Cloudsplitter

Chapter 1

Upon waking this cold, gray morning from a troubled sleep, I realized for the hundredth time, but this time with deep conviction, that my words and behavior towards you were disrespectful, and rude and selfish as well. Prompting me now, however belatedly, to apologize and beg your forgiveness.

You were merely doing your duty, as assistant to your Professor Villard, who in turn is engaged in a mighty and important task, which is intended, when it has been completed, not only to benefit all mankind but also to cast a favorable light upon the family of John Brown. And since I myself am both — both a man and a member of the family of John Brown — then I myself stand to benefit twice over from your and Professor Villard’s honest labors.

Self-defeating, then, as well as cruel and foolish of me, to thwart you. Especially when you are so clearly an open-minded, sincere, and intelligent seeker of the truth, the whole truth — so help me, Miss Mayo, I am sorry.

I ask you to understand, however: I have remained silent for so many years on all matters touching on Father and our family that by the time you arrived at my cabin door I had long since ceased even to question my silence. I greeted your polite arrival and inquiries with a policy made nearly half a century ago, a policy neither questioned nor revised in all the years between. Policy had frozen into habit, and habit character.

Also, in the years since the events you are investigating, my life has been that of an isolate, a shepherd on a mountaintop, situated as far from so-called civilization as possible, and it has made me unnaturally brusque and awkward. Nor am I used, especially, to speaking with a young woman.

I remind you of all this, of my character, I guess you could call it, so that you can place my remarks, memories, and revelations — even the documents that you requested and which I will soon sort out and provide for you — into their proper context. Without continuous consideration of context, no truth told of my father’s life and work can be the whole truth. If I have learned nothing else in the forty years since his execution, I have learned at least that. It is one of the main reasons for my having kept so long so silent. I have sat out here tending my sheep on my mountaintop, and the books and newspaper articles and the many thick volumes of memoirs have come floating down upon my head like autumn leaves year after year, and I have read them all, the scurrilous attacks on Father and me and my brothers in blood and in arms, as well as the foolish, dreamy, sentimental celebrations of our “heroism” and “manly courage” in defense of the Negro — oh, I have read them all! Those who made Father out to be mad, I have read them. Those who called him a common horse thief and murderer hiding beneath the blanket of abolitionism, I read them, too. Those who met Father and me and my brothers but once, on a cloudy, cold December afternoon in Kansas, and later wrote of us as if they had ridden with us for months all across the territory — yes, those, too. And those who, on hearing of Father’s execution, wept with righteousness in their pious Concord parlors, comparing him to the very Christ on His very cross — I read them, too, although it was hard not to smile at the thought of how Father himself would have viewed the comparison. Father believed in the incomparable reality of Christ, after all, not the incorporeal idea. Father’s cross was a neatly carpentered scaffold in Virginia, not a spiked pair of rough timbers in Jerusalem.

Forgive me, I am wandering. I want to tell you everything — now that I have decided to tell a little. It’s as if I have opened a floodgate, and a vast inland sea of words held back for half a lifetime has commenced to pour through. I knew it would be like this. And that’s yet another reason for my prolonged silence — made worse, made more emphatic and burdensome and, let me say, made confusing, by the irony that the longer I remained silent, the more I had to tell. My truth has been held in silence for so long that it has given the field over entirely to those who have lied and risks having become a lie itself, or at least it risks being heard as such. Perhaps even by you. Thus, although I have begun at last to speak, and to speak the truth, it feels oddly and at the edges as if I am lying.

I say again that I am sorry that I rebuffed you the other day. You are young and may not know, but solitude, extended for a sufficiently long time, becomes its own reward and nourishment. And an old man’s voice aloud can become repugnant to his own ears, which is perhaps why I have chosen to write to you, and to write at as great a length as will prove necessary, instead of merely speaking with you and politely answering your questions in person as you wished. The anxious bleat of my sheep, the bark of my dog, and the gurgle and crack of my fire — these, for decades, are practically the only voices that I have heard and spoken back to, until they have become my own voice. It is not a voice suitable for a lengthy interview with a young, educated woman like yourself come all the way out here from the city of New York to my hill in Altadena, California.

What sense could you have made, anyhow, of an old, bearded man bleating, barking, and cracking all day and night long? I picture you — had I actually granted the interview that you so kindly requested — becoming embarrassed, confused, finally angry and resigned; and you, closing your notebook and taking polite leave of me, reporting back to your eminent Professor Oswald Garrison Villard at Columbia University that you arrived too late. Poor old Owen Brown, third son of John Brown, the last living witness and party to the Pottawatomie massacre and the victories and tragedies of Bleeding Kansas and the long, terrible series of battles in the War Against Slavery that culminated in the disastrous raid on Harpers Ferry — that pathetic, aged, solitary man, Owen Brown, is now quite mad himself, and so we shall never know the truth of whether his father, too, was mad. We shall never know if John Brown was in his right mind when he butchered those men and boys down on the Pottawatomie that awful night in ’57. Or whether, when he terrorized the pro-slavers in Kansas, he was in fact the old-time, Puritan hero and military genius that so many made him out to be. Or if, when he took Harpers Ferry and refused to flee into the mountains, he had by then lost his mind altogether. The son himself, the hermit-shepherd Owen Brown, is mad, you would say to your professor (and perhaps are saying to him even now), and we shall never know conclusively if the father was mad also. Thus, given what we already know of John Brown, you will say, and in the absence of significant evidence to the contrary, we must concur with our century’s received opinion and, before the next century begins, adjudge him a madman.

I hope, therefore, that your quick receipt of this first of what shall be several, perhaps many, such letters will slow that judgement and eventually reverse it.

Was my father mad? I realize it is the only question that can matter to you. Since they first heard his name, men and women have been asking it. They asked it continuously during his lifetime, even before he became famous. Strangers, loyal followers, enemies, friends, and family alike. It was then and is now no merely academic question. And how you and the professor answer it will determine to a considerable degree how you and whoever reads your book will come to view the long, savage war between the white race and the black race on this continent. If the book that your good professor is presently composing, though it contain all the known and previously unrecorded facts of my father’s life, cannot show and declare once and for all that Old Brown either was or was not mad, then it will be a useless addition to the head-high pile of useless books already written about him. More than the facts of my father’s hectic life, people do need to know if he was sane or not. For if he was sane, then terrible things about race and human nature, especially here in North America, are true. If he was insane, then other, quite different, and perhaps not so terrible things about race and human nature are true.

And, yes, just as you said, I am probably the only person remaining alive who has the knowledge and information that will enable you and your professor to answer the question. But you must understand. The three-hundred-year-long War Between the Races, from before the Revolution up to and including Harpers Ferry, was being fought mainly as the War Against Slavery. Then, briefly, in ’61, it became the War Between the States. And from then until now, there has been such a grieving, angry clamor that I knew I would not be heard, except as one of the sons of John Brown trying to justify his father’s and his own bloody deeds — a puny, crippled man who fled the carnage he helped create and for the rest of his long life hid alone in the West.

The truth is, for us, the so-called Civil War was merely an aftermath. Or, rather, it was part of a continuum. Just another protracted battle. Ours was very much a minority view, however. It still is. But from the day it began, to Northerner and Southerner alike, the Civil War was a concussive trauma that erased all memory of what life had been like before it. On both sides, white Americans woke to war and forgot altogether the preceding nightmare, which had wakened them in the first place. Or they made it a pastoral dream. Even the abolitionists forgot. But for those few of us whose lives had been most thrillingly lived in the decade preceding the War, one thing has led obviously and with sad predictability to another, with no break or permanent ending point between the early years of the slave uprisings in Haiti and Virginia and the Underground Railroad in Ohio and New York and the Kansas battles and Harpers Ferry and the firing on Fort Sumter and Shiloh and Gettysburg and Vicksburg and Appomattox Courthouse and the killing of Abraham Lincoln and the savage, dark, murderous days that have followed, even to today, at century’s end. They are like beads on a string to us, bubbles of blood on a barbed steel strand that stretches from the day the first enslaved African was brought ashore in Virginia to today, and we have not reached the end of it yet.

Thus, when the Civil War ended, I found myself feeling towards the rest of my white countrymen, both Northern and Southern, the way Negroes in America, and Indians, too, must always have felt towards white Americans generally — as if the white man’s history were separate from ours and did not honor or even recognize ours. That is yet another reason why I have remained silent for so long. I did not want my testimony captured and used in the manufacture of an American history that at bottom is alien to me. I did not want to help tell a story that, when it does not ignore mine altogether, effectively contradicts it. That would be treasonous. It would aid and abet our common enemy, who wants nothing more than to declare the war between the races non-existent. Or if not non-existent, then short-lived and well over.

So now perhaps you understand somewhat why I drove you off, and why I have come in this way to call you back again.

There is yet a further reason, I suddenly realize, for my having called you back, and I must attempt to confess it, painful as it is to admit, even to myself.

I am dying. Or I am already dead and have been dead these forty years, with nothing left of me, who once was Owen Brown, except a shadow cast on the near wall by my lamplight and these words tumbling from me like a death rattle, a last, prolonged exhalation. Absurd as it may sound to you who read these words, it is to me the literal truth. I am more the ghost of Owen Brown than I am the man himself.

Although I was but thirty-five years old in ’59 and escaped from Harpers Ferry like a rabbit through the corn and ended up safe here on my western mountaintop, my life since that day has been an after-life. In recent years, as I have grown into an old man, there have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of mornings when I have wakened in my cold cabin with my lungs flooded and, before the sun has dried the dew off the window pane, have concluded that sometime during the night I finally died. But then hunger or some other bodily need or the animals — my dog scratching at the door, the sheep bleating, the cry of a hawk — bring me back to the sad awareness that, no, I have not died, not yet, and thus am obliged once more to grope through the gray veils that wrap me and come to full wakefulness and begin again the daily rounds of a man alive.

Until the night that followed your arrival at my door, however, when I must indeed have gone deeper into the embrace of death than ever before. So that when in the morning I finally woke, if waking it truly was, I knew beyond all doubt that I am now he who was Owen Brown. Not he who is Owen Brown. Not that crotchety old man you met growling at you like a bear in its cave, but his past, his childhood and youth and his young manhood, that’s who I am. It was as if your visit had sounded a final knell that drove me into a purgatory which I had been longing for all these years but had neither the courage nor the wisdom to seek on my own. As if, now that I am here, there is no going forward or back, no possible ascent to heaven or descent to hell, until I have told my story.

Thus these words, these letters, and the packets of materials which in time I will turn over to you. All my worldly effects, as it were, I bequeath to thee. Make of them, you and your professor, whatever you will. In the long, ongoing War Between the Races, this, I suppose, must be my final act, and I pray only that, before I am in error judged good, if cowardly, and my father mad, if courageous, I be given the time to complete it.

It is all very strange. Now that I have opened communications with you, I find myself unable to keep my inner voice silent. I have given off all work — my sheep and the spring lambs wander the grassy hills unaccompanied in search of water and pasturage, protected only by my faithful little dog, Flossie who returns from the herd every few hours to the cabin door and scratches and whines outside, as if angered by my protracted absence and intent on rousing me from an inexplicable sleep.

But I am not asleep. I do now and then drift towards a dozing state, but I am driven back from it each time by the rising sound of my voice, as if it, too, has a will of its own and, like Flossie, does not want me to sleep. Whether I am seated at my table, as now, writing the words down, or in my chair in the darkness by the window with the silvery moonlight falling across my lap, or lying in my cot by the back wall staring at the low ceiling all night long and into the next day, my ears are filled always with my own voice. The words are like water in a brook that bubbles from an underground spring and spills downhill across rocks and fallen trees to where it gathers in eddies and builds a dark, still pool, moving me finally to rise from my cot and sit down at my table and begin again to write them down, my purpose being merely to break the little dam or jam and release the pressure against it and let the flow of words resume.

It is more than passing strange. And joyous, somehow. I see where I am, and yet it is as if I who was Owen Brown have flown from my mountaintop. I have today been recalling an earlier, my first, departure from this place and its similarity to this day’s dying — although that was literal and this, of course, is merely figurative. Then, just as now, what a strange joy I felt! It was a full decade ago, in the spring of ’89, and I had been lingering alone on this high, treeless hill for close to thirty years, waiting for the moment of my death to finish its last flash through my weary body, biding my time, helpless and silent as smoke and with all the patience of the long-dead. I was waiting, silently waiting, not so much for my actual death, which meant little to me, one way or the other, as for the pine box that contained my bones to be carried three thousand miles from the hills of California back along the railroad lines to my family’s house and farm in the Adirondack mountain village of North Elba, New York. To the place that, because of the Negroes living there, we called Timbuctoo.

A letter from a distinguished woman in the East who had long honored Father’s deeds had arrived at my door, just as you arrived in person last week. It informed me, not of the needs of an illustrious biographer, as you did, but of the coming re-interment of the last of the bodies of those who had fallen with Father at Harpers Ferry. The letter invited me to attend the ceremonies, which were to be held on the upcoming ninth of May, Father’s birthday, at his gravesite, where my brothers’ and companions’ old bones, gathered from shallow graves in Virginia and elsewhere across the country, were at last to join his.

Until that cold morning, for the thirty long years since the end came at Harpers Ferry, I had hoped for no other event, for no additional particularity of circumstance, than that my poor bones, too, my remains, at last be interred there. With or without some slight ceremony, it did not matter a whit to me — so long as they were deposited in my family’s yard in the plot of hard, dark, and stony ground that surrounded the huge, gray boulder in the meadow before the house. For those many years, I had been waiting for nothing but the fit and proper burial of my crumbling, shrouded old corpse in that precious dirt alongside the bodies of my father, John Brown, and my brothers Watson and Oliver, and my companions in arms who had fought beside me in the Kansas wars or were cut to pieces in the raid on Harpers Ferry or were executed on the scaffold afterwards.

All those moldering bodies! All those yellowed, long bones and grimacing skulls carted in boxes unearthed from shallow graves and buried there alongside one another! And now mine also!

But, no, not yet. I wrote back at once, saying only that I would not come, giving no excuse and explaining nothing. I was still very much alive, and silence and solitude had to remain my penance and my solace. I would not, I could not, give them up.

But then, one morning shortly after my curt note had been posted, I woke in my cot and, as I have said, believed that, finally, I, too, had died. Soon, of course, and as afterwards became usual, I saw that sadly I was not dead yet. I was still he who is Owen Brown, he whose dog wakes him and brings him shuffling to the door, he who releases his herd of merinos from the fold into the sloping meadow below, then returns to his cabin and washes his face in cold water and commences living another silent, solitary day.

Was it, in hopes that I was wrong, an attempt to test my reluctantly drawn conclusion that I had not died yet — as perhaps I do here now, writing these words to you ten years later? Was it an attempt to accomplish in life some new arrangement for my death? I cannot say why now and could not then, but that very day I decided to depart from this mountain for a while and return finally to our old family home in the Adirondacks, where my only proper grave lies even today. I arranged for the care of my sheep and my dog with a neighbor in the valley and departed straightway for the East.

I had long believed, or, to be accurate, had long wished, that I would arrive at North Elba from the east somehow, not the west. That I would emerge from the broad shade of Mounts Tahawus and Mclntyre. At my back, long streaks of early morning sunlight would slide through familiar notches in the mighty Adirondack Range and splash down the valleys and spread out at my feet before me like a golden sea washing across the tableland. I had imagined that the spirit of Owen Brown, third son of Osawatomie John Brown, like a spot off the morning sun itself, would come rapidly up along the broad meadows we named the Plains of Abraham, for that is what they first brought to our minds, with the snow-covered peak of Whiteface beyond the house and a crisp Canada wind striking out of the northwest.

I pictured it early in the day, still close to sunrise or shortly after it, when at last the beloved house stood in front of me. The house would be pink and gold in first light and stout and square as the day we first came here from Springfield, the way Father described it at the supper table in our house down there and drew its plan in his notebook to show us. I had imagined the plank door closed tight and latched against the nightfrost — it was to be early spring or fall, a string of silver smoke curling from the kitchen chimney, and no smoke at all from the parlor chimney opposite, where last night’s fire would have long gone out, the log turned to ashes, powdery and cold, bricks chilled like ingots.

These anticipations were left-over memories, however. Rags and tatters fluttering brightly across my darkened thoughts. From my haunt in the San Gabriel Mountains in the far West, I could not know who lived in the old house nowadays. My stepmother, Mary, and my sisters and remaining brothers had all fled the place decades before to Ohio, Iowa, Oregon, and Washington State, scattered across the country by the winds of war and its callous aftermath. Did anyone live there at all? The window glass was to have been iced over, etched with florid designs, I thought.

No, I came instead, not from Tahawus and Mclntyre in the east with dreamily imagined, celestial hoo-rahs and fanfare to announce me, but almost casually, as if out for a stroll along the road that led from the settlement, where the new train from Albany had let me off. I came walking alone out of the northwest, with Lake Placid and scarred old Whiteface Mountain at my back. And I came not as a disembodied spot of first sunlight, for I was no spirit and there was no sun that day — it was a cold, gray mid-morning, with a low sky that threatened snow. I arrived instead as an actual and embodied old man with a long, white beard, dressed in my plain wool suit and cloth cap, picking my way along the dirt road with my hazelwood stick. All the old familiar aches and pains came with me, too — the arthritis in the hips and the cold throb of my crippled left arm, uselessly bent against my waist, my permanent banner to boyhood carelessness and deceit.

My return to Timbuctoo in ’89 was closer to dream, however, than to a lived thing, or even than to memory. At least, that is how I am remembering it now. There was a rhythmical, purposeful continuity of sensation and perception, and no mere disorganized intermingling of fact, emotion, and idea, such as memory provides. A snowflake passed by my face, and then several more, and the breeze abruptly shifted from my back to my front, bringing with it a light, gauzy wash of snow. The large, wet flakes struck my beard and body, and, amazed, I watched them melt away as fast as they fell against my warm clothing and hands. Whatever world I was presently inhabiting, a dreamer’s, a ghost’s, a madman’s, I was surely an integrated part of it, subject to the same physical laws as were all its other parts. No mere invisible witness to nature, as I had hoped, I was in sad fact one of its functioning components. Or else we were both, the entire natural world and I, merely the imaginings of a larger, third Being.

The snow shower blew over, and then, suddenly, I realized that I was not alone on the road. A short ways ahead of me, a group of perhaps a dozen children and a pair of young women walked steadily along in the same direction as I, marching, it seemed, in loose formation, with one woman at the front and the other at the rear. No doubt for the very same reasons as I, they were headed from the village in the direction of the farm.

They were white people. I note that because, when I turned and glanced behind me, I saw an elderly Negro couple — a man in a dark woolen suit not unlike mine and a proper wool fedora and a woman in a long black dress, bonnet, and cape — coming slowly along. They each carried what appeared to be a Bible, as if marching off to church or coming straightway from it. Then, behind them, where the road emerged from an overhanging thatch of tall white pines, came a second group, six or seven Negro people of various ages, at least three generations. And these Negroes, too, were dressed as if for a formal occasion. There was a dark-faced man among them who for a second I thought was Father’s dear friend and mine, a man whom you may well have heard of by now, Mr. Lyman Epps. I was somewhat disoriented, however, due to fear and excitement, and could not be sure. Hadn’t he died long ago? I, of all people, should know that. Was this his son, perhaps?

But, in spite of my confusion, I knew where I was. Not a great deal had changed in the thirty years that I had been away. I instantly recognized the land and the rise and fall of the narrow road, which, owing to the springtime ruts and mud, obliged me to keep to the high center as I walked. On either side, under shade in amongst the trees and in the protected glens and dales, slubs of old, crusted snow still lingered.

There was a light wind soughing in the high branches of the pines, and I heard in the distance the mountain run-off in the West Branch of the Au Sable River, where it gushed under the bridge on the Cascade Road and from there tumbled down these rocky heights northeast all the way to Lake Champlain and on to the St. Lawrence and the great North Atlantic Ocean beyond.

On my right, set up in the sugar maples, was the Thompson farm, gone to ruin now, with the barn half-fallen and the fields on either side shifting back to chokecherry and scrub pine, but still recognizably the same four-square, cleanly constructed dwelling place of the family I loved second only to my own. Beyond the house, sheds, and barn, and beyond the lilacs gone all wild and tangled and still a month from blooming, a grove of paper-white birch trees mingled with aspens on an uphill meadow. Their spindly limbs floated in silhouette inside pale green clouds of new buds, like the delicate, blackened skeletons of birds. On the further slopes, dark maples and oak switches twitched leafless in the breeze.

I was situated at that moment in the turning of the northern year, when the end of winter and the start of spring overlap like shingles on a roof and the natural world seems doubled in thickness and density. A slight shift in the direction of the wind cools the air a single degree, and suddenly a puddle of standing water is covered with a skin of ice that, seconds later, as the same wind parts the clouds and opens the sky, melts in the sunlight. At this moment, all is change. Transformation seems permanent. I was trembling with a type of excitement that I had never felt before, a powerful mixture of anticipation and regret, as if I somehow knew that eternal gain and irretrievable loss were about to be parceled out equally — as if the idea of justice were about to be made a material thing.

I briefly looked back and saw that there were still more people of various ages and stations filing along, some white and some black, and I recognized that we were a procession. There was a horse-drawn carriage just entering the clearing before the Thompson farm, driven by a bearded white man of middle age, with his stout wife seated beside him. Following the carriage came a large, canopied wagon pulled by two matched teams of rugged Vermont Morgans, with a white man in a black ministerial suit at the reins and a young Negro man similarly clothed situated next to him. There seemed to be hundreds of people coming along, and though the impulse to stand aside and watch everyone pass by was stronger than mere curiosity, the impulse to fall in and keep step with the others was stronger still, and I turned away and continued forward along the road.

In a moment, I had passed the turning and entered a section of the road that led through a stretch of tall white pines, where it was dark as night, almost, and more patches of old snow remained, radiating light and cold. A sudden, strong gust of wind blew through the pines and swirled the branches overhead, filling my ears with a sound that made my heart leap with pleasure, for it had been a lifetime and more, it seemed, since I had last walked beneath pine trees that sang and danced furiously in the wind like that. Briefly, I was an innocent, wonderstruck youth again, newly arrived in the Adirondack wilderness. The road was covered with a blanket of soft, rust-colored needles, and I inhaled deeply, losing all my thoughts in the vinegary smell, stumbling backwards in the flow of time.

When I passed out of the pine forest, the road dwindled to a track and entered a broad, overgrown meadow, yellow and sere with the old, winter-killed grass and saturated with run-off from the slopes above. We cleared this meadow ourselves the first summer we came to this place, my younger brothers Watson, Salmon, Oliver, and I, and grazed Father’s Devon cattle on it, leaving the stingier, rock-strewn, upper fields for the Old Man’s blooded merino sheep. But now the whole expanse of cleared land was drifting back to forest, with only a patch of it remaining in grass and that spotted all over with new sumac and masses of tangled brush.

The first time that I walked this path to our farm was back in 49, when I came over from Lake Champlain on the Cascade Road with the family and Lyman Epps and saw the house here on the southern end of the promontory that we were told was called the Tableland but which Father insisted would be called the Plains of Abraham. In his usual way, he had imagined everything for us beforehand — the house was as he had said, and the barn would be exactly where he drove his stakes, facing due southeast across the Plains of Abraham into the mighty Tahawus, as the Iroquois had named it, the Cloudsplitter, so that year-round, from the barn and from our front door, we could watch the sunrise inch north in spring and then south in fall, passing like a clock hand between it and Father’s second-favorite mountain, Mclntyre, marking the slow, seasonal turn of the heavens — for Father had wanted us to mark God’s perfect logic as much by the motion and movement of the planets and sun above as by the symmetries that surrounded us here on earth.

Seven years later, I walked up to this place from the Indian Pass accompanied by a dead man’s body and two fugitive slaves and came to the house and delivered all three over to my family and fled this house and valley for Ohio and then for Kansas. Of this, you know nothing, of course, but you shall know, I promise. Three years after that, the Old Man and I came home for the even more portentous departure for Harpers Ferry. They were hard arrivals and departures. But in between and before and after, there were the thousands of easy, domestic comings and goings that a farming family is obliged to make — daily we walked and sometimes rode this line back through the woods that linked our home to the larger world, beating a footpath into a track and a track into a road which connected eventually to all the other roads that we would travel together and alone.

Considered in all the tossed and turbulent terms of my life, this fading path through the woods — for the trail crossing the meadow had diminished now to little more than that — was like the central nerve of my body, its very spinal cord. Everything of moment branched off that nerve, everything in a sense originated there, and ultimately everything must loop back and end there. And so, apparently, it had, for here I was, walking it again.

The great, broad plain and our farm just beyond the crest of the meadow were still hidden from my view. Up ahead, the children and their female teachers had nearly reached the crest, and beyond that line were the snow-covered mountain peaks — pale wedges rising from the near horizon like the sails of approaching galleons. Then, one by one, the children followed their teachers over the top and disappeared, as if jumping off a precipice. Dutifully, I trudged up the slope behind them and in my turn came to the top. And when I gazed down, I saw that I had arrived finally at my home.

