The Negro has listened to talk of moral suasion for two hundred years. We can’t wait. Did Toussaint-Louverture, wait for the French in Haiti? Did Spartacus wait on the Roman government? Did Garibaldi wait on the Genovese?”

Owen said, “I am sure they are good people of whom you speak, Father. But it is cold out here.”

“We ought to be like David of old,” the Old Man grumbled, “living off the grace and nurturing of our King of Kings, who provides for all our needs and wants. I myself am not cold. But for your sakes I do have a few friends left in this world.” He ordered the men to saddle up again and led us out to a few farmers in nearby Pee Dee who agreed to take us on—after the Old Man sold them most of his horses and wagons and made arrangements for us to help them shuck corn and tend their homesteads through the rest of the winter months. There was some grumbling, but the men was grateful to have food and shelter.

Soon as that was arranged, the Old Man announced, “I has sold the wagons and our supplies for a purpose. I needs a train ticket to go back east. I will leave you here, men, in comparative warmth and safety, whilst I travel to Boston alone to seek out funds in the name of our Redeemer. For we needs to eat, and our fight requires money, of which there is plenty back east, which I will fetch from our many supporters there.” They agreed, for a warm place to sleep was golden and we was exhausted, whereas the Old Man was kicking like a Texas mule.

As the Old Man made ready to go east, his men gived him a few things to take with him, letters for home, gifts for friends, and blankets to keep warm. As he gathered them things, he announced, “Kagi, you is my lieutenant, and you will be in charge of training the men in military exercises and the like that they’ll need in our fight against slavery.”

Kagi nodded his agreement. Then the Captain cast an eye at yours truly. “Onion, you will come with me.”

Owen looked surprised. “Why her?” he asked.

“Onion is a good-luck charm. She is reminiscent of your dear brother Frederick, who lies sleeping in this territory and whose goodness attracted both beast and human. We need every tool now for our purpose, thus it is time to bring the Negro to the fore for his own liberation. I will need her to help hive the Negro. Both the Negro and our white supporters will see the innocence of her countenance and say, ‘Yea, child, ye of the Blessed Father, we will inherit the kingdom. He has prepared for us, and we will join up to fight for the cause of our children!’ They will come by the thousands!” And he clapped his hands and nodded his head. There weren’t no stopping him in the way of enthusiasm on the matter of freedom.

I weren’t against it, naturally. I wanted to get out the plains fast as possible. It was my intention to jump off soon as he looked the other way. But Bob was there. He’d clung on through the cold trek over the prairie, having been grabbed up by Owen in Pikesville and pulled along, like always. And just like always in the past, Bob laid low for his chance to cut, and when he seen the Old Man’s intent to head east to free country, he spoke out.

“I can help you find Negro soldiers,” he announced, “for the Negro is more inclined to listen to the saying of a colored man than a girl.”

Before I could argue the point, the Old Man snorted. “God is no respecter of men over women, good Bob. If a man can’t meet the needs of his own women or children, why, he’s just half a man. You stay here with the rest, for the thousands of Negroes that will flock to our stead will need you to calm them and keep them from pounding the bushes until our war starts, for they will be anxious to go at it. Me and Onion will lay the groundwork, and then you, sir, will be our ambassador to welcome them into our army of men.”

Bob sulked and stayed back and kept his peace, which, as it turned out, weren’t long, for two weeks after we got back east, a letter come to the Captain that Bob had run off.

We took a train that hauled us from Chicago to Boston, which is what the Old Man said his plan was. Rolling behind that steam engine was a slam-banging, bumpy, clickety-clackety situation, but it was righteous warmer and more comfortable than the prairie. He traveled variously as “Nelson Hawkins,” “Shubel Morgan,” or “Mr. Smith,” depending on what he could remember, for he often generally forgot his fake names and often asked me to remind him which one he was using. He made various attempts to comb out his beard without success, but with me traveling incog-Negro, posing as a consort, he weren’t tricking nobody. I looked raggedy as an old knot rope from weeks on the prairie, and the Captain was famous as bad whiskey. The Pro Slavery passengers cleared out the car when they saw him, and anytime he professed a need for food or drink on the train, why, the other Yankee passengers ponied up whatever food they had for his pleasure. He took these gifts without a blink. “These is not for ourselves, Onion, but rather in the name of our Great Haymaker and for the cause of liberty of our enslaved brothers and sisters.” He ate only what he could eat and not a drop more. That was the ironical thing about the Old Man. He stole more wagons, horses, mules, shovels, knives, guns, and plows than any man I ever knowed, but he never took anything for hisself other than what he used personally. Whatever he stole was for the cause of fighting slavery. If he stole something and didn’t use it, why, he’d run it back to the poor drummer he stole it from to return it, less’n course the feller was disagreeable, in which case he’d liable to find himself dead or roped to a pole, with the Old Man lecturing him on the evils of slavery. The Captain enjoyed lecturing captured Pro Slavers on the evils of slavery, so much so that a couple of ’em said, “Captain, I’d ruther you plugged me now and get it over with than lecture my ears one more second, for your words is drowning me. You is killing me here.” Several prisoners quit the game altogether and dropped off to sleep as he lectured, for many of ’em was drunk, only to wake up sober to find the Old Man praying over them, which was even worse torture, being that they was now sober and the Old Man carried on his prayers longer when he had an audience.

It was on the train that I learned that John Brown was a poor man. He had a large family, even by prairie standards he birthed twenty-two children altogether with two wives. He outlived the first wife and still had the second one living in Elba, New York, along with twelve children, them that weren’t killed off through sickness and disease. Most of his young’uns at home was knee-high children or girls, and he constantly scooped up small items and remembrances for them on the train to Boston, such as colorful paper and spools of thread he found tossed about on the passenger car floor, saying, “I’ll give this one to Abby,” and “This would delight my little Ellen.” It was there that I come to understand how guilty he felt for my Pa getting kilt when he first kidnapped me two years prior. He’d given me a store-bought dress he’d got for his own daughter Ellen. The Old Man never bought his goods in any store. That store-bought dress had long wore out by then. I was sporting a fine embroidered number I’d gotten from Pie when he found me in Pikesville. But that gived way on the plains to trousers, undergarments, shirt, and hat, all stolen, course, which I was allowed to wear on account of the fierce weather. The Old Man seen I took to that clothing and it delighted him, for he figured me as being a tomboy of sorts, which generally amused him. Rough and gruff as he was, he was kindhearted to every child he come across. Many a time I seen him set up all night with a colicky colored child who was part of whatever exhausted band of runaway Negroes he was slinging along to freedom. He’d feed her as her tired parents slept, pouring hot milk or soup down her throat, and sing her to sleep. He pined for his own little children and wife, but seen that his fight against slavery was more important than them.

He spent most of the journey reading the Bible, studying maps, and writing letters. You never seen a man write more letters than Old John Brown. He wrote letters to newspapers, politicians, enemies, his wife, his children, his old Pa, his brother, and several cousins. He received letters from his wife and creditors, mostly—considerable amounts from creditors, for he outworked a cooter in the borrowing department in the old days and owed money on every business he’d owned which gone belly-up and there was considerable numbers of them. He also got letters from Negroes on the run and even Indians asking for help, for he was partial to the red man as well. In most every town where the train stopped, he had some friend or other living there who could post letters for him, and, like as not, when the train stopped to pick up passengers, a child would leap aboard or hand him through the window a bunch of letters addressed to him, for which the Old Man passed him a shilling, then throwed a bunch of letters at him to mail. A few letters arrived with a bit of money in them, from his supporters back east. Which was one reason why letters was so important to him. When he weren’t writing letters, he constantly scribbled on maps, several small ones and one big one. He carried that thing rolled up like a large scroll, and unscrolled it and scratched at it constantly in pencil, scrawling numbers and lines, muttering about troops and flanking maneuvers and so forth. He’d sometimes set it down and walk the railroad car, pacing back and forth, figuring. The other passengers was mostly finely dressed businessmen from Missouri, Pro Slavers, and to them, the Captain walking the aisle bearing two seven-shooters barely hidden inside his ragged frock coat and the broadsword sticking out his gunnysack, along with a colored child dressed in farm trousers and hat, was quite a sight. Other than a few Yanks who offered him a nibble or two for himself and his “consort,” nobody much bothered him.

The journey to Boston was supposed to take four days, but on the third day, as we swung through Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the train stopped to take on water, and he announced, “We are getting off here, Onion.”

“I thought we was going to Boston, Captain.”

“Not directly,” he said. “I suspect there might be a spy among my men in Iowa. I don’t want the federal hounds to catch us.”

We hopped another train in Pittsburgh for Philadelphia, and got off there for a day to wait for the next train to Boston which weren’t due to leave till morning, whereupon the Old Man decided to walk about the city for he was an outdoor man and couldn’t bear the thought of setting by a warm woodstove in the station and resting his feet. That city was right enjoyable. The sights and colors of it whirled up before my eyes like a peacock’s feathers. Even the smallest street in Philadelphia made the biggest road in Kansas Territory seem like a rutted back alley, full of nags and chickens. Folks in fine clothing strutted about; and there were homes of red brick with perfect, straight chimneys. Telegraph wires, wooden sidewalks, and inside privies lined every street. The trading stores were loaded with fresh poultry, cooked fish, brass candles, ladles, cradles, warming pans, hot-water bottles, commodes, brass ware, even bugles. As I took it all in, I decided the Old Man was a fool to leave the east to fight on the prairie on behalf of the colored. Even the colored in Philadelphia didn’t seem to care about their slave brothers. I seen a few of them strolling about, sporting pocket watches, walking canes, breast pins, and finger rings just like white folks, they were right dandy. In fact, they was dressed better than the Old Man.

The next morning, at the train station, the Old Man, he got into a wrangle with the ticket agent, for he was nearly out of money and had changed his mind about going to Boston straight off. Instead he wanted to stop off at Rochester, New York, first. That stretched him to the limit, and he spent his last money getting the tickets changed. “You perhaps question why I am spending my last before we get to Boston,” he said. “Fret not, Onion. We will find more funds where we’re going. It is worth the cost of ten tickets to Boston, for we are going to meet with the king of the Negro people. He is a great man and a dear friend. Have no doubt, Onion, that in the coming years his exploits will be heralded across this country for generations, and you will be able to tell your children that you have met him. He has promised to fight with us to the end, and that is important, for we will need his help in our cause, to hive the bees. We will need thousands of Negroes, and with him, we will get them. So be kind to him. And polite. He has promised to fight with us. We must convince him to keep his promise to help us hive the bees.”

We arrived at Rochester station in the early morning, and as the train pulled in, there upon the platform stood a Negro unlike any I’d ever seen. He was a stout, handsome mulatto with long dark hair parted in the middle. His shirt was starched and clean. His suit was pressed and flat. His boots spotless. His face was shaved and smooth. He waited still as a statue, proud, erect. He stood like a king.

The Old Man descended the train, and the two shook hands and embraced warmly. “Onion,” he said, “meet Mr. Frederick Douglass, the man who will help lead our cause. Frederick, meet Henrietta Shackleford, my consort, who goes by the name of the Onion.”

“Morning, Fred,” I said.

Mr. Douglass looked at me coldly. Seemed like the bottom of his nose opened up two inches as he peered down.

“How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“Then where is your manners, young lady? What kind of a name is Onion for a young lady? And why are you dressed in that fashion? And why do you address me as Fred? Don’t you know you are not addressing a pork chop, but rather a fairly considerable and incorrigible piece of the American Negro diaspora?”

“Sir?”

“I am Mr. Douglass.”

“Why, howdy, sir. I am here to help hive the bees.”

“And hive them she will,” the Old Man said cheerily. I never seen him knuck to somebody the way he knucked to Mr. Douglass.

Mr. Douglass looked me over close. “I suspect there is a pretty little piece of pork chop under all them rags, Mr. Brown,” he said. “And we will forthrightly teach her some manners to go with them fair looks. Welcome to Rochester, young lady.”

“Thank you, Mr. Fred,” I said.

“Mr. Douglass.”

“Mr. Douglass.”

“She a spritely little package, Douglass,” the Old Man said proudly, “and has showed pluck and courage through many a battle. I reckon it is the highlight of her life to meet the man who is going to lift her people from the chains of the underling world. Onion,” he said, clapping Mr. Douglass on the back, “I has been disappointed many times in my life. But this is one man on whom the Old Captain can always depend.”

Mr. Douglass smiled. He had perfect teeth. The two of them stood there proudly, beaming there, standing on the train platform, white and colored together. It made for a pretty picture, and if I’d had one of them picture-taking contraptions that had just come out in them days, I’d have recorded the whole thing. But the fact is, like most things the Old Man done, his business didn’t work out the way it was drawed up. He couldn’t have been more wrong about Mr. Douglass. Had I knowed what was coming, I expect I’d have taken that little derringer I kept from my Pikesville days out my pants pocket and popped Mr. Douglass off in the foot, or at least cleaned him up with the handle of it, for he would short the Old Man something terrible going forward, at a time when the Captain needed him the most. And it would cost the Old Man a lot more than a train ticket to Rochester.

18. Meeting a Great Man

The Old Man laid up at Mr. Frederick Douglass’s house for three weeks. He spent most of that time in his room, writing and studying. That weren’t unusual for him, to set over paper and write, or walk about with a pocket full of compasses, scribbling notes and consulting maps and so forth. It never amounted to nothing, but three weeks was a long time for me to sit inside anybody’s house, and for the Old Man, I expect it was worse. The Captain was an outdoor man. He couldn’t sit at a hearth long, or sleep on a feather bed, or even eat food that was cooked for civilized people. He liked wild things: coons, possum, squirrel, wild turkeys, beavers. But food prepared inside a proper kitchen—biscuits, pie, jam, butter—he couldn’t stand the taste of them things. So it was suspicious that he set there that long, for that’s all they ate in that house. But he hunkered down in a bedroom by hisself, coming out only to use the privy. From time to time Mr. Douglass went in there, and I overheard them two jawing with raised voices. I overheard Mr. Douglass at one point say, “Unto the death!” but I made nothing of it.

Three weeks gived me plenty of time to get acquainted with the Douglass household, which was run by Mr. Douglass’s two wives—a white one and a colored one. That was the first time I ever saw such a thing, two women married to one man, and both of ’em being of a different race. Them two women hardly spoke to one another. When they did, you’d a thunk a chunk of ice dropped into the room, for Miss Ottilie was a German white woman, and Miss Anna was a colored woman from the South. They was polite enough to each other, more or less, though I expect if they weren’t civilized, they’d a punched each other wobbly. They hated each other’s guts, is the real picture, and took their rage out on me, for I was uncouth in their eyes and needing barbering and learning of proper manners, ways to sit and curtsy and all them things. I gived them a lot of work in that department, for what few manners and ways Pie taught me out on the prairie was cow dung to these women, who didn’t use an outdoor privy, and never chewed tobacco or used words like “haw” and “git.” After Mr. Douglass introduced me to them and retired to his own scribbling—he scribbled, too, like the Old Man, them two scribbled in separate rooms—them two women stood me before ’em in the parlor and studied me. “Take them pantaloons off,” Miss Anna barked. “Throw them boots out,” Miss Ottilie throwed in. I allowed I’d do what they asked but would do it in private. They fought over it, which gived me time to slip off and change alone. But that drove Miss Anna mad, and she made a comeback two days later by dragging me into her kitchen to draw me a bath. I scooted out to the drawing room and runned to the white wife, Miss Ottilie, who insisted she draw me a bath, and let them two wrangle over that. In that manner I kept them off me and let them catfight the whole business out.

Them two women would’a grinded each other up if I’d remained there long. But luckily they didn’t have time to fool with me much, being that every inch of movement in that house, every speck of cleaning, cooking, dusting, working, writing, pouring of lye, and sewing of undergarments revolved around Mr. Douglass, who walked about the house like a king in pantaloons and suspenders, practicing his orations, his mane of dark hair almost wide as the hallways, his voice booming down the halls. I once heard the mighty marching band at Tuskegee in Tennessee beating at a parade, and that band of two hundred strong, with drums beating and trumpets wailing was an enjoyment. But it weren’t nothing compared to the blasting of Mr. Douglass practicing his orations about the fate of the Negro race in his house.

Them women tried to outdo each other with the handling of him, even though he regarded them both like they was cooters and stink bombs. When he took meals, he took them alone at the big mahogany desk in his office. That man gobbled down more in one setting than I seen thirty settlers chunk down in three weeks out in Kansas Territory: steak, potatoes, collard greens, yams, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, chicken, rabbit, pheasant, buck meat, cake, biscuits, rice, cheeses of all types, and kneaded bread; he washed it down with milk, curd, peach juice, cow’s milk, goat’s milk, cherry juice, orange juice, grape juice. Neither did he turn away from alcohol libations and drinks of all sorts, of which several types was kept on hand at the house: beer, lager, wine, seltzer, even bottled water from various springs out west. That man put a hurting on a kitchen.

I was exhausted with being a girl a week into the stay, for a damsel out west on the trail could spit, chaw tobacco, holler, grunt, and fart, and gather no more attention to herself than a bird would snatching crumbs off the ground. In fact, your basic Pro Slaver found them behaviors downright likable in a girl, for there weren’t nothing better to a feller out on the plains than finding a girl who could play cards like a feller and clean up the bottom of a bottle of whiskey for him when he was pie-eyed. But in Rochester, by God, you couldn’t so much as doodle your fingers without insulting somebody on the question of a lady behaving thus and so, even a colored lady—especially a colored lady, for the high-siddity coloreds up there was all tweet and twit and whistle. “Where’s your bustle?” a colored lady snapped at me when I walked down the street. “Un-nip your naps!” piped up another. “Where’s your wig, child?” asked another.

I couldn’t stand it and retreated back to the house. All that blitzing and curtsying pressured me, and I got the thirst, needed a jag, a sip of whiskey, to clear me out. Sipping blisters at Miss Abby’s had whetted my whistle for tasting the giddy water when things growed tight, and once I got off the freezing trail and fell into the good-eating life, I growed thirsty from all that squeezed-up, settled-down living. I had the thought of cutting out from the Old Man at that time, slipping off and working in a tavern of some type in Rochester, but them taverns there weren’t nothing compared to taverns in Kansas Territory. They was more like libraries or thinking places, full of old farts in button-down frock coats setting around sipping sherry and wondering about the state of the poor Negro not prospering, or drunk Irishmen learning to read. Women and girls weren’t allowed, mostly. I thunk about getting other jobs, too, for every once in a while a white woman in a bonnet would saunter up to me on the sidewalk and say, “Is you interested in earning three pennies to do laundry, dear?” I was twelve at the time, coming on thirteen or even fourteen is my guess, though I never knowed to be exact. I was still allergic to work no matter what age, so washing folks’ drawers weren’t an idea I was game to surrender to. I had trouble enough keeping my own clothes clean. I was growing short of temper from all this treatment, and I expect them women would’a found out my real nature once something broke wrong and I drawed my heater, which I still kept. For I had come to the notion that on account of my adventures out west with the Captain, I was a gunfighter of sorts, girl or not, and I felt above most of them citified easterners who ate toast with jam and moaned and crowed about not having no blueberries in the winter months.

But the lack of woozy water chewed at me, and one afternoon I couldn’t stand it no more. I decided to drown my thirst with a taste of muddle sauce that Mr. Douglass kept in his kitchen pantry. He had bottles and bottles of it. So I slipped in there and grabbed a bottle, but no sooner did I take a quick drinkie-poo than I heard somebody coming. I quick put the bottle back just as Miss Ottilie, his white wife, appeared, frowning. I thought she’d busted me flat-footed, but instead she announced, “Mr. Douglass asks to see you in his study now.”

I proceeded there and found him setting behind his spacious desk. He was a short man, the top of the desk was nearly as high as he was. He had a big head for such a tiny person, and his hair, standing on end like a lion’s mane, loomed over the top of the desk.

He seen me coming and bid me to close the door. “Since you are in the employ of the Captain, I has got to interview you,” he said, “to make you aware of the plight of the Negro in whose service you has been fighting.”

Well, I was aware of that plight, being that I am a Negro myself, plus I heard him bleating it about the house, and the truth is, I weren’t interested in fighting for nobody’s cause. But I didn’t want to offend the great man, so I said, “Well, thank you, sir.”

“First of all, dear,” he said, drawing himself up, “sit down.”

I done that. Set in a chair just across from his desk.

“Now,” he said, drawing hisself up. “The Negro comes in all colors. Dark. Black. Blacker. Blackest. Blacker than night. Black as hell. Black as tar. White. Light. Lighter. Lightest. Lighter than light. White as the sun. And almost white. Take me, for example. I am of a brown hue. You, on the other hand, is nearly white, and comely, and that’s a terrible dilemma, is it not?”

Well, I never thunk of it that way, but since he knowed everything, I gived him my best answer. “Yes, sir,” I said.

“I’m a mulatto myself,” he said proudly.

“Yes, sir.”

“Being comely, we mulattoes have therefore various certain experiences that define our existence and set us apart from the other adherents of our racial congruities.”

“Sir?”

“We mulattoes are different from most Negroes.”

“We is?”

“Of course, my child.”

“I reckon so, Mr. Douglass, if you say so.”

“I deedy doody say so indeed-y,” he said.

I reckoned he said that as a joke, for he chortled and looked at me. “Ain’t that funny?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Cheer up, little Henrietta. Where are you from, dear?”

“Why, Kansas, Mr. Douglass.”

“No need to call me Mr. Douglass,” he said, coming from behind his desk and approaching where I sat. “My friends call me Fred.”

It didn’t seem proper to call a great man like him Fred, for the only Fred I knowed was dumber than doughnuts and deader than yesterday’s beer. Besides, Mr. Douglass was stout as a porcupine about the rules of me calling him “Mr. Douglass” at the train station before. But I didn’t want to offend the great leader, so I said, “Yes, sir.”

“Not sir. Fred.”

“Yes, sir, Fred.”

“Oh, come now. Get cheery. Here. Move. Have a seat here,” he said. He moved to a tiny couch that was as cockeyed and cocky-mamy as anything I ever seen. One side faced one way. One side faced the other. I reckoned the carpenter was drunk. He stood before it. “This is a love seat,” he said, motioning me over with his hands. He done it like he was in a hurry, impatient, like he was used to people listening to his thoughts, which I expect they was, him being a great man. “Would you like to sit here whilst I explain to you further the plight of our people?” he asked.

“Well, sir, I reckon that plight looks righteous bad now, till you furthers it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Well, er, with people like you leading the way, why, we can’t go wrong.”

Here the great man laughed. “You are a country girl,” he chortled. “I love country girls. They’re fast. I’m from the country myself.” He pushed me down in the love seat and sat down on the other side of it. “This love seat’s from Paris,” he said.

“Is she a friend of yours?”

“It’s the city of light,” he said, sneaking an arm around my shoulder. “You simply must experience the sunlight coming over the Seine River.”

“Sunlight over a river? Oh, I seen it come over the Kaw many times. Every day in Kansas, in fact. It rains out there every day sometimes, too, just like it do here.”

“My dear,” he said. “You are a waif in the darkness.”

“I am?”

“A tree of unborn fruit.”

“I am?”

“Yet to be picked.” Here he tugged on my bonnet, which I quickly pushed back in place.

“Tell me. Where were you born? What is your birthday?”

“I don’t know exactly. Though I reckon to be about twelve or fourteen.”

“That’s just it!” he said, hopping up to his feet. “The Negro knows not where he was born, or who his mother is. Or who his father is. Or his real name. He has no home. He has no land. His station is temporary. He is guile and fodder for the slave catcher. He is a stranger in a strange land! He is a slave, even when he is free! He is a renter, an abettor! Even if he owns a home. The Negro is a perpetual lettor!”

“Like A, B, and C?”

“No child. A renter.”

“You rent here?”

“No, dear. I buy. But that’s not the point. See this?” He squeezed my shoulder. “That is merely flesh. You are natural prey to the carnal wisdom and thirst of the slave owner, that dastardly fiend of fiendishness. Your colored woman knows no freedom. No dignity. Her children are sold down the lane. Her husbands tend the field. While the fiendish slave owner has his way with her.”

“He do?”

“Of course he does. And see this?” He squeezed the back of my neck, then stroked it with fat fingers. “This slender neck, the prominent nose—this, too, belongs to the slave owner. They feel it belongs to them. They take what is not rightfully theirs. They know not you, Harlot Shackleford.”

“Henrietta.”

“Whatever. They know not you, Henrietta. They know you as property. They know not the spirit inside you that gives you your humanity. They care not about the pounding of your silent and lustful heart, thirsting for freedom; your carnal nature, craving the wide, open spaces that they have procured for themselves. You’re but chattel to them, stolen property, to be squeezed, used, savaged, and occupied.”

Well, all that tinkering and squeezing and savaging made me right nervous, ’specially since he was doing it his own self, squeezing and savaging my arse, working his hand down toward my mechanicals as he spoke the last, with his eyes all dewy, so I hopped to my feet.

“I reckons your oration’s done drove me to thirst,” I said. “I wonders if you have some libations around in one of these cabinets here that would help loosen up my gibbles and put me in the right understanding of some of your deepest comminglings about our peoples.”

“By God, pardon my rudeness! I’ve just the thing!” he said. “Would that I had thought of that first.” He fair dived for his liquor cabinet and pulled out a tall bottle and two tall glasses, pouring me a tall one and a short one for himself. He didn’t know but that I could drink like a man, having already gulped a bit of his hot sauce without his knowing and having absorbed rummy sauce with Pro Slave rebels out west who could hoist a barrel of whiskey down their throats and see double without a hitch. Even your basic pioneer settler church woman out west could outdrink any soft Yank who ate food stored in jars and cabinets and prepared in a hot stove. They could drink him right under the table on the spot.

He shoved the tall glass of whiskey at me and hoisted the short glass for himself.

“Here. Let us toast to the education of a country girl who learns about the plights of our people from its greatest orator,” he said. “Careful now, for this is strong.” He turned his glass to his talking hole and drunk it down.

The effect of that whiskey hitting his gizzards was altogether righteous. He sat up as if electrified. It throwed him. He shook and rattled a bit. His large mane of hair stood on end. His eyes growed wide. He seemed sotted right off. “Whew. That’s a sip, a sot, and a mop!”

“Why, you is right,” I said. I drunk mine’s down and placed the empty glass on the table. He stared at the empty glass. “Impressive,” he grumbled. “You means business, you little harlot.” He filled both glasses again, this time filling both to the brim.

“How’s about one for the plights of our people in the South who ain’t here to hear your speech on ’em?” I said, for I aimed to get pixilated, and his whiskey was weak. He poured another and I drunk mine down again.

“Hear, hear,” he said, and he followed suit, downing his a second time and looking bleary-eyed.

Mine’s was gone, but I growed to like the taste. “What about the pets who is in slavery, too, suffering in all the heat and cold without your word on ’em?” I said. He poured and I downed it again.

Well, that surprised him, seeing me throw that essence down so easy. See, I learned my drinking out on the prairie of Kansas and Missouri with redshirts, Pro Slavers, and abolitionists, of which even the women could drain a gallon or three and not get two-fisted so long as somebody else was pouring. It pushed his confidence a bit, seeing a girl outdo him. He couldn’t stand it.

“Surely,” he said. He refilled both glasses again. “Preach it, my country waif, sing that they needs to hear me everywhere in the world!” He was getting addled now, all his fancy prattling started to drop off him like raindrops bouncing off a roof, and the country in him begun to come out. “Nothin’ like a spree and a jag then a bout!” he barked, and he poured that weepy, sorry, tea-tasting willowy whiskey down his red lane one more time. I followed him.

Well, we just went on like that. We run through that bottle and then runned into a second. The more stupefied he got, the more he forgot about the hanky-panky he had in mind and instead germinated on what he knowed—orating. First he orated on the plight of the Negro. He just about wore the Negro out. When he was done orating on them, he orated about the fowl, the fishes, the poultry, the white man, the red man, the aunties, uncles, cousins, the second cousins, his cousin Clementine, the bees, the flies, and by the time he worked down to the ants, the butterflies, and the crickets, he was stone-cold, sloppy, clouded-up, sweet-blind drunk, whereas yours truly was simply buzzing, for that tea was weaker than bird piss, though when you drunk it by volume, it growed more to your liking and tasted better each lick. By the third bottle of essence, he had gone to pot completely, tripping over his oration and skunking about the birds and bees, which was the point of it all, I reckon, for while I was not even half-mud-eyed, he was bent on not being outdrunk by a girl. But being the great leader that he was, he never let go of himself, though he seemed to lose his fancy for me. The more bleary-eyed he got, the more he talked like a right regular down-home, pig-knuckle-eatin’ Negro. “I had a mule once,” he bawled, “and she wouldn’t pull the hat off your head. But I loved that damn mule. She was a stinkin’ good mule! When she died, I rolled her in the creek. I would’a buried her, but she was too heavy. A fat thousand-pounder. By God, that mule could single-trot, double-trot... .” I rather fancied him then, not in the nature-wanting sort of a way, but knowing that he was a good soul, too muddled to be of much use. But after a while I seen my out, for he was off the edge, wasted and looped beyond redemption, and couldn’t hurt me now. I got up. “I got to go,” I said.

He was setting in the middle of the floor by then, his suspenders off, clasping the bottle. “Don’t marry two women at once,” he managed to burble. “Colored or white, it’ll whip you scandalous.”

I made for the door. He took one final dive for me as I made for it, but fell on his face.

He looked up at me, grinning sheepishly as I opened the door, then said, “It’s hot in here. Open da winder.” Then laid his mighty Negro head, with his mighty hair like a lion’s mane, down flat on his face, and was out cold, snoring when I quietly took my leave.

19. Smelling Like Bear

I didn’t tell the Old Man about his friend’s exploits. I hated to disappoint him and it didn’t seem proper. Besides, once the Old Man made up his mind about somebody, nothing could change him. If the Old Man liked somebody, it didn’t matter whether they was heathen or reckless or a boy sporting life as a girl. So long as they was against slavery, that was good enough.

He left Mr. Douglass’s house roaring pleased, which meant his face weren’t scrunched up like a prune and his mouth weren’t closed like a pair of tight britches. That was unusual for him. “Mr. Douglass gived me his word on something important, Onion,” he said. “That is good news indeed.” We loaded onto a westbound train to Chicago, which didn’t make sense, for Boston was the other way, but I weren’t going to question him. As we settled in for the ride, he proclaimed loudly so that all the passengers to hear, “We is aiming to change in Chicago for horses and wagon to Kansas.”

We click-clacked along for nearly a day and I fell asleep. A few hours later, the Old Man shook me awake. “Grab our bags, Onion,” he whispered. “We got to jump.”

“Why, Captain?”

“No time for questions.”

I cast a glance outside and it was nearly dawn. In the train car, the rest of the passengers was dead asleep. We moved to a seat near the car’s edge and lollygagged there till the train stopped to take on water, then jumped off. We hid in the thickets on the side of the tracks a good while, waiting for the engine to get up steam and roll again, the Old Man with his hand on one of his seven-shooters. Only when the train pulled away did his hand drop off his hardware.

“Federal agents is tracking us,” he said. “I want them thinking I’m out west.”

I watched the train pull away slowly. It was a long stretch of straight track up the mountains, and as the train huffed up it, the Old Man stood up, dusted himself off, and stared at it a long time.

“Where are we?”

“Pennsylvania. These is the Allegheny Mountains,” he said, pointing at the winding mountains in the direction of the train, which struggled up the straight track to a winding curve. “This was my boyhood home.”

That was the only time I ever heard the Old Man refer to his growing-up years. He watched the train till it was a tiny dot in the mountains. When it was gone, he took a long look around. He looked downright troubled.

“This ain’t no way for a general to be living. But now I know why the Lord gived me a hankering to see my old home. See these mountains?” He pointed around.

I couldn’t see nothing but mountains, and I said, “What about ’em, Captain.”

He pointed to the wide passages and craggy cliffs all around us. “A man can hide in these passes for years. There’s plenty game. Plenty timber for shelter. An army of thousands couldn’t dig out a small army that’s well hidden. God pressed His thumb against the earth and made these passages for the poor, Onion. I ain’t the first to know it. Spartacus, Toussaint-Louverture, Garibaldi, they all knowed it. It worked for them. They hid thousands of soldiers that way. These tiny passages will entrench hundreds of Negroes against an enemy of thousands. Trench warfare. You see?”

I didn’t see. I was fretting that we was standing out in the cold in the middle of no place, and come night, it’d be even colder. I weren’t liking that idea. But, being that he never asked my opinion, I told him truthfully, “I don’t rightly know ’bout them things, Captain, having never been in no mountains myself.”

He looked at me. The Old Man never smiled, but the gray eyes got soft a minute. “Well, you’ll be in ’em soon enough.”

We weren’t far from Pittsburgh, turns out. We followed the tracks all day back down the mountain to the nearest town, waited, and caught a train to Boston. On the train, the Old Man announced his plan. “I got to raise money by speechifying. It ain’t nothing to it. It’s just a show. After I raise enough chips, we’ll head out west again with a full purse to gather the men and raise the hive in our fight against the infernal institution. Don’t tell nobody nothing ’bout our purpose in the meantime.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“And I might ask you to tell some of our donors about your life of deprivation and starvation as a slave. Being hungry and all. Whipped scandalous, and them type of things. You can tell them that.”

I didn’t want to confess to him I weren’t never hungry as a slave, nor was never whipped scandalous. Fact is, only time I was hungry and eating out of garbage barrels and sleeping out in the cold was when I was free with him. But it weren’t proper to say it, so I nodded.

“And while I gives the show,” he said, “you must watch the back of the hall for any federal agents. That’s important. They is warm on us now.”

“What do they look like?”

“Hmm. I reckon they got oily hair and is done up in proper clothing. You’ll see ’em. Don’t worry. I done arranged everything. Yours won’t be the only eyes watching. We’ll have plenty help.”

True to his word, we was met up at the Boston train station by two of the finest, richest-looking white fellers I ever seen. They treated him like a king, fed us well, and drug him along to a couple of churches for some speechifying. He pretended he weren’t for it at first, but they insisted it was already arranged—and he went along as though it come as a surprise. At the churches he gived boring speeches to crowds of white folks who wanted to hear all about his adventures fighting out west. I never been one for speeching and carrying on, unless course there’s joy juice or paying money involved, but I must say that while the Old Man was hated out on the plains, he was a star back east. They couldn’t get enough of his stories about the rebels. You would’a thunk that every Pro Slaver, including Dutch, Miss Abby, Chase, and all them other low drummers, scammers, four-flushers, and pickpockets, who mostly lived off pennies and generally didn’t treat the Negro any worse than they treated each other, was a bunch of cranks, heathens, and drunks who runned around murdering one another while the Free Staters spent all day setting in church at choir practice and making paper cutout dolls on Wednesday nights. Three minutes into his talk, the Old Man had them high-siddity white folks hollering bloody murder against the rebels, nigh shouting against slavery. He weren’t much of a speaker, to be honest, but for once he got the wind in his sails about our Dear Maker Who Restoreth Our Fortunes, he got ’em going, and the word spread fast, so by the time we hit the next church, all he had to say was, “I’m John Brown from Kansas, and I’s fighting slavery,” and they roared. They called for them rebels’ heads, announced they’d trounce ’em, bounce ’em, kill ’em, deaden ’em where they stood. Some of the women broke into tears once the Old Man spoke. It made me a bit sad, truth be to tell it, to watch them hundreds of white folks crying for the Negro, for there weren’t hardly ever any Negroes present at most of them gatherings, and them that was there was doodied up and quiet as a mouse. It seemed to me the whole business of the Negro’s life out there weren’t no different than it was out west, to my mind. It was like a big, long lynching. Everybody got to make a speech about the Negro but the Negro.

If the Old Man was hiding from a federal agent, he had a strange way of showing it. From Boston to Connecticut, New York City, Poughkeepsie, and Philadelphia, we done one show after another. It was always the same deal. He’d say, “I’m John Brown from Kansas, and I’s fighting slavery,” and they’d howl. We collected quite a bit of money in this fashion, with me movin’ ’bout the hall passing the hat. Sometimes I collected as much as twenty-five dollars, sometimes more, sometimes less. But the Old Man made it clear to all them followers that he was planning to head back west to fight slavery, clean, in his own fashion. Some questioned him about how he planned to do it, how he planned to fight slavery and all, who he was gonna do it with, and so forth. They put the question to him ten times, twenty times, in every town. “How you gonna fight the Pro Slavers, Captain Brown? How you gonna conduct the war?” He didn’t tell a straight-out fib. Rather he bounced around the question. I knowed he weren’t going to tell them. He never told his men or even his own sons his plans. If he weren’t tellin’ his own people, he weren’t tellin’ no group of strangers who throwed him a quarter apiece. Truth is, he didn’t trust nobody with his plans, especially his own race. “These house-born city-grubbers is good for talk only, Onion,” he muttered. “Talk, talk, talk. That’s all they do. The Negro has heard talk for two hundred years.”

I could’a heard it another two hundred years the way I was living, for I was mostly satisfied in them times. I had the Old Man to myself, and we lived high. I ate well. Slept well. In feather beds. Traveled on trains in white folks’ compartments. Them Yanks treated me fine. They didn’t no more notice me of being a boy under that dress and bonnet than they would notice a speck of dust in a room full of cash. I was simply a Negro to them. “Where did you find her?” was the question most asked of the Old Man. He’d shrug and say, “She is one of the many multitudes of enshackled persons whom I has freed in God’s name.” Them women fussed over me something fierce. They oohed and ahhed and gived me dresses, cakes, bonnets, powder, ear loops, pompons, feathers, and gauze. I was always wise enough to keep silent around white folks in them days, but there weren’t no call for me to talk nohow. There ain’t nothing gets a Yankee madder than a smart colored person, of which I reckon they figured there was only one in the world, Mr. Douglass. So I played dumb and tragic, and in this manner I managed to finagle a full set of boy’s pantaloons, shirt, jacket, and shoes, plus twenty-five cents from a woman in Connecticut who sobbed when I told her I was aiming on freeing my enslaved brother, of which I had nar one. I hid those clothes in my gunnysack for my own purpose, for I always had my eye on movement, always kept myself ready to roll. In the back of my mind was the notion that the Old Man would one day be deadened by somebody, for he was a fool about dying. He’d say, “I’m on God’s clock, Onion. I’m prepared to die fighting against the infernal institution,” which was fine for him but not for me. I always made ready for the day I’d be on my own.

