Cloudsplitter

Chapter 10

A sparkling blue day it was, in early September of that year, when the Old Man and I took passage for Liverpool aboard the side-wheeler Cumbria, a packet out of Boston. We had arrived in the city three days earlier, after nearly a fortnight’s stay in Springfield, where Father had made his usual, tireless attempt to set things right with his and Mr. Perkins’s creditors, succeeding only in extending his and Mr. Perkins’s line of credit with the western sheepmen for the length of time it would take him to sell in England the wool he could not sell in America. Or would not sell in America. Not for the sixty-five cents per pound he was then being offered — some ten to twenty cents per pound less than he had agreed to pay the sheepmen in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

It was a simple problem. Father had taken shipment of vast quantities of wool from the west and had been storing it in the Springfield warehouse, after having promised, with Mr. Perkins’s guarantees, to pay the western producers significantly more for it than the woolen merchants and cloth manufacturers in New England were then offering. And now, twelve and more months later, the producers were clamoring for their money, which Father, of course, did not have. To break a monopoly among the buyers, Father had tried to create a monopoly among the sellers. Basically, the problem had arisen because the buyers could afford to wait out the sellers.

In vain did I argue the wisdom of cutting all his losses off at once and returning quickly to the farm in North Elba, there to build a small tannery, such as he had established in New Richmond when I was a child, back before Mother died — a modest, local business adequate to our needs and in no way dependent upon his abilities to anticipate and resist the machinations of shrewd, calculating men of great wealth residing elsewhere.

To me, paper money, promissory notes, letters and lines of credit, market fluctuations, tariff laws, and so on were as abstract and metaphysical as German speculative philosophy. To Father, however, they were oddly concrete, as real as the food he ate, as the water he heated for his morning shave, as the tobacco-colored long-tailed wool suit he wore every day of his adult life. Consequently, he believed that he could move among the elements of finance with the same ease and control he employed in ordering up his supper in a hotel dining room or firing a kettle of cold water every morning or pressing out the wrinkles in his trousers by placing them beneath his mattress while he slept. He was like the unlucky gambler who can’t believe in any luck but good and keeps on trying to cover his old losses by making new bets.

I never thought Father mad, as he was so often later portrayed, except now and again, and especially in these matters of finance. But it was a madness that in those days he shared with most men of ability and restless intelligence. It was like a plague, this dream of growing rich by speculation, and not to become infected with it was a sign of dullness and low intelligence. My argument against Father’s scheme, then, carried very little weight. To him, it was the argument of a simple man or a man with no ambition.

Brother John, I believe, was on the Old Man’s side in this and had caught the disease himself, although he had not as extreme a case as Father’s, and while Jason seemed as immune from the plague as I, he, unlike me, appeared little bothered by the Old Man’s feverish schemes and delusions and, except when Father demanded his filial aid and comfort, tended quietly to his own affairs — his vineyards and orchards in Ohio. Jason maintained a benign independence of Father that I envied but barely understood. “Owen,” he used to say to me, with that sweet, yet slightly ironic, smile playing across his lips, “you’ve got to let it alone. The Old Man’s going to do what he wants, no matter how much you fret and fume over it. You might as well stand back, brother, and just try to enjoy the show.”

It was never that easy for me. How was it possible not to go along with the Old Man and not fail him? I could not imagine myself doing it. I was tied to him like a wife, a child, a slave, it sometimes seemed — although, of course, I well knew that the chains that bound me to him were entirely of my own making. After all, from the end of my childhood, at about the age of sixteen, Father had not once forbade me from leading any sort of life that I wanted. That I was living his life, as it appeared, or one that was a mere appendage of his, was a measure not so much of his power as of my weakness.

In Boston for the few days before our departure on the Cumbria, I trailed after the Old Man like a puppy as he attended afternoon and evening public and private meetings. Abolitionism was everywhere in Boston then. Argued and articulated with all the zeal and refined intelligence of the old Puritans’ debate over Free Will and Grace, it was, for all of that, mere talk, or so it seemed to Father and me — talk driven and framed by reckless passion, as if being right or wrong on the subject were more important to the debaters than saving people’s lives, not to mention their souls.

We were staying at the home of an abolitionist colleague of Father’s — a philanthropic friend of Mr. Gerrit Smith’s, actually, from whom Father had obtained a general-purpose letter of introduction for use in England. The gentleman was the well-known Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, and he and his pleasant, hospitable wife, the poet Julia Ward Howe, an heiress, had given us a room in their grand residence on Louisburg Square. It was a tall brick house with bow windows facing the street on every storey, so that you could stand and look down upon the busy street below, like a captain of industry surveying his shop. The city of Boston was like that then, a busy manufactory where everything, from bread and feathered hats to religious ideas and fine art, was manufactured, purveyed, distributed, consumed, and commented upon with remarkable efficiency and general alacrity, a humming machine in which every citizen was a part, from the humblest illiterate Irish newsboy or maid to the loftiest Harvard scholar or Beacon Hill theologian.

I loved the city at once and might well have run off from Father then and there and made it my permanent home, like the young Ben Franklin fleeing his home to seek his fortune in Philadelphia, had I, like Franklin, a proper trade or some other means of making my living than that of caring for sheep or homesteading northern wildernesses. If, in other words, I had not been my father’s third son. It was strange, although I did not recognize it as such then, to be so young and to be filled already with regret. It was as if, at the age of twenty-six, I viewed my daily life with a nostalgia for a life that I had never led and never would lead. I knew other young men who felt as I did, but they were men who had married too quickly and woke every morning with the vain desire to start their lives over again, youths who, every day, by the time they dressed for work and came to the table for breakfast, had to accept yet again that they were stuck with a life they did not want. But no man of my acquaintance who was my age and was not unhappily married felt as sadly trapped as I. Nor would any one of them have understood it in me. They might well have wished to be me.

I remember that we arrived in Boston from Springfield by train in the late afternoon and had no sooner set down our bags and paid our respects to Dr. and Mrs. Howe than we were off, headed down the tilted brick sidewalks of Beacon Hill to the Charles Street Meeting House to see and hear the famous Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was to speak that very evening on the wonderful subject of heroism. Dr. Howe had put Father onto this event with the observation that the Concord sage would be addressing the issue of the proper response to slavery for the modern intellectual. It was apparently a talk the Doctor and his wife had already been privileged to hear at the Concord Atheneum, where it had been delivered to an audience of skeptics, a crew of Garrisonian, non-violent abolitionists, and had swept them all over to the radical side of the debate. An inflammatory gesture, then, was what Father expected, a call to arms, a prescriptive description of a new kind of American hero.

We arrived early and sat in the third row of seats, as close to the front as possible. Soon the large hall was filled, mostly with distinguished-looking men and women whose bearing and gazes were the epitome of benevolent intelligence and whose manners bespoke, not arrogance, but simple, if well-fed, self-confidence. A more civilized collection of human beings I had never seen, and I could not keep myself from turning in my seat and craning my neck to see and admire them as they entered from the darkening street and took their places.

Father sat stiffly with his hands on his knees, staring straight ahead, as if he were alone in the audience or were in an antechamber awaiting an interview with a prospective employer. There were several people who must be famous, I thought, if only because of the way other folks, when this one or that entered and took his seat, at once stared and whispered to their companions. But I recognized no one, of course. Could that handsome, eagle-eyed man be Charles Sumner? Could that small burl of a woman next to him be the famous agitator for female rights and abolition, Lydia Maria Child? Might the sublimely intelligent Transcendentalist philosopher William Everett Channing be here amongst us?

I knew none of these illustrious people, of course, except by their marvelous reputations, and I believed that anyone who looked more distinguished than Father, as these people surely did, must be at least as distinguished as he and then some. Unlike Father, they had lived in Boston all their lives and came from wealthy old families and had been privileged by fine educations and social relations with one another: they were bound to be beacons on a height. So I believed. And Father’s light, by comparison, was a flickering candle cupped in his hand against the wind. I was, therefore, not so much ashamed of Father in this context as sorry for him, especially sitting there stock-still and stiff in his seat, red-faced and tense, his large, workingman’s hands and wrists sticking out from his sleeves, his mouth tight, his gray eyes staring straight up at the podium. In this impressive company of likeminded people, Father seemed, not enhanced, but sadly, surprisingly diminished.

And when a hush settled over the crowd and Mr. Emerson in utter simplicity and with no introduction came forward and began to speak, Father, poor Father, seemed even smaller than before, to the point of disappearing altogether from my ken, which almost never happened in a public place, for I was rarely able to ignore him or his reactions to a speech or sermon. Busily fashioning my own reaction around what I supposed was his, I seldom heard clearly the speech or sermon itself.

This occasion was different, however. To me, Mr. Emerson was every inch the ideal poet and sage, and if a man may be said to be beautiful, he was that. Slender, but strong and supple-looking, like a man used to outdoor exercise, of medium height with a noble carriage and easy, natural gestures, he stood before us and spoke in a voice that, while intimate and almost conversational in tone, carried to the furthest reaches of the hall, for his every word seemed raptly attended to, even by the last few fellows to squeeze in at the door in back. From his first sentence to his last, there was not a whisper or a rustle from the audience. He relied on none of the usual rhetorical flourishes of the arm and mighty brow that were then so popular with public speakers; none of the tricks of voice and variations of pace and volume to surprise the audience and gain its attention cheaply. Instead, he spoke simply, directly, in a way that made you feel that he was speaking to you alone and to no one else in the hall. His bright eyes were the color of bluebells and did not fix on any single person but fixed on the space just above one’s own head, as if he were contemplating one’s thoughts as they rose in the air. Now and again, he would glance down at the text before him, as if to take in a new paragraph or sometimes an entire page, and then his large, handsome head would lift, and he would go on, with no hesitation or break in the flow of his speech. He was at that time in his mid-forties, I suppose, in the prime of his manhood, although he seemed both younger — in the clarity and openness of his expression — and older — in the wise self-assurance of his delivery.

Awed and rapt as I was, especially at the start, I did not make out much of what he said, as he was at first speaking of figures and literary works I had never heard of — a playwright named Beaumont Fletcher was one, and various characters from the plays. But I did catch that he was indeed speaking of heroism and how it had been misunderstood in the past, as much misunderstood by poets and playwrights as by politicians. He intended here, he declared, to understand it freshly. And he seemed, as Dr. Howe and his wife had promised, to be applying that new understanding of heroism to our present dilemma with regard to the issue of slavery generally and the abolitionist movement in particular.

In the work of the elder British dramatists, he said, there was a constant, obsessive recognition of gentility, just as skin color is recognized in our society today. A marvelous and original reversal, I thought, of how we normally think of those two aspects of society — gentility, or the classes of men, and race. Opposites are made to seem apposite. Yes, this was a freshened way of looking at things.

Then, after a while, he began to isolate and examine the various manifestations of heroism, as if, on the surface, he were discussing merely the literary heros, but all the same, with hints and subtle asides, indicating that our present national crisis over slavery was the necessary field for such a person. He was calling for the arrival of a man out of Plutarch, one of Father’s favorite authors also, I noted with pleasure, a man who could refute the despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists with “a wild courage, a stoicism not of the schools, but of the blood!” Mr. Emerson wanted a “tart cathartic virtue!’ he said, that could contend with the violations of the laws of nature committed by our predecessors and by our contemporaries. And here he lapsed into language — or I should say, he rose to language — that, although not once uttering the word itself, excoriated slavery horribly and with great originality. It is a lock-jaw, he said, that bends a man’s head back to his heels. It is a hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes, an insanity that makes him eat grass.

A man must confront and confound all this external evil, he explained, with a military attitude of the soul. This is the beginnings of heroism, this attitude. The hero advances to his own music, and there is somewhat that is not philosophical in heroism, he noted, somewhat not holy in it. “Heroism seems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it. It has pride. It is the extreme of individual nature,” he declared. These words struck fire with me, for, of course, they described my father perfectly, and I wondered if the Old Man himself realized it. Or was that, too, characteristic of heroism — that the hero does not recognize himself as heroic?

There was more, much more, that put me in mind of Father, as Mr. Emerson continued. Heroism, he told us, is almost ashamed of its body.

And this: that the stoical temperance of the hero is loved by him for its elegance, not for its austerity. “A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses, but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.”

Mr. Emerson spoke in an aphoristic style that, no matter how obscure or abstract his thought and language, made it easy for me to understand his ideas and remember his words and quote them afterwards to those who were not so lucky as to have heard them in person. I remember, years later, spouting, as if they were my own, Mr. Emerson’s words that night in Boston. My companions were humble men, Negro and white men, huddled with me around a campfire in Kansas or holed up in a freezing cabin in Iowa or a farmhouse in Maryland, and I would try to inspire them by saying things like, “The characteristic of heroism is its persistency.” And, “If you would serve your brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you.” And this, which became thereafter my personal motto: “Always do what you are most afraid to do.”

High counsel was how I took Mr. Emerson’s talk on heroism. High counsel, and prophecy, too. “Times of heroism!” he explained, “are generally times of terror.” And then he recalled for us the martyrdom of the brave Lovejoy who, in the name of the Bill of Rights and his right to shout against the sin of slavery, gave himself over to the rage of the mob. We now are living in a time of terror, was Mr. Emerson’s point, and thus are we likewise about to see the arrival of our heroes. They are coming soon. And we must be prepared to recognize them when they appear in our midst, and Mr. Emerson was bending all his considerable, all his incomparable, talents and wisdom to that end. Who could not be grateful?

Well, Father, for one. Perhaps Father alone. In the midst of the applause at the end of Mr. Emerson’s lecture, Father rose from his seat, to applaud the more enthusiastically, I first thought. But, no, it was to leave the hall, and with a glower on his face, he made his way past the laps of his neighbors and hurriedly, pointedly, stalked up the aisle to the exit at the rear. Shocked and more than slightly embarrassed by his rude departure, I followed, head down, and joined him on the street.

For a few moments, we walked in silence. “That man’s truly a boob!” Father blurted. “For the life of me, I can’t understand his fame. Unless the whole world is just as foolish as he is. Godless? He’s not even rational! You’d think, given his godlessness, his sec-u-laahr-ity, he’d be at least rational” he said, and gave a sardonic laugh.

“Yes, but didn’t… didn’t you admire his language?” Mr. Emerson had used language in an oblique and original way that, while it made his personality shine brilliantly, also had made the ostensible subject of his talk opaque, so that, to understand him, one had practically to invent for oneself what he was saying. I found this experience nearly wonderful, as if he were speaking poetry. But I knew not what to point to in Mr. Emerson’s lecture that might have appealed to Father. If you did not swallow the whole of it, you could not accept a part. And if you accepted a part, you had to be nourished by the whole.

“His language? Come on, Owen. Airy nonsense, that’s all it is. For substance, the man offers us clouds, fogs, mists of words. ‘Times of terror; indeed! What does he know of terror? Ralph Waldo Emerson has neither the wit nor the soul to know terror. And he surely has no Christian belief in him! That’s what ought to be terrifying him, the state of his own naked soul.” He sputtered on as we walked back to Dr. Howe’s residence, where the good Mrs. Howe had promised to leave us some cold supper.

I followed silently, pondering the meaning and import of his fulmination, even as I nurtured an odd thought which had come to me towards the end of Mr. Emerson’s peroration — that Father resembled no man so much as the Concord poet himself. The Old Man was a rough-cut, Puritan version of Ralph Waldo Emerson, it seemed to me that first night in Boston and for many years afterwards, and even unto the present time, when it matters probably not at all. But it was that night of some personal significance to me.

Even physically, the two looked enough alike to have been brothers — although Father would have been the cruder, more muscular version. They both wore old-fashioned, hawk-nosed, Yankee faces with pale, deep-set eyes that looked out at the world with such an unblinking gaze as to force you to avert your own gaze at once or give yourself over to the man’s will. And just as easily and selflessly as Father believed in his God, Mr. Emerson believed in the power and everlasting truth of what he called Nature. For both men, God, or Nature, was beginning, cause, and end, and man was merely an agent for beginning, cause, and end.

As I walked, dropping further and further behind the Old Man in my reverie, I found myself amusing myself with the picture of Mr. Emerson coming off a meeting with Father and imagined him saying the same things to his son about the crazy man John Brown. “The man’s truly a boob! For the life of me, I can’t understand his fame!” For if there was a flaw in Mr. Emerson’s argument, it is that he was probably incapable of seeing my father as the very hero he was calling for. And if there was a flaw in my father’s heroism, it may be that he could not see himself in Mr. Emerson’s portrait.

We turned off Charles Street to make our way uphill towards Louisburg Square, and I remember a young man striding downhill in our direction, well-dressed, fresh-faced, and whistling a tune — no tune I recognized; like a bird he was, whistling for the sheer pleasure of it. A purely happy fellow, undivided in himself, it seemed, as if he’d been successfully courting a lovely maiden and had been invited to return tomorrow evening to continue. He whistled past and continued down the street, to his bachelor rooms, no doubt. A happy man! I stopped in my tracks and watched him for a few seconds, wondering what it felt like, to be so uncomplicatedly happy as he, when Father called, “Hurry, Owen! Keep up, keep up! Don’t stare after people like a bumpkin.”

I quickly caught up to him, and when we had walked on in silence a ways, the Old Man, in a low voice that suggested he was having second thoughts, asked me what was my true opinion of Mr. Emerson’s lecture. I saw that he was now somewhat embarrassed by his earlier outburst and that some of the poet’s words may in fact have touched him. Perhaps he had been stung by their similarity to his own thoughts and beliefs and had never before heard them so handsomely expressed, and thus his anger had been directed not at Mr. Emerson but at himself.

“Truthfully?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I have to say, I took his words as high counsel, Father. And prophecy.”

He did not answer at first. Then he said, “High counsel, eh? You heard that? You heard that and nothing else, nothing that contradicted your beliefs?”

“No. What I heard only corroborated my beliefs and strengthened me in them. Not everything Mister Emerson said was altogether clear to me, of course, but all of it was very beautiful. All of it.”

I thought that Father would then upbraid me, but instead he pursed his lips as he often did when thinking something through for the first time and said, “Very interesting. That’s interesting to me, Owen. And prophecy? You heard that, too?”

“Well, yes. I believe so.”

“Very interesting. High counsel and prophecy. Well, who knows? God speaks to us in unexpected ways. Even in the words of philosophers,” he said, and smiled and reached up and put his arm over my shoulder.

We briskly walked that way, side by side, the remaining few blocks to Dr. Howe’s home, and the entire distance, as I strode along, I whistled the same, nearly tuneless tune that I’d heard the happy young man whistle before. I believe that I felt for those few moments just as he had; and it was grand.

I was no more eager to depart with Father from Boston, even for a place as inviting as England, than I had been to leave Springfield for Timbuctoo, and for many of the same reasons. Here, in a city amongst a multitude of distractions and competing truths, it was easier not to succumb to the singular force of Father’s truth. I was stronger here. Isolation — such as we had endured in Timbuctoo and even to a lesser degree back in Ohio and before that in New Richmond, and such as I knew I would endure with Father aboard a ship and in a foreign land-bound me, bound all us Browns, the more tightly to the Old Man’s view of things.

Here in Boston, however, even more than in Springfield, I saw good men and women everywhere who despised slavery, who had thought deeply and long on matters of religion and moral philosophy, and who loved goodness and truth fully as much as did Father, and yet they seemed not so fierce and judgemental in their ways as he. Perhaps they were indeed soft and compromised by wealth and privilege, as Father claimed, made prideful by their fame and the admiration of their like-minded, high-minded compatriots. Perhaps Father was right, and they were, as he liked to say, “boobs.” But I could not help but admire their easy tolerance of one another and their patient optimism. Father’s way was lonely, painfully lonely to me, and I never felt it so much as when we were circulating in cities amongst the men and women who should normally have been our natural allies.

In the holy war against slavery, Father seemed more and more, and especially here in Boston, like a Separatist. I found myself growing cross and impatient with him for it and the next day nearly quarreled with him. He and I had gone down to the docks from Dr. Howe’s to confirm our bookings aboard the Cumbria and to verify our Monday morning departure with the tide two days thence, and also just to look at the ship itself, to appraise her size and proportions, so as to anticipate better the degree of our physical discomfort for the duration of our journey. Neither of us had ever traveled so far before — our longest journey by boat may have been the ferry across Lake Champlain from Vermont to New York or a horse-drawn barge on the Erie Canal. And though, naturally, we did not speak of it to one another, we were both more than a little nervous and even somewhat fearful.

I had been noticing, as we walked along the thronged streets, printed advertisements for an address by Mr. William Lloyd Garrison that evening at the Park Street Church. They had been posted all over the city, many of them deliberately torn down and trampled underfoot, it seemed. Despite its reputation, Boston was no more undivided in those days over the issue of slavery than any other Northern city — which is to say that the white citizens who opposed the institution altogether, who were for abolition, complete and forever, in all the states, were a distinct minority — a tiny minority. And those who were for slavery, who thought it a positive good, which ought to be extended over all the western territories, they, too, were a tiny minority. The vast majority in between just wanted the problem to go away. And while the majority did not exactly approve of the enslavement of Negroes, they deeply resented their white neighbors who had chosen to make an issue of it.

In Boston, however, numbered among the people who did make an issue of it were some of the most respectable and admired citizens in the entire country. Thanks to the reputations of Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing and Dr. and Mrs. Howe and dozens of other luminaries in the fields of education, the arts, public service, commerce, and religion, it was here, more than anywhere else in America, that civic virtue, high-mindedness, and theology had gotten associated with abolitionism. Overt opposition to it, therefore, got expressed mostly by ruffians and drunkards, while the respectable citizens stayed home, silently tolerated both sides, and felt smugly above the fray, as if the two minorities, in the eyes of God and the ongoing history of the Republic, neatly canceled each other out.

Stopped for a moment at a crowded intersection, I suggested to Father that it would be nice if we could hear Mr. William Lloyd Garrison speak tonight at the meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. “We might not have another chance to hear him in person,” I said brightly.

He shot me a puzzled, slightly irritated look and, without answering, darted into the cobbled street and strode on ahead of me.

I hurried to catch up, and when I was beside him again, I said in a loud voice, “Well, if not Ralph Waldo Emerson calling for a new heroism at the Charles Street Meeting House, then why not William Lloyd Garrison denouncing slavery at the Park Street Church?”

“What?”

“If not the radical Transcendentalist, then why not the radical Christian? Are we too pure for The Liberator, too?” Since my early childhood, Mr. Garrison’s sheet had come to us on the front lines like a trusted messenger sent from the headquarters of the army waging war against slavery. Father had used that very figure himself. Numerous times, I reminded him.

“Yes, I have used the figure,” he admitted. “But you mistook it. I meant it as a criticism of what’s exactly the problem with these pacifistic ‘society’ men and women.” We were by now down amongst the piers below the Custom House — a whole city of wharves and warehouses, a clattering tangle of crates, bales, tubs, and kegs and all manner of cartons and free-standing goods arriving, departing, and stopped at various stages in between; of shippers and trans-shippers and receivers of goods from all over the world. There was tea and silk from China, rum and molasses from the West Indies, carpets and ivory from India, and from the European nations everything from French lace to Lancaster steel, from Dresden paper to Portuguese wine.

“They think that we’re the corporals and they’re the generals’ he went on. “And men like Garrison, all they’re interested in is becoming commander-in-chief. So they waste their time and other people’s money squabbling amongst themselves, while our Negro brethren languish in slavery. Action, action, action, Owen! That’s what I want! Enough of this talk, talk, talk.”

“Then you won’t go with me” I said.

It was a noisy, chaotic scene down there amongst the stone wharves and warehouses, and difficult to carry on a normal conversation with wagons and carts rumbling past and stevedores, lumpers, and teamsters hollering and drunken seamen lurching through the throng. Although it was a September afternoon, it was as warm and humid as mid-summer, and most of the workmen were shirtless and sweating. Seagulls screamed and begged in brazen crowds or waddled along the edges of the piers or perched half-asleep on the stanchions and atop the hundreds of chimneys and masts of steamers and sailing ships and coastal packets reaching into the sky like a forest of pines. The smells of fish and rum were heavy in the air. In later years, I always associated those odors with the Boston waterfront: fish at the edge of turning, and the sweet, burnt-sugar smell of Jamaican rum — a dizzying, in no way unpleasant smell that touched my brain and staggered me like a drink of raw whiskey.

Father said, “Well, yes, I might be willing to hear Mister Garrison. Out of curiosity. But he’s elected to speak on the Sabbath.” He meant, of course, after sunset on a Saturday. “If it were to be a prayer meeting, fine. I’d attend. But otherwise, no. And it does seem otherwise, as he is a Quaker.”

“May I attend, then, and report back to you?”

“As you wish. You’re not bound by my religion, Owen.” “No.”

“I will return to the Howes’ and read awhile and pray.” “Why do I not feel released, Father?” I said.

He smiled back. “I dare not guess.”

We did not speak of it again but went about our business at the office of the shipping agent for the Cumbria—which, to these landlubbers and viewed from the dock, appeared quite seaworthy — and returned to the Howes’ in time for a pleasant early supper of stuffed grouse served on fancy China plates with genuine antique silverware from France. Later that evening, still secretly angry with Father, who remained closeted in our rooms at prayer, I headed out, by way of Beacon Street, to the Park Street Church, which was located not far from Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill. Beacon Street ran alongside the wide expanse of the famed Common, with a facing row opposite of large, old brick town houses, the patrician homes of many of Boston’s elite. As I walked, I kept to that side of the street, close by the tall, elegant houses and as far from the darkened Common as possible, for there — lurking among the shrubs and trees and appearing suddenly out of the darkness to glare and howl at the decorous, well-dressed men and women walking peacefully towards the church — was the enemy.

They were boys, mostly, and young men, idlers and drunkards, brawlers, louts, whoremongers, and common thieves; there were numerous females among them, too, maps and doxies as wild and brutal looking as their brothers. It was not so much their unwashed physiognomies that made them appear brutal and coarse, as their rage. No matter how noble the human face in repose, how symmetrical, fresh, and clear it may appear, when the brow is bent and glowered down, the mouth misshapen by an obscene word, the nostrils flared in revulsion and the lips sneering, and when the fist gets doubled and held out like a weapon, one recoils as if from a sub-species, as if from a demonic, bestial version of one’s self. How can we all be humans alike, when one of us has turned suddenly so ugly? And when a whole crowd turns ugly, turns itself into a mob, what species is it then?

I could fairly well smell the brandy and beer on the breath of the youths who stuck their whiskered faces out at me and brayed their Negro-hating sentiments at me and the other men and women who were silently, peacefully walking the sidewalk alongside me. The gang cackled and screeched and sometimes even tossed a rock and then ducked back into the bushes out of sight, to be replaced a few rods further on by another gang, whose drunken members would pick up the chant. “Nigger-lovers!” they hollered. “Yer nigger-lovers! Yer niggers yerself! Ugly black niggers! Ugly black niggers!” And so on, stupidly, even idiotically, they ranted — until we were walking a kind of gauntlet, it seemed, or proceeding through a maddened, howling mob to our own public hanging, headed not to a place of worship but to a scaffold. How courageous, I thought, were these men and women beside me, many of them elderly, who walked in silence along the sidewalk, being jeered and tormented by people with murder in their eyes. That our pale complexions protected us, keeping us from being physically attacked by them and possibly even killed, caused me to realize anew that white is as much a color as black. Our flag, our uniform, was our white skin, and while it provoked this attack from our fellow whites, it also shielded us from serious harm.

Nonetheless, once inside the large, clean, rationally proportioned sanctuary of the church, I breathed a great sigh of relief and realized that I had been seriously frightened by the harassment of the mob — although it was hard to distinguish fear from anger. My legs felt watery, and my heart was thumping. I wanted to strike out, to hit and hurt those foul mouths, and it had taken great restraint for me simply to appear to ignore them and walk serenely along to my meeting like the others, instead of picking up a loose brick or thrown rock and hurling it back at the coward who had thrown it, or chasing the fellows into the bushes and thrashing them there. I was a big, sturdy young man then and could easily have tossed three or four of them around like so much cordwood. Indeed, had one of them actually struck me with a rock, I believe I would have lost my serenity and rushed across Beacon Street after him. I was never a Quaker.

None of the others, however, as they entered the church, seemed in the slightest bothered by the caterwauling of the mob outside. They treated it like a disagreeable rain and seemed to brush it off their cloaks and shawls as they entered the foyer and greeted one another cheerfully and took their seats inside. Standing there in the foyer, shivering with rage — or fear — and tamping down fantasies of violent retribution, I, however, suddenly felt ashamed of myself. “Action, action, action!” was Father’s call, but here, in this serene and pacifistic context, action seemed vile, easy, childish. Mr. Garrison’s perspective, I knew, and that of the Anti-Slavery Society as a whole, was based on the Quaker philosophy of non-violence, and it was easy to criticize it from afar, while gnashing one’s teeth over the ongoing injustice of slavery and its growing power in Washington during those years. But here, in the face of the mob, pacifism seemed downright courageous and almost beautiful.

I was suddenly glad that Father was not at my side, for although he, like me, probably would not have charged into the woods of the Common to thrash his tormentors, he surely would have entered the foyer of the church growling and snarling at the weakness of the Society members for not having created a stout and well-armed security force from amongst their membership and posting it all along Park Street to protect their meetings.

“If you behave as slaves, you will be treated as slaves,” he often said. He said it to freed Negroes; he said it to sympathetic whites. “If you wish to do the Lord’s work on earth, you must gird your loins and buckle on your armor and sword and march straightway against the enemy.”

Ah, Father, how you shame me one minute and anger me the next. How your practical wisdom, which at times borders on a love of violence for its own sake, challenges my intermittent pacifism, which borders on cowardice. Your voice stops me cold, and then divides me. One day and in one context, I am a warrior for Christ. The next day, in a different context, I am one of His meekest lambs. If only in the beginning, when I was a child, I had been able, like so many of my white countrymen, to believe that the fight to end slavery was not my fight, that it was merely one more item in the long list of human failings and society’s evils that we must endure, then I surely would have become a happy, undivided man.

With thoughts like these, then, and in a kind of dulled despondency, I took my seat in a pew at the rear of the sanctuary, for the church was nearly filled by now with proper Bostonians, all of them white people, well-dressed, with the benignly expectant faces of people gathered for the dedication of an equestrian statue. Indeed, the meeting itself, once it got under way, was not unlike just such a ceremony. Father would have been appalled, and even I was somewhat embarrassed for being there.

My mind wandered during the benediction and the welcome to new members and guests, and I did not rise like the other newcomers to introduce myself to the assembly — out of embarrassment, no doubt, but also because at the proper moment I was thinking of something else and was not sure, when I saw a scattering of folks in the audience stand and heard them, one by one, say their names, what the ceremony was all about. I was thinking about the packs of wild boys and men outside and their dark domain beyond.

Even before Mr. Garrison appeared, I rose from my seat and left. In a moment, I was back on the street. The howlers were gone, disappeared into the darkness of the Common, where I supposed they now lurked, waiting for their prey to emerge from the church, when they would resume barking and snarling at them.