A vast crowd of people had assembled below in the front yard of the house and all about the front and sides of the barn. There were many wagons, four-in-hands, buggies, and fancy carriages with men and women seated on them, and quite a few men up on horseback, and large standing groups of people of all ages. A significant number of these appeared by their dress and bearing to be personages of no slight importance in the world, reverends and top-hatted bankers and the such. I saw a lot of Negro people there, too, poorer folks than the whites, most of them elderly. They kept mainly to the side and to themselves, although here and there a richly dressed black man mingled informally with the whites, and there were even a few white individuals standing amongst the blacks. At the further edges of the crowd, back by the barn and along the far side of the house, boys and dogs chased one another in the usual way, while in amongst the adults, numerous small children sat perched upon their fathers’ shoulders.

The huge throng was assembled in a vast semi-circle, as if in an ancient amphitheater, between the old house and barn and the great, gray stone in the center. It was a grand scene! With affection and a kind of gratitude, with feelings beyond speech, I gazed down on the poor, bare buildings that we had lived and worked in all those years, that had sheltered and shielded not just us Browns but also the hundreds of fugitives who had come to our door seeking succor and protection from the wilderness and the snows and cold winds and all the terrors of the flight from slavery.

At the center of the arc of the crowd was the huge, gray rock-intimidating, mysterious. Like a chamber it was, a room filled with solid granite. Next to it stood the old, Puritan-style slate gravestone that memorialized the death of Great-Grandfather John Brown, Father’s namesake, which Father had lugged up from Connecticut so as to memorialize on its other side the death of brother Fred in Kansas as well. The worn slab marked Father’s own grave now. A short ways beyond the rock was a mast-high flagpole with no flag a-flying, and at its base three lines of soldiers in dress uniform had assembled formally in drill order, standing at parade rest.

Then came the abrupt further edge of the clearing, where the wide swale of forest began, copses of fresh-budding hardwoods and great stretches of evergreens, as the land gradually rose towards the snow-covered peaks of the mountains, and above the mountains, glowering, dark gray sheets of sky stretched overhead front to back and covered us all like a canopy. It was to me a wonderful sight!

I glanced back, and sure enough, here came hundreds more people along behind — the same elderly couple and the family of Negroes and the loaded wagon and carriage I had seen back by the Thompson place, and many more behind them, afoot and on horseback and in wagons and coaches. What a marvelous celebration! I thought, and hurried on, nearly tumbling in my eagerness to descend from the high overlook to the plain below.

When I reached the crowd there, I passed around the back of it and made my way towards the near side of the house and there slipped along the edge of the crowd, around and between carriages and tethered horses. They were all strangers to me, and I to them. Thirty years had passed since I had been in a public gathering of any sort, and I was a young man then, standing in Father’s shadow. Who would recognize me now? Whom would I recognize? No one living.

Most of the people stood idly by, talking lightly and taking their ease, as if awaiting the arrival of a master of ceremonies. Their attention seemed to be directed with intermittent watchfulness towards Father’s rock at the front, and I moved in that same direction myself. Barely the top of it was visible to me as I passed through the multitude, but I was drawn straight and swiftly to it, as if the rock had been magnetized and I were a pin on a leaf afloat in water.

And suddenly there I was, clear of the crowd and standing alone before the rock, with Great-Grandfather Brown’s old slate marker posted beside me on the right, and Father’s bones buried deep beneath it. In front of me, looming like some high altar from pagan times, was the great, gray stone. It seemed to shine in the milky morning light, and its surface was coldly clarified and dry, like the skin of a statue of a mythological beast. As I neared the rock, everything else blurred — the crowd of people, the house and barn, the mountains around — and faded altogether from my view. All was silent.

Before me, incised into the skin of the granite, were words, letters, numerals as familiar to me as the lineaments of my own face, yet a rune. A stonecarver, sometime in the years since I had seen it last, had cut into the rock the letters and numerals that spelled out Father’s name and the year of his execution. I looked upon them now, and I fairly heard, instead of read, the name and year spoken aloud in Father’s own unmistakeable voice and pronunciation, John Brown 1859, as if he himself had been miraculously transformed into that rock and I into the quaking, white-bearded old man standing here before him, and the rock had spoken his riddle.

Then, feeling directed to its presence by Father himself, I looked down to my left and saw the hole in the ground. The hole was pure black, like carbon, and neatly cut, about six feet across and six wide. It was freshly dug and deep. From where I stood I could not see the bottom. The soil was dark, wet, having only recently thawed, and was heaped in a neat cone at the further side. I turned away from the huge boulder and moved slowly towards the blackness — for that is what it was, a six-foot square of blackness, a door to another world than this — and felt an almost irresistible tug, a pull beyond yearning, to go forward and enter it, to step off this too solid earth into blackness, as if taking that final step were as simple as walking through the portal of one room into the next.

I stopped, but could not say what stopped me. Gradually, though, I began to hear noises again, and the crowd and yard and buildings around me drifted back into my ken, and I found that I had left Father’s presence and had rejoined the multitude. Dogs barked, children cried and laughed, men and women chattered with one another. Horses creaked in their harnesses, and wagon wheels crunched across the ground. A crow called out. The breeze blew, and clouds shifted overhead. I smelled tobacco smoke and oiled leather, horse manure, woolen clothing, and winter-soaked old grass and leaves.

I cannot say if it was cause or effect. But when I found myself once again in the midst of the spectacle and not cast outside it, I was able to back quickly away from the black hole in the ground, to turn and move off from Father’s rock, there to take up an obscure position more or less in the middle of the crowd, to stand and wait with them for the rest of the people to arrive and for the ceremonies to begin. I was waiting now, like the others, for the speeches, the prayers, and the singing of the hymns, for the ornate box of the crumbling remains of eleven murdered men to be lowered into the ground:

Watson Brown

Oliver Brown

Albert Hazlett

John Henry Kagi

Lewis Leary

William Leeman

Dangerfield Newby

Aaron Stevens

Stewart Taylor

Dauphin Thompson

William Thompson

and also the body of this man — Owen Brown — who had lived for so many years longer than the others, brought back at last from Altadena, California, to join the bodies of his martyred brothers and compatriots in the grave beside his father’s grave.

But, instead, I who am Owen Brown stood aside and watched, as the remains of those eleven men — separately shrouded and then placed together tenderly in a single huge box with their names engraved on a silver plate — disappeared into the black hole that had been cut into the hard ground next to Father.

There were songs, prayers, and speeches. And then the flag went up, and the soldiers fired their guns into the air in full military salute.

The Negro man who so resembled Father’s dearest friend, Lyman Epps — or, truly, was it Lyman’s son? — stepped forward and in a trembling, sweet tenor voice sang the Old Man’s hymn, “Blow, Ye Trumpets, Blow.”

And, finally, the crowd dispersed.

And I remained there at our old farm alone — alone to face these somber graves at the foot of the great, granite stone with Father’s name and death date carved upon it. Alone before the cold spring wind blowing across the plain from Tahawus. The Cloudsplitter.

Alone — all, all alone!

I hesitate to tell you this, but I must, or you will not understand what I did and why. You will not even understand what I am doing now.

Though the burial ceremonies had long since ended, and the crowds had gone, I remained, as if forbidden to leave. If I had believed in the God of my fathers, I would have thanked Him for bringing me here at last. But I did not believe in God, then or now. So, instead, I thanked my fellow man, the living men and women whom I imagined digging a hole in the dirt way out west and pulling from it the box with my body in it and bringing it here and setting it down into the ground before me. For though the carcass is riddled, broken, and finally devoured by worms, the spirit survives it, like its very own child. The spirits whose bodies lie buried in mountains of Arctic ice or beneath shifting desert sands or in unmapped potters’ fields paved over by modern city streets — graves where no one pauses, where no one stands and says the name of the dead and goes silent and listens for a moment to hear the dead man or woman speak — those spirits are just as I have been, far away on a mountain in California all these years, speaking only to the sky, the sun, the moon, the cold stars above. And where there are no ears to listen, there is no story to tell. There is only a ghost bawling into the empty night.

Thus, at Timbuctoo, standing in the doorway of my family’s house, believing that my body lay crumbling in a box alongside the bodies of my father and brothers and all those who were with us at Harpers Ferry, I felt assured at last of a listening ear. There I could imagine a curious and affectionate man or woman or child, a white person or a black, an ordinary American citizen come to this place to tender his respects and to wonder about the life of my father, Old John Brown, Captain Brown, Osawatomie Brown, and his sons and followers who were martyred far away in Virginia for their violent opposition to the enslavement of three million of their fellow Americans. And because I could imagine such a person being at that place — I had seen such a person, seen hundreds of them, that very morning! — then I could imagine myself, for the first time since the end came, coming forward coherently into speech. And so I spoke, and much of what I am telling you now I said then, too.

Take that as an analogy, Miss Mayo. And if my words sometimes seem scattered to you or if I appear confused by the events in my life or by the actions and natures of others, if I wander and ruminate distractedly at times, then, please, forbear, for at such times I have for a moment or two merely lost my ability to imagine you reading these words, and my story therefore has briefly come undone or has regressed to a moan or a childish, half-forgotten, incantatory chant invoked to ward off my loneliness. It will pass, it will leave off — as soon as I picture you wandering down the lane that leads to our old farmhouse, where you stop and stand thoughtfully for a while before the graves by yonder huge, gray boulder. Do not worry, for, even though you cannot see me, I will look out and see you and will come quickly forward to speak to you.

I stand at the door in the evening light and gaze out upon the greening valley beyond Father’s somber rock and the graves that surround it, and my thoughts spread into the past like fingers groping in the dark, touching and then seizing familiar objects that lie situated in oddly unfamiliar relations to one another. In such a way am I obliged to reconstruct my past, rather than to recall it. Or perhaps simply to construct it for the first time, for it was never so clear and coherent back when I was living my life as it seems now.

These words are my thoughts given shapely proportions and relations to one another. My story is my only remaining possibility for an ongoing life, which is how it must be for everyone, living or dead.

In the distant, dusky light of a fading day in May, I peered across the fresh, wet meadow grass to the sooty Adirondack mountains. It was the eighty-ninth anniversary of my father’s birth; I was alone; it was late in the day; and a garrulous apparition is what I had become, lingering at his own, at his father’s, his brothers’, and his fallen comrades’ gravesites, speaking into the fast-approaching night and then talking still, talking even, when it came, in darkness.

Let it darken down. It mattered not a whit to me. Let the earth turn and the moon wax and wane and the tides rise and fall. Light or dark, warm or cold, early or late — I require no lamp, no fire, no sleep. Let the rain fall, the cold winds blow; let the snow come tumbling from the skies and the clouds scatter and the skies turn bright with sunlight on the morrow and the hills glisten in the dew.

I no longer know physical discomfort, nor even fatigue. I have been freed of all that. The world, simply by virtue of its continuing presence, directly pleasures me, as would any dream of life delight a man dropped permanently into sleep. This may be purgatory, but I take it as a long-desired and wholly unexpected gift. The dream of a dream come true. And it’s as if at the end of the dream there waits, not an awakening, but… what? A further, deeper dream? Silence, perhaps.

Yes, the silence of the-truth-be-told.

My thoughts and memories and even my feelings spin and spiral upwards like silk ribbons, where they float vividly amongst old, nearly forgotten memories of Kansas and the wars we fought then and afterwards. But the ribbons keep losing their momentum and tumble back down again, as if, due to the cold of a particular altitude or by having entered some atmospheric level where the elements differ from those here below, they are converted from silk to iron and are drawn back to this hard Adirondack earth by the punishing force of gravity.

Again and again, I move through the abandoned, darkened house and attempt to leave this place and find that I cannot. The door lies open before me; I came in through it as easily as a summer breeze. Yet, still, I cannot go back outside, cross the deserted yard before the large rock and the graves, and pass back along the road I came by and head out across the valley towards Mount Tahawus, retracing my morning steps and disappearing into the mists that hover tonight over its broad flanks.

What seemed at first a blessing — my finding myself located here amongst the crowd of mourners and celebrants at the ceremonial burial of the bones of my brothers and the other raiders from the Virginia attack — seems now almost a curse. I left this farm to all intents and purposes permanently way back in the autumn of ’54, when I went out to fetch poor brother Fred from Ohio and instead disobeyed Father and went down into Kansas with Fred and joined up with our older brothers, John and Jason, and thus an account of the events that took place during the years that I spent in North Elba is a story of no great significance in history. But those few years seem now like the large wheel in a clockwork, the wheel that drives all the other wheels, which are smaller than it and advance more rapidly on their axes and at differing speeds. They measure out the individual seconds, minutes, and hours of my entire life, of Father’s entire life and the life of my family. Driven by that great, slowly turning wheel, the smaller wheels tell littler stories, which are like tales or essays measured against a long romance. They are the stories of Bleeding Kansas, of the abolitionist movement, of the Underground Railroad, of Harpers Ferry, and so on. None of them, however, is my story, the one I am compelled to set down here, as if it were a confession of a great crime that, amidst all the fury and in the noise and smoke and carnage of great events, somehow went unnoticed when it occurred, unpunished afterwards, and unrecorded by you historians and biographers. Mine is the one account that explains all the others, so it is no great vanity for me to tell it.

Even so, after a lifetime of keeping silent and allowing you historians and biographers to establish and make permanent your received truth regarding John Brown and his men, to correct your record is not really why I tell it now. I tell it now because I cannot cease speaking until I have finally told the truth and can lie down in the grave alongside the others, dead, properly dead and buried and silent, and forgiven by them at last. I have begun to see that they are the ones to whom I speak. Those who died. No one else. Not you, Miss Mayo, and not your professor. And I do not haunt them; they haunt me. And their haunting will not end until I have revealed, not to you, but to them, my terrible secret.

A man can keep a betrayal like mine shut inside himself and unacknowledged all the way down the years of his life to his grave. But the dead whom he betrayed will not let him rest until he has finally revealed it to himself and confessed it to them. The world need not know it; only those whose deaths he caused must hear him. The world at large can go on making up, revising, and believing its received truth. (It will do so anyway — history little notices last-minute or even deathbed confessions.) The received truth of history is shot through and falsified by unknown secrets carried to the grave.

The burden of carrying a terrible and incriminating secret for a lifetime, of dying with it untold, is not great. It’s done all the time. For long periods of one’s life — especially if one goes off, as I did, and lives alone on a mountaintop — one doesn’t even have to think about it. As the years go by, it grows encrusted with rationalizations and elaborate, self-serving explanations and gets distorted by the pliability of living memory, one’s own and others’. And so long as one remains silent, other people will inevitably construct a believable narrative that makes the inexplicable plausible.

What really happened at the Pottawatomie massacre? Why did Old Brown go down into Harpers Ferry and stay there long after he could have come out alive? Why did he take his sons and his sons-in-law and all those other fine young men to certain death with him? How did his third son, Owen Brown, come to be the one son who escaped? All these inexplicable events have been explained hundreds of times, hundreds of ways, some of them ingenious, some foolish, all of them plausible. But all without the backing of truth.

No matter. So long as I remained silent, so long as I myself did not try to explain the inexplicable, my secret went unnoticed and proved thus to be no great burden for me to keep untold, to keep unrevealed, even to myself.

I had believed, when I first agreed to write to you, that it was my task to tell Father’s untold story, to fill out the historical record with my eyewitness account so as to revise once and for all the received truth about John Brown and his sons and followers. All my life I had resisted doing that, and it seemed wonderful to me that, as it then appeared, I had been given a final chance to set it down. But now it seems that I am not so much revising history as making a confession of a crime, a terrible, secret crime which — if I had been able to keep to my original intentions and long-nurtured desires and had not been obliged to pass beyond them, there to discover strange, unexpected new intentions and desires — would have remained safely hidden. A crime still known by me alone.

This, then, is not simply a report to you or Professor Villard. A dead man confesses to other dead men so that he may join them. And to dead women, too, all of them gone before me now — stepmother Mary, sister Ruth, my younger sisters, Annie, Sarah, and even the lastborn, Ellen — the women who lost and for the rest of their lives grieved over father, brother, husband; the women who, though their bodies were not buried here alongside Father’s and the others’, nevertheless are out there with them, waiting to hear me. I confess to mere acquaintances and strangers, too. I confess to all the men and women, Negro and white, who believed in Father and his mission, who gave him their life’s trust and treasure and even gave him their sons and brothers.

I peer from the window and now and again step forward into the doorframe and look away into the darkness. There they are. All of them are out there; a vast multitude silently awaits me, as if I were on a brightly illumined stage and the broad, grassy valley were a darkened amphitheater. In dim, reflected moonlight I see their sober faces uplifted, expectant, as free of judgement of me as I am of them, for they cannot know their own true stories until they have heard mine.

They knew me, and they hear me now neither with particular sympathy nor without it, for, while no one of them may have committed any such crime as I, they all surely were tempted and at times were as confused as I and as enfeebled, conflicted, and angry. Certainly my brothers were, and my sisters and stepmother and the young men who sacrificed their lives in the long war against slavery. I knew them, too, and in those terrible, fierce years leading up to Harpers Ferry there was not a one of them who was at all times clearer of motive and understanding than I. They will not judge me. They will merely hear me out. My account is a gift. Permanent rest, for them as much as for me, is impossible without it.

Chapter 2

You may not know this, but I have been remembering what follows here below and don’t know what else to do with the memory than to convey it by this means to you. Somehow, my words seem more a proper indictment written down like this; they cannot be so easily ignored or forgotten or denied by me as when I merely mouth them.

In the spring of ’31, when he was four months old, my brother Fred’s birth-name got replaced by the name of an earlier Frederick, a boy who was born between me and Ruth, a five-year-old boy who had died in March that year of the ague. I cannot recall even the face of that first Frederick. And, to my regret, I long ago forgot the birth-name of the second, the infant who eventually became the true Frederick, our Fred, and there is no one else left who would remember it.

Then, a year and a half after the re-naming, in the autumn of ’32, when my sister Ruth was three years old and little more than a baby herself, we lost our mother. We were living in the wilds of New Richmond in western Pennsylvania, having recently removed there from Hudson, in Ohio. The new Frederick was by then nearly two. There was another baby, unnamed, who was born and died a few days before my mother herself died. John and Jason were eleven and ten and were out of school and regularly employed in the tannery with Father. I was eight and thus still a schoolboy.

But until Mother died, we Browns had been to all appearances a normal family of our time and place, if a bit overly strict in matters of religion. After that, we became like some ancient Hebrew tribe of wanderers and sufferers, burdened by the death of women and children and by our endless obligations to our father’s restless, yet implacable, God. Isolated from our neighbors and tangled in tribulation and increasingly dire financial circumstances, we were weighed down further by complicated vows and covenants that made sense only after Father had explained them to us. And even though his explanations made our life briefly comprehensible, since there was always a reason for everything that we did, over the long run they made things worse, for he likened our life, not to the lives of the modern American people who surrounded us, but to those of his Biblical heroes. It was as if, after Mother died, we moved outside of conventional time and wandered with our herds and puny belongings through some distant land and epoch, so that we were not living in Ohio, but in Canaan, not in Pennsylvania, but among the Philistines, not in Massachusetts, but in Pharaoh’s Egypt.

Probably, Father had viewed himself and others in that peculiarly vivid, Biblical light from early in his life, for he had been a devout and an unusually imaginative Christian since boyhood, when he had practically memorized the entire Bible. But, for me, it began when Mother died. It seems strange to me now, strange that I didn’t know it earlier, when I was still a believer, but as my Christian faith secretly began to fade, a fading surely occasioned and probably even caused by the sudden death of my mother, I came gradually, at the same time and pace as the fading, to an awareness of the unusual degree to which our lives as a family and as individuals were described, prescribed, and subscribed by the Bible. The Word of God. His Holy Writ. As understood, interpreted, and applied by our father, John Brown. It was almost as if we were characters in the Good Book and had no other lives or destinies than what Father said had been given to us there.

Let me tell you how it was then. Because after Mother died, everything changed, and I want you to know us in the ways we were not generally known, for better or worse. I don’t know if somehow Father himself became a different man, a man more forcefully committed to the liberation of the Negro, and more religious, even, than he had been before, or if instead everything and everyone merely remained the same, and it was I alone who had changed, a small boy who suddenly saw things about his life and circumstances that until then had been invisible to him. But whichever it was, for me, at least, everything changed.

I have been remembering this morning how it was when I entered the darkened room, the small front parlor of our log house, and learned that Mother had died. It was still a rough and wild section of the country there in New Richmond, and I came home from the simple, one-room log schoolhouse that Father had built when we first settled in the region, where the young fellow from Connecticut taught the children of the settlement. Mr. Twichell was his name, Joseph Twichell. Him you may not know of yet. He was a fine young fellow, hardly more than a boy himself, freshly graduated from Yale College. Father, on one of his early trips east to sell cattle, had met him at an abolitionists’ meeting and had convinced him to come all the way out to the Western Reserve, so that he could serve the Presbyterian God and His Son, not in New Haven amongst the wealthy, educated class of people that he sprang from, but away in the wilderness, teaching rudimentary reading, writing, and figuring skills to the children of lowly shepherds, farmers, and tanners.

Mr. Twichell was a slender, almost delicate fellow with a pointed Yankee face, all narrow nose, chin, and forehead — a face made of small, delicate bones. And I remember him with pleasure and ease, for he bore immense good will towards children, as if he thought the ways in which we were treated by adults would shape our minds and morals for the remainder of our lives. This was an unusual perspective in those days, especially way out there in the Western Reserve amongst families with no time for coddling the young, no use for it whatsoever. Teach them merely what they need to know for doing their basic business and for keeping them from being cheated by strangers, then send them home to clear the forest and work the farm — that was the prevailing viewpoint.

I returned from school one autumn afternoon along towards dusk, hopping like a red squirrel through fallen leaves. I can hear the rustling sound of the leaves, ash, hickory, and oak, and can smell their dry, cinnamon smell in the clean, cool autumn air cut through with woodsmoke as I passed the cabins of my schoolmates in the settlement and moved further down the narrow, rutted road towards Father’s tannery and our isolated house just beyond. Too young to join my brothers at the tannery and too old to stay at home with the babies, I went alone to school in those days. But — and here is something else that you cannot have learned elsewhere — I had a constant companion then, an imaginary boy who was as real to me as a twin brother and whom I had named Frederick, no doubt because of some half-buried worry about the recent transfer of the name from the dead brother to the living one.

I had revealed his existence to no one but Mother, for I knew that she and only she would look kindly on him. My companion was, in a strange, prescient way, very much like my brother Fred would soon become, when in a few years we in the family would begin to understand that, in certain, crucial ways, Fred was different than the rest of us children, especially we boys — or, to put a finer point on it, that Fred did not feel things the same as we did, as if he were more sensitive to cold than we or less sensitive to heat — and, as a consequence, Fred would have to be treated more carefully than we were. Already Father had begun to arrange a special set of rules for Fred, which did not deny him the rights and privileges enjoyed by the rest of us at the same age but did not require him to take on the same responsibilities, either.

Even then I saw that Father was a genius at legislating rules and regulations for the governance of the numerous members of his family, adjudicating over everything domestic, from the most trivial quarrel and difference of opinion and desire to the most complex and lofty difference of principle. Notwithstanding his claim that he was, at bottom, even amongst his family, a democrat, Father exercised all the authority of a monarch, and got away with it, perhaps because he was never arbitrary or whimsical and never compromised merely in order to obtain some vaguely dissatisfying middle ground. At our supper table, Father’s seat was the seat of government, all three houses of it, executive, legislative, and judiciary. His constitution was, of course, the Bible, in particular the Old Testament. His Declaration of Independence and Preamble were the Books of Genesis and Deuteronomy. His Bill of Rights was taken straight from the New Testament: love the Lord thy God above all else, and treat thy neighbor as thou wouldst have him treat thee. Christ’s first Commandment and His Golden Rule — these were the scales upon which Father weighed all our needs, decided all our disagreements, and meted out to us our punishments and rewards.

Fred’s was a difficult case to rule on, however. From the time he first began to speak, it was evident that he was an innocent, that he was a boy incapable of lying. He was not like the rest of us. He always told the truth with perfect, natural, unthinking ease, and as a result — not for any lack of intelligence, but due to his primitive honesty — he was incapable of understanding that others often lied to him. Even after he became a man. Thus, unlike the rest of us, unlike me in particular, Fred could not protect himself against liars by lying to them first. He was not simple — his understanding in many areas was as good as the next fellow’s — but to most people he must have seemed mentally slow. And because they treated him that way and consequently were wont to cheat and mislead him, we were obliged to protect him as if indeed he were. At home amongst his three older brothers and sister Ruth and the younger ones when they came along, our stepmother Mary’s children, his innocence, as he grew older, reflected only badly on the rest of us — especially on me, for I was as a boy an incorrigible and incompetent liar. It was an early habit, and I do not know how it came to be that, but once begun, it could be stopped only with extreme diligence and discipline, neither of which could I properly muster myself, and so, frequently, I found myself corrected and chastized by others, especially by Father and his fierce belt.

When, with my imaginary Frederick at my side, I turned in at the tannery yard, I saw at once that something strange and ominous was going on. The blindfolded horse on the bark-grinder had come to a stop and stood unwatched in the center of the yard, with the long wooden arm of the grinder still attached. There was no smoke coming from the chimneys of the tannery, none of the usual signs of activity — of hides being hung to dry, of John, Jason, or the other workers hefting baskets of wet bark from the vats or lugging freshly scraped skins in and out of the low storage sheds, of customers going over accounts with Father, and so on. And before the house, three saddle horses stood hitched.