We slung along like that for a few weeks till spring approached, and the Old Man begun pining for the prairie. Them city parlor halls and speakings was wearing him down. “I’d like to go back west to smell the spring air and fight the infernal institution, Onion,” he said, “but we still has not made enough yet to raise our army. And there is still one special interest I must tend to here.” So instead of leaving from Philadelphia the way he planned, he decided to make a second pass at Boston before heading west for good.

They had him set up at a big hall there. His handlers had primed the thing. There was a fine, mighty crowd standing outside, waiting to be let in, which meant much money to be collected. But they delayed it. Me and the Old Man was standing behind the big organ pipes in the pulpit, waiting for the crowd to come in, when the Old Man asked one of his handlers who was standing about, “What’s the delay for?”

The man was in a tizzy. He seemed scared. “A federal agent from Kansas has come to this area to arrest you,” he said.

“When?”

“No one knows when or where, but someone spotted him at the train station this morning. You want to cancel today’s event?”

Oh, that primed the Old Man. That drug him out. He loved a fight. He touched his seven-shooters. “He better not show his face in here,” he said. And the others standing around allowed that they agreed, and promised that if the agent showed himself, why, he’d be jumped and shackled. But I had no trust in them Yanks. They weren’t uncivilized like the raw Yanks out west, who would knock you cold and drug you along from a stirrup by one boot and beat you something scandalous like a good Pro Slaver would. These Yanks was civilized.

“There will be no arrest in here today,” the Old Man said. “Open the doors.”

They ran and done as he said, and the crowd filed in. But before he walked out to the pulpit to speak, the Captain pulled me aside and gived me warning. “Stand along the far wall and watch the room,” he said. “Keep your eyes open for that federal agent.”

“What do a federal agent look like?”

“You can smell him. A federal man smells like bear, for he uses bear grease to oil his hair and lives indoors. He don’t cut stove wood or plow a mule. He’ll be clean looking. Yellow and pale.”

I looked into the hall. Seemed like about five hundred folks out there fit that description, not including the women. The Old Man and his boys had taken down a bear or two in our travels, but other than eating the meat and using the fur to warm my gizzards, weren’t nothing I could remember about the bear smell. But I said, “What do I do if I see him?”

“Don’t say nothing or interrupt my talking. Just wave the Good Lord feather in your bonnet.” That was our sign, see. That feather he gived me from the Good Lord Bird, which I gived to Frederick, and got back from Frederick after he died. I kept that thing stuffed in my bonnet flush to my face.

I allowed that I would do as he said, and he went up to the pulpit while I moved into the room.

He walked up to the podium wearing both his seven-shooters and his broadsword with a look on his face that showed he was ready to crust over on some evil. When the Old Man got to boiling and was ready to throw hot grits around and raise hell, he wouldn’t get excited. He’d go the other way. He’d calm up, get holy, and his voice, normally flat like the plains, would get high and tight, curvy and jagged sharp, like the Pennsylvania mountains he favored. First thing he said was, “I has word a federal agent is on my tail. If he is present, let him show himself. I will meet him with an iron fist right here.”

Blessed God if you couldn’t hear a pin drop in there let me drop a corpse by the telling of it. Good God, he put a scare into them Yanks then. They growed quiet when he said that, for he feared ’em up something good. They seen his true nature. Then, after a few moments, they got their courage up, and growed mad, and booed and hissed. They flew hot as the devil, and shouted out they was ready to leap on anyone who would so much as look at the Old Man sideways. That brought me some relief, but not much, for they was cowards and talkers, whereas the Old Man, when he beat his drum wrong about somebody, he’d drug ’em over the quit line without too much tearing his hair out ’bout the whole bit. But he couldn’t kill nobody in there, not with all them people there, and that gived me some comfort.

The room quieted after he shussed ’em and assured ’em no agent would dare show himself anyhow. Then he went on into his normal speech, pissing all over the Pro Slavers as usual, hollering ’bout all the killings they done, without mentioning his own, of course.

I knowed that speech like the back of my hand, having heard it many times by then, so I got bored and fell asleep. Near the end of things, I woke up and runned my eyeballs along the walls, just to be safe, and darned if I didn’t spot a feller who seemed suspicious.

He stood along the back wall among several other fellers who hooted and hollered against the Pro Slavers. He didn’t join them in that. Didn’t gnash his teeth or grind his hands or nod his head, or cry and pull his hair and holler against the Pro Slavers like those around him did. He weren’t enraptured with the Old Man. He stood stone-cold silent, cool as spring water, watching. He was a clean-cut feller. Short, stout, pale from living inside, wearing a bowler cap, white shirt, and bow tie, with a handlebar mustache. When the Old Man paused in his speech for a moment, the crowd shifted, for it growed hot in the room, and the feller removed his hat, showing a mane of thick, oily hair. By the time he pushed back a lick of that oily hair and throwed the hat back on his head, the thought had gathered in my mind. That was an oily-haired man if I ever saw one, and I ought to go over there and at least smell him for bear.

The Old Man had kicked his speech into full-out blast by that time, for near the end of his speech he always worked his talk up full, and was in high spirits anyway for he knowed he was heading west after this last big throw-down. He gived his usual proclamations against the dreaded master and the poor slave not prospering and so forth. The crowd was loving it, the women crying and pulling out their hair and gnashing their teeth—it was a good show—but I was alarmed now, watching that spy.

I weren’t taking no chances. I slung my feather out my bonnet and waved it toward the podium, but the Old Man was in high spirits and had peaked by then. He had launched into the final part of his talk, where he busted loose to God in prayer, which he always done at the end, and course he always done his praying with his eyes closed.

I already done told you how long the Old Man’s prayers went. He could tear into a prayer for two hours and spout the Bible easy as you and I can spout the alphabet, and he could do that alone, by hisself, with nobody standing around. So imagine when he had a few hundred folks setting there listening on his thoughts and pleas to our Great King of Kings who made rubber and trees and honey and jam with biscuits and all them good things. He could go on for hours, and we actually lost money on account of that, for sometimes them Yanks got worn out with his rumblings to our Maker and cleared the hall before the basket got passed. He growed wise to that tactic by that time and begun to keep his speculatings short, which for him meant still at least a half hour, his eyes shut at the pulpit, howling at our Maker to hold him in high stead while he done His duty of murdering the slavers and sending them to Glory or Lucifer, though he had a devil of a time keeping it to that length.

I reckon the agent had spied the show before, ’cause he knowed the Old Man was winding down, too. He saw the Old Man close his eyes to start his Bibling and quickly slipped off the back wall and worked through the crowd gathered along the side aisle of the hall, making his way to the front. I quick waved my feather at the Old Man again, but his eyes was shut tight as he gived the Lord ninety cents on the dollar. There weren’t nothing to do but move with the agent.

I came off the back wall and worked my way around the room behind him fast as I could. He was closer to the stage than I was, and movin’ quick.

The Old Man must’a smelled a rat, for in the middle of his proclamations ’bout immortal souls and the afflicted, his eyes suddenly popped open and he blurted out a quick “Amen.” The crowd hopped out their seats and surged to the front of the hall, making a beeline to commingle with their hero and shake his hand and get his autograph and give him coin donations and so forth.

They swarmed the agent as well, and slowed his progress. But he was still ahead of me, and I was but a colored girl, and the crowd pushed me aside in the scramble to shake the Old Man’s hand. I was being thumped ’bout by Yankees trying to swarm the Old Man. I waved the Good Lord feather again but I was drowned out by taller adults all around. I caught a glimpse of a little girl up front who beat the crowd to the Old Man, holding out a paper for him to sign. He leaned down to sign it, and as he done so, the agent busted through the crowd and made it to the front of the room and was nearly on him. I jumped into the pews and leaped over the seats toward the front.

I was ten feet off when the agent was within arm’s length of the Captain, who had bent down with his back to the agent to put his mark on the paper for the little girl. I crowed out, “Captain! I smell bear!”

The crowd paused a moment, and I do believe the Captain heard me, for his head snapped up and the old, stern, wrinkled face clicked to alertness. He stood and spun around in a snap, his hands on his seven-shooters and I ducked low, for that gun makes a powerful boom when it wakes up. He caught the feller cold. Had the drop on him, for the agent hadn’t quite reached him yet, nor gone for his metal. He was a dead man.

“Aha!” the Old Man said.

Then, to my surprise, his hands came off his seven-shooters and his tight face uncrinkled. He stuck his hand out. “I see you has got my letters.”

The stout feller with a mustache and bow tie stopped short and bowed low in his bowler cap. “Indeed!” he said. He spoke with an English accent. “Hugh Forbes at your service, General. It is an honor to meet the great warrior of slavery of whom I have heard so much. May I shake your hand?”

They shook hands. I reckon this was the “special interest” the Captain had waited on, the thing he had hung around waiting for back east before heading back to the plains.

“I has studied your great war pamphlet, Mr. Forbes,” the Old Man said, “and I daresay it is excellent.”

Forbes bowed low again. “You humble me, dear sir, though I do confess my military training duties are underscored by the many victories I experienced on the European continent under the legions of the great General Garibaldi himself.”

“Indeed it is pertinent,” the Old Man said. “For I has a plan that needs your military training and expertise.” He glanced around at the folks gathered ’round them, then at me. “Let us retire to the back room here, whilst my consort counts up the funds from tonight’s gatherers. There is doings of which I needs to discuss with you in private.”

With that, the two went into the back room of the hall while I collected the funds. What they discussed I weren’t privy to, but they commingled there the better part of three hours, and when they emerged, the hall had cleared out.

It was quiet and the streets was safe. I handed the Old Man the $158 collected from that night’s doings, our best take ever. The Old Man produced another pile of bills, counted them up, placed a total of $600 in a brown bag, just ’bout every penny we’d made from our three months of giving speeches and shows up and down the East Coast, raising money for his army, and handed the bag to Mr. Forbes.

Mr. Forbes took the bag and stuffed it in his vest pocket. “I am proud to serve in the legions of a great man. A general in the score of Toussaint-Louverture, Socrates, and Hippocrates.”

“I’m a captain, serving in the army of the Prince of Peace,” Old Man Brown said.

“Ah, but to me you are a general, sir, and I will call you thus for I serve under nothing less.”

With that, he turned and marched down the alley, military style, like a soldier, clickety-clack, erect and proud.

The Old Man watched him all the way till he reached the end of the alley. “I has been trying to find that man for two years,” he announced. “That is why we lingered here so long, Onion. The Lord finally brung him to me. He will meet us in Iowa and train our men. He is from Europe.”

“He is?”

“Yes indeed. A trained expert under Garibaldi himself. We has a true military trainer, Onion. Now, finally, I am ready to go to war.”

Forbes reached the end of the alley, turned to the Old Man, tipped his cap, bowed, and walked away into the night.

The Old Man never saw him again.

20. Rousing the Hive

We sat in a flophouse in Chester, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, for two weeks while the Old Man wrote letters, studied maps, and waited for word of the military trainer, Mr. Forbes, arriving in Iowa. When he got a letter from Mr. Kagi saying he hadn’t arrived, he knowed the jig was up. He didn’t mope ’bout it, but rather seen it as a positive sign. “We been had by a wicked snare, Onion. The devil is busy. But the Lord reckons we don’t need training to fight our war. Being on the righteous side of His word is training enough. Besides,” he announced, “my greater plan is ’bout to be unleashed. It is time to hive the queen bees. We is going to Canada.”

“Why, Captain?”

“Is it the white man upon whom the Negro can depend to fight his war, Little Onion? No. It is the Negro himself. We are ’bout to unleash the true gladiators in this hellion against the infernal wickedness. The leaders of the Negro people themselves. Onward.”

I weren’t against it. Being that me and the Old Man traveled as man and consort, the mistress at the flophouse where we stayed made me sleep in the maids’ quarters, a rat-infested sop of a room that reminded me of Kansas. I had gotten spoiled by them Yanks crying over me being a slave and filling me with hasty pudding, smoked turkey, venison, boiled pigeon, lamb, dainty fish, and pumpkin bread every chance they got. The mistress of that tavern weren’t one of those. She didn’t have two cents’ worth of sympathy for no abolitionist, mostly ’cause she was basically a slave herself. She served sour biscuits and gravy, which was fine for herself and the Old Man, for he didn’t have no taste for anything cooked, but my own tastes growed to pumpkin bread, fresh blackberries, turkey, venison, boiled pigeon, lamb, dainty fish, pumpkin bread, and butchered ham with real German sauerkraut like I had up in Boston every time I dropped word on being a slave. I was all for staking out new territory. Besides, Canada was free country. I could stay there and be done with him before he got deadened, which was my thoughts.

We took the train to Detroit, and from there met up with the Old Man’s army, which had growed from nine to twelve. Included in that group was four of the Old Man’s sons: Owen, of course, Salmon, plus two younger ones, Watson and Oliver. Jason and John had quit. A. D. Stevens was still there, grousing, dangerous Yankee that he was. Kagi had commanded them as the Old Man had ordered, and there was some new roughnecks: Charles Tidd, a hot-tempered feller who had served as a soldier with the federals. John Cook was still there, now carrying two six-shooters on his hips, and several others including the Old Man’s sons-in-law, the Thompson boys, and the Coppoc brothers—them last two being shooting Quakers. That was the main ones. With the exception of Cook, who could talk the horns off the devil’s head, they was mostly quiet, serious fellers, men of letters, so to speak. They read newspapers and books, and while they was mellow in polite company, they’d loose their business on you with a muzzle loader and blow a hole in your face in a minute. Them fellers was dangerous, but for the simple reason they had a cause. Ain’t no worse thing in the world than fronting up against one of those, for a man with a cause, right or wrong, has got plenty to prove, and will make you suck sorrow if you get in the way of ’em wrongly.

We wagoneered up to Chatham, Ontario, the men in the back while the Old Man and I rode up front. He was cheerful all the way, allowing that we was heading to a special meeting. “It’s the first of its type,” he announced. “A convention with Negroes from all over America and Canada is hiving to make a resolution against slavery. The war begins in earnest, Onion. We will have numbers. We will have resolution. We will have revolution! It’s percolating!”

It didn’t percolate right off. Only forty-five folks percolated to Chatham, and of that number, nearly a third was the white fellers from the Old Man’s army or was white fellers who picked up and joined us along the way. It was January, cold and snowy, and on account of that or whatever other duties kept them free Negroes home, it was as pitiful a convention as I ever did see. It was held in an old Masons’ lodge in a single day, with lots of speeches and resolving and herebys and halooting ’bout this and that and not a bite to eat; a bunch of them fellers read declarations the Old Man had written up, and there was a lot of hollering ’bout who shot John and what the slave needed to do to prosper and get clear of the white man. There weren’t nothing too good for encouragement in the whole deal from what I could see. Even the Old Man’s pal Mr. Douglass didn’t come, and that made the Old Man’s feathers fall some.

“Frederick never plans well,” he said airily, “and he will regret the lack of planning that caused him to miss one of the great moments in American history. There is great speakers and great minds present here. We is changing the course of this country as we speak, Onion.”

Course, being that he was the main appointed speaker and wrote the constitution and set the bylaws and basically done the whole thing himself, that helped make the thing in his mind seem more important. It was all ’bout him, him, and him. Nobody in America could outdo John Brown when it come to tooting his own whistle. He let the Negroes have their moments, course, and after they blowed out more hot gas and done more grousing ’bout the white man and slavery in that one day than I was to hear in the next thirty years, it was his turn. It was the end of the day, and they had speechified and signed papers and made resolutions and the like, and it was the Old Man’s turn to speak and show his papers and froth his mouth ’bout the whole slavery show. I was dead tired and hungry by then, course, having had nothing to eat being around him as usual, but he was the main event, and that being so, they was all licking their chops for him when he shuffled to the front of the room fluffling his papers, while the room lay quiet, full of expectation.

He wore a string tie for the occasion, and sewed three new buttons on his tattered suit, of which they was all different-colored buttons, but for him that was sporty. He stood upon the old rostrum, cleared his throat, then declared, “The day of the Negro’s victory is at hand.” And off he went. I ought to say here that these wasn’t no ordinary Negroes the Old Man was talking with. These Negroes were upper crust. They wore bow ties and bowler caps. They had all their teeth. Their hair was clipped clean. They was schoolteachers and ministers and doctors; shaved men who knowed their letters, and, by God, the Old Man roused these sporty, free, highfalutin, big-time Negroes till they was ready to roast corn and eat earworms in his favor. He raised the rafters on that old lodge house. He had them Negroes bellowing like sheep. When he harped ’bout destroying the white man’s slave yard, they hollered, “Yes!” When he railed ’bout taking the revolution to the white man, they screamed, “We is all for it!” When he honked on ’bout busting them slaves loose by force, they piped out, “Let us begin!” But when he quit his speech and held up a paper asking for volunteers to come up and sign on in his war against slavery, not a man stepped forward nor raised his hand. The room was quiet as a cotton sack.

Finally a feller in the back stood up.

“We is all for your war on slavery,” he said, “but would like to know what your specific plan is.”

“I can’t announce it,” the Old Man grumbled. “There might be spies among us. But I can tell you, it ain’t a peaceable march using moral suasion.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I aim to purge America’s sin with blood. And I will do it soon. With the help of the Negro people.”

That curdled my cheese right there, and I decided Canada is where I would stay. I had my pantaloons, shirt, and shoes hidden away, plus a few pennies I’d managed to save up from our Yankee fund-raising. I figured with all them high-siddity niggers in the room, there must be at least one or two kindhearted souls among ’em who would help me get started out new again, maybe tender me some shelter and a bit to eat till I got going enough to pull up my own knickers.

A slim feller with long sideburns and a smock coat near the front of the room stood up. “I allows that is plan enough for me,” the feller said. “I will join up.” His name was O. P. Anderson. A braver soul you will not meet. But I’ll get to O.P. in a minute.

Next the Old Man looked around the room and asked, “Is there anyone else?”

Not a soul stirred.

Finally another feller spoke out. “If you will just tell a little of your battle plan, Captain, then I will join. I can’t sign a contract knowing what kind of dangers is ahead.”

“I ain’t asking you to trot ’round a circle like a horse. Is you wanting to save your people or not?”

“That’s just it. They’re my people.”

“No they’re not. They’re God’s people.”

That started some wrangling and conniption, with some arguing this way and that, some with the Old Man, others against. Finally the first feller who started the ruckus said, “I ain’t afraid, Captain. I escaped slavery and run three thousand miles here on foot and horseback. But I hold my life dear. And if I’m to lose it fighting slavery, I would like to know the manner in which it is to happen.”

Several others agreed with him, and allowed they’d join, too, if the Old Man would simply reveal his plan—where it would happen, when, what was the strategy, and so forth. But the Old Man was stubborn on that count, and wouldn’t turn. They pressed him on it.

“Why is you holding back?” one said.

“Is there a catch?” said another.

“It’s a secret conference, Captain! Ain’t nobody gonna tell!”

“We don’t know you!” somebody hollered. “Who are you? Why should we trust you? You is white, and got nothing to lose, whereas we stand to lose everything.”

That got him, and the Old Man firmed up, he got mad, for his voice thinned out and his eyes growed steady and cold, which they did in them times. “I has proven over the course of my life that I am a man of my word,” he said. “I am a friend of the Negro and I move to God’s purpose. If I say I am planning a war to end slavery, that is word enough. This war will begin here but not end here. It will go on whether you join it or not. You have to meet your Maker just as I do. So go ahead: Work out on your own what you chooses to tell Him when your time to meet Him comes. I only ask”—and here he glared ’bout the room—“that whatever you do, tell no one about what you’ve heard here.”

He looked ’bout the room. Not a soul spoke out. He nodded. “Since there is no one else signing on, our business is done. Therefore, as president of this here body and author of this here constitution, I hereby move to close this—”

“Hold a minute, Captain.” Here a voice come from the back of the room.

Every head turned to see a woman. She was the only woman in the room besides yours truly, who don’t count. She was a short, slender number. She wore her hair under a wrap and a simple maid’s dress and apron. Her feet was covered by a pair of man’s boots. She dressed like a slave, except for a colorful shawl, beaten and worn, which she carried across her arm. She had a quiet manner ’bout her, she weren’t a talker, you could see that, but her eyes was dark and boiling. She moved toward the front of the room like the wind, quick, silent, smooth, taut as rope, and them fellers parted and slid their benches out the way to let her pass. There was something fearful ’bout that woman, silent, terrible, and strong, and I made up my mind to keep away from her right off. I had good practice being a girl by then. But colored women could sniff out my true nature better than most, and something told me that a powerful-looking woman like that could not be fooled with nor did she fool easily. She slipped to the front of the room with her hands folded in across her chest and faced the men. If you passed by the window of that old lodge and peeked inside, you’d’a thunk a cleaning woman was addressing a room full of professors, explaining to them why she hadn’t cleaned the privy or some such thing, for the men was dressed in suits, hats, and bow ties—whereas she was dressed like a simple slave.

“My name’s Harriet Tubman,” she said. “And I know this man.” She nodded to the Captain. “John Brown don’t have to explain nothing to this plain woman. If he say he got a good plan, he got a good plan. That’s more than anyone here got. He done took many a whipping for the colored, and he took it standing up. He got his own wife and children starving at home. He already gived the life of one of his sons to the cause. How many of you has gived yours? He ain’t asking you to feed his children, is he? He ain’t asking you to help him, is he? He’s asking you to help yourself. To free yourself.”

Silence in the room. She glared ’bout.

“Y’all clucking like a bunch of hens in here,” she said. “You setting here warm and cozy, worrying ’bout your own skin, while there’s children crying for their mothers right now. There’s fathers torn apart from their wives. Mothers torn from their children. Some of you got wives, children, living in slavery. And you setting here on the doorstep of change, scared to walk through it? I ought to take a switch to some of you. Who’s a man here? Be a man!”

Well, it hurt my heart to hear her talk that way, for I was wanting to be a man myself, but afraid of it, truth be told, ’cause I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to be hungry. I liked somebody taking care of me. I liked being coddled by Yanks and rebels for doing nothing but shoving biscuits down my throat, and being led ’bout by the Old Man, who took care of me. And before that, Pie and Miss Abby taking care of me. Mrs. Tubman standing there so firm saying them words, reminded me of Sibonia before she met the hangman’s noose, tellin’ Judge Fuggett to his face: “I am the woman, and I am not ashamed or afraid to confess it.” She was a fool to hang for freedom! Why fight when you can run for it? The whole business shamed me worse than if Mrs. Tubman had whipped me, and before I knowed it, I heard a terrible squawking sound in the room, the sound of a scared soul, shouting forth, hollering, “I’ll follow the Captain to the ends of the earth! Count me in!”

It was several moments before I realized all that piping and squawking was my own voice, and I nearly wet myself.

“Praise God!” Mrs. Tubman said. “And a child will lead them! Praise Jesus!”

Well that got ’em all going, and before you know it, every single soul in that room stood up and stumbled over each other in their bowler hats to get to the front of the room to sign on. Clergymen, doctors, blacksmiths, barbers, teachers. Men who never handled a gun or sword. To a man they put their names to that paper, signing on, and it was done.

The room emptied thereafter, and the Captain found himself standing in the empty hall with Mrs. Tubman while I cleaned up, sweeping the floor, for he had borrowed the hall under his name and wanted to return it as he got it. He thanked her as she stood there, but she waved her hand. “I hope you do have a plan, Captain, for if you don’t, we will all suffer for nothing.”

“I’m working on it, with God’s help,” the Old Man said.

“That ain’t enough. God gived you the seed. But the watering and caring of that seed is up to you. You’s a farmer, Captain. You know this.”

“Course,” the Old Man grumbled.

“Make sure it’s right,” Mrs. Tubman said. “Remember. Your average Negro would rather run from slavery than fight it. You got to give ’em direct orders. With a direct, clear plan. With an exact time. And a fallback plan if the thing don’t go. You can’t deviate from your plan once it set. Start down the road and don’t go sideways. If you deviates, your people will lose confidence and fail you. Take it from me.”

“Yes, General.” That’s the first and only time I ever heard the Old Man capitulate to anyone, colored or white, or ever call anyone a general.

“And the map I gived you of the various routes through Virginia and Maryland, you must memorize and destroy. You got to do that.”

“Course, General.”

“Okay. God bless you, then. Send me the word when you is ready, and I will send as many to you as I can. And I will come myself.” She gived him the address of the tavern in Canada where she was staying, and made ready to leave.

“Remember, you must be organized, Captain. Do not get too hung up on emotional matters. Some is gonna die in this war. God don’t need your prayers. He needs your action. Make your date solid. Hold tight to it. The wheres and whats of your plan, don’t nobody need to know, but hold tight to the date, for folks is coming a long way. My people will be coming from a long way. And I will be coming from a long way.”

“I will make it clear, General,” he said. “And I will hold tight to the date.”

“Good,” she said. “May God bless you and keep you for what you has done and is ’bout to do.”

She flung on her shawl and prepared to leave. As she did, she spotted me toward the door, sweeping the floor, hiding behind that broom more or less, for that woman had my number. She motioned to me. “Come over here, child,” she said.

“I’m busy here, ma’am,” I croaked.

“Git over here.”

I went over, still sweeping.

She looked at me a long time, watching me sweep the floor, wearing that damn fool dress. I didn’t say a word. Just kept on sweeping.

Finally she placed her small foot on the broom and stopped it. I had to look up at her then. Them eyes was staring down at me. I can’t say they was kind eyes. Rather they was tight as balled fists. Full. Firm. Stirred. The wind seemed to live in that woman’s face. Looking at her was like staring at a hurricane.

“You done good to speak out,” she said. “To make some of these fellers stand up as men. But the wind of change got to blow in your heart, too,” she said softly. “A body can be whatever they want to be in this world. It ain’t no business of mine. Slavery done made a fool out of a lot of folks. Twisted ’em all different kinds of ways. I seen it happen many a time in my day. I expect it’ll happen in all our tomorrows, too, for when you slave a person, you slave the one in front and the one behind.”

She looked off out the window. It was snowing out there. She looked right lonely at that moment. “I had a husband once,” she said. “But he was fearful. He wanted a wife and not a soldier. He became something like a woman hisself. He was fearful. Couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand being a man. But I led him to freedom land anyway.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We all got to die,” she said. “But dying as your true self is always better. God’ll take you however you come to Him. But it’s easier on a soul to come to Him clean. You’re forever free that way. From top to bottom.”

With that, she turned and walked past the other side of the room toward the door, where the Old Man was busy picking up his papers, maps, and his seven-shooter. He seen she was leaving, and dropped his papers to hurry to open the door to let her out. She stood at the open door a minute, watching the snow, her eyes glancing up and down at the empty, snowy road. She studied the street carefully a long moment, looking for slave stealers, I reckon. That woman was always on the lookout. She watched the street as she spoke to him.

“Remember, Captain, whatever your plan, be on time. Don’t deviate the time. Compromise life before you compromise time. Time is the one thing you can’t compromise.”

“Right, General.”

She bid him a hasty good-bye and left, walking down the road in them boots and that colorful shawl draped on her shoulders, snow falling on the empty road around her, as me and the Old Man watched her.

Then she quickly turned back, as if she forgot something, walked to the steps where we stood, still wearing her beaten colorful shawl, and held it out for me. “Take that and hold it,” she said, “for it may be useful.” Then she said to the Old Man again, “Remember, Captain. Be on time. Don’t compromise the time.”

“Right, General.”

But he did compromise the time. He blowed that one, too. And for that reason, the one person he could count on, the greatest slave emancipator in American history, the best fighter he could’a got, the one person who knowed more ’bout escaping the white man’s troubling waters than any man alive, never showed up. The last he seen of her was the back of her head as she walked down the road in Chatham, Canada. At the time, I weren’t sad to see her go, neither.

21. The Plan

By the time the Old Man got back to Iowa, he was so excited, it was a pity. He left the U.S.A. for Canada with twelve men, expecting to pick up hundreds. He come back to the U.S.A. with thirteen, on account of O. P. Anderson, who joined us on the spot, as well as a few white stragglers who come along for a while and dropped off like usual when they seen that freeing the slaves was liable to get your head squared by an ax or butchered some other way. The rest of the coloreds we’d met up in Canada went back to their homes in various parts of America but had promised to come when called. Whether they was gonna be true to their word or not, the Old Man didn’t seem worried, for by the time he got back to Iowa, he was downright joyful. He’d got the General behind him, that was Mrs. Tubman.

He almost weren’t sensible in his excitement. He was joyful. It ain’t a clean proposition when you decides to mount thirteen fellers and declare a war on something rather than somebody. It occurred to me then he might be slippin’ and I ought to maybe take my leave when we got back home before he got too deep into whatever foolishness he planned next, for he didn’t seem right. But in them days I didn’t linger on any subject so long as I was shoving eggs, fried okra, and boiled partridge down my throat. Besides, the Old Man had more bad luck than any man I ever knowed, and that can’t help but to make a person likable and interesting to be around. He spent long hours in his tent, praying, studying maps, compasses, and scribbling numbers. He always wrote letters like a madman, but now he wrote triple the letters he wrote before, so much that his army’s main job in them first weeks in Tabor involved nothing more than sending and getting his mail. He sent his men to Pee Dee, Springdale, and Johnston City, to pick up letters from safe houses and taverns and friends and send off letters to Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. It took him hours to go through his mail, and while he done that, his men trained with wood swords and pistols. Some of that mail was letters with money from his abolitionist supporters back east. He had a group of six white fellers in New England who gived him big lumps of money. Even his friend Mr. Douglass sent him a shilling or three. But the truth of it is, most of them letters, the ones that weren’t from creditors, contained not money but questions. Them white folks back east was asking for—no begging for—his plans.

“Look at this, Onion,” he railed, holding up a letter. “All they do is ask questions. Talk, talk, talk, that’s all they do. Armchair soldiers. Setting around while someone destroys their house and home with the infernal institution. And they call me insane! Whyn’t they just send the money? I’m the one they trusted to take on the fight, why tie my hands behind my back by asking me how. There ain’t no ‘how,’ Onion. One must do, like Cromwell. There are spies everywhere. I’d be a fool to tell ’em my top-secret plans!” He was confounded with it. He was furious when some of his supporters declared they weren’t going to send him a dime more if he didn’t tell them their plans.

The ironical thing is, I reckon he would have told them his plans. He wanted to tell ’em his plans. Problem is, I don’t think the Old Man knowed what his plan was hisself.

He knowed what he wanted to do. But as to the exactness of it—and I knowed many has studied it and declared this and that and the other on the subject—Old John Brown didn’t know exactly what he was gonna do from sunup to sundown on the slavery question. He knowed what he weren’t gonna do. He weren’t going to go down quiet. He weren’t going to have a sit-down committee meeting with the Pro Slavers and nag and commingle and jingle with ’em over punch and lemonade and go bobbing for apples with ’em. He was going down raising hell. But what kind of hell, he was waiting on the Lord to tell him what that is, is my reckonings, and the Lord weren’t tellin’, at least that first part of the year in Tabor. So we set ’bout Tabor in a rented cabin, the men training with swords and fussin’ over spiritual matters and fetching his mail and grousing amongst themselves, waiting for him to bark out what was next. I got the ague and was on my back for a month of that time, and not long after I got well, the ague hit the Old Man. It floored him. Knocked him on his back. He didn’t move for a week. Then two. Then a month. March. April. At times I thought he was gone. He’d lay there, mumbling and murmuring, saying, “Napoleon used the mountains of the Iberians! I ain’t done yet!” and “Josephus, catch me if you can!” only to fall out again. Sometimes he’d sit straight up, feverish, staring at the ceiling, and holler, “Frederick. Charles! Amelia. Get that bird!” then drop off again, like he was dead. The two of his sons, Jason and John Jr., who declared they was out of the slave war and had already quit, he’d call out their names sometimes, hollering, “John! Get Jason in here!” when neither was within five hundred miles. Several of his army left, promising to return, and did not. But others replaced them. The main ones though—Kagi, Stevens, Cook, Hinton, O. P. Anderson—they stayed, training themselves with wood swords. “We promised to fight with the Old Man till death,” Kagi said, “even if it’s his.”

Four months in that cabin gived me plenty of time to hear the Old Man’s thoughts, for he was in a fever and prone to blab ’bout himself. Come to find out he’d failed at just ’bout everything. He had several businesses that failed: cattle rustling, tannery, land speculating. All gone belly up. Bills and lawsuits from his old business partners followed him everywhere. To the end of his life, the Old Man wrote letters to creditors and throwed a dollar here or there to whomever he owed money to, which was a considerable amount of people. Between his first wife, Dianthe, who he outlived, and his second wife, Mary, who he did not, he had twenty-two children. Three of them, all little ones, died in a bunch in Ritchfield, Ohio, where he worked in a tannery; one of ’em, Amelia, was scalded to death in an accident. Losing them children hurt his heart sorely, but Frederick’s dying, he always seed that as murder, and it was always the biggest hurt on his heart.

We caught Frederick’s murderer, Rev. Martin, by the way. Cold got the drop on him back outside Osawatomie, Kansas, six months earlier, in fall, while rolling through there out of the western territory. We come upon him sleeping in a hammock at his settlement, a small spread tucked in a valley beneath a long, sloping ridge just outside Osawatomie. The Old Man was leading his crew along the edge of that ridge with his eye out for the federals when he suddenly stopped and held up the column, peering down at a figure in his front yard laying in a hammock, dead asleep. It was Rev. Martin, all right.

The Old Man sat atop his stolen mount and stared at Rev. Martin a long time.

Owen and Kagi rode up next to him.

“That’s the Rev,” Owen said.

“It is,” the Old Man said.

Kagi said calmly, “Let’s ride down there and have a talk with him.”

The Old Man stared down the ridge a long time. Then he shook his head. “No, Lieutenant. Let’s ride on. We’ve a war to fight. I don’t ride for revenge. ‘Revenge,’ says the Lord, ‘is Mine’s.’ I ride against the infernal institution.” And he upped and nicked his horse on the side, and we rode on.

His fever stayed on into May, then June. I nursed him during that time. I’d come in to give him soup and find him sleeping, only to bust awake in a sweat. Sometimes, when his mind came back to him, he’d brood over military books, poring over maps, land drawings, circling various towns and mountain ranges with a pencil. He seemed to edge toward getting better at them times, then suddenly bust back into full-out sickness. When he felt better, he’d wake up and pray like a fiend, two, three, four hours at a time, then drop off to peaceful sleep. When the fever got him again, he’d fall into feverish talking with our Maker. He had whole conversations with the Lord then, with backbiting arguments and sharing thoughts and biscuits with an imaginary man standing there, sometimes throwing pieces of cornmeal or johnnycake ’bout the room, as if he and the Maker, who was standing somewhere ’bout him, was having a marriage spat and throwing food ’bout the kitchen. “What do you think I am?” he’d say. “A money tree? A fool for gold? But that’s hardly a righteous request!” Or he’d suddenly set up and blurt out, “Frederick! Ride on! Ride on, son!” then fall out, asleep, only to wake up hours later, not remembering a thing he’d said or done. His mind had gone off on a jolt and fling, so to speak, it had ginned and baled hay and gone on home, and toward July, the men got to burbling ’bout disbanding altogether. Meanwhile, he allowed no one except me to enter his cabin to nurse and feed him and see ’bout him. It got to when I’d come out the cabin, his men would gather ’round me and say, “Is he living, Onion?”

“Yet living. Sleeping.”

“He ain’t dying, is he?”

“No. Praying and reading. Eating a little.”

“He got a plan?”

“Nar word.”

They waited like that and didn’t make a fuss with him, busying themselves under Kagi by clanking away with their swords, reading the military pamphlet written by Colonel Forbes, which is all the Old Man got out of that little gamer. They played with a cat named Lulu that wandered in, and picked corn and done other odd jobs for farmers that lived nearby. They got to know one another in that fashion, and Kagi stuck out in that time as a leader of men, for fighting and squabbling erupted among them during many an idle hour of chess and fighting with wood swords and fussin’ ’bout spirituality, for some of ’em was nonbelievers. He was a thoughtful feller, firm and steady, and he kept them together. He talked into line the more doubtful ones who mumbled ’bout disbanding and going back east to teach school or work jobs, and kept the rest of the rough ones in check. He didn’t take no backwater off nobody, not even Stevens, and that scoundrel was rough work and would bust out the brains of anybody who looked at him sideways. Kagi could handle him too. Come one evening in late June, I walked into the Captain’s cabin bearing a bowl of turtle soup, which always seemed to revive the Old Man some, and found him setting up on his bed, looking strong and wide-awake. A huge map, the favorite one he always fiddled with, lay in his lap, along with a bunch of letters. His gray eyes was bright. His long beard flowed down his shirt, for he never cut it from that day forward after he got that ague. He seemed well. He spoke in a strong way, his voice high and tight, like it is when he is in battle. “I has spoken with God and He has given me the word, Onion,” he said. “Summon the men. I’m ready to share my plan.”

I gathered them up and they congregated outside his cabin. He emerged shortly after, pushing back the canvas flap covering the door, stepping before them with his usual stern expression. He stood tall, without his jacket, without a walking stick to lean on nor did he lean against the doorway, to let them know he weren’t weak or sick no more. The campfire was lit before him, for dark was coming, and the prairie dust blowed leaves and tumbleweeds ’bout. In the long ridge behind his cabin, wolves howled. In his old knarled hands he held a sheaf of papers, his big map, and a compass.