I think back to that night from this vantage point a half-century later, and I cannot remember what, if anything, was in my mind when I crossed the street and stepped into the thicket there. I cannot imagine what my intentions were, as I stumbled down the unfamiliar slope in darkness and made my way towards the rough pasture in the middle, where in the distance I saw what appeared to be a scattering of small campfires and huts made of cast-off boards and old pieces of canvas sheeting. Now and again, the figure of a man or a pair of men passed near enough for me to see and be seen, and, once, a fellow said to me, “Evenin, mate,” almost as if hed recognized my face, and passed into the darkness close by. When I looked back over my shoulder to see where he had gone, I saw him stop and step forward from the shadows towards me, as if expecting me to follow. I said nothing and plunged ahead, in the direction of the distant firelight.

Giddy with an unidentifiable excitement and breathing heavily, as if after great exertion, I made my way slowly over the rough, cloddy ground, which gradually opened onto a broad, unmowed field. Oddly, I felt myself to be in no danger. I was not being pushed from behind, but rather was being drawn forward, as if by some powerful, magnetic force emanating from in front of me.

It was a clear, warm night. The sky was crossed with broad swaths of stars and a gibbous moon, which gave enough light for me gradually to gain a sense of the space I was in. Although it lay just beyond a ridge of elms blackly silhouetted in the moonlight, the city of Boston seemed miles from here. High-minded meetings and church services, elegantly appointed dining rooms and parlors and university lecture halls and counting houses, all the manufactories and dwelling places of proper Boston, seemed far away — and when I pictured Father at that moment seated in Dr. Howe’s fine, paneled library in the house on Louisburg Square, reading from the Doctor’s leather-bound edition of Milton or one of the old Puritan divines, it was as if the Old Man were located, not a mere half-mile from me, but someplace halfway to California.

Suddenly, in a way that I had never experienced before, not even when I went roaming through the nighttime streets and alleyways of Springfield the previous spring, I felt free of Father. Free of the force of his personality and the authority of his mind. Free of his rightness. Yes, more than anything else, it was his rightness that so oppressed me in those years. I could in no way honestly or openly oppose it. It exhausted me, humiliated and punished me, and divided me against my true self whenever I sought to liberate myself from his iron control of my will. Inevitably, his moral correctness, which I could never deny, brought me to heel. It was in my bones and blood to follow him wherever his God led him. For, although I did not believe in my father’s God, I believed in the principles that my father attributed to Him. And so long as the Old Man did not waver in his loyalty to those principles, I could not waver in my loyalty to the Old Man.

Yet tonight, in this strange sanctuary of darkness, I felt as if I were afloat on stilled, black waters, drifting in a slow, aimless swirl whose very aimlessness thrilled me. A slight shift in the breeze could fix my direction or alter it, and thus I wandered left and right around boulders and bushes, as the land sloped gradually away from the place where moments earlier I had departed from the street. I slipped past a knot of men gathered before a small fire and passing a clay jug and smoking short pipes. One of them spoke to me in a friendly voice. “Out lookin’ for y’ cat, lad?” he asked. I said no and passed on, and they laughed lightly behind me. Ghostly figures stepped forward and silently withdrew, and every third or fourth of them hissed to me or beckoned for me to follow.

Were these shadowy figures, these frail, gray wraiths and dark spirits, the same demonic figures I had seen earlier howling at the good Quaker abolitionists on their way to meeting? These people hardly seemed capable of raising their voices, much less shrieking obscenities and tossing rocks and other missiles. But then I saw a band of ruffians, seven or eight of them, boldly approaching me, swigging from a shared bottle and laughing boisterously. They marched straight towards me, as if we were on a path and their intent was to force me out of it. They were boys, fifteen or sixteen years old, amusing themselves by banding together and playing the bully to solitaries like me. As they neared me, one of them hollered, “Out of our way, ye damned bunter, or we’ll slice off y’ prick and make y’ eat it!” and the others laughed.

Shabby Irish laddies they were, all puffed up with alcohol and the rough pleasure of each other’s company, and I knew what they thought I was, out here in the night alone — a catamite, a molly-coddle, in search of another. Possibly, in a strange sense, they were right about who I was and what I was doing there, at least for this one night in my life. They had no way of knowing for sure, however, and neither did I. But regardless, I was not about to play the girl for them, or the nigger, and step aside so they could march past unimpeded. Instead, I waded straight into them, as if they were a low wave at a beach.

There is an anger that drives one, not to suicide or even to contemplate it, but to place oneself in a situation which has as its outcome only two logical conclusions — a miraculous triumph over one’s enemies, or one’s own death — so that the line between suicide and martyrdom is drawn so fine as not to exist. It was a contrivance of my own making, but I did not know it yet, when the first of the lads reached forward as if to grasp me by my placket, and I tore his hand away with my right hand and clubbed him in his grinning face with my left, sending him sprawling.

That was as close to miraculous triumph as I came, however. At once, the rest of the gang was upon me like a pack of wolves taking down an elk in deep snow. In pairs and from all sides, they darted in on me and struck me in the face and belly and groin, kicked at my knees, and although I did some damage to them, they soon had me crouched over, and in seconds, with several hard, well-placed kicks to my ankles, they had me on the ground face-down, curling in on myself to protect my head and nether parts from their continuing barrage of kicks and blows. They said not a word to me or to each other, and now that they had me down, businesslike, went straight to work, pounding at me as if they wished to murder me. The beating went on for many minutes, until I was beyond pain, or so encased by it that I could no longer distinguish the individual blows. Their boots and fists smacked loudly against my spine and ribs and the back of my head and the meat of my arms and legs, pitching my limp body this way and that, until finally the force of the blows tumbled me off the path into a shallow gully beside it, where there was enough bilge and foul-smelling trash that they did not want to pursue me there.

I lay still and kept my eyes shut and heard them spit at me but did not feel it. I heard them laugh and call me names that I did not understand, and then at last they either grew bored with the game or thought me unconscious or dead, for the spitting and derision ceased, and I heard their boots against the gravel as they strode off. And then silence.

For a long while I lay there in the wet filth. Every time I tried to raise myself, pain shot through my body and forced me back down. Then I believe I lost consciousness, for the next I remember is the broad red face of a white-whiskered police officer. I was lying on my back in the pathway, looking up at his worried expression. I remember his words to me. “Well, now, lad, I guess you’re not dead after all,” he said.

It took two policemen to bring me to Father at Dr. Howe’s house, where I was laid out like a corpse on a pallet next to the fireplace in our chamber on the third floor. The Doctor and Mrs. Howe wished to attend to me personally, but Father, after examining me for broken bones and not finding any, other than several likely cracked ribs, would have none of it and insisted on cleaning and caring for me himself. To which I had no objection, for Father was a wonderful and knowledgeable nurse. I was not quite capable of making an objection anyhow, as I could barely speak through my bloodied and swollen mouth. Besides, I was deeply ashamed of my condition, of how I had gotten into it, and wanted as little fuss made over me as possible and as few witnesses. It was obvious that I had been set upon and beaten. The policeman, when he brought me through the door into the parlor, said only that he had found me like this in the middle of the Common, but, oddly, no one interrogated me further, not the police, not Dr. and Mrs. Howe, and not Father.

As soon as we were alone, Father stripped my torn clothing off and washed me down in placid silence, as if I were one of his lambs and had been attacked by a wild animal or a pack of feral dogs. Throughout, Father said not a word. Finally, when he had me wrapped in a warm blanket and I was drifting towards sleep, he peered down at my face as if examining it for further wounds and said, “Owen, tell me now what happened to you tonight.”

“Is it necessary?”

He answered that he wished only to know how I came to be walking at night through the woods and fields of the Common, when the place was a well-known haunt of hooligans and prostitutes. “Your private business is your own business;’ he said, “but I pray that it’s not what it looks like.”

I almost wished that it were; it would have been somehow more natural; but I could not lie to him. I told him the story of my evening, just as I have related it now — of my having passed along the gauntlet of taunts and derision on my way to the meeting, and of the strange, yet seductive, passivity of the abolitionists as they walked through this assault and afterwards at the meeting, and of my slow-boiling, confused rage, how it eventually drove me from the meeting back to the street and thence into the Common.

Father drew a chair up to my bed, and with thread and needle in hand and my torn shirt, sat listening in grim, attentive silence as I spoke through broken lips. “I don’t truly know why I went there, though. It was because of what happened earlier, I suppose. There were all kinds of strange, demented people in that place,”I said. “It’s as if the place has been specially set aside for them. I felt like I was inside a vast cage with packs of wild animals roaming, and that I was one of the animals.” I told him that when a group of them wished me to step aside and defer to them, I had attacked them.

“You attacked them?” His eyes opened wide, and he ceased sewing. “Yes.”

He reached out and set his hand on my head. “You went in there and purposely attacked this gang of Negro-hating hooligans?”

“Yes. It looks that way. It felt that way, too.”

“Didn’t you realize, son, that they were capable of stabbing you, of killing you, of simply beating you to death, as they nearly succeeded in doing? Didn’t you know that, or are you merely that naive?”

“No, I knew.”

“Yet you went in there anyhow. You went after them.”

“Yes.”

Gently he stroked my hair. “I see you freshly, son.” He sat back and looked steadily at me. “You have as much of the lion in you as the lamb. In my prayers tonight, I will be thanking God for that,” he said, and smiled, and went peacefully back to his sewing, and I to sleep.

The next morning was a fine, bright day, still unseasonably warm. I woke feeling broken, however, in pieces and chunks, barely able to stand, pummeled by a hundred shooting pains from crown to foot, and feverish. It was Sunday, and I remember, when Father marched me off to church services, that I was fuzzy-headed and dizzy and only dimly aware of what we were up to. I did not recognize the streets we passed along, and if Father had told me that we were now in Liverpool and I had slept through the crossing to England, I would have believed him.

And before long I did indeed think that I was dreaming, for our reality that morning corresponded uncannily to a nighttime dream that I frequently had in those years. Father and I were the only white people in a crowd of well-dressed Negroes. As we moved through the large gathering of black, brown, and tan men, women, and children, they parted for us and nodded respectfully, some of the men touching the brims of their hats, the women politely averting their gazes, the children looking at us with surprised eyes — lovely people of all the many Negro shades, from pale butterscotch and ginger all the way to ebony and even a few of that most African hue of blue-black. It was as if every tribe of the continent of Africa, from Egypt to the southernmost tip, were represented there. Father walked cleanly through the crowd in his usual manner — back straight as a hoe handle, head pitched slightly forward and led by his out-thrust jaw, arms swinging loosely at his sides, like a man pacing out a field for a survey — and I struggled to keep up, my feet heavy and difficult to move, as if I were wading through mud or walking underwater.

Soon the crowd closed around him and filled in between us, and I found myself cut off from him, falling further and further back, and suddenly I became afraid, not so much of the Negroes who surrounded me as of being separated from Father. Like a small child, I cried out to him, “Father! Wait!” At that, the crowd seemed to part again and to open up a corridor between us. Father slowly turned and peered at me. Then, impatiently waving me on, he resumed walking up the broad steps of a small brick church and entered and disappeared from my view into the darkness of the sanctuary. The narrow corridor through the crowd remained open, however. Laboriously, I made my way along it, sweating from the effort and the heat of the day and the many aches and pains of my beating the night before, when I had walked another gauntlet, that one amongst white people. I was never so conscious as I was then, during those few moments that I spent traversing the short, paved space at the entrance to the Negro church of Boston, of the difference between the faces of the oppressors and the oppressed, or the faces of my white-skinned brethren and my black. And I was never so conscious of my own bewildering, sad difference from both. My face was invisible to me. Father! I nearly cried out. Wait for me! I cannot bear to be so alone! Without thee beside me, I seem not to exist at all! Without thee to look upon me, whether I am amongst white people or black, I am invisible!

I found him inside the church, of course, seated in a pew close to the front, and I took the empty seat next to him, fairly collapsing into it. He studied my face with sudden concern and felt my brow. “You’re unwell, son|’ he said. “Perhaps you should have stayed at the Howes’ today.”

“No, no, I want to be here. I’m very happy here, Father,” I said to him. And I was. Frightened of nameless things; and filled to overflowing with chaotic emotions; yet happy! I felt an inexplicable readiness, as if for a religious awakening, as if for an infusion of light and power. I sensed it coming, not from a truly divine source like Father’s God, but from some other, up to now wholly unknown source of light and power, which lay outside myself and beyond all my previous experiences of awakening, beyond all my earlier resolves and oaths, all the sudden stages of my moral growth, all my old degrees and kinds of enlightenment and the pledges that had followed hard upon them. Filled with trembling expectation, then, I waited to become a new man. Or, perhaps, for the first time, a man.

And, indeed, it happened there, on that Sunday morning in September, in the African American Meeting House on Belknap Street in Boston, Massachusetts. While the choir sang a familiar old Methodist hymn, I began to shake and shiver and then experienced a great seizure. I remember the beautiful Negro voices pealing like heavy, dark bells, like distant thunder rolling down the valleys and across the fields of North Elba, coming closer and closer to me:

Come, O thou Traveler unknown,

Whom still I hold but cannot see;

My company before is gone,

And I am left alone with thee.

With thee all night I mean to stay

And wrestle till the break of day!

The fingers of both my hands tingled and buzzed, and I believed that the power of movement had returned to my long-dead arm, and I looked down and saw it move unbid, saw it bend at the elbow for the first time since boyhood, saw it rise and fall as easily as my right arm, until I was clapping my hands together and swinging both arms like the rest of the congregation and like Father beside me. The choir sang, and the preacher, a large, white-haired, full-faced man the color of mahogany, joined in at the second verse, and the rest of the people sang, too, including Father, who knew the words well, for it was one of his favorites.

I could not sing, however. I knew the hymn by heart, but it was as if I had been struck dumb. I opened my mouth, and no sound came. In silence, I made the words:

I need not tell thee who I am;

My sin and mis’ry declare;

Thyself has call’d me by my name;

Look on thy hands and read it there.

But who, I ask thee, who art thou?

Tell me thy name, and tell me now.

I did not believe in ghosts then, nor angels nor spirits of any kind, but it was as if I myself had become one, ghost, angel, or spirit, as if I had been lifted by the music and the clapping and swaying of the congregation and now hovered above them all, like a spot of reflected sunlight. Way down below, standing amongst the crowd of black and brown people, I saw clearly the two white men, my father and his large, red-haired son, swaying and clapping and singing with the others. For a few moments, I was split off from my body, entire and yet wholly invisible to the others, who sang with a mighty voice:

In vain thou strugglest to get free;

I never will unloose my hold;

Art thou the Man who died for me?

The secret of thy love unfold;

Wrestling, I will not let thee go,

Till I thy name, thy nature, know’.

All the universe seemed contained for those moments in that room, and the room was filled with music. I watched as my body below began to quake, and I saw my head snap back and my eyes roll in their sockets. I saw Father stare at me with alarm, and when my body stiffened and jerked about as if in a death-dance, I saw him place his arms around my shoulders to calm and comfort me, for he could not know that I was insensible of him and as much at peace as I had ever been in my life. I wished that I could reassure him of that, but I could not. The standing crowd, intent on its singing and in perfect unison swinging their arms and clapping their hands, appeared not to notice the grimly anxious white man in the snuff-colored suit and his large, flailing son.

What though my shrinking flesh complain

And murmur to contend so long?

I rise superior to my pain: When I am weak, then am I strong.!

And when my all of strength shall fail,

I shall with the God-man prevail.

Slowly, I descended and re-entered my body, and it seemed to soften somewhat and then to resume its former comportment, and Father eased me back down into my seat. When I opened my eyes, there he was, looking earnestly into my face. I smiled up at him.

“Son? Truthfully, now. Have you been brushed by an angel of the Lord?” was his whispered question.

I said, “Yes.”

He let a triumphant smile pass over his face and turned back to the front, where the members of the choir had now taken their seats and the preacher was moving towards the altar to begin his sermon. With a great barrel of a voice, large and round, he began. “My children. My brothers and sisters. Let me speak today on this question. Let me ask, let all of us ask, ‘Why should the children of a King go mourning all their days?’“

He continued, but I heard almost none of the sermon and little of what followed, for I was still be-dazzled; and would remain so for many days and even weeks afterwards: bedazzled by my new solidity and strength, and by my wonderful clarity of purpose.

Chapter 11

For Father, the long sea-voyage to England was a splendid occasion for his expectations of success to rise steadily. Leaps and bounds, in fact. Solitude, any kind of extended isolation from the everyday world of petty disappointments and frustrations, did that to him — released his fantasies from curtailment and got him feverish with mental dramas and schemes, which, with each new day’s dreaming, he built upon freshly. Dream upon dream he went, quickly constructing an immense tower of expectation too fragile to stand against the first opposing breeze and too brittle to bend before the press of mundane reality. But there was no holding him back beforehand, no way of warning him or of forcing him to remember what happened last time. On a ship at sea for nearly a fortnight, with no one but the captain and crew and a handful of other passengers and me to correct him, the Old Man was free to sail, as it were, inside his own thrilled mind. And so he did.

The captain of the Cumbria, Captain Ebediah Roote out of New Bedford, a small, trim cube of a man with Quaker chin-whiskers, wanted only to make his passengers comfortable and then to forget them and attend to his crew, craft, and cargo, which were worth so much more to his employers than the comfort of the passengers. For this reason, he gave Father permission to conduct daily prayers and services in the main cabin, hoping no doubt that Father, with his evident fervor and tirelessness, would organize and sufficiently distract the rest of the passengers to keep them out from under foot. And, indeed, Father did just that, and perhaps as a consequence, at least from the captain’s point of view, the crossing for the first eleven days went smoothly.

The Cumbria was a steam-assisted, two-masted packet of fifteen hundred tons, a small freighter built in the ’30s and renovated periodically since. She provided few of the sumptuous diversions and accommodations of the more typical and modern passenger ships that crossed between England and the United States then. People who chose to travel aboard a freighter like ours were usually supercargoes — small-businessmen or their agents accompanying their own cargo — or poor students and artists traveling on the cheap, or people who did not want to be seen by members of their own society. We, I suppose, were passengers of both the first two types, businessmen, but, like poor students, without cargo, for our shipment of wool had gone before us. Nearly two hundred thousand pounds of borrowed Ohio and Pennsylvania wool, it lay ready for auction to the English cloth manufacturers — seven hundred bales of it stacked to the roof and surrounded by hundreds of tons of Irish, Scottish, and Yorkshire wool in a warehouse in Liverpool.

I remember cringing at the thought of it, almost with embarrassment, certainly with dread. Father, on the other hand, contemplated the image with pride and heady anticipation of a great, hard-earned triumph. “When old John Bull sees the quality of our stock, the price of his will drop like a stone, and ours will rise,” he frequently declared, rubbing his hands together with glee. “And then, finally, our greedy New England merchants will find themselves competing instead of conspiring with one another. They’ll be up against non-collaborationists! Real money-men! After this, they’ll have to pay our price, or else we’ll just sell it abroad!”

How, I asked him, could we be so sure that our wool was markedly superior to what the British grew?

“How? How? We’ve seen the shoddy goods they try to foist off on us poor colonials, pitching it to us at prices way above our own. Owen, that stuff’s grown by peasants!” he pronounced. The Irish and Scottish shepherds were poor and demoralized, he explained. They were practically serfs, a conquered, abject population impoverished for generations by a feudal over-lordship. They were farmers who couldn’t even own the land they worked or the animals they raised, and thus they had no more pride in the products of their labor than did slaves in the American South. And off he’d go on an elaborate comparison between the products of slave labor and free, quite as if all the cotton being produced in the South by slave labor were not of sufficient quality to control the world market in cotton and make the slaveowners richer than Croesus and their senators and congressmen powerful all out of proportion to their numbers.

Dream on, Old Man, I thought, but said nothing. Scheme on, Father. But even if you’re right, and the price of English wool drops like a stone because our product is so much more desirable in Liverpool than their own, the New England merchants will simply turn around and buy cheap English wool instead of ours, and the cotton kings of Washington, as soon as they discover it, will vote heavy tariffs on imports, until the prices are equalized again and the cost of trans-Atlantic shipping makes the difference, favoring the buyer at home again. A wasted enterprise.

None of that mattered to the Old Man, though. To him it was a self-evident truth: our wool was superior to the British wool; therefore, the British would pay more for it than for their own; and thus, despite the tariffs and the costs of shipping, we could beat the New England merchants at their own game. His anger — at the collaborationists, as he called them, and at English feudalism, as he saw it, and at slavery and the slave-powered cotton economy, which he viewed as the root cause of the sufferings of all Northern sheepmen — made him deaf and blind. Deaf to me, and blind to the winking smiles of the Boston merchants who traveled with us aboard the Cumbria and who were subjected to Father’s constant explanations of his plans to crack the English woolen market.

Business was not his only subject, needless to say. Every day following breakfast, Father sermonized to our fellow passengers, leading his tiny congregation in long prayers and hymn-singing and Bible study. Later, he harangued them on the evils of slavery. His congregants were four Boston merchants, a young English journalist, Mr. Hugh Forbes, who said he was attached to the New York Tribune and was returning to England to visit his wife and children, and a middle-aged woman and her young female companion. These two were an aunt and her niece, going abroad for the senior woman’s health, supposedly, although Father believed that the motives for their journey had more to do with the younger woman’s likely pregnancy than the other’s health. It was the journalist, Forbes, who most intrigued Father, for he claimed to have fought alongside Garibaldi in the recent, failed Italian revolution, was supposed to have written a two-volume manual on military tactics, and had once (or so he said) been a Viennese silk merchant. In Father’s daily reports back to me in the cabin, the most frequently discussed passenger was Mr. Forbes.

Unfortunately, I was miserable and sick with nausea, with giddiness, headache, and vomiting, from the first hour of our crossing to nearly the end of it, from Boston Harbor to the Irish Sea. It was the first time at sea for me, and except for our return, it would be the last. According to several passengers and the crew, who had much experience in these matters, the crossing was a relatively calm one; yet I suffered as if we were aboard a small barque upon storm-tossed waters, as if we were at sea in a hurricane.

There was, of course, an element of convenience in this for me, for it kept me belowdecks in our tiny cabin day and night and thus well out of sight and sound of Father, except when he came to our cabin to report on his day’s activities and conversations and then to read, pray alone, and sleep, all of which he did no more than necessary, as the cabin stank of vomit and my chamber pot, and my company was that of a man curled in his bunk like a cutworm, bloodless face to the wall, body wrapped in sweat-soaked sheets, conversation limited to moans and chattering teeth.

For a time, Father tried various remedies, some of them suggested by his fellow passengers and some by Captain Roote himself — drinking warm water, sassafras tea, herbal potions, eating bits of biscuit, loblolly, and so forth. But nothing cured me of my sea-sickness, and so, after a few days, I became a pathetic object of the other passengers’ derisive, feigned concern, until gradually everyone, even Father, seemed to forget that I was aboard or else regarded me as if I were merely Father’s cargo, out of sight and mind until we landed.

This did not displease me. I wanted no more than to be left alone with my thoughts and memories. For it seemed to me then, as it does even now, half a century later, that I was passing out of one life into another. I was like a snake shedding its skin. There was no single event or insight that had instigated this painful transition, nor was it the result of careful reasoning and analysis. Certainly, the three disturbing days and nights in Boston had played a crucial part, leading as they did to my seizure and apparent conversion at the Negro church, my “awakening.” But the rapid collapse of our work back in Timbuctoo, its easy, deadly violence and our inability to stave it off — indeed, the relish with which we all, Father, John, Jason, and I, had taken it up, and then the tragic and, as it seemed to me, unnecessary death of poor Mr. Fleete — all this mattered greatly. And yet somehow, due mainly I suppose to Father’s fervor and singleness of purpose, and due also to my ignorance of my own true nature, I could not fully acknowledge these experiences or absorb them with understanding. And so I welcomed the chance to re-read them, as it were, in my mind.

Meanwhile, Father preached to our fellow passengers and the ship’s captain and crew. Much to their consternation, surely. It may have been the failure of his work in North Elba, combined with his fears of financial ruin, but he was possessed by a sort of mania during those weeks at sea, which must have frightened some of his listeners and surely amused others, for he would come back to our cabin in the evenings and condemn them all roundly for their mocking refusals to hear him out.

The merchants, he said, were more attentive and polite, more religious even, than the two Transcendental women, as he called them, and the English journalist, Mr. Forbes. Which was a puzzle to Father, because when it came to the question of slavery, it was the women and Mr. Forbes who sided with him, and the merchants who thought him foolish. “But regardless of their stance on slavery,”‘ he said, “they all split the Bible off from the Declaration and the Laws, and in that way they mis-read both. Consequently, every one of them gets away with feeling smug and above it all. I don’t understand these people. It’s the Holy Bible that impels us to action, and it’s the Declaration and the Laws that show us precisely where to act. What’s the problem with these people?”

My response was usually to groan in pain and queasiness and turn my back to him and stare at the wall next to my bunk, which seemed to calm him somewhat or at least to divert his attention and fix it onto the question of my cure. “Will you try to eat a biscuit, my boy? Just try a bite of biscuit.”

“I can’t keep it down. I can barely keep down warm water.”

“Shall I sing to you, son?”

“If you wish. Quietly, though, please. My head pounds, and my joints ache.”

“Quietly, then.” And he would begin, in a low and tender voice, one of the sweet Methodist hymns. A verse or two into it, however, and his voice would begin to lift and grow in volume, and soon he was nearly shouting out the words.

“Father! My head! Too loud, Father.”

“Of course, son. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, my boy,” he would say, and he would begin the hymn a second time, quietly, almost whispering the words now, and of course it was not long before once again he was bellowing it out, obliging me to wrap my poor head in the pillow, which would cause him finally to cease his singing altogether and, not without a sigh to indicate the degree of his sacrifice, settle for silently reading from his Bible or in one of his accounts of Napoleon’s campaigns, which he was then studying with an eye to making an on-site examination after we had completed our business in Liverpool.

With or without Father, daytimes I confined myself to our cabin. Prompted by necessity, however, it had become my habit after a few nights at sea to walk awhile abovedecks alone late, and I well remember one night in particular. Long after Father had come in, when finally he lay snoring in the upper bunk — from the first night out, he had made me sleep below, so as to ease my fits of sickness and not to wake him when I had to get down and use the chamber pot — I rose and pulled on trousers and shin; and then, barefoot, my sloshing chamber pot held carefully in two hands and extended well before me, pitched my watery limbs and turbulent barrel of guts down the narrow, dimly lit passageway and made my way up to the main deck. At the stern, I tossed the contents of the pot into the sea and returned to midships, where I set the container down by the cabin passageway and took what had become my nightly stroll, such as it was — a circuit or three, depending on the tolerance of my roiling innards.

On this night the sea was calm and the breeze light. The squeamishness of my stomach had somewhat abated, and I was able to look out over the glistening black waters without nausea and steady my gaze on the moonlit horizon without dizziness, and for the first time I actually enjoyed the slight roll and buoyancy of the ship below me and the tender flap of the vast sails above, the slosh and creak of the slowly turning sidewheel. I listened with affection to the groan of the masts and spars, the slap of the lines and whir of wooden pulleys, as the wind luffed and loafed overhead. The quiet, steady plash of the low waves as they met the bow seemed almost tropically soft, as if we were in the shallow, warm waters of the Caribbee, and for a long moment I quite forgot that I was cast upon the broad, fierce back of the old, cold North Atlantic.

Then, as I made my dreamy way around to the leeward side of the ship, I discerned the figure of a fellow passenger, a small, frail-looking woman wearing a heavy, dark woolen shawl over her head. She clung to the railing there and stared down into the inky depths as if lost in thought.

When I spoke to her, “Good evening, m’am,” she turned abruptly from her reverie as if startled, and to reassure her I quickly introduced myself by name and said I was a fellow passenger, the son of John Brown, whom she had no doubt already met.

“Oh, yes,” she said. Then, after a long silence, added, “The preacher.” We had not yet been properly introduced, due to my illness and persistent reclusion, but I already knew who she was, of course. I had glimpsed her when we first came aboard in Boston, and later Father had described her at length and had often speculated about her condition and reasons for travel.

She said her name, Miss Sarah Peabody, of Salem, Massachusetts, and held out her delicate, bare hand, which I grasped in mine for a second. Not knowing what then to say or do, I let go of it quickly, as if her hand were unnaturally hot, instead of alabaster cool. She seemed wraith-like, more apparition than mortal, the image of someone long dead or not yet born, this pale young woman — little more than a girl, I saw, when she opened her small, almond-eyed face to me. Not yet twenty, I thought. And in a dark, sharpened way, she was very pretty.

“Well, Father’s not exactly a preacher,” I finally said. “But, yes, I suppose he does tend to preach to folks. He’s a man of religion, you might say.”

She smiled lightly. “Mister Brown is an… impressive man,” she said, with a hint of mockery in her tone. Her face was intelligent, and though she was clearly a genteel and refined person, she looked straight at me and, despite her fragility, spoke with mild self-assurance. She was a young woman who seemed sure of her gifts and their value. A new kind of female, to me.

I could not imagine her pregnant and abandoned, however — I could not imagine her becoming pregnant. Even so, there was something about her gaze and light smile that was not in the slightest virginal, that was bold and provocative, and I found myself defending Father to her, as if wanting her approval of him and, more to the point, of me as well. I told her that my father was a businessman, a wholesaler of wool. And that he was also a famous abolitionist.

“Really?” She arched her eyebrows and smiled more with pity than condescension. “A famous abolitionist? Strange that I’ve never heard of him. Although perhaps I should have.” She began suddenly to speak with surprising animation. She had thought that she knew everyone of importance who was in the movement. She and her family, she said, the Peabodys, were all deeply involved in the struggle to bring an end to slavery and had been for many years. She and her family were also active in bringing about other reforms, she said, women’s rights, education, and so on. Except for one aunt, she conceded. Not her Aunt Elizabeth, the woman with whom she was traveling to England, but another, her Aunt Sophia, who was married to an author.

“Poor Aunt Sophia, she follows the Democratic politics and principles of her husband. A fine and famous man,” she said, “who ought to know better.” She told me the author’s name, Nathaniel Hawthorne. “You no doubt have heard of him and perhaps have read some of his tales,” she said.

At that time, however, his name meant nothing to me. “I’m not much for tales,” I said. When it came to literary matters, I told her, I was an ignorant country boy, a rough shepherd, whose reading was mostly still shaped by his father’s tastes, which is to say, by religion and politics. Amongst the so-called moderns, John Bunyan was our tale-teller and John Milton our poet, and they were hardly moderns, were they? The rest, according to Father, was dross, or worse. Filth.

“Your father;’ she said. “The famous abolitionist.”

“Well, yes,”I said. “But perhaps he’s better known amongst the abolitionists in Springfield and out west in Ohio, where we used to live.” I thought for a moment to tell her of his association with Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith, but realized that I would be merely bragging, and besides, it would be as indiscreet as it was vain for me to invoke the names of those fine men merely to glamorize Father’s name. Especially in the light of our recent escapades in the northcountry, adventures that neither Mr. Douglass nor Mr. Smith would care to be associated with.

“Actually, Father works pretty much alone, and with the Negroes themselves. Not so much with white people, excepting, of course, us family members. Which actually enhances his effectiveness, rather than hinders it,” I added, and my voice and phrasing sounded in my ears precisely like Father’s, as if he were speaking through me, as if, even in chatting casually with this attractive young woman, I had no voice or language of my own.