With my Frederick close behind, I began to run towards the house, as if I had already divined what had occurred. But I did not know, I could not have known, for Mother had seemed perfectly well that morning, although once again she had not come to the door and waved us off when in the gray dawn light my Frederick and I had set out for the schoolhouse. But somehow, suddenly, on this day I knew — perhaps because I feared so powerfully the loss of my mother that no other eventuality mattered to me and on this day was finally no longer able to suppress that fear: I knew that her continuing inability to rise from her bed was not what Father had said, the consequence of fatigue and a result of the sadness of having recently lost her newborn infant. Those things passed, not easily but naturally; they were part of the seasonal round of our and our neighbors’ daily lives: the dark fatigue of women and the death of infants. But this, I suddenly believed, was different.

So strong was my fear of losing Mother that, as long as nothing had happened to her, no matter what other disaster befell us, it would be as if nothing bad had happened at all. Her essential goodness and her love of me compensated for everything that was not good. And in an unpredictable, unstable world, where babies died before children and children died before adults, where without warning twisters and droughts and hard freezes descended on us like Biblical plagues and ruined a year’s and sometimes a lifetime’s careful husbandry of crops and livestock, a world in which the God to whom everyone prayed for mercy and justice seemed not to care one way or the other, in such a precarious, incomprehensible world, my mother’s love was the only kindly constant, her gentle smile my sole comfort, her soft, shy voice the music that pacified my turbulent mind.

I dropped Frederick’s hand and ran full speed towards the house. Frederick laughed, as if I had invented a game, and gave chase, trying to tag me. At the door, he finally tagged me on the shoulder and said, “Ha! Got you! Now get me!”

I shook his hand away and tugged frantically on the door and banged on it, crying, “Mother! Mother! Let me in!”

It would not give, try as I might to open it. I was sobbing, hammering against the door with my fists now, enraged and terrified. Whether it was barred from the inside against me or in my panic I simply could not work the latch, I do not know; I hurled my weight against it and kept crying, “Mother! Mother!”

Then suddenly the door swung wide, opening into the small, darkened room. I found myself facing Father’s broad chest. His arms reached around me and held me tightly to him. I remember his stifling smell of leather and blood and wool. I glimpsed behind him the shadowy forms of my older brothers, John and Jason, and several men and a woman, people I knew from their outlines but did not at that moment recognize — they were merely adults, large people, shades blocking out my mother’s light. Foremost amongst them, and darkest, was Father. He wrapped me in his iron arms, holding me face-first against his woolen shirt, and said, “Owen, come on outside for a moment. Come, son, and let me speak calmly with you. Come outside, Owen,” he said, and he moved me backwards out to the stoop, where my Frederick was standing, bewildered.

Frederick said, “Don’t cry, Owen. I only meant to tag you. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Father held me firmly by the wrist, and as he drew me across the stoop, I squirmed and tried in vain to break free of his grasp. “Come here, son,” he said to me in a low voice. “Come on now, let’s sit down and talk. I must talk a moment with you.”

He sat on the step and finally released his hold on me, and when he did, I shoved him aside and ran back through the slowly closing door into the house. “Owen!” he called, but too late.

The room was dim, cold, and damp, like a sepulchre, and although it was crowded with people, I saw no one in the room now, except Mother, who lay on her and Father’s day-bed near the window, fully dressed, her eyes closed, as if she were asleep. Father’s brother, Uncle Frederick, he for whom my dead brother had originally been named, was there, up from Ohio, and he quickly moved towards me and grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to move me back outside, away from Mother.

I wrenched myself free of his grasp and ran straight to her and clutched both her hands in mine. They were as cold as clay and as inert, and at first I was afraid of them, as if they were small, dead animals, skinned and dried. But they were my mother’s hands, as familiar to me as my own, and they were all I had left of her, so I pulled on them, as if to lift her up from her bed or to yank her back from the abyss into which she was falling. I drew her into a half-seated position on the daybed. But her head flopped to one side like a doll’s, and her weight became too much for me, and her body began to tilt towards the wall. Her face was turned entirely away from me then, and suddenly it was as if she were pulling against my grasp, shoving me from her.

I unclasped my hands from hers and watched her slip away from me. Her body fell back onto the day-bed and then slid over the lip of the abyss into the darkness. She was gone. Gone. And in that instant, although I was still a child, I understood to the bottom of my soul that I was now alone. I knew, too, that I would remain so for the rest of my life.

Slowly, I turned and left the darkened room. Father waited outside, still seated on the doorstoop. I sat down beside him, taking the same position there as he, head down, hands on knees, back straight. Father and son. We did not speak.

I never saw my mother again. I never saw my imaginary companion, my poor lost Frederick, again, either. My father would soon remarry, as you know, a good woman whom I called only Mary, never Mother, and she would provide him with eight more children. But nothing would be the same for me, ever again. I mark the end of my childhood from that day.

I’m sorry. I can write no more today. I will resume, however, as soon as my hand is steady again and my mind cleared of this embarrassing self-pity.

Following yesterday’s letter, I’ve been recalling this morning those early days in New Richmond and the peaceful prior years of my boyhood in Hudson — both wildernesses of the old Western Reserve when we resided there, as fraught with difficulty and danger on our first arrival and settlement as was our Adirondack mountain farm later. We lived in our villages then amongst wolves and bears and mountain lions in deep forests that blocked out all light in the lost ravines. We lived close to Indians, Iroquois, mostly, suspicious and withdrawn and silent, who sometimes left their forest enclaves and visited our villages to trade, but mainly kept a safe distance from us. And there was the occasional fugitive slave, coming up from Kentucky or the mountains of western Virginia by way of the Underground Railroad, run generally by the Quakers back then, and passing through to Canada — a quiet, frightened, day-long visitor hidden in the attic of our house and spirited on under hay in Father’s wagon as soon as night fell to the farm of a Quaker or some fellow radical abolitionist twenty or thirty miles to the north.

But recalling those days of long ago, after having seen all of the civilized world that an ordinary man needs to see in order to know the true nature of people in society, I am struck by nothing so much as our sustained virtue and orderliness. Wherever we lived in those days, wherever we set up our house and farm and commenced doing business with our neighbors, we were like an island in a sea of chicanery, godlessness, disorder, and willful ignorance. For we Browns were distinct; we were different from most of those who surrounded us. We were surrounded not just by wilderness but by reckless sinners.

As individuals and as a family, we were sinners, too, of course, like all men and women, but ours was the fastidious sin of pride, for we were proud of our difference and took pleasure in enumerating the ways in which it got daily manifested. We even prided ourselves on the number of occasions and the ways in which our friends and neighbors were affronted by our virtue and orderliness or found it strange or eccentric and as a result held themselves off from us, choosing to view us, as did the Iroquois, from what must have felt to them a safe distance.

Our pride, that subtlest and most insidious of sins, got manifested in a variety of ways, but, all reports to the contrary, I do not believe that we were arrogant. Certainly Mother, and later my stepmother, Mary, and my sister Ruth were not arrogant. And the younger children were all naturally modest and shy, boys and girls alike, and were constantly encouraged to remain so when they ventured out into the wider world than home provided, and for the most part they did. My older brothers and I, too, strove not to lord it over others less fortunate than we, less disciplined, less inclined to sacrifice their force and time on earth for the greater good, what Father called “the commonweal.” And even Father himself was not arrogant — although he was indeed commanding and headstrong — and made only those demands on us that he made on himself as well, and made no demands on others, but wholly accepted people as he found them. To Father, other people chose to live our way — and there were a few here and there who did — or they chose not to. It was the same to him, either way.

On the other hand, though there was never a man so detached from the sinner who so loathed sin, when it came to the sin of owning slaves, which Father labeled not sin but evil, all his loathing came down at once and in a very personal way upon the head of the evil-doer. He brooked no fine distinctions: the man who pleaded for the kindly treatment of human chattel or, as if it could occur naturally, like a shift in the seasons, argued for the gradual elimination of slavery was just as evil as the man who whipped, branded, raped, and slew his slaves; and he who did not loudly oppose the extension of slavery into the western territories was as despicable as he who hounded escaped slaves all the way to Canada and branded them on the spot to punish them and to make pursuit and capture easier next time. But with the notable exception of where a man or woman stood on the question of slavery, when Father considered the difference between our way of life and the ways of others, he did not judge them or lord it over them. He did not condemn or set himself off from our neighbors. He merely observed their ways and passed silently by.

And he knew all the ways of men and women extremely well. He was no naif, no bumpkin. My father was not the son of man who stopped up his ears at the sound of foul language or shut his eyes to the lasciviousness and sensuality that passed daily before him. He never warned another man or woman off from speech or act because he was too delicate of sensibility or too pious or virtuous to hear of it or witness the thing. He knew what went on between men and women, between men and men, between men and animals even, in the small, crowded cabins of the settlements and out in the sheds and barns of our neighbors. And he knew what was nightly bought and sold on the streets and alleys and in the taverns of the towns and cities he visited. The man had read every word of his Bible hundreds of times: nothing human beings did with or to one another or themselves shocked him. Only slavery shocked him.

Father was a countryman, after all, a farmer and stockman much admired by other farmers and stockmen, a workingman who could roll up his sleeves and cut timber, tan hides, or build a stone wall alongside the roughest men in the region. And although he was a failure at it, he was a businessman, too, a man who traveled widely, to Boston and New York and once even to England and the European continent, and stayed in hotels and taverns where prostitutes plied their trade in the lobbies and drinking rooms below and visited the men he traveled with in their rooms next to his, with only a thin partition between. Father knew the ways of most men and women, and he did not loudly condemn them. He merely elected to behave differently, to go his own way, to keep himself pure, and to marry young.

Our virtues as a family were, of course, guided and enforced from our earliest childhood years well into adult life by Father’s own example and by his steady instruction. Although, when we did become adults, after about the age of sixteen or so, his manner of dealing with our lapses changed, in that he no longer chastized us or enforced his will and the wisdom of his ways with the rod and belt or punished us for our disobedience. Instead, he merely withdrew from the offender the shining light of his trust. And no punishment was so powerful a corrective as that. He did not require that we share with him his deep, unquestioning Christian faith, as long as our every act was a reflection of our belief in the rightness of the Golden Rule and our love of the Truth. “If you cannot be a believing Christian but will nonetheless do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and if you will obey the first commandment of Jesus Christ and only substitute the word ‘Truth’ for God, then I swear that I shall not disavow you.” That was his pledge to us.

My brothers, John and especially Jason, took him at his word, and by the time they turned twenty, they had already long abandoned the Christian faith and had become rigorous but upright freethinkers in matters of divinity. When I, a few years behind, saw that this did not cause a significant rift between them and Father, I secretly followed suit. Our loss of faith did not please Father, naturally, and he never ceased to speak of it, but he nonetheless knew that there was no way he could command us to maintain our faith, any more than God could command him to maintain his. And so, instead, he grieved over it and constantly upbraided, not us, but himself, for having failed us as a teacher and father.

There was no way we could disabuse him of this notion. Nor did we especially want to, for it was one of his virtues, after all, and we held all his virtues in the highest esteem. And because our close adherence to his example was what gave to the family as a whole its character, its defining nature and difference from other families, we could not reject the worth of a single one of his virtues without rejecting an essential aspect of the family as well. Which would have been like choosing the life of the outcast. So that if Father grieved over his failure as a teacher and father, then John, Jason, and I were obliged to grieve over our failure as pupils and sons.

Nevertheless, despite the differences in degree of our faith in Father’s Lord and his Saviour Jesus Christ, we were a pious little clan, we Browns. The daily round of prayers and hymn-singing, Father’s morning Bible lessons, and his insistence on interpreting all events in Biblical terms were of great value. They disciplined and ordered our attention together as individuals and as a group. They woke us from our self-absorbed slumber, connecting us one to the other and all to the larger world outside, and linked that world to the great, overarching sphere of Truth, or God, which we loved before all other truths, or gods.

I remember Father’s surprisingly lovely singing voice — surprising because his speaking voice was somewhat reedy and thin, a consequence less of his language and attitude than of his physical nature. When he sang, however, his voice was strong and melodic and pitched high, like a young boy’s. He sang sweetly, yet with sufficient force to redden his face, which, when we were children, invariably brought smiles to our faces. He would notice, before we could cover our mouths, and would smile also and sing all the more loudly. In making a joyful noise unto the Lord, smiles and even laughter were permitted, and our favorite hymns were the joyous, loud ones, like “Blow, Ye Trumpets, Blow.” At prayer, however, or during the daily lesson, we knew to keep our heads lowered, our brows knitted as if in sober thought, our hands clasped together, and no catching one another’s amused eyes when Father, as he occasionally did, due to the fervency of his feelings, lost the train of his thought and fell to stammering or repetition.

In those days, to anyone who saw us, we were naturally regarded as pious. But not in the strict Methodist or old German Lutheran manner, as we have sometimes been portrayed. No, piety in us Browns was an attitude of respect which we held towards the Truth and our fellow man and which we strove to maintain daily in all our small as well as our large affairs. Our rituals and forms of worship, which were mainly the basic, old, New England Presbyterian forms, functioned, at least for me and my brothers and, perhaps to a lesser degree, Ruth and the other, younger children, merely to remind us of that respectful attitude and, every morning and evening and over every meal, to renew it in our hearts and to place that attitude of respect, of reverence even, in the forefront of our minds.

And if respect for the truth and our fellow man was the basis of our piety, then there was probably no more consistent and singular expression of our piety than our adherence to the principle of honesty in all our dealings, as much with strangers as with each other, as much with enemies as with friends. It sometimes made us appear odd to folks who were not so insistent on honest dealings, and it made Father, in the end, an incompetent businessman. But for us, that oddity, as I said, was a point of pride. And although we were often obliged to forgo an easy advantage, especially when it came to matters of money, our honest dealings frequently obliged decent people in turn to deal the same way with us, and we were thus sometimes able to prosper by it.

But it is well-known that from earliest childhood we Browns were taught not to lie. We were chastized severely when caught doing it. It was Father’s first corollary to his first commandment. If ye love the Truth, then ye cannot lie. Less well-known, perhaps, is the fact that I was the worst offender amongst us, as a child, that is; and in the early days, when he was a young man and Mother was alive, Father was more severe in his punishment and in his means of correcting us children than later, and we sometimes did not understand why he beat us so energetically and for so long. (There was the danger, perhaps especially with me, of his bending the branch too far and breaking it off, instead of correcting it to straightness; or of having it snap back defiantly against him and end up bent the other way, permanently misshapen. But I knew nothing of that then.)

By the time I was five or six years old, well before Mother had died, I had already begun to manifest the habit of lying to an exceeding degree, even for a child. I seemed to take sensual pleasure in it and almost sought out occasions for lying, making up tales, entire adventures, elaborate encounters, and so on, which had never taken place. I went beyond mere exaggeration, and although I oftentimes partially believed in the truth of my accounts, just as I believed in the corporeal reality of my imagined companion, Frederick, there nonetheless was a side of me that was wholly aware of their falsehood and was pleased by it. It gave me momentarily a sense of importance to say that I had seen a bear when I had not, to report on the visit of an Indian when no such person had appeared, to claim that I had been complimented by the schoolmaster, Mr. Twichell, when he had for days ignored me altogether and in fact seemed to think me rather a dull child.

I remember vividly a significant alteration of this wretched habit, so that in later years, when I lied, it was no longer out of blind compulsion but rather as the product of a conscious, calculated decision. Once, in New Richmond, Grandfather Brown, whose namesake I was, came over from Akron to visit us for a few days. It was during the dark months not long after Mother died, when Father had fallen into one of his periods of silence and withdrawal and passivity, and it had gone on dangerously long, so that family members and neighbors, too, were concerned for the welfare of his five children and for his own physical and mental health. Father was prone to such periods anyhow, especially following a spate of trouble, but this time he seemed unable to end it, unable to pass through his grief and loss and get on with the everyday business of his life.

Grandfather Brown stayed for a week, I remember, and as the end of it approached, Father was returning to his old, custodial self. When he roused us at dawn, the downstairs fires were now lit, and when the workers arrived at the tannery, Father was there to greet them and lay out the day’s work. In the evenings, he had resumed his reading aloud from the Bible to the younger children, and before we went to bed he totted up the day’s accomplishments and failures of each child and listed tomorrow’s obligations — to wash down the kitchen floor, sweep the yard, bring in the early peas, repair the sheepfold, separate the pullets from the hens, and so on — from each child, according to age and ability, an accounting of his or her allotted task, and to each child the next day’s charge.

I myself greeted this return to the old routines with mixed feelings, as if I almost missed the gloom and silence and inactivity that had followed Mother’s death. But the others all seemed relieved and for the first time in months happy and playful again, so I tried to join in. But then, on the final morning of Grandfather’s visit, when I passed alone through the parlor on my way out to school, I espied on the mantelpiece, where he had placed it the night before, Grandfather’s large gold watch and chain. It was a particular treasure to him, engraved with his initials, a bit ostentatious, the one vanity that that otherwise simple and utterly unpretentious man indulged in. I picked up the watch and held it for a moment, then slipped the watch, which he in his antique way called a chronometer, into my trouser pocket and dashed away to school with it, while the old man slept peacefully in the next room.

What were my motives? I did not know then, nor do I today. Except to say that the timepiece drew me like a talisman, a magical amulet. Since Grandfather’s arrival, I had been studying it at every opportunity, aware constantly of its location, whether in Grandfather’s vest pocket or on the sideboard or mantelpiece or in his tough, leathery hand. And once I had it in my possession, I felt wonderfully, magically empowered by it, as if it were the legendary sword, Excalibur, instead of a mere man-made timepiece. As if, with the watch in my pocket, I were a grown man in charge of my own life, not a boy anymore.

At school, in the clearing by the woodshed, where we children loaded the day’s stovewood to carry inside, I showed the watch to my friends, claiming that my grandfather — a man born before the Revolutionary War, I proudly pointed out — had given it to me, because our names were the same, Owen Brown, which was why the initials engraved on its case were the same as mine. The initials were mine in actual fact, I said. See? O.J.B.

My friends, the boys especially, were impressed and crowded round me to see it the better, imagining the watch and heavy chain, as I did, worn in a Colonial soldier’s waistcoat pocket by me, or someone sharply resembling me, as he marched heroically into the smoke and fury of Revolutionary battle.

At once, however, I realized that I had gone too far and now would have to swear the other children to secrecy. “Don’t say nothing to Mister Twichell about it,” I said. “My father was supposed to be the one who got Grandfather’s watch, and he don’t know yet that it’s gone to me, instead. Grandfather said he’d tell him today, while I’m off the place.”

I was betrayed, of course. Not by one of the children, though. By Mr. Twichell himself, who had stood at the doorway and had observed my little performance from across the schoolyard. When I passed by the schoolmaster and entered the building with my armload of firewood, he tapped me lightly on the shoulder, smiled down, and said, “Owen, when you have put the wood in the box, come and show me what you were showing the children.”

I did as instructed, and he took the timepiece and turned it over, examining the initials and the fine face with the Roman numerals. “How did you come by this?” he gently asked.

I looked around and saw that all the children were watching, waiting for me to reveal my lie, for at bottom they had known the truth, or at least had known that I was lying, and now I was about to be exposed in public, not just as a liar, but as a thief as well. I hesitated a second, and Mr. Twichell said again, “How did you come by such a marvelous instrument, Owen?”

I sucked in my breath and quickly repeated the lie that I had told the children outside.

He gazed at the watch for a few seconds, admiring it, and when he handed it back to me, asked if I could read the time from the markings on its face. I nodded yes, and he asked me how I knew which was which, for they weren’t numbers, were they? They were X’s and V’s and Vs.

“They’re in the same place as the regular numbers,” I said.

He said that was so, and then told us to take out our slates and begin the day’s lesson, which turned out to be — fortuitously, he said, winking broadly at me — upon the difference between Roman and Arabic numerals. In a surprisingly short time, every child in the room could write in Roman any date the teacher called out to us and any hour, the number of the states in 1776 and the number today in 1833, the white population of the United States, the Negro population of the United States, the total of the two, and the difference between.

At day’s end, when I passed out of the schoolhouse, Mr. Twichell stopped me at the doorway and handed me a small, folded sheet of paper. “I’m sorry, Owen,”he said, in a voice so soft that only I could hear it. ‘This is for your father. Please, don’t fail to deliver it to him.” I took the note with trembling hand, for I knew what it said, and slipped it into my trouser pocket, next to Grandfather’s watch. “You may read it if you wish;’ Mr. Twichell added. He seemed sad and guilty, almost, and I knew why. But he had done the right thing. I was the sinner, not he.

I did not read the note; I could not. I did not deserve to. Dutifully, when I arrived home, I went straight to Father, who was at work inside the tannery, and passed the note to him. He slowly unfolded the paper and read it. Finally, without a word, he held out his hand before me, and I drew the watch from my pocket and laid it flat in his huge, callused, outstretched hand. He thanked me, turned to Grandfather, who had been seated on a stool next to the fire, watching, and gave it over to him. Carefully, Grandfather examined the watch, as if checking it for damage, and placed it into his vest pocket. Then he took up his walking stick, rose creakily, and walked from the room to the yard, where my brothers were at work.

Father said, “Is there anything you can say in your defense, Owen?” His face was very sad and downcast, like Mr. Twichell’s.

“No.”

He sighed. “I thought not. Come with me,” he said.

We went to the barn, where it was dark. Motes of hay drifted slowly from the lofts through beams of light shining through the cracks and openings above. He told me to remove my shirt, which I did, while behind me and out of sight he took from its nail on the main post of the barn the hated piece of cowhide which, years ago, long before my birth, he had tanned and cut into a long strip strictly for the purpose of chastizing his children. I bowed my head and waited, shivering, for the first blow against the cold skin of my bare back.

And when the blow came, the force of it sent my breath from my body, and before I could inhale, the second blow came, harder than the first. Twelve times he lashed my back, one for each hour on the face of the watch, he told me, as he swung the leather strap again and again, each stroke shoving me nearly off my feet. Twelve strokes, he said, so that I would forever associate this particular punishment with my lie. “Twelve strokes for telling people that you owned what was owned by another. For lying.” Each stroke drove me a step forward — twelve steps in a circle in the dirt floor of the barn.

Finally, he stopped. I had not wept and was surprised by that and wondered if somehow, due to my sinful nature, I had lost the capacity for it. Father said, “There are also sixty minutes on the face of a watch, Owen. And not only did you lie, you stole. You coveted your grandfather’s property and stole it from him.” To my amazement, then, Father turned me around to face him and handed me the leather strap and stripped off his own shirt. “As much as you’ve failed me as a son, I’ve failed you as a father,” he said, and he got down on his knees before me. “We’re connected, our sins are connected, in the same way as the sixty minutes and the twelve hours on the face of Grandfather’s watch are connected. Therefore, you must place sixty lashes on my back. Then you’ll never forget how we, you and I, and Grandfather, too, all of us, are connected in all our thoughts and deeds.”

Bewildered at first and frightened by his command, I nonetheless did as I was told and struck him across his naked back with the leather, his own whip of chastizement. It was a feeble blow, but it was all I could muster. “Harder!” he instructed, and I obeyed. “Harder still!” he commanded, and so I did, again and again, growing stronger with each blow, until I had lashed him all sixty times. And then, at the sixtieth and final blow, at last I began weeping copious tears.

“Now, Owen, now you see how it is between God and man,” Father said to me. “Now you’re weeping. And when the Bible says, ‘Jesus wept,’ you know why He wept. Don’t you?”

I could not answer.

“Don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand now.” And I put my shirt back on and left him there alone in the dim light of the barn, praying quietly to God for forgiveness.

I will tell you another story of our life then and of early deceit and punishment, one that, like the other, will bear significantly on later events. More so than any of our neighbors, wherever we lived, we Browns kept the Sabbath holy. Defined precisely, in the way of Father’s literal ancestors, the old New England Puritans, and of his spiritual forebears, the ancient Hebrews, our Sabbath began on Saturday night at sundown and ended at sundown the following day. Father brooked no variations or exceptions to this rule. Sometimes we children argued with him as to whether the Saturday sun had actually set yet, for there was still light filtering through the trees from the west, and John or Jason might contend that if the trees behind the house had been cut, then there would be at least another half-hour of daylight, so it was not truly sunset. But Father would have none of that, answering, “Yes, John, and I suppose if the western hills were not there, we’d have fully an hour of daylight left. Come in now, boys, and honor the Lord with your silence.”

And after a few more minutes of broody grousing around outside, we’d give up and come trooping into the house, latching the door behind, to commence our twenty-four hours of confinement, of silence, prayer, and contemplation of the Lord. It was an imprisonment, broken only by the need the next morning early to tend to the animals and later to join in the few hours of worship at church that, when we were young and living in Hudson and New Richmond, Father was still able to insist on. Of course, after he broke with the Hudson Congregationalists over the slavery question back in ’37, an event you have no doubt already uncovered in your researches, after that, we no longer had even the diversion of church services when the Sabbath came around. Instead, we prayed and sang together at home, and Father preached.

It was difficult for us children, though, especially when we were very young. We moped and drifted somberly about the house, not free even to work or whittle some little tool or toy, no spinning or weaving for the females, no cooking, no household projects, for any of us. Silence, prayer, contemplation, and — except for the Bible — no reading. From our rooms upstairs we peered dreamily out the windows, as ordinary Christians passed down the road on their way to town or cut through the yard into the woods beyond with their muskets on their shoulders, gone deer hunting or out for grouse or partridge, and how we envied them. The girls as much as we boys. We were all fairly high-strung, active children used to constant physical exertion, and to put a twenty-four-hour halt suddenly once a week on our wild spirits, which usually got exercised harmlessly in work and outdoor play and sports, was an extreme imposition, often too extreme for us to place upon ourselves without heavy enforcement from Father.