“I has commingled with the Lord,” he said, “and I has a battle plan which I aims to share. I knows you all wants to hear it. But first off, I wants to give thanks to our Great Redeemer, He Who sheddeth His blood on the cross of holy held high.”

Here he folded his hands before him and prattled off a prayer for a good fifteen minutes. Several of his men, nonbelievers, got bored, turned on their heels, and wandered off. Kagi departed to a nearby tree, sat down under it, and fiddled with his knife. Stevens turned around and walked off, cursing. A feller named Realf produced pen and paper and commenced to scribbling poetry. The others, Christians and heathens alike, stood patiently as the Captain railed at God, the wind blowing against his face, going high and low with his prayer, up and down, round and round, asking the Redeemer for guidance, direction, chatting ’bout Paul when he wrote Corinthians and how he weren’t good enough to take the strap off Jesus’s shoes and so forth. He gone on with that railing and ranting at full steam, and when he finally throwed out the last “Amen,” those who had departed to read their mail and monkey with their horses saw he was finally ready and returned hastily.

“Well, now,” he said, “as I said before, I has commingled with our Great Redeemer, He Who hath sheddeth His blood. We has discussed this entire enterprise from top to bottom. We has wrapped our minds around each other like a cocoon wraps a boll weevil. I has heard His thoughts, and I, having heard them, I must say here that I am but a tiny peanut in the corner sill of the window of our Savior’s great and powerful thoughts. But, having studied with Him and asked Him several times, going on years now, of what to do about the hellish institution of evil that exists in this land, I am certain now that He has chosen me to be an instrument of His purpose. Course, I already knowed that, just like Cromwell and Ezra the prophet of the old knowed it, for they was instruments in the same fashion, especially Ezra, who prayed and afflicted himself before God in the same fashion as I have, and when Ezra and his people were in a strait, the Lord busily and quietly engaged them to the arrangement of safety without harm. So fear not, men! God is no respecter of persons! Indeed it says in the Bible, the book of Jeremiah, ‘For these are the days of vengeance and there shall—’”

“Pa!” Owen cut him off. “Out with it!”

“Hmph,” the Old Man snorted. “Jesus waited an eternity to free you of the curse of mortal sin, and you didn’t hear Him bellowing like a calf as you are now, son. But”—and here he cleared his throat—“I has studied the matter, and I will share with you here what you need to know. We are going to trouble Israel. We will raise the mill. And they will not soon forget us and our deeds.”

With that, he turned and lifted the flap on the door of his cabin and pushed the door to go back inside. Kagi stopped him.

“Hold on!” Kagi said. “We have tarried here, hanging kettles and banging rocks with wood swords for quite a bit. Are we not men here, with the exception of the Onion? And even she, like us, is here of our own volition. We deserve more than cursory information from you, Captain, lest we go out and fight this war on our own.”

“You will not succeed without my plan,” the Old Man grunted.

“Perhaps,” Kagi said. “But surely there is danger involved. And if I am to wager my life on any plan, I would like to know the manner of it.”

“You will know it soon enough.”

“Soon enough is now. Or I, for one, will announce my own plan, for I have been working on one. And I suspect the men here will hear it.”

Oh, that knotted him up. The Old Man couldn’t stand it. He just plain couldn’t stand having someone else be the boss or tell a plan better than his. The men were watching close now. The wrinkles in his face knotted up and he blurted out, “All right. We’re leaving in two days.”

“For where?” Owen said.

The Captain, still holding the canvas door cover over his head, dropped it, and it flapped across the cabin door like a giant, dirty sheet hung out to dry in the wind. He glared at them with his hands in his pockets, jaw jutting out, disgruntled to the limit. It just plain irritated him to be talked to that way, for he listened to no council but his own. But he hadn’t no choice.

“We plans to strike at the heart of this infernal institution,” he said. “We will attack the government itself.”

A couple of fellers tittered, but Kagi and Owen did not. They knowed the Old Man better than the others, and knowed he was serious. My heart skipped a beat, but Kagi said calmly, “You mean Washington? We can’t attack Washington, Captain. Not with thirteen men and the Onion.”

The Old Man snorted. “I wouldn’t plow that field with your mule, Lieutenant. Washington is where men talk. This is war. Wars is fought in the field, not where men set about eating pork and butter. In war, you strikes at the heart of the enemy. You strike his supply lines like Toussaint-Louverture struck the French on the islands around Haiti. You busts open his food chain like Schamyl the Circassian chief done against the Russians! You attacks his means like Hannibal in Europe done against the Romans! You take his weapons like Spartacus! You hives his people and arms them! You dissiminates his power to his chattel!”

“What is you talking ’bout!” Owen said.

“We is going to Virginia.”

“What?”

“Harpers Ferry in Virginia. There’s a federal armory there. They make guns. There’s a hundred thousand rifles and muskets in that place. We will break in there and, with those weapons, arm the slaves, and allow the Negro to free himself.”

Many years later, I joined a choir in a Pentecostal church after taking a liking to a minister’s wife who slept around to save the wear and tear on her holy husband. I runned behind her several weeks till one morning the pastor gived a rousing sermon ’bout how the truth will set you free, and a feller stood up in the congregation and blurted out, “Pastor! I got Jesus in my heart! I’m confessing! Three of us in here has porked your wife!”

Well, the silence that followed that poor man’s declaration weren’t nothing compared to the quiet that fell on them roughnecks when the Old Man dropped that bomb on ’em.

To be clear on it, I weren’t afraid at that moment. In fact, I felt downright comfortable, ’cause for the first time, I knowed I weren’t the only person in the world who knowed the Old Man’s cheese had slid off his biscuit.

Finally John Cook managed to speak. Cook was a chatty feller, dangerous, the Old Man declared many a time, for Cook was a loose talker. But chatty as he was, even Cook had to cough and snort and clear his throat a few times before he found his voice.

“Captain, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, is eight hundred miles from here. And just fifty miles from Washington, D.C. It’s heavily guarded. With thousands of U.S. government troops nearby. There’s militia from Maryland and Virginia all around it. I’d guess there’d be maybe ten thousand troops mustered up against us. We wouldn’t last five minutes.”

“The Lord will protect us from them.”

“What’s He gonna do, cork their rifles?” Owen asked.

The Old Man looked at Owen and shook his head. “Son, it hurts my heart that you has not taken God into your bosom in the ways I’ve taught you, but as you know, I let you go your own way in your beliefs—which is why you remains so thick after all these years. The Bible says he who thinketh not in the ways of the Redeemer knoweth not the safeness of the Lord. But I have thunk with Him and know His ways. We have thunk this matter through together for nearly thirty years, the Lord and I. I know every part and portion of this land of which I speak. The Blue Mountains runs diagonally through Virginia, Maryland, all the way up into Pennsylvania and down into Alabama. I know them mountains better than any man on earth. As a child, I ran through them. As a young man, I surveyed them for Oberlin College. And during that time, I considered this slavery question. I even made a journey to the European continent when I runned a tannery on the premise of inspecting the European sheep farms, but my real aim was to inspect the earthwork fortifications made by the chattel who fought against the rulers in that great continent.”

“That is impressive, Captain,” Kagi said, “and I don’t doubt your word or study. But our aim has always been to steal slaves and trouble the waters so the country will see the folly of the infernal institution.”

“Pebbles in the ocean, Lieutenant. We ain’t stealing Negroes no more. We hiving ’em to fight.”

“If we’re gonna attack the federal government, why not take Fort Laramie in Kansas?” Kagi said. “We can control the fight in Kansas. We got friends there.”

The Old Man raised his hand. “Our presence here on the prarie is a feint, Lieutenant. It’s meant to throw our enemy off our trail. The fight is not out west. Kansas is the tail end of the beast. If you were to kill a lion, would you chop off his tail? Virginia is the queen of the slave states. We will strike at the queen bee in order to kill the hive.”

Well, they had caught their breath now and warm words was passed. Doubts sprung up. One by one, the men chirped out their disagreement. Even Kagi, the calmest feller among ’em and the Captain’s most solid man, disagreed. “It’s an impossible task,” he said.

“Lieutenant Kagi, you disappoint me,” the Old Man said. “I has thought this matter through carefully. For years, I have studied the successful opposition of the Spanish chieftains when Spain was a Roman province. With ten thousand men, divided into small companies, acting simultaneously yet separately, they withstood the whole consolidated power of the Roman Empire for years! I have studied the successful warfare of the Circassian chief Schamyl against the Russians. I have lingered over the accounts of the wars of Toussaint-Louverture on the Haitian islands in the 1790s. You think I have not considered all these things? Land! Land, men! Land is fortification! In the mountains, a small group of men, trained as soldiers, in a series of delays, ambushes, escapes, and surprises, can hold off an enemy for years. They can hold off thousands. It is has been done. Many times.”

Well, that didn’t flatten them fellers out. The warm words become hard words and rose to chirping and near shouts. No matter what he said, they weren’t listening. Several announced they was leaving, and one, Richardson, a colored who just joined a few weeks previous—bellowing and trumpeting ’bout how he was itching to fight slavery—suddenly remembered he had cows to milk at a nearby farm where he was working. He hopped a horse, spurred that thing to a high trot, and was gone.

The Old Man watched him go.

“Anyone who wants to can leave with him,” he said.

There was no takers, but still, they jawed at him some more for the better part of three hours. The Old Man listened to them all, standing at the doorway of his cabin with his hands in his pockets, the dirty canvas cover of the doorway flapping behind him in the breeze, giving his words extra punch as it slapped and knocked against the door while he spoke against their fears. He had practiced this in his mind for many years, he said, and for each worry they come up with, he had a response.

“It’s an armory. It’s guarded!”

“By two night watchmen only.”

“How we gonna sneak out a hundred thousand guns? In a boxcar? We need ten boxcars!”

“We don’t need all of ’em. Just five thousand will do.”

“How we gonna get out the area?”

“We won’t. We slip into the nearby mountains. The slaves will hive with us once they know where we are. They will join and fight with us.”

“We don’t know the routes! Are there rivers about? Roads? Trails?”

“I know the land,” the Old Man said. “I have drawn it for you. Come inside and see.”

They reluctantly followed him and crowded into his cabin, where he unfurled a huge, canvas map on the table, the giant map I’d seen him secreting in his jacket and scrawling at and chewing the edges on from the first day I’d met him. Atop the map, labeled Harpers Ferry, were dozens of lines which showed the armory, nearby plantations, roads, trails, mountain ranges, and even the number of slaved Negroes living on nearby plantations. He’d done a lot of work, and the men were impressed.

He held the candle over the map so the men could see it, and after they looked at it for a few moments, he pointed to it and began to speak.

“This,” he said, pointing with his pencil, “is the Ferry. It is guarded by a single night watchman on either end of it. With the element of surprise, we will take them easily. Once we take them, we cut the telegraph wires here, and take the guardhouse easily, right here. The railroad tracks and the gunnery factory we hold till we load our weapons. It’s that easy. We can take the whole place in the middle of the night and be done in three hours and be gone. We gather our weapons and slip into the line of mountains”—here he pointed to his map—“that surround it. These mountains pass through Maryland, Virginia, down into Tennessee and Alabama. They’re thin passes. Too narrow for cannons, too tight for wide columns of troops to pass.”

He put the candle down.

“I surveyed these places several times. I know them like the back of my hand. I have studied them for years, before any of you were born. Once we establish ourselves in those passes, we can easily defend against any hostile action. From there, the slaves will flock to our stead, and we can attack plantations in the plains on both sides from our mountain posts.”

“Why would they join us?” Kagi asked.

The Old Man looked at him as if he’d just pulled out his teeth.

“For the same reason that this little girl”—here he pointed to me—“has risked life and limb to join us and lived out on the plains and braved battle like a man. Can’t you see, Lieutenant? If a little girl will do it, a man certainly will. They will join us ’cause we will offer them something their masters cannot: their freedom. They are thirsting for the opportunity to fight for it. They are dying to be free. To free their wives. To free their children. And the courage of one will move the next. We’ll arm the first five thousand, then move farther south, arming more Negroes as they join with the plunder and arms of the Pro Slavers we defeat as we go. As we move south, the planters will not be able to withstand their Negroes leaving. They will stand to lose everything. They will not be able to sleep at night worrying about their Negroes joining the masses that approach them from the north. They will quit this infernal institution forever.”

He placed his pencil down.

“That, in essence,” he said, “is the plan.”

You had to reckon, for an insane man, he sure knowed how to cook it up, and for the first time, the looks of doubt started to fall off the men’s faces, and that put me back to feeling chickenhearted, for I knowed the Old Man’s schemes never worked out to the dot the way he drawed them up, but he was sure to do whatever they was, anyway.

Kagi rubbed his jaw. “There are a thousand places where it can fail,” he said.

“We have already failed, Lieutenant. Slavery is an unjustifiable, barbarous, unprovoked sin before God—”

“Spare us the sermon, Pa,” Owen snapped. “We ain’t got to bite off the head of the whole thing.” He was nervous, and that was unsettling, for Owen was coolheaded and usually went along with his Pa’s ideas, no matter how corn-headed they was.

“Do you prefer that we await the outcome of moral persuasion to end slavery, son?”

“I prefers a plan that keeps me from becoming an urn in somebody’s backyard.”

There was a fire going in the cabin, and the Old Man moved to pick up a log and place it on the dying fire. He stared at the campfire as he spoke. “You is here out of your own choice,” he said. “Every one of you, including Onion,” he said, pointing to me, “a plain and simple colored girl, which should tell you something about courage, big men that you are. But if any man here feels the plan will not work, you are welcome to leave. I bear no ill will toward any man who does so, for Lieutenant Kagi is right. It is dangerous work I propose. Once the element of surprise is done, they will come at us hard. Of that there is no doubt.”

He looked ’bout. There was silence. The Old Man spoke softly now, comforting. “Don’t worry. I thought it clean through. We will make our business known to the struggling Negroes in the surrounding areas beforehand, and they will hive to us. Once that is done, we can attack the armory with even greater numbers. We will seize it in minutes, hold it long enough to load our weapons, then slip out into the mountains and be gone by the time the militia get wind of it. I has it on good word that the slaves from the surrounding counties and plantations will hive to us like bees.”

“On whose word?”

“On good word,” he said. “There are twelve hundred coloreds living at the Ferry. There’s thirty thousand coloreds within fifty miles of the Ferry, if you include Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Virginia. They will hear of our revolt, flock to us, and demand that we arm them. The Negro is primed and ready. He need only the chance. This is what we are giving him.”

“Negroes are not trained soldiers,” Owen said. “They can’t handle weapons.”

“No man needs training to fight for his freedom, son. I have prepared for that eventuality. I have ordered two thousand pikes, simple broadswords that can be wielded by any man or woman for the purpose of destroying an enemy combatant. They are stored in various warehouses and safe houses that we will pick up along route. Others we will have sent to us in Maryland. That is why I let John and Jason quit. To prepare those weapons for us before they went home.”

“It sounds easy as grazing oats the way you sell it,” Cook said, “though I am not sure I am for it.”

“If God wills it that you should stay back while the rest of us ride into history, I am not against it.”

Cook growled, “I didn’t say I was staying back.”

“I gived you an out, Mr. Cook. With full redemption for your service and no hard feelings. But should you stay, I will guard your life with as much jealousy as if it were my own. And I will do that for every man here.”

That calmed them down some, for he was still Old John Brown, and he was still fearsome. One by one, the Old Man checked their doubts. He had studied the question. He insisted the Ferry weren’t closely guarded. It weren’t a fort, but rather a factory. Weren’t but two night watchmen to take out to get into it. Should the plan fail, the place was built where two rivers, the Potomac and Shenandoah, met. Both were getaways for a quick escape. The town was remote, in the mountains, with less than 2,500 people—workers, not soldiers—living there. We’d cut the telegraph wires, and without a telegraph, it would be impossible for word of our attack to pass. The two rail lines that ran through it had a train scheduled to stop there during our attack. We’d stop that train, hold it, and if necessary use it as an extra escape route if trapped. The Negroes would help us. They were there in numbers. He had suitcases full of government numbers on Negroes. They lived in the town. They lived ’bout on plantations. They had already gotten word. Thousands would flock to our stead. In three hours it would be done. In twenty-four hours we would be gone in the mountains and safe. In and out. Easy as pie.

He was as good a salesman as you could find when he wanted to be, and by the time he was done, he rosied it up so nicely you’d’a thunk the Harpers Ferry armory was just a bunch of pesters waiting to be squashed by his big, toeless old boot; the whole thing sounded easy as picking apples out an orchard. Truth is, though, it was a bold plan, outrageously stupid, and for his men, young, adventurous roughnecks who liked a cause, just the kind of adventure they signed up for. The more he sold it, the more they warmed to it. He just beat ’em down with it, till finally he yawned and said, “I am going to sleep. We are leaving in two days. If you are still here then, we ride together. If not, I understand.”

A few, including Kagi, seemed to cotton to the idea. A few others did not. Kagi murmured, “We will think on it, Captain.”

The Old Man looked at them, all young men, gathered around him in the firelight, big, rough, smart fellers standing around looking at him like he was Moses of old, his beard flowing down to his chest, his gray eyes sure and steady. “Sleep on it. If you wakes up tomorrow with doubts, ride out with my blessing. I only ask that those who depart to watch your tongue. To forget what you have heard here. Forget us. And remember that if you have a busy tongue, we will not forget you.”

He glared around at the men. The old fire had returned now, the face hard as granite, the fists removed from his pocket, the thin, drooped body covered by the ratty soot and toeless boots standing erect. “I has more studying to do, and we will commence our battle plans tomorrow. Good night,” he said.

The men wandered outside. I watched them filter off and slip away, till only one man stood. O. P. Anderson, the only colored among them, was the last to leave. O.P. was a small, slender, delicate feller, a printer, a sharp feller, but he wasn’t overbuilt like the rest of the Old Man’s crew. Most of the Captain’s men were strong and rugged adventurers, or gruff pioneers like Stevens, who carried six-shooters on both sides and picked fights with anyone who came near him. O.P. weren’t like Stevens or the rest of them at all. He was just a drylongso colored feller with good intentions. He weren’t a real soldier or gunfighter, but he was there, and from the fret on his face, he looked to be scared something scandalous.

When he stepped out the cabin, he slowly lowered the canvas flap and wandered off to a nearby tree and sat. I sauntered over and sat next to him. From where we was, we could see inside the tiny window of the cabin. Inside, the Old Man could be seen standing at his table, still poring over his maps and papers, slowly folding them up, scratching a marking on a couple here and there as he put them away.

“What you think, Mr. Anderson?” I said. I was hopeful that O.P. thunk what I thunk, which is that the Old Man was crazy as a bedbug and we should skip off right away.

“I don’t understand it,” he said glumly.

“Understand what?”

“Understand why I’m here,” he muttered. He seemed to be speaking to himself.

“You gonna leave, then?” I asked. I was hopeful.

From where he sat at the foot of the tree, O.P. looked up and stared at the Old Man, busy inside his cabin, still fiddling with his maps, muttering to himself.

“Why should I?” he said. “I’m as mad as him.”

22. The Spy

Like most things with the Old Man, what was supposed to take a day took a week. And what was supposed to take two days took two weeks. And what was supposed to take two weeks took four weeks, a month, and two months. And so it went. He was supposed to leave Iowa in June. He didn’t put his hat on his head and tip good-bye to that place till mid-September. By then I was long gone. He had sent me forward into the fight.

It wasn’t the fight I wanted, but it was better than getting kilt or staying out on the plains. He decided to send one of his men, Mr. Cook, ahead to Harpers Ferry to serve as a spy and to spread the word of his plan amongst the Negroes there. He announced it to his lieutenant Kagi one morning in July, when I was there serving them two breakfast in the Old Man’s cabin.

Kagi didn’t like the plan. “Cook is a chatterbox,” he said. “He’s a rooster. Plus he’s a ladies’ man. He’s sending letters to his various lady friends saying he’s on a secret mission and he’ll have to leave soon, and they’ll never see him again. He’s brandishing his gun in public and saying he killed five men in Kansas. He got ladies in Tabor fretting all over him, thinking he’s gonna die on a secret mission. He’ll crow our plan all over Virginia.”

The Old Man considered it. “He’s an irritant and he does have a long tongue,” he said, “but he’s a good talker and can scout the enemy and move about daily life there. Whatever he says about us ain’t gonna harm God’s plan for us, for no one is inclined to believe a blowhard like him anyway. I will advise him that he should use but his eyes and mouth in Virginia to our purpose and nothing more. He’d be a hindrance to us otherwise, for we have a bit more plundering to do to gather weapons and money and he don’t soldier well. We have to use everyone to their best. Cook’s best weapon against an enemy is his mouth.”

“If you want to hive the Negroes, why not send a Negro to Virginia with him?” Kagi said.

“I has considered sending Mr. Anderson,” the Old Man said, “but he’s nervous about the proposition overall, and may not toe the line. He may scatter.”

“I don’t mean him. I mean the Onion,” Kagi said. “She can pose as Cook’s slave. That way she can keep an eye on Cook, and help hive the bees. She’s old enough. And you can trust her.”

I was standing there when them two was pondering this, and I can’t say I was against the idea. I was anxious to get out of the west before the Old Man got his head blowed off. Iowa was rough living, and the U.S. Cavalry was hot on our trail. We’d had to move several times ’bout Pee Dee and Tabor to keep out of sight, and the thought of grinding over the prairie by wagon and stopping every ten minutes while the Old Man prayed, with federal dragoons riding down on us one way and Pro Slavers hunting us another, weren’t a notion that throwed a lot of sugar in my bowl. Also, I growed fond of the Captain, truth be told. I was partial to him. I’d rather he got killed or smashed up on his own time away from me and I would know he was dead later—much later would be soon enough. I knowed he was insane, and if he wanted to fight against slavery I was all for it. But I myself had no plans on doing a wink of the same. Traveling east to Virginia with Cook put me closer to the freedom line of Philadelphia, and slipping off from him would be easy, ’cause Cook never let his talking hole rest and didn’t look beyond his own self much. So I piped up to the Old Man and Mr. Kagi that it would be a great idea for me to go with Mr. Cook, and I would do my best to hive the Negroes while I was there waiting for the rest to come.

The Old Man looked me over close. The thing ’bout the Captain was that he never gived you straight-out instruction, unless you was in a shooting fight, of course. But in day-to-day living, he mostly declared, “I’m going this way to fight slavery,” and the men said, “Why, I’m going that way, too,” and off we went. That’s how it was with him. This whole business in the newspapers later ’bout him leading them young fellers around by their noses, that’s hogwash. You couldn’t get them ornery roughnecks to do what you wanted, for while they was roughnecks, they was sweet on a cause, and broad-minded to whoever led them to it. You couldn’t get a two-hundred-dollar mule to tear them fellers away from the Old Man. They wanted to be with him ’cause they was adventurers and the Old Man never told them how to be. He was strict as the devil on the matter of religion when it come to his own self, but if your spiritual purpose took you a different way, why, he’d lecture you a bit, then let you move to your own purpose. So long as you didn’t cuss, drink, or chew tobacco, and was against slavery, he was all for you. There was some straight-out rascals in his army, when I think of it. Stevens, course, was a bad-tempered and disagreeable rascal if I ever seen one, chanting to spirits and arguing about his religious beliefs with Kagi and the rest. Charlie Tidd, a white feller, and Dangerfield Newby, a colored—both of them joined up later—them two was outright dangerous and I don’t know that they had a drop of religion between the two of ’em. Even Owen weren’t all-the-way God-fearing to his Pa’s standard. But so long as you was against slavery, why, you could do just whatever you pleased, for despite his grumpiness, the Old Man always thought the best of folks and misjudged their natures. Looking back, it was a terrible notion to send Cook to spy, and a worse notion to send me as an ambassador to rally the colored, for both of us was wanting for knowledge and wisdom, and neither of us would give a sting for nothing but ourselves. We were the two worst people he could have sent ahead.

And course he went with it.

“Splendid idea, Lieutenant Kagi,” he said, “for my Onion here can be trusted. If Cook spills the beans, we will know it.”

With that, the Old Man went out and stole a fine Conestoga wagon from a Pro Slaver, and had the men load it with picks, shovels, and mining tools which they spread ’bout in the back, and throwed several wooden crates in there marked Mining Tools.

“Careful with what is in these crates,” the Old Man said to Cook as we loaded up, nodding at the crates marked Mining Tools. “Do not hurry along the trail. Too much bumping and grinding along and you’ll meet the Great Shepherd in pieces. And watch your tongue. Any man who cannot keep from his friends that which he cannot keep to himself is a fool.” To me he said, “Onion, I will miss you, for you is dutiful and our Good Lord Bird besides. But it is better that you be out of our trek east, for the enemy is close and there is dirty work ahead of us, what with the gathering of means and plunder. You will no doubt be of great assistance to Mr. Cook, who will benefit from having you at his side.” And with that, me and Cook was off on that Conestoga wagon headed for Virginia, and I was one step closer to being free.

Harpers Ferry is as pretty a town as you’d want to see. It’s set above two rivers that meet. The Potomac runs along the Maryland side. The Shenandoah runs along the Virginia side. The two rivers bang up against each other just outside town, and there’s a peak, an overhang just at the edge of town, where you can stand right there and watch them run cockeyed and smack up against each other. One river hits the other and runs backward. It was a perfect place for Old John Brown to favor, for he was as upside down as them two rivers. On both sides of town is the beautiful blue Appalachian Mountain ranges. At the edge of those ranges was two railroad lines, one running along the Potomac side, heading toward Washington and Baltimore, and the other on the Shenandoah side, running toward west of Virginia.

Me and Cook got there in no time, sailing along in clear weather with that Conestoga wagon. Cook was a chatterbox. He was a treacherous, handsome scoundrel, with blue eyes and pretty blond curls that traveled down his face. He kept his hair ’round his face like a girl, and would conversate with anyone who came along as easily as molasses can spread on a biscuit. It ain’t no wonder the Old Man sent him, for he had a way ’bout him that made picking information out of folks easy work, and also his favorite subject was hisself. We got along well.

Once we got to the Ferry we moved with the aim of finding a house near the edge of town for the Old Man’s army where he could also receive all the arms and so forth that the Old Man had arranged to ship down. The Old Man had been clear in his instructions, saying, “Rent something that don’t attract a lot of attention.”

But attention was Cook’s middle name. He asked ’bout in town and when he didn’t hear what he wanted, went into the town’s biggest tavern, declaring he was a rich miner for a big mining outfit and I was his slave and he needed a house to rent for some miners that was on their way. “Money is no object,” he said, for the Old Man had outfitted him with a pocket full of fatback. Before he left the place, every man in the tavern knowed his name. But a slave owner did come up to us and told Cook he knowed of a settlement nearby that might be up for rent. “It’s the old Kennedy farm,” he said. “It’s a bit out of the way from the Ferry, but it might suit your purpose, for it is large.” We rode out to it and Cook looked it over.

It was far from the Ferry, ’bout six miles, and it weren’t cheap—thirty-five dollars a month—which Cook was sure the Old Man would squawk ’bout. The farmer had passed away and the widow weren’t budging on the price. The house had two rooms downstairs, a tiny upstairs, a basement, and an outdoor shack to store arms, and across the road, an old barn. It was set back ’bout three hundred yards from the road, which was good, but it was awful close to a neighbor’s house on both sides. If the Old Man had been there he wouldn’t have took it, ’cause anyone peeking from the neighbors’ houses could look in on it and see in. The Old Man had been clear that he needed a house that was set back by itself, not around no other houses, for he’d have a lot of men hiding there and a lot of traffic going in and out, what with shipping arms and gathering men and all. But Cook had a hankering for a fat white maiden he seen hanging laundry down the road when we first rode out to scout the place, and when he seen her, he cashed in his chips on it. “This is it,” he said. He paid the widow owner of the place, told her his boss of the mining company, Mr. Isaac Smith, was coming in a few weeks, and we was in.

We spent a couple of days setting up, and then Cook said, “I am going to town to joust about and get information on the layouts of the armory and the arms factory. You go roust the coloreds.”

“Where are they?” I asked.

“Wherever colored are, I expect,” he said, and was gone.

I didn’t see him for three days. I sat there the first two days scratching my ass, figuring ’bout my own plans to run off, but I didn’t know nobody and didn’t know if it was safe to walk ’bout. I had to know the lay of the land before I cut, so, not knowing what to do, I sat tight. On the third day there, Cook came busting in the door, laughing and giggling with that same fat, young little blond lady we seen down the road hanging laundry, both of ’em cooing and dewy-eyed. He spied me setting there in the kitchen, and said, “Why didn’t you go roust the colored like you was supposed to?”

He said this right in front of his lady friend, giving the plan away right off. I didn’t know what to say, so I blurted out, “I don’t know where they are.”

He turned to the lady with him. “Mary, my slave here”—oh, that boiled me some, him playing it that way. Playing it to the hilt, he was, playing big, after he done gived the whole plan away—“my colored here’s looking for some coloreds to congregates with. Where is the coloreds?”

“Why, they is everywhere, my peach,” she said.

“Ain’t they living someplace?”

“Sure,” she giggled. “They lives everywhere out and ’bout.”

“Well, as I told you, we is on a secret mission, my sweet. A very important mission. For which you can’t tell a soul, as I told you,” he said.

“Oh, I knows that,” she said, giggling.

“And that is why we needs to know exactly where the Onion here can go find some colored friends.”

She considered it. “Well, there’s always some high-siddity free niggers wandering ’bout town. But they ain’t worth peanuts. And then there’s Colonel Lewis Washington’s nigger plantation. He’s the nephew of George Washington himself. And Alstad’s and the Byrne brothers. They all got colored slaves, nice and proper. There’s no shortage of niggers ’round here.”

Cook looked at me. “Well? What you waiting for?”

That needled me, him playing big shot. But I cut out the door. I decided to try the plantations first, for I figgered an ornery and snobbish colored wouldn’t be no use to the Captain. Little was I to learn they could be trusted as much as any slave and was good fighters to boot. But I’d only trusted two coloreds up to that point in my life, not counting my late Pa—Bob and Pie—and neither of them worked out to the dot. I’d got instructions from Cook’s lady friend on where the Washington plantation was, and went out there first, being that it was on the Maryland side of the Potomac, not too far from where we was staying.

The house was on a wide road where the mountain flattened out. It set behind a wide wrought-iron gate, down a long curved driveway. At the front of that gate, just outside it, a slim colored woman was out gardening and raking leaves. I approached her.

“Morning,” I said.

She stopped her raking and stared at me a long time. Finally she blurted out, “Morning.”

It occurred to me then that she knowed I was a boy. Some colored women just had my number. But this was during bondage time. And when you in bondage, you is drowning, in a manner of speaking. You no more pay attention to the getup of the feller next to you than you do the size of his shoes if he got any, for both of you is drowning in the same river. Unless that feller is tossing you a rope to pull you ashore, his shoes ain’t much of a bother. I reckon that’s why few colored women I come across didn’t scratch at me too much. They had their own problems. Anyway, there weren’t nothing to be done ’bout it then nohow. I had an assignment. And until I figured out the lay of the land, I couldn’t run off no place. I was spying for the Old Man and I was looking out for my own self, too.

“I don’t know where I am,” I said.

“You are where you is,” she said.

“I’m just looking to get the lay of the land.”

“It lay before you,” she said.

We wasn’t getting nowhere, so I said, “I’m wondering if you knowed anybody who wants to know their letters.”

A nervous look shot across her face. She glanced over her shoulder at the big house, and kept that rake working.

“Why would somebody want to learn how to do that? Niggers got no cause to read.”

“Some do,” I said.

“I don’t know nothing ’bout that,” she said, still working that rake.

“Well, miss, I’m looking for a job.”

“Learning how to read? That ain’t no job. That’s trouble.”

“I knows how to read. I’m looking to teach someone else how to read. For money.”

She didn’t say another blooming word. She lifted that rake off the ground and showed me the back of her head. She plain walked off.

I didn’t wait. I got outta sight. Jumped into the thickets right then and there, set tight, thinking she’d gone into the house to squeal to the overseer boss or, even worse, her master. I waited a few minutes, and just as I was ’bout to light out, a coach wagon driven by four huge horses dashed from the back of the house and drove hard toward the gate. That thing was movin’. Up front was a Negro driver, dressed in a fine coach jacket, a top hat, and white gloves. The wagon busted through the front gate and the Negro halted it on a dime just outside the gate where I was.

He hopped down and looked around into the thickets. Looked right at ’bout where I was. I knowed he couldn’t see me, for the foliage was thick and I crouched low. “Anybody there?” he asked.

“Ain’t nobody here but us chickens,” I said.

“C’mon out here,” he snapped. “I seen you from the window.”

I done like he said. He was a thick-sprouted, broad-chested man. Close up, he looked even more splendid in tails and coachman’s costume than he did from afar. His shoulders was broad, and though he was short, his face was bright and sharp, and his gloves shone in the afternoon sun. He stared at me, frowning. “The Blacksmith send you?”

“Who?”

“The Blacksmith.”

“Don’t know no Blacksmith.”

“What’s the word?”

“I can’t think of none.”

“What song you singing, then? ‘We Can Break Bread Together’? That’s the song, ain’t it?”

“Got no song. I only know them Dixie songs like ‘Old Coon Callaway Come On Home.’”

He looked at me, puzzled. “What is wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“You on the gospel train?”

“The what?”

“The railroad.”

“What railroad?”

He glanced behind him at the house. “You run off? You a runaway?”

“No. Not yet. Not exactly.”

“Them’s three answers, child,” he snapped. “Which of ’em is it?”

“Pick any one you want, sir.”

“I ain’t got time for fooling. State your business quick. You in thick lard already, out here prowling the Colonel Washington’s road without permission. You bet’ not be here when he comes back. I got to fetch him in town in thirty minutes.”

“Would that town be Harpers Ferry?”

He pointed down the mountain at the town. “Do that look like Philadelphia down there, child? Course that’s Harpers Ferry. Every day of the week. Where else would it be?”

“Well, I come to warn you,” I said. “Something’s ’bout to kick off there.”

“Something’s always ’bout to kick off someplace.”

“I mean with the white folks.”

“White folks always got the kick, to everything and everybody. They got the mojo and say-so, too. What else is new? By the way, is you a sissy? You look mighty queer, child.”

I ignored that, for I had work to do. “If I was to tell you that something big’s coming,” I said, “something very big, would you be akin to rousing the hive?”

“Rousing the what?”

“Helping me. Rouse the hive. Gather the colored people up.”

“Girl, you weeding a bad hoe for satisfaction, talking that way. If you was my child, I’d warm your two little cakes with my switch and send you hooting and hollering down that road, just for popping off to my wife ’bout reading. You’ll get every nigger ’round here throwed in hot water talking that way. She ain’t with the cause, y’know.”

“The what?”

“The cause, the gospel train, she ain’t with it. Don’t know nothing ’bout it. Don’t wanna know. Can’t know. Can’t be trusted to know, you get my drift?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking ’bout.”

“G’wan down the road, then, with your foolish self.”

He climbed up on his wagon and readied up to har up his horses.

“I got news. Important news!”

“Big head, big wit. Little head, not a bit. That’s you, child. You got a condition.” He lifted his traces to har up his horses. “Good day.”

“Old John Brown’s coming,” I blurted out.

That got him. Stopped him dead. There weren’t a colored person east of the Mississippi who hadn’t heard of John Brown. Why, he was just a saint. Magic to the colored.

He stared down at me, holding his reins still in his hands. “I ought to whip you something scandalous just for standing there and lying like you is. Spouting dangerous lies, too.”

“I swear ’fore God, he’s coming.”

The Coachman glanced at the house. He swung the wagon ’round and faced it so that the far side of the coach door was blocked from the view of the house. “Git in there and lay down low on the floor. If you pop your head up before I tell you to, I’mma ride you straight to the deputy and say you was a stowaway and let him have you.”

I done as he said. He harred up them horses, and we rode.

Ten minutes later the wagon halted, and the Coachman climbed down. “Git out,” he said. He said it before the door was halfway open. He was done with me. I climbed out. We was on a mountain road in thick woods, high above Harpers Ferry, on a deserted stretch of trail.

He climbed up on the wagon and pointed behind him. “This here is the road to Chambersburg,” he said. “It’s ’bout twenty miles yonder. Go up there and see Henry Watson. He’s a barber. Tell ’em the Coachman sent you. He’ll tell you what to do next. Stay off the road and in the thickets.”

“But I ain’t a runaway.”

“I don’t know who you is, child, but git gone,” the Coachman said. “You sporting trouble, popping up out of nowhere and running your talking hole full steam ’bout Old John Brown and knowing your letters and all. Old Brown’s dead. One of the greatest helpers to the Negro in the world, deader than yesterday’s love. You ain’t worthy to speak his name, child.”

“He ain’t dead!”

“Dead in Kansas Territory,” the Coachman said. He seemed certain. “We got a man here who reads. I was in the church the day he read that newspaper to us. I heard it myself. Old Brown was out west and had militia chasing him and the U.S. Cavalry hot on his tail and everybody and his brother, for there was a reward on him. They say he outshot ’em all, he did, but they caught him after a while and drowned him. God bless him. My master hates him. Now git.”

“I can prove he ain’t dead.”

“How so?”

“’Cause I seen him. I knows him. I’ll take you to him when he comes.”

The Coachman smirked, grabbing his reins. “Why, if I was your Pa, I’d put my boot so far up your arse you’d cough out my big toe, standing there lyin’! What the devil is wrong with you, to stand there and lie like that in God’s hearing? What’s the great John Brown want with a little nigger sissy like you? Now put your foot in the road ’fore I warm your two little brown buns! And don’t tell nobody you know me. I’m ’bout filled up with that damn gospel train today! And tell the Blacksmith if you see him, don’t send me no more packages.”

“Packages?”

“Packages,” he said. “Yes! No more packages.”

“What kind of packages?”

“Is you thick, child? Git along.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking ’bout.”