“Well, I’m sure your father is a hero;’ she said to me, and patted my hand, soothing a troubled child. “He does seem very much to have cast himself in the old-fashioned heroic mold. Like one of Cromwell’s captains, the way he presents himself. Is he a man of action, as well as a man of religion?”

I could not determine if she was serious or making fun of me, and though I grew somewhat shy, I tried nonetheless to engage her bright spirit, which drew me irresistibly towards her. “Oh, yes, certainly. Action, action, action! That’s Father’s by-word.”

“A man of action and a man of God! My goodness, what a rare combination. I don’t believe I’ve ever met such a man, at least not until now. And you, Mister Owen Brown, in matters of war are you his lieutenant, and in matters of religion his acolyte?”

“You could say that. Regarding the war against slavery, I mean.”

“Then you, too, are a man of action?”

“Well, less than he. No, not at all, in fact. I suppose I’m a follower.”

“A man of God, then?”

“Less than he there, too. Not at all there, I fear. In religion, I’m not even a follower. Although I’d like to be.”

She said to me then that she thought she and I were much alike, which surprised me, for at that moment, no one seemed less like me than this woman, and I told her so.

“But we’re both attached to people of whom we are but diminished forms,” she said, and at that point there began a most extraordinary conversation between us. Slowly, we walked the length of the ship and back again, opening ourselves to one another in a manner altogether new to me. And, as it appeared, new to her as well, for every few moments she would exclaim, “Heavens, I can’t believe I’m talking this way to a perfect stranger!”

“I guess it’s difficult to be strangers on a sea-voyage,” I said.

“Yes, and I guess I’m even more lonely than I thought. You don’t mind, do you?” she asked.

“No, no, of course not. I’m lonely, too.”

I called her by her given name, Sarah, and she addressed me familiarly, too. She confessed that she had come out onto the deck tonight filled with despondency and hatred for her life. Everything so far had ended up disappointing her, she said. Everything. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, she spoke of her illustrious family, the Peabodys of Salem, Massachusetts, with an admiration that approached awe, even including her Aunt Sophia, the woman whose politics she had previously criticized. Now she described her aunt as beautiful and kind and endlessly loyal to her husband, a man who himself was a literary genius, she conceded, in spite of his being a Democrat and anti-abolitionist.

She contrasted herself with these brilliant and famous relatives: she was ordinary, she said, without their gifts of intellect or speech. And she was in no sense as virtuous as they. Her family members and their friends and associates were, for the most part, rigorous Unitarians and well-known Transcendentalists. But for all their liberalism in religion, in terms of their public and private behavior they were still old-fashioned, upright Puritans. “In other words, they are good people” she said. “Morally upright.” Their generation had abandoned the Calvinist theology in their youth, but had kept the morality. She, on the other hand, having been encouraged by her elders since her nursery days to forsake the old Puritan forms of religion, had retained none of the Puritans’ moral uprightness and rigor. She was a sinner, she said. A sinner without the comfort of prayer and with no possibility of redemption.

“I wonder, Owen Brown, do you think that this is what it means to be all modern and up-to-date?” She gave a short, metallic laugh, and, once again, I couldn’t tell if she was serious. “Think about it,” she went on. “In spite of the fact that our lies and weaknesses and our sensualities feel to us exactly like sins, we are no longer permitted to believe in sin. It’s absurd!” she exclaimed. She went silent for a moment, when suddenly I realized that she was weeping.

“What’s wrong? Can you tell me what’s at the bottom of this, Miss Peabody?”

She didn’t answer at first, and I regretted my question. Then she sighed and said, “The simple truth is that my life has no meaning to me. It’s true, Owen Brown. None. I feel guilt, a great weight of guilt. But no shame!”

I touched her glistening cheek and said nothing. After a moment, I saw in the moonlight that she was smiling again. Though it was for me a struggle to follow the sudden twists and turns of her emotions and words, I had managed it nonetheless and believed that I understood her, at least momentarily, for I thought that I felt the same way as she — about life, about myself, about everything. Sarah Peabody’s words and her tears and her abrupt and bitter laughter had given sudden, expressive shape to my own inarticulated despair. Although despair, like a miasma, had long influenced my mind and spirit — gray, noxious, slick, and spreading into every corner of my consciousness — until now it had remained wordless, unnamed. But here, thanks to this girl, I could name it. My life, like hers, had no meaning, except as a diminished form of other lives. Father’s, in particular. And I, too, felt guilt and no shame.

“Then I’m as much a sinner as you, Sarah” I said. “More of a sinner,” I declared, offering cold comfort, I knew. I told her that she wasn’t alone, for I could no more believe in the God of our fathers than she. Despite Father’s tireless wish for me to believe. Thanks to her family’s apostasy, she was blameless for her fall from religion. But my fall, I pointed out, had been my own doing, not my family’s. Then I told her of my “awakening” at the Negro church in Boston and how my lie had thrilled Father. “It wasn’t wholly an act!’ I said to her. “I did feel something. But it certainly was a lie to let Father believe that I had been touched by the wing of an angel.” I told her how my lie had sent the Old Man into a paroxysm of thanksgiving. I was guilty, of course, a sinner, but there was no God to punish me. So here I was, continuing with the charade and feeling guilty every moment, devouring my guilt as if it were delicious, nourishing food, but growing fat and sick with it, as if it were rancid. I told her that I felt like a man with a need for putrid meat.

She gently laid her small hand over mine. We were standing again by the rail where I had first seen her. “Oh, Owen Brown, be easy on yourself. Really. You don’t know, maybe that is how it feels to be touched by the wing of an angel.” Even so, she explained, I had only a little lie to live with, and besides, it was a lie that made someone I loved very happy. My father now believed that his son was a Christian. And that, therefore, he had himself a proper acolyte. “It’s a good lie, Owen. There are such things, you know. Good lies. Even for us lapsed Calvinists. Don’t abandon it. Keep it,” she said. “For me, I’m afraid, it’s different. Significantly different. My lie can’t be kept, and there’s no way for me to abandon it, or it me. And, worse, my lie makes no one happy.”

Then, to my amazement, she told me the truth about her condition. “I’m unmarried, Owen, and I’m with child. I’m pregnant. As you may have already guessed,” she said, but I denied it.

Another lie.

“What do you think of that?” she asked, looking into my face for the answer. “Really. Tell me the truth.”

I could not speak at first. Finally, I managed to stammer, “Well… well, yes. That’s… that isn’t right. I mean… I’m sorry, really, I’m sorry… ’ stammering not because of any shock or disapproval but because I had not the ready answer that shock and disapproval would have provided: the politely smiling lie. She saw that and seemed pleased.

For a moment, we stood there side by side at the rail, looking down at the black water in silence. Then I said, “Where I’m from, Sarah… actually, everywhere, a man is accountable to a woman and her family. But that… that seems not to be the case here.”

“No, it certainly isn’t. Seduced and abandoned. Is that how you describe it? I’m a young woman seduced by a cad and abandoned, Owen Brown. A fact soon to be visible to all.” She gave one of her small, bitter laughs. “But nothing’s that simple, of course. It never is. After all, I loved the man,” she said. Then she confessed that she still loved him. She confessed that she had been willingly seduced. He was in no way a cad, and he didn’t exactly abandon her. And in his own way, he was as trapped as she. Not by his body, of course, as she was, but by his circumstances. He couldn’t marry her. Not even if he wanted to. He was married to someone else. Married to a fine, loving woman, in fact, whom she very much admired, and he had three beautiful children by her. And he had been as foolish and reckless and cruel to that woman and their children as she.

“But you’re the one who has to pay the price.”

“Yes, I must pay the price. At least publicly. There’s your ‘shame,’ Owen. My shame. Although it must also be my child’s. But he pays another way. In secret. He knows everything that I know, naturally, but he can never say it, can never stand forth in public and accept responsibility for his sins. He can never be publically accountable, not without shaming his dear, innocent wife and children, which would only compound his sin. No, he will have to live with his guilt instead,” Sarah said. And because it was a secret guilt, it would be compounded for the rest of his life. His sin was like the pearl of great price purchased with borrowed money, which he would never be able to pay back. Sarah’s shame and her child’s reflected shame might actually fade in time — her sin was public, or soon would be, but sometimes people forget and eventually forgive. “Especially if we aren’t around to remind them with our physical presence,” she said. “But his guilt will grow and grow. No one can ever forgive him, not even he himself, and he can never forget me. For as long as he lives, whether I live or die, I’ll remain the emblem of his sin. I know him well, Owen Brown. He’s a brilliantly sensitive man, and he makes all the finest moral distinctions. He’s practically famous for it.” She suddenly laughed.

“Is he a pastor?” I asked. I could not imagine any ordinary man capable of seducing this woman. He would have to have been a man of powerful intellect, a man possessed of a great gift of language, and certainly someone highly respected in her society.

“Is he a pastor? A minister?” She smiled evenly. “That’s sweet. He might have been, I suppose. Born too late for that, though. But never mind who or what he is, Owen. Don’t ask any further. I shan’t tell, and it doesn’t matter anyhow.”

“I’m sorry;’ I said. “I didn’t mean to pry. But I think you’re way too kind to him. If I were your father or your brother, let me tell you, I’d deal with the fellow in a proper way. I’d make him ashamed, all right. A man like that.”

“Owen, no. You don’t understand. No one knows who he is, except me. No one. And the man himself. Oh, he knows! But I’ve told no one: not my family, not my aunt, no one. I’ve simply refused, and I never will reveal his name. Never. It’s the only power I have over him.” She laughed, then was serious again. “And remember, I love him, Owen. You must try to understand, I don’t want to bring him down. He’s a public man, and I don’t want to ruin his life or scandalize his marriage or taint the lives of his innocent children. I’ve done enough damage as it is. And luckily, except for what I’ve brought upon my poor mother and father and my dear aunts, most of the damage I’ve done only to myself. And to my poor unborn child,” she added, with immense sadness in her voice.

I said I supposed she was right. But I didn’t understand.

She gazed into my face and abruptly laughed. “Really, sometimes I do wish I were a man. Look at you! You’re in as much despair over your life as I, yet the most important question you have to deal with is how to be a man of action and a man of religion. How to be more like your beloved father. You feel like neither — you’re not a man of action and not a man of religion — and so you pine away, like a poor seduced and abandoned girl.”

“You make me feel foolish.”

But so much of a man’s life is merely a matter of choice, she declared — the right choice, the wrong choice. And even if a man makes the wrong choice, he can still change it. He simply has to change his mind. “You’re a man, Owen, aren’t you? And, really, when you have good health, you men are your minds. You can become a man of action, if you want. Or of religion. Or both. You may not end up famous for it, like your beloved father, but you can be it. Tell me, Owen, isn’t that how it is?” She stared grimly down at the black waves and clenched the rail with both hands.

“Well, no,” I said. “Or at least it never has seemed as easy as that. Not to me. But perhaps I should go in now” I said to her, for she seemed not to be listening anymore. I believed that I had been dismissed. “I must bid you good night,” I said.

She looked straight out at the darkness and did not respond. “Miss Peabody, I’m going in now. I hope… I hope that we can resume our conversation tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she said in a thin voice. “That would be nice.”

“Good night, then, Miss Peabody.”

“Yes, good night, Mister Brown.”

I drew myself away and returned the long way around the bow towards the stairs that led belowdecks to our cabin, where Father lay snoring in sleep. She was right, I knew. My troubles were as nothing compared to hers. And much as I wanted to believe that my life, my fate, was sealed and that I was trapped as fully by my character as she was by her pregnant female body, in fact, my fate was not sealed, and I wasn’t trapped. For I was, indeed, my mind. As were most men. And I could change it. I could simply change my mind, as she said.

I could believe the lie that I had told Father and become, like him, a man of religion. Perhaps belief could be willed into existence, just as unbelief could. It would not be entirely a lie anyhow, if, like Father, I was obliged to struggle against unbelief and sometimes, perhaps slightly more often than he, failed. Had he not, especially as a young man, now and then failed to sustain his faith in God?

And I could become a man of action as well. In the war against slavery, I had a wonderful cause, a wide field of worthy endeavor; and in Father I had a fearless and energetic model.

The wind had picked up slightly, and the ship had begun to slip and chop some, and the sails were snapping and the lines crackling overhead. My nausea was edging back. I grabbed up my empty chamber pot where I had left it and quickly descended to our cabin, and I went at once to my bunk and lay down to ponder these new and important matters.

I remember lying in my bunk the next morning, happily re-visiting the scene of the night before and making plans to see Sarah again that day, so that we could pursue the several strands of our conversation further. I was rehearsing sentences to say to her, repeating them to myself, as if memorizing a poem. It was a gray, blustery morning, and Father had earlier gone above for breakfast and to lead the daily prayer service, both of which I had begged off, due to my persistent nausea, which, because of the wind-roughened sea, had worsened somewhat.

He did not return to check on me at his accustomed time, and it was not until late in the afternoon that he finally hove into view at the door of the tiny cabin, holding to the jambs for support against the tossing of the ship. I was lonely and glad to see him, for we had not spoken when he left, and I wanted to tell him about my meeting with the remarkable Miss Peabody.

I had no intentions, of course, of telling him what of her private condition she had revealed to me, or of her beliefs and their profound effect on me, but I thought that he would be interested in hearing about her connections to the New England abolitionists. Actually, I simply wanted to talk about her, to put her into words — to think about her in a concrete way, so that I might be emboldened to seek out her company a second time and then pursue a true friendship with her.

Father sat heavily at the foot of my bunk and placed his Bible upon the narrow shelf beside him. “How goes it, son?” he asked.

“About the same. Worse since the weather turned” I said truthfully. I lay on my side with my knees pulled nearly to my chin.

He stared down at his hands on his lap and seemed oddly preoccupied. “Can I get you something to eat? Have you been drinking water? You must drink, son,” he said in a low, disinterested way.

“I’ve taken my sips, what I can handle, at least. Nothing to eat, though, thanks.”

He sat in silence for several moments, until I asked, “What’s the matter, Father? Is something wrong?”

He sighed. “Ah, yes. There is. The girl I spoke of earlier. The one traveling with her aunt from Salem?”

“Yes? What of her?”

“Ah, the poor, distracted thing. She’s gone and thrown herself into the sea.”

I sat bolt upright and stared at him in disbelief. “What? Miss Peabody? No, that can’t be true! Not Miss Peabody!” I cried. “How could she do such a thing?”

My first thought was that I had abandoned her. Then that she had gone off and left me behind, that she had abandoned me. All my thoughts were accompanied, as if prompted, by anger. And all were of myself. I should not have left her alone. I should have stayed with her the whole night long. I might have protected her against the darkness of her mind. I might have been able to keep her here in this world, for me. I and me.

“Yes, the same,” Father said. “A sad and very disturbing act. I was obliged to preach a good while to the company this morning. I took my text from Jonah. It’s a vexed and anxious company up there today. And the poor aunt, she’s struck down with grief for her niece. I don’t understand it. She must have been a bitter, angry child. I had to struggle just to make sense of it for the others. For her troubles, to shade her against the blazing sun of a woman’s troubles, the Lord God had prepared her a gourd, and she sat beneath it and no doubt was glad of it. But when God prepared also a worm that smote the gourd and made it wither away, she was like Jonah, who wished more to die than to live. Angry as Jonah in Nineveh was that young woman. Even unto death. You know her name, Owen. How’s that?”

“I believe… I believe that you told it to me,” I said, and lay back down.

He slowly let his breath out. “Yes. Well, I really can’t understand it. Suicide always escapes my understanding. Wherefore is light given to her who is in such abject misery, and wherefore is given life unto the bitter in soul? Wherefore, to one who longs for death and digs for it more than for hidden treasures, to one who rejoices exceedingly and is glad when she can find the grave? Wherefore, Owen, indeed? She was a pretty, smart young thing, Owen. I liked talking with her. A little too much educated by Transcendentalism, though. But despite that, I liked her. She talked right smart to me.”

“Did anyone see her go? When did she do it?”

“Sometime in the night. No one saw. Her bed wasn’t slept in, and when her aunt woke, she sent up the alarm, and the ship was searched stem to stern. But the girl was nowhere aboard. Her aunt has collapsed into grief. And regret. And shame, no doubt.”

“Why? I mean, why regret and shame? She didn’t drive the girl to suicide. A man did that. A coward.”

“I know, I know, but her niece was in her care, and she seems to have loved the girl very much, and now she’ll have to report the sad news back to her parents in Massachusetts. The man, well, whoever he is, he’ll burn in hell. That’s for certain.”

“Maybe she’s still somewhere aboard the ship. There must be places they haven’t searched yet. No one came looking for her here, for instance.”

“I vouchsafed this place, Owen. So you wouldn’t be disturbed. No, she threw herself into the sea, poor child.”

“Horrible.”

“Yes. Horrible. She believed not, and she died in her sins.”

Father went on like that for a while longer, as he often did after preaching or following a particularly upsetting event, muttering scraps and bits of Bible afterward, like sparks flaring in a dying fire. But I barely heard him. I drew into myself and tried to shut my eyes against the vision of the young woman dropping into the black sea, where she is cuffed and rolled and then embraced by the waves, until she is drawn down by the awful weight of her soaked clothing, her long, dark hair coming undone and fanning out above her head as she descends, her arms extended as if for balance, head thrown back for a last glimpse of the starry night above, and when she has no breath remaining, she opens her mouth, and the cold water that surrounds her rushes in and fills her, and her icy body plunges unresisting through the ocean like a shaft of light.

Again and again, I tried to wipe the vision from my eyes, to listen to Father, who was speaking of Deuteronomy now and the laws of treating with those who violate virgins, of the unknown man who had driven this young woman to such an extremity of despair that she would reject the light that God had given her. But his words flew past me like birds.

I hadn’t loved the woman, of course. But I knew that I might have swiftly come to that, and thus her death struck me a blow all out of proportion to the length of our acquaintance. My pain was like an echo of a cry that I had made long years before. Again, I felt not that I had abandoned her but that she had abandoned me, and somehow, as the hours passed, it did not feel like vanity to think that. It felt like anger.

Now I had even more reason to keep to my quarters, and so for the few remaining days of the crossing I nursed my sickness with hurt and gloom and a curiously satisfying kind of mourning — satisfying in that I counted and contemplated all those whom I had lost so far in my short life, and in so doing was distracted from my nausea and general giddiness. Father came and went like a recurrent dream, and I barely knew whether it was night or day.

Until one morning when I woke, and my stomach for the first time seemed settled, and I was genuinely hungry. I sat up in my bunk and placed my feet down on the deck: the ship felt steady beneath me — although clearly we were still at sea and had not yet made land. The waters that carried us had changed, however, as if we had come in off the ocean and were traversing a lake instead.

Then Father appeared at the entrance to our cabin and in high spirits informed me that we had just passed the Scilly Islands off Cornwall and were coasting north in the Irish Sea, headed towards Liverpool. “We’re in Cromwell’s waters,” he said with pleasure. “Imagine that, Owen! Come up and see the headlands off the starboard side. You’ll imagine Cromwell’s forces setting off to conquer and convert the Irish from paganism and papistry. Celts and Angles, Vikings and Romans, Picts and Normans — they’ve been sailing back and forth across these waters for centuries! Conquering and converting one another for a thousand years! It’s wonderful, isn’t it? The mad enthusiasm of these people!” He laughed.

He kept smiling happily and set about packing our two valises, our small luggage. “They’re not like us Yankees, are they? We’re a continental people, you know; they’re island people. And what a difference that makes, eh? They’re like the Fijis and the Hawaiians and those fierce, painted Caribs in their long, sea-going canoes, subduing their island neighbors and then a generation or two later being subdued right back. These days, of course, the Anglo-Saxons are on top and thinking it’ll last for all time. But you wait: someday soon the rowdy Celts’ll be back, and then the Picts. And who knows, maybe the Normans will make another run for it, eh? Napoleon nearly did it, and not too long ago.”

“Could be” I said. “Could be,” I gathered my gear and, after washing my face and neck and dressing in my one fresh shirt, went up on the main deck to enjoy the sight of land. There I saw from north to south a long row of white, low cliffs and beyond them a strip of cultivated fields, bright green, despite the lateness of the season, and overhead a pillowy bank of soft clouds breaking off to a blue sky. There seemed little more than small fishing villages along the shore; the ship was too far out for me to distinguish individual dwellings. No ports or large towns. It was hard to imagine, as Father had, the righteous armies of the faithful massing there.

The salty air was cool against my face. A fair wind blew out of the southwest, and the wheel churned steadily as a mill, and the sails bellied nicely and helped push the ship smartly north. Terns and gulls swooped low over the boat, and several of the passengers — bored merchantmen and supercargoes in shirtsleeves and a grim young man in a frock coat, whom I took to be the atheistic journalist, Mr. Forbes — idly tossed the raucous birds bits of biscuit. The merchants laughed to see the birds fighting amongst themselves and stealing crumbs from one another. The journalist, who watched the men instead of the birds, appeared to be sourly proving some other point.

But like the gulls, I was hungry, and I quickly made my way to the galley, where, although it was long after the hour when breakfast was normally served, I talked the cook into giving me several slices of hard bread and a portion of ’scouse, salt beef and potatoes and peppers mixed in gravy, and a mug of warm cider. Sitting myself down in the sunshine on a bulkhead, I ate and drank, and in short order I was a new man, ready to come ashore, eager to walk on solid ground again.

My melancholy preoccupations had begun to dissipate and scatter like yesterday’s storm clouds in today’s bright sun, when I saw standing portside, next to the rail near the bow, a woman whom I took at once to be Miss Peabody’s aunt. She was situated exactly where I had last seen my friend, when I departed from her that fateful night.

The woman looked somewhat beyond middle-age and was large, unusually so, shaped like a bronze bell, and seemed the picture of solitude and loneliness. She wore a long, black dress with hat and gloves, and her face was covered with a black veil. I could not make out her expression, because of the veil, but she appeared to be looking back out to sea, gazing in the direction we had come, as if making her final goodbye to her poor, drowned niece.

I knew that there was nothing I could do or say that would comfort her. It was such a sad sight, and it so threatened to drop me back into my recent gloom, that I could not bear to watch her, so I picked myself up and strolled back to the stern of the ship, to make there my first casual conversations with the sailors and other men in the crew, conversations and inquiries that, had I not been stricken with seasickness, I would have undertaken at the very beginning of our journey. Now, as we neared our landing at Liverpool, despite the tragic death of Miss Sarah Peabody, and despite my lengthy illness, I found myself in excellent spirits, healthy and well-fed, newly befriended by cheerful, sturdy workingmen, and, concerning our business here, fast becoming as optimistic as the Old Man. I saw that there had been completed, almost without my intending or even hoping for it, a thorough-going transformation in my character and in my relation to my father. The process had commenced in earnest in Boston and had continued during the crossing and now, somehow, inexplicably, it seemed to have been completed by the sad, wasted death of the young woman Sarah Peabody — all accomplished, for the most part, without my awareness or understanding. Until it was over, that is, when — by remembering who and how I had been before, especially in relation to Father — I realized that I had become, in an important sense, a new man. No more the disgruntled, sulky boy who followed his Old Man around and waited for orders that he could resent. No more the pouting, conflicted ape. This new fellow, who had been a reluctant follower, was now an enthusiast, was a proper lieutenant, was a fellow believer! He might fail here and there — fail to act, fail to believe — but he would no longer question his aspirations or his commitment.

Thus I fairly bounced down the gangplank ahead of Father as we disembarked at the crowded quay on the Mersey River, where the Cumbria had docked and was already being unloaded by husky lumpers and stevedores and loaded onto carts and wagons by teamsters. It was a noisy, chaotic hub-bub of a scene: hawkers and higglers in tiny stalls, men in tall beaver hats on horseback and in carriages making their way through the crowd, ragged beggars on crutches with hands held out, a musician in a harlequin’s suit with a monkey on his shoulder and a dancing dog on a string, and meandering gangs of urchins and skinny men in caps who looked like cutpurses; there were merchants, clerks, supercargoes, and shipping agents ticking off goods received and goods about to head out, and shirtless, orange-haired Irishmen lugging barrels and crates. Here and there, a distinguished-looking gentleman or lady arrived by carriage to greet a visitor or collect a parcel. People called and bawled to one another and sometimes grabbed my sleeve and tried to sell me food off their smoking carts: greasy, fried fish wrapped in paper, roasted potatoes, bits of meat on skewers; and old ladies carrying trays filled with jellied sweets accosted me at every turn; everyone was shouting at me, it seemed, but I understood barely a word I heard. Their pronunciation and the speed with which they spoke was all off. It was as if I were not in an English-speaking country at all, or as if I myself did not speak English. There were Negro men working alongside the whites, and Hindoos with turbans, and bearded men in black coats and hats whom I took to be Jews. There were tall, blond, white-skinned Swedes and florid Russians and even a few in the crowd whom I recognized as Americans, long-faced Yankees in black, and tanned Southerners with walking sticks and broad hats and pale suits. I felt that I had arrived in Phoenicia.

The buildings were high and looked ancient, mostly of gray stone, and the crooked alleyways and streets between them seemed narrower and smelled more of old food, beer, and human waste than Boston even. But there was a remarkable increase in human activity here, more noise, more color and variety among human types, than in Boston, which delighted me and seemed to please Father, too, for he had a small smile on his face as we pushed through the throng and made our way from the hurly-burly of the quay to the huge stone warehouse where he had arranged for our wool to be stored pending our arrival and now to be examined and graded and, presumably, sold.

While I stayed in the dimly lit warehouse and inventoried our nearly two hundred thousand pounds of wool and made sure that none of the bales that Father, John, and I had so carefully graded, labeled, and shipped from Springfield had been damaged or come undone in transit or storage, Father retreated to the office with the purveyors’ agent, a Mr. Pickersgill, to set a time for the buyers to view Brown & Perkins’s wonderful American wool. A pimpled teenaged apprentice watched over me suspiciously, as if he expected me to steal our own wool. All six hundred ninety bales of it, neatly packaged in burlap and tied with heavy cord, had been stacked in a bay near the rear of the huge, cool, cavernous building, and after I had examined and counted every one, I proudly signed the slip the boy had handed me—Received in good order by Owen Brown, agent for Brown Perkins, Springfield, Mass., U.S.A. — and admired for a moment the tidiness of our bales, comparing them to the rough-looking stock that surrounded ours and rose in heaps nearly to the high, dark eaves, theirs, all of it, sloppily and irregularly packaged and tied. Then I picked up my valise and went straight out to the street, there to loll in the sun and admire the passing crowd.

It looks good for us, I thought. The Old Man was right. These British are no match for us.

Soon Father emerged from the warehouse, blinking in the bright light like a mole, but looking pleased with himself and eager to move to the next piece of business, which I assumed was finding lodgings. “Turns out we’ve arrived a day late for the weekly viewing and sales,” he said. It would be six days before the buyers from Manchester, Leeds, and the other cloth-manufacturing towns returned to Liverpool to examine the wool that came in during the week and make their bids according to grade and quality. “So, my boy, we have a bit of a holiday in front of us;’ he said, and he rubbed his hands together in a show of pleasure. “What d’ you say we take it?”

“What do you propose?”

“Well, let’s just keep moving! Here we are, like Father Abraham sojourning in the land of promise, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob. We are strangers and sojourners here, as were all our fathers. Am I right?”

“Right! So where do you propose we go?”

“Why, to London! And to the very continent of Europe! We’ll track Napoleon’s hundred days’ march, all the way from Elba to Waterloo!”

“We’ve only got six days for marching, Father,”I pointed out. “Not one hundred. And we have to end back here, not Waterloo.”

“And so we shall.” He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder, and we stepped down to the cobbled street and joined the flow of the crowd heading into the heart of the city. He had learned from Mr. Pickersgill, the warehouse clerk, that if we hurried to Garston Street at Speke Hall, we could catch an overnight post-chaise to London. The train had already departed. “Let’s go now!” he said. “It’ll cost us less anyhow to sleep in a moving rattler than a bed in a boarding house that goes nowhere.”

I had no money of my own, naturally, so wherever Father went, there close behind, of necessity, came I. As if I were in his employ, his apprentice boy. And in a sense, of course, I was. But I did not mind any longer thinking of myself that way, since our goals were now the same. After all, had I money of my own, I would have done just as he — I would have taken a holiday, ducked into a shop on the way for bread and cheese and a sack of shiny red apples, and made for the night coach or a rattler to London and beyond. Who knows, I might even have gone to Waterloo.

Chapter 12

This was the first time that I had been out of my native land, and therefore the first time that I’d walked the streets of a country where slavery had been banished, and I felt cheerfully liberated by it. England was then, as now, of course, an antique monarchy, not a modern republic. Nevertheless, it was a freer country than ours, for no man could legally buy and sell another, and for that reason alone, as soon as we stepped ashore, the air we breathed seemed cleaner, fresher, more energizing, than ours at home. I think Father felt the same exhilaration as I. We did not speak of it to one another, however — it was as if we were superstitiously afraid to say the words “Negro” and “chattel” and”slavery,”as if we both knew that merely to utter the words in passing would drop us back into the gloom and rage that we then associated with being citizens of the United States of America. We needed a holiday, a vacation from the obligation to be constantly conscious of our national shame, and when it came, we both took it with unaccustomed alacrity.

Our high spirits did not diminish, even when we discovered, to our surprise and my slight displeasure, that our fellow passengers in the post-chaise from Liverpool to London were Mr. Hugh Forbes, the English journalist, and Miss Elizabeth Peabody, from the Cumbria. But we did not raise the topic of Negro slavery with them, either; we did not say the hated words. Nor did they, probably because they had already heard enough on the topic from Father during the crossing and did not need or particularly want to hear more. Instead, all of Father’s comments and observations were limited at first to remarking on the passing scenery and then to interrogating Mr. Forbes on the recently ended wars in Italy, on military tactics, and on the ideas and principles of the leader of the failed revolution, the famous Giuseppe Mazzini, whom Mr. Forbes, a man of numerous small pomposities, claimed to have known personally.

The vagueness with which he answered Father’s questions made me suspicious of his claims, but Father seemed eager to believe them, and when in private, during a brief mail-stop outside Manchester, I whispered my suspicions to the Old Man, he just waved me off and explained that Mr. Forbes talked elusively and vaguely because he was British. “They all talk that way, Owen,” he pronounced. “It’s a national trait. They’re a very circumspect people, y’ know. Think of Shakespeare,” he said. I did, and still did not agree, but said nothing more.

Miss Peabody, whom Father had described earlier as “a voluble woman with many sharp Transcendental edges,” was quite obviously still stunned by the death of her niece and kept to herself, as was natural. I had mumbled my condolences, as soon as I realized who our veiled fellow passenger was, but otherwise we men deferred to her in silence and tried not to intrude upon her privacy and grief. Even Father left her alone, although I knew he would have enjoyed leading her in prayer for the salvation of her niece’s unsaved soul. He believed, as the Bible showed, that God was sufficiently powerful and merciful to break His own rules from time to time and, if sufficiently prevailed upon with prayer, might be willing to admit a fallen suicide into paradise. But, for once, the Old Man politely restrained himself.