Sometimes, usually by early afternoon on Sunday, by which time we had become explosive from the confinement and silence, we older boys would contrive to escape from the house for a few hours and return before sundown without being missed. Father’s habit was to retire to the parlor and sit in his chair by the window with his Bible on his lap and read silently, now and then dozing off. It was usually one of the younger children who saw the Old Man’s chin finally fall to his chest and heard him start to snore, and who, on our orders, would tiptoe up the narrow stairs to the rooms above with this welcome intelligence, and, John in the lead, we older boys, sometimes with Ruth tagging along behind, slid open a window and crept along the ridge of the shed roof to where we swung out onto the branch of a maple tree and quickly scrambled to the ground. Then for a few hours we were free to race through the woods like buckskins, shrieking and hollering to one another, making all the wild noises that for fifteen or twenty long hours we had kept bottled up inside our chests.

I remember, for powerful reasons, one Sabbath in particular, which I will describe, for it has a meaning that extends into the later part of my story. It was late in the fall of ’33, when I was but nine years old, the year after Mother died, and our stepmother, Mary, had been living with us for only a few months. A nearby neighbor and not much more than a girl herself, Mary had first been hired by Father to keep house and care for his younger children during the days, while he ran the tannery, but soon he married her. She was then pregnant with her first child, Sarah, born the following spring. I remember little else of that sad whirl of a year, except what happened to me on one crisp, sunshiny day, when John, Jason, and I, as we had done a hundred or more times, made our escape from our father’s and new stepmother’s dark, silent house to the large, bright world outside.

I was then a cold, withdrawn child, hopelessly saddened by the death of my mother. The pain of my days and nights was such that I thought of little else and thus was to all appearances a permanently distracted child, one of those children who seem neither to know nor to care where they are or who is with them. I was a boy whose gaze was always inward and fixed there, not on himself, but on some imagined closed door. I have seen dogs whose beloved masters have gone into the house, leaving the animals to wait outside, there to sit on the cold stoop, staring at the door with unbroken gaze. I was like that poor animal, and the door was the death of my mother.

John went first out the window and crept along the ridge of the steeply pitched roof of the shed, followed by Jason. Then me. At the end of the roofline, there was a two-storey drop to the ground, which had been dug away for the entry to our root cellar below. A sturdy, full-grown maple tree stood at the back of the shed, with several branches close enough to the structure that a medium-sized boy could in a single move slide down from the ridge of the roof to the eave, where he could leap out and catch onto the tree and from there make his way easily to the ground. Without hesitating, John reached the end of the ridge, turned, squatted, and duck-walked quickly down the wood-shingled slope, sprang into the air, grabbed the branch of the tree, and like a squirrel hurried down its length. Jason, grinning, was right behind him.

Then came I, walking in a kind of haze. I made my way to the end of the roof. But instead of stopping there and lowering myself to a sliding position, like the others, I simply continued straight on, as if the ridge of the roof extended below me. I remember stepping off the roof into open space and falling for a very long time through sunlight and bright green leaves and blue sky in a dreamy downward flight, pulled, not by gravity, but by some force even more powerful than gravity. I was like the boy Icarus, who flew too near the sun on unnatural wings and was hurled back to earth as punishment for his pride and vanity. Down, down I fell, crashing at last against the stone steps to the root cellar.

I must have reached out at the last second with my left arm, as if to push the ground away, for the arm lay beneath me, crushed by my own weight and the force of my fall. I was fully conscious and at first felt no particular pain, but when John and Jason reached me and rolled me over, I saw that my arm had been snapped almost in two by the cut edge of the stone steps. Jason began to howl at the sight of it, for one of the bones above the wrist had torn through the flesh and sleeve, and the arm was gushing blood.

I was in terrible pain then. I could not say anything; I could not even cry. Everything was yellow and red, as if the earth had caught fire. Jason was bawling in terror. John whispered hoarsely, “Shut up, Jason! Just shut up! You’ll bring the Old Man!” But then he saw my arm and realized that it was all up with us. “Run and get Father!” he said. “But go back up the tree way. Go through the house, tell him Owen fell from the roof and we saw him from inside. He won’t lick Owen now anyhow, and maybe he’ll let us off, too.”

Jason did as he was told, and a moment later Father appeared, towering over me and John, his huge, dark shape blocking out the yellow sky. John stood and stepped quickly away. “He fell off the roof, Father,” he said. “We saw him from inside.”

“Yes. So it seems,”Father said. His hands were chunked in fists on his hips, and he surveyed the scene, looking first up at the ridge of the roof, then along our route to the eave, to the maple tree and the ground.

To John, Father said, “You and Jason came out the window and climbed down the tree to help him, did you?”

“Yes, Father.”

Swiftly, he descended the steps to where I lay all crumpled and broken. Crouching over me and examining my arm, he said to me, “You appear to have been sufficiently punished, Owen. I’ll not add to it. Your brothers, however, will have to wait for theirs.”

I remember Father tearing the sleeve off my shirt and tying the scrap of cloth tightly around my arm above the elbow to stop the bleeding, talking calmly all the while to the other boys, saying to them that, because they were my elders, he held them responsible for this injury, and they were only making it worse for themselves by lying about it now. He instructed Jason to bring him some kindling sticks for a splint from the woodbox inside and a sheet from one of the beds, and then he grasped my broken arm with both his powerful hands, and when he wrenched the bones back into alignment, the pain was too much for me to bear, and I lost consciousness.

I am recalling this event now with difficulty and almost as if it happened to another person, for it was so many years ago, and the crippled arm of the man I later became completely displaced the pain endured by the nine-year-old boy I was then. My arm did not heal straight and remained locked in a bent position, as you may have observed when we met, and all my life my left hand has worked more like a clever claw than as a proper match to its twin. It was indeed, just as Father said, my punishment. It was a permanent mark, an emblem, placed upon my body like the mark of Cain, which all could see and I myself would never be able to forget. So that, all my life, every time I reached out with both arms to pick up a lamb or shear a sheep, every time I laid a book on my lap and opened it, every time I sat down to eat or prepared to dress myself or tie my shoes or undertook some simple household task, I would remember not the pain of my fall and the long recovery and healing afterwards, but the fact of my having disobeyed and deceived Father.

It was the last time any of us sneaked out of the house on the Sabbath, although I suspect that years later, when the event had faded into family lore, some of the younger children, Salmon, Watson, and Oliver, took their Sabbath-day turn at chancing Father’s wrath. We never spoke of it, but no doubt John and Jason were chastized severely with Father’s leather strip. Although nearly as tall as Father, especially John, who turned thirteen that year, they were boys still and slender, and Father had no compunctions then about laying on the rod. I do know that for many weeks, while I carried my arm like a dead thing in a sling, they were made to do my chores, and long years later, whenever we worked alongside one another, they were still somewhat solicitous of me, as if they had retained a measure of guilt for my being crippled. I, of course, as I have done here, blamed only myself.

That was in New Richmond, but today I am reminded of an episode from those days in Hudson, Ohio, before we went to the Pennsylvania settlement. It was one of the few occasions when we boys managed to get the best of Father. John, Jason, and I stole some early cherries from the orchard of our Uncle Frederick, who lived nearby. It was done at John’s instigation, of course — Jason, even as a boy, was unnaturally scrupulous about such things, and I, who was then about seven (Mother was still alive, I remember that, so I must have been seven), was always the follower of my elder brothers. One of the hired girls who lived and worked at Uncle Frederick’s saw us stealing the cherries and reported it to her older sister, and together they marched straight to their employer and told him of our crime, exaggerating by tenfold the small quantity of cherries we had made off with.

After Uncle Frederick had taken the girls’ information to Father, we received from Father a quick licking, which was appropriately perfunctory, considering the smallness of our crime, but it left us, especially John, feeling vengeful against the hired girls, whose names were Sally and Annie Mulcahy, poor, orphaned Irish girls brought out west from the city of Pittsburgh. They were near our age, and I suppose we believed that they had betrayed us to the adults out of no more decent impulse than to advantage themselves at our expense.

Within hours of our licking, John had filched from the barn a small tin of cow-itch. You, a city woman, may never have heard of it, but “cow-itch” is the common name for a salve infused with the hairs of the cowhage plant, which hairs, applied to human skin, burrow into the skin at once, causing great pain for a long time, as if barbed needles had been thrust into the sufferer’s nerves. It is excruciatingly painful against human skin and sears it for hours afterwards and cannot be washed or wiped off. We used it as a vermifuge against certain diseases of the skin of cattle and sheep. Father always kept a supply with him, for even when he traveled, he brought along a medicine kit for animals; if not for his own livestock, then for demonstration purposes, as Father was forever educating the farmers and cattlemen and sheepmen he met along the way.

That evening after supper, we sneaked over to Uncle Frederick’s house and smeared the stuff liberally over the seats of the outhouse, which we knew was used strictly by the Mulcahy girls. They lived in an attic above the kitchen wing and had a separate entrance and staircase to their quarters. We had often noticed them coming and going early and late, and we knew that they usually visited the outhouse together, especially after dark. In fact, their practice, strange to us, had become something of a joke to Uncle Frederick and the rest of the family (not to Father, naturally, nor to Mother, both of whom disapproved of coarse humor). But Uncle Frederick liked to say that Sally Mulcahy couldn’t do her business without Sister Annie along, and Annie couldn’t do hers without Sister Sally. So far from home and living on the frontier among strangers, the girls were, of course, merely afraid and naturally shy.

None of that mattered to us, however. When we had finished our devious work, we hid in the bushes near the outhouse and waited for the results. Shortly before dark, the two girls came tripping down the outside stairs from their attic, crossed the back yard to the outhouse, and went inside. In less than a minute, one of the girls began to shriek. Then the other. “Something’s bit me! Ow-w-w! Something’s bit me!” cried Annie. “I’m afire!” her sister answered. “Me bottom’s afire! Ow-w-w!” We, of course, thought the whole thing hilarious and could barely keep still or silent, while the girls howled in terrible pain. They ran from the outhouse, their skirts up and knickers down and their bright red fannies aflame. Laughing and clapping one another on the back, we three bad boys crept off through the underbrush to home, properly avenged.

It did not take long, however, for Uncle Frederick and Aunt Martha to conclude that their Irish girls had been victimized by none other than the Brown boys, who, in their view, were allowed by Father to run wild as Indians anyhow. Frederick, who was Father’s younger brother and a deacon in the Congregational Church, was a shopkeeper in the town of Hudson. He was less rural and pious than Father, less withdrawn from the larger community, and despite his sometimes bawdy humor, he was a stern, demanding man. He and his wife, Martha, were childless and perhaps envied Father’s much admired fruitfulness and thus thought him not as properly rigorous a parent as they themselves would have been, had the Lord blessed them in a similar way.

When Martha and Frederick brought their accusations of our “vicious, bad behavior” to Father, he agreed to punish us severely, but only if we were proven guilty by objective evidence or confession. To his credit, Father never simply sided with adults against children. And there being no objective evidence, no eye-witnesses, he needed a confession. Thus we were interrogated by him for several long hours that night. But we did not crack. We simply denied that we had been over at Uncle Frederick’s house and claimed that we’d been hunting up a lost lamb at the time of the incident, and no amount of verbal rebuke or recrimination from Father made us back down. Secretly, we believed that we had been in the right and our lie was justifiable. Our earlier punishment for stealing the cherries had not fit the crime. Finally, Father seemed to give up and told us that we’d have to sleep in the haymow in the barn tonight. Not as punishment, he said, but as an opportunity to discuss amongst ourselves the wrongfulness of our act and the nasty work we were doing to our souls by refusing to confess it.

This was a ruse. The haymow, where we sometimes slept by choice on hot summer nights or for occasional mild punishment on cold nights, had a scuttle that led directly to the cattle stanchions below. We knew from past experience that a person could stand below the scuttle and hear every whispered word above: we had stood there ourselves and overheard conversations above that were presumed to be private, and Father had done it to us as well, repeating our overheard words back to us later as a joke.

We vowed, therefore, to be silent, and no sooner had we settled ourselves for sleep in the haymow than we heard the barn door below creak open and a few seconds later heard Father’s breathing and now and then heard him shifting his weight at the lower end of the scuttle. For a long time, we listened to him, alert as deer. Suddenly, John got up from the hay where we lay and loudly announced, “I’ll tell you, boys, if someone’s standing down there at the bottom of the scuttle, he’s going to get clubbed with this!” Whereupon, in a fury, he picked up a large chunk of wood, a heavy piece of a joist four or five feet long, and strode to the scuttle and without hesitation simply tossed it down the chute.

It was a startling thing to do! If it had hit Father, it might have killed him. But the Old Man must have jumped aside at the last second, for we heard the timber bang resoundingly against the floor below and, an instant later, heard the barn door open and then close, as Father tiptoed away. I remember lying up there in the hay for a long time afterwards, shaking with fear and biting off a sudden, inexplicable impulse to laugh aloud.

John was altogether silent and lay a ways apart from me and Jason, and, when Jason said, “What if you had hit him?” did not answer. Turning to me, Jason said, “You know, we’re lucky it didn’t hit him,” and to my astonishment I found myself laughing loudly, wildly, almost crying. I rolled back in the hay and turned myself over and around, squirming like a snake, all the while laughing hilariously, as if a great joke had just been told me. And when at last the laughter stopped, and I lay still, I realized that I had wet myself. My trousers were soaked. Ashamed and miserable then, I crawled as far from my brothers in the haymow as I could get and curled up like a little animal in the far corner and lay awake for most of the rest of the night.

We had defeated Father, yes, indeed, but the event had terrified us. Or at least it had terrified me. As for my brothers, I cannot say. It was one of those things we never spoke about afterwards, even years later, when there was a second humorous event involving cow-itch, which with surprising pointedness, involved Father as well.

I wonder if I should tell it here, for it seems, except in my memory of the event, unrelated. Yet there is no more compelling principle of organization in this long telling than that of memory, and no other principle of selection than that of revealing to you what you cannot otherwise know. So, yes, I’ll tell it here, and you can decide for yourself if you can take from it further understanding of my father and of me.

One night many years later than the event described above, when we were living in Springfield — in the fall of ’47, it must have been, the year before Father made his first journey to North Elba — after several nights of listening to John preach the virtues of some of the newer sciences and health therapies, such as phrenology and Mesmerism, which he was then studying in a mail-order course from New York City, Father, who had been airily dismissive of all such notions, agreed to attend a demonstration by a well-known hypnotist, a Professor La Roy Sunderland. Coming from Father, this was a considerable and unexpected concession, and John was delighted by it.

Together, the three of us, Father, John, and I, marched off immediately after supper to the Palace Theater, where we took our seats as near to the front as possible. The Professor was an imposing figure of a man, with a flowing blond beard and a scarlet face and a grand, oratorical voice and manner. Most if not all of the people in the audience that night were true believers in the powers of hypnotism, so the Professor had the pleasure of speaking to the already converted, and his demonstration was laced with sarcastic, condescending references to those ignorant folks who, like Father, “preferred superstition to science.” This did not sit well with Father, naturally, and he squirmed and muttered throughout, as the florid Professor, with charts of the brain and diagrams of nervous impulses and connectors, explained how hypnotism successfully blocked off pain and could be used wonderfully, if only people were sufficiently enlightened, in surgery and in the treatment of fractures and injuries.

He had many anecdotes to bolster his reasoning, and after a while, when he felt that his audience had been adequately instructed and prepared, he called for some volunteers, so as to demonstrate before our very eyes the power of this marvelous new science. Immediately, a half-dozen men and women, mostly young, left their seats in various sections of the auditorium and made their way to the stage.

“The man’s a charlatan,” Father grumbled in a low voice. “His ‘volunteers’ are no more genuine than play-actors.”

“So why don’t you volunteer, Father?” John suggested.

“I think I’ll enjoy the show more from here, thank you.”

“What about you, Owen?” John said.

“No,” I said. “I’ll just watch, and make up my mind later.” I was shy about being seen up on a stage like that. Because of my arm, perhaps, but mainly because of an innate desire to blend in with the crowd and not seem showy or self-advertising. Besides, I did not particularly want to play a role in this ongoing quarrel between John and Father. It was their fight, not mine. For some years now, John had seemed intent on converting Father to his belief in “science” and “objectivity!” which Father well knew was merely a covert way of arguing with him about the truth of the Bible and religion. I had long since decided to keep my apostasy as private as possible and never tried to defend it against Father’s faith.

From his group of volunteers, Professor Sunderland selected the most attractive person, a buxom, fair-skinned young woman with brown hair wound neatly around her head, and drew her to the center of the stage. He asked her if she had ever been hypnotized before. She responded in the negative, and he said, “Excellent, excellent,” and invited her to sit down on a stool that his assistant had placed there. When she was seated, he proceeded to wave his fingers lightly before her face and then asked her to count aloud backwards from ten. Before she reached five, she had ceased counting altogether and was gazing insensibly out at the audience.

“This lovely young lady,”the Professor announced, “has not left us. She hears and understands my every word. She has, however, been rendered insensible to pain.”

“Nonsense,”‘ Father muttered.

The Professor informed the young woman that she would not remember any of what was about to occur, that he would do nothing to harm her or anyone else, and he would not ask her to do or say anything that was morally repugnant to her. She gave no indication that she had heard or understood him but merely sat there on the stool with a small smile on her lips, as if she were remembering a pleasant incident from earlier in the day. She seemed quite peaceful and at rest.

At a gesture from the Professor, his assistant suddenly appeared beside him with a lit candle. “Extend your left hand, palm to the floor, please,” the hypnotist said, and the woman instantly complied. When he brought the flame of the candle to within an inch of her palm, she showed no evidence of having felt its heat. For a long time, he held it there, before taking it away and handing it back to his assistant, retrieving this time a bit of ice. He told the woman to turn her hand over, which she did, and he placed the ice into her hand and closed her fingers over it. Her pleasantly calm expression and relaxed physical manner did not change; the cold bothered her no more than had the heat.

At this point, the Professor’s assistant brought out a medium-sized anvil, an object he carried with obvious difficulty, due to its great weight, probably some seventy-five pounds. The hypnotist hefted the anvil, then passed it to one of the sturdy young men amongst the volunteers still on the stage, and noted that the young man had difficulty hefting it. “Is it genuine?” he asked the fellow, who grinned and said yes. “Our frail young woman” he said, “will handle this anvil as if it were made of paper. It will seem to her as light as a sack of feathers.”

Suddenly, Father stood up and was calling out to the Professor. “Hold on there, mister! Just hold on a minute!”

“Sir?” The hypnotist was clearly startled and perhaps a little alarmed. Father’s manner was severe, and he seemed, even to me, in a fume.

“The woman is insensible to pain, you say!”

“I do, indeed.”

“Well, sir, I do not believe you or her! You have not sufficiently tested her, as far as I am concerned. I believe that I can make her instantly sensible to pain, if given the opportunity.”

Professor Sunderland hesitated a moment, as if taking the measure of his opponent. Then he smiled politely and said, “Sir, you may yourself test the subject. But only if you yourself are willing to undergo the same test.” The man had met this sort of challenge before.

Father, who had already moved from his seat to the aisle, stopped in his tracks. “Well, sir, I am not the one claiming to be insensible to pain. No one has waved his fingers before me and said abra-ca-dabra.”

“To be sure. But to protect my subject from injury, I must insist that you yourself endure whatever pain you wish to test her with. How do you propose to test her, may I ask?” He smiled broadly at the audience.

Father would not back down. His face reddening noticeably, he made his way down to the front and mounted to the stage, where, to my surprise, he produced from his coat pocket two small vials. Then, turning to us, he announced that one of the vials contained ammonia, which he was sure would cause the girl to flinch and weep. In the other, he said, was a strong medicine known as cow-itch, which he was sure many in the audience were familiar with, although I suspected he was wrong on that. The ammonia alone, he said, would do the trick, and he uncorked the bottle and held it under the nose of the girl. He held it there for nearly a full minute, to be sure that she inhaled it. She made no response at all.

The crowd was delighted and applauded cheerfully.

“Ah, but now, sir,” said the Professor, “you must undergo the same test.”

Father said, “She may have held her breath.”

“Try it again, if you wish. And hold it there as long as you like.” Again, Father held the ammonia below the girl’s nostrils, this time for perhaps three minutes, while we all watched her face carefully for the slightest sign of discomfort. But it was as if the bottle were filled with fresh spring water.

Professor Sunderland finally reached forward and took the bottle from Father and gently turned Father to face the audience. “Now, my friend, let us see if you do indeed have ammonia here.”

Father closed his eyes and faced squarely ahead. And when the Professor waved the vial under his nose, Father jerked his head back and visibly winced. The audience broke into loud laughter and applause.

“The woman has some ability to hide her reactions to strong smell,” Father said. “Let me try her with the cow-itch.”

“As you wish, sir,” said the hypnotist.

With the corner of his handkerchief, Father applied a swab of the stuff to the girl’s bare neck. She did not flinch or change her expression in the slightest. Father’s shoulders sank.

“Well, my friend, may we test you the same way?” said the hypnotist. “You have the advantage of her, I notice, as a man apparently used to working outdoors in the sun.” He crooked a finger over Father’s collar and drew down his leather tie, exposing to the audience Father’s dark red neck. “May I?” he politely asked, and took the handkerchief from Father’s hand and rubbed it vigorously across the back of Father’s neck.

The Old Man winced, but he did not otherwise reveal the awful pain that I knew he was experiencing and which was growing worse by the instant. Poor man. Along with everyone else in the audience, John was laughing loudly now, as Father struggled to maintain his compo. sure and depart from the stage as swiftly as possible. Practically at a run, he came back up the aisle and, ignoring us as he passed, kept going, straight out the door.

“Should we go with him?” I whispered to John.

“Naw, he’ll befine,”he said, grinning. “In a few days.”

I departed from my seat then and followed the Old Man, feeling too much sympathy to leave him alone. I found him outside on the street, clawing in a frenzy at his collar, struggling to rub the stuff out, but only succeeding in driving it deeper into his flesh. I decided to say nothing and accompanied him all the way home in silence, hanging back a few steps while he stopped at nearly every light pole to rub the back of his neck violently against the cold metal like a poor, stricken beast. It was a pathetic and oddly moving sight, and I was as much fascinated and compelled to stare as I was embarrassed by Father’s antics. I felt ashamed for looking at him. But how I enjoyed seeing Father suffer in public! And how, at the same time, I wished it had not happened at all.

These small stories which I have lately written out for you have drawn me back to the origins of our larger story, to the unknown parts of it, at least. And there is a particular, important book in our life as a family which you may not yet have come upon in your research. Half a century ago, it was very popular amongst the abolitionists. I have this morning retrieved it from the box of Father’s books, which, as you know, remain, along with many of his letters, in my custody, and have been recalling the first time I read in it. The book is called American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. I urge you to read aloud the portions of the book which I will copy out here below, so that you will have a more exact idea of how it was for us. We were seated around the fire in the kitchen fireplace of the old Haymaker Place in Hudson, Ohio, where we then lived. Father opened it to the first page and, with his voice very loud, commenced to read from it. After he had read for several moments, he passed the book to us and bade each in turn to read from it.

First, my stepmother Mary read, haltingly and sometimes stumbling over unfamiliar words, for she was not a skillful reader. Then my brother John, who was eighteen years of age that winter, rapidly read a page or two. And after him, Jason, who was seventeen, in a voice that was almost a whisper, took his place. Finally, the book came to me, and I began to read.

We will, in the first place, prove by a cloud of witnesses that the slaves are whipped with such inhuman severity as to lacerate and mangle their flesh in the most shocking manner, leaving permanent scars and ridges. After establishing this, we will present a mass of testimony confirming a great variety of other tortures. The testimony, for the most part, will he that of the slaveholders themselves, and in their own chosen words. A large portion of it will he taken from the advertisements, which they have published in their own newspapers, describing their runaway slaves by the scars on their bodies made by the whip. To copy these advertisements entire would require a great amount of space and flood the reader with a vast mass of matter irrelevant to the point before us; we shall therefore insert only so much of each as will intelligibly set forth the precise point under consideration. In the column following the word “WITNESS” will be found the name of the individual, his place of residence, and the name and date of the paper in which it appeared, and generally the place where it was published. Following the identification of each witness will be an extract from the advertisement containing his or her TESTIMONY….

I stopped and looked up at Father, expecting him to reach forward for the book. But he merely nodded for me to go on, and so I obeyed.

WITNESS: Mr. D. Judd, jailor, Davidson Co., Tenn., in the “Nashville Banner” Dec. 10,1838. TESTIMONY: “Committed to jail as a runaway, a negro woman named Martha, 17 or 18 years of age, has numerous scars of the whip on her back.”

WITNESS: Mr. Robert Nicoll, Dauphin St., between Emmanuel and Conception Sts., Mobile, Ala., in the “Mobile Commercial Advertiser” Oct. 30,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ten dollars reward for my woman Siby, very much scarred about the neck and ears by whipping.”

WITNESS: Mr. Bryant Johnson, Fort Valley, Houston Co., Ga., in the “Standard of Union” Milledgeville, Ga., Oct. 2,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, a negro woman named Maria, some scars on her back occasioned by the whip.”

WITNESS: Mr. James T. De Jarnett, Vernon, Autauga Co., Ala., in the “Pensacola Gazette,” July 14,1838. TESTIMONY: “Stolen, a negro woman named Celia. On examining her back you will find marks caused by the whip.”