He glared down at me. “Is you on the underground or not?” he said.

“What underground?”

I was confused, and he stared down at me, hot. “Git on up the road to Chambersburg ’fore I kick you up there!”

“I can’t go there. I’m staying at the Kennedy farm.”

“See!” the Coachman snorted. “Caught you in another lie. Old man Kennedy drawed his last breath last year ’bout this time.”

“One of Brown’s men rented the house from his widow. I come to this country with him.”

That cooled him some. “You mean that new chatty white feller running ’round town? The one sporting ’round with fat Miss Mary, the blond maid who lives up the road from there?”

“Him.”

“He’s with Old John Brown?”

“Yes sir.”

“Why’s he running ’round with her then? That silly nag’s been boarded more than the B&O railroad.”

“I don’t know.”

The Coachman frowned. “My brother told me to quit fooling with runaways,” he grumbled. “You can’t tell the straight truth from a crooked lie with ’em.” He sighed. “I reckon if I was sleeping in the cold under the sky I’d be talking cockeyed too.” He groused some more, then fished in his pocket and pulled out a bunch of coins. “How much you need? All’s I got is eight cents.” He held it out. “Take this and git. G’wan now. Off with you. G’wan to Chambersburg.”

I growed a little warm then. “Sir, I ain’t here for your money,” I said. “And I ain’t here to go to nobody’s Chambersburg. I come to warn you Old John Brown’s coming. With an army. He’s planning to take Harpers Ferry and start an insurrection. He told me to ‘hive the bees.’ That’s his instruction. Said, ‘Onion, you tell all the colored that I’m coming and to hive ’em up. Hive the bees.’ So I’m tellin’ you. And I ain’t tellin’ nobody no more, for it ain’t worth the trouble.”

With that, I turned and started down the mountain road toward Harpers Ferry, for he had rode me a ways out.

He called out to me, “Chambersburg’s the other direction.”

“I knows where I’m going,” I said.

His coach was pointed toward Chambersburg, too, up the mountain, away from me. He harred up his horses and galloped up the mountain trail. It took him several minutes to get up the road and find a place to turn around, for he had those four horses drawing it. He got it done in a snap, and brought them horses banging down the mountain behind me at a full trot. When he reached me, he pulled them beasts to a dead stop. Stopped ’em on a dime. He could drive the shit outta that coach. He stared down at me.

“I don’t know you,” he said. “I don’t know who you are or where you come from. But I know you ain’t from this country, so your word ain’t worth a pinch of snuff. But lemme ask you: If I was to ask at old Kennedy’s farm ’bout you, would they know you?”

“Ain’t but one feller there now. That feller I told you ’bout. His name is Mr. Cook. The Old Man sent him to spy on the town ahead of his coming, but he ought not to have sent him, for he talks too much. He’s likely done spread the word to every white man in town ’bout the Captain.”

“Good God, you surely fib like a winner,” the Coachman said. He sat for a long moment. Then he looked around to see if the way was clear and nobody was coming. “I’mma test you,” he said. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled-up piece of paper. “You say you know your letters?”

“I do.”

“Well read that,” he said. Sitting up in the driver’s seat, he handed it down to me.

I took the paper and read it aloud. “It says, ‘Dear Rufus, please give my coachman Jim four ladles and two spoons from your store and make sure he don’t eat any more store-bought biscuits from you, which is charged to my account. That nigger is fat enough as it is.’”

I handed it back to him. “It’s signed, ‘Col. Lewis F. Washington,’” I said. “That’s your master?”

“God damn that elephant-faced old bugger,” he muttered. “Never drew a short breath in his life. Never done a day’s work. And feeding me boiled grits and sour biscuits. What’s he expect?”

“Say what?”

He shoved the paper in his pocket. “If you was speaking the truth, it’d be hard to tell it,” he said. “Why would the great John Brown send a sissy to do a man’s job?”

“You can ask him yourself when he comes,” I said, “for you is full of insults and nothing more.” I started down the mountain, for there was no convincing him.

“Wait a minute.”

“Nope. You been told, sir. You been warned. G’wan ’round to the Kennedy farm and see if you don’t find Mr. Cook setting there talking in ways he shouldn’t.”

“What ’bout Miss Mary? She working with Old John Brown too?”

“No. He just made her acquaintance.”

“Sheesh, he couldn’t do no better than that? That woman’s face could stop a clock. What manner of man is your Mr. Cook that he runs behind her?”

“The rest of his army don’t act in the manner of Mr. Cook,” I said. “They coming to shoot men, not chase women. They is dangerous. They coming all the way from Iowa and they got more hardware than you ever saw, and when they load their breachloaders they drop the hammer and tell it to hurry. That’s a fact, sir.”

That got him, and for the first time I seen the doubt move off his face a little. “Your story is fetching, but it sounds like a lie,” he said. “Still, ain’t no harm in me sending somebody by old man Kennedy’s farm, if that’s where you say you living, to check on your fibbing. In the meantime, I reckon you ain’t dumb enough to mention me or the Blacksmith or Henry Watson to nobody in town. You liable to end up on the cooling board if you do. Them two is as bad as they get. They’d bust a charge into your head and feed you to the pigs if they thunk you gived away their doings.”

“They better makes sure they got all their back teeth if they do it,” I said. “For when Captain Brown comes I’mma tell him you and your friends here was a hinderance, and y’all will have to deal with him. He’ll curdle your cheese for treatin’ me like a liar.”

“What you want child, a gold medal? I don’t know you from Adam. You come out the blue, spinning a heap of tall yarns for somebody so young. You lucky your lie landed with me, and not with some of these other niggers ’round here, for there’s a heap of ’em would hand you over to the slave patrollers for a goosefeather pillow. I’ll check your story with Mr. Cook. Either you is lying or you is not. If you lying, you had to work like the devil to dream up that yarn. If you not, you is disobeying God’s orders to the limit in some kind of devilish fashion, for ain’t no way on God’s green earth that Old John Brown, hot as he is, is gonna come here, where all these weapons and soldiers is, to fight for the colored’s freedom. He’d be putting his head right in the lion’s mouth. He’s a brave man if he’s living, but he ain’t a straight fool.”

“You don’t know him,” I said.

But he didn’t hear me. He had harred up his horses and was gone.

23. The Word

Two days later, an old colored woman bearing brooms inside a wheelbarrow pushed up to the door of the Kennedy farm and knocked. Cook was fast asleep. He woke up, grabbing his pistol, and runned to the door. He spoke with the door closed, his pistol down by his side. “Who is it?”

“Name’s Becky, massa. I’m selling brooms.”

“Don’t want none.”

“The Coachman says you did.”

Cook looked at me, puzzled. “That’s the feller I told you ’bout,” I said. He stood there blinking a minute, half-sleep. He didn’t no more remember what I told him ’bout the Coachman than a dog would remember his birthday. Fat Mary from down the road was wearing him out. He didn’t get back to the house the night before till the wee hours. He come in with his disheveled clothes and his hair a mess, smelling like liquor, laughing and whistling.

“All right, then. But come in slow.”

The woman walked in slowly and purposeful, pushing the barrel before her. She was old, slender, deep brown, with furried white hair, a wrinkled face, and a tattered dress. She pulled two new brooms out of the barrel and held one in each hand. “I made these myself,” she said, “fashioned from the best straw and brand-new pine handles. Made from southern pine, the best kinds.”

“We don’t need no brooms,” Mr. Cook said.

The woman took a long look around. She saw the boxes marked “Mining” and “Tools.” The clean mining picks and axes, which hadn’t seen a bit of dirt. She looked at me once, then again, blinking, then at Cook. “Surely the little missus here”—she nodded at me—“could use a broom to clean up after the young master.”

Cook was sleepy and irritable. “We got brooms enough here.”

“But if you mining and getting all dirtied up, you’ll be bringing in all kinds of filth and dirt and so forth, and I wouldn’t want the master to get too sullied up.”

“Can’t you hear?”

“I’m sorry, then. The Coachman said you’d need brooms.”

“Who is that again?”

“That’s the feller I told you ’bout,” I piped up again. Cook looked at me and frowned. He weren’t like the Old Man. He didn’t quite know what to do with me. He was all right when we was on the trail out west and there weren’t nobody else around to shoot the yarn with. But once he got around civilization, he didn’t know whether he should act white or colored, or be a soldier or a spy, or shit or go blind. He hadn’t paid me the least bit of attention since we got to the Ferry, and what attention he did pay to me weren’t respectful. I was just a bother to him. It was all fun to him. I don’t know but that he didn’t think anything would come of the Old Man’s plans, or believed him in the least, for Cook had never been in a real war, and never seen the Old Man fight. “Is she one of them you supposed to be hivin’?” he asked.

“One of ’em,” I said.

“Well, hive her,” he said, “and I will brew us up some coffee.” He picked up a bucket and moved outside. There was a water well out back, and he stumbled out there holding that bucket, rubbing his eyes.

Becky looked at me. “We is here on a mission,” I said. “I reckon the Coachman told you.”

“He told me he met a strange li’l cooter on the road dressed funny, who gived him bad instructions, and was likely stretching his blanket lying.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me names, for I has done you no wrong.”

“I’ll be calling you dead if you continues on as you is. You do much harm to yourself when you paddle ’bout, selling fool’s gold. Talking ’bout a great man. And talking it into the ears of the wrong folks. The Coachman’s wife don’t work on the gospel train. She got a mouth like a waterfall. You putting a lot of people in danger, hooting and railing ’bout John Brown like you is.”

“I already had a mouthful ’bout that from the Coachman,” I said. “I don’t know nothing ’bout nobody’s gospel train, not in no way, form, or fashion. I ain’t a runaway and ain’t from these parts. I been sent forward to hive the bees. Get the colored together. That’s what the Old Man sent me for.”

“Why would he send you?”

“He ain’t got but two coloreds in his army. The other ones he weren’t too sure ’bout.”

“In what way?”

“Thought they might trot off before they done what the Captain told ’em what to do.”

“The Captain. Who’s that?”

“I already told you. John Brown.”

“And what did the Captain tell you to do?”

“Hive the bees. Ain’t you heard me?”

Cook came to the kitchen, holding a pot of water. Then moved to put some kindling on the fire to make some hot water. “You hive her yet?” he said gaily. He was just a fool. He was the gayest man I ever saw. It would cost him. He’d be deadened ’cause of it, acting a fool.

“She don’t believe it,” I said.

“What part of it?”

“No parts of it.”

He stood up and cleared his throat, agitated. “Now listen, Aunt Polly, we come all this way to fr—”

“Becky’s my name, if you please.”

“Becky. A great man’s ’bout to come here and free your people. I just got a letter from him. He’ll be here in less than three weeks. He needs to hive the bees. Free you all.”

“I done heard all I need to hear about hiving and freeing,” Becky said. “How’s all this hiving and freeing gonna happen?”

“I can’t right tell all of it. But Old John Brown is coming, surely. From out west. Freedom’s nigh for you and your people. Onion here ain’t lying.”

“Onion?”

“That’s what we call her.”

“Her?”

I piped up quickly, “Miss Becky, if you ain’t one to hive or get on board with what John Brown’s selling, you ain’t got to come.”

“I didn’t say that,” she said. “I wants to know what he’s selling. Freedom? Here? He might as well be singing to a dead hog if he thinks he’s gonna come here and get away scot-free with that. There’s a damn armory here.”

“That’s why he’s coming,” Cook said. “To take the armory.”

“What’s he gonna take it with?”

“Men.”

“And what else?”

“And all the Negroes that’s gonna join ’em once he takes it over.”

“Mister, you talking crazy.”

Cook was a braggert, and it clean plucked his feathers to talk to a person that didn’t believe him or talked back to him. Especially a colored. “Am I?” he said. “Looky here.”

He led her to the other room, where the stacks of the mining boxes marked Mining Tools lay ’bout. He took a crowbar to one and opened it up. Inside, stacked in neat rows, were thirty clean, brand-new Sharps rifles, one after another.

I had never seen the inside of them boxes neither, and the fullness of the thing hit me and Miss Becky at the same time. Her eyes got wide. “Glory,” she said.

Cook snorted, bragging. “We got fourteen boxes here, just like this one. There’s more coming by shipment. The Captain’s got enough arms to furnish two thousand people.”

“There ain’t but ninety slaves in Harpers Ferry, mister.”

That stopped him dead. The smile disappeared from his face.

“I thought there was twelve hundred colored here. That’s what the man at the post office said yesterday.”

“That’s right. And most of ’em’s free colored.”

“That ain’t the same,” he muttered.

“It’s close enough,” Miss Becky said. “Free colored’s connected to bondage, too. Many of ’em’s married to those in bondage. I’m free, but my husband, he’s a slave. Most free colored’s got slave relations. They ain’t for slavery. Believe me.”

“Good! Then they’ll fight with us.”

“I ain’t say that.” She sat down, rubbing her head. “Coachman done sent me into a dilemma,” she mumbled. Then she uttered hotly, “This is some damn trickeration!”

“You ain’t got to believe,” Cook said gaily. “Just tell all your friends that Old John Brown is coming in three weeks. We attack on October twenty-third. He gived me the date by letter. Spread that around.”

Now, I was just a young boy dressed like a girl and foolish as a dimwit and not able to hold anybody in their wrong, stupid as I was, but still, I was a young man coming into myself, and even I weren’t that dim. It occurred to me that it didn’t take but one of them colored angling for a can of peaches or a nice fresh watermelon from their master to rouse the whole bit, to spill the beans, and the jig was up for everybody.

“Mr. Cook,” I said. “We don’t know if we can trust this woman.”

“You invited her,” he said.

“Suppose she tells!”

Miss Becky frowned. “You is got some nerve,” she said. “You busted in on Coachman’s property, damn near gave him away to his runny-mouth wife, and now you tellin’ me who can be trusted. It’s you we can’t trust. You could be selling us a heap of lies, child. You better hope your yarn matches up. If not, the Blacksmith will deaden you right where you is and be done with it. Ain’t nobody in this town gonna fret over a nigger child dead in an alley someplace.”

“What I done to him?”

“You endangering his railroad.”

“He owns a railroad?”

“The underground, child.”

“Hold on,” Cook said. “Your Blacksmith ain’t deadening nobody. Onion here is like a child to the Old Man. She’s his favorite.”

“Sure. And I’m George Washington.”

Now Cook got hot. “Don’t get sassy with me. We coming here to rescue you. Not the other way ’round. Onion here, the Captain stole her out of slavery. She’s like his kin. So you ought not to talk about your Blacksmith hurting this one here, or nobody else. Your Blacksmith won’t be drawing air long, fooling with the Captain’s plans. He don’t want to be on the wrong side of Captain Brown.”

Becky put her head in her hands. “I reckon I don’t know what to believe,” she said. “I don’t know what to tell the Coachman.”

“Is he the Negro in charge around here?” Cook asked.

“One of ’em. The main one’s the Rail Man.”

“Where’s he at?”

“Where you think? On the railroad.”

“The underground?”

“No. The real railroad. The B&O. The one that goes chug-chug. I reckon he’s in Baltimore or Washington, D.C., today.”

“Perfect! He can hive the bees there. How can I reach him?”

She stood up. “I’ll take my leave, now. I done told you too much already, sir. For all’s I know, you could be a slave stealer from New Orleans, come up here to steal souls and sell ’em off down river. You can have one of them brooms. It’s a gift. Use it to sweep the lies out this place. Watch the lady next door, if you don’t want deputies around. She’s a nosybody. Mrs. Huffmaster’s her name. And she don’t like niggers nor slave stealers nor abolitionists.”

As she moved toward the door, I blurted out, “You ought to check with your people. Check with your Rail Man.”

“I ain’t checking with nobody. It’s a trick.”

“G’wan, then. You’ll see. We don’t need you, neither.” She showed me her back, but as she moved to the door, there was a coat hook there, and she noticed the beaten shawl that the General gived me in Canada hanging on it. The shawl from Harriet Tubman herself.

“Where’d you get this?” she asked.

“It’s a gift,” I said.

“From who?”

“One of the Captain’s friends gived it to me. Said it would be useful. I just brung it ’cause ... I used it to cover some of my things in the wagon.”

“Did you now ...” she said. She gently took the General’s shawl off the coat hook. She held it in the light, then laid it on the table, her brown fingers spreading it wide. She stared carefully at the designs on it. I hadn’t paid them no mind. It weren’t nothing but a crude dog in a box with his feet pointed at all four corners of the box, with his snout nearly touching one of the top corners. Something in that design moved her, and she shook her head.

“I don’t believe it. Where’d you meet ... the person that gived you this?”

“I can’t say, for I don’t know you, neither.”

“Oh, you can tell her,” Cook said, runny mouth that he was.

But I didn’t open my mouth a bit. Miss Becky stared at the shawl, her eyes suddenly bright and full. “If you ain’t lying, child, it’s a great day. Did the soul who gived you this say anything else?”

“No. Well ... She did say don’t change the time, ’cause she was coming herself. With her people. She did say that. To the Captain. Not me.”

Miss Becky stood silent a minute. You’d a thunk I gived her a million dollars, for it seemed like a spell come over her. The old wrinkles in her face evened out and her lips broke into a small smile. The lines in her forehead seemed to vanish. She picked up the shawl and held it out away from her. “Can I keep this?” she asked.

“If it’ll help, all right,” I said.

“It helps,” she said. “It helps a great deal. Oh, the Lord is in the blessing business, ain’t He? He done blessed me today.” She got in a hurry then, whipping the shawl onto her shoulders, gathering up her brooms and tossing them in the wheelbarrow, as me and Cook stared.

“Where you going?” Cook said.

Miss Becky paused at the door, grabbed the door handle and held it tight, staring at it as she spoke. The happiness fell off her then, and she was all business again. Serious and straight on. “Wait a few days,” she said. “Just wait. And be quiet. Don’t say nothing else to nobody, white or colored. If a colored comes here asking ’bout your Captain, be careful. If they don’t mention the Blacksmith or the Rail Man in their first breath, draw your knife on ’em and make it count, for we is all blown. You’ll get word soon.”

And with that she opened the door, grabbed her wheelbarrow, and left.

24. The Rail Man

Not long after, Cook got a job at the Ferry working at the Wager House, a tavern and railroad depot right at the armory where he could annoy the folks. His hours was long. He worked into the night, while I stayed at the farm, tidied house, tried to cook, hide what I could of them crates, and pretended to be his consort. ’Bout a week after he started, Cook come back to the house one evening and said, “Somebody wants to talk with you.”

“Who is it?”

“Somebody colored at the railroad.”

“Can you bring ’em here?”

“Says he don’t want to come here. Too dangerous.”

“Whyn’t he tell you what he got to tell?”

“Said it clearly. You the one he wants.”

“He say anything ’bout the Blacksmith?”

Cook shrugged. “I don’t know nothing ’bout that. Just said he wanted to talk to you.” I made ready to go. I was bored to tears cooped up in that house anyway.

“Not now,” Cook said. “Tonight in the wee hour. One in the morning, he said... . Just set tight and go to bed. I’m going back to the tavern. I’ll wake you up when it’s time.”

He didn’t have to wake me up ’cause I set up. All evening, waiting, anxious, till Cook finally come in around midnight. We walked down the mountain from the Kennedy farm to the Ferry together. It was dark and drizzling as we came off the mountain. We crossed the Potomac side of the bridge, and as we done so, we saw the train had arrived, the B&O, a huge railway engine setting just outside the rifle works building at the Ferry. The locomotive set there, steaming, taking on water. The train’s passenger cars was empty.

Cook led me around to the back side of the station and down the entire length of the train. When we reached the last car, he split off into the thickets and headed down toward the Potomac, to the water’s edge. The Potomac runned underneath the railroad tracks. It was pretty dark down there, nothing to see but the swirling water in the moonlight. He pointed to the riverbank. “Feller wants to talk to you down there. Alone,” he said. “These coloreds is distrustful.”

He waited up at the top of the bank while I moved down to the bank of the Potomac. I sat there and waited.

A few minutes later, a tall, hulking figure emerged from the far end of the bank. He was a right-powerful-looking man, dressed in the neat uniform of a railroad porter. He didn’t come right up on me, but rather stayed in the shadow of the railroad trestle as he come closer. When he seen me, he didn’t come closer but stopped a few feet off and turned and leaned on the trestle, staring at the river. Above us, the train gived a sudden clank and burst of steam, its valves and all clacking thusly so, blowing that steam. I jumped as I heard it, and he glanced at me, then looked away back toward the river again.

“Take ’em an hour to get the steam up,” he said. “Maybe two. That’s all the time I got.”

“You the Rail Man?”

“It don’t matter what I am. Matters what you is. What are you?”

“I’m a messenger.”

“So was Jesus. You ain’t seen Him running ’round in a skirt and bloomer panties. Is you a girl or a boy?”

“I don’t know why everyone’s huffing and puffing ’bout what I am,” I said. “I’m just carrying a word.”

“Bringing trouble is what you doing. If a body ain’t sure, it’ll cost you.”

“What I done wrong?”

“I understands you is looking to buy some of the Coachman’s brooms. We carries them to Baltimore and beyond,” he said.

“Says who?” I asked.

“Says the Blacksmith.”

“Who is he, anyway?”

“You don’t wanna know.”

He stared across the water. By the light of the moon, I could see the outline of his face. He looked to be a friendly-faced feller, but his face was strained and tight. He weren’t in no happy mood.

“Now I’ll ask it again,” he said. He glimpsed over his shoulder at Cook, who watched down on us, and then back at the water. “Who are you. Where you from. And what you want.”

“Well, I don’t reckon I know what to say to you, for I done told it twice already.”

“When you roll up on a watery mouth like the Coachman’s wife, hooting and hollering ’bout insurrection, you better state yourself clean.”

“I weren’t hollering ’bout insurrection. I just told her I knowed how to read.”

“That’s the same thing. You keep quiet ’bout them kinds of things ’round here. Or you’ll have the Blacksmith to deal with.”

“I ain’t come all the way down here for you to throw threats at me. I’m speaking for the Captain. I ain’t got nothing to do with it.”

“With what?”

“You know what.”

“No, I don’t. Tell me.”

“Why’s every colored ’round here talking in circles?”

“’Cause the white man shoots straight—with real bullets, child. ’Specially if a Negro’s thick enough to talk insurrection!”

“It weren’t my idea.”

“I don’t care whose idea it is. You in it now. And if your man—if your man is who you says he is—if your man’s on the line ’bout rousting out the colored, he come to the wrong town. Ain’t but a hundred here at most will roll with him, if that.”

“Why’s that?”

“Ain’t but twelve hundred colored here. A good number of ’em’s women and children. The rest would fatten hogs under a tree with their own offspring ’fore they even raised an eyebrow to the white man. Shit. If Old John Brown wanted some coloreds to fight in his favor, he could’a gone sixty miles east to Baltimore, or Washington, or, or even the eastern shore of Maryland. Them coloreds there read the papers. They got boats. Guns. Some of ’em’s watermen. People who can move people. That would’a been sugar in his bowl. Even in southern Virginia, down in cotton country. There’s plantations down there loaded fat with colored who’ll do anything to get out. But here?” He shook his head, he glanced over his back at the Ferry. “He’s in the wrong country. We’s outnumbered. Surrounded on all sides by whites in every county.”

“There’s guns here,” I said. “That’s why he’s coming. He wants the guns from the armory to arm the colored.”

“Please. These niggers ’round here wouldn’t know a rifle from a load of greens. They can’t handle nobody’s rifle. They won’t let a nigger near them guns.”

“He got pikes. And swords. A lot of ’em. Thousands of ’em.”

The Rail Man snorted bitterly. “It ain’t gonna matter. First shot he fires, these white folks is gonna burn him.”

“You ain’t seen him when he’s battlin’.”

“Don’t matter. They’ll pull his head off his body and when they’re done, they’ll air out every colored within a hundred miles just to make ’em forget we ever saw Old John in these parts. They hate that man. If he’s living. Which I don’t think he is.”

“Go on, then. I’m tired of fending and proving. When he comes, you’ll see. I seen his planning. He got maps full of colors and drawings where the coloreds is gonna come from. He says they’ll come from everywhere: New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh. He got it all planned out. It’s a surprise attack.”

The Rail Man waved his hand, disgusted. “It ain’t no surprise here,” he snorted.

“You knowed he was coming?”

“I never liked the idea from first I heard it. Never thought he’d be stupid enough to try it, either.”

That’s the first time I ever heard anyone outside the Old Man’s circle mention the plan. “Where’d you hear it from?”

“The General. That’s why I’m here.”

My heart skipped a beat. “Is she coming?”

“I hope not. She’ll get her head blowed off.”

“How you know so much?”

For the first time, he turned to me. He sucked his teeth. “Your Captain, God bless him, he’s gonna go home in threes when they done with him here. And whatever colored is stupid enough to follow him’s gonna get shot to pieces, God damn him.”

“Why you so mad? He ain’t done nothing to you.”

“I got a wife and three children in bondage here,” he snapped. “These white folks is gonna donate every bullet they got to elephant-hunt the Negro once they kill Old John Brown. They’ll be right raw for years. And whatever coloreds they don’t stick in a death wedge in the ground they’ll send off. They’ll sell every soul in bondage ’round here who even looks colored. Right down the river to New Orleans they’ll go, God damn him. I ain’t saved up enough to buy my children yet. I only got enough for one. I got to decide now. Today. If he comes—”

He shut up. That ate at him. Just tore at him and he looked away. I seen he was troubled, so I said, “You ain’t got to worry. I seen plenty more Negroes who promised to come. Up at a big meeting in Canada. They speeched ’bout it all day. They was angry. Lots of ’em. These were big-time fellers. Reading men. Men of letters. They promised to come—”

“Oh, hogwash!” he snorted. “Them uppity, long-breathed niggers ain’t got enough sand in the lot of ’em to fill a God-damned thimble!”

He fumed, looking away, then pointed to the train on the trestle above us. “That train there,” he said, “that’s the B&O line. It rolls outta Washington, D.C., and Baltimore every day. Rolls north a bit and connects up with the train out of Philadelphia and New York City twice a week. I seen every single colored that’s ever been on that train for the last nine years. And I can tell you, half of them Negro leaders of your’n can’t afford a ticket on that train that would take ’em more’n ten yards. And them that could, they’d blow their wives’ head off with a pistol for a single glass of the white man’s milk.”

He sighed angrily, blowing through his nose now. “Oh, they talk a good game, writing stories for the abolitionist papers and such. But writing stories in the paper and making speeches ain’t the same as being out here doing the job. On the line. On the front line. The freedom line. They talk a whole heap, them stuffed-shirt, tidy-looking, tea-drinking, gizzard lickers, running around New England in their fine silk shirts, letting white folks wipe their tears and all. Box Car Brown. Frederick Douglass. Shit! I know a colored feller in Chambersburg worth twenty of them blowhards.”

“Henry Watson?”

“Forget names. You ask too many questions and know too God-damned much now.”

“You ought not to use God’s name in vain. Not when the Captain comes.”

“I ain’t studying him. I been working the gospel train for years. I know his doings. Been hearing of ’em for as long as I been doing this. I like the Captain. I love him. Many a night I prayed for him. And now he ...” He groused and cursed some more. “He’s deader than yesterday’s dinner, is what it is. How many’s in his army?”

“Well, last count there was ... sixteen or so.”

The Rail Man laughed. “That ain’t hardly enough for dice. The Old Man’s lost his buttons. At least I ain’t the only one that’s crazy.” He sat down at the water’s edge now, then tossed a rock in the water. It made a tiny splash. The moon shone down on him brightly. He looked terrifically sad. “Gimme the rest,” he said.

“Of what?”

“The plan.”

I gived it to him from soup to nuts. He listened closely. I told him all ’bout taking the night watchman in the front and back entrance, then fleeing to the mountains. After I was finished, he nodded. He seemed calmer. “Well, the Ferry can be took, that much the Captain’s right ’bout. There ain’t but two watchmen. But it’s the second part I don’t get. Where’s he expecting his coloreds to come from, Africa?”

“It’s in the plan,” I said, but I felt like sheep bleating.

He shook his head. “John Brown is a great man. God bless him. He ain’t lacking in courage, that’s for sure. But God’s wisdom has escaped him this time. I can’t tell him how to do his business, but he’s wrong.”

“He says he’s studied it for years.”

“He ain’t the first person who’s studied insurrection. Coloreds been studying it for a hundred years. His plan can’t work. It ain’t practical.”

“Could you make it so, then? Being that you’s a big wheel in the gospel train around here? You know which coloreds would fight, don’t you?”

“I can’t make two hundred coloreds get up outta Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and come up here. He needs at least that many to bust out the armory and get to the mountains once he’s got what he wants. Where’s he gonna get them kind of numbers? He’d need to run souls from Baltimore up through Detroit and down to Alabama.”

“Ain’t that what you do?”

“Running one or two souls ’cross the freedom line to Philadelphia is one thing. Running two hundred souls from D.C. and Baltimore this way is another. That’s impossible. He’d have to spread the word far and wide, all the way down to Alabama to make sure he gets them kind of numbers. The gospel train can carry a word fast, but not that fast. Not in three weeks.”

“You saying it can’t be done?”

“I’m saying it can’t be done in three weeks. Takes a letter a solid week to get from here to Pittsburgh. Sometimes a rumor travels faster’n a letter—”

He thought a minute.

“You say he’s throwing big metal at ’em in three weeks?”

“October twenty-third. In three weeks.”

“There ain’t no time, really. It’s a God-damn shame. Criminal, really. Except ...” He fingered his jaw, thinking. “Y’know what? Tell you what. Pass the word on to the Old Captain thusly—you let him decide on it. For if I speaks it, and someone asks it of me, I’m bound by the Lord’s word to tell the truth, and I don’t want that. I’m a good friend of the mayor of this town, Fontaine Beckham. He’s a good friend to the colored, and to me. I got to be able to tell him, if he asks, ‘Mr. Mayor, I knows nothing ’bout this whole bit.’ I can’t lie to him. Y’understand?”

I nodded.

“Pass word to the Old Man thusly: There’s hundreds of coloreds in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., itching for a chance to fight slavery. But they got no telegraph and gets no letters.”

“So?”

“So how would you pass word fast to thousands of folks who got no telegraph and gets no letters? What’s the fastest way from point A to point B?”

“I don’t know.”

“The railroad, child. That gets you to the city. But then you got to get to the colored. And I know just how to do it. Listen. I knows a few in Baltimore runs a numbers game. They collect numbers every day from both those in bondage and those that’s free. They pays out to the winner no matter what. Hundreds plays it every single day. I plays it myself. If you can get the Old Man to give me some money to grease them feller’s palms, the numbers men will spread the word fast. It’ll go everywhere within a day or two, for them types don’t fear the law. And if there’s a penny in it for them, that’s all they care ’bout.”

“How much money?”

“’Bout two hundred and fifty oughta do it. That’s twenty-five apiece. Some for them in Washington and some for the men in Baltimore. There’s ten of ’em I can think of.”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars! The Old Man ain’t got five dollars.”

“Well, that’s what he got to work with. Get me that money and I’ll spread it around in Baltimore and D.C. And if he throws in another two hundred fifty, I’ll have a set of wagons and horses to throw at it, so them fellers that wants to join him—I expect it’ll be women, too, lots of ’em—they’ll ride here. Ain’t but a day’s ride from here.”

“How many wagons?”

“Five oughta do it.”

“Where they gonna come from?”

“They’ll follow the tracks. Tracks cut a pretty straight path here from Baltimore. A dirt trail follows it along. There’s a couple of bad patches of trail—I’ll school the Negroes on it—but the trail is all right. The train don’t travel but twenty or thirty miles an hour. It stops every fifteen minutes to pick up passengers or water. They’ll be able to keep up all right. They won’t fall far behind.”

He paused a moment, staring out at the water, nodding, thinking, hatching it in his head as he spoke it. “I’ll ride in here on the train. It comes in at one twenty-five a.m. every night, the B&O out of Baltimore. Remember that. One twenty-five in the a.m. The B&O. I’ll be on it. When you and the Old Man’s army give me the signal, I’ll signal the fellers in the wagons on the road that it’s time to move in.”

“That sounds a little thin to me, Mr. Rail Man.”

“You got a better plan?”

“No.”

“That’s it, then. Tell the Captain he’s got to stop the train at one twenty-five, just before it crosses the B&O Bridge. I’ll get you the rest of what to do later. I got to git. Tell the Old Man to send me five hundred dollars. I’ll be back in two days on the next run. One twenty-five a.m. sharp. Meet me right here at that time. After that, don’t never speak to me again.”

He turned and left. I ran up to Cook, who stood at the top of the bank. Cook watched him leave.

“Well?”

“He says we’ll need five hundred dollars to hive the bees.”

“Five hundred dollars? Ungrateful wretches. Suppose he takes off with it. We coming to unslave them. How do you like that? The Old Man’ll never pay it.”

But when he found out, the Old Man did pay it, and a lot more. Too bad he did, too, for it cost him big-time, and by then the whole thing was blowed wide open and there weren’t no way of sending it backward, which I wish he could have, on account of a few mistakes I made, which cost everybody, including the Rail Man, pretty heavy.

25. Annie

Cook wrote the Old Man directly with the Rail Man’s request, and within a week, a colored man from Chambersburg rolled up to the house in a wagon, knocked on the door, and handed Cook a box labeled Mining Tools. He left without a word. Inside the box was a few tools, supplies, five hundred dollars in a sack, and a letter from the Old Man tellin’ him the army was arriving within a week. The Old Man wrote that his army would sprinkle in, by twos and threes, at night, so as not to attract suspicion.

Cook throwed the money sack into a lunch pail with some vittles and gived it to me, and I slung out to the Ferry to wait for the B&O train out of Baltimore at one twenty-five a.m. The Rail Man was the last to come off the train after the passengers and crew left out. I hailed him and gived him the lunch pail, tellin’ him out loud that it was lunch for the journey back to Baltimore—just in case anyone was within hearing. He took it without a word and moved on.

Two weeks later, the Old Man arrived alone, gruff and stern as usual. He fluffed ’bout the farm for a few minutes, checking the supplies and the roads and other matters thereabout, before he sat down and let Cook give him the lay of the land.

“I take it you has been shy of speaking our business,” he said to Cook.

“Quiet as a mouse,” Cook said.

“Good, for my army is coming soon.”

Later that day, the first of them arrived—and she was quite a surprise.

She was a girl, a white girl, sixteen, with dark hair and steady brown eyes that seemed to hold lots of surprises and a ready laugh behind them. She wore her hair pinned back in a bun, a yellow ribbon ’round her neck, and a simple farm-girl dress. Her name was Annie, and she was one of the Old Man’s older daughters. The Old Man had twelve living children altogether, but I reckon Annie had to be the best of the female lot. She was pretty as the day was long, quiet in nature, modest, obedient, and pious as the Old Man was. That took her out of my world, course, being that if a woman weren’t a low-down dirty stinker who drank rotgut and smoked cigars and throwed poker cards, there weren’t nothing she could do to mash my button, but Annie was easy on the eyes and a welcome surprise. She arrived in quiet fashion with Martha, sixteen, who was the wife of his son Oliver, who came trickling in to join us with the rest of the Old Man’s army from Iowa.

The Old Man introduced me to the girls and announced, “I knows you is not partial to housework, Onion, being more of a soldier than a home cooker. But it is time you learn the ways of women as well. These two is to help you put the house in shape. You three can tend to the men’s needs and make the farm look normal to the neighbors.”

It was a fine notion, for the Old Man knowed my girl limits and that I couldn’t cook for a pinch of snuff, but when he announced the sleeping arrangements, my feathers fell. We three girls was to sleep downstairs in the house, while the men slept upstairs. I agreed course, but the minute he hopped upstairs, Annie moved to the kitchen, drawed water for a bath, throwed her clothes off, and hopped into the tub, which caused me to scat from the kitchen and slam the door shut behind me, standing in the drawing room with my back to the door.

“Oh, you is a shy thing,” she said from behind the door.

“Yes I is, Annie,” I said from the other side, “and I appreciate your understanding. For I is ashamed to undress around white folks, being colored and all, and having my mind on the upcoming freeing of my people. I don’t yet know the ways of white people, having lived around the colored so long.”

“But Father says you was a friend to my dear brother Frederick!” Annie shouted from the tub behind the door. “And you has lived on with Father and his men for the better part of three years.”

“Yes, I has, but that was on the trail,” I shouted back from my side. “I needs time to ready myself for indoors living and being free, for my people don’t know how yet to live civilized, being slaved and all. Therefore, I am glad you is here, to show me the ways of righteousness behind God’s doings in my life as a free person.”

Oh, I was a scoundrel, for she bit the whole thing off. “Oh, that is so sweet of you,” she said. I heard her splashing and scrubbing and finally getting out the tub. “I will be glad to do it. We can read the Bible together and rejoice in learning and sharing the Lord’s word and knowledge, and all His ways of encouragement and doings.”

It was all a lie course, for I weren’t no more interested in the Bible than a hog knows a holiday. I decided to keep out the house, knowing them arrangements just wouldn’t do, for while she was a bit dowdy compared to the swinging lowlifes I lusted after out west—in fact right dusty-looking in bonnet and hat when she come in, from days of riding from the family’s home in upstate New York—I glimpsed a good part of the inner package when she throwed herself in that tub, and there was enough there, by God, ripe and plump, to build as much of a fire ’round as I could imagine. I couldn’t stand it, for I was then fourteen, near as I can tell it, and had yet to experience nature’s ways, and what I knowed of it filled me with dread and wanting and confusion, thanks to Pie. I had to fill my mind with other doings lest my true nature show itself. I didn’t have a decent bone in my body, God seed it, so I resolved to keep off from her and out the house “hiving the bees” as much as possible.