For me, it was exceedingly difficult not to speak to her of Sarah Peabody, to tell the woman of my brief encounter with her niece on the very night of her death, for I was no doubt the last person to have seen her alive and to have spoken with her at length. Not that I could have told the aunt anything consoling. Still, I might have said that her niece had touched my heart with unusual force and had moved my mind in a significant way. I might have said that my brief meeting with her had unexpectedly clarified my thoughts and that I would remember her for the rest of my days, as indeed I have.

But our spirits, mine and Father’s, were soaring, despite my distrust of Mr. Forbes and our constant awareness of the suffering of Miss Peabody. Not even the shocking sight at dusk of the sooty mills of Manchester and the blackened hovels of the thousands of laborers whose lives were given over to the mills dampened our enthusiasm and curiosity. The crimes evidenced by these monstrous, huge, prisonlike factories were English crimes, not American; and the greed that drove the mighty engines of the mills and the owners’ callous disregard for the lives devoured in their service were English greed and callousness, not American; and as we passed through the city, the raggedy, exhausted, vacant-eyed men and women and pathetic small children whom we saw wending their way along the narrow streets from the mills to their teeming tenements were English, Scottish, and Irish workers — not a one of them American. It was a luxurious detachment that we enjoyed as we crossed this benighted land, and though it was but a respite, I could only hope that we had earned it, Father and I, and that our inability when in America to disassociate ourselves from the sufferings of our Negro brethren, our constant anguish, shame, and rage when at home, had purchased this brief holiday honestly and fairly.

“This is a fine country, isn’t it, Owen?” Father said, peering out his window at the passing villages and farms. He commented on the scenery as if we, his fellow passengers, could not see it, which was his habit anyhow, although it was somehow not so noticeable to me in America as here. “Their farming and stonemasonry are very good, Owen. But look, their cattle are generally only more than middling good, I would say. And on average their horses, at least those I’ve seen so far, bear no comparison with those of our Northern states, especially. The hogs look healthy and slick, though, wouldn’t you say? And the mutton-sheep are almost as fat as their porkers.”

Soon it began to rain, and then it grew dark, and our world was reduced to the cramped interior of the coach. While I tried intermittently to doze and Miss Peabody, as it appeared, gloomily meditated on the death of her young charge, Father drew Mr. Forbes forward into a discussion of military tactics, which rambled on into the night. Mr. Forbes did seem to know his subject, however, well enough at least to speak convincingly about the ways and means of training and maintaining a small, disciplined, easily deployed force of insurrectionists so that it could effectively oppose a much larger, slower-moving, national army.

This was, of course, the very subject the Old Man was most interested in hearing about, and he quickly warmed to it. I knew that he was transposing everything Mr. Forbes said, which mostly concerned the failed wars in Italy, into victory on an Appalachian landscape in the American South, and that, in Father’s mind, Mazzini’s ragtag army of republicans was a rapidly growing force of freed and escaped Negro slaves and a few courageous whites, a citizens’ army broken into small bands operating from thickly forested mountains, fighting mostly with weapons seized from the enemy and living off the land and goods and foods donated by secret sympathizers, darting down from their mountain hideouts under the cover of darkness to make lightning-like raids against the lowland plantations, liberating the slaves there and steadily enlarging their forces with the able-bodied African men and women willing to join the fight, and sending the others north along the great Subterranean Passway, as he called it, all the way up the chain of mountains from the Appalachians to the Alleghenies to the Adirondacks, on to the home base in Timbuctoo and thence to Canada.

Mr. Forbes was a slender, talkative man in his middle thirties, with a high, balding head and dark, wavy hair, which he kept long and combed across the top in a vain attempt to hide his baldness, although it shone through nonetheless. He had the chalky complexion of a man not used to outdoor work, dark, deep-set eyes, a long, aquiline nose, and he wore a drooping moustache. His teeth were not good, but, withal, he was a handsome man and intelligent-looking, if in a delicate, slightly effeminate way, as when now and again he winced at the rising volume of Father’s voice and looked somehow pained, as if embarrassed, when the coach crunched over a stone or dropped into a narrow ditch and tossed him in his seat.

“I suppose some things seem obscure, Mister Brown, but really, they’re quite obvious, aren’t they?” said Mr. Forbes. “Once they’ve been pointed out, of course. Either by genius before the fact or, as is more often the case, after the fact by disaster. Don’t you think so?” He had a habit of pausing in his statements and briefly admiring his fingernails, then going on. “For instance, Mister Brown, here’s some after-the-fact wisdom, if you like. Taken from the Italian campaign. Taught by disaster.” The smaller force, he said, had of necessity always to be made of men who, though they believed many things, must believe but two. Number one, each soldier must believe that he is engaged in a struggle in which he and his comrades are morally right and their opposition morally wrong. No middle way. No room to negotiate a compromise. It couldn’t be a simple dispute over land. Basic principles, not mere borders, must be at stake. And number two, he must believe that he is fighting for his own life and for the lives of his loved ones. So that the only imaginable alternative to his participating in this dreadful war is death for him and his loved ones. No going home for a season to harvest the olives and the grapes. “Give me liberty or give me death,” Mr. Forbes said, smiling. “That sort of thing. A bit like your American revolution, wouldn’t you say? It helped, of course, that you were lucky. And had brilliant leadership, I must say. Brilliant. At a time when ours was inept. Lovely. For you, I mean.”

Mr. Forbes did not seem particularly to like the brave Italian soldiers he was describing or even to admire the great Giuseppe Mazzini. Like many of the journalists whom I came to know later, during the Kansas War and afterwards, he seemed to feel himself superior to his subjects and affected a cynical and amused detachment towards them. This didn’t bother Father, apparently, or else he simply didn’t notice it, which worried me, as Father continued to interrogate the man and appeared at times to confide in him certain plans and intentions which I thought were better left secret. I would turn out much later to have been correct in my estimation of the character of Mr. Hugh Forbes, for, as is well known, he joined us as an ally late in the Kansas campaign and then at a crucial moment afterwards became one of our chief betrayers and nearly brought us down. For now, though, and even right up to the point of his betrayal, he was to Father a man possessing much valuable knowledge, and the Old Man meant to use him. I sat and watched and listened. And whenever I thought the Old Man was going too far, or coming too close, I interrupted him and led them to a different aspect of the topic, for I could not get him off the topic altogether.

The rain poured down, and the coach sloshed roughly forward towards London. The leather curtains flapped and slapped against the sides, and now and then a fine spray of water entered the dark interior, wetting us. Father asked Mr. Forbes, “I’m wondering, how, sir, would you be able to discipline and train such an insurrectionary force? You can’t go out and conscript soldiers and drill them in public and instruct them and so on. You have to operate in secret and in small numbers. Especially in the beginning.” No matter how much your soldiers shared those two essential beliefs — that in the face of outrageous wrong they were morally right, and that they were fighting for their and their loved ones’ lives — they still were not professional soldiers, after all. Most of them would be unskilled laborers, he pointed out to Mr. Forbes. Our recruits, he explained, would be people who were likely to be illiterate, unused to military machinery and weapons, untrained in distinguishing between occasions that require independent action and those that require submission to authority. And they would be people who had been taught for generations to hold themselves beneath the very men they were now opposing.

“Is this theoretical, Mister Brown?” drawled Mr. Forbes. “Or are you planning a revolt?”

“Father,” I said into the darkness, cutting him off. “Isn’t it like Gideon and the Gileadites? In the war against the Midianites. Remember?”

“Ah! So it is! So it is! There’s your answer, Mister Forbes. My son knows what you do not, sir. That the greatest military manual ever composed is the Holy Bible! Properly construed. And he’s quite right, the answer to my question is in front of my eyes. For the Lord said unto Gideon, ‘Whoever is fearful and afraid, let him depart early from Mount Gilead.’ And twenty-two thousand men departed from the mountain, leaving behind ten thousand who were not cowards. And the Lord said, ‘There are yet too many.’ Too many! Imagine! Not too few. And the Lord conceived of a test for Gideon to put to the remaining people, such that all those who went down on their knees to drink were separated out, and there were then but three hundred remaining, only those who had put their hand to their mouth when drinking, the men too proud to go down on their knees even to drink from the river Jordan. And the Lord said unto Gideon, ‘By these three hundred men will I save you and deliver the Midianites into thine hand.’

“And here, Mister Forbes, the Bible is very instructive in a most particular and interesting way!’ Father went on. “Gideon, who this time was instructed by his dream, divided his three hundred men into three companies of one hundred each, and according to the dream, he himself would lead one company only, and they would go to the camp of the Midianites at the beginning of the middle watch. Very useful instructions, when you think about it. The beginning of the middle watch. Smart, eh?”

“Considering that it came from a dream,”Mr. Forbes said in a low voice.

Father ignored him. “And Gideon ordered each man to carry in one hand a trumpet and in the other a lamp lit inside a pitcher, and on hearing Gideon’s own trumpet they were to break the pitcher and hold up the lamp and blow upon the trumpet and cry out, ‘The sword of the Lord!’ so as to look and sound like ten times ten thousand. ‘The sword of the Lord!’ And when they did that, Mister Forbes, all the hosts of the Midianites who were not slain at once by the sword of the Lord fled into the wilderness!”

I heard Mr. Forbes utter a loud yawn. “Amazing,” he said.

“Yes. If your General Mazzini had looked more deeply into his Bible,” the Old Man went on, “he might in the end have triumphed over his enemies.” When Mazzini had wanted to know how to cut off his enemy’s supplies, Father explained to Mr. Forbes, he should have read 2 Kings, chapter 19. And for setting ambushes, he might have consulted Judges 9, verse 34, where he would have been told to lie in wait against Sechem in four companies, or else divide into two companies, as did Joshua against Ai, and lead the enemy out of its fortress by having one company pretend to flee, and then the second company could enter the fortress and set it afire, and when the men of Ai saw that their citadel was in flames, they would turn and rush back to save it and would be caught in the open plain between the two companies of Joshua and cut to pieces. And to know how to slay an enemy chieftain who is surrounded always by his guard, Father said to look into Judges 3,19–25, and go to your enemy as Ehud went to Gilgal and say that you have a secret errand to him from the Lord, and when Gilgal has sent away his guard, thrust your dagger with your left hand into his belly to the haft, so that the fat will close upon the blade and he cannot draw it out and only the dirt will come. Then go forth and lock the doors upon him and escape unto Seirath.

“Indeed,” Mr. Forbes said. “With your left hand, eh?”

“Oh, yes! Facing him! Because of the placement of the internal organs, the liver and the bowels and so forth,” he explained. “So he’ll die at once and not cry out.” For some time Father continued showing Mr. Forbes the brilliance of the Bible as a military manual, citing chapter and verse from a dozen different books, and I felt that his listener must surely have fallen asleep, for he no longer spoke. I, of course, had heard the Old Man employ the Bible this way hundreds of times before on any number of topics, from the care of sheep to the management of grief, and had myself fallen asleep in the middle of his citations, to waken in time for the grand peroration at the end and nod agreement. This was how the Old Man talked, how he communicated his thoughts and beliefs, and it could be pretty impressive, because he knew his Bible better than any man and could apply it with intelligence and verve and sometimes, perhaps without intending it, even with humor.

This time, however, I heard him differently. For it was clear, as he laid out one case after another, that he did indeed know more about military tactics and strategy than Mr. Forbes, his presumed expert, and probably knew more than General Mazzini, too. He was drawing on the experience of a people who had conducted wars large and small for thousands of years. Never mind that they claimed to have received their instructions from the Lord, from dreams, or even from the entrails of birds; Father’s great knowledge of the Bible gave him direct access to the experience of a thousand generations of military men and women, providing him with the collective memory of an entire race of people. Father didn’t read the Bible like a man who thought he was like the ancient Israelites, he read it as if he were an Israelite himself, as if he, too, were receiving instructions from the Lord. The man did not simply remember the Bible, as a person remembers the alphabet or even as he remembers old injuries or triumphs. No; for the Old Man, the Bible was his memory.

“Well, Mister Brown, that’s all very interesting,” said Mr. Forbes. “But I’m afraid the modern military mind requires a bit more than the Bible for its instruction. Times change, don’t they?”

“Ah, but human beings don’t!” Father exclaimed. “And, unfortunately, one of those things that do not change is the very belief, the delusion, if I may say so, which you have just now uttered, that human beings change. That, too, is constant, my friend. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ Times may change, sir, but the Lord does not, and therefore neither does he who was made in His image, for changelessness is in the nature of Him who hath made us. We are the same man as old Adam was.”

“Indeed. Well, I’m afraid I’m not a religious man,” said Mr. Forbes. He then announced his desire to sleep, promising to resume this most interesting conversation in the morning before reaching London.

Father said fine, fine, he too would like to sleep, and so would we all, Miss Peabody especially, he added, although she had said not a word in several hours and must indeed have been lost in her dark thoughts, quite unconscious of Father’s and Mr. Forbes’s conversation and unlikely to sleep, regardless of her fellow passengers’ consideration or lack of it. She did not acknowledge Father’s remark, nor did I, and so we all fell into silence.

Through the long night we made our bumpy, rain-chilled way, catching short naps as we could, stopping briefly for breakfast at an inn outside the village of Dunstable, a ways north of London, and made the vast capital city proper shortly before midday. Several times, the Old Man tried picking up his discussion with Mr. Forbes where they had left off, but the Englishman seemed reluctant to pursue it further and smiled condescendingly and put him off, as if he thought Father slightly cracked. I had seen that response in people many times before, hundreds of times, in fact, and I had almost always felt sympathy for them, even a little pity, with anger at Father mixed with embarrassment for myself. But this time I felt merely superior to Mr. Forbes and dismissive. He was too closed-minded, too conventionally educated, or perhaps simply too stupid, to appreciate the Old Man’s originality and clarity, I thought.

You did not have to be a Christian to see that Father’s insights into the nature of man were brilliant and that his principles were admirable; in fact, it probably helped if you were not a Christian, for many of Father’s views significantly departed from those held by the modern churchmen. You did, however, have to look at things afresh, as if no one had ever asked your question before. How does one conduct an ambush? How does one assassinate an enemy chieftain? How does one oppose a large, well-trained professional army with a small, ragtag force of angry civilians?

In every case, the Old Man simply answered with another question: How is it done in the Bible? Unlike most Christians, Father did not go to the Bible merely to confirm what he wished to be the case, whether about man or God; he went there to inquire what was the case. And where better to look after all? Where else had the nature and doings of man and God been more closely observed over a longer period of time than in the Bible?

In London we did not tarry, and I barely had a glimpse of the city. Which I somewhat regretted, as it was the hugest conglomeration of people and buildings that I had ever seen or imagined, and I would have liked to take its measure, if nothing else. It consumed fully an hour for our coach to make its way from the edges of the city to the center. All those crowded, twisted, narrow streets and maze-like lanes lined with brick warrens and tiny, dark hutches — it was a literally dizzying sight, and I staggered when I stepped down from our coach to the street! The sky was but a thin, gray satin ribbon zig-zagging overhead, and a light mist drifted down from it upon us, making us shine like smooth, wet stone and giving everything a strange, heightened clarity. I wanted to walk off into the city, to leave the others behind and wander aimlessly, utterly anonymous and invisible in such a crowd.

But perhaps it was just as well that Father was so intent on getting to the continent of Europe, for it would have taken me months, even years, to gain sufficient perspective on the city and its thronged enormity to know where in it I stood at a given moment. I could see and wonder only at what was directly in front of me and had no way of knowing its relation to the rest. My viewpoint was all foreground, no background.

Father’s was also, but this seemed not to bother him. From the instant that we stepped all stiff and damp from the coach to the cobbled street, he was busily arranging our departure for Belgium. Before bidding goodbye to our fellow passengers, however, he took Mr. Forbes aside and obtained from him both his London address and his address in New York, which he wrote into his pocket notebook. He then said that he would soon be contacting Mr. Forbes personally or would be sending one of his agents to speak with him in strictest confidence concerning a matter of grave importance and utmost secrecy. The agent would likely be one of his sons and would identify himself as such by recalling certain details of our voyage.

“You’re quite serious, aren’t you?” Mr. Forbes said. He stood, carpetbag in hand, his weight carefully balanced on one foot, the other nearly in the air, as if he were ready to run.

“I am, indeed, sir. I believe that I will want you for an ally in some business that I am planning. You have certain experiences and knowledge that I may have need to draw upon.”

“I thought the Bible was all you needed.”

The Old Man smiled slyly. “Perhaps the Bible has told me that I need a man like you at my side. Just as Abraham, to free his brother Lot from Sodom, needed the Canaanite chieftains.”

“Ah, yes. Abraham. Very well, then,” he said. “You are an interesting man, Mister Brown, and I believe you bear watching. And as I am a journalist, I shall do that. Shan’t I?”

“Just so,” Father said, and shook his hand firmly.

When Mr. Forbes had gone on his way, the Old Man turned to Miss Peabody, who stood beside a heap of suitcases, her own and, I assumed, her niece’s. She appeared to be waiting for a carriage. Father said, “Is there any way I can help you, Miss Peabody?”

She politely answered no, that she had hired a porter and would be on her way directly to her hotel.

“My son and I would both once again like to express our sympathy to you.”

She said, “Thank you, Mister Brown” and turned pointedly away from us, leaving Father’s hand hanging in the air and mine just behind it.

“Goodbye, then,” he called to her. “Goodbye! I will pray for your relief from sorrow!”

She did not answer, and we moved off from her. “I believe I offended her earlier,” Father said in a low voice. “With my persistent sermonizing aboard the ship.”

“Never mind. It’s her niece who needs your prayers.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right. Of course. But I do go on sometimes. I forget myself’

I said to Father, “Speak to me about your conversation with Mister Forbes. Really, what do you need him for?”

He smiled, as if relieved not to think about the Peabody women and the sometimes ticklish business of his enthusiasm for prayer and sermonizing. “Wal, my boy;’ he drawled, “as the man himself said, he is a journalist. And though he is atheistic, he is sympathetic to our cause.”

“But he’s not an American. He’s English.”

“All the better. Americans are always readier to believe foreign reports on our affairs than they are the homegrown variety. Don’t you think?” he said, mimicking the Englishman’s accent. He laughed and grabbed up his valise and said, “Come on, m’ boy, we’ve got to catch the very next train to Dover! Enough of these hard English coaches, eh? We can do it, if we hurry. We’ll be on the other side of the English Channel by nightfall!”

We had disembarked at King Street near the Covent Garden Market Hall, and it was only a short walk to the station at Charing Cross, which was located on a wide boulevard called the Strand. Father strode along in his usual straight-legged fashion, led by his chin, and I scrambled to keep up, distracted by the passing crowd, by the elegantly coiffed and bustled women in their long dresses, the gentlemen with their canes and silk hats, the fine, high-wheeled carriages and tall chaises with liveried drivers and footmen and the handsome matched teams that drew them through the jammed streets.

The over-abundance of visible wealth, power, and suave self-assurance amazed me. This, I thought, is the other side of those smoking factories and the hovels we saw in Manchester and the other towns, where children collapse and die daily at their machines. And this is the visible profit produced by the terrible sugarcane plantations in Jamaica and Barbados, where slavery has been replaced by serfdom. The whole country seemed like a single, huge factory, whose raw materials and labor were fed into it from the barren hills of Ireland and Scotland and from distant tropical plantations. Liverpool was its shipping dock and London its counting house. I could not imagine myself as a member of the ruling class, one of these grand men and women passing me on the street; consequently, I thought that if I were an Englishman living in England, I would surely be one of those old Luddites, smashing machinery with hammers. And if I lived in one of the colonies, I would be like those old Maroons under Cudjo, escaped slaves living up in the mountains and slipping down to the plantations at night to set the cane fields on fire. In some countries, I said to myself, the only life you can properly desire is that of destroyer.

So on we went to Europe itself, hurrying east by train to Dover and by ferry boat to Flanders, and then by train again, click-clacking our way across green, marshy Walloon country to Brussels, and thence by foot, as the early morning mists rose from the meandering streams of Brabant, out the Charleroi road to the farm village of Waterloo, where a generation earlier the greatest armies and generals of Europe had hurled themselves against one another, settling in smoke and blood, once and for all, or so we believed back then, the fates of half the nations of the world. We knew nothing of what was coming after, of course; little enough of what had gone before. I was there that day merely because Father had led me there — Hurry, hurry, hurry! — and he had come to Waterloo because he wanted to see how, just when Napoleon was about to win it all, he had lost everything.

I was beginning to understand the Old Man’s obsession with Napoleon and Waterloo. For a long while, it had seemed little more than another of his passing, erratic distractions, his characteristic way of not thinking about a thing that pained him, a practice that he was periodically inclined to indulge in, especially in times of stress, usually financial. Sometimes familial, of course. Sometimes political. But these wayward interests of his rarely lasted longer than the particular period of stressfulness, and as soon as the pressures on him eased a little, as they always did, he would return to his two great, permanent, ongoing obsessions — religion and the war against slavery.

This interest in Napoleon and Waterloo, however, had lasted longer than it should have. His expectations of financial success in the English wool market were now realistic, it seemed, and the pressures ought to have lifted. For the first time in years, he could think about wool and money without wincing in pain, which should have brought him straight back to slavery and religion. He did not have to think any longer about Napoleon — the greatest man of the century to most people, even to most Americans, but to John Brown, one would have thought, an evil genius, a small Corsican puffed up with delusions of imperial grandeur, a man whose vanity and shocking ambition had been responsible for the death and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of men at arms and the permanent impoverishment of millions of civilians. Father had no love for Caesar, and even less for those who, like Napoleon, wished to emulate him, no matter how brilliantly they waged war or how much adored they were by their followers.

That very morning, before leaving for the battlefield, I had asked him directly what was so wonderfully attractive about Napoleon. We were eating our breakfast, smoked fish and bread and cheese and rich, creamy milk — how clearly I remember that rough, fresh Flemish food! We were seated at a bench-like table in a roadside tavern a short ways outside the bustling, large market-town of Brussels, where, on our arrival late the night before, we had taken lodgings. We spoke no French, of course, nor any other European language, so Father had compensated by much pointing and by shouting in very slow English to the waiters, station attendants, and hotelkeepers, as if they themselves spoke English but did it badly and were hard of hearing. He managed to make himself understood, however, but only because our wants and needs were simple and obvious.

“I know that Napoleon’s an important man,” I said to him, “especially here, to the Europeans. But really, Father, what’s he to us Americans, except a sort of cynical, power-hungry humbugger? In a democracy, a man like that would be successful only on the stage, or he’d be put in prison early.”

Father laughed. “Or hed run for senator from New York. And probably win it, too.”

“I’m serious. Why do you admire him so?”

“Admire him, Owen? I loathe him! However brilliant a military man he was, he was nevertheless an atheistic monster, an egotistical dictator of the first rank. When he was finally declared dead on his little island of Saint Helena, while all over the world people wept, I cheered.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Well, to put it simply, I want to understand why he lost. And this one battle made all the difference.” It was Bonaparte’s hundred days’ march, Father explained, his final, mad plunge back into Europe from Elba, that intrigued him. Not that he was so successful, storming back from exile the way he did. Father said he would have expected that. It was a supremely intelligent move, with predictable results, once he made it. Except for his loss at Waterloo — that was not predictable. No, what intrigued and puzzled Father was that after such a success, which shocked and terrified all of Europe, in the end Napoleon failed. For future reference, Father explained, he wanted to know if Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo was due to a tactical blunder or to the superiority of Wellington and Blikher, the Prussian. Or did his own generals, the Frenchmen Ney and Grouchy, betray him? No evidence for that. Was it cowardice? Not likely. Too much caution? Highly unlikely. Too little? Perhaps. Regardless, it was important to know.

“You expect to learn that,” I said, “here, now… what is it? Nearly forty years after the event?”

“Ah, my boy, sometimes you can only smell out these things in person. When you walk the very ground of the history you’re investigating, when you sniff the air, check the light, glance sideways and over your shoulder, when you pick up a handful of the dirt and crumble it between your fingers, you can learn things that no history book can ever teach.” Besides, he pointed out, the English historians all want to celebrate Wellington, so they tell that version of the story, and the Prussians are touting Blücher, and the French are intent on selling everyone on either Napoleon’s grandeur or the legitimacy of Louis XVIII. The Old Man frankly didn’t care who or what was won or lost here. “I’m an American” he said. “I want only to know why he failed.”

“Yes,” I said, “but why do you need to know this? What’s it got to do with your plans?”

It was those one hundred days, he explained. One hundred days — from Napoleon’s unexpected departure with a half-dozen faithful lieutenants from the island of Elba, where he’d been exiled, to his arrival here at Waterloo three months later with a quarter-million armed men at his command. “That’s what it’s got to do with my plans,” he said, smiling, and he got up from our table and made for the door. “Let’s get going, son!” he called. “We don’t have a hundred days. As you said. We’ve only got this one!”

The battlefield was a huge, rolling, hillocky expanse of low grass, like an enormous cemetery without markers, criss-crossed by soft, overgrown ditches and low ridges and bordered in the distance by a dark line of yew trees, with squared-off, small fields beyond, where local farmers in blue smocks and short spades made the fall turning of their soil by hand. When we first arrived at the battlefield, the dew was barely off the grass, and I followed the Old Man from site to site, while he counted off steps, as if he were surveying the land and I were his assistant lugging the chain. Marking the advances and retreats, first of Wellington’s forces and the Flemish infantry, then those of his Prussian counterpart, General Blücher, and the several French armies, Father seemed to have memorized the battlemaps, for he knew the exact positions of all the armies that had met here that June day in 1815, and he walked straight to them and paced off the distances between their lines.

“The ground all along here” he said, “where it slopes down to the plain, there, was soppy and wet. Yes, yes,” he said, squinting down the field. On the night of the seventeenth, when Bonaparte arrived from Ligny, the Old Man explained, the ground was soft from two days and nights of rain, and then it stopped raining, and he waited until eleven the next morning. Up on the heights there, he said, pointing. Then, before marching against the Belgians and the Dutch, he waited for the ground to dry. That was important, the Old Man said — said to himself, actually, not to me. That was a crucial delay. It gave Wellington time to dig in on the opposite heights, Mont St. jean they called it, barely a hill, but a good redoubt, if Wellington was given the time to fortify it.

Father strode abruptly down the long, grassy slope, to check the soil, I assumed, so as to determine how muddy it must have been at eleven A.M. on June 18,1815, while I lagged behind and watched from the ridge. The sun had risen to above the hilltops behind us, and the day was growing hot, the air heavy with moisture. Making my way across the vast expanse of the battlefield, I came in a short while to a low grove of trees where a narrow stream wandered through. Here I took a seat in the shade beneath the trees, removed my hat, and leaned back against the friendly trunk of one and watched Father off in the distance, as he marched straight-legged uphill and down, counting out the paces, then stopped, peered around, touched the soil, scratched his chin, and, pondering for a moment, turned on his heels and marched off in a new direction, casting himself first as the entire army of one side and, a few minutes later, turning himself into the army of the other.

It was an amusing sight, and certainly he must have looked peculiar to the local farmers who were here and there working in the fields adjacent to the battleground — this lean, middle-aged man in a dark coat with flapping tails and a flat-brimmed hat set straight on his head, striding in geometrically precise lines beneath the hot, mid-morning sun over hill and dale, at meaningless points abruptly stopping and wheeling, pausing briefly with chin in hand, and suddenly putting himself on the march again. And while I myself was no more capable of actually seeing the things he saw out there than were those curious Flemish farmers who leaned on their spades and gazed after him, nonetheless I knew what he saw and heard and even smelled. I knew that he was deliberately, thoughtfully, with impressive, detailed knowledge, situating himself at the hundreds of points where the armies of six nations had met, and that he now walked in the midst of a thunderous battle, heard the angry shouts and pitiful cries of thousands of men falling face-first into the dirt and dying there straightway, saw the fire and smoke of long rows of cannon and the screaming horses going down and heard the crash of huge wagons and machines breaking apart, as wave upon wave of men marched suicidally against high walls of musketry, slashing sabers, blazing pistols, pikes, and daggers, until the lines broke and bloody hands reached out and grasped the throats of terrified, wild-eyed boys and men — farmers, artisans, and simple workmen fleeing for their lives, while all about the field human limbs were heaping up, arms and legs and heads severed brutally from the trunks, leaving howling, bloody mouths at the cut ends and the trunks cast down like so much meat, and the living, those who could still rise, staggering forward, covered with dirt, blood, feces, vomit, as behind them the corpses stiffened in the watery ditches and swelled and started to stink in the heat of the June day, and behind the corpses, up on the ridge, the generals plotted their next assault.

I sat on a hill in the shade of a tree, like one of the generals myself, and watched my father track and translate a series of elaborate, invisible runes in the distant fields. I watched a man controlled by a vision that I, his son, was too roughly finished to share, a vision that he would be obliged, therefore, to come back and report to me, just as he reported back to me his vision of the Lord. I believed in his visions, that they had occurred, and that they were of the truth — the truth of warfare, the truth of religion. This was what I had learned the night that I spoke with Miss Peabody aboard the Cumbria — her last night on earth and, in a sense, my first. I had changed my mind that night, as she had commanded, and forthwith had changed my self. In making my mind up, I had made my self up. And for the first time, the only necessary time, I had decided simply that my father’s visions were worthy of my belief. The rest was like day coming out of night. I would remain, of course, a man made of ordinary stuff, and on my own had nothing else to work with. My great good fortune, however, was that my father was more of a poet than I, was a seer, and was perhaps a prophet. He was a man who saw things that I knew must be there but could not see myself, and because I loved him and trusted him, and because of the power of his language and the consistency of his behavior, my belief had swiftly become as powerful and controlling, as much a determinant of my mind and actions, as Father’s belief was of his. In this refracted way — though I remained until the end his follower and continued to live with no clear plan of my own and no belief in God — I became during those days for the first time a man of action and a man of religion. The difference between us, between me and my father, is that I would inspire no one to follow me, either into battle or towards God, whereas he had me, and soon would have a dozen more, and finally whole legions and then half a nation, following him.

In the evening, after a supper of mutton that the Old Man much admired, we strolled until dark about the town of Brussels, and Father related to me his findings. We walked to the heart of the town and came out upon an ancient, cobblestoned market-square, where the town hall was located. There we admired for a while a large medieval statue of St. Michael trampling the devil under his feet. The statue had been placed on a spire atop the tall building, and to observe it we were obliged to stand at the furthest point in the square, our backs to a stone wall, peering up, as if watching an eclipse. Pronouncing the statue useful, Father declared it the sort of thing we ought to have more of in American towns.

“It’s a Catholic statue, though” I pointed out.

“No, it’s older than that. You don’t have Catholics until you have Protestants. No, it’s a Christian statue.”

“And America is a Christian nation.”