WITNESS: Maurice Y. Garcia, sheriff of the County of Jefferson, La., in the “New Orleans Bee,” Aug. 14,1838. TESTIMONY: “Lodged in jail, a mulatto boy having large marks of the whip on his shoulders and other parts of his body.”

WITNESS: R. J. Bland, sheriff of Claiborne Co., Miss., in the “Charleston (S.C.) Courier,” Aug. 28,1838. TESTIMONY: “Was committed to jail, a negro boy named Tom; is much marked with the whip.”

WITNESS: Mr. James Noe, Red River Landing, La., in the “Sentinel” Vicksburg, Miss., Aug. 22,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, a negro fellow named Dick — has many scars on his back from being whipped”

WITNESS: William Craze, jailor, Alexandria, La., in the “Planter’s Intelligencer,” Sept. 21,1838. TESTIMONY: “Committed to jail, a negro slave — his back is very badly scarred.”

WITNESS: James A. Rowland, jailor, Lumberton, N.C., in the “Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer” June 20,1838. TESTIMONY: “Committed, a mulatto fellow-his back shows lasting impressions of the whip and leaves no doubt of his being a slave.”

WITNESS: J. K. Roberts, sheriff, Blount Co., Ala., in the “Huntsville Democrat” Dec. 9,1838. TESTIMONY: “Committed to jail, a negro man — his back much marked by the whip.”

WITNESS: Mr. H. Varillat, No. 23 Girod St., New Orleans, La., in the “Commercial Bulletin,” Aug. 27,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, the negro slave named Jupiter — has a fresh mark of a cowskin on one of his cheeks.”

WITNESS: Mr. Cornelius D. Tolin, Augusta, Ga., in the “Chronicle Sentinel,” Oct. 18,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, a negro man named Johnson-has a great many marks of the whip on his hack.”

Here, with trembling hand, I delivered the book across to Father, who throughout had sat peering somberly into the fire that blazed in the great open fireplace. He brought the book near to his face, as he customarily did, and in his reedy voice continued where I had left off.

The slaves are often branded with hot irons, pursued with firearms and shot, hunted with dogs and torn by them, shockingly maimed with knives, dirks,&C.;have their ears cut off, their eyes knocked out, their hones dislocated and broken with bludgeons, their fingers and toes cut off, their faces and other parts of their persons disfigured with scars and gashes, besides those made with the lash.

We shall adopt, under this head, the same course as that pursued under previous ones — first give the testimony of the slaveholders themselves to the mutilations &c, by copying their own graphic descriptions of them in advertisements published under their own names and in newspapers published in the slave states and, generally, in their own immediate vicinity. We shall, as heretofore, insert only so much of each advertisement as will be necessary to make the point intelligible.

Father ceased to read, and we five sat for a moment in silence. All the younger children were long asleep in the rooms above. Then Father passed the book, still open at the page where he had left off, over to me, and falling into the antique manner of speech that he sometimes used, especially when overcome by emotion, he said, “Owen, thou hast still at times the voice of a child. Read these words, so that we may better hear in thy innocent voice their terrible, indicting evil.”

Not fully understanding, I nonetheless obeyed, and read on.

WITNESS: Mr. Micajah Kicks, Nash Co., N.C., in the Raleigh “Standard,” July 18,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, a negro woman and two children; a few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron on the left side of her face; I tried to make the letter M.”

WITNESS: Mr. Asa B. Metcalf Adams Co., Miss., in the “Natchez Courier” June 15,1832. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, Mary, a black woman; has a scar on her back and right arm near the shoulder, caused by a rifle ball!’

WITNESS: Mr. William Overstreet, Benton, Yazoo Co., Miss., in the “Lexington (Kentucky) Observer,” July 22,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway,a negro man named Henry, his left eye out, some scars from a dirk on and under his left arm, and much scarred with the whip.”

WITNESS: Mr. R. P Carney, Clark Co., Ala., in the “Mobile Register,” Dec. 22,1832. TESTIMONY: “One hundred dollars reward for a negro fellow, Pompey,40 years old; he is branded on the left jaw.”

WITNESS: Mr. J. Guyler, Savannah, Ga., in the “Republican,” April 12,1837. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, Laman, an old negro, grey, has only one eye”

WITNESS: J. A. Brown, jailor, Charleston, S.C., in the “Mercury” Jan. 12,1837. TESTIMONY: “Committed to jail a negro man, has no toes on left foot.”

WITNESS: Mr. J. Scrivener, HerringBay, Anne Arundel Co., Md., in the “Annapolis Republican,” April 18,1837. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, a negro man, Elijah; has a scar on his left cheek, apparently occasioned by a shot”

WITNESS: Madame Burvant, corner of Chartres and Toulouse Sts., New Orleans, in the “New Orleans Bee” Dec. 21,1838. TESTIMONY:

“Ranaway, a negro woman named Rachel, has lost all her toes except the large one”

WITNESS: Mr. O. W. Lains, in the “Helena (Ark.) Journal,” June 1, 1833. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, Sam; he was shot a short time since through the hand and has several shots in his left arm and side.”

WITNESS: Mr. R. W Sizer, in the “Grand Gulf (Miss.)” June 1, 1833. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, my negro man, Dennis; said negro has been shot in the left arm between the shoulder and elbow, which has paralyzed the hand”

WITNESS: Mr. Nicholas Edmunds, in the “Petersburgh (Va.) Intelligencer,” May 22,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, my negro man named Simon; he has been shot badly in the back and right arm.”

Long into the winter night I read, my voice breaking like glass at times, as it did then naturally, due to my youth, but more particularly because of the horrors that loomed before my eyes. My breath caught in my throat, my eyes watered over, my hands trembled, and it seemed that I could not go on saying the words that described such incredible cruelties. Yet I continued. It was as if I were merely the voice for all five of us seated together in that candlelit room before the fire, and we were together very like a single person — Father, Mary, John, Jason, and I, bound together by a vision of the charnel house of Negro slavery.

I said the words on the page before me, but I felt situated outside myself, huddled with the others, listening with them to the broken voice of a white boy reading from a terrible book in a farmhouse kitchen in the old Western Reserve of Ohio. Those cold, calm accounts from newspapers, those mild and dispassionate descriptions of floggings, torture, and maimings, of families torn asunder, of husbands sold off from wives, of children yanked from their mother’s arms, of human beings treated as no rational man would treat his beasts of burden — they dissolved the differences of age and sex and temperament that separated the five of us into our individual selves and then welded us together as nothing before ever had. Not the deaths of infant children, not the long years of debt and poverty, not our religion, not our labor in the fields, not even the death of my mother, had so united us as our hushed reading, hour after hour, of that litany of suffering.

In my lifetime up to that point and for many years before, despite our earnest desires, especially Father’s, all that we had shared as a family — birth, death, poverty, religion, and work — had proved incapable of making our blood ties mystical and transcendent. It took the sudden, unexpected sharing of a vision of the fate of our Negro brethren to do it. And though many times prior to that winter night we had obtained glimpses of their fate, through pamphlets and publications of the various anti-slavery societies and from the personal testimonies given at abolitionist meetings by Negro men and women who had themselves been slaves or by white people who had traveled into the stronghold of slavery and had witnessed firsthand the nature of the beast, we had never before seen it with such long clarity ourselves, stared at it as if the beast itself were here in our kitchen, writhing before us.

We saw it at once, and we saw it together, and we saw it for a long time. The vision was like a flame that melted us, and afterwards, when it finally cooled, we had been hardened into a new and unexpected shape. We had been re-cast as a single entity, and each one of us had been forged and hammered into an inseparable part of the whole.

At last, after I had recited the irrefutable and terrifyingly detailed rebuttals to the slavers’ objections to the abolition of slavery — with Objection III, “Slaveholders Are Proverbial for Their Kindness, Hospitality, Benevolence, and Generosity”—I saw that I had come to the end of Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. I closed the book on my lap. I remember that for a long time we remained silent.

Then slowly Father got up from his chair and placed a fresh log on the dying fire and stayed there, his back to us, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, and watched the flames blaze up. Without turning, he began to speak. He was at first calm and deliberate in speech, as was his habit, but gradually he warmed to the subject and began to sputter loudly, as he often did when excited by the meaning and implications of his words.

He reminded us of an event some two years past, when, in this same month of November, on learning of the assassination, in Alton, Illinois, of that holy man Elijah Lovejoy, Father had publically pledged his life to the overthrow of slavery. We all knew this. He had done it in church, and we and our neighbors had witnessed his pledge, and so had the Lord, who sees everything, Father declared. And we and the Lord had also seen that, since then, just as he had done all the long years of his life before making that pledge, Father had continued to be a weak and despicable man.

We said no, but he said yes and waved us off. The truth was that he had not made himself into the implacable foe of this crime against God and man which he had sworn publically to oppose. Then he said, “My children, the years of my life are passing swiftly.” He fisted his hands and placed them before his eyes like a child about to weep. He said that while he had been idling selfishly and in sinful distraction, lured by his vanity and by pathetic dreams of wealth and fame, the slavers had dug in deeper all across the Southern states. They had spread out like foetid waters, flooding over the plains into Texas and the territories. They had steadily entrenched themselves in positions of power in Washington, until now the poor slaves could no longer even raise their voices to cry for help without being slain for it or being swiftly sold off into Alabama and Mississippi. Black heroes, and now and again a white man like Lovejoy, had risen in our midst and were everywhere being persecuted and even executed for their heroism, legally, by the people of these United States.

“My children,” he said, “it’s mobs that rule us now. And all the while Mister Garrison and his anti-slavery socialites bray and pray and keep their soft, pink hands clean. Politicians keep on politicking. For the businessmen it’s business as usual: ‘Sell us your cheap cotton, we’ll sell you back iron chains for binding the slaves who pick it.’”

Father then cursed them; he cursed them all. And he cursed himself. For his weakness and his vanity, he said, “I curse myself”

He turned to us and now crossed his arms over his chest. His face was like a mask carved of wood by an Indian sachem. His eyes gazed sadly down at us through holes in the mask. It was the face of a man who had been gazing at fires, who had roused the attendants of the fires, serpents and demons hissing back at the man who had dared to swing open the iron door and peer inside. We all knew what Father had seen there. We had seen it, too. But he, due to his nature and characteristic desire, had gazed overlong and with too great a directness, and his gray eyes had been scorched by the sight.

I was a boy; I was frightened by my father’s face. I remember recoiling from him, as if he himself were one of the guardian serpents. I remember Father looking straight into our eyes, burning us with his gaze, as he told us to hear him now. He had determined that he would henceforth put his sins of pride and vanity behind him. And he would go out from here and wage war on slavery. The time has come, he declared, and he wished to join the time in full cry. “And I mean to make war by force and arms!” he said. “Not such weak-kneed war as Mister Garrison is determined to make, he and that crowd of Boston, parlor-polite abolitionists. I mean to make the sort of war that was waged by the great Negroes, Cinque, Nat Turner, and L’Ouverture, and by the Roman slave Spartacus. I mean to make war in which the enemy is known and strictly named as such and is slain for his enmity to our cause.”

He called us his children, even Mary, and said that the time for talk was past. The time for seeking the abolition of slavery by means of negotiations with Satan had always been long past. There never was such a time. Therefore, before us, his beloved family, before his wife and sons, and before God, he was making tonight his sacred pledge.

Here Father explained what we already knew, that he had long entertained such a purpose anyhow, despite his slackness and distraction, but that he now believed it was his duty, the utmost duty of his life, to devote himself to this purpose, and he wished us fully to understand this duty and its implications. Then, after spending considerable time in setting forth in most impressive language the hopeless and hideous condition of the slave, much of the details borrowed from our just-completed reading of Mr. Weld’s American Slavery as It Is, Father seemed to have finished his declaration, when suddenly he asked us, “Which of you is willing to make common cause with me?” He looked from one face to the next. “Which of you, I want to know, is willing to do everything in your power to break the jaws of the wicked and pluck the spoil from Satan’s teeth?” He put the question to us one by one. “Are you, Mary? John? Jason? Owen?”

My stepmother, my elder brothers, and I, we each of us in turn softly answered yes.

Whereupon Father kneeled down in prayer and bade us to do likewise. This position in prayer impressed me greatly, I remember, as it was the first time I had ever known him to assume it, for normally he remained standing in prayer, with his hands grasping a chair-back and his head merely lowered.

When he had finished the prayer, which was for guidance and protection in our new task, he stood, as did we, and he asked us to raise our right hands to him. He then administered to us an oath, which bound us to secrecy and total devotion to the purpose of fighting slavery by force and arms to the extent of our ability.

“We have thus now begun to wage war!” he declared. Although it seemed to me then, as it does now, so many years later, that he had already begun his war against slavery numerous times before this, here he was, in a sense beginning it again. And although I did not know it on that particular night, he would find himself obliged to bind himself to this sacred purpose many more times in the future as well. Father’s repeated declarations of war against slavery, and his asking us to witness them, were his ongoing pronouncement of his lifelong intention and desire. It was how he renewed and created his future.

Tonight, however, was significantly different. This was the first time that he had determined forthrightly to take up arms and wage war by force. Also, and more importantly, perhaps, it was the first time that I myself was a part of his pledge, that we all were sworn together, bound by our war on slavery to see the end of it, or of us. The overthrow of slavery was no longer Father’s private obsession. I had allowed him to make it mine as well.

Chapter 3

There is something that I have always wanted to explain, because in the various considerations of Father’s lifelong commitment to the overthrow of slavery, it has been much misunderstood. A great but little noted problem faced by Father throughout his life was his constantly divided mind. This division arose because, as much as he wished to be a warrior against slavery, he also wished to be, like most Americans, a man of means.

To be fair, it was a more basic and praiseworthy need than that. He had a large family, after all, and merely to house and feed and clothe them required enormous, sustained effort, especially if his only sources of income were his farm and his tannery. And by the time he had reached his mid-thirties, he was beginning to fear that, because of this requirement, he would always be a poor man with no time to wage war against slavery. His poverty, therefore, sabotaged his moral life. That is how it seemed to him. And that is what eventually led him down a path that very nearly did indeed sabotage his moral life.

Despite his having been poor and struggling since childhood, the Old Man himself dated the onset of his true financial woes to his thirty-ninth year, to the period of what he called his “extreme calamity.” Father always believed that there were three ways to make money in America: manufacturing or growing things; buying things low; and selling things high. A man who did only one of these would forever remain poor. He had to do at least two of them: best if he did all three, but without capital to invest in large-scale manufacture, impossible. A farmer made things, as it were, and sold them; a tanner did the same. Father had tried making and selling for nearly two decades, but he was still poor and exhausted: the process of manufacturing food, livestock, or leather goods took too long and consumed all a man’s days and nights, and thus he would never in his lifetime accumulate sufficient capital to manufacture steel, for instance, or some other item of great cost where the margins of profit were large enough to enrich him in his own time. He might turn to buying low and selling high, then. And what could be easily bought and rapidly sold by a man with little or no capital? Land. Hundreds of thousands, millions, of acres of loamy land rolling west from the Alleghenies all the way to the Mississippi and beyond. There was no greater or cheaper material resource available to an Ohio man in those days.

Inexpensive, arable land — it lay for miles all around him, and every month new immigrants from the crowded New England states and the eastern seaboard cities and even parts of Europe were pouring into the Western Reserve, bringing with them an insatiable hunger for farmland. They would also need new roads and canals to ship their produce east, new settlements and villages to reside and do business in, new schools and churches and public buildings to accommodate their expanding society. But before all else, they needed land, for they were mostly small farmers and young, and they brought with them or could easily borrow the necessary cash to buy it with. And in those years the bankers were eager to loan money with little or no collateral to secure it, for they well understood that a man who did not need that land for his own use, if he borrowed enough money to buy it first, could turn around and sell it for a higher price tomorrow, could pocket the difference, borrow more and buy more and sell that, too.

Basically, that was how Father fell into debt — by following the advice of bankers — and afterwards no amount of time and energy spent at war against the slavers, no amount of preaching to his neighbors, and no amount of training and conditioning his large family to become an army for the Lord could keep his mind free of his terrible indebtedness. Thus his divided mind.

It was very complicated, how Father first got himself into debt and then proceeded to worsen his situation permanently, and as I was but a boy in my early and middle teens then, I did not much understand it. Besides, it was not then or ever Father’s way to provide people with the details of his business matters, so that most of what I know I learned years later and gleaned from others. He could not keep everything from us, of course. Especially since we, his family, had so often to cover for him and over time were called upon to make so many material sacrifices that were a direct result of the Old Man’s schemes. But I do not think that anyone — family member, friend, or business associate, or even Father’s own lawyers, when later he was suing and being sued — knew all the facts of his financial dealings. He tended to give out partial or contradictory information and sometimes even false information, all designed, or so it seemed, to keep his interrogator from asking further questions, as if somewhere at the bottom there were a secret fraud, when in fact there was none — it was only Father who was being fooled, and for the most part fooled by himself. He was deceived by his desires, actually, which is why, when it all came crashing down on his head, he blamed his own greed and vanity.

Early on, his secrecy had sprung from an ingrained sense of decorum and desire for privacy. Then for many years, when he was in flight from bankruptcy and, later, from the consequences of bankruptcy itself, he probably felt that secrecy was necessary to protect his family and business associates. “A man who is wholly candid about his finances, who opens his ledgers to anyone who asks, such a man abandons his responsibility to Others,”Father insisted, although he had arrived at this philosophy by a somewhat circuitous route. It served him well in the end, however, and others also. After Kansas and Harpers Ferry — when what had originally been Yankee manners, and then self-interested necessity, had become military policy — these habits of secrecy and occasional dissembling protected many of the people who were his chief supporters, and they may well have even saved the lives of some good men, like Frederick Douglass and Dr. Howe and Frank Sanborn.

It started back in the middle ’30s, after Father had closed down his tannery in New Richmond and returned to Hudson, Ohio, where, like so many other men of small money and big ideas, he got drawn into buying land and farms on easy credit and unsecured loans. Of course, with hindsight one can say that it was inevitable and hardly inexplicable, and having found himself dangerously overextended, he should simply have cut his losses and gotten out. But the Old Man, once he had determined that optimism was realism, could not be shaken from his course. After all, just take a look around, he would say in those early days of the land boom. All over the Western Reserve, men clearly less intelligent and hard-working than he were getting fabulously rich. Why not jump in himself? And why not bring in friends and family, too? Share the coming harvest.

At first, however, and for a long time, he successfully resisted the temptation to join the general run to speculate on land with borrowed money. That was when optimism was not realism; it was fantasy, or worse. He saw it then as a sickness, the mentality of a stampeding herd. And he justified his resistance, typically, on moral grounds, on principle, fortified by the Bible. As in Deuteronomy 15:6: Thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow. As in Proverbs 22:7: Therichruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

Later, when he began to borrow, it was on principle then, too. He borrowed everywhere from everyone — from his father and brothers in Akron, from rich men and poor, banks, friends, and strangers. He had a well-deserved reputation for probity and honesty, and so great was his belief in his ability to take the measure of land (a not altogether unfounded belief: though self-taught, he was a skillful surveyor and possessed a sensitive, knowing eye for good farmland) and so attractive a talker was he that, once he set his mind to make a purchase, it was not difficult for him to convince others to become his partners and to loan him the money for his share of the partnership as well. From this side of the fence, however, he took to citing Luke 14: 28–30—the story of the man who tried to build a tower and did not have sufficient material to finish it and was mocked by his neighbors. And 2 Kings 6:4–6—the story of the borrowed iron axe-head that fell into the water and was made to float and was not lost. And also, from 2 Kings 4:1–7—the story of Elisha’s widowed daughter-in-law, whose sons were taken in bond by her creditors, so she borrowed many vessels from her neighbors, and the vessels were made to fill with oil, which were then sold to pay all her debts, even that for the borrowed vessels, freeing her sons and leaving the rest for her and her sons to live luxuriously on afterwards.

Sadly, Father’s Bible failed to warn him that the newly elected President, Martin Van Buren, would abruptly establish the National Bank and change the lending rules, causing the famous Panic of ’37. Thanks to Van Buren’s National Bank, soon all the small-monied borrowing men like Father were left holding packets of worthless paperpiles of currency issued by the various states and high mountains of mortgaged titles to vast tracts of western land and farms that could be neither sold for one-tenth their costs nor rented for the interest due on the unsecured loans that had purchased them barely a year before. The lucky fellows and the bankers and politicians who understood the system and thus had been able to anticipate the sudden deflation of value that inevitably follows hard upon a speculative boom, those men sold off their properties early and high and walked away counting their profits. Within weeks, they were doing the President’s bidding, calling in their neighbors’ loans and hiring sheriffs to seize land, houses, livestock, and even the personal property of the foolishly stubborn men who persisted in believing that the decline was only a temporary aberration. For those men, men like John Brown, surveyor, tanner, and small-time stockman, the collapse of the land boom was catastrophic.

Thus, by the summer of ’39, Father — who two years earlier had thought himself practically an Ohio land baron, who in his mind had laid out an entire town on five thousand mortgaged acres overlooking the Cuyahoga River, where he expected soon to see a government-financed canal that would be as enriching to him as the Erie had been to developers in western New York; a penniless man who owned title to two mortgaged farms he did not live on and one, the Haymaker Place, that he loved and hoped to make his family estate one day; a one-time tanner of hides raising thoroughbred horses and blooded Saxony sheep, who rode about like a squire in a carriage behind a matched pair of gray Narragansetts, all this on borrowed money — that man suddenly, inexplicably, found himself hounded by bondsmen, banks, process-servers, and sheriffs.

Bound as much by principle and Biblical text as when he had stayed out, Father with foolish consistency covered his borrowings with more borrowing and dropped deeper and deeper into debt. In ‘37 and ‘38, with everyone else rushing to sell short and salvage what little property he could, Father, almost alone, refused to get out. “This too shall pass, children, this too shall pass,” he would say. “We must be patient.” But all his promissory notes, which had been piled on top of one another even higher than any of us had imagined, were coming due. One by one, his titles began to be seized, titles that he had used to guarantee second loans, which afterwards he had used for the purchase of still other properties, until finally it began to look as though he would lose all his plots of land, his canal-side properties, also his carriage and Narragansetts and the blooded stock. Even the house we lived in, the Haymaker Place, was under siege, the sweet little farmstead that we older boys and Mary, sister Ruth, and the younger children had been managing well enough to keep the family adequately fed and clothed, while Father raced around the countryside frantically trying to keep his paper empire from being blown utterly away.

He was in those days more frightened than I had ever seen him before or afterwards. The growing violence of his words alarmed all who heard him, especially Mary and us children. The more frantic and frightened he became, the more reliant on his Bible for guidance and on his moral force for instruction he became, but now his discourse was a tangle of contradictory quotations and maxims that even he could not unravel. “This prolonged tribulation, if it be the will of Providence, must be endured with cheerfulness and true resignation,” he instructed us. “We must try to trust in Him who is very gracious and full of compassion and of almighty power, for those that do not will be made ashamed. We must not be ashamed, children! Remember that Ezra, the prophet, when himself and the capitivity were in a strait, prayed and afflicted himself before God. So must we go and do likewise.”

Thus, though we had come to dread the announcement of any new scheme or plan to make money and at last turn things around, it was with barely concealed relief that we greeted his decision to round up a herd of miscellaneous cattle from all over the county and drive it east to Connecticut, where there was a ready, cash-paying market operated by the agency of Wadsworth & Wells, a company that Father had dealt with successfully in the past. In short order, he managed to put together a sizeable herd of cows owned mostly by Grandfather and several of Father’s friends, with seventeen head of our own, all but our last two milch cows. He drove his cattle aboard the barge at Ashtabula, and we waved him off and, when he was out of sight, happily embraced one another, glad to see him gone from us for a while, so that we could re-gather our wits and reclaim a shared sense of reality.

When he went east in ’39, Father’s real plan, which he did not reveal to those who had entrusted him with their cattle, was not merely to raise cash by selling livestock to Wadsworth & Wells, but also while there to negotiate still further loans in New York or, if necessary, up in Boston, to cover his growing losses back in Ohio. It took him only a few days to fail in New York; bankers there had already withdrawn all speculative loans from the Western Reserve and were not about to risk more. Directly, he went on to tap the more deeply rooted money trees in Boston, and when he returned to complete his cattle-dealing in Hartford, although lugging an empty bucket, he was once again brightly optimistic. He never said who, but someone up there had allowed Father to believe that within a few days, a week at the most, of his return to Hartford, he would receive an unsecured loan of five thousand dollars. I suspect his supposed benefactor was a wealthy abolitionist like Mr. Stearns or even Dr. Howe, whose wife, the poet, was rumored to be an heiress, but it might have been a Yankee banker still looking to extract titles to western lands from a bumpkin in need, a rich man only temporarily deluded as to his own best interests by Father’s enthusiasm, naïveté, and evident honesty.

Five thousand dollars. The figure is important. This was the amount for which Father had recently been sued by the Western Reserve Bank of Warren, Ohio, for having defaulted on several loans. Judgement had been found against him, and unable to pay even a portion of the debt, he was being threatened with outright bankruptcy or jail. At the last minute, an old friend from Akron, Mr. Amos Chamberlain, had kindly taken over the note for him. To guarantee that loan, the Old Man had written Mr. Chamberlain a note against the Haymaker farm. What he did not tell Mr. Chamberlain or the Western Reserve Bank was that the Haymaker title had earlier been used to guarantee any number of additional loans of money for the purchase of other large plots of land along the Cuyahoga River. It had been done pursuant to the digging of the proposed Ohio-to-Pittsburgh canal, which, unfortunately, had ended up going in further west, near Cleveland. It was another of his schemes gone bad, still unpaid, and one of the bottom cards in Father’s shaky house of cards.