That didn’t look to be easy, for we was charged to look after the Old Man’s army, which begun arriving in twos and threes right after the girls did. Luckily the Old Man needed me to consort and help him with his maps and papers, for that afternoon he rescued me from the kitchen by calling me to the drawing room directly to assist him in his drawings and plans. As Annie and Martha scampered ’bout the kitchen, preparing it for big work, he pulled several large canvas scrolls out his box and said, “We has finally raised the ante. The war begins in earnest. Help me spread these maps on the floor, Onion.”

His maps, papers, and letters had sprouted some in size. The small packet of papers, news clippings, bills, letters, and maps he once crammed into his saddlebags back in Kansas had growed to piles of papers thick as the Bible. His maps was scrolled on large canvas paper, unfurled to nearly as tall as me. I helped him spread them on the floor and sharpened his pencils and fed him cups of tea as he set on his hands and knees poring over them, scribbling and planning, while the girls fed us both. The Old Man never ate much. Usually he gobbled down a raw onion, which he bit into like an apple and washed down with black coffee, a conglomeration which made his breath ripe enough to draw the wrinkles out a shirt and starch it clean. Sometimes he throwed a little hominy down his gizzards just for variation, but whatever he didn’t eat, I polished off for him, for food was always scarce around him. And with more men arriving by the day, I knowed by then to furnish my innards as much as possible for the day when there wouldn’t be no furnishings to line it, which I expected wouldn’t be far off.

We worked like that for a day or two till one afternoon, poring over his map, he said to me, “Has Mr. Cook held his tongue whilst you was here?”

I couldn’t lie. But I didn’t want to discourage him, so I said, “More or less, Captain. But not to the limit.”

Staring at his map on all fours, the Old Man nodded. “As I figured. It doesn’t matter. Our army will be here in full within a week. Once they’re here, we will gather the pikes and go to arms. I goes as Isaac Smith in public ’round here, Onion, don’t forget it. If anyone asks, I’m a miner, which is true, for I mines the souls of men, the conscience of a nation, the gold of the insane institution! Now, give me my report on the colored, which you and Cook has no doubt been hoeing and cultivating and hiving.”

I gived him the clean side of it, that I had found the Rail Man. I left out the part ’bout the Coachman’s wife and her maybe spilling the beans. “You has done a good job, Onion,” he said. “Hiving the bees is the most important part of our strategy. They will come, no doubt, by the thousands, and we must be ready for them. Now, in lieu of cooking and cleaning for our army, I suggest you continue your work. Hive on, my child. Spread the word among your people. You are majestic!”

He weren’t nothing but enthusiastic, and I didn’t have the heart to blurt out to him that the coloreds wasn’t sharing his enthusiasm one bit. The Rail Man hadn’t said a word to me since I gived him that money to spread the word among numbers runners in Baltimore and Washington. The Coachman avoided me. I saw Becky in town one afternoon, and she damn near fell off the wooden sidewalk scrambling to get out my way. I reckon I was bad luck to them. Somehow the word had gotten out on me, and the colored in town runned the other way every time they seen me coming. I had my hands full at home, too, running from Annie, who seen me as needing her religious training and liked to go naked every couple of days while the men were out, plopping into the tub anytime she pleased, causing me to scamper out the room on one pretense or another. At one point she announced it was time for me to wash my hair, which had gotten scandalous nappy and frizzy. I normally kept it tucked under a rag or a bonnet for weeks, but she got an eyeful of it one afternoon and insisted. When I refused, she allowed she’d find a wig for me, and one evening ventured to the Ferry and returned with a book she brought forth from the town library called London Curls. She read off a list of wigs that would work for me: “The brigadier, the spencer, the giddy feather top, the cauliflower. The staircase. Which is best for you?” she asked.

“The Onion,” I allowed.

She burst into laughter and let it go. She had a laugh that made a feller’s heart jump, and that for me was dangerous, for I growed to liking her company a bit, so I took to making myself even scarcer. I made it a point to sleep next to the stove at night, away from her and Martha, and always made sure to be the last soul on the first floor to go to sleep at night and the first out the door in the morning.

I kept myself on the go that way, hiving the bees without much success. The colored of Harpers Ferry lived on the far side of the Potomac railroad tracks. I hung around them for days, looking for coloreds to talk to. Course they avoided me like the plague. Word had gotten around to them ’bout the Old Man’s plot by then. I never did figure out how, but the colored wanted no parts of it nor me, and when they seen me, moved off quick. I was especially moved to discouragement one morning when the Old Man sent me on an errand to the lumber mill. I couldn’t find it, and when I rolled up to a colored woman on the road to ask for directions, before I could open my mouth, she said, “Scatter thee, varmint. I ain’t got nothing to do with you and your kind! You gonna get us all murdered!” and off she went.

That moved me to discouragement badly. But it weren’t all bad news. After Kagi arrived, he met up on his own with the Rail Man, and I reckon his cool manner calmed the Rail Man some, for Kagi reported they’d gone over various plans to get the colored to the Ferry from points east and thereabouts, and the Rail Man seemed to have it worked out right and promised to deliver. That pleased the Old Man no end. He announced to the others, “Luckily for us, the Onion has been diligent in her work, hiving.”

I cannot say I agreed with him there, for I hadn’t done nothing but fumble ’bout. It didn’t matter to me what he said then, to be truthful, for I had my own problems. As the days passed, Annie became a powerful force in my heart. I didn’t want it to happen, course, never seen it coming, which is how these things work, but even in all my running around outside, it couldn’t help but that the three of us, Annie, Martha, and myself, was kept busy as bees in the house once the Old Man’s army rolled in. There weren’t no time to make a clean break with all that scrambling around, and my idea of running off to Philadelphia, which was always my plan, got lost in all that busywork. There just weren’t no time. The men come pouring in, a trickle at first, in the dead of the night, by twos and threes, then more steadily and in bigger numbers. The old players came first: Kagi, Stevens, Tidd, O. P. Anderson. Then some new ones—Francis Merriam—a wild-eyed feller a bit off his rocker. Stewart Taylor, a bad-tempered soul, and the rest, the Thompson brothers and the Coppocs, the two shooting Quaker brothers. Lastly, two Negroes arrived, Lewis Leary and John Copeland, two stalwart, strong-willed, handsome fellers who hailed from Oberlin, Ohio. Their arrival perked the Old Man’s ears toward the colored again, for them two was college fellers and arrived out of nowhere, having heard the fight for freedom was coming through the colored grapevine. He got much encouragement from seeing them pop into place, and one evening he looked up from his map and asked me how the hiving ’bout the Ferry was going.

“Going fine, Captain. They hiving hard.”

What else was there to say to him? He was a lunatic by then. Hardly eating, not sleeping, poring over maps and census numbers and papers and scribbling letters and getting more letters in the mail than seemed possible for one man to get. Some of them letters was full of money, which he gived to the girls to buy food and provisions. Others was urging him to leave Virginia. My mind was so confused in them days, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. There weren’t no room to think. The tiny house was like a train station and armed camp put together: There was guns to ready, ammo to figure, troop strength to discuss. They dispatched me all over, to the Ferry and back, here and there in the valley and all around it to get supplies, count men, spy on the rifle works, tell how many windows was in the engine house at the Ferry, fetch newspapers from the local general store, and count the number of people in it and the like. The Old Man and Kagi begun several late-night runs back and forth to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, ’bout fifteen miles, to collect other arms by wagon, which he had shipped to secret addresses in Chambersburg. It was just too much work. Annie and Martha was a cooking and washing service and entertainment sensations, for the men had to stay cooped upstairs in the house all day playing checkers and reading books, and them two kept them amused and entertained, in addition to the three of us scurrying ’bout downstairs preparing food.

This went on for nearly six weeks. The only solace from that madness was to hive the colored, which got me out the house, or at times, to set out on the porch with Annie in the evenings. That was one of her jobs, to set there serving as lookout and to keep the house looking normal and keep the downstairs presentable to make sure that nobody wandered in and found the hundreds of guns and pikes laying around in crates. Many an evening she asked me to set out on the porch with her, for none of the men was allowed to show themselves, and besides, she saw it as her business to educate me as to the ways of the Bible and living a Christian life. We spent them hours reading the Bible together in the dusk and discussing its passages. I come to enjoy them talks, for even though I’d gotten used to living a lie—being a girl—it come to me this way: Being a Negro’s a lie, anyway. Nobody sees the real you. Nobody knows who you are inside. You just judged on what you are on the outside whatever your color. Mulatto, colored, black, it don’t matter. You just a Negro to the world. But somehow, setting on the bench of that porch, conversating with her, watching the sun go down over the mountains above the Ferry, made me forget ’bout what was covering me and the fact that the Old Man was aiming to get us all minced to pieces. I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn’t count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman.

“What do you want to be someday?” Annie asked me one evening as we set out on the porch at sunset.

“What you mean?”

“When this is all done.”

“When what is all done?”

“When this war is over. And the Negro is free.”

“Well, I’ll likely be a ...” I didn’t know what to say, for I weren’t thinking of the whole bit succeeding. Running to freedom up north was easier, but I had no absolute plans on it that very moment, for setting with her made every minute feel joyous, and time passed quickly and all my plans for the future seemed far off and not important. So I said, “I’ll likely buy a fiddle and sing songs the rest of my life. For I enjoys music.”

“Henrietta!” she scolded naughtily. “You never allowed you can sing.”

“Why, you has never asked.”

“Well, sing for me then.”

I sung for her “Dixie” and “When the Coons Go Marching Home.”

We was setting on a swinging bench that the Old Man set up, hung from the ceiling, and as I sat next to her and throwed my singing at her, her face softened, her whole body seemed to grow soft as a marshmallow, settling in that swinging chair, listening. “You sing beautiful,” she said. “But I don’t favor them rebel songs. Sing a religious song. Something for the Lord.”

So I sang “Keeping His Bread” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

Well, that done her in. She got just dumbstruck happy by them songs. They buttered her up to privilege, practically. She set there swinging back and forth, looking righteously spent, and soft as biscuit dough, her eyes looking moist and dewy. She squirmed a little closer to me.

“Gosh, that is beautiful,” she said. “Oh, I do so love the Lord. Sing another.”

So I sang “Love Is a Twilight Star” and “Sally Got a Furry Pie for Me,” which is an old rebel song from back in Kansas, but I changed “furry pie” to “johnnycake,” and that just cleaned her up. Knocked her out. She got right syrupy, and her brown eyes—by God, them things was pretty as stars and big as quarters—set upon me and she put her arm around me on that bench and looked at me with them big eyes that liked to suck my insides out, and said, “Why, that is the most beautiful song I have ever heard in my life. It just makes my heart flutter. Would that you was a boy, Henrietta. Why, I’d marry you!” And she kissed me on the cheek.

Well, that just ruint my oats, her grazing on me like that, and I made it my purpose right then and there to never go near her again, for I was a fool for her, just a fool, and I knowed no good was gonna come of them feelings.

It was a good thing the Old Man set Annie on the porch as lookout, for a constant source of trouble lived just down the road, and was it not for Annie, we’d have been discovered right off. As it was, it set the whole caboodle off in the worst way. And as usual, it was a woman behind it.

Her name was Mrs. Huffmaster, a bit of trouble that Becky had mentioned. She was a barefoot, nosy, dirty-to-the-corn white woman who walked the road with three snot-nosed, biscuit-eating, cob-headed children, poking her nose in every yard but her own. She wandered that road before our headquarters every day, and it weren’t long before she invited herself onto the front porch.

Annie normally seen her through the window and dived for the door just before Mrs. Huffmaster could get to the porch so she could hold her out there. Annie told Mrs. Huffmaster and the neighbors that her Pa and Cook runned his mining business on the other side of the valley, which was the excuse for them renting the old farm. But that didn’t satisfy that old hag, for she was a nosybody who gobbled up gossip. One morning Mrs. Huffmaster slipped up onto the porch before Annie seen her and knocked on the door, aiming to push it open and step inside. Annie spied her at the last second through the window just as Mrs. Huffmaster’s foot hit the porch deck, and she leaned on the door, pinning it shut. It was a good thing, too, for Tidd and Kagi had just unpacked a carton of Sharps rifles and primers, and had Mrs. Huffmaster walked in, she would have stumbled over enough rifles and cartridges laying on the floor to pack a troop of U.S. Cavalry. Annie kept the door shut as Mrs. Huffmaster pushed against it, while me, Kagi, and Tidd scampered around, putting them guns back in the crate.

“Annie is that you?” the old hag said.

“I’m not proper, Mrs. Huffmaster,” Annie said. Her face was white as a sheet.

“What’s the matter with this door?”

“I will be right out,” Annie sang.

After a few hot minutes, we got them things put up and Annie slipped out the door, pulling me along with her for support, keeping the woman on the porch.

“Mrs. Huffmaster, we is not prepared for guests,” she said, fluffing herself and setting in her bench on the porch, pulling me next to her. “Would you like some lemonade? I’ll be happy to get you some.”

“Ain’t thirsty,” Mrs. Huffmaster said. She had the face of a horse after eating. She looked around, trying to peek in the window. She smelled a rat.

There was fifteen men setting in that house upstairs, quiet as mice. They never went out during the day, only at night, and they set there in silence while Annie chewed the fat and run that nosybody off. Still, that woman knowed something was up, and from that day forward, she made it her business to stop off at the house anytime. She lived just down the road, and made it known that Cook had already got her dander up by romancing one of the neighbors’ daughters, who her brother had expected to marry. She took that as an affront of some kind, and made it her business to come by the house each day at different times, with her ragged, barefoot, dirty children trailing behind her like ducklings, poking her nose around and picking at Annie. She was a rough, uncouth woman who belonged more in Kansas Territory than back east. She constantly picked on Annie, who was refined and sweet and pretty as a peeled onion. Annie knowed it weren’t her business to ruffle that woman’s feathers in any way, so she took it standing up, calm as lettuce.

It got so that each afternoon at some point Mrs. Huffmaster would stomp onto the front porch where Annie and I sat and bark out, “What is you doin’ today?” and “Where’s my pie?” Just straight out bullying and poking. One morning she stomped up there and said, “That is a lot of shirts you is hanging out on your back line there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Annie said. “My Pa and brothers has a host of shirts. Changes ’em twice a week, sometimes more. Keeps my hands busy all day washing ’em. Ain’t that horrible?”

“’Deed it is, especially when but one shirt will serve my husband two or three weeks. How you get so many shirts?”

“Oh, by and by. My father bought them.”

“And what does he do again?”

“Why, he’s a miner, Mrs. Huffmaster. And there’s a couple of his workers live here, work for him. You know that.”

“And by the way, where is your Pa and them digging again?”

“Oh, I don’t ask their business,” Annie said.

“And your Mr. Cook sure do have a way with girls, being that he romanced Mary up the road. Does he work in the mine, too?”

“I reckon he does.”

“Then why’s he working the tavern down at the Ferry?”

“I don’t know all his business, Mrs. Huffmaster. But he is a dandy talker,” Annie said. “Maybe he got two jobs. One talking and one digging.”

And on and on it went. Time and again Mrs. Huffmaster invited herself inside the house, and each time Annie would put her off by saying, “Oh, I can’t finish cooking yet,” or point to me and say, “Oh, Henrietta here is ’bout to take a bath,” or some such thing. But that lady was moved to devilment. After a while she stopped being friendly altogether, and her questions took on a different tone. “Who is the nigger?” she said to Annie one afternoon when she come upon me and Annie setting out reading the Bible and conversating.

“Why, that’s Henrietta, Mrs. Huffmaster. She’s a member of the family.”

“A slave or free?”

“Why, she’s a ...” and Annie didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Why, I’m in bondage, missus. But a happier person in this world you cannot find.”

She glared at me and said, “I didn’t ask if you was happy.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But if you is in bondage, why is you hanging ’bout the railroad down at the Ferry all the time, trying to roust the niggers up? That’s the talk ’round town ’bout you,” she said.

That stumped me. “I done no such thing,” I lied.

“Is you lying, nigger?”

Well, I was stumped. And Annie sat there, calm, with a straight face, but I could see the blood rushing to her cheeks, and see the cheerfulness back out of her face, and the angry calm lock itself into place instead—like it did with all them Browns. Once them Browns got to whirring up, once they got their blood to boiling, they got quiet and calm. And dangerous.

“Now, Mrs. Huffmaster,” she said. “Henrietta is my dear friend. And part of my family. And I don’t appreciate you speaking to her in such an unkind manner.”

Mrs. Huffmaster shrugged. “You can talk to your niggers however you like. But you better get your story straight. My husband was at the tavern at the Ferry, and he overheard Mr. Cook say that your Pa ain’t a miner or slave owner at all, but an abolitionist. And that the darkies is planning something big. Now your nigger here is saying y’all is slave owners. And Cook says y’all is not. Which is it?”

“I reckon you is not privy to how we live. For it is none of your business,” Annie said.

“You got a smart mouth for someone so young.”

Well, that woman weren’t of the notion that she was talking to a Brown. Man or woman, them Browns didn’t knuck to nobody once they got on their hind legs ’bout something. Annie was a young thing, but she flew hot and stood up in a snap, her eyes a-blazing, and for a minute you seen her true nature, cool as ice on the outer part, but a firm, crazy wildness inside there somewhere; that’s what drove them Browns. They was strange creatures. Pure outdoor people. They didn’t think like normal folks. They thunk more like animals, driven by ideas of purity. I reckon that’s why they thought the colored man was equal to the white man. That was her Pa’s nature, surely, jumping ’round inside her.

“I’ll thank you to step off my porch now,” she said. “And make it quick, or I’ll help you to it.”

Well, she throwed down the gauntlet, and I reckon it was coming anyway. That woman left in a huff.

We watched her go, and when she crossed the muddy road out of sight, Annie blurted out, “Father will be angry with me,” and burst into tears.

It was all I could do to keep myself from hugging her then, for my feelings for her was deep, way down deep. She was strong and courageous, a true woman, so kind and decent in her thinking, just like the Old Man. But I couldn’t bring myself to it. For if I’d a pressed up against her and held her in my arms, she’d’a knowed my true nature. She’d’a felt my heart banging, she’d’a felt the love busting outta me, and she’d’a knowed I was a man.

26. The Things Heaven Sent

Not a week after Annie put her foot in Mrs. Huffmaster’s duff, the Captain upped and laid down the date. “We move on October twenty-third,” he announced. That was a date he’d already called out, and written letters ’bout, and told loudmouth Cook and anybody else he reckoned would need to know it, so it weren’t no great secret. But I reckoned it made him feel better to announce it to the men lest they forget or wanted to hightail out of it before the whole deal begun in earnest.

October twenty-third. Remember that date. At the time, that was two Sundays distant.

The men was happy, for while the girls slept downstairs and was right comfortable, yours truly included, the men was packed like rats in the upstairs attic. There was fifteen up there in that tiny space sleeping on mattresses, playing chess, exercising, reading books and newspapers. They was squeezed tighter than Dick’s hatband, and had to keep quiet all day lest the neighbors or Mrs. Huffmaster hear them. During thunderstorms they jumped up and down and hollered at the top of their lungs to get their feelings out. At night a few even roamed the yard, but they couldn’t venture far or go to the village, and they had gotten so they couldn’t stand it. They took to squabbling, especially Stevens, who was disagreeable anyway, and throwed up his fists at any slight. The Old Man brung ’em in too early, is what it was, but he had no place to store ’em. He hadn’t planned on keeping ’em cooped up there that long. They come in September. By October it’d been a month. When he announced they was ready to make their charge on October twenty-third, that was three more weeks. Seven weeks total. That’s a long time.

Kagi mentioned this to him, but the Old Man said, “They’ve soldiered this far. They can stand another couple of weeks.” He weren’t studying them. He had become fixated on the colored.

Everything depended on their coming, and while he tried not to show he was concerned, he was wound up tight on it—and ought to have been. He had written to all his colored friends from Canada who promised to high heaven they was gonna come. Not too many had written back. He set still through the summer and into September, waiting on them. In early October, he got thunderstruck with an idea and announced he and Kagi was gonna ride to Chambersburg to see his old friend, Mr. Douglass. He decided to take me along as well. “Mr. Douglass is fond of you, Onion. He has asked about you in his letters, and you will make a good attraction for him to come join us.”

Now, the Old Man knowed nothing ’bout Mr. Douglass’s drinking and fresh ways, chasing me ’round his study and all as he done, and he weren’t gonna know, for one thing you learns when you is a girl is that most women’s hearts is full of secrets. And this one was gonna stay with me. But I liked the idea of going to Chambersburg, for I had never been there. Plus, anything to get me out the house and away from my true love was a welcome change, for I was heartbroken on the matter of Annie and was happy to get away from her anytime.

We rode up to Chambersburg in evening, early October, in a horse-drawn, open-backed wagon. We got there in a jiffy. It weren’t but fourteen miles. First the Captain called on some colored friends up there, Henry Watson, and a doctor named Martin Delany. Mr. Delany had helped ship arms through to the Ferry, apparently at much danger to himself. And I had a feeling that Mr. Watson was the feller the Rail Man had referred to when he said, “I know a feller in Chambersburg who’s worth twenty of them blowhards,” for he was a cool customer. He was an average-size man, dark skinned, slender, and smart. He was cutting hair in his barbershop on the colored edge of town when we come up on him. When he seen the Old Man, he shooed the colored out his shop, closed it down, brung us to his house in the back of it, and produced food, drink, and twelve pistols in a bag marked Dry Goods, which he handed the Old Man without a word. Then he handed the Old Man fifty dollars. “This is from the Freemasons,” he said tersely. His missus was standing behind him as he done all this, closed up his shop and so forth, and she piped out, “And their wives.”

“Oh, yes. And their wives.”

He explained to the Old Man that he’d set up the meeting with Mr. Douglass in a rock quarry at the south edge of town. Frederick Douglass was big doings in them days. He couldn’t just walk into town without nobody knowing. He was like the colored president.

Mr. Watson gived the Old Man directions on how to get there. The Old Man took ’em, then Watson said, “I am troubled that the colored may not come.” He seemed worried.

The Old Man smiled and patted Mr. Watson on the shoulder. “They will roust, surely, Mr. Watson. Don’t fret on it. I will mention your worries to our fearless leader.”

Watson smirked. “I don’t know ’bout him. He gived me a mouthful ’bout finding a safe place. Seems he’s slanting every which way on the question of your purpose.”

“I will speak to him. Calm his doubts.”

Mrs. Watson was standing behind them as they talked, and she blurted out to the Old Man, “We got five men for your purpose. Five we can trust. Young. Without children or wives.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“One of them,” she managed to choke out, “one of them’s our eldest son.”

The Old Man patted her on the back. Just patted her on the back for courage as she cried a little bit. “The Lord will not forsake us. He is behind our charge,” he said. “Take courage.” He gathered up the guns and money they gived him, shook their hands, and left.

Turns out them five fellers never had to come after all, the way it all worked out, for by the time they was geared up to go, the only place for them to head was due north as fast as their legs could carry them. White folks got insane after the Old Man done his bit, they went on a rampage and attacked coloreds for miles. They was scared outta their minds. I reckon in some fashion, they ain’t been the same since.

I hears that much has been said ’bout the last meeting between the Old Man and Mr. Douglass. I done heard tell of ten or twenty different variations in different books written on the subject, and various men of letters working their talking holes on the matter. Truth be to tell it, there weren’t but four grown men there when the whole thing happened, and none lived long enough to tell their account of it, except for Mr. Douglass himself. He lived a long life afterward, and being that he’s a speechifier, he explained it every which way other than in a straight line.

But I was there, too, and I seen it differently.

The Old Man came to that meeting disguised as a fisherman, wearing an oilskin jacket and a fisherman’s hat. I don’t know why. No disguise would’a worked by then, for he was red hot. His white beard and hard stare was plastered on every wanted poster from Pittsburgh to Alabama. In fact, most of the colored in Chambersburg knowed ’bout that supposed secret meeting, for they must’ve been two or three dozen that turned out in the dead middle of the night as we rolled in the wagon toward the rock quarry. They whispered greetings from the thickets on the side of the road, some held out blankets, boiled eggs, bread, and candles. They said, “God bless you, Mr. Brown” and “Evening, Mr. Brown” and “I’m all for you, Mr. Brown.”

None said they was coming to fight at the Ferry though, and the Old Man didn’t ask it of ’em. But he seen how they held him. And it moved him. He was a half hour late for meeting Mr. Douglass on account of having to stop every ten minutes to howdy the colored, accepting food and pennies and whatever they had for him. They loved the Old Man. And their love for him gived him power. It was a kind of last hurrah for him, turned out, for they wouldn’t have time to thank him later on, being that after he moved to the business of killing and deadening white folks at breakneck speed, the white man turned on them something vicious and drove lots of ’em clear outta town, guilty and innocent alike. But they juiced him good, and he was fired up by the time we turned into the rock quarry and bumped down the path toward the back of it. “By gosh, Onion, we will push the infernal institution to ruination!” he cried. “God’s willing it!”

The quarry had a big, wide, long ditch at the back of it, big enough for a wagon to roll through. We rolled into that thing smooth business, and an old colored man silently pointed us right through it to the back. At the back of it, standing there, was Mr. Douglass himself.

Mr. Douglass brung with him a stout, dark-skinned Negro with fine curly hair. Called himself Shields Green, though Mr. Douglass called him “Emperor.” Emperor held himself that way, too—straight-backed, firm, and quiet.

Mr. Douglass didn’t look at me twice, nor did he hardly greet Mr. Kagi. His face was drawed serious, and after them two embraced, he stood there and listened in dead silence as the Old Man gived him the whole deal: the plan, the attack, the colored flocking to his stead, the army hiding in the mountains, white and colored together, holing up in the mountain passes so tight that the federals and militia couldn’t get in. Meanwhile Kagi and the Emperor stood quiet. Not a peep was said by either.

When the Old Man was done, Mr. Douglass said, “What have I said to you to make you think such a plan will work? You are walking into a steel trap. This is the United States Armory you are talking about. They will bring federals from Washington, D.C., at the first shot. You will not be there two minutes before they will have you.”

“But you and I has spoken of it for years,” the Old Man said. “I have planned it to the limit. You yourself at one time pointed out it could be done.”

“I said no such thing,” Mr. Douglass said. “I said it should be done. But what should be and could be are two different things.”

The Old Man pleaded with Mr. Douglass to come. “Come with me, Frederick. I need to hive the bees, and with you there, every Negro will come, surely. The slave needs to take his liberty.”

“Yes. But not by suicide!”

They argued ’bout it some more. Finally the Old Man placed his arm around Mr. Douglass. “Frederick. I promise you. Come with me and I will guard you with my life. Nothing will happen to you.”

But, standing there in his frock coat, Mr. Douglass weren’t up to it. He had too many highballs. Too many boiled pigeons and meat jellies and buttered apple pies. He was a man of parlor talk, of silk shirts and fine hats, linen suits and ties. He was a man of words and speeches. “I cannot do it, John.”

The Old Man put on his hat and moved to the wagon. “We will take our leave, then.”

“Good luck to you, old friend,” Mr. Douglass said, but the Old Man had already turned away and climbed into the wagon. Me and Kagi followed. Then Mr. Douglass turned to the feller with him, Shields Green. He said, “Emperor, what is your plan?”

Emperor shrugged and said simply, “I guess I’ll go with the Old Man.” And without another word, Emperor climbed into the wagon next to Kagi.

The Old Man harred up his horses, backed away from Mr. Douglass, turned that wagon ’round, and took his leave. He never spoke to Frederick Douglass or ever mentioned his name again.

All the way back to Harpers Ferry he was silent. I could feel his disappointment. It seemed to surge out of him. The way he held the traces, drove them horses at half-trot through the night, the moon behind him, the silhouette of his beard against the moon, his beard shaking as the horses clopped along, his thin lips pursed tight, he seemed like a ghost. He was just knocked down. I guess we all has our share of them things, when the cotton turns yellow and the boll weevil eats out your crops and you just shook down with disappointment. His great heartbreak was his friend Mr. Douglass. Mine’s was his daughter. There weren’t no way for them things to go but for how God made ’em to go, for everything God made, all His things, all His treasures, all the things heaven sent ain’t meant to be enjoyed in this world. That’s a thing he said, not me, for I weren’t a believer in them times. But a spell come over me that night, watching him eat that bad news. A little bit of a change. For the Captain took that news across the jibs and brung hisself back to Harpers Ferry knowing he was done in. He knowed he was gonna lose fighting for the Negro, on account of the Negro, and he brung hisself to it anyway, for he trusted in the Lord’s word. That’s strong stuff. I felt God in my heart for the first time at that moment. I didn’t tell him, for there weren’t no use bothering the Old Man with that truth, ’cause if I’d’a done that, I’d’a had to tell him the other part of it, which is that even as I found God, God was talking to me, too, just like He done him, and God the Father was tellin’ me to get the hell out. And plus, I loved his daughter besides. I didn’t want to throw that on him. I knowed a thing or two right then. Learned it on the spot. Knowed from the first, really, that there weren’t no way Mr. Douglass could’a brung hisself to fight a real war. He was a speeching parlor man. Just like I knowed there weren’t no way I could’a brung myself to be a real man, with a real woman, and a white woman besides. Some things in this world just ain’t meant to be, not in the times we want ’em to, and the heart has to hold it in this world as a remembrance, a promise for the world that’s to come. There’s a prize at the end of all of it, but still, that’s a heavy load to bear.

27. Escape

Things was a hot mess the moment we hit the door of the farm back at the Ferry. Time we walked in, the Captain’s son Oliver and Annie were waiting at the door for him. Annie said, “Mrs. Huffmaster called in the sheriff.”

“What?”

“Says she saw one of the coloreds in the yard. She went to the sheriff and denounced us as abolitionists. Brung the sheriff by.”

“What happened?”

“I told him you’d be back Monday. He tried to get in but I wouldn’t let him. Then Oliver came down from upstairs and told him to get off. He was angry when he left. He gave me a mouthful ’bout abolitionists running slaves north. He said, ‘If your Pa’s running a mining company, where’s he mining? If he’s got to move his mining goods, where the cows and the wagons he’s using for that purpose?’ He says he’s coming back with a bunch of deputies to search the house.”

“When?”

“Saturday next.”

The Old Man thunk over it a moment.

“Was one of our men in the yard? One of the Negroes?” Kagi asked.

“It doesn’t matter. Just wait a minute,” the Old Man said.

He lingered a long moment before speaking, standing there, swaying a little. He looked nearly insane by then. His beard flowed nearly to his belt buckle. His suit was ragged to near pieces. He still wore the fisherman’s hat from his disguise, and beneath it his face looked like a wrinkled mop. He had all kinds of problems going on. The curtain was pulled back off the thing. Several men had written letters home to their mamas saying good-bye, causing all kinds of suspicion, with the mamas writing to the Old Man saying, “Send my boy home.” His daughter-in-law Martha, Oliver’s wife, was pregnant and bawling every half hour; some of the white folks who’d given him money for his fight against slavery now wanted it back; others had written letters tellin’ congressmen and government folks ’bout what they’d heard; his money people in Boston was bugging him ’bout how big his army was. He had all kinds of problems with the weapons, too. Had forty thousand primers without the right caps. The house was loaded with men who was tightly wound up and cooped in that tiny attic that was so crowded it was unbearable. The weight of the thing would’a knocked any man insane. But he weren’t a normal man, being that he was already part insane in a manner of speaking. Still, he seemed put out.

He stood there, swaying a minute, and said, “That is not a problem. We’ll move on Sunday.”

“That’s in four days!” Kagi exclaimed.

“If we don’t go now, we may never go.”

“We can’t move in four days! We got everybody coming on the twenty-third!”

“Them that’s coming will be here in four days.”

“The twenty-third is only a week from Sunday.”

“We haven’t got a week,” the Old Man snorted. “We move this Sunday, October sixteenth. Whoever wants to write home, do it now. Tell the men.”

Kagi didn’t need to do that, for several was gathered ’round listening and had already written home, being cooped up in the attic with nothing to do but write. “How we gonna pass the word to the colored?” Stevens asked.

“We don’t need to. Most of the colored that’s supposed to be here will come. We got five from Chambersburg, five from Boston that Merriman’s promised. Plus the men from around here. Plus those from Canada.”

“I wouldn’t count the men from Canada,” Kagi said. “Not without Douglass.”

The Old Man frowned. “We still got twenty-nine overall men to my count,” he said.

“Fourteen who ain’t present and accounted for,” Kagi said.

The Old Man shrugged. “They’ll hive from everywhere once we get started. The Bible says, ‘He who moves without trust cannot be trusted.’ Trust in God, Lieutenant.”

“I don’t believe in God.”

“Doesn’t matter. He believes in you.”

“What about the General?”

“I just got a letter from her,” the Old Man said. “She’s ill and can’t come. She gived us the Rail Man. That’s enough. He’ll spread the word among her people.”

He turned to me. “Onion, hurry down to the Ferry and wait for the train. When the B&O comes in, tell the Rail Man we’re movin’ on the sixteenth, not the twenty-third. That’s a week early.”

“I better do that,” Kagi said.

“No,” the Old Man said. “They’re onto us now. You’ll be stopped and questioned. They won’t bother with a colored girl. I need you men here. We got a lot to do. Got to fetch the rest of the Sharps rifles and prep ’em. Got to get the tow balls and primers ready, got the pikes to unpack. And we got to get Annie and Martha up the highway within a day, two at most. Onion will ready them when she gets back. For she’s going with them. I’ll not have women here when we make our charge.”

That made my heart leap with happiness.

“How will they go?” Kagi asked.

“My son Salmon’ll take ’em up to Philadelphia. They can take the train to upstate New York from there. No more time to talk, Lieutenant. Let’s move.”

I hustled down the rail yard at the Ferry singing like a bird, happy as all get-out. I waited under the bank for the one twenty-five B&O, hoping it weren’t late, for I didn’t want to be left behind. I weren’t gonna miss my ride out of there in no way, shape, form, or fashion. I would let them drop me off in Philadelphia. I had waited a long time to get there. I could leave guilt-free. The Old Man had gived me his blessing.

Thanks be to God, that thing rolled in on time. I waited till all the passengers emptied. The train had to huff and chug up another few feet to take on water, and when it stopped at the water tower, I runned down to seek out the Rail Man. I saw him near the back of the train, movin’ passengers’ bags into the station and onto waiting wagons. I waited till he was done. He moved to the other side of the train near the caboose and congregated with another colored porter. I approached him there, and when the other porter seen me coming, that feller slipped away. He knowed my deal and I was arsenic to him, but the Rail Man seen me, and without a word nodded to the spot under the bank where we met before and stepped back onto the train.

I rushed down to the bank and waited for him, standing in the shadow of the trestle, so as not to be seen. He came down shortly and he was hot. He placed his back on the trestle post and he talked with his back to me. But he was still hot. “Didn’t I tell you not to come here?” he said.

“Change of plans. The Old Man’s rolling in four days.”

“Four days? You funning me!” he said.

“I ain’t,” I said. “I’m just tellin’ you.”

“Tell him I can’t get that many people together in four days. I just got the ball rolling.”

“Bring what you got, then, for he is dedicated to that time,” I said.

“I need another week. The twenty-third is what he said.”

“The twenty-third is out. He’s going this Sunday.”

“The General is sick. Don’t he know that?”

“That ain’t my problem.”

“Course it ain’t. All’s you worried ’bout is your own skin, you little ferret.”

“You raising a ruckus with the wrong person. Whyn’t you pick on somebody your own size?”

“Watch your mouth or I’ll level you off, ya varmint.”

“Least I ain’t a thief. For all I know, you done took the Old Man’s money for nothing and gonna not show up like the rest.”

The Rail Man was a big man, and he had his back to me. But now he turned and grabbed me by the dress and lifted me clear off the ground.

“One more cockeyed word out that fast little hole in your face, you little snit, and I’ll throw you in the river.”

“I’m just tellin’ you what the Old Man said! He said he’s movin’ in four days!”

“I heard it! Saddle your tongue with the rest. I’ll have here who I can. Tell your Old Man to stop the train before it gets to the bridge on the Potomac. Don’t let it get across. Stop it there and give me a password.”

“What’s that?”

“A word. A sign. Ain’t they got passwords and all they use on your side?”

“Nobody said nothing ’bout that.”

He placed me down. “Shit. Some kind of damn operation this is.”

“So can I tell the Captain you know?”

“Tell ’em I know. Tell ’em I’ll bring who I can.”

“What else?”

“Tell ’em we need a password. And stop the train before it gets on the bridge. Not at the station. Otherwise the passengers will get out. Stop it at the bridge and I’ll come out and see what’s the matter. I’ll hold a lantern out. I’ll walk along the train and say whatever password we figure on. Can you remember that? Stop the train before the bridge.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell you what, since you’re thick, I’ll give you a password. It’s got to be something normal. So I’ll say, ‘Who goes there?’ And whoever is there will say, ‘Jesus is walkin’.’ Can you remember that?”

“Who goes there? Jesus is walkin’. I got it.”

“Don’t forget. ‘Who goes there?’ and ‘Jesus is walkin’.’ If they don’t say that, then by God I ain’t gonna wave the lamp for them that’s behind me. I’ll have a baggage car full of colored behind me, and maybe a wagonload coming alongside the trail as well. I’d have got more but I can’t roust ’em up in four days’ time.”

“Understood.”

“After I wave that lamp from the tracks, the colored’ll know what to do. They’ll jump off the back, come up, take the conductor and engineer, and hold ’em as prisoners for the Captain. The rest will take a few rail tools I give ’em and destroy the tracks behind the train so it can’t back up. I’ll hold the train for that.”

“How you gonna do that?”

“There’s another colored porter and a colored coalman, too. They’re with us. In a fashion.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means they know ’bout it and staying out the way. Everybody in this world ain’t a fool like me. But they’re trustworthy. If they wasn’t, you’d’a been deadened already. Hanging ’round the station like you is, runnin’ off at the mouth. Every colored at the Ferry knows what’s going on. Anyway, them two will hold the train under the pretense of being dumb niggers, long enough for the colored in the baggage car and wagons to get out. Understood?”

“All right, then.”