“It is, indeed,” he said. “Or ought to be. It was surely meant to be.” We moved on then, and soon Father returned to the subject of Napoleon. All of Napoleon’s reasons for being defeated at Waterloo, he stated, came down to his having lost the element of surprise. For three straight months, up to and including the time he arrived with his armies at Ligny and drove Blücher’s Prussians from the field, Bonaparte had done the thing that was least expected of him. For that reason alone, all other things being equal or nearly so, he had come away victorious. But when he decamped at Ligny and moved on through the rain, he arrived at dawn at Waterloo, where he discovered that between his army and Wellington’s somewhat exposed and approximately equal force, there lay a half-mile of marshy meadowland. Here, for the first time, he did the expected thing. He pulled up and waited for the sun to dry the field. That gave Wellington time to dig in and, as it turned out, time for Blücher’s regrouped Prussians to arrive from Ligny. There was no way Napoleon could have defeated the Allies after that. For he had not done the unexpected thing. When Blücher arrived, it was nearly noon, and as the battle had just commenced, he was able to re-inforce Wellington’s army. That made all the difference. First, the element of surprise had been lost, and now things were no longer equal. Napoleon had to lose. Mathematics, simple numbers, had taken over. Certain victory was turned into a rout. For Napoleon, it was the end of his campaign, the end of his war, the end of his hundred days. There was nothing left for him now but retreat, eventual surrender, exile, the restoration of the monarchy in France, and a return to the status quo in the rest of Europe.

“What should he have done, then?”

“He should have done whatever Wellington least expected him to do. Which is, first of all, to attack. Attack at once.” And not only should he have attacked at once, Father went on, for the mud would have hampered Wellington’s army as much as his own, but he should have split his force into two equal-seeming parts. “Like Joab against the Syrians and the children of Ammon,” he explained. “One part would be made the superior, however, the way Joab secretly placed the best men of Israel under his command and placed the rest, an inferior lot, under his brother, Abishai.” Then Napoleon should have attacked from the two flanks, not to make a pincers, but to make two separate fronts, so as to force Wellington to divide his army into two parts also. Except that in Wellington’s case, the two would not have merely seemed equal, like Napoleon’s. They would in fact have been equal. Consequently, Napoleon’s secretly superior half would have quickly overrun the British half opposing it. And his inferior portion over on the other flank would have triumphed also, because Wellington’s side would have broken and run when they saw their opposite flank taken by a force apparently equal to the force facing them. “Just as the children of Ammon, when they saw the Syrians broken by Joab’s army of the best men of Israel, fled from the inferior force under his brother, Abishai. Napoleon’s greater false-half, in defeating Wellington’s actual half, would be handing victory like a gift to his lesser half. Thus his army as a whole would have defeated Wellington’s as a whole, and Blücher, arriving six hours later, would have been obliged to beat a hasty retreat back to Prussia. Napoleon would be emperor once again. He might still be emperor today.”

We turned off the square onto a wide avenue and walked on, and while I pondered Father’s findings and tried to apply them to his own planned campaign against the slaveholders of the American South, he whistled contentedly a favorite hymn and now and then paused to admire and comment upon the grand houses and impressive palaces of the town.

“It’s a valuable lesson, then?” I said.

“What is?”

“Your discoveries concerning Napoleon’s defeat.”

“Yes, of course. We mustn’t ever forget it. There will come a time, Owen, I promise you, when we will be cut down — unless we do the unexpected thing.”

“When will that be? When’s it coming?”

“Soon;’ he said. “Sooner than anyone thinks.” He seemed then to drift off, as if observing future events with as much clarity as earlier today he had viewed the past. But a moment later, he abruptly returned and said, “First, however, we’ve got some business in Liverpool to attend to! We’ve got to sell some Yankee wool to our British cousins, my boy, and at a price that’ll free us of debt, once and for all. I’m sick of living like a toad under a harrow!”

“Right!” I said, and laughed aloud. Not because of his figure of speech, but because it seemed so incongruous to be meditating one moment on warfare, ancient and modern, and the next to be planning strategy for the sale of wool. I could hardly wait for the day when we would no longer have to think about commerce and could bend all our energies and attention to war! War against the slavers! “I wish we could rush straight into battle now!” I exclaimed.

“Ah! So do I, son;’ he said, smiling. “So do I.” And he walked on, hands clasped behind his back, head slightly bowed, as if it were the Sabbath and he were on his way to church.

Two days later, we arrived back in Liverpool and at once made ready to show our wool to the Englishmen. The morning before the auction was to take place, we came down bright and early from our lodgings to the warehouse, so as to be on the scene when the agents for the cloth manufacturers examined all the sheepmen’s stock and set in their own minds how high they would bid later. This practice was a guard against being victimized by puffers, men who were sometimes secretly hired by the sheepmen to bid the prices up, and was, of course, when the prices for the various grades of wool were actually established and agreed upon among the buyers. It was no different here than in the United States, where there was a considerable amount of secret collusion between the buyers, most of whom had elaborate, long-term business dealings with one another, such as previous debts or deals, services owed or promised, goods with liens attached, and so on, often concerning some business quite other than that of purchasing wool and in some other city. Thus the auction itself was more or less a formality; there were seldom any surprises, and prices rarely moved up or down more than a fraction of a cent per pound.

In Springfield, for number 2 grade wool, before Father had withdrawn his entire stock from the marketplace to ship it abroad, Brown & Perkins had been offered, and had turned down, thirty-five cents a pound. Number I had been going for forty-one cents. The three higher grades, X, XX, and XXX, had been priced proportionally higher. Father’s plan was to obtain in Liverpool a price of forty-five to fifty cents per pound for the number 2, low enough to undercut slightly the current English price, and to scale the other grades accordingly. After subtracting shipping costs and tariffs, he figured that he would still come out ahead by at least ten cents per pound, a net gain of twenty thousand dollars over what he would have gotten for the same wool in Springfield. Furthermore, as he had explained to me numerous times, by withdrawing Brown & Perkins’s one hundred tons of wool from the domestic market, he had created an artificial shortage there, which would force the prices up for a time, and thus he would profit twice, here and now in England and next month in Springfield, when the fall fleeces arrived from the western sheepmen.

Father had me pull half-a-dozen bales of number 2 from different layers of our lot and haul them out onto the floor. This was normally a two-man job, but in those days, despite my crippled left arm, I was strong enough to handle a two-hundred-fifty-pound bale alone by grabbing it on top with my right hand and hooking the bale underneath with my left and slinging it up onto my right shoulder. If it was tied correctly and I had a strap, I could even lug it with one arm, like an enormous burlap-wrapped satchel. “Stack them over here, son,” Father said, pointing to a place a short ways off from the others, so that our wool stood out from theirs.

I think that Father wished to make a bit of a show for the British gentlemen, who lounged about the cavernous space in several small groups, chattering idly amongst themselves, most of them in fine suits and silk cravats, affecting canes and wearing gloves and tall hats. We stood out anyway, due to our rough clothing and Yankee speech and manners, but the image of honest American yeomanry was perhaps what Father wanted to put on display, nearly as much as the wool from Brown & Perkins of Springfield, Massachusetts, and I wasn’t displeased to play my role, the tall, strapping lad who tosses around two-hundred-fifty pound bales by himself.

Our counterparts, the British sheepmen, stood by their sample bales with caps in hand, silent, eyes cast down, as if they believed they were in the presence of lofty personages, feudal lords and squires, instead of scheming merchants. Father, by way of contrast, leaned against his stack of bales almost casually and whittled with his pocketknife on a stick he’d cut from the hedge by our boarding house and had brought along, I now realized, for precisely this somewhat theatrical purpose.

Soon a group of four or five buyers with slight smiles on their faces had gathered near us, examining our persons more than our bales of wool, all the while continuing to talk amongst themselves, in their drawling, nasal, English way, of their club dinner the previous evening. Then several more of the sanguinarians sauntered over, their walking sticks clicking across the warehouse floor, and soon there was a crowd surrounding us, looking bemused and a little bored. If they were impressed by who or what we were, they disguised it.

The clerk of the works, Mr. Pickersgill, a small man with a malmsey nose and Dutch spectacles, whose task it was to organize the sale and with whom Father had dealt on our arrival, came quickly out of his office and joined the group and nervously began to speak for us, as if we were Iroquois Indians and could not speak to these fine gentlemen for ourselves. “This ’ere’s Mister John Brown from the firm of Brown and Perkins. It’s a big lot ’e’s got, sirs. Some seven ’undred bales at various grades. Hammericans he declared, as if it were the name of our tribe.

“Indeed,” said one. “From Pumpkinshire!”

“Extraordinary,” said another.

“I like your cravat,” said a third, a short, platter-faced fellow with an outsized head and a limp blond moustache. He removed one of his fawn-colored gloves and reached forward and tweaked the piece of soft leather that Father customarily wore at his throat, causing Father to cease his whittling at once and pull himself up straight and glare at the man, until he withdrew his hand and delicately wiped it with a handkerchief and replaced the glove.

There were several low har-hars from the group. Father resumed his whittling and said, “When you wish to examine my wool, gentlemen, please inform Mister Pickersgill, and I’ll be glad to show it to you.” He briefly stated that he had brought close to one hundred tons of clean, graded wool, all of it raised by expert sheepmen in the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, and that his number 2 would prove superior to their X and equal to their XX, although he would price it to compete with their number 2.

There were a few snuffles of disbelief, and one of the Englishmen asked him who had graded his wool. “More to the point,” he said, “who cleaned it?” and the company laughed, for it was unfortunately true that American wool was notorious in those days for not being clean, and a hundredweight of fleece might have as much as twenty pounds of dirt and feces stuck in it. This had been one of Father’s ongoing concerns, making sure that Brown & Perkins wool was clean, even for the domestic market, where the practice of folding trash in with the fleeces was all too common. From the beginning of his and Mr. Perkins’s Springfield enterprise, Father, although only a middleman, had made a great effort when purchasing the wool in the west to teach his shepherds how to wash their sheep thoroughly before shearing and how to pick the wool clean before shipping their clips to him in Springfield. His lectures on the subject at fairs and shows where he demonstrated his methods were famous among the sheepmen from New England to Ohio.

“Gentlemen, I have purchased every clip of this wool from shepherds I’ve trained personally. It’s been sheared from sheep whose stock I’ve improved with my own purebred merinos and Saxonys. And I myself am the man who has graded this wool. I’ve graded it, and my own sons and I have examined it before shipping for cleanliness.” This was not exactly true, for it was impossible to examine closely two hundred thousand pounds of wool. One graded it by taking a single handful of fleece from each shepherd’s clip, and one sampled clips at random to check for dirt and hoped that the shepherds were as good as their promise to deliver clean wool. Which, for the most part, they were. Besides, Father could generally estimate two hundred fifty pounds of clean wool by casting his eye over its volume.

“An expert, then,” said one of the Englishmen, a tub-bellied fellow with a yellow waistcoat stretched to its limits. “We have us an expert. He grades his own wool!” he said, turning to his fellows and smiling like a catfish.

“I am an expert, when it comes to grading wool. I’ve made it my business for nearly forty years, man and boy. Too many cunning shavers out there, gentlemen. Too many trimmers. Not enough honest men, like yourselves. But even so, a sheepman would be a fool not to know how to grade his own wool.”

“And you’re no fool, eh, Yank?” called one.

“Gentlemen,” Father said, heating up, “I can grade wool in the dark.”

“Indeed?”

“Aye. Blindfolded.”

“Extraordinary!”

“I can read a clip blind, from a single tuft,” Father declared, truthfully, for I had seen him do it hundreds of times.

The short man with the broad face and blond moustache then stepped forward and removed his own necktie, a blousy piece of fawncolored silk that matched his gloves, and held it out to Father. “Perhaps you’d like to demonstrate, Mister…?”

“Brown. Be glad to,” he said, and he passed me his knife and stick, removed his hat, and tied the scarf around his head, blocking his sigh t.

“No help from you now, my fine golumpus,” the man said to me, and he departed from the group and exited quickly from the warehouse, returning after a few seconds bearing a reddish tuft of hair in his gloved hand. “Now, Mister Brown, here’s your sample,” he said, and gave Father the tuft.

Father rubbed it between his fingers and dropped it at once to the floor. “Gentlemen,” he pronounced, “if you have any machinery that will spin the hairs of a dog, one of those large, wire-haired red dogs, I believe, then I would advise you to put this into it,” and with a flourish, he pulled off the blindfold.

After that, the Englishmen seemed more respectful of Father and more openly curious about our wool. We might be a couple of rustics from the republic of Pumpkinshire, but we were not fools.

Nor were they. After some pleasantries — during which the rotund man in the yellow waistcoat took a drink from a silver flask and extended it to Father, who naturally declined, suffering himself to be called, quite good-naturedly, a bloody parson — Father began once again to praise the quality of Brown & Perkins wool.

In the midst of his discourse, one of the more sober-visaged buyers, a man who up to now had been silent, interrupted him and said, “Mister Brown, I saw your son there setting out these bales. He’s a stout lumper, I must say, especially with his dumb arm and all, my compliments, but really, sir, since it was so easy for him to heft these bales, perhaps you could have him replace them and pull from your stock a few that we ourselves might choose for appraisal. I’m sure you understand, sir.” This man was tall and distinguished-looking, with a narrow gray beard. He was somewhat older than the others, and they seemed to defer to him — even Mr. Pickersgill, I noticed, whose interests were supposed to be the seller’s, not the buyer’s — for they all punctuated his statement with wise nods and pursed lips, as if for his approval.

Father wasn’t pleased by the implications of the request, but he agreed to it, and I was obliged to haul the bales back, replacing them on the floor with three that the tall Englishman himself selected, all of them, like the first batch, marked number 2, the base-price grade.

“And now, my good man, if you would be so kind as to show us your fine American wool,” said the Englishman, pointing with his cane at the center bale.

“My pleasure,” Father said in a hard voice, and he cut the cord so as to expose a top corner of the bale.

“If you don’t mind,” said the Englishman, passing his cane to the man behind him, and he took the knife from Father’s hand and swiftly cut away the rest of the cord, stripping the bale halfway down of its burlap wrapper. The snowy white fleeces, released to the open air, puffed up at once and grew to nearly twice their size, smelling sweetly of lanolin and freshly scythed grass, evoking a sudden, painful, unexpected memory of home, my first longing to return.

In silence then and in a strange sort of frenzy, five or six of the group rushed at the open bale and plunged their hands into it. They groped up to their elbows and pulled fleeces apart and grabbed great clumps of wool from the depths of the bale, sniffing it, rubbing tufts across their palms and between their fingers, passing snowy gouts back to their colleagues and reaching in for more. They were like a pack of ravening wolves. We had never seen this sort of behavior from buyers before and were stunned into silence.

Finally, Father recovered from his shock and called out, “Wait! Gentlemen, wait! You’re ruining the bale! What on earth are you doing?”

They went on a few moments longer, until at last the tall man stopped and turned to Father and glared at him. “This, sir, is what you Americans call clean wool?” he said in a cold voice, and he reached back into the bale with both hands and drew from its depths a large quantity of wool, nearly a bushel of it, and dropped it at Father’s feet. He retrieved his cane from one of his fellows and spread the wool out. It was filthy. Sticks, twigs, grass, and leaves and clots of dried fecal matter stuck to it.

Father’s face reddened at once, as he realized what had happened. Bad luck, yes; but worse. Much worse.

“More dirty Yankee wool, eh?” one of the fellows in back called. “Same old stuff”

“Filthy.”

“Disgusting.”

“So there’s your Yankee parson, eh?”

Several men in the group broke away then and moved towards the English sheepmen further down. Mr. Pickersgill hesitated a moment, but quickly followed after them, as if eager not to be associated with us. The tall Englishman did not leave, however, and now he stared hard at Father, whose ears and neck were scarlet with embarrassment and anger. “Mister Brown” he said evenly, “I’m quite disappointed. Frankly, I took you to be an honest man.”

“I am! I… this is a mistake, sir,” he stammered. “A mistake. It’s but a single bale. I… I myself have been cheated by this bale, sir.”

“Indeed.”

“No, really, sir. Why not examine another bale? Here, here, take a poke through this one,” he said, indicating the next bale. “Owen, bring down some others for the gentleman toexamine,”he said.

“Never mind that. I think we’ve seen enough” said the Englishman. “Mister Brown, you’d have to open every bale and sort out all two hundred thousand pounds of your wool and separate the clean wool from the dirty and somehow wash and dry the rest, if you wished to sell it at the going rate now. You’d have to clean it the way it should’ve been cleaned in the beginning, and then repack it. All one hundred tons, Mister Brown. I rather doubt that you and your son have the time and money to manage that. And even then, Mister Brown, why should we trust you? Even then, no matter what you yourself claimed, we’d be buying the wool on faith, and there’s a price for that, you know. It’s not the going price, I’m afraid.”

Father responded with silence and stared at the savaged bale with loathing.

“I’m sorry, Mister Brown. You seem like a decent fellow. I advise you to simply sell your wool here in Liverpool as it is. Get what you can for it, and return home happy to have sold it at all. There’s enough of a shortage here this fall that you’ll move it. It won’t go untaken.”

Father looked at him coldly. “You’ve got me in a vise, haven’t you? You’ll pay what you want for my wool, glut the market, and drive down the price of your homegrown stuff. Then you’ll turn around and probably sell our wool back to the American clothmen, who’ll pay dearly for it, due to shortages there.” He was spluttering now, enraged, as his situation gradually became clear to him. The English buyers were about to make themselves a pretty profit twice over and in the bargain cheat the sheepmen on both sides of the Atlantic. They were probably arranging this very minute to provide short-term, high-interest loans to their New England colleagues for the purchase of Brown & Perkins wool in Liverpool at a lower price than it would go for at home.

“No one, except possibly you, is trying to cheat anyone, Mister Brown.”

“I? I? I’ve been cheated more than anyone here!” Father shouted. “I can accept my personal share in this disgrace, sir, but I didn’t know of it. I have been hurt here! Hurt worse than you can ever know. My partner, Mister Simon Perkins, has been damaged financially by this fiasco, as have I. But my honor has been damaged in this! My honor!”

“Yes. Well, I’m sorry for that, Mister Brown. Good day, sir,” said the Englishman, and he walked away, leaving Father and me staring down at the wrecked bale of wool, its contents scattered over the floor at our feet. It was an ugly mess; it was also an indictment, and a trap. Father knew that he had been disgraced. And that it could only lead to further disgrace.

“Oh, Owen. What will I do? What will I do now?” His hard gray eyes suddenly softened and went wet, and his face fell and appeared to collapse into itself. I thought for a moment that he might sit down upon the floor and weep, and I reached forward and put my arm around his shoulders.

“Be the good shepherd, Father.”

“Please, son. Don’t talk nonsense.”

“I mean it, be the good shepherd. Cease being the man who is the hireling and not the shepherd. Leave off being the man who doesn’t own the sheep, and when he sees the wolf coming, abandons the sheep, so the sheep are scattered and slain.”

“Yes. It’s in the Book of John. Yes, I know.”

“Be the good shepherd,” I said again, for I wished him to understand that all these men were hirelings and wolves, and in this wool business we were but hirelings ourselves. And now, at the coming of the wolves, we appeared to have abandoned the sheep, who were our enslaved Negro brethren at home. “Be the good shepherd, the Bible says, and know thy sheep and be known of thine.”

“Do I understand you, Owen?”

“I hope so. Yes.”

“You’re calling me back to myself. Aren’t you, son?”

I told him that I was, and that we did not need to dwell so much either on victory or on defeat here amongst the hirelings and the wolves, so long as the outcome of our business with them was to depart from them at once and bring us back to our true selves. We should do here whatever we could and do it with equanimity and calm straightforwardness, I said, but then we should return at once to our true work, where our worth wasn’t measured by our ability to obtain a few cents per pound of wool one way or the other. If we were doing our true work, our worth would be measured in links of broken chain, in manacles cast off, and in whips plucked from the hands of slavemasters and thrown upon the ground.

I was ashamed, I told him, to be as distracted as I had been lately by this business of selling wool, this business of being a hireling. I wanted to return to the real battle, to the only thing that mattered. I wanted to resume our war against the slavers and to wage war against them until they were dead, every single one of them, or until every Negro man and woman in America was as free as I was myself and our nation had become a holy sanctuary and was no longer a prison and a charnel house.

He smiled sweetly up into my face and embraced me. In a low, tremulous voice, he said, “You are fast becoming my greatest blessing, son. The Lord’s greatest gift to me.”

His old force quickly returned to him then, and he bade me pack up the strewn wool from around the floor and tie the bale back as before, while he went to Mr. Pickersgill and re-stated his desire to have our wool auctioned this afternoon as previously scheduled. “But I’ll tell him not to accept less than twenty-seven cents per pound for number 2, thirty-five for number I, and so on up the line.” That would undercut the English prices enough to get it sold, he said, but not by so much that we’d be left with nothing to show for our troubles. It was less than what we would have got in Springfield last month, but it was the best we could do today here in England. “We’ll just do what we can, and we’ll move straight on from there. Right, son?”

“Right. Action, Father! Action, action, action!”

“Ah, that’s the boy!” he said, his eyes gleaming with pleasure. “Owen, the Lord hath given thee an understanding heart. He hath given thee wisdom! Thou art my Solomon. I should have named thee Solomon!” he declared. “Should I do that, call thee Solomon?”

“No,” I said, laughing. “Not unless you call yourself David.”

His eyes widened comically, although he didn’t intend to be funny, and he shook his head, as if to rid himself of the notion of being named David. Then off he hurried, to speak with Mr. Pickersgill, while I bent to the task of repairing the broken bale of dirty wool.

Chapter 13

Our return from England to Springfield that autumn, hapless and empty-handed, the failed Yankee woolen entrepreneurs, was unremarkable — except for Father’s renewed ferocity regarding the war against the slaveholders. We had, of course, heard the news, just before departing Liverpool, of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act: it was in all the English newspapers. There were reports of disruptions and public demonstrations in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia and widespread outrage, even among Northern whites who previously had been acquiescent, and calls for armed resistance for the first time from the Garrisonians (although Father did not count that for much). As a result of this cowardly piece of legislation, there was now no safe haven for escaped slaves anywhere in America. A Negro human being was like a wandering cow, identified by color and all too often by the owner’s brand, returnable when and wherever found. And free Negroes, too, were terrified for their lives, for the new law turned every white citizen of every Northern state into an unpaid agent of Southern slaveowners and gave no legal protection to free Negro men, women, or children, any one of whom could be instantly transformed into an escaped slave merely by a bounty-hunter’s say-so and hauled off to the South and sold as chattel.

Mostly, it was this Fugitive Slave Act that provided the Old Man with a new focus for his rage, which, since the debacle in Timbuctoo, had been somewhat deflected by the now-failed mission to England for Brown & Perkins and by our Flemish holiday, as I thought of it. Also, quietly, I had begun to encourage his rage, for I was now eager to test my own mettle in the fires of battle. This was a new role for me, heating up Father’s blood, and it was strangely exhilarating to me. Who would have thought it: Owen Brown, the quiet son, encouraging the Old Man to march steadily against the enemy?

Despite our love and respect for him, I don’t think we took his plan all that seriously, even when he rolled out his maps and described his strategies to people outside the family fold, as he had done with our friend Lyman Epps and poor Mr. Fleete, shot in the escape from Elizabethtown. Father had revealed his secret plan to a few white people, too, such as Mr. Thompson, our friend and neighbor in North Elba, before they broke over the matter of transporting the Negro couple from Richmond, and Mr. Gerrit Smith, back when he first made the arrangement to settle us in Timbuctoo. Whenever he did reveal his plan, the Old Man always swore his listener to absolute secrecy, naturally, but who would not eagerly guarantee silence? The plan seemed so crack-brained then that no one would have believed you if you told him what Old Brown was up to. We in the family certainly told no one, if for no other reason than that we were somewhat embarrassed by it. We wished to protect Father’s reputation for probity, after all, and also our own. And who wants to be laughed at, especially on someone else’s account?

Generally, then, until the autumn that Father and I returned from England, I had treated his plan for invading the South and liberating the slaves as another of his harmless diversions, an elaborate way for him to express the anger and frustration caused by his financial failures and by the pacifism and compromises of the other whites in the anti-slave movement and by the fearfulness and lack of unity among so many Negroes. It kept him from despair over his money-problems, and it stopped him from throwing up his hands in disgust and walking out on the abolitionists altogether. It was his fantasy, not mine.

There was one early occasion, however, when I actually, whole-heartedly, shared his dream of a war of liberation and terror. It occurred when he first revealed his plan to Frederick Douglass. I watched this distinguished, intelligent, worldly gentleman, a Southerner and an escaped slave himself, a man who knew the risks and stakes personally, a true warrior in the war against slavery — I watched Mr. Douglass take Father’s military strategies seriously and felt ashamed of my skepticism and temporarily cast it off. Although it would be another two years before I rid myself of it for good, that night in ‘48 in Springfield, when Mr. Douglass first came to visit, was an important beginning of my life as a warrior, too.

I remember hurrying home on a dark, wintry night from the Brown & Perkins warehouse to our crowded little house on Franklin Street, hoping to be there in time for supper with the others. Walking slam-bang through the door into the front parlor, I saw Father seated at the table with a tall, broad-shouldered, dark brown man with a forceful jaw and a great leonine mass of hair. I recognized Mr. Douglass instantly, of course, for although I had not seen him in the flesh before this, engravings of his handsome, impressive face had appeared in any number of issues of The Liberator and other abolitionist periodicals. He was younger than I had thought him to be, still in his early thirties then, but with beginning streaks of gray in his hair. He had a massive face and a broad, high forehead, a wonderfully patrician look, but in an African way, as if he were a direct descendant of a long line of Ethiopian kings. Seated side by side at the old pine table where we normally took our meals, both men were gazing intently at a large sheet of paper Father’s map of Virginia and points south, I saw at once. His Subterranean Passway.

Back then, when we were newly located in Springfield and Brown & Perkins was briefly thought to be a thriving business, visitors to our home were often visibly surprised to see how modestly we lived. Mr. Douglass, in his fine woolen suit, sat stiffly at the table, his feet squarely under his chair, as if he were more accustomed to meeting white abolitionists in formal, velvet-covered parlors than in a workingman’s dwelling-place. We owned very little furniture then, a continuing effect of the Ohio bankruptcy, which was actually of a benefit to us in that narrow, wood-frame row house — the rooms were tiny, like hutches, and we were a family of nine people and needed the space for our very bodies. We utilized the six small chambers in an unorthodox way, determined more by need than by convention, making the kitchen serve as a combination cookroom, washroom, and workshop and the front parlor as an office and for taking our meals. Father and Mary slept in the dining room proper, and we children, seven of us, were distributed by sex and age in the three sleeping rooms upstairs. It was a spartan home in a laborers’ neighborhood but, withal, a cozy and cheerful place, where we had many guests and visitors, mostly unpretentious people, sheepmen from out west and Negroes connecting through Father to a line or way-station of the Underground Railroad, people who made themselves comfortable in such bare surroundings more easily, perhaps, than Mr. Douglass.

Father introduced me to the man. “This is my third son, Owen. He’s been working late at the warehouse,”he said, to explain the tufts of wool clinging to my clothing and hair and the dirt on my face and hands.

Mr. Douglass rose from his seat and extended his large hand and smiled gently. “A pleasure” he said, a simple statement made almost lordly by his powerful, deep voice and regal bearing. This was a man! I rubbed my hand on my coveralls and grasped his and shook it with enthusiasm, although I was too shy and awed by him to speak a single word.

“Mister Douglass is on his way to Rochester, from a speaking engagement in Boston. He learned of us from the Reverends Garnet and Loguen,” Father said, obviously pleased by having been recommended by the two Negro radicals. “They said we were to be trusted. No small encomium for a white man, if I may say so, coming from those two,”he said to Mr. Douglass with evident pride.

Mr. Douglass smiled generously at Father. “Yes, that’s true, I’m afraid.”

“When you’ve washed and changed your shin, Owen, you may come and join us,” Father then said.

I rushed through my ablutions back in the kitchen, where Mary and Ruth and the younger children were at work preparing supper. John was then still in Akron, finishing his business school studies, and Jason and Fred were situated in Hudson, minding Mr. Simon Perkins’s flocks. Although I was the eldest son then in residence, I was still young enough to be surprised and honored by Father’s invitation to join him and Mr. Douglass in the parlor.

When I arrived back at the table and took my seat next to Father, I saw that he was showing Mr. Douglass his sketches of the log blockhouses that he intended to build at strategic points along the Passway, forts to serve both as supply depots for his army and as way-stations for passing the liberated slaves north — those who chose not to stay in the South and fight alongside him and his main force. Father had long ago designed these simple structures: easily defended, windowless cubes made of thick logs with firing slots and secret basements and long escape tunnels, they were to be tucked away in the narrow defiles and gorges of the Appalachians. He believed, against all conventional thinking on the matter, that a military force could better defend a low place than a high. In Deuteronomy, the Lord had warned the Israelites against settling in high places — and for good reason, according to Father. “First, because in a low place you’ll have a well, and your water won’t run out. And second, because if the defile is sufficiently narrow, you can’t be surrounded. In order to lay a siege against you, the enemy will be obliged to divide his force and climb to the heights. At which point, you proceed at once to charge against the weakened force left below, and then you quickly surround the climbers on high, who will now be under siege by you, trapped without water and with no way down except by your leave.”

“I see,” said Mr. Douglass. “And you propose to man each of these blockhouses with a small force of… what? Twenty-five men at the most?”

“At most,” Father said.

“Whilst your main army conducts forays into the flatlands below.”

“Exactly.”

“Fine, but how shall they be supplied? Your main forces can’t do it. They’ll be too busy eluding capture and hanging by the slaveowners.”

“They’ll be supplied from the North,” Father explained. He would establish agents in Ohio and Pennsylvania, whose responsibility would be to gather and store supplies and arms purchased for them by radical abolitionist supporters and to ship them south along the Passway, even as freshly liberated slaves came north along the same route. No wagon would come south empty, just as no wagon would return empty, either: the Underground Railroad was to run two ways now, instead of one. Father’s main army, he went on, would simply take its supplies, its food, fresh horses, and so forth, from the raided plantations. They would also have whatever food and supplies they were given by sympathetic Southern whites. For there would be some supporters among the whites, Father was sure, small farmers and the like, who, not owning any slaves, were bound to be profoundly disgusted by the ways that the system oppressed them, too, people who would therefore welcome the opportunity to aid and abet men come south to wage war against slavery.

Here Mr. Douglass shook his great head. “I think, Mister Brown, that you don’t know those folks like I do. You’re a white man and perhaps understand whites, but you’re not a Southern white man. Go on, though. There’s much to admire here anyhow,” he said gently.

A sustained, guerilla war would swiftly drive the price of a slave worth one thousand dollars today to ten thousand dollars or even more, Father explained. The cotton could not be grown, harvested, ginned, shipped, and sold without a huge labor force, and there were not enough whites in the South to accomplish that great and economically necessary task alone. Father was convinced that if the fight lasted long enough and caused a sufficient number of slaves to escape, the costs of holding on to their slaves would so greatly outweigh the benefits that the Slavocracy would move to strike a deal that would free all slaves in exchange for their return home as paid workers. “Slaves run north for freedom” Father noted, “not work.” If they had freedom, they would stay, and many of those now living in the North would likely return also. “I do not intend to conquer the South,” Father declared. “I merely mean to make slavery prohibitively expensive. If a people cannot be made to do the right thing, Mister Douglass, then we must make them do the thing that is in their interest.”