A few days passed, and no money arrived from Boston. A week. Then another. Every few hours, Father walked from the office of Wadsworth & Wells, which he was using as his headquarters, to the post office, only to return empty-handed, puzzled, increasingly angered, and very frightened. At best, he would lose everything: the farm and livestock, the house and all its furnishings — everything! How would he feed his poor babies? How could he face his family and friends? Then sometime during the afternoon of June 14, 1839, Mr. Wadsworth went into the office of his company and discovered that the sum of five thousand dollars had been removed from the cash box. As the box was undamaged and still locked, he knew at once who had taken it. Besides Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Wells, only Father, their trusted agent, who might now and then need a few dollars in order to help conduct their business, had a key.

I do not know what my father was thinking while he stood that day in the empty office, counting out the money. He could not possibly have gotten away with it. And the betrayal! He was almost a partner, a trusted confidant of Messrs. Wadsworth and Wells, their reliable procurer of western cattle, one of the most knowledgeable and honest stockmen they had ever worked with. He must have felt like a child who has long protected one lie with another and has woven an entire fabric of lies, laying one strand atop and under the other, and has come eventually to long for the truth to stand revealed, not because he loves the truth, but because exposure will bring an end to the agonizing labor of weaving a world of falsehoods. To get it over with, simply to make sense of his daily life, the child finally tells an utterly outrageous lie, one that cannot be believed. With a single lie, he overthrows the entire false world and reinstates the true. The theft from Wadsworth & Wells was like that, for nothing Father could say to explain it would be believed by them, and for a single moment, as he reached into the cash box and counted out the five thousand dollars, Father must have been that child. He closed the box and placed it back inside the cabinet and locked both.

At once, he sent the money off to his friend Mr. Chamberlain in Ohio, who would on receipt of it relinquish back to Father the title of the Haymaker Place. All was well again. Until, of course, later that evening, when Messrs. Wadsworth and Wells both presented themselves at the door of Father’s room at his Lawrence Street boarding house. When they knocked, Father, in what he regarded as a remarkable coincidence, as if the Lord were introducing him back to himself, happened to be reading in his Bible, John, Chapter 10: He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.

Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Wells said that they had come to his chamber, not to accuse Mr. Brown of theft, but simply to ask into his use of the five thousand dollars. They thought that he must have needed it to make a large purchase for them, and they wished to know what it was.

He did not lie; he could not; he told them straight out: he had taken it for his own use. But it was only a temporary removal, he insisted, for he fully expected to receive the same amount in hours or, at the most, days, from a party up in Boston. This was true enough. And had he not at the same time believed that he was owed that much and more by Wadsworth & Wells, he said, money owed for the eventual sale of the cattle he had delivered to them from the west, he would have felt considerable anguish and remorse for having removed the money prematurely. But while he was truly ashamed of having gotten himself into a situation whereby he needed the money desperately and at once, he felt on the other hand no shame for having actually taken the money, no guilt.

Now, though he no longer owed five thousand dollars to his old friend Amos Chamberlain, he owed it instead to Wadsworth & Wells, who, with some justification, felt that while they may not have been exactly robbed of it, neither had they willingly loaned it. At that awful moment of his discovery, seated before his stern, skeptical discoverers, the Old Man had no choice but to comply with their demand that he sign over to them, contingent upon his return of their five thousand dollars, the one remaining property in his name, his beloved Haymaker Place, which sheltered his wife and children.

Meanwhile, the expected money from the mystery loaner in Boston did not materialize. I suspect that it had never been more than a mild promise merely to consider his request, but the Old Man, when he wanted, could make a polite rejection seem its opposite. They waited a week more, and finally Mr. Wadsworth declared that he and Mr. Wells would hold whatever monies they got for selling the herd of cattle against his eventual repayment of the money he owed them or until the sale of the Haymaker property. They had no way of knowing the true value of the farm, of course, or whether it had any prior liens on it, so they simply used the cattle as collateral. And they told him that, regretfully, they would no longer be able to rely on him as their western agent.

At that point, Father had no choice but to leave Hartford and make his somber way homeward. Thus he returned to us a humiliated man and poorer by far than when he had left to put his affairs at last in good order. Poorer, more desperate, and deeper in debt than ever, this time to men who, unlike Mr. Chamberlain, unlike Grandfather and our other relatives, friends, and neighbors back in Ohio, had no particular interest in protecting John Brown and his family. There was nothing for it then but a steady worsening of his affairs. Like Napoleon in Russia, he had advanced too far beyond his meager resources, so that he could no longer retreat back to a safe base, there to wait out the winter storms. Instead, he would have to slog and thrash his way forward, a blind man in a blizzard. And so he did for the rest of his life, dragging us along behind.

Back in Hudson, like a man switching a single pea beneath three shells, the Old Man managed to forestall disaster and hold on to the Haymaker Place a while longer, until the following year, the summer of ’40. After much legal wrangling and suits and counter-suits leading all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court, a final judgement had been found. Bankruptcy was unavoidable. This time, all Father’s debts were being called in, and his beloved old Haymaker Place had at last to be abandoned.

To his further horror, the original lien against the place had been called in by the bank and sold at auction, with Mr. Amos Chamberlain the eventual buyer, and the proceeds from the sale, once Father’s loans from the bank were covered, were to be paid against the sum owed Wadsworth & Wells. Mr. Chamberlain, in what Father saw as an unforgiveable betrayal, had managed to find the cash to offer the bank eight thousand five hundred dollars for the place. “If the man had that sort of money’ Father fumed, “he might’ve loaned it to me and let me keep the farm, so that I might feed my family!”

Blinded by his anger, Father was unable to accept the reality of the situation. He refused to turn the farm over to Mr. Chamberlain, and as a consequence, one warm day the county sheriff and his deputies came out to the farm to put us off it. The Old Man viewed the Haymaker Place as his last stand. “I need this farm! I must hold it and work here, if I’m ever going to provide my creditors with their just due,” he insisted. In recent months, he had abandoned all vain fantasies of spinning gold from straw and had wisely resumed tanning hides on the property, his most reliable means of support over the years, where his labor and skills and those of his sons were sufficient to turn a small profit. Thus he had come to imagine for the first time in years a realistic way of slowly working himself out of debt, one hard-earned dollar at a time. But he needed the house and its outbuildings and the stands of shagbark hickory that surrounded the farm in order to accomplish it.

The prospect of losing the place put him into a mindless frenzy. “Boys, we will fight them to the death! A man must defend his property!” he declared to us that June morning. “It’s an old story. If it can be made merely to appear that Naboth the Jezreelite has blasphemed God and the King, then it will be perfectly right and good for Ahab to possess his vineyard! So reasoned wicked men against Naboth thousands of years ago, boys, and so they reason against me today!”

We were all at midday dinner in the house, Oliver but a baby then, the kitchen full of babies, it seemed — Charles, who would die in the terrible winter of ’43, and Salmon and Watson, and little Sarah, who was six and who would also die in that winter of ’43. Fred, then a sweetly meditative child with none of his later turbulence, was nine; Ruth was but eleven and already performing the labors of a grown woman; and there was I, at sixteen, like a large, housebound dog, simple-mindedly excited by the loud, rough noise of Father’s voice; and Jason, two years older, silently observing, placid, skeptical but loyal; and John, the eldest, eager to display his superior understanding of the situation and his willingness to stand fast with the Old Man.

Father’s voice cracked and split in the fire of his feelings. “I warned them, I told them this morning at the bank, warned them straight out. I told them that I would shoot down their agents, if they came to take my home and land from me, and I swear, that’s exactly what I will do! I wanted peace, but this.. this Ahab” he spat, “will not let me have it!”

Mary — I think of her now, but I did not think of her then — poor, distressed Mary, with all her small children to tend to, while her husband raged and his elder sons urged him on, must have desired then, as so many times before and later, all the way to the terrifying end days in Virginia, just to be rid of men altogether. She knew better than any of us that there was no way for our family to survive these difficult times except by means of patient, quiet application of our daily labors, and while the Old Man appeared often to agree, when he became frustrated or frightened he could not keep his anger or his fantasies leashed. And we older boys took our lessons from him.

Father loaded his musket and instructed John, Jason, and me to do the same. Then we four marched from the house down to the town road, where there was at the edge of the property an old, low log cabin built by the original Haymaker, which we used now as a storage shed for hickory bark and lumber. “Here we shall make our stand,” he pronounced, and commanded us to spend our time fortifying the structure with whatever boards and timbers there were lying around. He had work at the tannery and at the house yet to finish, he said, and would protect the property from there. He ordered us to stay at the cabin night and day. Ruth or he himself would bring us food and fresh clothing. “And if the rascals show their faces, boys, fire once into the air to signal me, and I’ll come a-running. They’ll see then that we are serious about this!” he declared, and he was off, loping back up the slope to the house, leaving us alone in our outpost.

“Well, if the sheriff does show;’ Jason soberly said, “let’s just be damned sure he knows we’re only firing in the air.”

John agreed. “That’s all the Old Man wants anyhow.” His voice had a quaver to it. “He knows that when they see we’re serious about defending our home, they’ll likely back off

“Yeah, well, I’d like to make it count,” I said. “I’d like to take one of them Ahabs down.” I aimed my musket out the window of the cabin. “Just like that. Boom! Take down the chief. One shot, and the fight’s over. That’s how you do it, y’ know.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” John said. “Come on, give us a hand. We’ve got to turn this cabin into Father’s idea of Ticonderoga.”

“Or Zion” Jason added.

The afternoon of the first day passed quickly, and then Ruth brought us our supper, and darkness fell. We kept watch throughout the night and slept in four-hour shifts. The next day, we busied ourselves building a sort of palisado of old boards and odd-sized timbers around the front of the cabin, a peculiar-looking wall that seemed to have no military or domestic function, for it was incapable of keeping anyone out or in. It was more imagined than real, but the entire episode was more imagined than real.

Which made it perfect for me. I kept my musket close by while I worked, and every now and then dropped my work, grabbed up the gun, and, crouching low to the ground, aimed into the nearby bushes. “Boom! Got ’im! Victory for the Browns! Death to the invaders!”

By the end of the second day, we had grown bored and restless; even I. Father came down from the tannery, where he was hard at work filling orders for hides, and bucked us up, or at least me, with talk of bloody defiance, and then strode back to the house again. We were not altogether unhappy to be freed of our usual tasks at the tannery, but we were growing impatient for action.

Early the following morning, we were up and about the cabin, grumbling over the uselessness of our charge. “This whole affair is just another of the Old Man’s damned fantasies!’ Jason said. He was lumped up in a corner of the cabin, sulking in his blanket. “I’ll be glad when he gives it up. Even if it means we have to go back to scraping hides.”

John, who was then a sometime student of business accounting and commerce in a school over in Akron, sat on the dirt floor by the window with a book in his lap, studying his lessons. “There’s nothing to be done anyhow. The law’s the law”,John said without looking up. “The Old Man just takes a while to realize it. He’ll come around eventually. He always does.”

I stood at the open doorway, where, looking right, I could see along the broad road from Hudson, and, on the left, Father trudging down the lane from the house with our breakfast in a sack, hot corn bread, I hoped, and plum jam and boiled eggs. Father apparently had already been hard at work in the tannery, for, despite the morning coolness, he was not wearing his usual coat and shirt, only his red undershirt, with his trousers held up by wide suspenders.

He was fifty or sixty yards from the cabin, when I heard horses coming along the road and turned and saw a group of men approaching, three or four on horseback and several more in a light trap drawn by a pair of roans. One of the riders I recognized as the county sheriff, another as Mr. Chamberlain, the newly despised new owner of our farm. I also recognized several of the riders as Mr. Chamberlain’s sons. The men in the trap I assumed were deputies. It was an impressive force, and they appeared well-armed.

Still some distance uphill from us, Father saw them, too. “Shoot them if they come off the road and step a single foot onto our land, boys!” he hollered, and I ducked into the cabin, where John was already scrambling for his musket.

Jason peered out the window that faced the road and said, “Oh, no. They’ve come.” John and I swiftly stood side by side at the door and made our guns visible to the riders, who were now pulling up before the cabin and our rickety wall, although they were not yet on our land, so we were not obliged to shoot. Father, in his undershirt and galluses, was a ways off but coming on with purposeful stride and a steadily reddening face. He had no gun in hand, only our poor breakfast.

“Shoot that traitor Amos Chamberlain, shoot him first, boys!” he shouted. “He’s the villainous one! Spare the others — they’re just doing their legal duty!”

I took dead aim at the forehead of the bearded, bulky Mr. Chamberlain atop his chestnut stallion. Then I heard a rustling behind me and turned and saw Jason clambering out the rear window of the cabin. He had left his musket leaning against the wall. In a second, he was gone, disappeared into the heavy brush. “Jason’s fled!” I whispered to John.

“He’s not stupid,” John said in a low voice, and I saw that my brother had lowered his musket and was standing forward in the portal. Then, with his gun pointed peacefully at the ground, he stepped outside the cabin and walked slowly towards the intruders.

Unsure of what to do now, I kept my gun trained on Mr. Chamberlain and looked to my left towards Father, as if for instructions. Up the sloping lane behind him, I could see my stepmother with the infant Peter in her arms and the seven younger children beside her on the wide porch of the white, two-storey house. Salmon and Watson were holding on to the dogs, and Ruth had in her hands a large wooden bowl. The unpainted barn and tannery shed and the sheep pens were off to the right of the house, with the vegetable garden on the left and then the apple orchard and Father’s mulberry trees and the corn field further on. Rising slowly behind the house were wide rolling green meadows bordered by leafy oak and chestnut trees and our two remaining milch cows and the mares grazing in the shade by the stone wall at the near edge of the hickory forest. It truly was a lovely farm, the prettiest place we had ever lived in, Father’s last remaining tie to an orderly life.

Slowly, I lowered my gun and stepped forward beside John, as Father came up, still holding the sack with our breakfast. I remember smelling the corn bread, stronger even than the smell of the sweating horses and men grouped before us.

“H’lo, Brown,” the sheriff said, and he cleared his throat and spat a stream of tobacco. He was a tall, mustachioed man with a paunch the size of a wicker basket. “I guess you know why we’re here. We don’t need to have no trouble. This can all go peacefully.”

“There’ll be no peace in this place, so long as that man insists on taking my house and land!” Father said, pointing fiercely at Mr. Chamberlain, who puffed his considerable size up and chewed his thick lips in fury.

The sheriff went on calmly, as if Father had said nothing. “You got to give it over, Brown. Otherwise, I’m going to have to place you under arrest. The law is clear here, Brown. Any further quarrels about deeds or title you got with Mister Chamberlain here you can settle in court on your own later. Right now, though, the place and its contents is legally his. You and your family, you got to clear out.”

“We will not leave our land!”

“It’s not your land anymore, Brown!” Mr. Chamberlain shouted down.

“You won’t pack up your family and personal household articles and go peacefully?” the sheriff said.

“He can’t take no household articles!” Mr. Chamberlain cried. “They’re all going to be auctioned off, soon’s he clears out. He knows all this! He’s just stalling till he can sneak off with property that isn’t legally his no more.”

“Be quiet, Amos,” the sheriff said. “One more time, Brown. Make it easy on yourself and your family.”

“In order to take my land,” Father declared, lapsing, as he often did when his feelings were high, into Quaker speech, “thou must first squash me and mine beneath thy foot! I will not help thee in this heinous act!”

“Oh, dammit, then. You’re under arrest, Mister Brown,” the sheriff said, and he ordered Father to step up peacefully into the trap. “Don’t make me put irons on you, Brown. This is a tough enough business as it is, putting folks off their land, without you making it any tougher.”

Then, to my shock and sharp disappointment, Father’s shoulders sagged. He meekly asked if he could first retrieve his shirt and coat and his Bible from the house.

“You let him back inside that house’ Mr. Chamberlain warned, “he might decide to make a stand. There’s no telling what he’ll do to it. You’ve got him now, so take him in.”

Father looked plaintive and hurt. “But I must have my coat and shirt. I am not properly dressed, sir. And my Bible. I need it.”

The sheriff hesitated a few seconds, but then said, “No, c’mon, Brown. One of your boys here can bring your coat and so on, they can bring it to you later. I got to lock you up.”

“A-hab.” Father said the word slowly and gave it the shading of a curse. But all the force seemed to have gone out of him. He handed me the sack with our breakfast and slowly stepped up into the trap and took a seat behind the driver.

We stood there by our ramshackle wall, John and I, and watched the men ride off with their sad, slumped prisoner. He sat in the wagon in his red undershirt, miserable, humiliated, gazing back at us. I waved goodbye to him, but he made no sign.

Finally, when they had gone from sight, Jason stepped cautiously around the side of the cabin and came and joined us.

“Jason, you’re a bloody coward!” I shouted at him.

“Sure. You bet I am.”

John said, “Let it go, Owen. Jason did right. The Old Man had to lose this one. And he knew it. He was just blustering. He lost it way back. No sense making a fight over it now. They’ll let him out by tomorrow morning, if not before.”

“What’s in the bag? Breakfast, I hope. I’m hungry as a hogl’ Jason said, and reached for the sack in my hand.

I jerked it away and then swung it at him, smacking him on the forehead.

“Hey, hey, hey!” John said. He took the bag from me, and the two of them walked slowly away, up the lane towards the house, dividing the johnnycake and boiled eggs between them, while I hung back, standing alone by the side of the road, fighting off a boy’s angry tears.

But by the same afternoon, Father was back. He walked down the road and up the lane to the house, where, with as much dignity as he could muster in his undershirt, he somberly greeted us all around. Then he marched straight to the tannery, where he had hung his shirt and coat on a peg, and when he had decorously dressed himself in his accustomed clothing, as if preparing to go to church, he told us, in a somber, measured way, what had happened. The sheriff had delivered Father to the Akron jail, had even locked him inside a cell, but then had released him at once on his own recognizance, pledged to appear at trial later in the month. Mr. Chamberlain had agreed not to prosecute, so there would be no trial, as long as by that time we had departed from the farm with no more personal property than we were permitted under the bankruptcy proceedings. “We must obey the law, children. Hard as it is,” he said.

“But we were supposed to take a stand!” I declared. “You said we’d stand and fight. I was willing to shoot the man down, Father. I was! I was all ready and had the man in my sights. Jason, he took off like a coward, but John and I—”

“Enough!” Father said. “I am a fool. That’s all. It’s my fault that we’ve come to this terrible a pass. If you want to shoot someone, Owen, shoot me.” He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder, then removed it and walked ahead of us to the house, to sort and separate and inventory all our farm and household goods for the auction.

Even today, so many years later, more than a whole lifetime later, I can recall every one of the items exempted from public auction. They were the articles that we carefully separated from the house and barn and put out onto the porch and yard and then packed into our wagon one by one, and later unpacked and packed again, over and over, hauling them through the next nine years by cart, canal boat, and on our own backs, from one temporary domicile to another, all the way to Springfield, Massachusetts, and eventually to the cold, hard hills of North Elba, where, at last, we set them down and they stayed put.

There at the Haymaker farm, I followed Father like a scribe from one end of the crowded porch to the other and across the front yard, writing in a tablet, while he strictly enumerated each of the articles and goods that the law permitted us to own and carry off. I made two copies of the list, one to be delivered to Mr. Chamberlain, signed by John Brown and notarized, and one for ourselves, which, for a long time, wherever we lived, Father kept posted on the kitchen wall, as if it were a reminder of his wealth, instead of his poverty.

For years, every morning, afternoon, and evening, we passed by this list, until it was engraved in our memories, like the books of the Bible or the names of the English kings. We older boys, especially Jason, could recite them like an alphabet, and often did, to the amusement of Mary and the younger children and to Father’s slight consternation — although he surely saw the joke, for he could have removed the list from the wall at once, if hed wanted.

10 Dining Plates

1 set of Cups & Saucers

1 set Teaspoons

2 Earthen Crocks

1 Pepper Mill

1 Cider Barrel

4 Wooden Tails

6 Bedsteads

1 Writing Desk

4 Blankets

1 Wash Tub

1 pr. Flat Irons

Also, these provisions:

1 bushel Dried Apples

20 bushels Corn

15 gals. Vinegar

8 bushels Potatoes

1 bushel Beans

20 gals. Soap

150 lbs. Pork

10 lbs. Sugar

These books:

11 Bibles & Testaments

1 vol. Beauties of the Bible

1 vol. Flints Surveying

1 vol. Kush

1 vol. Church Members’ Guide

36 Miscellaneous Works

These “articles and necessaries”:

2 Mares

2 Halters

2 Hogs

19 Hens

1 Mattock

1 Pitchfork

1 Brandinglron

1 Handsaw

4 Old Axes

2 Beaming Knives

2 Roping Knives

2 Ink Stands

4 Slates

4 cords of Bark

2 Saddles

1 ton of Hay

19 Sheep pledged to S. Perkins

1 Shovel

1 Harrow

1 Plane

1 Log Chain

1 Crow Bar

2 Milch Cows

2 Hoes

1 Iron Wedge

1 pr. Sheep Shears

3 Pocket Knives

4 Muskets with Powder, Caps & Balls

And this clothing:

2 Overcoats

5 Coats

10 Vests

12 prs. Pantaloons

26 Shirts

10 Women’s and Girls’ Dresses

3 Shirts

2 Cloaks

4 Shawls

8 Womens and Children’s Aprons

5 prs. Boots

3 prs. Shoes

13 prs. Socks & Stockings

7 Stocks & Handkerchiefs

4 Bonnets

1 Hat

5 Palmlea/Hats

8 Men’s and Boys’ Cloth Caps

1 Fur Cap

1 Leather Cap

Such were all the worldly goods of a farming family of thirteen people, and over the following years our inventory did not vary much, for we did not add to our property: that was quite impossible, except here and there, with the addition of a revolver, for instance, or a few more cows or hogs. We simply replaced what wore out or got eaten.

Chapter 4

Certain things said and described in my last missive have prompted in me fresh thoughts and memories of how we as a family loved Father, and how I in particular loved him. But from the tender shape of your inquiry when we met, I deduce that you and Professor Villard believe my father to have been a great man. I’m not so sure I agree.

Perhaps my opinion on this question is of no account here, for I was never in a position to take his measure, except as his son. And maybe we mean different things by greatness. I wonder if you mean something more like fame. For me, Father could have been great without having been famous. Nonetheless, I can understand your position. You have a historian’s perspective.

To you, it matters not that during his lifetime, like all abolitionists, Father was a much despised man, and that not just slaveholders hated him, but Whigs as much as Democrats; that he was hated by white people generally; and then, after Kansas and Harpers Ferry and during the Civil War years and beyond, even to today, that he was reviled by Southerners and Copperheads and even by many who had long supported the abolitionist cause, Republicans and the such. Nor, very probably, does it matter to you that he was also widely admired and even loved, loved passionately and almost universally by Negroes and by the more radical white abolitionists, and that he was celebrated and sung by all the most famous poets, writers, and philosophers here and abroad. What matters to you is that between those two extreme poles of opinion concerning John Brown, since December 12, 1859, every American man, woman, and child has held an opinion of his own. So, yes, Miss Mayo, if greatness is merely great fame and is defined by an ability to arouse strong feelings of an entire people for many generations, then Father, like Caesar, like Napoleon and Lincoln, was indeed a great man.

But who amongst your new, young historians and biographers, even amongst those who loathe him or think him mad, has considered the price paid for that sort of greatness by those of us who were his family? Those of us who neither examined him from a safe distance, as you do, nor stood demurely in his protective shadow, as we have so often been portrayed, but who lived every single day in the full glare of his light?

We were, after all, none of us dullards or witless. Every one of us Browns was of the energetic, sanguinary type, stubborn in thought and garrulous in speech. Why, even poor Fred, for all his innocent simplicity, when grown was a formidable figure of a man, independent and capable of astonishing acts: witness his bravery at the Battle of Black Jack in Kansas; witness his shocking self-mutilation. And both of Father’s wives, my mother, Dianthe, and my stepmother, Mary, were willful, extremely capable women of considerable intelligence and sound judgement. How else could they have managed the hard life that Father imposed upon them?

We were not easily cowed or led. We rose early, worked hard, and talked constantly. We reacted intensely and elaborately to every person, idea, and opinion that passed into our ken, to everything that occurred in the private life of each member of the family and that we heard about in the larger world as well. Whatever passed for news in those days, especially if it in the slightest way concerned the slavery question, went discussed at our table and afterwards around the fire and while we rode into town for supplies and worked in the fields and tannery. We talked and talked and talked, and we argued with one another; even the smaller children, though they could barely form sentences yet, were encouraged to speak out on great topics and small. And at night in our beds, lying in the darkness of the loft, we continued talking, arguing, explaining, with lowered voices now, slower, rumbling towards sleep, one by one breaking off from the discussion of right and wrong, true and false, until one voice only remained, speculative, exploratory, tentative, and then, at long last, silence.