“Once them niggers clear the train, I’m out. You pass that word to the Old Man. Tell him thus: Once they’re off the train, the Rail Man is out. And without that password, too, I ain’t movin’. ‘Who goes there?’ and ‘Jesus is walkin’.’ I don’t hear them words, that lamp won’t swing from my hand. If that lamp don’t swing, them niggers won’t move. And it’s done, whatever it is. Anyway, my part ends right there, no matter how the cut comes or goes. You understand?”

“I got it.”

“All right. Git along, then, ya half-assed rascal. You’s an odd something. Slavery done made some odd weasels outta us, and I surely hope you don’t see the end of your days looking the way you do now. If you see me again in life on the road or anyplace else in this man’s world, never speak to me again or even nod in my direction. I wish I never met you.”

And with that, he moved off quick, slipping down the bank and under the trestle, up the slope to the hissing train and climbed on it. By the time I hustled across the covered bridge back onto the Maryland side and made my way up to the road that followed the Potomac along toward the Kennedy farm, that thing was chugging toward Virginia and out of sight.

When I got back to the house, it was chaos. That place was rolling like a military fort under fire. The fellers scrambled ’bout every which way, toting crates, suitcases, guns, powder, muskets, boxes of ammunition. They was relieved to get movin’, having been crushed in that tiny space so long it was a pity, and so they moved at full speed, busting with pep and excitement. Annie and Martha scurried ’bout, ready to leave, too. Everyone in that small farmhouse moved with purpose, pushing and shoving past me, while I lingered a bit. I moved to slow purpose them next two days, for I wanted to say good-bye to the Old Man.

He weren’t studyin’ me. He was in his glory, movin’ through the place like a hurricane. He was covered in soot and gunpowder, racing from upstairs to downstairs and back again, giving orders. “Mr. Tidd, dip them tow balls in oil so we can fire the bridges with ’em. Mr. Copeland, throw more cartridges into that rifle box there. Move with speed, men. Quick. We are in the right and will resist the universe!” I watched him the better part of two days as he ducked from one room to the next, ignoring me altogether. I gived up after the second day and slipped into a corner of the kitchen to feed my face, for I was always hungry and it was near time to leave. I got in there just in time to see Annie slip in and sit down, exhausted. She looked out the window a minute, not noticing me, and the look on her face made me just plain forget ’bout where I was.

She sat there near the stove, glum, then slowly picked up a few pots and pans and things to pack up, trying to keep a brave face on. Not a single one of them Browns ever lacked confidence in their Pa, I’ll say that for ’em. Just like him, they believed in the Negro being free and equal and all. Course they was out of their minds at the time, but they can be excused, being that they all growed-up religious fools, following the Bible to the letter. But Annie was wound down. She was feeling low. I couldn’t bear seeing her so spent, so I slipped over to her, and when she seen me she said, “I got a terrible feeling, Onion.”

“Ain’t no need to worry ’bout nothing,” I said.

“I knows I shouldn’t. But it’s hard to be brave about it, Onion.” Then she smiled. “I’m glad you coming with me and Martha.”

Why, I was so happy my heart could bust, but course I couldn’t say it, so I downplayed it like usual. “Yes, I am, too,” was all I could say.

“Help me get the rest of the things here?”

“Course.”

As we moved ’bout, making ready to leave, I begun to think on what my plans was. Annie and Martha lived on the Old Man’s claim in upstate New York near Canada. I couldn’t go up there with them. That would be too hard for me to be near Annie. I decided I would ride the wagon to Pennsylvania country and get off there, with the aim of getting to Philadelphia—if we could make it that far north. It weren’t a sure thing, for no matter how you sliced it, I was endangering ’em, surely. We would be rolling through slave country, and since we was traveling with speed, would have to move by day, which was dangerous, for the closer you got to the freedom line of Pennsylvania, the more slave patrols was likely to stop and confront Salmon ’bout whether he was transporting slaves. Salmon was young and strong-headed. He was like his Pa. He wouldn’t suffer no fools or slave patrols to stop him while he moved his sister and sister-in-law to safety, and he wouldn’t surrender me, neither. Plus he’d have to get back. He’d shoot first.

“I have to fetch some hay,” I told Annie, “for it’s better that I ride under the hay in the back of the wagon till we get to Pennsylvania.”

“That’s two days,” she said. “Better you sit up with us and pretend to be in bondage.”

But, seeing her pretty face staring at me so kind and innocent, I was losing my taste for pretending. I cut out for the shed without a word. There was some hay stored there, and I brung it to the Conestoga we was preparing to get movin’ on. I’d have to ride under the hay, in the wagon, in broad daylight till night for the better part of two days. Better to hide that way than out in the open. But, honest to Jesus, I was getting worn out with hiding by that time. Hiding in every way, I was, and I growed tired of it.

We loaded up the wagon the day before the big attack and left without ceremony. The Captain gived Annie a letter and said, “This is for your Ma and your sisters and brothers. I will see you soon or in the by and by, Lord willing.” To me he said, “Good-bye, Onion. You has fought the good fight and I will see you soon as your people is free, if God wills it.” I wished him luck, and we was off. I jumped inside the bottom of the wagon in the hay. They covered me with a plank that spanned along the side of the wagon and placed Annie on it, while Salmon, who was driving, sat up front with his sister-in-law Martha, Oliver’s wife.

Annie was sitting right above me as we moved out, and I could hear her throw out a tear or two amid the clattering of the wagon. After a while she stopped bawling and piped out, “Your people will be free when this is all done, Onion.”

“Yes, they will.”

“And you can go off and get a fiddle and sing and follows your dreams all you want. You can go on about your whole life singing when it’s all done.”

I wanted to say to her that I would like to stay where she was going and sing for her the rest of my life. Sing sonnets and religious songs and all them dowdy tunes with the Lord in ’em that she favored; I’d work whatever song she wanted if she asked me to. I wanted to tell her I was gonna turn ’bout, turn over a new leaf, be a new person, be the man that I really was. But I couldn’t, for it weren’t in me to be a man. I was but a coward, living a lie. When you thunk on it, it weren’t a bad lie. Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day. You know his wants, his needs, and watch him proper. But he don’t know your wants. He don’t know your needs or feelings or what’s inside you, for you ain’t equal to him in no measure. You just a nigger to him. A thing: like a dog or a shovel or a horse. Your needs and wants got no track, whether you is a girl or a boy, a woman or a man, or shy, or fat, or don’t eat biscuits, or can’t suffer the change of weather easily. What difference do it make? None to him, for you is living on the bottom rail.

But to you, inside, it do make a difference, and that put me out to the part. A body can’t prosper if a person don’t know who they are. That makes you poor as a pea, not knowing who you are inside. That’s worse than being anything in the world on the outside. Sibonia back in Pikesville showed me that. I reckon that business of Sibonia throwed me off track for life, watching her and her sister Libby take it ’round the neck in Missouri. “Be a man!” she said to that young feller when he fell down on the steps of the scaffold when they was ready to hang him. “Be a man!” They put him to sleep like the rest, strung him up like a shirt on a laundry line, but he done okay. He took it. He reminded me of the Old Man. He had a face change up there on that scaffold before they done him in, like he seen something nobody else could see. That’s an expression that lived on the Old Man’s face. The Old Man was a lunatic, but he was a good, kind lunatic, and he couldn’t no more be a sane man in his transactions with his fellow white man than you and I can bark like a dog, for he didn’t speak their language. He was a Bible man. A God man. Crazy as a bedbug. Pure to the truth, which will drive any man off his rocker. But at least he knowed he was crazy. At least he knowed who he was. That’s more than I could say for myself.

I rumbled these things in my head while I lay in the bottom of that wagon under the hay like the silly goose I was, offering a pocketful of nothing to myself ’bout what I was supposed to be or what songs I was gonna sing. Annie’s Pa was a hero to me. It was him who held the weight of the thing, had the weight of my people on his shoulders. It was him who left house and home behind for something he believed in. I didn’t have nothing to believe in. I was just a nigger trying to eat.

“I reckon I will sing a bit once this war is over,” I managed to say to Annie. “Sing here and there.”

Annie looked away, bleary-eyed, as a thought struck her. “I forgot to tell Pa about the azaleas,” she suddenly blurted out.

“The what?”

“The azaleas. I planted some in the yard, and they come up purple. Father told me to tell him if that happened. Said that was a good sign.”

“Well, likely he’ll see them.”

“No. He don’t look back there. They’re deep in the yard, near the thickets.” And she broke down and howled again.

“It’s just a flower, Annie,” I said.

“No, it’s not. Father said a good sign is signals from heaven. Good omens is important. Like Frederick’s Good Lord Bird. That’s why he always used those feathers for his army. They’re not just feathers. Or passwords. They’re omens. They’re things you don’t forget easily, even in times of trouble. You remember your good omens in times of trouble. You can’t forget them.”

A horrible, dread feeling come over me as she said that, for I suddenly remembered that I clean forgot to tell the Captain the password the Rail Man told me to pass on to him at the bridge when they stopped the train. He’d said to tell them the password. He’d say, “Who goes there?” and they’d pass it back, “Jesus is walkin’.” And if he didn’t hear that password, he weren’t gonna bring his men on.

“Good God,” I said.

“I know,” she howled. “It’s just a bad omen.”

I didn’t say nothing to her but I lay there as she howled, and God knows it, my heart was pounding something dreadful. To hell with it, was my thinking. Weren’t no way in the world I was gonna crawl out from under that hay, walk that toll road in daylight, privy to every paddie slave snatcher between Virginia and Pennsylvania and go back to the Ferry and get shot to pieces. We’d ridden nearly three hours. I felt the sun’s heat bouncing off the ground into the bottom of the wagon where I lay. We had to be near Chambersburg by then, just near the Virginia line, smack dab in slave country.

Annie howled a bit more, then steadied herself. “I know you’re thinking of Philadelphia, Onion. But I’m wondering ... I’m wondering if you’ll come to North Elba with me,” she said. “Maybe we could start a school together. I know your heart. North Elba is quiet country. Free country. We could start a school together. We could use—I could use a friend.” And she busted into tears again.

Well, that done it. I lay under that hay thinking I weren’t no better than them speechifying, low-life reverends and doctors up in Canada who promised to show up for the Old Man’s war and likely wouldn’t. The whole bit shamed me, just pushed up against me something terrible as she howled. It pushed on me harder with each mile we went, pressing on my heart like a stone. What was I gonna do in Philadelphia? Who was gonna love me? I’d be alone. But in upstate New York, how long could I go on before she’d find out who I was? She’d know it before long. Besides, how can somebody love you if you don’t know who you is? I had thoroughly been a girl so long by then that I’d grown to like it, got used to it, got used to not having to lift things, and have folks make excuses for me on account of me not being strong enough, or fast enough, or powerful enough like a boy, on account of my size. But that’s the thing. You can play one part in life, but you can’t be that thing. You just playing it. You’re not real. I was a Negro above all else, and Negroes plays their part, too: Hiding. Smiling. Pretending bondage is okay till they’re free, and then what? Free to do what? To be like the white man? Is he so right? Not according to the Old Man. It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment. And that includes loving somebody. If you can’t be your own self, how can you love somebody? How can you be free? That pressed on my heart like a vise right then. Just mashed me down. I was head over heels for that girl, I loved her with all my heart, I confess it here, and her father’s charge would be against me for the rest of my life if he got killed on account of the Rail Man not hearing the right password. Curse that son of a bitch father of hers! And the Rail Man too! That self-righteous, ignorant, risk-taking, elephant-looking bum! And all them slave-fightin’ no-gooders! It would be on my head. The thought of the Captain getting deadened on account of me made me feel ten times worse than Annie not loving me, which if she’d’a knowed what I was, she’d’a been disgusted with me, a nigger, playing a girl, not man enough to be a man, loving her and all, and she wouldn’t love me back in the least, or even like me, no matter how much she felt for me at that moment as a full-hearted girlfriend. She was loving a mirage. And I’d have her father’s blood on my hands the rest of my life, laying there like a coward under the hay and not being a natural man, man enough to go back and tell him the words that might help him live five minutes longer, for while he was a fool, his life was dear to him as mine’s was to me, and he’d risked that life many times on my account. God damn it to hell.

To have the Captain’s blood on my hands on account of something I was supposed to do, it was just too much. I couldn’t stand it.

The plank she was setting on was propped on two boards. With both hands I pushed it a foot or so forward and burst out the hay and sat up.

“I got to go,” I said.

“What?”

“Tell Salmon to stop.”

“We can’t. We in slave country. Get back in that hay!”

“I won’t.”

Before she could move to it, I slid out from under the plank, pulled the bonnet off my head, and ripped the dress down to my waist. Her mouth opened in shock.

“I love you, Annie. I won’t ever see you again.”

With one swift motion, I grabbed my gunnysack and leaped out the back of the wagon, rolling on the road, her shocked cry echoing into the woods and trees around me. Salmon harred up the wagon and yelled back for me, but he might as well been hollering down an empty hole. I was up the road and gone.

28. Attack

I runned down the road like the wind, and caught a ride with an old colored man from Frederick, Maryland, who was driving his master’s wagon to the Ferry to pick up a shipment of lumber. It took us a full day to roll back for he was sharp, and had to roll past slave patrollers while stating his marse’s business. He dropped me off a few miles from the Ferry on the Maryland side and I done the rest on foot. I made it to the farmhouse late, several hours after dark.

The house was dark as I approached and I couldn’t see no candlelight. It was drizzling and there was no moon. I had no timepiece, but I guessed it was close to midnight.

I burst in the door and they were gone. I turned toward the door, and a figure blocked it and a rifle barrel met me right in the face. A light was throwed on me, and behind it stood three of the Old Man’s army: Barclay Coppoc, one of the shooting Quakers, Owen, and Francis Merriam, a one-eyed batty feller, crazy as a weasel, who had joined up late in the doings. All three was holding rifles and armed to the teeth with sidearms and broadswords.

“What you doing here?” Owen asked.

“I forgot to give your Pa the password for the Rail Man.”

“Father didn’t have a password for him.”

“That’s just it. The Rail Man had one for me to give him.”

“It’s too late. They left four hours ago.”

“I got to tell him.”

“Sit tight.”

“For what?”

“They’ll figure it out. We could use you here. We is guarding the arms and waiting for the colored to hive,” Owen said.

“Well, that is the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life, Owen. Can’t you wake up to it?”

I looked at Owen, I swear ’fore God he tried to keep a straight face on it. “I’m dead set against slavery, and anyone who ain’t is a fool,” he said. “They’ll come. And I will set here and wait till then,” he said. I guess this was his way of showing his faith in his Pa, and also getting out the deal. The farm was five miles from the Ferry, and I reckon the Old Man left him ’cause Owen had seen enough of his crazy Pa’s doings. He’d been all through the Kansas Wars and seen the worst of it. Those other two up there, the Old Man probably left them there to relieve them from the action, for Coppoc weren’t but twenty, and Merriam was thick as mud in his mind.

“Did the B&O come yet?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Haven’t heard it.”

“What time is it?”

“One ten in the a.m.”

“It don’t come till one twenty-five. I got to warn him,” I said. I moved toward the door.

“Wait,” Owen said. “I’m done pulling you out the fire, Onion. Set here.” But I was out the door and gone.

It was a five-mile run down to the Ferry, pitch-black with a drizzling rain. Had I stayed on the old colored man’s wagon and not got off at the Kennedy farm, I could’a ridden right into town and made it in better time, I reckon. But that old man was long gone. I had my satchel throwed around my back with everything I owned, including a change of boy clothes. I was planning on lighting out when it was done. The Rail Man would give me a ride. He weren’t staying, he said as much. Had I any sense I would’a throwed a revolver in my sack. There was a dozen of ’em laying in the farmhouse, two setting on the windowsill when I walked in there, likely loaded and primed. But I didn’t think of it.

I came hard down that hill, and didn’t hear a bit of firing as I came down it, so no shooting had started. But when I hit the bottom and runned along the Potomac, I heard a train whistling and saw a dim light on the other side, ’bout a mile off to the east, curving ’round the edge of the mountain. That was the B&O, not wasting no time, coming out of Baltimore.

I throwed myself down the road fast as my legs could go, running toward the bridge that crossed the Potomac River.

The train got to the other side just before I did. I heard the hissing of the brakes as it stopped short, just as I put my foot on the far side of the bridge coming over. I seen it halted there, setting, hissing, through the bridge span trestles as I ran. The train had stopped ’bout a few yards shy of the station, just as the Rail Man said it would. Normally it stopped at the station, discharged passengers, then moved up a few yards to the water tower to take on water, then headed over the Shenandoah Bridge, where it headed down to Wheeling, Virginia. That weren’t normal, for the train to stop there, which meant the Old Man’s army had already started their war.

The Shenandoah was a covered bridge, with a wagon road running on one side of it and the train tracks on the other. From my side atop the B&O Bridge, I seen two fellers with rifles approaching the train from the Shenandoah Bridge side where it was stalled, ’bout a quarter mile off from me. I was still making it, running across the B&O Bridge, the train stopped dead, setting there, hissing steam, the lantern at the front of it dangling over the cowcatcher.

From the bridge as I got closer, I recognized the two figures as Oliver and Stewart Taylor, walking along the sides of the train, holding rifles to the engine master and coal slinger as they climbed down the train. They climbed down right into Oliver’s hands, they did. He and Taylor moved them along toward the back of the train, but what with the hissing and clanking of the engine, and being where I was, running hard, I couldn’t hear what was said. But I was busting it, running hard, almost there, and as I got closer, I could hear their voices talking a little bit.

I was just ’bout across the bridge when I saw the wide, tall silhouette of the Rail Man emerge from a side door of a passenger compartment and climb down the steps. He come down the steps slowly, carefully, reached up, shut the train door behind him, and set off down the tracks on foot. He come right at Oliver, holding a lantern at his side. He didn’t wave it. Just held the lantern steady at his side, walking toward Oliver and Taylor, who was walking away from him toward the Ferry with their prisoners. Oliver looked over his shoulder and saw the Rail Man, and he motioned Taylor to keep going with the two prisoners while he broke off and turned back toward the Rail Man, his rifle at his hip. He didn’t raise it, but he held it steady there as he came toward the Rail Man.

I runned hard to get there, giving it every string I had. I humped off the bridge on the Ferry side and turned and followed the tracks toward them and hollered as I come. They weren’t but two hundred yards off or so, but that train was clanking and banging, and I was in the dark, running down the tracks, and when I seen Oliver close in on the Rail Man, I hollered out, “Oliver! Oliver! Hold it!”

Oliver didn’t hear me. He glanced over his shoulder for just a second, then turned back to the Rail Man.

I was close enough to hear as I come now. The Rail Man kept coming at Oliver, and I heard him shout out, “Who goes there?”

“Stay where you are,” Oliver said.

The Rail Man kept coming, said it again, “Who goes there?”

“Stay there!” Oliver snapped.

I hollered out, “Jesus is walkin’!” but I weren’t close enough, and neither of them heard me. Oliver didn’t turn his back this time, for the Rail Man was on him, not five feet off, still holding that lamp at his side. And he was a big man, and I reckon on account of his size and him coming toward Oliver in that fashion, not being afraid, well, Oliver shouldered his rifle. Oliver was young, only twenty, but he was a Brown, and once them Browns moved on intent, there weren’t no stopping. I screamed, “Oliver!”

He turned again. And this time seen me coming at him. “Onion?” he said.

It was dark and I don’t know if he seen me clear or not. But the Rail Man did not see me at all. He weren’t more than five feet from Oliver, still holding that lamp, and he said to Oliver again, “Who goes there!” impatient this time, and a little nervous. He was trying to give him the word, you see, waiting for it.

Oliver spun back toward him with the rifle on his shoulder now and hissed, “Don’t take another step!”

I don’t know if the Rail Man got Oliver’s intent wrong or not, but he showed his back to Oliver. Just spun around and walked away from him, brisk-like. Oliver still had his gun trained on him, and I reckon Oliver would have let him walk back onto the train if the Rail Man had gone on and done that. But instead, the Rail Man did an odd thing. He stopped and blowed out that lantern, then, instead of walking back onto the train, turned to walk toward the railroad office, which was just a few yards off the track there. Didn’t head toward the train. Went toward the rail office. That killed him right there.

“Halt!” Oliver called out. He called it twice, and the second time he called it, the Rail Man dropped the lamp and stepped up toward the office. Double-stepped now.

God knows it, he never did wave that lantern. Or maybe he was disgusted that we wasn’t smart enough to know the password, or he just weren’t sure what was happening, but when he dropped that lantern and made toward the office, Oliver must’a figured he was going for help, so he let that Sharps speak to him. He cut loose on him once.

That Sharps rifle, them old ones during that time, they barked so loud it was a pity. That thing choked out some fire and offered up a bang so big you could hear it echoing all along the sides of both rivers; it bounced off them mountains like a calling from on high, the sound of that boom traveling across the river and bouncing down the Appalachian valley and up the Potomac like a bowling ball. Sounded big as God’s thunder, it did, just made a terrible noise, and it busted a ball straight into the Rail Man’s back.

The Rail Man was a big man, over six hands tall. But that ball got his attention. It stood him up. He stood still a few seconds, then moved again like he wasn’t hit, kept going toward the railroad office, staggering a bit, stepping over the tracks as he done so, then collapsed at the front door of the railroad station on his face. He flopped down like a bunch of rags, his feet flopping into the air.

Two white men flung open the door and drug him in just as I reached Oliver. He turned to me and said, “Onion! What you doing here?”

“He was with us!” I gasped. “He was flocking the colored!”

“He should’a said it. You seen it. I told him to halt! He didn’t say a blamed word!”

There weren’t no use in tellin’ him now. It was my mistake and I planned to keep it. The Rail Man was dead anyway. He was the first man killed at Harpers Ferry. A colored.

The white folks runned with that later on. They laughed ’bout it. Said, “Oh, John Brown’s first shot to free the niggers at Harpers Ferry killed a nigger.” But the fact is, the Rail Man didn’t die right off. He lived for twenty-four hours more. Lived longer than Oliver did, it turns out. He had a whole day to tell his story after he was shot, for he bled to death and was conscious before he died, and his wife and children and even his friend the mayor called on him, and he spoke to them all, but he never did tell a soul what he done or who he really was.

I later heard tell that his real name was Haywood Shepherd. The white folks at Harpers Ferry gived him a military funeral when the whole thing was done. They buried him like a hero, for he was one of their niggers. He died with thirty-five hundred dollars in the bank. They never did figure out how he got that much money, being a baggage handler, and what he planned to use it for. But I knowed.

If the Old Man hadn’t changed dates on him, making it so the Rail Man gived his password to the wrong person, he’d’a lived another day to spend all that money he saved on freeing his kin. But he brung his words to the wrong man, and the wrong movement.

It was an honest mistake, made in the heat of that moment. And I don’t beat myself over the head with it. Fact is, it weren’t me who blowed out the Rail Man’s lantern and dropped it that night. It was the Rail Man himself that done it. Had he calmed down and waited another second he would’a seen me and waved that thing up and down. But it was hard buying that whole bit deep inside, truth be to tell it, for a lot was wasted.

I told Oliver standing there, “It’s my fault.”

“There’ll be time enough to count lost chickens later,” he said. “We got to move.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Understand later, Onion. We got to roll!”

But I couldn’t move, for a sight over Oliver’s shoulder froze me in my tracks. I was standing before him, looking down the track behind him, and what I seen made my two little walnuts, packed inside my dress, shrivel up in panic.

In the dim light of the tavern that lit the track, dozens of coloreds, maybe sixty or seventy, poured out of two baggage cars. It was Monday morning in the wee hours, and some was still dressed in Sunday church clothes, for I reckon they’d gone to church the day before. Men in white shirts, and women in dresses. Men, women, children, some in their Sunday best, and others with no shoes, some holding sticks and pikes and even an old rifle or two. They jumped out of them baggage cars like they was on fire, the whole herd of ’em, turning and running off on foot, making tracks back toward Baltimore and Washington, D.C., as fast as their feet could go. They was waiting on the Rail Man to wave that lamp. And when he didn’t, they took the tall timber and went home. It didn’t take much for a colored to think he’d been tricked by anyone, white or colored, in them days.

Oliver turned and looked back there just as the last of them leaped out the baggage car and hit the tracks running, then turned back to me, puzzled, and said, “What’s going on?”

I watched the last of them disappear, dodging in and out of the trees, jumping into the thickets, a few sprinting down the tracks, and said, “We is doomed.”

29. A Bowl of Confusion

I slunk behind Oliver and Taylor as they left the bridge in a hurry with the engineer and coal slinger as prisoners. They marched the two them past the Gault House on Shenandoah Street and straight into the gates of the armory inside the ferry gate, which was unguarded. On the way there, Oliver explained that the cat was out the bag. Cook and Tidd had already cut the town’s telegraph wires, his older brother Watson, another one of the Captain’s sons, and one of the Thompson boys was guarding the Shenandoah Bridge. The rest had overcome the two watchmen, stolen into the armory buildings, and seized them. Two fellers took up in the arsenal, where the guns was guarded. The train was held up. Kagi and John Copeland, the colored soldier, had the rifle works—that’s where the guns was made. The rest of the Old Man’s army of seventeen men was scattered ’bout in various buildings across the grounds.

“There weren’t but two guards,” Oliver said. “We took them by surprise. We sprung the trap perfect.”

We brung the prisoners into the Engine Works Building, the entrance guarded by two of the Old Man’s soldiers, and when we walked in, the Captain was busy giving orders. When he turned and seen me walk in, I thought he’d be disappointed and angry that I disobeyed his orders. But he was used to crazy conglomerations and things going cockeyed. Instead of being angry, the expression on his face was one of joy. “I knowed it. The Lord of Hosts foresees our victory!” he declared. “Our war is won, for our good omen the Onion has returned! As the book of Isaiah says, ‘Woe to the wicked. And say ye to the righteous that it shall be well with him!’”

The men around him cheered and chuckled, except, I noted, O. P. Anderson and the Emperor. They was the only two colored in the room. They looked just plain fertilized, put out, right unnerved.

The Old Man clapped me on the back. “I see you is dressed for victory, Onion,” he said, for I still had my gunnysack with me. “You come well prepared. We is headed for the mountains shortly. Soon as the colored hives, we will be off. There is a lot of work yet ahead.” And with that he turned away and begun giving orders again, tellin’ someone to go get the three men at the farm to ready a nearby schoolhouse to gather in the colored. He was just plumb full of orders, tellin’ this one to go this way and the other one to go that way. There weren’t nothing for me to do, really, except to set tight. There was already several eight or nine prisoners in the room, and they looked downright glum. Some of them were still shaking the sleep out their eyes, for it was near two a.m. and they’d been woken in some form or fashion. To my recollection, of them that was in the room was a husband and wife seized when taking a shortcut home through the armory from the Gault tavern in town, two armory workers, two railroad workers, and a drunk who lay asleep on the floor most of the time, but woke up long enough to declare that he was the cook at the Gault House tavern.

The Old Man ignored them, course, marching past them, giving orders, just happy as you please. He was as peachy as I’d ever seen him, and for the first time in a long while, the wrinkles in his face creaked and twisted amongst themselves and wrapped around his nose like spaghetti, and the whole conglomeration broke open into a look of—how can I say it—downright satisfaction. He weren’t capable of a smile, not a true, wide-open, get-your-drawers-out-the-window smile, showing that row of them gigantic, corn-colored front chompers of his I seen from time to time when he chewed bear or pig guts. But he was one hundred percent stretched out in terms of overall satisfaction. He had accomplished something important. You could see it in his face. It hit me heavy then. He had actually done it. He had taken Harpers Ferry.

When I look back, it hadn’t taken him more than five hours to do the whole bit from soup to nuts. From the time they walked in there at nine o’clock until that moment the train arrived just after one a.m., was five hours total. It went off smooth as taffy till I got there. They cut the telegraph wires, overcome two old guards, walked past two saloons that was well lit full of Pro Slavers, and walked dead into the armory. That armory covered quite a bit of ground, a good ten acres, with several buildings that done various facets of the rifle-making business, barrels, muskets, ammo, hammers, and so forth. They broke open every building in the grounds that was locked and took ’em over. The main one was Hall’s Rifle Works. The Old Man stuck his best soldiers in there, Lieutenant Kagi and the colored man from Oberlin, John Copeland. A. D. Stevens, who was disagreeable but probably the best fighting soldier among his men, Brown kept with him.

My arrival seemed to pound things up higher, for after a few minutes of tellin’ this feller to do this and that feller to do that and giving a few orders that didn’t have no sense to them, for the thing was done, the Old Man stopped and looked ’bout and said gravely, “Men! We are, for the moment, in control of a hundred thousand guns. That is more than enough for our new army, when they come.”

The men cheered again, and when all the cheering died down, the Old Man turned around and looked for Oliver, who had come into the Engine Works with me. “Where’s Oliver?” he asked.

“Gone back to guard the train,” Taylor said.

“Oh, yes!” the Old Man said. He turned to me. “Did you see the Rail Man?”

Well, I didn’t have the courage to break the bad news to him. Just couldn’t do it in a hard way. So I said, “In a fashion.”

“Where is he?”

“Oliver took care of him.”

“Did the Rail Man hive the bees?”

“Why, yes he did, Captain.”

O. P. Anderson and the Emperor, the two Negroes, they come over when they heard me answer to the affirmative.

“You sure?” O.P. said. “You mean the colored came?”

“Bunches.”

The Old Man was mirthful. “God hath mercy and delivered the fruit!” he said, and he stood up, bowed his head, and held his arms outward, palms up, got holy right there. He clasped his hands in prayer. “Didn’t He say, ‘Withhold not good from them to whom it is due,’” he near shouted, “‘when it is in the power of thine hand to do it’?” and off he went, prowling his thanks ’bout the book of Ecclesiastes and so forth. He stood there burbling and mumbling the Bible a good five minutes while O.P. and the Emperor chased me ’round the room, asking questions, for I walked away then. I just wanted to avoid the whole thing.

“How many of ’em was it?” O.P. asked.

“A bunch.”

“Where they at?” the Emperor asked.

“Up the road.”

“They run off?” O.P. asked.

“I wouldn’t call it running,” I said.

“What would you call it, then?”

“I calls it a little misunderstanding.”

O.P. grabbed me by the neck. “Onion, you better play square here.”

“Well, there was some confusion,” I said.

The Old Man was standing nearby, mumbling and murmuring deep in prayer, his eyes closed, babbling on, but one of his eyes popped open when he heard that. “What kind of confusion?”

Just as he said that, there was a loud knock on the door.

“Who’s inside there?” a voice shouted.

The Old Man runned to the window, followed by the rest of us. Outside, at the front door of the engine house was two white fellers, railroad workers, both of ’em looked drunk to the point of sneezing gut water, probably had just walked out the Gault House tavern on nearby Shenandoah Street.

The Old Man cleared his throat and stuck his head through the window. “I’m Osawatomie John Brown of Kansas,” he declared. He liked to use his full Indian name when he was warring. “And I come to free the Negro people.”

“You come to what?”

“I come to free the Negro people.”

The fellers laughed. “Is you the same feller that shot the Negro?” one asked.

“What Negro?”

“The one over yonder in the railroad yard. Doc says he’s dying. Said they saw a nigger girl shoot him. They’re plenty hot ’bout it. And where’s Williams? He’s supposed to be on duty.”

The Old Man turned to me. “Someone shot over there?”

“Where’s Williams?” the feller outside said again. “He’s supposed to be on duty. Open this damn door, ya fool!”

“Check with your own people about your man,” the Old Man shouted back through the window.

O.P. tapped the Captain on the shoulder and piped up, “Williams is in here, Captain. He’s one of the armory guards.”

The Old Man glanced at the guard, Williams, who sat on a bench, looking glum. He leaned out the window. “Pardon me,” he said. “We got him in here.”

“Well, let him out.”

“When you let the Negro people go, we’ll let him out.”

“Quit fooling, ya sawface idiot. Let him out.”

The Old Man stuck his Sharps rifle out the window. “I’ll thank you to take your leave,” he said, “and tell your superiors that Old Osawatomie John Brown’s here at the federal armory. With hostages. And I aims to free the Negro people from their enslavement.”

Suddenly Williams, the armory guard who was setting along the wall bench, got up and stuck his head out a window near him and hollered, “Fergus, he ain’t fooling. They got a hundred armed niggers in here, and they got me prisoner!”

I don’t know but that them fellers saw one of their own yelping out the window, or if it was what he said ’bout them armed coloreds, or if it was the Old Man’s rifle that done it, but they scattered in quick time.

In ten minutes, fifteen fellers was standing out there at a safe distance, mostly drunks from the Gault House saloon across the street, haggling and arguing among themselves, for only two of ’em had weapons, and in every building they’d run to inside the armory gates to fetch a gun from, they found a rifle pointed out the window at them with someone tellin’ them to get the hell off and away. One of them broke off from the rest gathered out front, tiptoed close enough to the front door of the engine house to be heard, and shouted, “Quit fooling and let Williams the hell out, whoever you is, or we’ll fetch the deputy.”

“Fetch him,” the Old Man said.

“We’ll fetch him, all right. And if you so much as touch our man, you cracker-eatin’ snit, we’ll bust a hole in you big enough to drive a mule through.”

Stevens growled, “I had enough of this.” He stuck his carbine through the window and busted off a charge over their heads. “We has come to free the Negro people,” he shouted. “Now spread the word. And if you don’t come back with some food, we’ll kill the prisoners.”

The Old Man frowned at Stevens. “Why’d you say that?”

Stevens shrugged. “I’m hungry,” he said.

We watched the men scramble out the gate, busting off in every direction, running up the hill into the village and the heights of jumbling, mashed-up houses that set beyond it, hollering as they went.

Well, it started slow and seemed to stay slow. Morning come, and outside the armory walls by the dawn’s light, you could see the town waking up, and despite all that yelling from the night before, not a soul among them seemed to know what to do. People walked back and forth up and down the street to work like it weren’t nothing, but at the train station, there was some growing activity. Several gathered there, I reckon, wondering where the engineer and coal man was, for the B&O locomotive engine sat there dead in the water, the engine quit, dried up, for it was plumb out of water and the engineer was gone from it, being that he and the coal man was our prisoners. Next to the Gault House, there was general confusion, and at the Wager House next to that—that was a saloon and hotel just like the Gault—there was some milling around as well. Several of those ’bout was passengers who got off the train and wandered up to the station, wondering what had happened. Several passengers held their luggage, motioning and gesturing and so forth, and I reckon they was tellin’ different stories, and I heard tell that several had murmured they seen a bunch of Negroes running off out the baggage car. But there was a festive atmosphere to the whole thing, to be honest. Folks standing ’round, gossiping. In fact, several workmen walked past the crowd, straight into the armory gate that morning to go to work, thinking nothing of it, and walked right into the barrels of the Captain’s men, who said, “We has come to free the Negro. And you is our prisoner.”

Several didn’t believe it, but they was hustled into the engine house sure enough, and by ten a.m. we had damn near fifty people in there, milling around. They weren’t disbelieving so much like the others from the night before, for the Captain put the Emperor to watch them, and the Emperor was dreadful serious to look at. He was a dark-skinned, proud-looking Negro with a thick chest and wore a dead-serious expression, sporting that Sharps rifle. He was all business.

By eleven a.m. the Old Man begun making one mistake after another. I say that now, looking back. But at the time it didn’t seem so bad. He was delaying, see, waiting for the Negro. Many a fool has done that, waiting for the Negro to do something, including the Negro himself. And that’s gone on a hundred years. But the Old Man didn’t have a hundred years. He had but a few hours, and it cost him.

He stared out the window at the train and the angry passengers spilling off it, more and more of ’em, huffing and puffing, mad ’bout their delay, not knowing what was going on. He turned to Taylor and said, “I sees no reason to hold up all them people from doing their business and their travels, for they has paid for those train tickets. Turn loose the engineer and the coal man.”

Taylor done as he was told, cut the train engineer and coal man loose, following behind them to the train so as to give word to Oliver, who was holding the train at the bridge, to let the train roll on.

In doing so, in letting that train go, the Old Man released ’bout two hundred hostages.

The engineer and coal man didn’t stop at the gate, not with Taylor following behind them, for he hustled them ’round the other side of the trestle bridge out the back entrance of the armory, direct to the steam engine. They got the steam up in thirty minutes, the passengers clattered on board, and they had that train rolling to Wheeling, Virginia, full out in record time.

“They’ll stop at the first town and telegraph the news out,” Stevens said.

“I see no reason to hold up the U.S. Mail,” the Old Man said. “Besides, we wants the world to know what we’re doing here.”

Well, the world did know by noon, for what begun as a festive event that morning with fellers taking shots of rotgut and chatting amongst themselves with gossip, had now wheedled down to disbelief, to irritation to finally cursing and gathering near the armory walls. We could hear them hollering rumors and guesses to one another ’bout the cause of the Old Man’s holding up the engine house. One man said a crazed group of robbers was trying to bust open the armory’s vault. Another hollered that a doctor killed his wife and was hiding there. Another ventured that a nigger girl lost her mind and killed her master and run into the engine house for protection. Another said the B&O train was sabotaged by a baggage handler over a love affair. Everything but what the Old Man had declared. The notion that a group of white fellers had taken over the country’s biggest armory to help free the colored race was just too much for ’em to handle, I reckon.

Finally, they sent an emissary to talk to the Old Man, an important-looking feller in a linen suit and bowler hat, likely a politician of sorts. He marched a few feet into the gate, shouted out at the Old Man to cut out the fooling and stop being a sot, and was met by a rifle shot over his head. That drummer whistled out the gate so fast his hat pulled off his head, and he was back across the road before that thing hit the ground.

Finally around one o’clock, a very old man, dressed like a common worker, broke from the crowd of mumblers and ruffled bystanders standing at the gate at a safe distance across the road in front of the Gault House, shuffled slowly across Shenandoah Street, walked dead into the armory, strode to the front of the engine house door, and knocked. The Old Man peeked at him through the window, his Sharps at the ready. It was full daylight now, and nobody had slept. The Old Man’s face was lined and tight.