For this reason, he was convinced that his war of liberation must be undertaken now or very soon, before slavery was extended into the western territories. If we did not strike now, he said, when the Southern states, because of their dependence on cotton, were economically vulnerable and more or less evenly matched in Congress by the North, then we would be faced later with only two alternatives — division of the Union or a bloody civil war. Or perhaps both. The longer we delayed, the more successful the South would be in extending slavery into Texas and the other territories, and even into Cuba and Mexico. Expansion out of the South into the west and the Caribbean isles would diversify the slaveholding economy from cotton and soon make it powerful beyond belief, and as those territories became states, they would come to dominate the North in Congress. With a slaveowning Democrat President, Senate, and House of Representatives, the North would have no choice but to secede from the Union or, to avoid total absorption by the Slavocracy, go to war. There were already calls for secession-or-war from both sides.

“Yes, but let me be sure, Mister Brown, that you’re not resurrecting that old idea of a black republic. Your plan could produce that. I would vehemently oppose that. A little land-locked Haiti, separate from and surrounded by a white United States;’ Mr. Douglass said. “I would not wish for that.”

“No, no, no! Not at all. Well, temporarily, perhaps. But only as a way of keeping the venture from being mistakenly construed as a policy of the Northern states,” Father insisted. He wished to do it more or less the same as the Texans had done against Mexico. He planned to publish assurances that as soon as slavery was abolished in every state and territory, his temporary Negro republic would be dissolved, at which time all conquered regions would be returned to the control of their original state governments.

Mr. Douglass sighed heavily, a melancholy exhalation, and peered down at the map before him. “The federal army will come after you, sir. It doesn’t matter, North or South — they won’t permit it.”

It would take them too long to act, Father explained, and when they did, he would have moved his forces to another front. From the mountains of Virginia, we would slip down to the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee and on into the hills of Georgia. We would be divided into small, highly mobile units, little more than bands, striking where least expected and then retreating to our mountain hideouts, disappearing into the upland forests like the Seminole Indians into the swamps of Florida. Also, as he pointed out, our campaign would have hundreds of thousands of civilian supporters, millions, North and South, which would weaken to a crucial degree any federal army commissioned to stop us. “A federal army would have to cut down every tree from Alabama to Ohio to defeat us!” Father said, wagging a finger.

“They well might. Perhaps—” Mr. Douglass began.

Father interrupted him. “Also, I believe that our job could be completed in a single year, too soon for them to muster the requisite force. On the first day, right off, we’d issue a statement of our intentions and show our willingness to negotiate a peace strictly in terms of the ending of slavery. We’d be absolutely clear that we have no other intention but to end slavery. A war conducted without a precise goal can never be won! Remember that, Mister Douglass. I learned it in Europe. By the same token, the more precise the goal, the fewer soldiers needed to win it. Learned that there, too. You must state your objective clearly and then show that you’re willing to die for it, and if you can demonstrate that it’s in your enemy’s own interest to have you gain your objective, as we’ll do by making the market price of every slave in America insupportably high, victory will fall into your lap like an overripe fruit!”

While the two went back and forth, Father explaining and defending his ideas and Mr. Douglass questioning them, gently objecting here and there, but gradually, as it seemed to me, going along, I looked freshly at Father’s map of his wonderful Subterranean Passway. It was the central nervous system for his whole operation, a spinal cord that ran from Timbuctoo south all the way to Alabama, with a thousand nerve-like branches east and west along the way. I remembered, years before, first tying into it from a western branch, riding down from Ohio with Father and my brothers into the hills of Kentucky, where we met slaves who had escaped from plantations far to the south in Georgia and South Carolina, exhausted men, women, and children who had been passed along for weeks, emerging blinking into the light of freedom as if they had come up from a network of tunnels hundreds of miles long. And I knew that Timbuctoo, where we would soon be living, tapped into the Passway at its head in the Adirondacks, and lately we had come at it from the east here in Springfield, Massachusetts, where I had seen the great Harriet Tubman, she whom Father called The General, “a woman who is most of a man,”he said, and heard her testify as to its existence. It was real, this Subterranean Passway. Father had not dreamed it up. The slaveholders had not been able to sever it or to block it permanently anywhere along its length. If they attacked it in one place, it appeared the next night in another. Father’s plan for a guerilla war against the Slavocracy was, in fact, a logical extension of the ongoing work of the Underground Railroad, and he had focused his thinking on the one aspect of the Railroad that no other abolitionist had so far grasped — that its continued existence had slowly raised the dollar value of slaves. He was proposing simply to accelerate that process.

Mr. Douglass said to Father, “Well, I do admire your plan, Mister Brown. Or, rather, I should say that I admire portions of your plan. Naturally, you aren’t the first man, white or Negro, to propose leading an armed rebellion among the slaves. It’s a common enough dream. But, unlike most others, you’ve anticipated many of the difficulties. And you have the large picture in mind as well. One thing, however. A question. I have many questions, sir, but this one first. I assume that you yourself plan to be the general for this army. And also the president of this ‘temporary’ Negro republic in the mountains. Does this mean that you, sir, would be our Moses?” Mr. Douglass smiled, but his words belied the smile.

Father looked at him straight. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll tell you the reason I’ve revealed all this to you tonight, Mister Douglass. I would have you be the Moses of your people, sir. Not me, and not any other white man. No, Mister Douglass, I would be Aaron unto thee, anointed and consecrated by thee, and then I would go forth and make the blood sacrifice for both our peoples. The crime against one is the sin of the other, and to avenge the crime is to expunge the sin.”

There was a long silence as the two looked directly into one another’s eyes — dark, melancholy eyes and flashing gray eyes. On the Negro man’s face was imprinted a great question, and on the white maris face a great statement, and the two, wordlessly, were struggling to make them match. I don’t think that Mr. Douglass had ever heard a white man speak like this before, at least a white man whom he did not think crazy. And I don’t believe that Father had ever spoken quite like this before.

In a low voice, Father said, “I have four grown sons who will follow me into the South.”

Who was the fourth? I thought, and then remembered our poor Fred. But, yes, why not Fred, too? In this matter, what was true of John, Jason, and me was true of him also. Yes, we will follow you, all four of us.

Father then said, “I have raised every member of my family to take this war straight to the slavemasters. They and I are prepared to die for it.”

Mr. Douglass slowly turned his great head to me. He looked me up and down and said, “Well, is this true, young man? That you’re prepared to die in battle? To die for the benefit of Negro slaves? Are you ready to give up your young life so that another young man, whose skin is black, can live as a free man?”

I glanced again at Father’s map of the Passway and saw that it was a good plan; it would work; he was right — victory would fall into our lap like overripe fruit. And I remember thinking then that I would not die; I could not: I was strong and intelligent, I could run very fast, I was a fine shot and a first-rate horseman and could live in the forest like an Indian: and so I said to Mr. Douglass, “Yes, sir, I’m prepared for that. Father has prepared me pretty well. He has anointed and consecrated me and prepared me for the blood sacrifice, like Moses did for Aaron.”

I saw Father suppress a look of simple pride and perhaps surprise at the boldness of my speech. He said, “So you see, Mister Douglass. I may well be Moses, but only here, in my own house.”

“Yes,” he said. “I do see. And I confess, I’m mightily impressed by all this. My brothers Garnet and Loguen, when they told me that you’re a very unusual white man, were not wrong.” He admitted, however, that all talk of slave rebellion made him nervous, especially when it was generated by men who themselves, white or Negro, would remain safely at home in the North, while the poor slaves rose up and got cut to pieces. Very few men were willing to be a Nat Turner. “But no matter how it goes, win or lose, there’ll be death and gore enough for any man, believe me, Mister Brown. No matter how ingenious your plan or how brave you and your sons are, there will be killing on both sides. And I’m not sure I want to be responsible for that. Not yet anyhow. These are mighty questions before us, sir.”

Mary and Ruth had set the table and were now carrying our supper out from the kitchen in several steaming pots. Father cleared away his charts and papers, as the children came and joined us, and soon we were ten people gathered around the table. Father, as always, commenced to pray over the food. While he prayed, I stole a glance down the table at Mr. Douglass, who was watching the scene as if from a great height with an expression of sweet approval on his broad face.

I looked over the scene myself then, to view it from his mild perspective — and saw a deeply religious family of modest means, a family with great peace of mind, with total unity and strange clarity of purpose, the wife and the children, from the eldest to the infant, instructed and led in all things by the firm but kindly Puritan patriarch, this straight-backed, gray-eyed man with light in his face, praying over them all: and most amazing of all, they were a clan of white people who saw the world, inexplicably, the way Negroes did.

We did not, of course. Not back then, we didn’t — except possibly for Father. As a family, we had not yet undergone our trial by fire, our harrowing in Kansas and Virginia. And I dare not believe that even Father saw the world back then in Springfield as Negroes did; it only seemed so, because of the vast difference between him and other white abolitionists in their personal treatment of Negroes, and because of the quality of his rage.

Besides, I had lied to Mr. Douglass. I was not willing to die for the freedom of the Negro, or for any other reason. But I did not know that then — I had thought that I was telling the truth, when in fact I was merely incapable of imagining my own death. Though I was twenty-four years old, I was still a boy. It really wasn’t until nearly two years later, during my journey to England, that I came to a point where I was truly willing to pay the price of being the man I wished to be and was willing, therefore, to die in the war against slavery. Once I’d reached that point, I was myself free and was no longer a boy. I had become a warrior, and thenceforth began increasingly to be of good use to Father, whose force and clarity of purpose, as happens to all warriors, sometimes weakened or grew confused.

Father had been right about the British cloth manufacturers. They had purchased our wool at prices so low they could sell it at a considerable profit straight back to their American counterparts, those same sly fellows whose monopolistic bids for Brown & Perkins wool had driven the Old Man into the English market in the first place. Thus, by shipping his and Mr. Perkins’s one hundred tons of wool off to England and selling it at discount there, Father had succeeded only in increasing the company’s indebtedness to its western suppliers. He had nearly doubled it, in fact. And the sheepmen were furious. From their perspective, their wool, a full year’s work, had been practically given away.

For a few days, before leaving England, the Old Man had tried blaming the sheepmen themselves, for trapping him with a few unlucky bales of dirty wool, but that would not hold up. He’d trapped himself, and knew it. In his rush to move all his stock to England, he had abandoned his usual rigor in checking the wool, and he’d graded it carelessly as well — a surprising amount of XXX and XX turned out to be number 1 and number 2. Thus, by the time we were aboard ship and headed home, he had ceased to blame anyone but himself, and for most of the crossing back, the Old Man beat his breast and spoke with thees and thous.

The truth was, again, that he had failed miserably, and there was no hiding it, not even from himself. The absurdity of his situation, the ridiculously tangled nature of his finances, had reached a point where he could no longer imagine ever getting free of it and would be forced to work now mainly to keep himself out of prison, for he knew that he was about to be deluged by a flood of lawsuits, large and small. Many of the sheepmen were convinced, unfairly but understandably, that Father had taken a bribe to ship their wool to England and sell it at such a devastating loss. They could not believe that a sane man would have done such a thing otherwise, and they were already serving notice to John in Springfield that they thought so. Fortunately, Mr. Perkins was still willing to stand by the Old Man, which would enable him to keep the family intact and sheltered in North Elba: if we had land, we could always feed and clothe ourselves. Father himself, however, would soon be racing from courthouse to courthouse, back and forth from New England out to the old Western Reserve, defending himself and Mr. Perkins against the myriad charges of fraud and deceit that were being raised by their creditors.

Knowing that this would become his main activity for a while had the unexpected benefit of taking Father’s mind for the first time in decades completely off moneymaking. It would allow him, when he was not preparing his attorneys to defend him and Mr. Perkins in court, to concentrate on his anti-slave activities. The catastrophic losses in England were such that, at last, he would be able to forget about becoming a rich man. Released from that possibility, he went through a sort of sea-change and began to be instead the man who entered history.

And, of course, things had changed at home, too. The passage of the heinous Fugitive Slave Act at once lit up the Northern sky like sheets of lightning and electrified thousands of white men and women who up to now had regarded themselves as moderate abolitionists. And suddenly our anger, our consuming rage, did not seem so odd anymore. Which was strange to me, for I had grown used to our family’s being both charged by its anger, as if it were our responsibility, and isolated by it, as if it were our curse. Now that rage was the norm, however, ours seemed to have been oddly premature and, in this new context, somehow inappropriate and useless. At least to me it did.

Father simply declared that it proved we had been right all along. But we had spent so much time and energy for so many years, all the years of my life, justifying in moral, legal, and Biblical terms the ferocity of our position, that we had not stepped away from it and considered its deeper and more personal sources. We had not even considered whether it had such sources. What was abnormal to others had long seemed normal to us — until, thanks to the Fugitive Law, everyone else turned out as alarmed and angry as we and as determined as we to commit acts of violence in order to deter the further extension of slavery. Earlier, our alarm and anger and commitment had seemed evidence of our election, as it were, proof of our moral superiority. Now, however, we were no longer positioned amongst our people like prophets, for every decent person in the North was finally awake to the emergency. Or so it briefly seemed. And during this period, instead of feeling at one with my neighbors and grateful for that, I began to wonder why had we seen so early the horrors of slavery, when practically everyone else was blind to it, and why we had been so ferocious, when nearly every other well-intended Northern white man and woman had merely been concerned or, at best, disgusted.

It is difficult for me now, a whole lifetime beyond those years, to cross over all the terrible intervening events and alterations in the sensibilities and values of ordinary folks and remember how we thought then. The Civil War changed everything for everybody, white and Negro, North and South, East and West; but it was the war before the War, in Kansas and then at Harpers Ferry, that changed us Browns. That’s when we went from being angry activists and prophets in the wilderness to being cold-blooded warriors. We went from helping Negroes escape from slavery to killing those who would enslave them. Those were the years when John Brown and his sons — farmers, shepherds, tanners, hopeful businessmen — became famous killers.

Who else in our time went through this transition? No one, until later, when forced to by the War. By then, John Brown and his sons, most of them anyhow, were dead — slain in battle or executed on the scaffold. It was as if, when our white neighbors finally woke to the threat of slavery and grew angry, as angry as we had been all along, we moved at once to the next stage and in that way kept our old position towards them intact. It was as if our true nature, Father’s nature, certainly, and mine, and to a lesser degree the nature of our family as a whole, arose from our insistence on maintaining a constant distance from others, on holding to our radical extremity. We would not allow ourselves to be like other white people. We would be angrier than they; we would risk and sacrifice more than they; we would be bloodier, more brutal, more consistently merciless and desperate than they.

We were becoming like Negroes, or wanted to become like them. Or, to be honest and exact, we were becoming the kind of men and women that we wanted Negroes themselves to be.

Can that have been true? For many years, I had sometimes thought that Father’s obsession with the enslavement of the Negroes was an unnatural thing. No other white man or woman in my acquaintance was so singularly enraged by the fate of black people, not even the most radical abolitionists, not even Gerrit Smith, who had given so much of his huge personal fortune to the cause. There were heroes in the movement, of course, men and women like Theodore Weld and the Grimké sisters, even a few who had given their lives for it, like Lovejoy. And there were many unknown people, men and women in small towns, clergymen, teachers, even businessmen, who had risked fortune, reputation, and physical well-being in order to advance the war against slavery. And everywhere there were poor, humble, God-fearing white folks, ordinary men and women who daily made sacrifices and endangered themselves for the benefit of the Negro slaves.

But none of these, at least none that I ever met or even heard about, engaged the Negro on such a personal level as did Father. It was as if he secretly believed that at bottom he himself was a Negro. He seemed to believe that his white skin — and the skins of his children, too, and of his wife, and the skin of anyone who would cleave to him in his enterprise — was black underneath. As if his rust-colored hair, if he did not dye and forcibly straighten it, were black and crinkled. As if his old-fashioned, pointy, New England Yankee face, that long, narrow hooked nose, grim slash of a mouth, and large red ears, were a mask hiding an African nose, mouth, and ears.

In a racialist society like ours, such a belief might be seen as merely absurd or as self-contemptuous, especially by white people, and in any society, racialist or not, it might be viewed as morally reprehensible. He could be accused, after all, of appropriating another man’s rewards for having endured great pain without having first been obliged to experience that pain himself. I have thought about this matter for most of my life, for I came to be very like my father in it, and I may well be dead wrong about it, but Father’s love for Negroes was not a simple extension of his love of justice, of his belief in the essential equality of all mankind, or of his abhorrence of cruelty, which was the case for most abolitionists and which should have been sufficient unto the cause. And mostly was. For most white abolitionists it was sufficient, certainly, and for most Negroes. Negroes, after all, did not need white people to love them. They merely needed us to deal justly with them, to grant them legal rights equal to our own, and not to be cruel to them merely because their skins were darker than ours. They only wanted us to treat them as well as we treated each other. As they saw it, the word “colored” described all human beings. To Negroes, white was as much a color as black, red, or yellow — if not more so.

If the country had been made of one race of people, if everyone had been white, then Father would not have singled out white people for his love, obviously. But he would not have looked eastward across the Atlantic and loved African Negroes, either; or black-skinned people anywhere. No, he loved American blacks, and he loved them, I believe, because of their relation to the dominant race of American whites. He saw our nation as divided unfairly between light-colored people and dark, and he chose early and passionately to side with the dark. Something deep within his soul, regardless of his own skin color, something at the very bottom of his own sense of who he was, of who he was especially in relation to the dominant, lighter race, went out to the souls of American Negroes, so that he was able to ally himself with them in their struggle against slavery and American racialism, not merely because he believed they were in the right, but because he believed that somehow he himself was one of them.

Of course, he was not one of them. He was a white man, with all the inescapable powers, privileges, and prerogatives of his race and sex: he could vote, own property, move about the land and settle wherever he chose; he could belong to any institution or church or attend any school he could afford; he could borrow money and loan it; he could invest his money in land or livestock and grow rich or become a bankrupt; he could own firearms; he could go to sleep at night and not fear that he would be wakened by slave-catchers and bounty-hunters come to sell him down the river; he knew who his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were and where they were buried; his children and wife would never be taken from him by another man; he was a white man, and he knew it.

And yet are there not adult men and women, with all the powers, privileges, and prerogatives of adults, who secretly think of themselves as children? Is it not as if our large, hairy bodies are merely fortunate disguises, and some of us are children going about in the adult world like spies, our hearts breaking daily at the sight of what our fellow children must suffer solely as a consequence of their not being as cleverly disguised as we? In cautious silence, we observe the cruelties and indignities, the inequities and powerlessness they must endure, until at last their bodies, too, grow large and hairy like ours and they are able to pass into the general population of adults, where, like most people, they either forget that they were ever children themselves or else they, too, become spies. We dare not identify ourselves one to the other, for fear that we will lose the powers and privileges of adulthood, and so we remain silent, whilst other people’s children are beaten instead of nurtured, whilst other people’s children are humiliated and bullied instead of taught, whilst other people’s children are treated as property, as objects of little value, instead of as human beings no less valuable in the eyes of the Lord than are we ourselves.

I believe that it was like this for Father, and became like this for me as well: that very early in his life, he came to feel towards white people generally as an unusually sensitive child feels towards brutal, unfeeling adults generally. He felt powerless, humiliated, and deprived, and felt it so strongly, so vividly, that he could not put it away when the circumstances which had brought about those feelings changed and no longer applied to him — that is to say, when he had become an adult himself and saw himself as white. Instead, he began dreaming himself as a Negro man, if he was anything like me — and I believe that he was — because his dream of himself as a child was too much a nightmare to endure and too powerful an experience for him to forget. This did not mean that he saw Negroes as children, and certainly not as child-like, any more than he saw himself as a child or child-like. He merely saw them, in their relation to white people, as his natural allies.

Once, I tried to bring this to him. I had been telling him of a dream I myself had had, in which I looked down at my arms and hands, and they were black. Where were we? I remember, it was the winter of ’58, and we were in Kansas, crossing down into Vernon County, Missouri, the time that we brought out eleven slaves and made such a wondrous fuss, our first raid into a slave state, and Father and I drove the wagon. Jason and Watson were with us then, along with Jeremiah Anderson, Albert Hazlett, and John Kagi, several of the men who came out of the Kansas wars and made up the core of our little army later in Virginia.

In my dream, I was surprised to see that I was a black-skinned man, but the discovery had pleased me and even made me proud, although it made me realize that from now on, when amongst white people, I would have to hide my true self.

It was at that time a strange dream to me, and I asked Father as we rode along if he ever had such a dream. He said yes, certainly, he had often dreamed himself as a Negro man, and whenever he did, he took it to mean simply that the Lord was reminding him not to allow himself to feel separate from His Negro children. He had the dream mostly when Negroes were giving him a lot of trouble, he said. When they would not do what he wanted, or when he could not do what they wanted.

I asked him then, “When did you first know that Negroes were as human as you yourself?”

Father knew that I wasn’t merely inquiring into the origins of his principles, for they had evolved naturally over years, as principles must. I was asking him about the sources of his understanding. He answered that he had been little more than a boy when, for the first time, he believed that Negro people were actually people, and he had never forgotten it. Many white people, including his own father, had taught it, of course, but Father had not until then truly understood it. Most white people don’t ever get that understanding, he said. Just as most men don’t believe, truly and deeply, that women are people. They think that, because they’re different than we, they are another type of creature than we, as a beloved horse or dog is.

“I was twelve” he went on, “and my father sent me by myself with a herd of livestock — cattle, mostly, but a few wild steers, too, and pigs, a sizeable, troublesome herd — all the way to General Hull’s headquarters at Detroit. It was a hundred-mile trek, west from our place in Hudson in Ohio along the long shore of Lake Erie through hostile Indian territory, because of the War and the British agitations, to where the American forces were holding off the British in the western campaign. No easy task for a boy of twelve,” he said simply. Grandfather Brown was then supplying meat to the army, and Father had accompanied him on several previous journeys to the front, but this was the first time that he had done it alone. He had told this much of the story before, but mainly as an example of his youthful independence.

“Anyhow, I stayed up there for a spell with a very gentlemanly landlord, a man once a United States marshal, who held a slave boy very near my own age. The boy was a very active, congenial lad, intelligent and full of good feeling, and to whom I was under considerable obligation for numerous little acts of kindness. The master made a great pet of me” he said. The man had brought Father to table with his first company and friends and called their attention to every little smart thing he said or did and to the fact of his being more than a hundred miles from home alone with a herd of cattle.

“All the while, this fine Negro boy, who was fully my equal, if not more, was badly clothed, poorly fed and lodged in cold weather, and he was beaten before my very eyes with an iron shovel or any other thing that came to the master’s hand. This terribly insulted my new-found pride in my accomplishments and my general smartness. It was as if I myself were being insulted and beaten. I’m ashamed to this day that I said nothing in protest,” he declared. It brought him, however, to reflect in a way that was new to him on the wretched, hopeless condition of slave children. On their being without a father or mother to protect and provide for them. That lad was alone in the world, and it was hateful to Father, the way the boy was treated. “The boy was so alone, Owen, that later, in my bed, I wept bitterly for him.” He said nothing for a few moments as we rode along the rough trail, and I thought that he was fighting off tears now at the memory of the Negro boy. After a while, he seemed to gather his emotions and said, “I was decidedly not a Christian at that age. But I remember wondering for the first time if perhaps only God was that slave boy’s father.”

“Who would have been his mother, then, if God was his father?” I asked.

“Well, he would have no mother, I guess. No earthly mother, for certain, and no heavenly mother, either. God alone would have to be sufficient. As He is sufficient for us all. And had he not been one of God’s children, the boy would have been a truly lost soul. That was a thing I could not imagine in a child.” He paused for a moment and added, “I understood that, I suppose, for I had lost my own mother by then.”

“Like me.”

“Yes. Like you.”

Ordinarily, when such an exchange occurred between us, Father would have corrected me, pointing out that I had a mother, after all, my stepmother, Mary. But this time he must have been remembering with unusual vividness how it been for him when he, too, was only eight years old and had not yet found God when his mother died and left him with only his earthly father. When he had been a truly lost soul. So he did not correct me, and we rode on into Missouri in a brooding silence.

I had learned something important, though. For the first time, I had perceived, however dimly, that there existed a significant connection between the way Father felt towards the Negro and the terrible, desolating wound he had suffered in his heart when his mother died. Though no one knew of it, of course — probably not even Father himself — it was not his principles but the lifelong effects of his childhood wound that had made the American Negroes his natural ally and that, in their eyes, made him that rarest of things, a trustworthy American white man. They trusted his rage, which he had come to direct entirely against slavery. And they trusted his permanent suspicions of white people, especially when it came to the subject of race: he was always ready to be betrayed by whites and even often thought Negroes too easily duped by them. Also, Negroes trusted his inability to forget about race, his insistence on seeing it as a factor in every dealing, every relationship, every conflict, between any two Americans, whether they were of the same race or not. Father took race to be the central and inescapable fact of American life and character, and thus he did not apologize for its being the central fact of his own life and character. And to the degree that my nature resembled his, by virtue of my upbringing, of my own desolating wound, which was so like Father’s, and of my having deliberately modeled myself on him, race was the central factor of my life and character, too. And by the time we returned from our English journey to Springfield and took up the fight anew, I had become sufficiently accepting of my nature that I, too, no longer apologized for it.

It did not take long for Father to throw himself into a plan for creating in Springfield an armed and trained militia among the Negroes there. And while it was perhaps my plan as much as his, for he had begun increasingly to consult with me, it was his forcefulness, his public voice, and his prestige among the Negro population that drove it to completion.

Ever since his first arrival in Springfield as a woolen merchant back in ’47, he had attended the Zion Methodist Church, which was an abolitionist dissident church, half of whose parishioners were Negro, and he had preached there frequently and from time to time had taught a Bible class. Consequently, he was well-known and admired in the community he most wished to reach.

Within a day of our return from England, he secretly gave out to several of the most outspoken and respected Negro men of the town that he would be holding a series of late-night meetings at the Zion Methodist sanctuary, to which only Negro men and women were welcome. Further, they were to be Negroes who trusted in God and were willing to keep their powder dry. “I wish to speak with and listen to Negro Christians willing and able to give a white man a hard knock. No others. Prepare yourselves by reading and pondering the meaning of Judges, chapter 7, verse 3. Also Deuteronomy, chapter 20, verse 8,” he instructed.

The meetings, he told them, would concern several proposals which he would be making solely to the people whose very lives were directly threatened by Mr. Webster’s cowardly capitulation to the slavers — his “compromise.” Father did not wish to address or hear from anyone else. He wanted no Garrisonians. No Anti-Slavery Socialites. No white people at all. “Let the whites make their own policy, as they always have. We must have our own.”

In a thoroughly racialized society, it was a strange kind of loneliness, and perhaps a peculiarly American one, to feel cut off from your own race. But in those agonizing years before the War, for a small number of us, that’s what it had come to. This matter of difference and sameness — the ways in which we were different from the Negroes and the same as the whites, and, vice versa, the ways in which we were the same as the Negroes and different from the whites — was a vexing one. If a white person persists, as we did, in delineating and defining these areas, soon he will find himself uncomfortable with people of both races — with the one, because of his unwanted knowledge of their deepest loyalties and prejudices, for, as a fellow white, privy to their private race conversations and an adept at decoding those closed, tribal communiques, he understands their true motives and basic attitudes all too well; and uncomfortable with the other also, because, whenever he chooses to allow it, his pale skin will keep him safe from their predators.

If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does. A man may have chosen deliberately to abandon one race — I will no longer adhere to white people merely because I happen to be one myself, says the good fellow — but if he is honest, he will quickly see that he is incapable of adhering to the other, too. Amongst Negroes, a white man is always white; they cannot forget it, and therefore neither can he. It’s only amongst whites that he suddenly turns colorless, is privileged to forget his skin, is allowed to move inside it, as it were. But beware, because if he does forget his skin, he becomes like them — he becomes another, specially privileged white man, a man who thinks the word “colored” does not apply to him. No, in America, whites are as much stuck with their skin color and bannered by it as the Negroes, and the Indians and Orientals, too. We may be a society founded on racial differences, a society poisoned at the root, perhaps, but we also aspire to be a democracy. Thus, until we have truly become a democracy, every American, white as much as black, red, or yellow, lives not in his skin but on it. If one person is called “colored,” let all be colored.

Paradoxically, then, it is when a white person resists the privilege of turning colorless that he frees himself, at least partially, from the sickness of racialism. It’s the only way for a white man finally to clamber up and out of the pit of Negro slavery wherein this nation was unnaturally conceived and born in a bloody caul and raised into twisted, sick adulthood. He has to separate himself from the luxurious unconsciousness that characterizes his own race, without claiming as his own the historical experience of the other. There is a price, though. He pays with cold loneliness, an itching inner solitude, a permanent feeling of separation from his tribe. He has to be willing to lose his own history without gaining another. He will feel like a man waking at dawn in a village that was abandoned while he slept, all his kith and kin having departed during the night for another, better place in an unknown land far, far away. All the huts and houses are empty, the chimneys are cold, and the doors hang open.

If I had not known that Father felt as I did, if I had not daily seen his brow furrow with the pain of it, his shoulders slump with the fatigue of having constantly to defeat the cynicism it proposed, had not heard him reduced to a sputter, his words all run dry of meaning, then I do not think that I could have withstood that peculiar loneliness. Without Father’s steady example and companionship, I would have capitulated to my own pain, fatigue, and frustration, and would either have given up and, lying to the whites, who sang one siren song of race, cleaved to them; or, lying to myself, cleaved to the blacks, who sang another.

At the start of the first meeting held in the sanctuary of the Zion Methodist Church, there were, to my surprise and pleasure, more than a hundred Negroes present, although by the end Father had driven away more than half. Like Gideon, he wished to separate the timid from the brave, and he did it with the fire of his rhetoric, the glare of his eye, and his insistence that if, in order to protect their homes and families from the bounty-hunters, they were not prepared to die, then they should depart forthwith.

They were, most of them, respectable freedmen, with even a few freed women in attendance and several deacons of the church and members of the choir. There were also numerous artisans and shopkeepers with whom we were well-acquainted — as Father made it a point to do business with Negroes whenever possible — and many young men whom I knew personally: roustabouts, stevedores, laborers, and factory hands with whom I had often spoken at abolition meetings. It was a crowd of earnest and intelligent people who understood perfectly the threat posed by this new slave-catching law, not only to the slaves who succeeded in escaping from their bonds but also to these free Negroes themselves, many of whose parents had been born in freedom in the North and had never been within two hundred miles of a slave state.

Well they knew that the color of their skin was now more than ever the mark of Cain. It was their brand, and with the passage of the Fugitive Law, they would have to prove that somehow the brand had been burned into their flesh by mistake. And who could prove this? Virginia courts had displaced Massachusetts courts. Any dark-skinned man, woman, or child, escaped slave or no, could be sworn a slave by a white man with forged papers and hauled back down South and sold off to the plantations there. At a single stroke of the pen, a free man or woman could be converted into valuable property. This was surely the evilest alchemy ever invented.

There was shock and anger amongst the whites of the North, certainly. Daniel Webster’s “compromise” may well have made more abolitionists of previously acquiescent whites than twenty years of steady preaching had done — which sometimes caused Father to say that the law must have been a significant part of God’s secret design. But this gave little comfort to the Negroes, as the outrage felt by whites was mostly spent on stoking their own righteousness and warming themselves before its fire. “Words, words, words,” Father said. “They won’t act until they themselves are physically or financially threatened,” he insisted.