Only to be broken at first light, usually by Father at the bottom of the stairs, calling to begin the day: Rise and shine, children!. Rise and shine! He’d already be up and dressed, with his Bible open on the table where he’d had his few moments of solitary study. And the round of the day would begin again, like a great wheel spinning, and its prime mover was not the sun — it only seemed so — but Father and his words and his bright, gray-eyed face. For, compared to the rest of us, no matter how hotly burned our individual flame, Father’s was a conflagration. He burned and burned, ceaselessly, it seemed, and though we were sometimes scorched by his flame, we were seldom warmed by it.

True, I loved the man beyond measure. He shaped me and gave me a life that took on great meaning. Many was the time, however, when I grew angry and wished to flee from him and his harsh, demanding God. Yet I stayed. It’s strange, but regardless of the pain and self-recrimination that my inability to worship Father’s God caused me, during all those years when other young men were separating themselves off from their fathers and mothers and establishing their own households, often far away in the West, more than any other single thing, it may well have been my discomfiting apostasy itself that kept me at his side. I was not as intelligent or skilled as some of my brothers and sisters — as Jason, for instance, who, besides being saintly in his moral sensitivity, was an almost preternaturally clever mechanic and agronomist. And compared to Ruth, whose emotions were consistently of an even and balanced nature, I was turbulent and changeable and sometimes truculent. Unlike the eldest of us, John, who had a deep, philosophical cast of mind, I seemed often shallow and merely pragmatic. Thus I was an ordinary fellow struggling with a tangled, profoundly conflicted set of views and feelings, and I came late, slowly, and only partially, and in fits and starts, to a clear understanding of the true nature of my relation to Father and to the family as a whole, and I just as often lost my grasp on the subject as I discovered it. I was like Jonah, it sometimes seemed, fleeing not God’s wrath but His will and His fierce, irrefutable logic. I cannot speak for the others, of course, but we often had to console one another to keep ourselves from falling into despair because of having temporarily lost Father’s approval. To a surprising degree, we who fell away from belief in Father’s God were able to do so, perhaps were invited to do so, because we were stuck with Father himself for a God, and try as we might, we could no more escape our god than he could his. Especially I.

It is ironic, then, that Father regarded as his supreme failure his inability to bring all of us children to share his belief. We were godly enough in our comportment; we were pious. But we would not believe. Even some of his daughters, as they became adults, would not believe. Although, unlike us boys, they did not think they should tell him of it. Perhaps because they were women and had more faith than we males in the usefulness of secrecy and decorum, perhaps because they were kinder than we — regardless, for all of us, it was as if Father’s own light burned so brightly that it eclipsed the Sun that shone on him. Thus it came to seem to us that it shone on him alone. And because from him we received only reflected light, as from the moon, we were not always so much warmed by it as merely illuminated.

There did come a time, however, when I arrived at an understanding and got a glimpse of the cost of the only path through life that was not revealed to us solely by Father’s light. It was in the fall of ’46,1 remember, and Father was out east alone, in Springfield, establishing his warehousing scheme for Mr. Simon Perkins, of whom you have no doubt already heard. We were then living on Mr. Perkins’s farm in Akron, not as servants, exactly, but at his sufferance, which Father preferred to think of as a partnership.

Ruth was seventeen years old that fall, a blooming young woman whose sprightly company was much sought after by the young fellows in the neighborhood, for her good sense, her good humor, and her broad-faced good looks. Not including Fred, who was sixteen years old and more or less looked after himself, there were six young children then at home — the youngest being Amelia, or Kitty, as we called her, who was barely one year old. Consequently, Ruth was obliged to be constantly at work with Mary, caring for the younger children and managing the house. Oliver was only six years old, but the other boys, Salmon, Watson, and Fred, were, like me, tending Mr. Perkins’s — and, as Father would have it, John Brown’s — large flock of sheep and running the farm. Mutton Hill was our affectionate name for the place, and an appropriate one, for Mr. Perkins’s flock numbered close to two hundred at that time.

All told, it was not a difficult operation, but there was no leisure time for any of us, a lack that was probably felt more by poor Ruth than by anyone else, due to her oncoming young womanhood and the presence there in Akron of a lively community of young men and women her age, all of them scouting and reconnoitering each other with the intensity and restlessness typical of rural youth in the throes of first rut. Despite her high spirits, Ruth was, as always, singularly pious and virtuous, but that did not mean she was not as moody and distracted as the other boys and girls of her acquaintance. Perhaps, because of her piety and virtue, she was even more agitated than the others. But who can say? I’m probably thinking of how I myself was at that age; I know next to nothing of what females experience.

Even so, I remember her seeming sometimes to smile absently and day-dream her way through those long, darkening fall afternoons and in the evenings to sigh a lot, letting loose with plaintive exhalations, as if pining for a lover far away. She had no lover, of course; and no one special was courting her then. But she was on occasion uncharacteristically withdrawn and thoughtful that summer and fall and was noticeably awkward at times, which was unusual enough for us to comment on, and when she bumped her head or stumbled over a doorstoop, we teased her for it.

I have been unfortunately blessed by having been placed in my life so as to witness firsthand most of the tragic and painful events that have afflicted my family, and thus have been too often obliged to carry the sad news to the others. This is no complaint, but there was a peculiar loneliness to the task, for neither was I the victim nor was I permitted to fall down in the dust and grieve: I had to speak as if I had no pain. For most of my life, it seems, that is how I was forced to speak. Perhaps that is why, when I grew older and the great events that marked our family were in the past, I withdrew to my mountain in California and remained silent altogether; and why now, when I know that I will never again have to witness the suffering of my loved ones, for they have all died or grown old themselves, I am compelled to tell so much.

On the occasion of which I speak here, I was obliged to write Father a terrible letter. I cannot now say exactly why I was chosen, but John and Jason were living apart from us for the first time, and there was no other adult at home then, except for Mary, whose letter-writing skills were not so developed as mine, and Ruth, who, as a principal in the awful news I was obliged to transmit, had been rendered incapable of speaking for herself, either in a letter or in person. Dear Father, I wrote with trembling hand. I do not know how to begin, for I must write to you of a dreadful event which occurred here the evening before last. Mary was upstairs in the girls’ bedroom with three-year-old Annie, who had been feeling poorly all day and appeared to be coming down with the croup, which had almost taken her off the previous spring, so it was an occasion for some alarm. I heard Mary’s footsteps overhead as she walked back and forth in the bedroom, from Annie’s small bed to the nightstand and dresser, easing the child into bed and towards sleep. Oliver and Salmon were in the second bedroom, the loft where we boys slept, practicing the wrestling holds that I had taught them earlier that summer, making their usual grunting sounds, as if they were ancient Greeks in an arena instead of little American boys grappling on the floor and colliding with the homemade furniture of a farmhouse bedroom. Watson was up there with them, seated on one of the beds, no doubt, instructing his younger brothers and criticizing their lack of wrestling skills. Fred and I were in the parlor, off the kitchen, where he sat by the front window, talking through the glass to the two little collies outside, who leapt about and barked at the sight of his friendly face, hoping to be let in where it was warm and where all their people had gone.

Having just set and lit the evening fire, I was seated next to it and, as I had made a trip that afternoon into town for feed and some nails, was preparing to enter into the account book the day’s expenses. Mr. Perkins was responsible for all costs associated with the keeping of the flock, and thus we kept scrupulous track of our expenses. I would have written to you at once, but there has been no time for it until now. Our little Kitty has died, a painful & tragic death with much suffering that thankfully she did not have to long endure. From where I sat, I could see around the corner the tin bathtub on the floor of the kitchen. The kitchen stove, however, was out of my line of sight, as were Ruth and the baby, Kitty, whom I could hear gurgling and burbling over one of the house cats.

Ruth was silent. Perhaps she, like Fred in the parlor, was looking out her window in the kitchen, looking not at the dogs begging Fred to let them come inside but at some imagined young man strolling down the pathway from the road from town, a beau come to call, a sweetheart of her own venturing forth to meet her large, boisterous, somewhat notorious family in the absence of the stern, demanding father, hoping to befriend the brothers and talk politely and deferentially to the woman of the house, so that when the father returned they would all speak well of the young man, and the father would then allow his eldest daughter to go walking with him. Kitty’s untimely death was the result of a simple, blameless accident. It was in the evening about 7o’clock & Ruth was heating water, so that the little children could bathe; and due to some business about the house, what with the usual commotion of the children & cooking supper, the water heated to a boil, and when Ruth ran to fetch the pot from the stove, she did not realize it was so hot & as a result she dropped it; & the boiling water splashed all over little Kitty, who was standing naked next to her waiting for her bath, and who evidently swallowed a great gulp of it when it spilled over her body, which was a mercy, for otherwise she would not have died so swiftly and would have lingered in terrible pain. I heard a horrible yowl, the cry of a wild animal, not that of a human being, and not so much a cry of pain as an enraged, savage shriek. That was the last utterance made by our baby sister Kitty, who had just begun to walk and say our names in ways that made us laugh and re-name ourselves, a blond, pink-skinned, robust child, made suddenly monstrous by her wild, final howl.

And then, just as suddenly, there was silence in the whole house. It was a terrible scene, Father, as you can no doubt imagine, horrible to us all; & especially to poor Ruth, who is suffering from unspeakable guilt & remorse. She has shut herself away from the rest of us, & weeps constantly, & when she does speak, it is to beg for forgiveness, especially of Mary, who is seriously shaken from the incident but asks me to say to you that she trusts in God and knows that Kitty is in heaven with Him. The silence may have lasted no more than a second, but it seemed to go on for a long while, before Ruth began to moan, “Oh-h-h, oh-h-h…,” a moan that, in contrast to Kitty’s howl, was purely, uniquely, pathetically human, a noise that is made by no creature but one who has been the direct cause of the death of a child.

Without having observed anything of the accident, except for the steaming skin of water that spread slowly across the floor towards the empty tin bathtub, I knew at once what had happened. And I believe that Fred knew, too, for we looked at one another for an instant, and his eyes were filled with unutterable sorrow. Ruth begged me at first not to write to you, so that she could be the one to bear this burden; but then said that she could not do it. So I have done it. By the time I reached the kitchen, Mary had come down the stairs, her face white with knowledge of what had already happened, and we saw Ruth standing in the far corner of the room with the scarlet body of the baby in her arms. The large black kettle, like a head with a gaping mouth, lay on its side on the floor next to the stove, the spilled, translucent water a carpet of snakes spreading around table legs and chairs.

Ruth’s eyes had rolled back, and she was making a guttural noise now, as if she were choking. The baby had already died. Its scalded, bright red body was emptied of spirit. It was a thing, a tiny, shriveled sack, and its small soul was bouncing wildly around the room near the ceiling, like a maddened, dying moth, a bit of quickly diminishing light. I held Mary by her shoulders, and together we approached Ruth, and very gently Mary reached out and took the body of her baby from her stepdaughter, turned, and walked away from us into the parlor, past poor Fred, who stood at the door with his hands over his ears, as if he still heard the baby’s howl. Silently, I came and stood before Ruth and held her in my arms, but she was insensible of my presence and went on making a choking noise, her head tilted back, eyes whitened and unseeing, as if she had fallen into a deep trance. She needs to hear from you, Father, the same as she has heard from Mary & me (& from John & Jason as well, for they have come down from Ashtabula). She needs to hear that you do not blame her for the death of Kitty. She blames herself more than enough for any of us to add a word. I tell you, it was not Ruth’s fault. She will never see it that way herself, however. It was a simple accident, & any one of us could have been the agency for it to happen as easily as was poor Ruth. Mary dressed the body of the child in a tiny flannel nightgown, wrapped it in a blanket, as if preparing it for sleep, and that same night I went into the barn, and as Father himself had done only a few years before, in that terrible winter of ’43, when four of his children sickened one by one and died, I built for the first time in my life a small pine coffin.

The boys, not knowing what else to do, followed me out to the barn and in the dim lantern light watched me in silence, as I had watched Father, the four of them standing there like somber acolytes, learning how to cut the boards to the correct size for the body of a child, so that the coffin would hold the child snugly, without confining it or bending it out of its natural shape, watching me carefully plane and fit the boards neatly together and drive the nails without damaging the wood and hinge the cover and latch it. We have buried little Kitty out behind the house, near where you planted the crab-apple trees last spring, & am making a proper marker for her that will say her dates and name, & any little motto, if you wish one for her. Mr. and Mrs. Perkins have been a great comfort to Mary & to the rest of us, & Mrs. Perkins has taken Annie & Oliver over to the big house for the time being, to make things easier for Mary; & many other local folks have come to the house with condolences Gsympathy. At the burial, I touched Ruth on the cheek with the fingertips of my right hand and put my claw of a left hand around her back and drew my sister close to me, as if to take into myself her grief and to share with her the shame she felt. The others at the graveside, our friends and neighbors, looked at us, and I was glad of that, for I wished them to see that all of us Browns were equally to blame for the death of our Kitty and that, therefore, no single one of us was to blame. I am sorry, Father, to be bringing you such terrible news. I hope that the business is going well. No particular problems with the flocks or the farm here. Your loving son,

Owen Brown

It was not until nearly a fortnight had passed that we heard from Father at last. Due to the inescapable daily requirements of our livestock and the farm, which honor no human tragedy, the life of the family had resumed its old patterns and routines and had connected back to its various larger cycles by then; and even Ruth had made a few tentative steps back into the fold, as it were, although she was a much altered young woman. She had become the sober, even melancholy woman that she would remain for most of her life thereafter, even during her happiest years, when she and Henry Thompson were courting up in North Elba and in the first year of their marriage, before Henry rode off with us to Kansas.

Father’s letter, arriving as it did after we had already commenced to accommodate our lives and feelings as best we could to the death of Kitty, was painful to read aloud, as was our custom with all his letters, and, later on, difficult for me to copy, as per his instructions, for Father had long since told us to be sure that all his letters were copied and saved, and as I had the best handwriting of any in the family at that time, the task usually fell to me. My dear afflicted Wife & Children, he wrote, and I wrote after him. I yesterday at night returned after an absence of several days from this place & am utterly unable to give any expression of feelings on hearing of the dreadful news contained in Owen’s letter of the 30th and Mr. Perkins’s of the 31st Oct. I seem to be struck almost dumb. Not likely, I thought. For I was angry at Father, not so much for his letter, which was about all he could have said under the circumstances and which was very much in his usual voice. I suppose I was angry at his not being present when we all, and especially Ruth, suffered from the death of little Kitty, so that not only did we have to endure the horror and pain of that event alone but we had to report it to him as well — for his judgement, his huge perspective, his words of beneficence or condemnation, as if he were some lord high sheriff and we were his serfs who had to account for the loss of one of our number — without mentioning in our account that she whom we had lost was an especially beloved child, without mentioning that the awful conditions of her death had inflicted lifelong pain and shame in the heart of one of us in particular.

None of this, of course, was Father’s fault; yet that did not hinder my anger, as I copied his letter into the green school notebook used for the purpose. One more dear, feeble child am I to meet no more till the dead, small & great, shall stand before God. This is a bitter cup, children, but a cup blessed by God: a brighter day shall dawn; & let us not sorrow, like those who have no hope. Oh, if only we who remain had wisdom wisely to consider & to keep in view our latter end. This, I knew, was a pointed reference to me and to John and Jason, for surely we were the ones who were obliged to “sorrow like those who have no hope” of ever being amongst the small and great standing before God. Our sorrow, mine and my brothers’, was the greater, Father implied, because as unbelievers we believed that we would not see poor Kitty again, and that was too bad, just too bad, and nobody’s fault but our own. According to Father, the brighter day was not ours to believe in, and thus we had no wisdom wisely to consider.

In normal circumstances, this difference between us and Father did not create any painful conflict; but when we, too, were suffering, when we ourselves were grieving, it only angered us that he regarded the ragged edge of our pain as merely a consequence of our moral failings. There was no telling him of this, however.

Oh, we could tell him of it, yes; but he could not hear us, his own belief was so powerful, so constantly clanging in his ears: with all those hosannas, halleluiahs, and simple hoo-rahs he was hearing, it was to his large, hairy ears as if nothing but a serpent’s hiss were coming from our mouths. Divine Providence seems to lay a heavy burden & responsibility on you in particular, my dear Mary; but I trust that you will be enabled to bear it in some measure, as you ought. I exceedingly regret that I am unable to return & be present to share your trials with you; but anxious as I am to be once more at home, I do not feel at liberty to return to Akron yet. I hope to be able to get away before very long; but cannot say when. These words I could barely transcribe without breaking off the point of my pen, and the tension in my hand caused me to spatter the paper with several ugly blots of ink. But he was not through. I trust that none of you will feel disposed to cast an unreasonable blame on my dear Ruth on account of the dreadful trial we are called to suffer; for if the want of proper care in each all of us has not been attended with fatal consequences, it is no thanks to us. With a cold fury in my heart, though I said nothing of it to anyone, I saw that Father could forgive Ruth only by including the rest of us in her blame, which, of course, allowed him to forgive no one. As he saw it, not just Ruth, but we, all of us, were guilty of wanting proper care, so that it was only the Lord’s will that had kept the rest of us from the fatal consequences of our sloth and inattention.

If I had a right sense of my habitual neglect of my family’s Eternal interests, I should probably go crazy from shame, he said, and I transcribed. And as he had apparently not gone crazy, were we to assume then that he did not have a right sense of his habitual neglect of his family’s Eternal interests? Was that his point? Or was he merely changing the subject, at which he was so skilled, in order to invite us to reassure him, to praise him, to be thankful that he was out there in Springfield looking after his family’s temporal, rather than Eternal, interests? I humbly hope that this dreadful, afflictive Providence will lead us all more properly to appreciate the amazing, unforeseen, untold consequences that hang upon the right or wrong doing of things seemingly of trifling account. Who can tell or comprehend the vast results for good or evil that are to follow the saying of one little word? Everything worthy of being done at all is worthy of being done in good earnest & in the best possible manner. Not that again, I said to myself and dutifully wrote his words into the tablet as if they were my own. Not more platitudes and maxims, not more of Ben Franklin’s rules for living. We are in middling health, & expect to write to some of you again soon. Our warmest thanks to Mr. & Mrs. Perkins & family. From your affectionate husband, & father,

John Brown

When I had finished transcribing the letter, I put the tablet away in the folder where we kept his papers, and we none of us read or spoke of the letter again. It was odd, for we had suffered numerous deaths in the family by then, and each of them had drawn us closer together; but the death of little Kitty caused me, and I think the rest of us as well, to withdraw ourselves from Father to a greater degree than any previous event or circumstance. Of course, here and there, now and again, one or the other of us had gone through a period of withdrawal from intimacy with Father, but it was almost always a solitary act, a brief and lonely rebellion. But on the occasion of Kitty’s death, we all as a group rebelled, even including Mary, and shut Father away from our feelings and conversations with one another for many weeks afterwards.

1 believe that I learned then for the first time that it was possible to oppose Father, to swell with anger against him and to walk away from his sputterings and recriminations, without any terrible cost to my own sense of worth as a man and without the crippling loneliness that I usually associated with opposing him. But I could not do it until the rest of the family marched with me. The awful irony is that we could never march against him unless one of us was capable of sacrificing another of us beforehand — as Ruth had sacrificed the baby Amelia, little Kitty. Only then could we stand against him and say to him, “Father, you do not understand.”

Yesterday, while searching through my cache of Father’s papers for the letters concerning the death of poor Kitty, I happened onto another long-forgotten transcription, which I am sure you have not read and which will show you an aspect of Father’s character that may surprise and even amuse you. It may also give you some further insight into the true nature of my relationship with Father, so that later, when I have told everything, you will believe me.

The document of which I speak, when it came to my hand, caused me unexpectedly to think back to the time when Father corked his face, as it were, and actually tried to pass himself off as a Negro. It was an audacious thing, but he was fully aware of that and did it anyhow. His ostensible purpose was to instruct and warn. He had carefully composed an essay entitled “Sambo’s Mistakes,” which he read many times over to any of us who would listen and after much hesitation finally submitted anonymously to the Negro editors of the Ram’s Horn, in Brooklyn, New York. It was not published, probably because it was seen for what it was — a white man in blackface telling Negroes how to behave. The rejection of his little essay infuriated Father, for he believed that he was saying things to Negroes that they ought to hear and rarely did, except when he himself told them in meetings or when invited to speak to the congregations of Negro churches. He explained that he had chosen to speak as Sambo because when he said these things to Negroes in whiteface, he was perceived strictly as a white man and thus was not truly heard. “Racialism infects everybody’s ears,” he said. “Negro ears as much as white.”

This was in the winter of ’48, after we had left Akron and were newly settled in Springfield, and I found the whole thing somewhat embarrassing then, although later on I came to see that in a sense, perhaps subconsciously, Father was advising and correcting himself as much as his Negro brethren. He was speaking his little narrative, in spite of his intentions to disguise himself, with his own genuine voice quite as much as when he wrote letters home and advised and corrected us. This may be of interest to you, for you were born long after Father’s death and can have no idea of how he sounded in actual conversation. Father’s voice, including his grammar and choice of words and his pacing, was more or less the same whether spoken aloud or written down on paper. It was uniquely his own — although I was often told that I myself spoke very much like him.

Earlier today, I carried Father’s original manuscript of “Sambo’s Mistakes,” from which I had made the “official” copy that he submitted to the Rum’s Horn, outside my cabin and read it in the dying light of day. It is perhaps the nearness of our voices, his and mine, that enabled me to recall his voice exactly when I read through this composition, for I could hear him speaking to me quite as if he were seated next to me on the stoop, the ink on the paper barely dry.

“Tell me truthfully, Owen’ he said, “if you think I have left anything of use and importance out. And note any particular infelicities of language, son, if you will.” And then he began to read “Sambo’s Mistakes” aloud, very slowly, savoring all the words as if they were great poetry.

Notwithstanding that I have committed a few mistakes in the course of a long life like others of my colored brethren, you will perceive at a glance that I have always been remarkable for a seasonable discovery of my errors and my quick perception of the true course. I propose to give you a few illustrations in this and the following paragraphs.

For instance, when I was a boy I learned to read, but instead of giving my attention to sacred and profane history, by which I might have become acquainted with the true character of God and man, learned the best course for individuals, societies, and nations to pursue, stored my mind with an endless variety of rational and practical ideas, profited by the experience of millions of others of all ages, fitted myself for the most important stations in life, and fortified my mind with the best and wisest resolutions and noblest sentiments and motives, I have instead spent my whole life devouring silly novels and other miserable trash such as most newspapers of the day and other popular writings are filled with, thereby unfitting myself for the realities of life and acquiring a taste for nonsense and low wit, so that I have no relish for sober truth, useful knowledge, or practical wisdom. By this means I have passed through life without profit to myself or others, a mere blank on which nothing worth perusing is written.

But I can see in a twink where I missed it.

Another error into which I fell early in life was the notion that chewing and smoking tobacco would make a man of me but little inferior to some of the whites. The money I spent in this way, with the interest of it, would have enabled me to have relieved a great many sufferers, supplied me with a well-selected interesting library, and paid for a good farm for the support and comfort of my old age; whereas I now have neither books, clothing, the satisfaction of having benefited others, nor a place to lay my hoary head.

However, I can see in a moment where I missed it.

One of the further errors of my life is that I have imitated frivolous whites by joining the Free Masons, Odd Fellows, Sons of Temperance, and a score of other secret societies and chapters established by and for men of color, instead of seeking the company of intelligent, wise, and good men of both races, from whom I might have learned much that would be interesting, instructive, and useful, and I have in that way squandered a great amount of most precious time and money, enough sometimes in a single year which, if I had put the same out on interest and kept it so, would have kept me always above board, given me character and influence amongst men, or have enabled me to pursue some respectable calling, so that I might employ others to their benefit and improvement; but as it is, I have always been poor, in debt, and am now obliged to travel about in search of employment as a hostler, shoeblack, and fiddler.

But I retain all my quickness of perception and see readily where I missed it.

An error of my riper years has been that, when any meeting of colored people has been called in order to consider an important matter of general interest, I have been so eager to display my spouting talents and so tenacious of some trifling theory or other which I have adopted, that I have generally lost all sight of the business at hand, consumed the time disputing about things of no moment, and thereby defeated entirely many important measures calculated to promote the general welfare.

But I am happy to say that I know in a flash where I missed it. Another small error of my life (for I have never committed great blunders) has been that, for the sake of union in the furtherance of the most vital interests of our race, I would never yield any minor point of difference. In this way I have always had to act with but a few men and frequently alone, and could accomplish nothing worth living for.

But I have one comfort, I can see with a passing glance where I missed it.

A little but nonetheless telling fault which I have committed is that, if in anything another man has failed of coming up to my standard, notwithstanding he might possess many of the most valuable traits and be most admirably suited to fill some one important post, I would reject him entirely, injure his influence, oppose his measures, and even glory in his defeat, though his intentions all the while were good and his plans well laid.

But I have the great satisfaction of being able to say without fear of contradiction that I can see very quick where I missed it.

Another small mistake which I have made is that I could never bring myself to practice any present self-denial, although my theories have been excellent. For instance, I have bought expensive gay clothing, nice canes, watches, gold safety-chains, finger-rings, breast pins, and other things of a like nature, thinking I might by that means distinguish myself from the vulgar, as some of the better class of whites do. I have always been of the foremost in getting up expensive parties and running after fashionable amusements and have indulged my appetites freely whenever I had the means (and even with borrowed money) and have patronized the dealers in nuts, candy, cakes, etc., have sometimes bought good suppers, and was always a regular customer at livery stables. By these and many other means I have been unable to benefit my suffering brethren and am now but poorly able to keep my own soul and body together.