“We understands you is Old John Brown of Osawatomie, Kansas,” the old man said politely. “Is that right?”

“That be me.”

“Well, seeing you close, you is old all right,” the feller said.

“I’m fifty-nine,” the Old Man said. “How old are you?”

“I has got you by eight years, sir. I’m sixty-seven. Now, you has got my younger brother in there. He’s sixty-two. And I’d appreciate if you’d let him out, for he is ill.”

“What’s his name?”

“Odgin Hayes.”

The Old Man turned to the room. “Who here’s Odgin Hayes?”

Three old fellers raised their hands and stood up.

The Captain frowned. “That won’t work,” he said. And he commenced to giving all three a lecture on the Bible and the book of Kings, ’bout how Solomon had two women each claiming the same baby, till the king said, I’ll cut the baby in two and give you both half, and one woman said, give it to the other mother, for I can’t stand to see my baby cut in two, so the king gived it to her, for he knowed she was the real mother.

That shamed ’em, or maybe it was the part ’bout being cut in two, or maybe him giving the lecture using his broadsword to make points in this way and that. Whatever it was, two of ’em confessed outright they was lying and sat down, and the real Odgin stayed standing up, and the Old Man let him out.

The old feller outside appreciated the gesture and said so, but as he walked across the armory back out to Shenandoah Street, the crowd had growed now, and several fellers in militia uniforms could be seen milling around, waving swords and guns. The Gault House and the Wager House, both saloons, was doing booming business, and the crowd was full-out drunk, boisterous and unruly, cursing and so forth.

Meanwhile, the prisoners inside, not to mention Stevens, was getting hungry and begun bellowing ’bout food. The Old Man seen this and said, “Hold on.” He hollered out the window at the gate. “Gentlemen. The people here is hungry. I got fifty prisoners here who has not ate since last night, and neither has my men. I’ll exchange one of my prisoners for breakfast.”

“Who you sending out?” someone hollered.

The Old Man named a feller, the drunk who had staggered in the night before and been captured and announced he was the cook at the Gault House.

“Don’t send that souse,” somebody shouted. “He can’t cook to save his life. Keep him in there.”

There was laughing, but then more grumbling and cursing, and finally they agreed on letting the feller out. The cook shuffled over to the Gault House, and in a couple of hours come back with three men carrying plates of food, which he gived out to the prisoners, and a bottle of whiskey. Then he took a drink and went to sleep again. He forgot all ’bout going free.

By now it was near four p.m. The sun was high overhead, and the crowd outside was hot. Apparently the doctor who had treated the Rail Man spread word to the town that the Rail Man was dying. Several men on horseback was seen galloping up through Bolivar Heights—you could see them running up the roads to the houses tucked up there just above the armory, and you could hear them yelling rumors that echoed down the hill: shouts that the armory was taken by a Negro insurrection. That made the thing electric. All the fun went out of it then. The drunk cursing turned to ranting and full-out cussing and swearing and talking ’bout people’s mothers and the raping of white women, and several rifles and guns could be seen brandished among the crowd, but there weren’t no firing from them yet.

Then, at the far end of the armory, across from the rifle works, several townspeople came sprinting out an unguarded building, holding rifles they had stolen. Kagi, Leary, and Copeland, guarding the rifle works at the far end of the yard, saw them through their window and opened up on them.

The crowd outside the gate quickly scattered, and now they opened up. The Old Man’s men returned the fire, which splattered the windows and pinged into the brick walls around the townsmen. They quickly re-formed into groups. Two militia companies in different uniforms, some fully uniformed and others in only hats and coats, suddenly appeared out of nowhere and assembled in raggedy fashion around the arsenal yard. Them fools had every kind of gun they could dig up: squirrel guns, muskets, fowling pieces, six-shooters, old muskets, and even a few rusty swords. Half a dozen of them crossed the Potomac above the Ferry, walked down the pass next to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and attacked Oliver and Taylor on the bridge, who engaged them. Another group came over on the Shenandoah opposite the rifle works. A third went to capture the Shenandoah Bridge, firing on two of the Old Man’s fellers who was guarding that. Kagi and Copeland suddenly had their hands full down at the far end of the armory with another group down there that had stolen them rifles. And just like that, it was full out. It had started.

The militia and civilians outside the main gate, they huddled for a minute, then assembled in a group and marched, and I mean marched, I’d say a good thirty of ’em, marched right inside the armory gate, firing on the engine house as they came, sending shots through every window.

Inside the engine house, the Old Man kicked into action. “Men! Be cool! Don’t waste powder and shot. Aim low. Make every shot count. They will expect us to retreat right away. Take careful aim.” The men did as he said, and, from the windows, busted enough charges at them militia to push them back ten yards, scattering them back out the armory gate and onto Shenandoah road in no time.

That firing was too much for them Virginians and they stayed out the gate, but not that far this time, not across the road. Their numbers growed by the second, too. More could be seen coming from the hills above, some running on foot, others on horseback. Out the window, I saw Kagi emerge from the rifle works and shoot his way through the yard, past the entrance gate with Copeland covering him, trying to make his way over. It was hot work getting to the engine house, but he managed it at a full sprint. The Emperor opened the door for him and slammed it shut behind him.

Kagi was calm, but his face was red and alert with alarm. “We got a chance to pull out now,” he said. “They movin’ a group to take both bridges. They’ll have the B&O Bridge in a few minutes if we don’t hurry. And if they take Shenandoah Bridge, we’re trapped.”

The Old Man didn’t bat an eyelash. He sent Taylor to cover the B&O Bridge, told Kagi to go back to his position with Dangerfield Newby, a colored, then said to Stevens and O. P. Anderson, “Take Onion back to the farmhouse and bring in the coloreds. They is no doubt hiving there and anxious to join in the fight for their freedom. It is time to take this war to the next level.”

O.P. and Stevens gathered themselves on the quick. O.P. wore a look on his face that said he weren’t sorry to leave, and neither was I. I had a bad feeling ’bout things, for I knowed then that the Old Man was losing his buttons. I weren’t in the mood to say good-bye to him then, even though I hadn’t fully confessed to him ’bout the Rail Man being shot dead. It didn’t seem to matter then, for the thing was winging out of control in a worse way than even I imagined, and my arse was on the line, and while it’s a small arse and was covered with a dress and petticoat for the better part of three years up to that point, it did cover my backside, and thus I was always fond of it. I was used to the Old Man losing touch and getting holy once the shooting started. That weren’t the problem. The problem was: ’Bout a hundred armed white fellers screaming outside the gate, tanked, seeing double, and the mob growing by the second. I might mention here that for the first time in my life, the feeling of holy sanctimony begun creeping into my spirit. I felt myself reaching to the Lord a little. It might’a been ’cause I had the urge to piss and no place to do it without giving myself away, for that was always a problem in them days—that, and always having to dress like I was going hunting every night when I gone to bed. But I think it was a little more. The Old Man tried to press sanctification on me many a day, but I ignored him in the years previous. It weren’t nothing to me but words. But, watching that crowd outside muster up, I growed chickenhearted from that affair, scared right down to my little dangling rascal and his twin little giddies. I found myself muttering, “Lord, ’scuse me a minute. I has not had a high tolerance for the Word before but ...” Kagi heard me and scowled a minute, for he was a strong man, a man of courage, but even a strong man can have his courage moved and overtested. I seen real concern in his normally cool face this time, and heard his voice crack when he said it. He gived it to the Old Man straight: “Get out now before it’s too late, Captain.” But the Old Man ignored him, for he’d heard me call out God’s name, and that tickled him. He said, “Precious Jesus! Onion has discovered Thee! Success is at hand!” He turned to Kagi, calm as a bowl of turtle soup, and said, “G’wan back to the armory. Reinforcements is coming.”

Kagi done like he said while O.P. and Stevens grabbed a couple of extra balls and cartridges for their rifles, throwed them in their pockets, and moved to the back window. I followed. The window faced the back wall of the armory. They busted a few shots out the window, which sent a couple of Virginians who’d wandered back there scrambling, and we three crawled through it and out. We made for the back wall, which led to the bottom of the river at the B&O Bridge. We was over that wall in no time. We runned through an open lot and sprinted across the bridge and made it across only ’cause Oliver and Taylor was giving fits to a small group of the enemy who was trying to drive them off it. We made it with bullets pinging everywhere, and within seconds crossed the bridge to the Maryland side. From there we hustled past two more of the Old Man’s men, crossed the road, and in seconds was climbing through thick thickets up the mountain toward the Kennedy farm—in the clear.

We stopped at a clearing ’bout a half mile up. We could see from our vantage point the crowds and militia growing outside the armory, groups of men now, charging into the armory in fours and fives, firing into the engine house, then backpedaling as the Old Man and his men answered ’em—dropping one or two Virginians each time. The wounded lay in the clear in the armory yard, moaning, just feet from their fellow fighters, some of whom had quit breathing altogether, and the rest of their brothers who stood crowded at the entranceway on Shenandoah Street, cursing angrily, afraid to come in and get them. Oh, it was a hot mess.

We watched, terrified. I knowed I weren’t going back over to the Ferry. The crowd outside the armory had growed to nearly two hundred now and more coming, most of ’em holding bottles of gut sauce in one hand and rifles in the other. Behind them, in the town itself and at Bolivar Heights above it, dozens of folk could be seen fleeing up the hills and out of Harpers Ferry, most of ’em colored, and a good deal of white folk, too.

Stevens kept going up the hill while O.P. and I stood for a moment together, watching.

“You going back there?” I asked O.P.

“If I do,” he muttered, “I’m walking on my hands.”

“What we gonna do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I wouldn’t go back there if Jesus Christ Himself was down there.”

I silently agreed. We turned and climbed up the mountain, following Stevens, making our way up toward the farmhouse fast as we could go.

30. Un-Hiving the Bees

We found Cook on a quiet dirt road near the Kennedy farm in a state of excitement. Before we could say a word, he blurted out, “We has hived some bees!” He led us to a nearby schoolhouse, where Tidd and Owen stood over two white men and ’bout ten slaves. The coloreds sat on the porch of the schoolhouse, looking bewildered and like they had just got out of bed. Cook pointed to one of the white men setting among ’em under the barrel of Owen’s rifle. “That’s Colonel Lewis Washington,” he said.

“Who’s he?” O.P. asked.

“He’s the great-nephew of George Washington.”

“The George Washington?”

“Correct.” He grabbed a shiny, powerful-looking sword lying on the porch floor. “We got this from the mantle of his fireplace.” He turned to O.P. and said, “I presents to you the sword of his great-uncle. It was a gift to Washington from Frederick the Great.”

O.P. looked at that broadsword like it was poison. “Why I got to have it?” he asked.

“The Old Man would want you to. It’s symbolic.”

“I ... I ain’t got no use for it,” O.P. said.

Cook frowned. Stevens snatched it and holstered it in his belt.

I walked over to Colonel Washington to have a look. He was a tall, slender white man in a nightshirt, still wearing his sleeping cap on his head, his face unshaven. He was trembling like a deer. He looked so glum and scared, it was a pity.

“When we busted in his house, he thought we was thieves,” Tidd snorted. “He said, ‘Take my whiskey! Take my slaves. But leave me alone.’ He squawked like a baby.” Tidd leaned down to Colonel Washington. “Be a man!” he barked. “Be a man!”

That got Stevens going, and he was an aggravating soul if I ever saw one. He was overall the best soldier I ever saw, but he was the devilment when it come to wagging his fists and digging into a fight. He strutted over to Colonel Washington and glared down at him, hulking over him. The colonel just shrank beneath him, setting underneath that big feller. “Some colonel you are,” Stevens said. “Ready to trade your slaves for your own wretched life. You ain’t worth a pea thrasher, much less a bottle of whiskey.”

Oh, that riled the colonel, Stevens scratching at him that way, but the colonel held his tongue, for he seen Stevens was mad.

Tidd and Owen produced pikes and rifles and begun handing them out to the coloreds, who, truth be told, looked downright bewildered. Two got up and took them gingerly. Then another grabbed one. “What is the matter with you?” Tidd said. “Ain’t you ready to fight for your freedom?” They said nothing, befuddled by the whole bit. Two of ’em looked like they had just got out of bed. One turned away and refused the weapons handed to him. The rest, after a bit of burbling and showing how chickenhearted they felt ’bout the whole affair, went along more or less, taking whatever weapon was offered and holding them like they was hot potatoes. But I took a notice to one of ’em sitting at the end of the row of the coloreds. He was seated on the floor, this feller in a nightshirt and pantaloons, with his suspenders hung low. He looked familiar, and in my excitement and fear it took me a long minute before I recognized the Coachman.

He weren’t dressed so splendid now, for he weren’t wearing his pretty coachman’s outfit with white gloves, as I seen him before, but it was him, all right.

I started toward him, then turned away, for he seen me and I got the understanding that he didn’t want me to recognize him. I knowed he had some secrets and thought it better to pretend not to know him, with his master there. I didn’t want to get him in trouble. If a feller had the impression that the bottom rail was gonna be on top, he’d act far different if he’d’a knowed that at some point the white man was gonna get the Ferry back and sling the Negro every which way. I seen what was going on down at the Ferry and he did not. Neither did Tidd, Cook, or the rest of the Old Man’s soldiers who stayed back up at the farm. But I saw O.P. pull Tidd aside and give him a mouthful. Tidd said nothing. But the Coachman watched them both, and while he didn’t hear what nar a one of them was saying, I guess he made up his mind at that moment that he weren’t going to play dumb and was going for the whole hog.

He stood up and said, “I am ready to fight,” and grabbed his pike when it was offered. “I needs a pistol as well.” They gave him one of them, too, and some ammunition.

His master, Colonel Washington, was setting on the floor of the schoolhouse porch, watching this, and when he seen the Coachman take them weapons, he couldn’t help hisself. He got snappy. He said, “Why, Jim, sit down!”

The Coachman walked over to Colonel Washington and stood over him with a terrible look on his face.

“I ain’t taking another word from you,” he said. “I been taking words from you for twenty-two years.”

That flummoxed Colonel Washington. Just dropped him. He got hot right there. He stammered, “Why, you ungrateful black bastard! I been good to you. I been good to your family!”

“You skunk!” the Coachman cried. He raised his pike to deaden him right there, and only Stevens and O.P. grabbing him stopped him.

They struggled with him mightily. Stevens was a heavy man, a big mule-strong feller, as tough a man as there was, but he could barely hold the Coachman. “That’s enough!” Stevens hollered. “That’s enough. There’s fight enough at the Ferry.” They wrestled him back away from the colonel, but the Coachman couldn’t stand it.

“He’s as big a skunk as ever sneaked in the woods!” the Coachman cried. “He sold my mother off!” and he went at Colonel Washington again even harder this time, and this time even Stevens, big as he was, couldn’t handle him. It took all four of them—Tidd, Stevens, Cook, and O.P.—to keep him from killing his former master. They had to grapple with him for several minutes. The Coachman gived all four of them all they could handle, and when they finally pinned him back, Stevens was so hot, he pulled his hardware and stuck it in the Coachman’s face.

“You do that again, I’ll air you out myself,” he said. “I’ll not have you spilling blood here. This is a war of liberation, not retribution.”

“I don’t care what name you calls it,” the Coachman said. “You keep him away from me.”

By God, the thing had winged so far out of control, it weren’t funny. Stevens turned to O.P. and said, “We got to move these people now. Let’s move them to the Ferry. The Captain needs reinforcements. I’ll tend to the others. You keep him away from the colonel.” He nodded at the Coachman.

O.P. weren’t for it. “You know what’s waiting for us at the Ferry.”

“We got orders,” Stevens said, “and I aims to follow ’em.”

“How we gonna get to the Ferry? We’d have to fight our way in. It’s closed off by now.”

Stevens peered at Washington out the corner of his eye. “We ain’t got to fight our way in. We can walk in. I got a plan.”

The road from the schoolhouse on the Maryland side going down to the Ferry is a dangerous one. It’s a steep, sharp hill. At the top of it, the road arcs like the curve of an egg. You bounce high over that, and from there you can see the Ferry and the Potomac clear, then you hit that hill and fly down that till you hit the bottom. Right there, at the bottom, is the Potomac River. You got to turn left hard to follow the road to the bridge back over to the Ferry. You can’t take that hill too fast coming off that mountain, ’cause if you come down too fast, it’s too steep to stop. Many a wagon, I reckon, has bent and broken an axle or two at the bottom, trying to take that turn too fast. You got to take that thing with your horses reined up tight and your brake pulled in hard, otherwise you’ll end up in the Potomac.

The Coachman took that road in Colonel Washington’s four-horse coach like the devil was whipping him. He bounced down that hill so fast, it felt like the wind was gonna pull me off. Stevens, Colonel Washington, and the other slave owner rode inside, while the slaves, me, and O.P. rode the running boards, hanging on for dear life.

’Bout a half mile from the bottom, before that dangerous turn come up, Stevens—thank God for him—he hollered out the window to the Coachman to har them horses and stop the wagon, which the Coachman done.

I was standing on the running board, watching, with my head at the window. Stevens, sitting next to Washington, removed his revolver from his holster, primed it, pulled the hammer back, and stuck it into Washington’s side. Then he covered it with his coat so it couldn’t be seen.

“We is going across the B&O Bridge,” he said. “If we get stopped by militia there, you’ll get us through,” he said.

“They won’t let us!” Colonel Washington said. Ooooo, he growed chickenhearted right there. Big man like that, crowing like a bird.

“Surely they will,” Stevens said. “You’re a colonel in the militia. You just say, ‘I have made arrangements to exchange myself and my Negroes for the white prisoners inside the engine house.’ That’s all you say.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Yes, you can. If you open your mouth in any other direction at the bridge, I’ll bust a charge in you. Nothing will happen to you if you follow my directions.”

He stuck his head out the window and said to the Coachman, “Let’s go.”

The Coachman didn’t hesitate. He harred up them horses and sent that wagon raking down that road again. I hung on from my fingernails down, glum as could be. I would’a jumped off that thing when it stopped, but there weren’t no scampering off with Stevens around. And now, with that thing up to speed again, if I’d’a jumped off on that hill, I’d’a been busted into a million pieces by them wagon’s wheels, which was thick across as my four fingers, if Stevens didn’t shoot me first, he was so mad.

I just weren’t fixated on that particular way of dying, the method of it, being throwed off a wagon or getting aired out for trying to run, but it occurred to me I might be crossing the quit line anyway once we hit the bottom of the hill, for I was on the side where it would fall if it overturned if the Coachman tried to pull into the turn going too fast. Blessed God, that upset me, and I don’t know why. So I fixed my mind on jumping. That turn at the bottom was sharp enough to pull them wheels off. I knowed the Coachman’d have to slow down to make that sharp twist left and head toward the Ferry. He’d have to break it down some kind of way. I figured to make my move then. Leap off.

O.P. had the same idea. He said, “I’m jumping when we get to the bottom.”

There was a slight curve just before we hit bottom, and as we came around it and made it hard for the river, we both seen we was fixed for disappointment. There was militia in formation on the road, marching right through the intersection, just as the Coachman was making for it.

He seen them militia, and didn’t brake much, God bless him, he hit that T-intersection straight on, hard as them horses could stand it, drove right into the middle of the militia, busted ’em up, scattered ’em like flies. Then he backed up, turned left, and stung them horses up with his whip and put it on ’em. That nigger could drive a mule up a gnat’s ass. Put some distance between us and them fellers in an instant, and he needed to, for once they recovered and seen all them raggedy niggers hanging off Colonel Washington’s fancy coach without no explanation, they drawed their hardware and cut loose. Sent balls a-whizzing. But the Coachman outdistanced them, and we lost them in the curve of the mountain road.

We could see the Ferry from where we was. We was still across the river from it. But we seen the smoke and could hear the firing. It looked hot. The road in front of us was spotted with militia hurrying to and fro, but they was from different companies and different counties, dressed in different uniforms, and they didn’t know one from the other and let us pass without a word. They had no idea the ones from behind us was firing at us, for the blasting of the ones behind us melted into the shooting coming from across the Potomac. Nobody knowed who was doing what. The Coachman played it smart. He drove right past them, hollering, “I got the colonel here. I got Colonel Washington! He’s exchanging hisself for the hostages!” They moved aside to let us pass. There weren’t no stopping him, which made it bad for me, for I couldn’t drop off that thing with all that militia around. I had to hang on.

Sure as God would have it, when we got to the B&O Bridge—that thing was loaded with militia, creaking down under the weight of ’em—Colonel Washington done just as he was told, followed orders to the dot, and we was waved through. Some even cheered as we passed, hollering, “The colonel’s here! Hooray!” They didn’t give it a thought, for a good number of ’em was drunk. Couldn’t have been less than a hundred men on that bridge, the very same bridge that Oliver and Taylor guarded just a day before by themselves in total darkness and weren’t a soul on it. The Old Man had blowed his chance to get out.

As we crossed the bridge, I had a clear sight of the armory from above. By God, there was three hundred militiamen down there if there was one, milling around the gate and walls and more coming from town and Bolivar Heights above it, cramming at the entrance, lining the riverbank, all along the sides of the armory walls. All white men. Not a single colored in sight. The armory walls was surrounded. We was riding into death.

I got light-headed on God then. The devil flew off my back and the Lord latched Hisself to my heart. I said, “Jesus! The blood.” I said them words and felt His spirit pass through me. My heart felt like it busted out the penitentiary, my soul swelled up, and everything ’bout me, the trees, the bridge, the town, became clear. I then and there decided if I ever cleared things, I would tell the Old Man what I’d felt, clear it with him ’bout all that religious blabbing he’d done, that it weren’t for naught, and also clear it with him ’bout not saying nothing ’bout the Rail Man and a few other assorted lies I told. I didn’t think I’d have the chance, to be honest, which I reckon means I weren’t totally given to the spirit. But I thunk on the notion anyway.

As we cleared the bridge and the wagon turned toward the armory, I turned to O.P., who was hanging on the running board by his fingernails. I said, “Good-bye, O.P.”

“Good-bye,” he said, and he done something that just knocked me out. He dropped off that wagon to his death and rolled down the bank into the Potomac. Rolled like a potato into the water, and that was the last I seen of him. Must’a been a good twenty feet. Rolled into the water. He weren’t going back to the armory to get shot up. He chose his own death. Chalk up a second colored to the Old Man’s scheme. To count, I’d seen with my own eyes the first two folks deadened in the Old Man’s army on account of him freeing the colored was the colored themselves.

We come to the armory gate with the Coachman hollering all the way that we had Colonel Washington, rolled right through that mob, and busted into the yard clear. The mob weren’t going to stop us. The colonel was in the wagon. They knowed his coach and knowed who he was. I reckoned they parted on account of an important man being inside there, but when we come through the gate and hit the yard clean, I seen the real reason why.

That yard was dead as a cornfield. Quiet as a mouse pissing on cotton.

What I couldn’t see from the bridge, I seen from the ground in front of the engine house. The Old Man had been busy. There was several dead men laying out in the open, white men and a couple of colored, too, all within shooting range of the engine house and buildings around it. The Old Man weren’t fooling. That’s why them militia congregated outside the armory gate and walls. They was still scared to go inside. He’d been beating ’em off.

The Coachman wheeled that wagon around a couple of chewed-up dead fellers and finally got tired of steering around them and just aimed the wagon straight for the engine house, bouncing over the heads of a couple of the dead—it didn’t bother them nohow, they didn’t feel nothing. He stopped dead directly in front of the engine house, those inside flung the door open, and we rushed inside, the door closing behind us.

That place stunk something ferocious. There was thirty or so hostages in there. Whites was gathered on one side of the room and the colored on another side, separated by a wall, but it weren’t a continuous wall to the ceiling, so you could move between the two sides. Nar privy was on either side of the room, and if you thunk whites and coloreds was different, you ain’t got a big put up to the truth when you get a whiff of their nature doings and comes to the understanding that one pea don’t grow to no higher grade than the other. That place reminded me of them Kansas taverns, but worse. It was downright infernal.

The Captain stood by a window, holding a rifle and his seven-shooter, looking calm as a corn shoot, but a little beaten down, truth be to tell it. His face, old and wrinkled even in normal times, was covered in grit and powder. His white beard looked like it’d been dipped in a bag of dirt, and his jacket was flecked with holes and gunpowder burns. He’d been up thirty hours without sleep and no food. Still, compared to the rest of his men, he looked fit as a fiddle. The others, young men, Oliver, Watson—who had been flushed off the Shenandoah—Taylor, looked clean run out, their faces white, pale as ghosts. They knowed what they was looking at. Only the Emperor seemed calm. That was a bodacious Negro there. And other than O.P., a braver man I never saw.

Stevens handed the Old Man Colonel Washington’s sword, which the Captain held high. “That is righteous,” he said. He turned to Colonel Washington’s slaves who had just come off the wagon and entered the Engine Works and said, “In the name of the Provisional Government of the United States, I, President John Brown emeritus elected, E pluribus unum, with all rights and privileges hereto, selected by a Congress of your brethren, I hereby pronounces you is all free. Go in peace, my brother Negroes!”

Them Negroes looked downright befuddled, of course. Weren’t but eight of ’em. Plus a few more lined up against the wall as hostages already, and they weren’t going nowhere, so that added to their confusion. Them Negroes didn’t move nor spout a blaming word between ’em.

Since nobody said nothing, the Old Man added, “Course if you want, since we is all here fighting a war against slavery. If you wants to join us in battling for your freedom, why, we is all for that, too. And for that cause, and for the cause of your freedom in the days ahead, so that no one can wrest it from you, we is going to arm you.”

“We done that,” Stevens said. “But their pikes fell off in the ride down.”

“Oh. Well, we got more. Where’s O.P. and the others?”

“I don’t know,” Stevens said. “I thought they was on the wagon. I reckon they’re hiving more bees.”

The Old Man nodded. “Yes, of course!” he said, looking at the flock we just brought in. He went down the line of Negroes, shaking a hand or two, welcoming them. The Negroes looked glum, which he ignored course, talking to Stevens as he shook their hands. “This is working exactly the way I figured it, Stevens. Prayer works, Stevens. Spiritualist that you is, you really ought to become a believer. Remind me to share with you a few words from our Maker when there is time, for I knows you have it in you yet to turn to the ways of our Great Humbler.”

He had plain gone off the deep end, of course. O.P. weren’t hiving nothing but the bottom of the Potomac. Cook, Tidd, Merriam, and Owen, they’d taken the tall timber back at the Kennedy farm. They was gone, I was sure. I never held that against them, by the way. They valued their skin. There was weak spots in them men, and I knowed all ’bout that, for I had weak spots myself—all over. I weren’t against ’em.

The Old Man suddenly noticed me standing there and said, “Stevens, why is Onion here?”

“She come back to the Ferry on her own,” Stevens said.

The Old Man didn’t like it. “She ought not be here,” he said. “The fighting’s gotten a bit dirty. She ought to be hiving more bees in safety.”

“She wanted to come,” Stevens said.

That was a damn lie. I hadn’t said a thing ’bout going back to the Ferry. Stevens gived orders at the schoolhouse, and like usual, I done what he said.

The Old Man placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “It does my heart good to see you here, Onion, for we needs children to witness the liberation of your people and to tell stories of it to future generations of Negroes and whites alike. This day will be remembered. Besides, you is always a good omen. I have never lost a battle when you is about.”

He forgot all ’bout Osawatomie, where they deadened Frederick and sent him packing, but that was the Old Man’s nature. He never remembered nothing but what he wanted to, and didn’t tell himself nothing but what he only really wanted to believe.

He got downright wistful standing there. “God has blessed us, Onion, for you is a good and courageous girl. Having you with me at this moment of my greatest triumph is like having my Frederick here, who gived his life in favor of the Negro, even though he didn’t know his head from his hindquarters. You has always gived him such joy. It gives me cause to thank our Redeemer and how much He hath given to all of us.” And here he closed his eyes, folded his hands across his chest, and busted into prayer, chanting his thanks to our Great Redeemer Who walked the road to Jericho and so forth, praying ’bout Fred being so lucky as to ride with the angels, and while he said it, he didn’t want to forget to mention some others of his twenty-two children, the ones who’d died from sickness and those who yet had gone to glory: the ones who died first, little Fred, Marcy when she was two, William who died of fever, Ruth who got burned; then he runned down the list of the living ones, then his cousin’s children, and his Pa and Ma, thanking God for accepting them on high and teaching him the Lord’s way. All this with his men standing ’round and the hostages behind him, watching, and a good three hundred white fellers outside, milling around looped and shit-faced, passing ammo and gearing up to make another charge.

There weren’t no Owen to bust him out of that trance—Owen’s the only one had the guts to do it, to my knowledge—for the Old Man’s prayers was serious business, and I seen him pull his heater out on any fool game enough to break off his conversations between him and his Maker. Even his main fellers Kagi and Stevens was scared to do it, and when they done it, they went ’bout it roundabout with no success, breaking drinking glasses at his feet, coughing, hacking, harring up spit, chopping wood, and when that didn’t work, they had target practice and blowed off caps right next to his ear, and still they couldn’t break him out of one his prayer spells. But my arse, or what was left of it, was on the line, and I valued it dearly, so I said, “Captain, I is thirsty! And there is some business at hand. I’m feeling Jesus.”

That snapped him out of his trance. He stood up straightaway, tossed out two or three amens, throwed his arms out wide and said, “Thank Him, Onion! Thank Him! You is on the right road. Give Onion some water, men!” Then he drawed himself up to his full height, pulled out from his belt and held up the sword from Frederick the Great, admiring it, then placed it across his chest. “May this new acceptance of the Son of Man in Onion’s heart serve as a symbol of inspiration to us in our fight for justice for the Negro. May it give us even greater force. Let it inspire us to lend ourselves even more wholly to the cause, and give our enemies something to cry about. Now, men. On to it. We is not done yet!”

Well, he didn’t say nothing ’bout busting out of there. Them’s the words I was looking for. He didn’t breathe a word of that.

He ordered the men and the slaves to chink out the walls, and they got busy. A feller named Phil, a slave feller, got some of the slaves together—there was ’bout twenty-five colored in there in all, some who had come or been gathered thereabouts along with those we brung, plus five white masters who set tight, not movin’—and them coloreds got busy. They chinked out some expert holes with pikes and loaded up the rifles. Lined ’em up one by one so the Old Man’s men could grab one after the other without having to load ’em up, and we prepared for perfect slumber.

31. Last Stand

The mob outside the gate waited a good hour or so for Colonel Washington to work whatever magic he had supposedly had, to exchange hisself and his Negroes for the white hostages. When it didn’t happen by the second hour, someone hollered out, “Where’s our colonel? How many hostages is you giving up for our colonel and his niggers?”

The Old Man stuck his face in the window and hollered, “None. If you want your colonel, come and get him.”

Oh, they throwed a hissy fit all over again. There was some hollerin’, fussin’, and huddlin’ up, and after a few minutes they walked ’bout two hundred militia through the gate, in uniform, marched ’em in there in formation, turned ’em against the engine house, and told ’em, “Fire!” By God, when they cut loose, it felt like a giant monster kicked the building. The whole engine house shook. Just a roaring and banging. Bricks and mortar chinked everywhere, from the roof pillars on down. Their firing blowed big pieces of brick mortar right clear through the walls of the Engine Works, and even tore off a big piece of the timber that held up the roof, it came crashing down.

But they didn’t overtake us. The Old Man’s men were well trained and they held steady, firing through the holes in the brick made by the militia’s firing, with him hollering, “Calm. Aim low. Make ’em pay dear.” They powered the militia with balls and drove ’em back outside the gate.

The militias gathered outside the walls again, and they was so drunk and mad now it was a pity. All that laughing and joking from the day before was gone now, replaced with full-out rage and frustration in every appearance. Some of them growed chickenhearted from that first charge, for several of their brothers had been hurt or deadened by the Captain’s men, and they peeled off and hauled ass away from the group. But more was coming down to the gate, and after a few minutes, they regrouped and come through the gate again in even greater numbers, for more men had arrived outside the armory to replace those that fell. Still, the Old Man’s men held them off. And that company drew back. They milled around out there by the safety of the gate, yelling and hollering, promising to string the Old Man up by his privates. Shortly after, they brung in a second company from somewhere ’bout. Different uniforms. Marched another two hundred or so into the gate, madder than the first, cussing and hooting, turned ’em on the building, and by the time they busted off their caps, the Old Man’s crew had diced, sliced, and gutted out a good number of ’em, and they broke loose for the gate running faster than the first, leaving a few more gutted or dead ’bout the yard. And each time the Virginians moved to fetch one of their wounded, one of the Old Man’s men poked his Sharps out the chinks in the brick wall and made ’em pay for them thoughts. That just got ’em hotter. They was burning up.

The white hostages, meantime, was dead quiet and terrified. The Old Man put the Coachman and the Emperor in charge of minding ’em, and had a good twenty-five slaves in there running ’bout busy. They wasn’t bewildered no more, them coloreds was with it. And not a peep was heard out of any of them white masters.

Now we wasn’t far from their saviors. We could hear the militia talking and yelling outside, screaming and cussing. That crowd growed bigger and bigger, and with that come more confusion to ’em. They’d say let’s go this way, try this, and someone would shout that plan down, then someone else would holler, “My cousin Rufus is wounded in the yard. We got to get him out,” and someone would say, “You get him!” and a fight would break out among ’em, and a captain would shout more directions, and they’d have to break up the fighting among themselves. They was just discombobulated. And while they done this, the Captain was ordering his men and the colored helpers, in calm fashion, “Reload, people. Aim low. Line the rifles on the walls loaded so you can grab one after you fire the first. We are hurting the enemy.” The men and them slaves was firing and reloading so fast, so efficient, seemed like a machine. Old John Brown knowed his business when it come to fighting a war. They could have used him in the great war that was to come, I’ll say that.

But his luck couldn’t hold. It runned out like it always done with him. In stitches. Clean out, the way it always did with him.

It begun when a chunky white feller come out to talk to the Old Man and try to smooth things. He seemed to be some kind of boss. He came into the armory a few times, said I’m coming in peace, and let’s work this out. But each time he came in, he didn’t venture too far in. Would stick his head in and scoot out. He weren’t armed, and after he poked his head and begged his way in a few times, the Old Man told his men, “Don’t shoot him,” and he hollered at the little feller, “Keep off. Keep back. We come to free the Negro.” But that feller kept fiddling with coming back and forth, sticking his head in, then going back out. He never come all the way in. I heard him out there trying to calm the men down outside the gate at one point, for they’d become a mob. Weren’t nobody in control of them. He tried that a couple of times and gave up on that and got to scooting a little farther into the armory again, just peeking in, then scampering back to safety like a little mouse. Finally he got his nerve up and come in too close. He runned behind a water tank in the yard, and when he got in there, he peeked his head out from behind that water tank, and one of the Old Man’s men in the other armory buildings—I believe Ed Coppoc done it—got a bead on him and fired twice and got him. Dropped his game. The man fell and stopped paying taxes right there. Done.

That feller’s death drove that mob outside into a frenzy. They was already spiked by then—them two saloons at the gate was doing big business—but that feller’s death drove them straight cross-eyed. Made ’em into a straight-out mob. Turns out he was the mayor of Harpers Ferry. Fontaine Beckham. Friend to the Rail Man and liked by all, white and colored. Coppoc couldn’t’a knowed it. There was a lot of confusion.

The mayor’s body lay there with the rest of the dead for a couple of hours, while the Virginians outside whooped and hollered and banged their drums and played the fife and promised the Old Man they was gonna come in there and cut him to pieces and make him eat his bloomers. They railed and promised to make his eyeballs into marshmallows. But nothing happened. Dusk come. It weren’t quite dark, but it got quiet out there, quiet as midnight. Something was happening out there in the dusk. They stopped hollering and quieted up. I couldn’t see them then, for it growed dark, but somebody must’a come there, a captain or somebody, and got them sorted out and better organized. They set there for ’bout ten minutes that way, murmuring quietly ’bout such and so and such and such, like little kids whispering, real quiet, not making a whole lot of noise.

The Old Man, watching through the window, drew back. He lit a lantern and shook his head. “That’s it,” he said. “We has them neutralized. Jesus’s grace is more powerful than what any man can do. Of that you can be certain, men.”

Just then they busted through that gate in a horde, four hundred men, the newspaper said later—so many you couldn’t see between ’em, a stampede, firing as they come, in a full-out, ass-and-hindquarters, band-beatin’, honest-to-goodness charge.

We couldn’t take it. We didn’t have the numbers and was spread too thin around the armory. Kagi and the two coloreds from Oberlin, Leary and Copeland, was at the far end in the rifle works building, and they was the first to fall. They was driven out the back windows of the building and fled into the banks of the Shenandoah, where they both got hit. Kagi took a ball to the head and dropped down dead. Leary got hit in the back and followed him. Copeland got farther into the river, managed to climb on a rock in the middle of the river, and was stranded there. A Virginian waded out there and climbed on the rock with him. Both men drawed revolvers and fired. Both guns snapped, too wet to fire. Copeland surrendered. He’d hang in a month.

Meantime, they overrun a man named Leeman in the armory. He dashed out the side door and jumped into the Potomac and tried to swim across. Militiamen spotted him from the bridges and fired. Wounded him but didn’t kill him. He drifted downstream a few feet and managed to pull himself up onto a rock. Another Virginian climbed out to him, holding his pistol out the water to keep it dry. He climbed onto the rock where Leeman lay sprawled on his back. Leeman hollered, “Don’t shoot! I surrender!” The feller smiled, leveled his gun, and blasted Leeman’s face off. Leeman lay sprawled on that rock for hours. He was used as target practice by them men. They got wasted on gut sauce and happily pumped him full of balls like he was a pillow.