This night, for the first time, Father preached violence in public. Moreover, he preached it to Negroes. Defensive violence, however. An over-fine distinction, some might say, yet it was an important one to Father. He was still not ready to carry the war straight to the oppressor, although he had begun to insist that, by virtue of their support of slavery, white Southerners had established a condition of war against all Negroes and those whites who sided with them, and they had therefore forfeited their right to live. “Pro-slavers are fair game,” Father had begun to say. His actions would not catch up to his words, however, until we got to Kansas. For now, a merely defensive action would have to suffice.

He began by asking his audience how they proposed to keep the slave-catchers from coming openly into the town and, with aid and comfort provided by the Springfield constabulary, taking off their sons and daughters to the cotton plantations of Mississippi and Alabama. How did they propose to prove that their child was not the same boy or girl who, according to the slave-catcher’s sworn statement, had run off with Harriet Tubman to an uncle and aunt in Massachusetts? The slave-catcher would have papers to support his case. He would have depositions and warrants. How did they propose to support their case? Remember, Father said, the slave-catcher can look at your innocent, beautiful daughter and say, “That’s not Ruth Johnson of Springfield, Massachusetts! That’s Celia McNair of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, property of Mister Jubal McNair!” How did they propose to answer him, when the word of a Negro man could no longer stand in a court of law against the word of a white?

And how did they intend now to deal with the poor, starving escaped slave, wounded and bleeding from the rigors of his escape and half-frozen from the New England cold, when he came late in the night scratching at their door, begging to be let in and fed and warmed by their fire and hidden for a night from the hounds of hell bent on re-capturing him? That man, who might well turn out to be a brother or an elderly uncle, could be seized now and sent back without a Massachusetts trial. And they themselves could be arrested and jailed for having stolen a Southern white man’s property — just as if his fine thoroughbred horse had been discovered blanketed and feeding inside their barn or his wife’s pearls hidden in their flour tin. “How do you intend to deal with that?” Father asked.

Several of the younger men grew restless and angry at these words, as if they felt indicted by them, perhaps hearing Father’s questions as accusations, and they stood up and began to edge towards the door. Others sat looking down at their hands as if ashamed, or crossed their arms over their chests and dropped their gaze, feigning deep thought, but mainly avoiding the eyes of their neighbors and of Father, especially.

His words surely caused them pain. He was saying nothing that they did not already know, but he was saying it in a way that must only have reminded them of their terrible helplessness. This made some angry, others ashamed, but it must have moved still others to some new and unexpected state of mind. The angry ones muttered and scowled and began to leave the church. Those who were ashamed averted their eyes. But the rest appeared to be waiting eagerly for Father to continue.

In the pew directly behind me sat brother John and his wife, Wealthy, the only other white people. I was seated in the front pew beside Father’s friend Mr. Harrison Wheeler, the tailor, a brave man who had tried to escape from slavery three times before finally succeeding. Having taken the name of a dead cousin who had purchased his own freedom some years past, Mr. Wheeler now lived as a free man. I did not know his slave-name.

I heard the door opening and closing — people were departing from the church one by one. A general restlessness was sweeping over the crowd, as most of those who remained shifted in their seats and cleared their throats, coughed, and murmured to one another. Father stood at the front, silently facing us all, his eyes glaring out beneath his heavy brow, mouth tight as an axe and jaw set, his hands fisted on his hips and feet apart like a man challenging another to a fight. When several moments had passed and no one any longer rose from his seat either to leave or to speak out, Father resumed his challenge, this time not by asking what his audience intended to do but by speaking of himself instead and what he would not do.

He and his sons and daughter-in-law, he said — and here, as if amongst the crowd of black and brown faces ours needed identifying, he pointed straight at us, which made me hot with embarrassment — he and his family would not recruit and lead a militia of our fellow white citizens to drive off the slave-catchers. No, he would not go about the town arguing armed resistance with the Anti-Slavery Society folks, and he would not beg money from the gentry to purchase weapons, and he would not wheedle and whine with the Quakers and the Presbyterians and the Methodists to load their muskets and protect their free Negro neighbors and open their doors to escaped slaves and defend them with their sanctified lives. No, he had done plenty of that, and look at what it had got them. It had got them this cowardly Fugitive Law.

From now on, he said, he would leave the white people to their own devices, to their speeches and meetings, to their proud denouncements and announcements, their newspapers, their atheneums and churches, their poems and philosophical essays. Not for him, not for John Brown, to make soldiers of white poets, philosophers, clergymen, journalists, and clerks. Not for any man. He knew a useless thing when he saw it. He, John Brown, though a white man, would no longer speak to his fellow whites for the Negroes of Springfield or anywhere else. From now on, Negroes would have to speak for themselves.

For a long while, he went on in that manner, and it seemed to drive many of the older people from the room and the more prosperous among them as well, some of whom may have thought that there were, after all, quite a number of Negroes who had been speaking to whites for them for many long years now, speaking, testifying, arguing, and praying for help and understanding with extraordinary eloquence and power, and they did not need to hear this white man signing off on them. Did he think they would beg him to speak for them? Why should they? He was right: look at what it had got them.

There were now fewer than half a hundred remaining, somber-faced men of various ages and a few women here and there. Mr. Wheeler had not moved from my side, I was glad to see, nor had any of the people whom I knew from personal acquaintance to be brave and proud defenders of their few rights, people who would under no circumstances shuffle and scrape before a white man. They leaned forward in their seats expectantly. There was in Father’s words and manner something that they wanted badly to hear and see, and they wanted to hear and see it not only in a white man but in themselves. And, indeed, it was for us all now that he began to speak, substituting the word “we” for the “you” and “I” of his previous harangue.

We must take up arms, he said, and we must become united amongst ourselves, and we must be prepared to die in the defense of our homes, of our loved ones, and of our brethren who are in flight from the slave-catcher. We must go home and take down the old musket or rabbit gun or the seldom-fired revolver that we bought at auction, and we will clean and oil it and make sure that the powder is dry and that we have bullets a-plenty, and then we must go out and fire it in our yard and in the fields beyond town, to test our weapon and to improve our aim, but also so that the general public will hear reports of it and know that we are armed. And we will sharpen our knives and attach them to poles, and we will let ourselves be seen walking abroad in the bright of day and dark of night with gleaming pikes on our shoulders, so that the general public will know that we mean to engage the enemy in close quarters, if necessary. And we will let it out that, in our houses, in the windows above the doors, we have put large cauldrons ready to be filled with scalding hot water that can be poured down upon the slave-catcher when he comes with his writs and warrants and pounds on our door demanding entry. That way the general public will know that we will employ any means necessary to defend our homes and whoever happens to be inside them.

“We must form a cadre;’ he declared, “a rock-hard core at the center of our community. It shall be a League of Gileadites! And its members’ names shall be known only to those of us who have taken an oath that, in the defense of our community and our enslaved brethren who have put themselves under our protection, in their names, we are prepared to die! Whenever the cry goes out from anyone in the Negro community for help against the slave-catcher, we will, like the old Concord Minutemen, drop our work or rise from our beds and grab up our weapons and come a-running!” No one who was himself not a Gileadite, he explained, would know which man among us had taken this vow, and thus no one would know which man among us was ready to die and was not afraid even of hanging for his actions. A single one of us standing invisible in a crowd of Negroes would make every person in the crowd more powerful, for all would be seen as potential Gileadites. We must let it out, therefore, without naming names, that some among the Gileadites were white men and some were Negro women, some were young and some were old, so that no single, small group could be separated from the population and persecuted generally. “In unity there is strength!” he stated. “And God will protect us only if we are willing to protect ourselves and each other.”

There were a number of Amens and other shows of enthusiasm from the people, whereupon Father, without changing the stern expression of his face, extended his open hands, palms up, at his sides, as was his habit when particularly pleased with himself. Several men in the room, including Mr. Wheeler, had stood and, wishing to speak, were waiting, hats in hand, for Father to acknowledge and call on them. “Anyone who wants to be heard may come up here now and speak,” Father said. “If there is a Gideon among us, let him come forward now, and let him forthwith divide the timid from the brave.”

Mr. Wheeler and the others hitched a bit and sat back down, and when no one came forward, as Father knew they would not, for all those who would have opposed him or would have wished to wrest leadership from him had already departed from the group, he walked to the further end of one of the nearly empty pews and himself sat down.

A moment or two passed in silence, as if everyone were waiting for the arrival of an important visitor, and then Father rose again from his seat and returned to the front. “We will let the Lord separate us out,”he declared in a low, calm voice. “Therefore, let us go to our homes now, and there shall each one of us pray alone for guidance in this matter. And whosoever returns to this place tomorrow night at this same hour, let him come prepared to swear the Oath of the Gileadites, which I myself shall be the first to take and then shall deliver to each of thee, one by one.” At that, he marched down the center aisle of the sanctuary and passed out the door to the vestry beyond and into the cold autumn night, and the rest of us followed.

Father had inspired and moved us beyond measure, it appeared, and me he had moved beyond expectation. It was as if he had been speaking for me, and I had through him become wonderfully articulate and clear. It was as if my crippled arm had been magically healed and, full-faced, I had stood forward, bright and challenging, my two arms extended for the first time in public, and, speaking before an audience of hesitant, frightened, and angry people, an audience of suspicious Negroes, I had succeeded in transforming myself into an old-time, Biblical prophet capable of leading men into a holy war, a war in which, as a result of my words, men and women were prepared to sacrifice themselves for the lives of others and for the greater glory of God.

Father’s thoughts and beliefs were mine. He had spoken for me, or, rather, I had spoken through him, and it seemed to me then to have occurred not because I had contrived for him to do it or had subtly managed him somehow — although in a certain light I suppose that my aid to him and reassurance could have been construed as such — but because now, for the first time, I was no longer resisting his will, no longer holding back from his calls for action, action, action. I had finally taken him at his word, the word which he had been laying in the porches of my ears since I’d drawn my first breath, and now his word was mine, his personal power mine, his ease with speech, his natural movement, his hard, gray eye, his intelligence and imagination, mine!

I remained, of course, still the hulking, crippled, red-headed country boy, the same shy, inarticulate bumpkin as before. But now all that was like a clever disguise designed to hide and shelter the real person inside — a man who, neither white nor Negro, was dangerous. A man who, whenever necessary, could step out of the shadows where in silence he silently labored his days away and suddenly stand revealed as a warrior for the Lord, a man of God who would inspire and lead God’s chosen people out of Egypt into the promised land, and who would do it even as he denied he was doing it, who would be Moses while claiming merely to be Aaron. Whom or what we love, although it can never be our reason for loving them, we become. Without his love of God, my father, I saw, would have been a pitiful man. But in giving himself over to God, Father had become many times larger and more powerful a man than he could ever have been otherwise. Now I, too, having finally come to love my father as totally as he loved God — I, too, was no longer pitiful.

That same night, we adjourned to the rooms where John and Wealthy had been living — since the removal to North Elba, Father had not maintained living quarters in Springfield, and consequently he and I had been sleeping in the office of Brown & Perkins’s empty warehouse. There Father instructed me to write up a statement of advice and principles which he could present to the Negroes tomorrow night and a draft of a pledge. He had arrived over the years at a high estimation of my literary abilities, although he had little more to go on than my letters and the help I gave him with his own. He also knew that I believed his style to be on the eccentric side of my own. Reluctantly, he had come to agree with me, and thus he frequently enjoyed employing me as a kind of village scribe, in which he was the village. He would say aloud what he meant or wished to mean, pacing back and forth, hands clasped behind him, brow furrowed in thought, while I scratched away with my pen, setting down his thoughts and intentions in language that I hoped would be readily understood by the man or woman to whom those thoughts and intentions were directed, a person who, with a transcription of Father’s own words in hand, would very likely have been puzzled or merely annoyed.

With his composition “Sambo’s Mistakes,” Father had tried working alone, and I think that afterwards he was sorry he had done so and in time blamed its failure to be published on his inability to set down on the page the true nature of his thoughts. Since then, whenever he wished to make a written statement of any importance or delicacy, he’d taken to calling on me. Increasingly, this job of scribe had become a pleasure for me — it gave me, naturally, a certain degree of importance not otherwise available, and it provided me with the chance to voice some of my own thoughts and beliefs as well.

Father talked and tried out first one sentence and then another, rejecting, editing, retracing his words, struggling to make his statement to the Negroes. He paced the length and breadth of the sitting room and rumbled on into the cold autumn night, while John and Wealthy slept in the adjacent chamber, and I sat at the little table and by the dim, flickering light of a Nantucket lamp, wrote down much of what he said and most of what he meant or wanted to say.

It was nearly dawn before we had a preamble, which we entitled “Words of Advice,” and a pledge, entitled “Agreement;” whereupon we adjourned to the Brown & Perkins office and slept a few hours on our cots, before having to commence the day’s work, which then consisted mostly of writing letters to attorneys and creditors and attempting to find a tenant for the warehouse who would take over Brown & Perkins’s lease.

That evening, Father and I — this time without John and Wealthy, for she was newly pregnant, and they would soon be departing for their farm in Ohio and thus could not be a part of our work here — returned to the Zion Methodist Church, where we were joined by most of the Negroes who had remained until the end of the meeting the evening before. They numbered thirty-two men and nine women, the majority of them between thirty and forty years of age, with a sprinkling of very young and elderly men among them. Seen together like that, grim-visaged, muscular, and healthy, their dark brown and black faces stern and determined, they constituted a formidable-looking force. I felt proud to be associated with them.

More than half of the company were friends and acquaintances of ours, the best among the blacks of Springfield. I was glad to see Mr. Harrison Wheeler still there, and Deacon Samuels, also the apothecary Mr. Minahan and his teenaged son, and several of the fellows who at different times had worked alongside me in the warehouse sorting and baling wool, trustworthy young men with stout arms and strong backs and anger to spare. Most of the Negroes who were lucky enough to be properly employed or have a profession were engaged at a level below their natural or acquired abilities, and as a result a Negro apothecary often had the intelligence and many of the skills of a white physician, and a Negro laborer was frequently the equal of a white foreman. Thus Father’s determination to do business with Negroes was based on no condescending desire to provide charity; it was, as he said, practical. And he was rarely disappointed by them — nowhere near as often as when he had to employ or deal financially with white people, who he believed were more likely than blacks to cheat or cut corners.

When everyone had been seated and the door closed and, at Father’s instructions, bolted, we began with a singing of the hymn “Broad Is the Path That Leads to Death,” a favorite of mine. Then Father announced that he would present to us a statement which he had drawn up. Holding the paper close to his eyes, like a court clerk reading a judge’s sentence, he commenced to read.

Words of Advice! To the Springfield, Massachusetts, branch of the United States League of Gileadites. Adopted November 15,1850, as written and recommended by John Brown.

Union is Strength!

Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery.

Witness the case of Cinque, he of everlasting memory, who seized the slave-ship Amistad, and the outpouring of sympathy and interest that followed hard upon it. The trial for life of one so bold and to some extent a successful man, for having defended his rights as a man in good earnest, aroused more sympathy amongst whites throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of more than the three millions of our submissive Negro population.

We need not mention our American white people’s response to the Greeks who are now struggling valiantly against the oppressive Turks, their sympathy for the Poles against mighty Russia, and for the Hungarians against Austria and Russia combined, in order to prove this. The truth is, no jury can be found in the Northern states that would convict a man, whether black or white, for defending his legitimate rights to the last extremity. That this is well understood by Southern Congressmen, who now appear to govern us, we see by their insistence that the right of trial by jury should not be granted to the fugitive slave.

Then he recited several sentences which I had tried to excise but which Father had insisted on including, for he could not leave off giving advice of this sort, not just to Negroes, but to everyone. Although he assured me that it would be obvious to all that he was criticizing white people, not black, I knew how it would sound to his audience, for I had endured a form of the same hectoring lecture for my whole life. But giving unwanted advice was his characteristic tic, and there was no avoiding it, so I cringed and awaited its passing.

Colored people have ten times the number of fast friends among the whites as they suppose. But they would have ten times the number they have now, were blacks but half as much in earnest to secure their dearest rights as they are to ape the follies and extravagances of their white neighbors and to indulge in idle show, in ease, and in luxury, if Negroes in America were to demonstrate in their private and public behavior the virtues which whites claim to admire but seem for the most part unable to practice themselves, of temperance, modesty, and decorum in all things, thrift, and charity, then they would acquire for themselves the widespread admiration of many of those who today revile and scorn them for their frivolity and wastefulness.

Soon, happily, his scolding done, he was again delivering his charge to us.

Should one of our number be arrested, all the rest of us must collect together and sternly surround the officers and constables as quickly as possible, so as to outnumber and intimidate our adversaries, even those who were not present and only afterwards heard rumor of our seriousness of purpose and our surprising numbers. And no able-bodied man shall appear on the ground unequipped and without his weapons, and thus his intentions, clearly exposed to view. Your musket and your sword, you may say, are to exterminate varmints. Let our adversary ponder whether of two legs or four.

Let that much be understood beforehand by all who see us abroad in the town, but our actual plans must be known only to ourselves, with the understanding that all traitors, wherever caught and proven to be guilty, must die. Yet we must not forget the admonition of the Lord to Gideon, “Whosoever is fearful or afraid, let him return and part early from Mount Gilead.” That is, give all cowards an opportunity to show their cowardice early, on condition of holding their peace and their tongues, for while we do not want them among us when in battle, our victory must be a victory for all.

Now this is most important to success. When the moment of confrontation with the enemy arrives, do not delay for a moment once you have made ready to strike him down! You will lose all resolution if you do. And let the first blow be the signal for all to engage. And once engaged, we shall not do our deadly work by halves. We will make clean work of our enemies, as one would butcher a steer — and be sure you meddle not with any others. Choose wisely who will be cut down, then do it swiftly to him alone. By going about our bloody business quickly and quietly, we will get the job done with efficiency, and the number that an uproar would bring together cannot collect and stop us.

We will have the advantage anyhow of those who would come out against us, for they will be wholly unprepared with either equipment or matured plans. All with them will be confusion and terror. Then our enemies will be slow to attack us after we have done up the work so nicely. And if, after they have re-gathered their thoughts and the terror has passed, should they still decide to attack us, they will have to encounter our white friends as well, for we may safely calculate on a division appearing among the whites and by that means may get to an honorable parley.

Be firm, determined, and cool, but let it be understood that we are not to be driven to desperation without making it as awful a job to others as it is to us. Give them to know distinctly that those who live in wooden houses should not throw fire and that we are more able to suffer and make pay than are our white neighbors, for our very lives are at stake.

Also, after effecting a rescue, if you are assailed, we must not go to our own houses but make straight for the houses of our most prominent and influential white friends, carrying with us our wives and small children. This will fasten upon the whites the suspicion of being connected with the blacks and will compel them to make a common cause with us, whether they would otherwise live up to their previous professions of sympathy or not. They would have then no choice in the matter. Some of their own volition will doubtless prove themselves true, most others would flinch, but either way, we would be guilty only of taking them at their earlier words.

In the courtroom where a trial is going on which is more show than trial, we can disrupt the proceedings and effect a rescue if we make a tumult — by burning gunpowder freely in paper packages, if you cannot think of a better way to make a momentary alarm. And might not a lasso be applied to a slave-catcher for once with good effect? Well we might \n the process give one or more of our enemies a proper hoist, but m such a case the prisoner will need to take the hint at once and bestir himself, and his friends in the dock should use the occasion to improve the opportunity of a general rush.

Hold onto your weapons and never be persuaded to leave them, part with them, or have them far away from you. Stand by one another and by your friends whilst a drop of blood remains in you or a breath of air. And, finally, be hanged on the scaffold or a gallows tree, if you must, but tell no tales out of school. Make no confession!

Remember and say it over and over, union is strength, union is strength’. But regardless, without well-digested arrangements such as these, nothing to any good purpose is likely to be demanded, let the demand be never so great. Witness the hundreds of cases of capture and return to slavery, regardless of the protests raised afterwards, when there was no well-defined plan of operation or suitable preparations made and sworn to beforehand.

By these proposed means, the desired end may be effectually secured. Namely, the enjoyment of our inalienable rights.

To hear my written words spoken in his resonating, public-hall voice by Father to a sober-faced audience of people who, because of those words, were made ready to take up arms and slay the enemy was wonderfully thrilling to me, and I felt the blood course up and down my arms and could scarcely repress a smile from my lips. I trembled with joy, as much for the meaning of the words and the pictures they painted in my own mind of making quick and bloody work of my enemies, as for the occasion of hearing Father speak them; and when, in that small, dimly lit sanctuary, Father called out to the crowd of us, “Who will come forward and sign an agreement to adhere to my words of advice?” I was the first to stand and deliver. On either side of me, other men and women were standing and stepping to the front also, until in a moment nearly every person in the room had joined me there.

Father said, “Now, let me say it again. Whosoever is fearful or afraid, let him depart from us. But if ye depart from us, say nothing of what ye have heard here. For ye have also heard what shall be done by us with traitors.” There were at that point a final few who made for the door, unbolted it, and disappeared into the night, leaving behind still more than thirty warriors to bind ourselves together and march behind Gideon against the Midianites.

“The Lord hath instructed us to reduce ourselves to this number,” Father said, “so that when we have accomplished our task, we will not say, ‘Mine own hand hath saved me.’ We must thank only the Lord,” he pronounced, and many in the group sang out, “Praise the Lord! Praise Him!”

Whereupon Father said, “This which I shall now read to thee is the Agreement, and when I have finished, come forward one by one and sign on this sheet of paper below it, so that we shall be bound together in this work as brothers and sisters, sworn to the death of every one of us.” He told us then to place our right hands over our hearts, which we did, and in a loud, clear voice, he read the Agreement, which, though I had myself written the words for him in the late hours of the previous night, sounded to me as fresh and new as if I had never heard them before.

As legitimate citizens of the United States of America, trusting in a just and merciful God, whose spirit and all-powerful aid we humbly implore, we pledge that we will ever be true to the flag of our beloved country, always acting under it. We, whose names are hereunto fixed, do constitute ourselves a branch of the United States League of Gileadites. We pledge that we will provide ourselves at once with suitable implements of war, and will aid those who do not possess the means, if any such are disposed to join us, to acquire and do the same. We further invite every colored person whose heart is engaged in the performance of our work, whether male or female, young or old, to join us in that work, which is the defense of our Negro brethren against the man-stealers and any of those cowards who would aid and abet them. All able-bodied men and women shall be prepared to die in this effort. The duty of the aged, infirm, and young members of the League shall be to give instant notice to all other members in case of an attack upon any of our people. Until some trial of courage and talent of able-bodied members shall enable us to elect officers from those who have rendered the most important services, we agree to have no officers, except a treasurer and secretary pro tern. Nothing but wisdom and undaunted courage, efficiency, and general good conduct shall in any way influence us in electing our officers.

Father laid the paper on the low table where normally flowers for Sabbath services were placed, flattened it with his left hand, and, saying, “So sworn, John Brown” wrote his name with a visible flourish. I then stepped to the table and took the pen from him, and saying the words “So sworn, Owen Brown,” with trembling hand wrote my name below his. One by one, the rest came forward, following the procedure exactly. So sworn, Alexander Washington. So sworn, Harrison Wheeler. So sworn, Shadrach Benchforth. So sworn, Mary Benchforth. So sworn, Felicity Moone. So sworn, Ebidiah Smith. And on down the line, until all of us had sworn and signed.

Then, bearing the document in hand, Father walked from behind the table where he had stood throughout and came to stand beside us, facing the nave of the sanctuary, where a small cross was attached high on the white-washed wall, and he led us briefly in prayer, humbly beseeching the Lord to protect us in this mighty task. “Make us hard, Lord, hard, like a stone, so that we shall crush and make bleed the teeth of the slavers when they bite down upon us” he prayed.

When he had finished, we all said our amens, and the Gileadites somberly filed out to the vestry and into the night. Father and I lingered behind to put out the lamps and candles, and when everyone else was gone and we were alone in the darkness of the vestry, I said to him, “Who’ll be the treasurer and secretary pro tern? And what will his duties be?” I couldn’t see much use for there being a treasurer, as there were no dues or other monies involved with the League, and I was unsure of what a secretary would do, as it was difficult to imagine a secret society engaged in much correspondence or keeping minutes. But the night before, when composing the Agreement, I had been ordered by Father to allow for that one officer, and so, without understanding, I had written it in. Now it seemed important. Naturally, I myself wished to be that person but, because of the honor it implied, dared not hope that the job would fall to me.

“The treasurer and secretary will safeguard these documents,” he answered, and he placed the Words of Advice and the Agreement with the signatures into my hand. “He will not deliver them to the enemy, Owen, even under pain of death. And when the time comes, as it surely will, that we receive monetary support for our work from our white friends, he will record such funds as we receive and will control their expenditure.”

I said nothing, and when Father had closed the church doors behind us and we had stepped down to the dark, deserted street, I carefully rolled the documents so as not to crease them, and we began walking side by side towards the warehouse. Finally, I could stand it no longer, and I said to him, “So are you making me the sole officer for the Gileadites?”

“For now, yes. I’ll speak of it first to the others, but I’m sure they’ll agree to it. There’s no one better qualified for the task. Do you mind?” he asked.

“No. No, I don’t mind,” I answered off-handedly.

But I remember thinking, At last! It has begun! At last, the killing has begun!

The wind outside my cabin has let up, and I hear mice skittering in the darkness across the warped, dried-out floors. Their bodies against the boards — though each weighs less than an ounce of fur and twigged bone, a mere thimbleful of flesh — seem nonetheless immeasurably realer than mine, weightier, as if the bit of stale, dusty air displaced by their tiny bodies and disrupted by their rapid movements alongside the crumbling walls exceeds in volume anything my body is capable of filling or disturbing. Yet I know that my presence, despite its frail ethereality, alarms them. The animals see and hear me the way they see and hear an ominous shift in the weather long before it occurs. I am like a ghost and in the course of this relation have traveled far and wide and back and forth in time, a dark spirit growing steadily darker, transported by memory and articulation and the compulsive direction of my thought. I can no longer say, Miss Mayo, whether I am in my cabin now in Altadena or our old house in ’89 in North Elba. Darkness merges time and place.

Above me, in the bare attic room where Ruth and I and the younger children and Lyman Epps and his wife, Ellen, slept on our pallets, divided one from the other, males from females, like Shakers by a curtain on a string, I hear the dry rustle of squirrels, or perhaps it is a pair of raccoons — it’s the shuffling gait of animals that have wintered inside, and now that spring has at last come to these northern Adirondack hills, they have mated, and the female has dropped a litter of cubs in her nest of sticks and leaves in the leeward corner, where since November she slumbered protected against the arctic snows and freezing winds. My sudden, unexpected presence here after years away has frightened the poor creatures. I hear the female trying to move her cubs to some place up there in the attic where she feels they will be safe, carrying them in her mouth one by one to the corner furthest from where she senses me. She senses the presence of an alien creature, possibly human, a killer, in one of the two rooms below.

Although I am still and it is dark and she can see and hear no one, can smell no sour human body, no tobacco smoke, no lamp, no guttering candle, nonetheless she knows that something like a human being, something like a killer, has entered this long-abandoned building and stands in silence now in the middle of the room below. She knows that there must be one of the killers, a human being, down here. The disturbance in the musty air can be nothing else, where for years there has been no human — no men with their dogs, no children even, with their small deadly weapons — except occasionally during the daylight hours, when a crowd of humans, male and female, smelling foully of death and making loud grinding and barking noises with their feet and mouths, come inside and stomp around for a while, as if contemplating taking up residence here, and then leave again.

Don’t fret, little mother, I’ll not hurt or hinder you. I may remain down here for a long while, perhaps for as many years as this otherwise abandoned old structure stands; perhaps longer, or maybe I’ll stay only for this one night, I can’t know; but don’t you worry, you tiny, frightened mice and agitated raccoons and squirrels, and even you porcupines under the house gnawing on the rafters beneath my feet — all my killing is done now. The killing is finished. You needn’t fear me, even you black bears whom I hear cough and growl outside in the yard, prowling the now-deserted site for refuse, quarreling over a few chicken bones and chunks of old bread tossed aside by the humans when they left this afternoon at the end of their ceremonies. Even the wolves slinking back down the valley from the ridge behind the house and the lion alone on the mountain need not fear my presence here. Every living creature is safe from me now.

But if they understood these words, no matter; they would take no comfort from them. They know us too well, our terrible propensity for killing. Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of Him. Both. Our only virtue sometimes seems to be that we are as cruel and violent to one another as we are to the other species, whom we slay and devour, or slay for the pure pleasure of it and toss aside, or simply slay because it’s expedient and heap up their corpses. I wish to warn them and to comfort them.

A pathetic wish; it serves no purpose. Sharp as their ears may be, they cannot hear these words, let alone understand them. I can warn and comfort no one, not even the dumb animals.

It’s just as well not to try, for all I am now is a story being told for all practical purposes by a man whose only possibility for positioning himself to speak it rests with his imagining this old house, the overgrown yard that surrounds it, the huge, gray stone yonder, and the yellowing bones that lie in boxes buried in the hard ground beside it. I’m but one of the thousand stories of the mystery of being human, and all the other animals know that story already and know the nine hundred ninety-nine more; it’s why they fear us: they know our nature, and don’t require a ghost to tell it.

Since the day I left this house for Kansas and beyond, I have wanted to be back here again — but not for this. I never in my lifetime wanted it to be true that the mystery surrounding my father’s life and death, the questions concerning his character and motives, even the question of his sanity, lay here in this house on this hallowed plot of ground. Though I better than anyone alive knew the answer to all those questions, which tormented so many good men and women, tormented everyone who loved him for himself and for what he did, I still during my lifetime did not say aloud what was the truth, not to myself and not to anyone else. I loved him, too, and loved what he did. So I kept silent and hoped that the questions would end, or that they needed no answers. I hoped that a mystery was sufficient.

After Harpers Ferry, I went away; I ran as far as the continent ran, to where there was nothing further than the endless, blue Pacific; and climbed a mountain there and built a cabin; and said nothing: nothing to the journalists, who found out from my brothers and sisters where I had hidden myself and came clambering up my mountain in Altadena to interview me, nothing to the historians, who mailed me long detailed lists of questions, which I tossed into the fire in my iron stove; nothing to Father’s old abolitionist friends and supporters, who came to my cabin seeking answers and left feeling pity for what the war against slavery and the deaths of my beloved father and brothers had done to me. I did not even speak of those matters with my brothers and sisters themselves, those who survived into old age with me, when in later years they arranged to gather together now and again in one of the houses they had scattered to, on a Fourth of July, sometimes on a Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday, and I would trundle down from my hermit’s shack and travel the many hundreds of miles to their homes, where late in the evening they would share their memories of Kansas, of the work before Kansas, and of Harpers Ferry. At those gatherings they all thought me shy, inarticulate, perhaps not as intelligent as they, as they always had anyhow, and they were not wrong. But that did not mean that I did not know the truth about Father and why he did the great, good things and the bad, and why so much of what he did was, at bottom, horrendous, shocking, was wholly evil.