But do not think me thoughtless or dull of apprehension, for I can see at once where I missed it.

A not-so-trifling error of my life has been that I am always expected to secure the favor of the whites by tamely submitting to every species of indignity, contempt, and wrong, instead of nobly resisting their brutal aggressions from principle and taking my place as a man and assuming the responsibilities of a man, a citizen, a husband, a father, a brother, a neighbor, a friend, as God requires of every one (and if his neighbor will not allow him to do it, he must stand up and protest continually and also appeal to God for aid!.). But I find that, for all my submission, I get about the same reward that the Southern Slavocrats render to the dough-faced statesmen of the North for being bribed and browbeat and fooled and cheated, as the Whigs and Democrats love to be, thinking themselves highly honored if they be allowed to lick up the spittle of a Southerner. I say I get the same reward’.

But I am uncommonly quick-sighted, and I can see in a twinkling where I missed it.

Another little blunder which I have made is that, while I have always been a most zealous abolitionist, I have been constantly at war with my friends about certain religious tenets. I was first a Presbyterian, but I could never think of acting with my Quaker friends, for they were the rankest heretics, and the Baptists would be in the water, and the Methodists denied the doctrine of Election, etc., and in later years, since becoming enlightened by Garrison, Abby Kelley, and other really benevolent persons, I have been spending all my force against friends who love the Sabbath and feel that all is at stake on that point.

Now, I cannot doubt, notwithstanding I have been unsuccessful, that you will allow me full credit for my peculiar quick-sightedness. As fast as I say it, I can see where I missed it.’

Father lowered the sheaf of lined pale blue paper, looked to me, and awaited my admiration. “Well? What do you think, son?” he asked.

“Yes… well;’ said I. “Yes, it’s… it’s very good. And you seem to have touched on everything that concerns you. Though it does end rather abruptly, don’t you think? I mean, is it enough simply to keep saying that you see in a twink where you have missed it?”

“No!” he said. “Of course not! That’s my point. Or will be, when I have made it. It’s what my second chapter will propose: what to do when you have seen the error of your ways. You see, American Negroes don’t have a figure like Benjamin Franklin, and that’s what I’m trying to establish here. A friendly, wise scold. Franklin spoke only to white people, wisely and well, to be sure, but what he said is of little use to a people despised and downtrodden because of their race. Franklin’s book never addresses the whole race question. But Negroes — I’m talking about the rank and file here, you understand, not the leaders — they need a book of practical wisdom which is as accessible and amusing to them as Franklin’s is to us white folks, and as down-to-earth. Sambo is my Poor Richard, son.

“When this is published in the Ram’s Horn, I’ll ask my colored friends what they think of it — innocently, you understand, as if I knew nothing of the authorship, testing their responses, getting suggestions as to what’s been left out. And then I’ll write my second chapter. A third and fourth chapter will follow, and so on, until I’ll have written an entire book, a book that can serve as a new primer for Negroes in the fight against slavery.”

“Fine, but why not let a Negro man write such a book?” I asked him, pointing out that there were plenty who were more than capable of it: Mr. Douglass, for instance, or the Reverends Garnet and Loguen. “They could do it without a disguise,” I added.

“Please!” He laughed, as if he thought the idea ridiculous. “Owen, we’re after a black Ben Franklin here, and none of those fine men is especially humorous or down-to-earth. And even if he were, he’d have to disguise himself just as much as I have. For different reasons, of course. Not because of race, but because he’d be so well-known amongst the Negro readership. Mister Douglass would have to call himself Sambo, too, just as I have, or else he’d sound like the famous Frederick Douglass, and who would believe these were his mistakes?”

“Who will believe, Father, that they are yours?” “No one knows who I am,” he said with a wink.

No, indeed. Back in ’48 in Springfield, Massachusetts, black or white, they did not know who John Brown was. Not even I knew. There was a day coming, however, and not far off, when the whole world would know his name — from the literary salons of Paris, France, to the humblest white farmer’s cabin of Kentucky, from the Scottish castles of the English queen to the daub-and-wattle slave-quarters of Alabama. So go ahead, write your story now, Old Man. Be for black folks a friendly, ordinary Negro scold, and do it while you can. Soon enough the man who is Sambo will be Old John Brown, Captain John Brown, Osawatomie Brown, a man who cannot hide who he is, even behind a beard and a dozen false names, and who can never again claim to be other than white, who can no longer even cultivate a fantasy that he is other than white. Though it will be rarely said so baldly, his race — that he is a white man and in the interests of Negroes has coldly killed other white men — will become the most important thing about him.

The image of Father reading beside me has faded. The light that accompanied my memory of him is gone, and although I cannot see him, I can still hear his voice. He says to me, “It’s very dark here. You don’t mind the darkness, Owen? And the cold? It’s grown very cold since the sun set. Why not go inside and light a fire?”

“I do mind the darkness. It’s making me feel too much the pain of being alone. But the cold, no. I don’t feel the cold.”

“Then go inside your cabin, my boy, and light a candle.”

That was the winter and spring when we lived in Springfield in the house on Franklin Street, a wood-frame row house no wider than a single room, somewhat dilapidated, barely furnished, in a neighborhood of mostly Negro freedmen, people who were even poorer than we. We were content, however, because for the first time in several years we were residing together, a regular family, and Father was not working someplace far off, careening about the skies like a wandering star or a comet due to return home sometime in the distant future. Even John, with his new wife, Wealthy, was with us that year, helping Father run Mr. Perkins’s wool warehouse.

John was easier to deal with than Father, or so it appeared, for as soon as John arrived from Ohio, the buyers of our wool began asking to see him, instead of the Old Man. This left Father free to pursue his several projects concerning the welfare and future of the Negroes in Springfield, who that year were particularly alarmed by the growing number of slave-catchers prowling through Northern cities. Father’s abolitionist work had taken on a new intensity there and a freshened singleness of purpose, probably because of the presence in Springfield of a large number of freedmen who were agreeable to him for their intelligence and for the ferocity of their opposition to slavery. It no doubt helped that he, in his fervor and clarity of purpose, was agreeable to them as well.

I myself was attached to the warehouse, where I was responsible for cleaning and sorting the wool that came in from the west, mostly from Father’s and Mr. Perkins’s associates in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and attending to its proper storage and, when the occasional sale was made to one of the woolen manufacturers, packing and shipping it on to the huge new factory looms of eastern Massachusetts. It was boring work, but not particularly arduous, and left me perhaps too much solitary time for dreaming about a future that in my heart I suspected would never be mine.

My dreams were for the most part the foolish fancies of a very naive and unusually immature young man — a shepherd boy’s idea of sophisticated Eastern society. I was twenty-four years old that winter, and Springfield was the largest town I had ever seen. The regular proximity of exotic (or so they seemed to me) young women kept me in an agitated state of mind and body, and I spent many an evening and early morning hour walking the streets alone, not so much to look at the young women, for they were not so much to be found on the streets during those hours anyhow, as to be alone with my tangled thoughts and feelings, struggling to control and organize them.

Most of my thoughts and feelings were surely driven by simple, natural male curiosity, unnaturally heightened by my lifelong fear of women and my shyness when among them and the rural isolation of my life so far, but they disturbed and confused me. I hesitate to make this confession, especially to someone I do not know and a woman, and very possibly I will write this down and then burn it, as I have certain other pages already written. In fact, I cannot say for certain if I have sent you some of these pages, all of them, or none. They are scattered and strewn about my table and cabin, and much of the time, when I am not seated here with pencil in hand, I am confused and lose myself and can’t distinguish what I have done from what I have not done.

I will tell everything. During the daylight hours, whenever I noticed an attractive woman, whether a pious young woman at church or a neighborhood friend of Ruth’s or one of the daughters of a Negro cohort of Father’s at an abolitionist meeting, I quickly averted my gaze and made every attempt to remove myself from her presence. But later, in the nighttime — while alone and walking the gaslit streets of the city, down along muddy, trash-strewn lanes and alleys by the river and past the taverns and brothels there, where I lingered outside and peered through fogged-over windows and glanced furtively through doors as whiskeyed patrons entered and left, and along tree-lined boulevards up on the heights where the large mansions were located and I stopped and gazed across lawns to darkened verandas — I imagined all sorts of encounters with all types of women, and little plays took place on the stage of my mind, in which I spoke all the parts.

“How do you do, miss? Are you out for an evening stroll? May I accompany you a ways?”

“Why, thank you, sir, I would appreciate your company and protection. Are you a native of these parts, sir? For I do not think I know you.”

They were pathetic little dramas, which enflamed my passions and sent me reeling back to our house on Franklin Street, where the rest of the family slept peacefully and virtuously. There I would toss and writhe in my cot in the room that I shared with my younger brothers, miserable, guilty, self-abusing.

Thus I little noticed the continued and worsening illness of another of the children, the baby, Ellen, born in Ohio the previous autumn, and I did not realize that my stepmother, Mary, had not fully recovered from her lying-in period following the birth. I lived in a household whose rhythms and concerns were being shaped once again by illness, and I did not notice. Here I was, this large, healthy young fellow lumbering out to work at the warehouse every morning, returning in the evening for supper and then slipping out again, stumbling through his days and nights with his mind filled only by the turbulence of lustful fantasies at war with private shames, while the rest of the family worried over another frail and failing babe and a mother unable to recover from the rigors of giving birth. In such a way did my preoccupation with trivial sins, with my sensual indulgence and guilt, cause me to commit a graver sin and to feel no guilt for it. No wonder Father seemed short with me that winter and spring: in my self-absorption, I thought that he and Mary and the rest of the family, John and Wealthy, Ruth, even the younger children, were casting me out, were not including me in their circle of intimate relations — when in fact it was I who had cast them out.

Then one night late in April, a few weeks before we planned to depart for our new home in the Adirondacks, I left the house in an unusually heightened state of alarm. I felt I had reached a fork in my road, and if I did not take a turning now I would be forever bound to follow the track I was on. A foolish desperation, I know, but the oncoming move to the wilderness of North Elba frightened me. We had begun dismantling and packing up our life in Springfield, almost without having yet settled there, and the house was filling with crates and cartons, and Father was making lists of goods and tools and was negotiating for a large wagon to carry everything north. That very evening he had informed me over our supper that my job would be to take the boys Salmon and Watson out to Litchfield, Connecticut, where he had been boarding his merino sheep and small herd of Devon cattle at the farm of a cousin, there to gather the livestock and move them north separately from the rest of the family, to meet up in the town of Westport, New York, on Lake Champlain.

I nodded and, on getting up from the table, sullenly announced that I would be going out to say goodbye to a few friends, since I did not expect to see them again. Father showed no interest in my stated intentions: I did not know, of course, thanks to my inane self-absorption, that his mind and the minds of everyone else in the family were very much distracted by the worsening condition of the sick baby, Ellen. It appeared to me that, but for our preparations to move, life was going on as usual. Except, as I saw it, no one particularly cared about me. So deluded was I that I had grown angry at them, at Father especially, for not having asked me pointedly where I was going, who were my friends, why did I need to tell them goodbye with two weeks yet to go before we left town? For not having caught my lie.

In a huff, then, and puffed up with self-righteous relief, I left the crowded little house on Franklin Street and made my way downtown towards the dark, broad Connecticut River, where barges and sloops and Long Island coasters tied up at the docks, and their crews and the stevedores gathered in dim, smoky taverns. In and around these taverns and boarding houses there were women — women waiting for the company and pay of lonely men and boys who came ashore for a night or two, women waiting for the drovers and woodcutters from the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire to come in from the marketplaces of the town with fresh money in their pockets and reckless intentions in their hearts.

Women, women, women! The mere idea of femaleness made me mad with desire, although I knew not what it was exactly that I desired. Sex? Copulation? Simple, carnal love? All that, I suppose. All that. The very fact of it. But something else, too. I craved knowledge, knowledge of a sort that up to then I’d had no access to, and here I speak of the certain and unmistakeable smell of a woman, the touch of her soft skin, the flow of her hair across my hand, the sound of a woman’s whispered voice in my ear, even the sight of her naked body. What were these smells, touches, sounds, and sights like? I had never experienced these aspects of femaleness. But I knew they existed, and that small knowledge made me wildly desirous of the further, larger, and much more dangerous knowledge beyond.

It was a warm night, the April air thick with the smell of lilacs and new, wet grass. I strode along, determined tonight not to leave this river town without learning at least something of what I was sure I would miss afterwards — for the remainder of my life, as it seemed. For I still believed the Old Man then, believed him when he said that our move up into the Adirondack wilderness of northern New York would be permanent. And had accepted that, because of the blacks settled there, Timbuctoo would be our base for all future operations in the war against slavery. I was sure that my permanent, lifelong job would be to run the farm and tend the flocks, so that Father could preach and organize and fight, activities to which his character and temperament were so much more neatly adapted than mine. I felt that I had reached the end of a conscripted childhood and was about to begin a similarly conscripted adult life. But on this April night, for a few hours, at least, I meant to be a free man.

I saw several women and avoided passing each one by crossing the street to the other side. But then came one I could not avoid, and after I had passed her by with my habitually averted gaze, she called out, “Hullo, Red! Would y’ be needin’ company tonight?”

She was a girl, practically, I had glimpsed that much, and red-haired herself, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, with bright white powder all over her face and a broad slash of painted lips and smudge-blackened eyes. She wore erratic scraps of cloth elaborately draped across her shoulders, wrapped, sashed, and pinned so as to suggest an exotic gown, although it was more a child’s motley costume than a woman’s dress.

I stopped and turned back to her, and she said, with a curl to her voice and a pronunciation that was noticeably Irish, “You’re a big feller, ain’t you, now.”

Because I could see that she was a child, she did not frighten me as a full-grown woman would, and I took a step towards her. “I’m… I’m only out for a walk,” I said. She was small and thin. Her head, covered with a crumpled black lace bonnet, came barely to my chest, the thickness of her wrist seemed not much greater than that of my thumb, and her waist was smaller than the circumference of my right arm.

When I approached her, she stopped smiling and stepped back from me into a bank of shadows that fell from a cut-stone retaining wall. We were down by the canal tow path, with the river passing in the darkness below and a cobbled street out of view above. I heard a horse clop past and the iron-sheathed wheels of a wagon. It was a lonely, dark, and dangerous place for a girl, even a girl such as she — perhaps especially for one such as she, whose purpose for being there was to solicit the attentions of men likely to be drunk or angry, men likely to regard her as disposable. More particularly, of course, she was there to solicit men like me — timid, passionately curious bumpkins, who would pay to use her, yes, but would not otherwise harm her.

I was useless to her, however, a waste of her time, for I had no more than a few loose coins in my pocket. Father, I thought, with more coins in his pocket than I, would try to save such a woman. He would lecture her on the evils of her ways and give her his last money and instruct her to go home and feed herself and her babes, if she had any. John and Jason were both recently married and, even if they had been as unattached as I, would have done likewise. I knew that I, however, had I the means, would only try to use her. I am confident that Father never in his life performed the sexual act outside the matrimonial bed (where, to be sure, he performed it frequently); the same for my brothers; but I, by contrast, even at the young age of twenty-four, still and perhaps forever too much the son and brother, could not imagine myself as husband, as father, as regular visitor to the marriage bed. And so here I was, where my father and brothers would never be, soliciting a prostitute.

Though I was a full-grown man, I wore my manhood like an ill-fitting costume — not unlike the way the girl before me wore her make-up and rags, her woman’s costume. We had met in the shadows of a high stone wall, two children ineptly disguised as adults. But where she had costumed herself as a grown woman in order to keep from starving or freezing to death, I was a child got up merely to accommodate the size and appearance and the startling impulses of a man’s body. But I was probably no more successful at disguising my childishness than she, and in a diminished sense, I, too, was in danger out here — a cull, easy prey to robbers, tricksters, confidence men and women, cutpurses and cutthroats of every stripe.

“I… I have no money!’ I said to her.

“Aw, come on, now, a nicely dressed feller like yourself?”

“Yes. I live not far from here. I’m just walking, out for a walk… as I said. I… I like to be by the river.”

“Then what d’ you want with me?” She took a further, backwards step into the deeper shadows, and I could not make out her powdered and painted face any longer.

“Nothing. Nothing. Just… I’m sorry, miss. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t scare me.”

“No?” I moved towards her, and she jumped awkwardly away, like a broken-winged bird, her parti-colored feathers all dusty and awry. I reached out with my right hand and placed it on her bony shoulder. Instantly, she ducked out from under it and turned her back to me, pressing herself against the cold stone wall.

“I won’t hurt you,” I whispered.

“You can’t touch me ‘less’n you pay.”

I reached into my pocket and drew out the few coins that remained, a gratuity I had received the day before from a Lowell merchant who’d had me haul five hundred weight bales of wool to his cart-copper pennies, enough for a single loaf of bread, no more. “Here, this is all I’ve got.” Looking warily at me, she half turned and opened her tiny hand; I passed her the coins, and they disappeared into her rags at once.

I peered down at my feet, embarrassed and unsure of what to do next, and when I looked up again, the girl had slid down along the wall and was about to bolt. “Hey, where’re you off to!”

“No place!” she said, alarmed, and stood stock-still, half hidden in the darkness.

“But you took my money!”

“Y’ don’t get much for coppers, y’ know.”

“But you were running off

“I was only movin’ out of the walkway some. C’m’ere, an’ be nice, mister. Don’t fret none, I’ll give you some of what y’ want, darlin’. C’m’ere, now,” she said to me in a lulling tone, as if she were trying to calm a large, frightened animal.

I moved abruptly to her but did not dare touch her this time. I was not afraid of her so much as afraid of myself. If I touched her, I did not know what would follow. Then, suddenly, it was she who had touched me. Her hand stroked me between my thighs, and a second later she was unbuttoning me, using both her hands. Before I could fully register what was happening, it was over: she was standing and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, a distant look on her face, as if she were calculating the few measly items that she might purchase with the pennies I had given her.

I turned away and quickly buttoned my trousers. “I… I’m sorry!’ I said, without looking around at her.

“What for?”

I turned and faced her. She drew her shawl over her scrawny shoulders and seemed about to leave. “Well… that, I guess.”

“You got what y’ paid for. No more.”

“Yes, I know. You’re right. I just.. well, it’s terribly wrong, that’s all. And I’m sorry for that.”

She shrugged and started off. “G’bye, dearie. Come back when you get your wages.”

“Wait!” I called. The girl stopped a few paces off, and I ran up to her. “Don’t go yet.”

She studied my face carefully, uncertain, a little curious, perhaps, but somewhat frightened as well.

I spoke softly. “I wonder… I was wondering if I might… look at you. I’m sorry… I thought, I wonder if you might let me see you.”

She cast a look at me aslant, then glanced up and down the walkway, as if seeking an escape route. “No. No looks. Y’ got what y’ paid for, mister.”

Without touching her, I placed my right hand and left forearm against the wall on either side of her, trapping her in front of me. “I want only to look at you,” I said. “Just for a moment.”

“Look at me? What do y’ mean? My bubbies y’ want to see?”

“Yes. And the other.”

“The other? Naw, you’re daft, mister. You’re makin’ me scared.” She had drawn down and in close to herself and had wrapped her thin arms tightly around her chest, making her seem even more like a child than before. Her large, smudged eyes looked plaintively up at me. “Please… just let me go now, mister.”

“First let me look at you. Then you can go. I won’t hurt you.”

“Just my bubbies?”

“Yes.”

“Not the other?”

No.

Slowly, she unwrapped her arms, reached under her shawl and fumbled momentarily with the buttons of her frock, and then she drew the clothing aside and showed me herself — a bony pink chest with tiny breasts. The fragile, innocent body of a child. For a second only, I stared, wishing suddenly that I were as able as she to open my own shirt and bare my breast and have it be the breast of a boy and not my thick, heavy-haired chest. So that, even as I humiliated her, I frankly envied her — when at last I realized what I was doing and was shot through with shame and looked away.

I waved my hands at her. “I’m sorry! Please forgive me” I said. “Please, cover yourself. I’m so sorry… to have done this to you,” I said. Then suddenly, not knowing what else to do, I got down on my knees before her and in silence hung my head.

“Well, you are some crack-brained cull, mister,” the girl said. She stepped around my prostrate form, and I heard her footsteps clack against the stone as she made her escape. When I looked up, she was gone. I was alone in the darkness. I heard the slosh of the river down below and the creak and groan of boats and barges bumping against the piers. On the street above, a pair of drunken men walked past. One laughed, the other sang a bit of a bawdy song.

He who once a good name gets

May piss a-bed and say he sweats…

They both laughed and passed by. Alone in the night once again, I walked for hours after that, aimless, confused, frightened by the appalling knowledge I had obtained — not knowledge of women in general or of the particular poor, nameless Irish girl whom, for a few pennies, I had used as a common whore, but knowledge of myself. I knew myself now to be vile, a beast. On my own like this, away from Father and the rest of the family, cut loose from their moral and intellectual clarity, from the virtue generated, sustained, and perfected among them, I was but a sack of contradictions and unpredictable impulses: I was a boy locked inside a maris body, my childish innocence contaminated now, not merely by longing and self-abuse, but by sexual contact of the most disgusting sort. I had inflicted myself upon a poor, pathetic street urchin, a whore, yes, but a person who, compared to me, was honest, was virtuous — was innocent. Once again, I envied her, and at that moment would have happily exchanged places with her, if for no other reason than properly to punish myself for my transgressions and my hypocrisy and to reward her for her virtue and suffering.

It should be she, not I, who could freely return to a warm household filled with a loving and upright family; she, not I, who was able to stand alongside her father and mother and brothers and sisters in church and public meetings and to walk freely about the town in the daylight glow of respect and admiration from the citizenry; she, not I, who performed honest labor and received for it shelter, food, clothing; she, not I, whose father, guide, and protector was the good man John Brown. Let me be the harlot, the hired property of drunken, brutal strangers. Let me go hungry and cold through the nighttime alleyways and dark corners of the town, exchanging brief, obscene gratifications for a few pennies. Let me be the victim.

Burdened with thoughts such as these, I slowly made my sorrowful way home to Franklin Street, arriving there sometime in the middle of the night. The house was not darkened, as I had expected, and when I entered I was greeted by Ruth and John and Wealthy, all in their nightclothes, gathered together in the kitchen comforting our stepmother, Mary, who sat downcast at the table with a bowl of warm milk before her. She had been weeping, I saw at once, and when I asked what had happened, John turned to me and swiftly took me aside and informed me that the baby Ellen had died just minutes before. It was a mercy, he said, for the poor little thing had not drawn a proper breath for hours. Father was still with her upstairs, and he could not be separated from the infant. “It’s as if he cannot believe her dead,” John said. Mother — for he, unlike me, called her that — Mother was all right now. She had accepted the death of the child as an inevitable thing the previous evening, although Father had not, and she had prayed for her to go as quickly and painlessly as possible. But Father had stayed up two whole nights with the babe in his arms, believing that he could somehow save her, even, at the end, trying to breathe into her mouth. But she had died in his arms, and he had refused to lay her down and now was walking up and down in the rooms above, still praying for her recovery.

I remember John saying, “The Old Man can’t seem to let this one go.” And I remember that he did not ask me where I had been until this late hour. No one asked. Clearly, and rightly, my private adventures and torment were of no account here.

Suddenly, there was Father at the bottom of the back stairs, entering the kitchen, his arms hanging down at his sides, his head lowered, with tears streaming down his face. I had never seen Father weep before, and the sight astonished and frightened me. He sat himself down next to his wife with a groping hesitancy, as if he had lost his sight, and he placed his hands against his face and wept openly as a child. No one said a word. This was beyond our understanding. I do not think that Father loved any one of his children more than the others, and he had lost at that time fully half a dozen of his babes, and he had not wept over any of them, although, to be sure, he had grieved deeply over them all, even to despair. His belief in the Life Hereafter had always been sufficiently strong that he could view their early going as a gift from God for the children and a trial from God for him. But somehow this was different. It was as if this time he believed that he, the father of the child, was being punished, not tried, by her death. “The Lord is filled with wrath against me!” he cried. ‘The Lord despiseth me!”

“No, no, Father,” we all said, and each in his own way tried to console him. We reached out to him and placed our hands on him, and several of us wept with him. Although I did not. I could not. I backed off a ways and watched in shame, for I knew the true cause of Father’s suffering, over and above his grief for the lost child. I was the cause. I knew that Father was blaming himself for my sins, condemning himself for not having interceded with me in my frequent lustful wanderings, which surely he had observed and marked. And now he believed that he was being punished by an angry God for his inattention. I did not need to hear Father say any of this; I knew it in my bones.

Slowly, I came forward, and the others, as if they knew what I intended, parted for me and made room for me to go down on my knees beside Father’s chair. “I’m sorry, Father, for what I’ve done. I have sinned, and I am sorry. Please, Father, please forgive me.”

At that, he ceased weeping and looked straight into my face. His great gray eyes penetrated my face to my very soul, and he did not flinch at what he saw there, and I did not squirm away from his gaze, much as I wanted to. “Owen, my son. You are a good boy, Owen. I forgive thee,” he said in a low voice, and he placed his hands on my shoulders and drew me to him. “The Lord hath taken one child from me and returned to me another, who was lost,” he said. “I welcome thee, Owen,” he said, and it was as if his words had cleansed me, for at once I felt uplifted and strong again. Whatever Father wished me now to do, I would do without argument, without hesitancy, without fear. I remember, on the night that the baby Ellen died, thinking that.