One of the Thompson boys, Will, the younger one, got out the armory some kind of way and got trapped on the second floor of the Gault House hotel, across the road from the armory. They burst in on him, drug him downstairs, kept him prisoner for a few minutes, then took him to the B&O Bridge and made ready to shoot him. But a captain runned over and said, “Take this prisoner inside the hotel.”

“The lady who owns the hotel don’t want him,” they said.

“Why not?”

“She said she don’t want her carpet mussed up,” they said.

“Tell her I ordered it. He ain’t gonna muss her carpet.”

Them men didn’t pay that captain no mind. They pushed him off, stood Thompson up on the bridge, backed off him, and blistered him full of holes right there. “Now he’ll muss up her carpet,” they said.

Thompson fell into the water. It was shallow water down there, and from where we was, you could see him floating the next morning, his face staring up out the water, his eyes wide, asleep forever, as his body bobbed up and down, his boots licking the bank.

We was holding ’em off at the engine house, but it was a full-out gunfight. From a corner of the yard, the rifle works building, the last man living out there, the colored man Dangerfield Newby, seen us making a fight of it and tried to make it for us.

Newby had a wife and nine children in slavery just thirty miles off. He’d been holed up in the rifle works with Kagi and the others. When Kagi and his men made for the Shenandoah River, Newby smartly held up and let the rest chase them others. While they done that, he jumped out a window on the Potomac River side and sprinted across the armory toward the engine house on the back side of the armory. That smart nigger was making time, too. He aimed to get to us.

A white feller from the back of the water tower seen him and throwed a bead on him. Newby saw him, drawed his rifle and dropped him, and kept coming.

He had almost made it to the engine house when a feller from a house across the street leaned through an upper-story window and laid an answer on Newby with a squirrel gun loaded with a six-inch nail. That nail plugged straight into Newby’s neck like a spear. Blood burst out his neck and the ground caught him, and he was dead before he got there.

We was fully shooting out cap for cap with them when this happened, so nobody could do nothing but watch, but the mob paid attention to his dying. He was the first colored they could get a hold of, and they was thirsty for him. They grabbed him, pulled his body out the entrance and into the street. They kicked him, pummeled him. Then a man ran up to him and cut off his ears. Another pulled off his pants and cut off his private parts. Another poked sticks into the bullet wound. Then they drug him up the road to a hog pen and tossed him in there, and the hogs rooted on him, one of them pulling out something long and elastic from his stomach area, one end of it being in the hog’s mouth and the other in Newby’s body.

The sight of Newby getting rooted by them hogs seemed to incite the Old Man’s men to cussing and shooting, and they fired into the militia with deadly effect, for they had worked in right close on us in numbers, and now the Captain’s men, furious, drove them back. They done it to effect for a few minutes, but there weren’t no chance. They had us then. They closed the door. We was surrounded. Without Kagi and the others to cover us from the other end of the yard, there was no more driving them out the gate. They was at all points ’bout us, but they lingered now, stopped their charges and hung where they was, just out of rifle range. Didn’t come no closer. The Old Man’s army had stopped ’em where they was, but more flooded into the yard on both ends, and they couldn’t be driven out the gate now. They was right there, ’bout two hundred yards off. We was defeated.

I found the Lord full out then. It’s true I found Him earlier that day, but I never full out accepted Him in total until that time, being that my Pa was thickly scandalous in the preaching department and the Old Man bored me to tears with the Word, but God works like He wants to. He outright laid on me full-out then, for He’d given me a warning before that He was coming into my heart in full, and He came right then on me full blast. If you think looking at three hundred boiling-mad, half-cocked Virginians holding every kind of breechloader under God’s sun staring back at you with murder in their eyes is a ticket to redemption, you is on the dot. I seen what they done to Newby, and every colored in that engine house knowed whatever devilment Newby got, we was two trips short of, for Newby was lucky. He got his while he was dead, and the rest of us was conjured to get it wide awake and alive, if we lived long enough to get it in that fashion. I found the Lord surely. I called on Jesus outright. A feeling come over me. I sat in a corner, covered my head, pulled out from my bonnet my Good Lord Bird feather, and held that thing tight, just a-praying, and saying, “Lord, let me be Your angel.”

The Old Man didn’t hear me, though. He was busy conjuring up ideas, for the men in the room had dropped away from the walls and windows to surround him, as he backed off from his window and wiped his beard thoughtfully. “We has them where we wants them,” he announced cheerfully. He turned to Stevens and said, “Take Watson out with a prisoner and tell them we will begin exchanging our men for Negroes. By now Cook and the others has hived some more bees at the schoolhouse and the farm. On our signal, they will begin their attack from the rear with the Negroes, thus provoking our escape. It is time to move into the mountains.”

Stevens didn’t want to do it. “The time to move into the mountains was about noon,” he said. “Yesterday.”

“Have faith, Lieutenant. The game is not up yet.”

Stevens grumbled and roughly grabbed a hostage and nodded at young Watson, who dutifully followed. The engine house door was actually three double doors, and they had roped them all shut. They unwrapped the rope from the center door, slowly pushed it open, and walked out.

The Old Man put his face to the window. “We is negotiating hostages in exchange for safe passage of my Negro army,” he shouted. Then he added, “In good faith.”

He was answered by a blast of grape that drove him back from the window and knocked him clear onto the floor. The Frederick the Great sword which he’d stuck in his belt, the one we’d captured from Colonel Washington, clattered away.

The Old Man weren’t badly wounded nor dead, but by the time he dusted himself off and got his sword back in his belt and went back to look out the window, Stevens lay on the ground outside badly wounded, and Watson was gut shot, banging desperately on the door of the engine house with a death wound.

The men opened the door for Watson, who came tumbling in there, spilling blood and guts. He lay on the floor, and the Old Man went over to him. He looked at his son, gut shot and moaning, just stood over him. It hurt him. You could see it. He shook his head.

“They just don’t understand,” he said.

He knelt over his son and felt his head, then his neck pulse. Watson’s eyes was shut, but he was still breathing.

“You done your duty well, son.”

“Thank you, Father,” Watson said.

“Die like a man,” he said.

“Yes, Father.”

It would take Watson ten hours, but he done just as his Father asked him to.

32. Getting Gone

Night came. The militia had retreated again, this time with their wounded and with Stevens, who was still living. They lit lanterns outside and it got deathly quiet. All the shouts and hollering outside was pushed across the street and gone. The mob was moved away from the armory gates. Some kind of new order had come over out there. Something else was going on. The Old Man ordered the Emperor to climb up to the hole in the roof blowed out by the fallen timber to take a look, which he done.

He came back down and said, “The federals is out there, from Washington, D.C. I seen their flag and their uniforms.” The Old Man shrugged.

They sent over a man, who walked over to one of those wooden doors that was lashed shut. He stuck his eye in a chink hole in the door and knocked. He called out, “I want Mr. Smith.” That was the name the Old Man used at the Kennedy farm when he went around in disguise at the Ferry.

The Old Man came to the door but didn’t open it. “What is it?”

The big eye peered inside. “I am Lieutenant Jeb Stuart of the United States Cavalry. I have orders here from my commander, Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee. Colonel Lee is outside the gates and demands your surrender.”

“I demands freedom for the Negro race of people that is living in bondage in this land.”

Stuart might as well have been singing to a dead hog. “What is it you want at this direct moment, sir, in addition to that demand?” he asked.

“Nothing else. If you can cede that immediately, we will withdraw. But I don’t think it’s in your power to do so.”

“Who am I speaking with? Can you show your face?”

The wood door had a panel in it for seeing. The Old Man slid it back. Stuart blinked a moment in surprise, then stood back and scratched his head. “Why, ain’t you Old Osawatomie Brown? Who gived us so much trouble in Kansas Territory?”

“I am.”

“You are surrounded by twelve hundred federal troops. You have to surrender.”

“I will not. I will exchange the prisoners I have in return for the safe passage of me and my men across the B&O Bridge. That is a possibility.”

“That cannot be arranged,” Stuart said.

“Then our business is done.”

Stuart stood there a moment, disbelieving.

“Well, go on, then,” the Old Man said. “Our business is finished, unless you yourself can free the Negro from bondage.” He slammed the porthole shut.

Stuart went back to the gate and disappeared. But inside the engine house, the hostages begun to sense the change in things. The bottom rail had been on top the whole night, but the minute they got a sense the Old Man was doomed, them slave owners started chirping out their views. There was five of ’em setting along the wall together, including Colonel Washington, and he started chirping at the Captain, which gived the rest courage to start in on him also.

“You’re committing treason,” he said.

“You’ll hang, old man,” said another.

“You ought to give yourself up. You’ll get a fair trial,” said another.

The Emperor strode over to them. “Shut up,” he barked.

They shrank back, except for Colonel Washington. He was snippy to the end. “You’re gonna look good ducking through a hangman’s noose, you impudent nigger.”

“If that’s the case, then I’ll spot you,” the Emperor said, “and blast you now in spite of redemption.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” the Old Man said. The Captain stood by the window, alone, staring out thoughtfully. He spoke to the Emperor without looking at him. “Emperor, come over here.”

The Emperor came over to the corner and the Old Man placed his arms around the colored man’s shoulders and whispered to him. Whispered to him quite a long time. From the back, I saw the Emperor’s shoulders bunch up and he shook his head several times in “no” fashion. The Old Man whispered to him some more, in a firm fashion, then left him to watch the window again, leaving the Emperor to himself.

The Emperor suddenly seemed spent. He drifted away from the Old Man and stopped in the farthest corner of the engine house, away from the prisoners. He seemed, for the first time, downright glum. The wind gone right out of him at that moment, and he stared out the window into the night.

It growed quiet now.

Up to that point there was so much going on in the engine house, there weren’t no time to think of what it all meant. But now that darkness fell and it was quiet outside the armory and inside it too, there was time to think of consequences. There was ’bout twenty-five colored in that room. Of that number I reckon at least nine, ten, maybe more, was gonna hang surely and knowed it: Phil, the Coachman, three Negro women, and four Negro men, all of them was enthusiastic helping the Old Man’s army, loading weapons, chinking out holes, organizing ammunition. The white hostages in that room would squeal on them surely. Only God knows what their names was, but their masters knowed ’em. They was in trouble, for they got right busy fighting for their freedom once they figured what the game was. They was doomed. Weren’t no bargaining left for them. Of the rest, I’d say maybe half of that number, five or six, helped but was less enthusiastic ’bout fighting. They done it but had to be ordered to do it. They knowed their masters was watching and was never enthusiastic. And then the last of them, that last five, they wouldn’t hang, for they sucked up to their masters to the limit. They didn’t do nothing but what they was forced to do. A couple even fell asleep during the fighting.

Now that the thing was swinging the other way, them last five was setting pretty. But the ones in the middle, them that was on the fence and had half a chance to live, they swung back toward their masters something terrible. They sucked up to ’em full stride, angling to get back to their good graces. One of ’em, a feller named Otis, said, “Marse, this is a bad dream.” His marse ignored him. Didn’t say a word to him. I can’t blame that Negro for sucking up the way he done. He knowed he was dead up a hog’s ass if his master put a bad word out on him, and the master weren’t playing his hold card. Not yet. They wasn’t out the woods yet.

The rest of the Negroes that was doomed, they watched the Emperor. He come to be kind of the leader to them, for they’d seen his courage through the night, and their eyes followed him after the Old Man spoke to him. He stood at the window, staring out, thinking. It was pitch-black in there, you couldn’t see a thing ’cept what little light the moon let into the portholes, for the Old Man wouldn’t let anyone light a lantern. The Emperor just stared out, then he paced a little, then stared out some more. Coachman, Phil, and the other Negroes who was sure to hang followed him with their eyes. They all followed him, for they believed in his courage.

After a little while the Emperor called them over to his corner, and they bunched around him. I came, too, for I knowed whatever punishment awaited them was mine’s, too. You could feel their despair as they gathered around him close and listened, for he spoke in a whisper.

“Just before light, the Old Man’s gonna start a shoot-up out front and let the colored out the back window. If you want out, you can climb out the back window when the shooting starts, make for the river, and be gone.”

“What ’bout my wife?” the Coachman asked. “She’s still in bondage at the colonel’s house.”

“I can’t tell you what to do ’bout that,” the Emperor said. “But if you is caught, make up a lie. Say you was a hostage. You gonna swing for sure otherwise.”

He was silent, letting this sink in.

“The Old Man’s giving us an out,” he said. “Take it or not. He and those that’s left got some tow balls dipped in oil which he’ll fire. He’ll throw them out into the yard to make a lot of smoke, then shoot behind it. You can do your best to get gone out the back window and over the back wall when that happens. Whoever here wants to try it can do it.”

“Is you gonna try it?” the Coachman asked.

The Emperor didn’t answer. “Y’all oughta sleep some,” he said.

They all reckoned they would, and retired to sleep for a couple of hours, for no one had slept in more than forty hours hence. That raid started on a Sunday. It was now Monday night going to Tuesday.

Most of the room slept, but I couldn’t, for I knowed what was coming, too. The Emperor didn’t sleep, neither. He stood by the window, staring out, listening to Watson groaning his death moans. Of all the coloreds in the Old Man’s army, the Emperor weren’t my favorite. I didn’t know him that well, but he weren’t short on courage. I went over to him.

“You gonna make a try for freedom, Emperor?”

“I am free,” he said.

“You mean you a free Negro?”

He smiled in the dark light. I could see his white teeth, but he didn’t say more.

“I’m wondering,” I said, “if there’s some way I can’t swing.”

He looked at me and smirked. I could see his face by the light of the moon through the porthole window. He was a dark man, chocolate skinned, with wide lips, curly hair, and a smooth face. I could see his silhouette. His head stood still in the window, and the breeze that blowed off his face seemed cool and refreshing. It was like the wind seemed to part around his face. He leaned over to me and said softly, “You don’t get it, do ya?”

“I get it.”

“Then why you asking questions to answers you already know? They gonna hang every colored in here. Hell, if you even looked at them white hostages funny you’ll hang—and you done more than that, surely.”

“They don’t know me,” I said.

“They know you sure as God’s standing over the world. They know you just as well as they know me. You ought to take it standing up.”

I swallowed hard. I had to do it. Couldn’t stand it, but I had to do it.

“What if one of us is different from what they know?” I whispered.

“Ain’t no difference between us when it come to the white man.”

“Yes, there is,” I said. I grabbed his hand and stuck it right on my privates in the dark. Just to let him touch my secrets. I felt him take in his breath, then he snatched his hand back.

“They don’t know me,” I said.

There was a long pause. Then the Emperor chuckled. “Good God. That ain’t hardly a conflageration,” he said.

“A what?” For the Emperor couldn’t read, and he come up with words that didn’t make no sense.

“A conflageration. A parade. You ain’t got enough fruit there to squeeze,” he snorted. “You’d have to work all night just to find them peanuts,” and he chortled in the dark some more. He just couldn’t stop chuckling.

That weren’t funny to me. But I’d already thunk it through. I needed some boy clothes. There was but two in the engine house whose clothes I could take, and no one would notice. A colored slave who got shot and died that previous afternoon, and Watson, the Old Man’s boy, who was not quite dead but almost there. The slave was too big for me, plus he was hit by a ball in the chest and his clothes was soiled with his blood. But they was nice clothes—he was obviously an inside slave—and they would have to do. Blood or not.

“I wonder if you do me a favor,” I said. “If I could just get a pair of pantaloons and shirt off that feller there,” I whispered, nodding at the slave, whose silhouette could be seen in the moonlight. “Maybe with your help, I could slip them on and move out with the rest of the colored. When the Old Man lets us out.”

The Emperor thought ’bout it a long moment.

“Don’t you wanna die like a man?”

“That’s just it,” I said. “I’m but fourteen. How can I die like a man if I ain’t lived like one yet? I ain’t had nature’s way with a girl once. I ain’t yet kissed a girl. I think a feller ought to have the chance to be himself at least one time in this world, ’fore he moves on to the next. If not just to praise His name as his own self, rather than as somebody else. For I done found the Lord.”

There was a long silence. The Emperor rubbed his jaw a moment. “Set here,” he said.

He went over and woke the Coachman and Phil and pulled them into a corner. There was some whispering between the three, and by God if I didn’t hear them chortling and laughing. I couldn’t see them in the dark but I could hear them, and I couldn’t get past that. Them three laughing at me, so I said, “What’s so funny!”

I heard the footsteps of the Emperor’s boots coming to me. I felt a pair of pantaloons shoved in my face in the dark. And a shirt.

“If them federals find you out, they’ll splatter you all over the creek. But it’d cause a regular frolic in here among us if you was to get out clear.”

The shirt was huge, and the pants, when I put them on, were even bigger. “Whose pants is these?” I asked.

“The Coachman’s.”

“What’s the Coachman gonna wear? He’s gonna run out the window in his drawers?”

“What do you care?” he said. For the first time I noticed he was shirtless. “He ain’t going nowhere. Neither is Phil. And here”—he stuffed in my hand a worn-out old feather—“this is the last of the Good Lord Bird. The Old Man gived it to me. His last feather. I’m the only one he gived one to, I think.”

“I already got my feather. I don’t need yours, Emperor.”

“Keep it.”

“What ’bout these pants? They’re huge.”

“You fit ’em good enough. The white man don’t care what you wear. You just another shabby nigger to him. Just play it smart. At dawn, when the Captain gives the order, we’ll fire them tow balls, throw a couple out the front and back, and send a few charges out the window, and then you get gone out that window quick. Them white folks ain’t gonna pay you no more attention than they do a hole in the ground if you can get clear of the Ferry. Tell ’em you belongs to Mr. Harold Gourhand. Mr. H. Gourhand, got it? He’s a white man lives near the Kennedy farm. The Coachman knows him. He says Gourhand’s got a slave boy ’bout your age and size, and both of ’em’s out of town.”

“Somebody’ll know him!”

“No, they won’t. The federals out there, they ain’t from this country. They’re from Washington, D.C. They won’t know the difference. They can’t tell one of us from the other anyway.”

At dawn, the Old Man gived the order. They fired the tow balls, tossed ’em, and commenced blasting out the window, letting the colored slip out the back window of the engine house. I went right along with ’em, four of us altogether went, and we more or less fell right into the arms of the U.S. Cavalry. They was on us the second we hit the ground, and pulled us clear of the engine house while their brothers fired on it something fierce. At the back gate, under the railroad tracks, they gathered around us, asking ’bout the white folks inside, and asking where is you from, and who does you belong to, and is the white folks hurt. That was the main thing they wanted to know, was the white folks hurt. When we said no, they asked was we part of the Old Man’s army. To a man we swore up and down we was not. You never seen such ignorant Negroes in your life. By God, we acted like they was our saviors, and dropped to our knees and prayed and cried and thanked God for bringing them to save us and so forth.

They took pity on us, them federal marshals, and the Emperor was right. They had cleared the entire area around the armory of local militia. The soldiers doing the asking weren’t locals from the Ferry. They was federal men who come up from Washington, D.C., and they bought our story, though they was suspicious enough. But, see, the fight was still raging while they questioned us, and they wanted to go back and get the local prize, which was the Old Man hisself, so they let us take our leave. But one soldier, he smelled a rat. He asked me, “Who do you belong to?” I used the name Master Gourhand and told him where Master Gourhand lived, up near Bolivar Heights, near the Kennedy farm.

He said, “I’ll give you a ride there.”

I hopped aboard his mount and got me a ride clear up to the Kennedy farm. I directed him there, hoping none of the enemy knowed yet ’bout the Old Man using it as his headquarters. Luckily they didn’t, for when we reached it, it was all quiet up there.

We charged into the yard on horseback, me riding behind the federal, and when we charged in there, who but O. P. Anderson was standing out front, drawing water from the well with another colored slave he’d picked up someplace. That fool was yet living. He had no rifle and was dressed like a slave. You couldn’t tell him from the other slave. His hair uncombed, he was dressed as poor as the other feller, looking rough as an orange peel. Them two could’a been brothers.

But the sight of me without my bonnet, dressed in men’s clothing, just knocked O.P. out.

“Whose nigger is this?” the soldier said.

O.P. blinked the shock out his face. He had trouble with his tongue for a moment.

“Huh?”

“He said he lives ’round these parts with a Mr. Gourhand,” the soldier said. “Poor creature was kidnapped and was held prisoner at the Ferry.”

O.P. seemed to have trouble speaking, then finally got right with the program. “I has heard the news, master,” he said, “and I am glad you brung this child back. I will wake the master and tell him.”

“There ain’t no need,” Owen said, coming out the cabin and stepping on the porch. “I is the master and I is awake.” I reckon he was hiding inside along with Tidd, a feller named Hazlett, and Cook. I got nervous then, for I’m sure them three had drawed a bead on that soldier from inside the house the minute he clomped up there. Owen stepping outside likely saved that soldier’s life, for them men had grabbed a few hours’ sleep and was bent on leaving in a hurry.

Owen stepped off the porch, took a step toward me and suddenly recognized me—seen me dressed as a boy for the first time. He didn’t have to play it slick. His shock was genuine. He liked to fell out. “Onion!” he said. “By God! Is that you?”

The soldier seen it weren’t no ruse then. He was a nice feller. “This nigger’s had quite a night. He says he belongs to Mr. Gourhand, who lives up the road, but I understand he is out of town.”

“That is correct,” Owen said, rolling with the lie. “But if you will hand his colored over to me, I will keep him safe for Mr. Gourhand, for it is a dangerous time to be about, what with what is going on ’round here. I thank you for bringing her back to me,” Owen said.

The soldier smirked. “Her?” he said. “That’s a he, sir,” he scolded. “Can’t y’all tell your niggers one from the other? No wonder y’all got insurrections all ’round here. You treat your colored so damn bad you don’t know one from the other. We’d never treat our niggers this way in Alabama.”

And with that, he turned on his mount and took off.

I didn’t have time to give ’em the full word on the Old Man’s situation, and didn’t need to. They didn’t need to ask. They knowed what happened. And neither did they ask ’bout my new look as a boy. They were in a hurry and making ready to run for their lives. They had slept a few hours from sheer exhaustion, but now that it was light it was time to go. They packed up on the quick and we took the tall timber together—me, O.P., Owen, Tidd, Cook, Hazlett, and Merriam. Straight up the mountain behind the Kennedy farm we went, with the sun coming up behind us. There was some fussin’ and fightin’ when we got to the top of the mountain, for everyone except O.P. wanted to take the mountain route direct north, and O.P. said he knowed another way. A safer way and more roundabout. Southwest through Charles Town and then farther west via the Underground Railroad to Martinsburg and then over to Chambersburg. But the others weren’t for it. Said Charles Town would be too out of the way and we were too hot. O.P. gived ’em a mouthful on it and that brought on more hard words, for there weren’t a lot of time, not with patrols likely rolling by then. So them five went their own way, direct up toward Chambersburg, while O.P. went southwest for Charles Town. I decided to cast my lot with him.

It was a good thing, for Cook and Hazlett got caught up in Pennsylvania a day or two later. Owen and Merriam and Tidd somehow got away. I never did see any of them ever again. I heard Merriam killed hisself in Europe. But I never did see Owen again, though I heard he lived a long life.

Me and O.P. got free through Mr. George Caldwell and his wife, Connie, who got us through Charles Town. They’re dead now, so it don’t hurt none giving ’em up. There was lots working on that underground gospel train that nobody knowed ’bout. A colored farmer drove us by wagon to Mr. Caldwell’s barbershop, and when Mr. Caldwell found out who we were, he and his wife decided to split us up. We was too hot. They sent O.P. off with a wagonload of coffins to Philadelphia driven by two Methodist abolitionists, and I don’t know what happened to him, whether he died or not, for I never heard from him again. Me, I was kept with the Caldwells. I had to sit with them, wait it out underneath their house and in the back room of Mr. Caldwell’s barbershop for four months before rolling ahead. It was on account of being ’bout the back room of the barbershop that I learned what happened to the Old Man.

Seems that Jeb Stuart and the U.S. Cavalry busted in the engine house with killing on their minds just minutes after I got out, and got to it. They overrun the engine house, killed Dauphin, Thompson, brother of Will, the Coachman, Phil, and Taylor. Watson and Oliver, both the Old Man’s boys, was done in. Killed every one in there, good and bad, all but the Emperor. The Emperor somehow lived, long enough to hang anyway.

And as for the Old Man?

Well, Old John Brown lived, too. They tried killing him, according to Mr. Caldwell. When they busted down the door, a lieutenant runned a sword right into the Old Man’s head as the Captain was trying to reload. Mr. Caldwell said the Lord saved him. The lieutenant was called to emergency duty on account of the uprising and was in a hurry when he left his house. He was so hot to get out, he grabbed the wrong sword off his mantelpiece as he runned out the door. He snatched up his military parade sword instead of his regular broadsword. Had he used a regular sword, he would’a deadened the Old Man easily. “But the Lord didn’t want him killed,” Mr. Caldwell said proudly. “He still got more work for him.”

That may be true, but Providence laid down a hard hand for the Negroes in Charles Town in them days following the Old Man’s defeat, for he was jailed and scheduled to be put on trial. I lived hidden in the back room of Mr. Caldwell’s barbershop during them weeks and heard it all. Charles Town was just up the road from Harpers Ferry, and white folks there was in a state of panic that bordered on insanity. They was plain terrified. Every day the constable would bust into Mr. Caldwell’s shop and rouse up Negro customers. He drug two or three men out at a time, brung them to the jail to question them ’bout the insurrection, then jailed some and released some. Even the most trusted Negroes in the slave owner’s houses was put out in the fields to work, for their masters didn’t trust them to work in the house, thinking their slaves would turn on ’em and kill ’em. Dozens of slaved Negroes was sold south, and dozens more run off, thinking they’d be sold. One colored slave come into Mr. Caldwell’s shop, complaining that if a rat’s tail touched the wall in his master’s house in the middle of the night, the entire house was roused, guns was grabbed, and this feller would be sent downstairs first to go see ’bout it. The white newspaper said that Baltimore arms dealers sold ten thousand guns to Virginians during Old John Brown’s trial. One Negro in the barbershop joked, “The Colt Company ought to do something nice for Captain Brown’s family.” Several fires were set on Charles Town plantations, and nobody knowed who done it. And a story in the Charles Town paper said that slave owners was complaining that their horses and sheep was dying suddenly, as if they’d been poisoned. I’d heard that one, too, whispered in the back of Mr. Caldwell’s barbershop. And when I heard it, I said to Mr. Caldwell, “Would that all these fellers doing that devilment today had showed up at the Ferry. It would have been a different game.”

“No,” he said. “It had to end the way it did. Old John Brown knows what he’s doing. They should’a killed him. He’s raising more hell now writing letters and talking than he ever did with a gun.”

And that was true. They put the Old Man and his men in jail in Charles Town, the ones from his army that lived through the fight: Hazlett, Cook, Stevens, the two coloreds, John Copeman, and the Emperor, and by the time the Captain got done writing letters and getting visitors from his friends in New England, why, he was a star all over again. The whole country was talking ’bout him. I hear tell the last six weeks of his life the Old Man got more folks moved ’bout the slavery question than he ever did spilling blood back in Kansas, or in all them speeches he gived up in New England. Folks was listening now that white blood was spilled on the floor. And it weren’t just any old white blood. John Brown was a Christian man. A bit off his biscuit, but a better Christian you never saw. And he had lots of friends, white and colored. I do believe he done more against slavery in them last six weeks with letter writings and talking than he ever done raising one gun or sword.

They set a quick trial for him, convicted him right off, and set a date for the Old Man to hang, and all the while that Old Man kept writing letters and squawking and hollering ’bout slavery, sounding off like the devil to every newspaper in America that would listen, and they was listening, for them insurrections scared the devil out the white man. It set the table for the war that was to come, is what it did, for nothing scared the South more than the idea of niggers running ’round with guns and wanting to be free.

But I wasn’t thinking them thoughts back then. Them fall nights become long for me. And lonesome. I was a boy for the first time in years, and being a boy, with the end of November coming, that meant in five weeks’ time it would be January, and I would be fifteen. I never knowed my true birth date, but like most coloreds, I celebrated it on the first of the year. I wanted to move on. Five weeks after the insurrection, in late November, I caught Mr. Caldwell one evening when he come to the back of the shop to give me some bacon, biscuits, and gravy and asked ’bout me maybe leaving for Philadelphia.

“You can’t go yet,” he said. “Too hot. They haven’t hung the Captain yet.”

“How is he? He’s yet living and yet well?”

“That he is. In the jailhouse as always. Set to hang on December second. That’s in a week.”

I thunk on it a moment. It hurt my heart a little to think of it. So I said, “It would do me well, I reckon, for me to see him.”

He shook his head. “I ain’t hiding you here for my safety and satisfaction,” he said. “I got enough risk just taking care of you.”

“But the Old Man always thunk I brought him good luck,” I said. “I rode with him for four years. I was friends to his sons and family and even one of his daughters. I’m a friendly face. It might help him, being that he ain’t never gonna see his wife and his children on this side no more, to see a friendly face.”

“Sorry,” he said.

He sat on that thought a few days. I didn’t ask it. He said it. He come to me a few days later and said, “I thunk on it and I changed my mind. It would be a help to him to see you. It would help him through his last days, to know you is yet living. I’m doing this for him. Not you. I will arrange it.”

He called on a few persons, and a few days later he brung an old Negro man named Clarence back behind the shop to where I was hid. Clarence was a white-haired old feller, slow movin’ but thoughtful and smart. He cleaned the jailhouse where the Old Man and the others was kept. He set down with Mr. Caldwell, and Mr. Caldwell discussed the whole thing. The old man listened thoughtfully.

“I gots an in with the captain of the jailhouse, Captain John Avis,” Clarence said. “I knowed Captain Avis since he was a boy. He’s a good man. A fair man. And he’s grown fond of Old John Brown. Still, Captain Avis ain’t gonna just let this boy walk in there,” he said.

“Can’t I come with you as a helper?” I asked.

“I don’t need a helper. And I don’t need no trouble.”

“Clarence, think on what the Captain has done for the Negro,” Mr. Caldwell said. “Think of your own children. Think of Captain Brown’s children. For he has plenty, and won’t never see them nor his wife no more on this side of the world.”

The old man thought for quite some time. Didn’t say a word. Just thunk on it, rubbing his fingers together. Mr. Caldwell’s words moved him some. Finally he said, “It is a lot of activity in there. The Old Man’s popular. A lot of people coming and going during the day. Lots more for me to do with them leaving things, gifts and letters and all sorts of stuff. The Old Man’s got a lot of northern friends. Captain Avis don’t seem bothered by it none.”

“So can I go?” I asked.

“Lemme think on it. I might mention it to Captain Avis.”

Three days later, in the wee hours of the second of December, 1859, Clarence and Mr. Caldwell came into the basement of the barbershop and roused me from sleep.

“We moves tonight,” Clarence said. “The Old Man is hanging tomorrow. His wife come down from New York and just left him. Avis’ll look the other way. He’s right touched by it all.”

Mr. Caldwell said, “That’s fine and good, but you got to move from here now, child. It’s gonna be too hot for me if you is found out and come back here.” He gived me a few dollars to get started in Philadelphia, a railroad train ticket from the Ferry to Philadelphia, a few rags, and some food. I thanked him and was gone.

It was close to dawn but not quite. Me and Mr. Clarence drove in an old wagon and mule to the jailhouse. Mr. Clarence gived me a bucket, a mop, and cleaning brushes, and we howdied the militia out front and walked past them and into the jailhouse smooth as taffy. The other prisoners was dead asleep. Captain John Avis was there, setting at a desk in front, scribbling his notes, and he looked at me and didn’t say a word. Just nodded at Clarence, and looked back down at his papers. We walked down to the back section of the house where the prisoners were, way to the end corridor, and on the right, in the last cell, setting up on his cot writing notes by the light of a small stone fireplace, was the Old Man.

He stopped writing and peered into the darkness as I stood in the hallway outside his cell, holding that bucket, for he couldn’t see me clear. Finally he spoke out.

“Who is there?”

“It’s me. Onion.”

I stepped out the shadows wearing pantaloons and a shirt, and holding a bucket.

The Old Man looked at me a long time. Didn’t say a word ’bout what he seen. Just stared. Then he said, “C’mon in, Onion. The captain don’t lock the door.”

I come in and set on the bed. He looked exhausted. His neck and face was charred from some kind of wound, and he limped as he moved to put a piece of wood on the fire. He moved gamely as he sat back on his cot. “How is you feeling, Onion?”

“I’m fine, Captain.”

“It does my heart good to see you,” he said.

“Is you all right, Captain?”

“I am fine, Onion.”

I didn’t right know what to say to him at that moment, so I nodded at the open cell door. “You could escape easily, couldn’t you, Captain? There’s plenty talk ’bout rousing up new men from all parts and taking you back out. Couldn’t you bust out and we could stir up another army and do it like the old days, like Kansas?”

The Old Man, stern as always, shook his head. “Why would I do that? I am the luckiest man in the world.”

“It don’t seem that way.”

“There is an eternity behind and an eternity before, Onion. That little speck at the center, however long, is life. And that is but comparatively a minute,” he said. “I has done what the Lord has asked me to do in the little time I had. That was my purpose. To hive the colored.”

I couldn’t stand it. He was a failure. He didn’t hive nobody. He didn’t free nobody, and that spun my guts a bit to see him in that state, for I did love the Old Man, but he was dying cockeyed, and I didn’t want that. So I said, “The slaves never hived, Captain. That was my fault.”

I started to tell him ’bout the Rail Man, but he put up his hand.

“Hiving takes a while. Sometimes bees don’t hive for years.”

“You saying they will?”

“I’m saying God’s mercy will spread its light on the world. Just like He spread His mercy to you. It done my heart good to see you accept God in that engine house, Onion. That alone, that one life freed toward our King of Peace, is worth a thousand bullets and all the pain in the world. I won’t live to see the change God wants. But I hope you do. Some of it anyway. By God, I feels a prayer hatching, Onion.” And he stood up and grabbed my hands and prayed for a good half hour, holding my hands in his wrinkled paws, his head down, powwowing with his Maker ’bout this and that, thanking Him for making me true to myself, and all sorts of other business, praying for his jailer and hoping the jailer gets paid and don’t get robbed and nobody breaks outta jail on his watch, and throwing in a good word for them that jailed him and killed his boys. I let him go on.

After ’bout a half hour he was done, and sat back down on his bed, tired. It was getting light outside. I could see just a peek of dawn was through the window. It was time for me to go.

“But, Captain, you never asked me why I ... went ’bout as I did.”

The old face, crinkled and dented with canals running every which way, pushed and shoved up against itself for a while, till a big old smile busted out from beneath ’em all, and his gray eyes fairly glowed. It was the first time I ever saw him smile free. A true smile. It was like looking at the face of God. And I knowed then, for the first time, that him being the person to lead the colored to freedom weren’t no lunacy. It was something he knowed true inside him. I saw it clear for the first time. I knowed then, too, that he knowed what I was—from the very first.

“Whatever you is, Onion,” he said, “be it full. God is no respecter of persons. I loves you, Onion. Look in on my family from time to time.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a Good Lord Bird feather. “The Good Lord Bird don’t run in a flock. He flies alone. You know why? He’s searching. Looking for the right tree. And when he sees that tree, that dead tree that’s taking all the nutrition and good things from the forest floor. He goes out and he gnaws at it, and he gnaws at it till that thing gets tired and falls down. And the dirt from it raises the other trees. It gives them good things to eat. It makes ’em strong. Gives ’em life. And the circle goes ’round.”

He gived me that feather, and set back on his cot, and gone back to his writing, writing another letter, I expect.

I opened the cell door, closed it quietly, and walked out the jailhouse. I never saw him again.

The sun was coming up when I come out the jailhouse and climbed in old Clarence’s wagon. The air was clear. The fresh breeze was blowing. It was December, but a warm day for a hanging. Charles Town was just waking up. On the road to the Ferry to catch the train to Philadelphia, military men on horseback, a long line of ’em, approached us, riding by twos, carrying flags and wearing colorful uniforms, the line stretching far as the eye could see. They rode past us in the other direction, headed down toward the field past the jailhouse, where the scaffold was already built, waiting for the Old Man. I was glad I weren’t going back to Mr. Caldwell’s place. He gived me my walking papers. Give me money, food, a train ticket to Philadelphia, and from there I was on my own. I didn’t stick around for the hanging. There was enough military there to crowd a field and beyond. I hear tell no colored was allowed within three miles of that hanging. They say the Old Man was taken out by a wagon, made to sit on his own coffin, and driven over from the jailhouse by Captain Avis, his jailer. He told the captain, “This is beautiful country, Captain Avis. I never knowed how beautiful this was till today.” And when he got on the scaffold, told the hangman to make it snappy when he hung him. But like always he had bad luck, and they made him wait a full fifteen minutes with his face hooded and his hands tied while the whole military formation of white folks lined up by the thousands, militia from all over the United States, and U.S. Cavalry from Washington, D.C., and other important people from all over who come to watch him hang: Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson. Them last two would be deadened by the Yanks in the coming years in the very war the Old Man helped start, and Lee would be defeated. And a whole host of others who came there to watch him hang would be deadened, too. I reckon when they got to heaven, they’d be right surprised to find the Old Man waiting for ’em, Bible in hand, lecturing ’em on the evils of slavery. By the time he’d done with ’em, they probably wished they’d gone the other way.

But it was a funny thing. I don’t think they’d have to wait that long. For we rode past a colored church as we moved out of Charles Town, and inside the church you could hear the Negroes singing, singing ’bout Gabriel’s trumpet. That was the Old Man’s favorite song. “Blow Ye Trumpet.” Them Negroes was far away from the doings on the plaza where the Old Man was to hang, way out from it. But they sang it loud and clear... .

You could hear their voices for a long way, seemed like they lifted up and carried all the way into the sky, lingering in the air long afterward. And up above the church, high above it, a strange black-and-white bird circled ’round, looking for a tree to roost on, a bad tree, I expect, so he could alight upon it and get busy, so that it would someday fall and feed the others.