Within a few days of the swearing of the Gileadites in Springfield, our little army was dissolved. Or, more to the point, Father abruptly withdrew from its command and took me with him, leaving the Negro Gileadites to their own devices and stratagems, which, happily for them, turned out to be sufficient unto the day. But to be cast down from such a height of excitement and anticipation, as I was cast down by Father, was truly agonizing for me. In those days, my particular closeness to Father and the intensity and whole-heartedness with which I embraced his plans and dreams of carrying the battle straight to the slaveholders separated me from my brothers, and I could not pass it off the way John did when, within a few days of Father’s and my somberly and ceremoniously pledging ourselves to defend with our life’s blood the fugitive slaves, the Old Man, as was his wont, turned his attention suddenly elsewhere — to the sorry business of Brown & Perkins, as it happened. John simply shrugged his shoulders and set off on his own business, as he and Jason had so often done in the past. I, however, was crushed with disappointment and bitter frustration. And I was vexed with Father, more so than I had ever been before.

Looking back now, these many years later, I can see with some sympathy how Father was sorely conflicted then between what he saw as his obligations to his family and his creditors and to Mr. Perkins, who had stood by him for so long, and what he saw as his duty to oppose slavery. I was, of course, not so divided, but there was no place else I could go to wage war than with Father, no army in which to enlist but his, no one to follow into battle but him. When he decided once again to let the fight go, all I could do was gnash my teeth in rage and sharpen my long knife and clean my gun and dream of spilling blood.

I might have stayed on in Springfield, defying Father’s order to return to North Elba and run the farm there, marching instead and on my own with the Gileadites — who, as it turned out, because of the fear they aroused simply by virtue of rumor and the sight of armed Negro men at the Springfield railroad station and on the streets, never did have the opportunity for an actual, bloody confrontation with the slave-catchers. Wisely, the man-stealers and their cohorts sought their prey elsewhere. But without Father at my side, I knew that I was not especially wanted by the Negroes anyhow. To them, I was merely one of the sons of Captain Brown, as they sometimes called him. I was the big, shy, red-headed fellow who ran errands for his illustrious sire. Any light on my face was reflected light.

Nights, as I lay in my cot and fumed over what I regarded as Father’s dereliction, his defection even, I dreamed up bloody scenes to give vent to my wrath and my longing for battle. I aimed down the barrel of my gun and fired into the chest of the slave-catcher standing over the prostrate form of a fugitive. I sneaked up behind an auctioneer on his way to market with a bound gang of human chattel, and in full view of his victims reached around his neck and slashed his throat with my knife, retrieved his keys, and with my bloodied hands set the men and women loose from their fetters and led them into the woods and up into the hills. Visions of carnage and revenge filled my mind and strangely pleased me, easing me, calming my turbulent thoughts — so that I could eventually accede to Father’s wishes and return to North Elba.

“I very much oppose having to go back there,” I told him the night before I departed from Springfield. “I want to stay here and fight alongside the Gileadites.” We were in the office of Brown & Perkins, and I had taken to my cot, prepared for sleep, while he worked on at the desk by lamplight, dashing off more letters that begged for time, for patience and understanding, for merciful delays of prosecution, that promised eventual, full payment, complete clarification and accounting, justice and restitution. This sort of letter he wrote himself, and he pointedly did not want me as his scribe.

He put down his pen and looked at me with irritation. “Owen, the Negroes don’t need you here. They can protect themselves as well without you as with you. No one needs you here now. I don’t. I need you to be with your mother and the rest of the family. We’ve gone over this. The winter is bearing down on them, and they’re suffering because of the absence of a man who can run the place.”

“What about Lyman? He’s there, he’s a man.”

“It’s not the same, Owen. I can’t be there myself, because of these infernal court cases. You know that. The family needs one of us, and it’s you, or it’ll have to be me, to get them safely through the winter and put the place ready for spring. We don’t want next year to go so hard. Think of your poor brothers and sisters, Owen. The babies. Think of your mother.”

“She’s not my mother,” I shot back.

“We’ll not go into that;’ he said curtly. “You’re angry with me, I know, for having to go off like this, for my sending you north. But you should deliver it to me, who deserves it. Don’t ship it to someone who doesn’t deserve it.” He turned abruptly back to his work. Then, after a few moments, he paused and without looking at me seemed to be reversing himself, for he offered to let me stay on in Springfield, if I wished.

I sat up in my cot, not quite believing him. But then he added that I could also go to Ohio with John and Wealthy, or join Fred and Jason at Mr. Perkins’s place. I could go anyplace I chose. Accompany him to Boston to help prepare his lawyer. Follow him to Pittsburgh for more of the same. Even go off to California with all the other young fools and dig for gold, if I wanted. Follow the elephant. “It’s your choice,” he said. “But wherever you choose to go,” he reminded me, still without lifting his eyes from the paper before him, “if you don’t go to North Elba, you’ll be abandoning your duty.”

Besides, he pointed out, I had no money, no house, no land. Or had I some private wealth, and he somehow had not noticed? And I had no trade, other than farming and the keeping of sheep. Or had I been taking instruction by mail in business like John, or horticulture like Jason? If not, would I perhaps like to hire myself out as a day-laborer here in Springfield? And where would I sleep at night, once he closed down the business? Did I have friends who would put me up, people he had not heard about?

He knew the answers to all those questions, of course. He knew what I had to do. And so did I.

At dawn, I rose and packed my few possessions into a gunny sack, slung it over my right shoulder and took up my rifle, and said goodbye to Father. He placed around my neck a purse on a cord with fourteen dollars and some coppers inside to give over to Mary and to pay for supplies he had ordered in Westpott for the farm, which I was to arrange to have transported on to North Elba when I got there. As always, he filled my head with last-minute instructions. Which of the merinos to breed this spring, which to sell, which to butcher for mutton; how much seed to set aside for a second planting if the first got hit by a late frost; which part of the acreage to clear next and which to leave for a woodlot; how much to pay in Westport for salt and flour, and who among the Negroes of Timbuctoo to hire and whether to pay them in goods or cash or crop shares. “Make work for them, if you can afford it, especially when the winter comes on. Even if you and Lyman and the boys are able to clear and cut on your own. They learn from your example, and it brings them a small cash payment as well, which they will surely need.

“Ah, Owen!” he declared. “I envy you, my boy. How I would love to be there now, clearing that mountain forest, working with my back and arms all day and gathering together with my precious family around the table at night,” he said, smiling and inhaling deeply, as if he could smell the crisp, cold Adirondack air. “That’s all the good Lord meant for a man to do. That, and to care for his neighbors. And you can do all of it up there. All of it. I envy you, son.”

I thanked him for it, still sullen and resentful, and we embraced, or, rather, he embraced me, and I strode away from him, crossing through town to the main road north — headed home, for that is what it was now. There was no other place I could name as home than that tidy farmhouse on the edge of the wilderness. So there I went. Home.

I had five days of walking ahead of me. A few times I accepted a farmer’s offer to put up in his barn, but otherwise I slept outdoors in a makeshift camp close to the road, huddled in my blanket before a small fire, like a tramp. I walked steadily from first light to last, up the long Connecticut Valley and across the Green Mountains of Vermont, then north again along the western shore of Lake George, past the ruins of old Ticonderoga to the glittering waters of Lake Champlain. There I stopped in Westport briefly on Father’s business, and then headed upland into the Adirondacks. And the entire time, all five days and nights, I filled my mind with the conscious pretense that I was completely turned around, that my compass had reversed itself and I was walking south instead of north. I was moving down along the Subterranean Passway into Virginia and North Carolina. I was marching towards the slaves and their masters. The fugitive slaves followed their north star; I followed its southern twin.

It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution! Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!

Chapter 14

I arrived home in North Elba late in the afternoon just as it was growing dark, greeted by my brother Watson a half-mile east of the farm, out where the road from Keene crests the long rise through the notch. I saw him from a distance and did not at first recognize him. He was tall and lanky, all sticks and rope. He had turned onto the road, emerging from the woods there, leading the Morgan named Adelphi, hitched to a sledgeload of logs taken evidently from the back lot of the property, a forest of blue spruce that sloped towards Pitch-off Mountain.

Watson saw me and waved. Though he was barely sixteen then, he had added considerably to his height since I’d last seen him and walked like a grown man who’d done a hard day’s work. In the months since my departure, Watson had managed to slip away from most of his boyhood, and when I drew near, I saw that his long, narrow face had the beginning haze of a reddish beard. It cheered me to see him so grown up. Nearly my height, he was well on his way to being taller than I, who up to now had been the tallest in the family.

For a few seconds, we grinned at one another with slight self-consciousness, and then I embraced him warmly and tugged his new whiskers. “What’s this, Wat?” I laughed. “Growing yourself a beard, eh?”

He grabbed my beard and gave it an answering yank. “Everybody always says you’re the handsome one. I thought I’d give it a try, see if it’s the beard. It’s just great to see you, Owen!” he exclaimed, and threw his ropey arm over my shoulder. He cocked his head and studied me and said that I looked different to him, that I’d changed somehow.

“Come on, I’ve not been gone that long.”

“No, seriously, Owen. You’re looking different. You didn’t fall in love or something, now, did you?” he said, and shook my shoulder and grinned.

I confessed that it did feel weird to me, coming home this time, as if I had been away for years. My mind filled for an instant with the face of Sarah Peabody, but I swiftly put the image away, replacing her, as if for Watson’s sake, with the sights and sounds of Liverpool, London, Waterloo.

“You’re a famous world traveler now!” he said. “I want to hear about every single thing that you and the Old Man saw over there.”

We walked along beside the horse and sledge, the broad valley opening out in front of us, with white-topped Tahawus and Mclntyre in the distance and the burnished range beyond, and although it was a gray, overcast day threatening to snow, I saw again how lovely this place was. Of course, Father loved it here. How could he not? And how could he not have envied me for being free to return here? I thought, and regretted for a moment that I had been so disgruntled with him.

I was expected, Watson then told me. But expected sooner than this, he said, as they had received a letter from Father some days earlier, telling them I was on my way north. “Me and the boys thought you might’ve got distracted some over in Westport.”

This surprised me. “When was his letter dated?”

He didn’t know. The thirteenth, he thought. Yes, the thirteenth. “I copied it” he said proudly. “Like you used to.”

How could that be? Two days prior to my signing the pledge with the Gileadites, Father had written to the family that I would soon be coming home? I grew angry again and freshly confused. He had already decided and had known, even as he was working up my spirits, that we would not fight alongside the Negroes of Springfield! He knew all along that I would be sent to North Elba. And had said nothing of it until afterwards, when he feebly claimed unexpected legal troubles.

What purpose could he have had — for the meetings, the sermonizing, the pledge? And appointing me secretary and treasurer — why? Was it all for show? And for whom? Not me, certainly. For the Negroes? Had he merely been putting on a play for the blacks of Springfield, working them up, organizing them for battle and steeling them to pledge and risk their lives, when he had no real intention of joining them himself, or even of allowing his son to join them?

I cursed aloud: “Damn him!”

“What’s wrong?” Watson asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “No, the Old Man, actually. It’s just that he knew I was coming back here long before he told me. Even you knew before I did.”

He laughed and punched me on the shoulder. “Ah, well, Owen, that’s the Old Man, isn’t it? You can forget about him now, though. He’s there, and we’re here. You’ve just been spending too much time with him and not enough with us. C’mon, Mother’s going to be happy to see you,” he declared. “And Ruth, too. Everybody!”

“Lyman, too?”

“Sure. Lyman, too,” he said. “It’s great you’re home, though. Tell me everything. I want to hear everything. Especially about old John Bull. I want to hear all about England. And Flanders! What’s that like?”

As we walked, I related some of the details of my journey, pleasing and exciting him to a surprising degree, as if I had been to the South Seas on a whaling ship. Down the long hill we went, and soon, although it was not yet four o’clock in the afternoon, we were walking in wintry darkness, as if dead of night had fallen. Then, in the distance, I saw the glimmer of lamplight from the kitchen, and I made out the shape of the house. In this wide, dark, cold valley with the blackened mountains beyond, the house looked like a small ship bobbing at anchor in a safe harbor.

“You go in,” Watson said. “I’ll take care of Adelphi. We can unload these trees tomorrow in a twink.”

I said fine and headed for the door, anxious suddenly and a little afraid, as if I were about to hear unwanted news.

But, no, everything was joy and thanksgiving, kisses and embraces and bright, shining faces. They all gathered around me, as if I were one of Ulysses’ returning warriors, gone for long years instead of months, and put their faces next to mine and kept touching me with their hands even after we had hugged one another. My face nearly hurt from the smiling. They pulled my coat off me and bade me sit at the table, while the babies, Annie and Sarah, who, at seven and four years old, were no longer babies, unlaced and playfully drew off my boots.

Mary, sweetly calm in the center of the sun-shower, blessed me and thanked the Lord for my safe return. She looked healthier than when I had left, her round face reddened from the heat of the kitchen stove and the excitement, and I glimpsed her prettiness, saw her for a second as she must have looked to Father when he first met her some eighteen years earlier, a warm, soft, utterly benevolent presence in his unyielding, masculine world.

I held her hands in mine and said, “I’m truly glad to see you, Mary. Are you as well as you look?”

“Oh, my, yes!” she said, and laughed, and Ruth and the boys, Oliver and Salmon, laughed, too.

“What’s the joke?”

“Oh, we’ll tell you later,” Ruth said, and ruffled my hair with her cool hand. “We’ve lots to tell. You and Father may not know it, Owen, but believe it or not, life goes on without you.”

“Apparently!’ I said, and looked around the crowded room. There were Oliver and Salmon, lithe, tanned boys grinning like monkeys, and the little girls, Sarah and Annie, already back at work, the one churning and the other putting out plates. And then for the first time I saw Susan Epps, standing beside the stove in the further corner of the kitchen. Her hands were folded in her apron, and she was smiling gently at me, as if waiting for me to acknowledge her before she could greet me. At once I got up and crossed down the room to her and gave her a friendly embrace, realizing as I did so that she was pregnant, and well along with it, too.

“Yes, indeed,” I said to her. “Life does go on!” and she gave a winning, shy laugh. I congratulated her and turned to look for Lyman. “Where’s your excellent husband?”

There was a silence, and then Watson, who had come in from the barn and was shucking his coat by the door, said, “He’ll be back soon.”

“Soon?”

“Tonight. Or tomorrow night. He’s moving a few folks north.”

“Well, good!’ I said. “I was kind of afraid that the whole operation’d come to a halt. You know, after the business with Mister Fleete and our jailbreak.”

In a low voice, Mary said, “It did stop things, Owen. At least amongst the whites.”

“I’d expect some to cut and run.”

“No, just about all have abandoned us.”

“The Thompsons?” I asked.

“Yes!’ Mary said. “Pretty much.”

“The cowards!” I said, and slapped the table with my hand.

“Not Henry, though,” Ruth piped. “He’s not abandoned us.” I looked over and remembered the exchange that I had seen between her and young Henry Thompson at church.

“Yeah, but Owen’s right,” Watson said. “The rest are cowards. It’s mostly just Lyman alone making all the runs now. I’d be there beside him, if the Old Man’d let me. It’s this Fugitive Law; it’s made cowards of our neighbors. People go over and harass the folks at Timbuctoo all the time, making like they’re looking for escaped slaves. Even some folks we once counted as abolitionists.”

I asked Susan, “Is this true?”

“Yes, mostly. But Lyman, him and a few others from there, are still taking people north. It worries me. But people get this close to freedom, you got to help them.”

We talked then for a while of the increased difficulties and dangers of harboring escaped slaves and transporting them from Timbuctoo to Canada. Lyman had evidently grown fierce in the work, enraged by the death of Elden Fleete and his own brief imprisonment and made reckless rather than timid by it, joined only by a few of the more adventurous Negroes and by Henry Thompson, with no help coming from any of the whites in the northcountry, not even the Quakers in Port Kent. There were marshals and slave-catchers all over now, stopping off at the farm every few days and like plantation overseers checking the shacks and huts of Timbuctoo, intimidating the whites generally and the Negroes pointedly and employing Partridge and others like him to spy for them.

Shortly, we were enjoying a fine, ample supper of Brunswick stew made with squirrels shot that morning by Salmon and Oliver, and pickled beets and cucumbers, and a pile of Mary’s famous Indian hoecakes — my welcome-home supper, Ruth called it. There was abundant good news, beyond Susan’s pregnancy. Yes, it was true, Ruth and Henry Thompson had been courting, and as soon as he could arrange an interview with Father, Henry intended to ask for her hand in marriage. And the big, grinning secret concerning Mary was that she, too, was pregnant.

Startled, I put down my spoon and asked, “Well! That’s something, isn’t it? Does Father know yet?”

“Why, Owen, of course he does! I wrote to him right away. As soon as I knew myself, I told him. He was pleased as pie. Didn’t he tell you?”

I said no, he didn’t. “That is wonderful news, though,” said I, weakly, thinking more of the difficulties promised by another child than the blessings. But now I understood why the Old Man had felt suddenly required to concentrate solely on work which would help support the family, and why he had put the Gileadites so abruptly aside, and why he had sent me back here. With his wife pregnant again, his sense of responsibility to his family would have been unexpectedly sharpened. He had not told me, no doubt, because it was still very early in her pregnancy, and after so many lost babies, Father had learned to protect himself by holding his excitement in abeyance: it had become characteristic of him to wait practically until the pregnancy was over before beginning to speak of it. Also, although he was a man who had helped a thousand sheep and hundreds of cows and horses to foal and had even helped deliver several of his own children, he was nonetheless peculiarly shy about talking of such matters when it came to humans.

I felt kindly towards Father again, and guilty for having been so quick to judge him. I upbraided myself and began to wonder whether I held some kind of permanent, unknown grudge against the man that kept me looking constantly for reasons to indict him, even while I went on believing that I loved and admired him beyond all other human beings. It was a strange, new question, and gave me pause.

The evening wore on, and as we talked and joked around the table and in the parlor afterwards, re-establishing our old, familiar roles and routines with one another, I was more or less forcibly integrated into the family, and gradually I began to understand some of the more subtle changes that had recently taken place at the farm, and mostly they disturbed me. The winter snows were about to blow down on us. But coming in, I’d noticed that a great deal of the autumn work on the place had not been done. The livestock had looked well-cared-for, but that, from long habit, was routine and to be expected. The boys had done a lot of hunting and fishing, I saw, with plenty of hides and pelts being dried in the barn — bear, wolf, the usual deer and beaver, a wildcat, even a pair of mountain lions — and an abundance of salted venison and trout and corned beef had been put up, but by the women, I assumed. Not half the wood in, and Lyman and the boys had cleared and burned less than five hundred square rods of the flatland that wed need for spring planting and next year’s hay. Blacksmith shop and butchering shed not closed in. Cold cellar not dug, and the soil already freezing hard. Barely half the fencing for the winter sheepfolds built. The barn had been closed in properly, but there were chicken coops and an extension for a winter pigsty that hadn’t been started. They’d bred the dams for early lambing, Watson assured me, and had tanned the hides of eight deer, but hadn’t gotten around yet to tanning the fleeces and pelts that Father had asked them to prepare for winter clothing. Fortunately, the women seemed to have done their autumn work — the smoking and salting of meats, putting up cheeses and lard, filling the root cellar with potatoes, squashes, and turnips — so we would at least have enough to eat.

But as I listened to the boys’ excuses and explanations, mostly made by Watson, who as the eldest felt obliged to speak for them, I began to see that their failures had more to do with Lyman’s continued and protracted absences from the farm, evidently caused by his work with the Underground Railroad, than by idleness or distraction on their part. They were, after all, only boys. Even Watson. They did not blame Lyman directly, but I saw that they wanted a proper foreman to organize the work every day and to provide instruction, oversight, and encouragement, and they needed a grown maris strong back to lift and heft alongside theirs.

Lyman’s Railroad work had to be done, too, of course. Who could reproach him for it? Certainly not I, and in fact I intended to join him myself in his nighttime runs as soon as possible. But the farm had been allowed to slide. And unless we quickly pulled it back in line, we’d soon freeze, or our livestock would, and we’d starve, or we’d have to abandon the place altogether — and then no one would be able to work the Railroad.

I detected some small resentments against Lyman by the boys, evidenced by their clear reluctance to praise him or even to talk much about him, as if the subject held little or no interest for them. Mary and Ruth were voluble enough concerning the man, but I felt that they were not so much praising him as demonstrating to Susan their love and support of her, protecting her from embarrassment, and even at that, it was faint praise they were offering, more often excuses and explanations for his inability to run the place properly than proud descriptions of some specific accomplishment.

Also, without Father to generate and sustain the contacts with Timbuctoo, the family appeared to have fallen away from the Negro community without having built any compensatory alliances with the whites, except for Ruth’s connection to the Thompsons, by virtue of her relationship with Henry. This was distressing. In this tough place, we all needed each other, white and Negro alike. But after the death of Elden Fleete, and with Father’s and my departure following hard upon, the Negroes had been a little tetchy, Watson said. Understandably so. And there being no one left at the farm who could reassure them of our faithfulness to their cause, they had withdrawn almost all contact, despite Lyman’s and Susan’s continued loyalty to the family.

The Negroes were in bad shape, Watson said, and Susan confirmed: harried by the local whites, fearful of being carried off by slave-catchers and marshals, and not at all prepared for winter. Also, Watson explained, there was a growing number of whites, led by our old friend Mr. Partridge of Keene, who wished that both the Browns and the citizens of Timbuctoo would go back to wherever they came from. Some of these whites had previously been supporters of Father’s efforts to help the Negroes, but now they, too, coveted the Negroes’ and our land out on the flats — rich, silted land, rare in the Adirondacks, which they could see was not being farmed properly. By their lights, we were misusing it, wasting our good fortune, and this angered them, for they were New England-style farmers, the type that likes to regard waste as a sin. Mr. Partridge, himself no great shakes as a farmer, was exploiting these resentments for his own purposes, which Watson said surely included gaining revenge for our having invaded his home in August, when we shot the slave-catcher and then freed Lyman and Mr. Fleete from the Elizabethtown jail.

Now, suddenly, where before I had thought of that episode with something approaching shame, I found myself regarding it almost with nostalgia, and I wished that we had done more damage than we did, wished that we had actually slain the slave-catcher and maybe Mr. Partridge, too, and wished that I had been the one to pull the trigger. There were tensions and conflicts everywhere breaking out, and I could not see how they could be quickly resolved, least of all by me. I could not step forward in church like Father and preach the Lord’s work to the whites one week and then preach it to the Negroes the next, or walk into the midst of a crowd of white men at a cattle auction and scold them for their sloth and cowardice as only the Old Man could scold, and then ride over to Timbuctoo and do the same to a crowd of glowering, suspicious ex-slaves.

Even so, while there was little or nothing I could do to improve relations with the local people, white or black, I could nonetheless pull things together here on the farm. Eager to get an early start, and not a little tired from my journey, I begged off Watson’s and Ruth’s entreaties to tell them still more of the story of Father’s and my travels abroad and climbed up to the loft well before the others. Lying in my cot there in the darkened chamber, I listened to the murmur of the voices of my family below: Mary and Ruth were carding wool and spinning, and the boys were coming and going between the house and barn, bedding down the animals, bringing in firewood, the last household chores of the day, while the little girls and Susan took turns reading from the primer, teaching one another to read and now and again appealing to Ruth or Mary to settle a dispute over a word’s meaning or spelling. With those sweet sounds filling my ears, I drifted into peaceful sleep.

A while later, when the others came up to bed, I woke and listened in the darkness as, one by one, they, too, fell into slumber. But this time, however, I myself could not fall back to sleep. I lay wide-eyed in the silent darkness of the room for hours, my mind a-buzz with half-completed thoughts startling and interrupting one another. I could not figure what was keeping me so agitated — I almost never had any difficulty sleeping. Quite the opposite. Hours slipped by, and then I lost all track of how long I had been awake, and not until the first bleeding away of darkness signaled the near approach of dawn did I suddenly realize that I was waiting for Lyman to come home. And when I knew that, I thought only of it, and him. Until pale daylight began to filter into the room, when I rose and dressed and directly set about putting things right: like Father, the first one up and working.

I remember thinking on that first frosty morning home, as I walked the grounds and examined the outbuildings and livestock, that it would be a simple matter to make up for Father’s and my lengthy absence and set the place straight. And, in a sense, it was simple, but not the way I expected. I calculated thirty days of steady work for the five of us — three boys, Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, and two grown men, Lyman Epps and me. I had learned early in life from Father how to organize a crew and lay out the day’s work before breakfast, how to see each job through to the end before commencing another, how to make sure that each of us knew exactly what was expected of him for the entire day, and so on.

Father had never been easy with distributing authority of any kind anyhow, and he had failed to do it here also. Although, as usual, he had included in his letters long lists of things to do and when and how, he had simply left taking care of the farm to his family members and Lyman and Susan in a general way, without explicitly stating who was in charge of what and whom — so, in a way, it was more the Old Man’s fault than anyone else’s that the place had come undone. No family members were lazy or incapable. They had just needed a captain, or in this case, due to the captain’s absence, a first mate. Without one, they had been working at sixes and sevens, each person responding only to his or her immediate needs, laboring more against each other than with each other, with no long view of things, no plan. Every man or boy for himself.

I will set everything right with ease, said I to myself. I had finished my inspection of the place with a circuit of the barn and a stop at the privy, where I noted the need to remove the season’s night soil, and was about to return to the house and lay the kitchen fire for Mary before any of the others were out of bed. Between Mounts Tahawus and Mclntyre the sun had already broken the horizon, and rosy streaks of new light spilled across the rippled, silvery sky. Over towards the village, the clouds were opening up, and in the dark blue western sky the morning star and a crescent moon were slipping towards the horizon. I stopped and took it in. It was dawn — first light, a marvelous, cold, half-illumined stillness — and made a comforting, reflective pause between night and day, between autumn and winter.

I could make out the village from the belfry of the church and a few threads of chimney-smoke rising from a black line of spruce trees by the river. There was a glaze of frost on the distant, yellowed fields and on the leafless branches and stalks of the chokecherry and alder bushes along the road from town and on the roofs of the house and barn and the unfinished outbuildings — a pale caul or a shroud, I could not say which, but it made everything look fresh and clean. I gazed around me and inhaled the cold mountain air with pleasure, the first pure pleasure I had felt in many days, since the night of the formation of the Gileadites.

My anger was gone. Soon everyone would admire me and be glad that I had come back.

As I neared the house to go in, I heard from the direction of the village the rumble of wagon wheels on the frozen road and the clop of a slow-moving horse. Around the curve in the road there came the second Morgan, Poke, the mare, pulling our old wagon at a plodding pace, and up on the box sat Lyman Epps, evidently asleep. Until the horse, smelling the barn, I suppose, accelerated somewhat and jolted him awake.

From the doorstoop, I watched him for a moment, without his having yet noticed me. He was exhausted, slump-shouldered, and barely able to hold his head up; his skin color was flat gray, like pewter, and his hair stuck out from under his cap in short, knotty clumps, and he seemed older, almost middle-aged: he looked more like an escaped slave himself, a man on the run, than a conductor on the Underground Railroad. How dangerously thin, especially now, I thought, was the line between an escaped slave and a freed slave, between the Negro man who was chattel and the one who was free. And how wide the gulf that lay between a Negro man, slave or free, and me.

He put up the wagon and unhitched Poke and led her into the barn to water and feed her and brush her down, still without having seen me. I was oddly hesitant about following him and speaking with him; yet we had much to say to one another. I felt shy as a girl with him, anxious and worried, even worried about my appearance’.

Suddenly angry with myself, I strode across the yard to the barn determined to erase my self-consciousness and went in and greeted Lyman with false heartiness. “Hello, friend!” I loudly exclaimed. “Are you working late, or starting the day early?”

He smiled wanly and shook my hand. “Good to see you, Owen. When did you arrive?”

I told him of my return the previous day and jabbered on about my journey from Springfield. While I yacked and he listened, I helped him settle the horse and hang the harness, until finally I realized that he was standing at the barn door, politely waiting for me to finish so he could go into the house.

“I’m sorry!” I said. “Here I’m keeping you from your wife. And you must be hungry and want to wash, while I’m going on about nothing.”

“No, no, that’s all right. I just needs to sleep some,” he said, and yawned. “Pulled me a long ride last night, all the way back from Massena on them corduroy roads, you know. My backbone’s sore.”

“How many’d you take up?”

“A pair of ‘em. Two men. From near Norfolk originally, off a Chesapeake Bay plantation. One a preacher. Preached my ear off the whole way up.”

“You get them over all right? No trouble?”

“No trouble. No help, neither, but no trouble.”

“Well, you’ll have some help now,”I said, adding that as soon as we had the farm readied for winter, I’d be working the Railroad with him. “That ought to shame a few other white folks back into action,” I declared.

“I don’t know, folks is pretty scared now!’ he said. “But good. I could use some help moving those as comes along from time to time. There ain’t as many as before, you know. Not since the Fugitive Law.”

“The Fugitive Law!” I said, and spat, like an actor in a melodramatic show.

“But I expect with winter coming,” he went on, “we’ll see a last batch making a run for it. So’s they don’t get stuck hiding out in people’s attics down here till spring.”

“Right, right, of course. But first we’ve got to—”

“In fact,” he said, interrupting me, “Tom Grey over to Timbuctoo, you recall him? He told me of a family of five, maybe six, be coming through from Utica tonight or tomorrow. If they ain’t already arrived. You didn’t hear nothing ’bout that, did you? Tom said he’d send word over here soon’s they arrived.”

“No. No one told me anything. But first we’ve got to get this place in shape, Lyman.”

“Yes. Yes, I know,” he said, and turned to leave.

I reached out and grabbed him by the arm, more forcefully than I intended, causing him to stop and remove my hand as if insulted by it.

“I’m sorry;’ I said. “It’s just I need to talk to you about the work, Lyman. Fact is, you and the boys have let things slide a little far, I think.”

He turned to me, with his face cast to the side. I began nonetheless to list the various jobs and projects that lay before us and to put them in the order that we would follow, when I shortly realized that he wasn’t hearing me, was merely waiting for me to finish so he could go inside the house. I grew impatient with him. In a sense, this was his farm, too, nearly as much as it was mine, and he had certain responsibilities towards it, which he clearly was not interested in accepting. “Lyman, you’re not listening, are you?”

“Owen” he said, still without looking at me, “what I am is tired. My back feels broke from three days and nights up on that wagon out there. Maybe we can talk about these matters later, when I’ve got me some rest.”

I don’t know what came over me then, but my ears began to buzz, and a gauzy, blood-red screen dropped before my eyes. With no conscious intention or desire to do it, I grabbed Lyman by the shoulder with my right hand, clamped my left onto his belt, and lifted and flung him bodily across the room, banging him hard against the stall, causing the horses to roll their eyes in fear and stamp their feet. He slid to the floor, shaken and astonished, and looked up at me with fear in his eyes for the first time ever, which I took in happily almost, accepting his gaze with a strange relief. As if I had long wanted him to fear me.

He said in a steady, low voice, “There’s something gone wrong in you.”

My breathing came hard, although I had not exerted myself — I was very strong, and Lyman, not a large man, had not resisted me. “Maybe… maybe there is. No, nothing is wrong in me. But my priorities… I have to hold to my priorities. This farm, it’s all so shaky. The winter’s coming. You wouldn’t listen.”

Slowly, he got to his feet and brushed bits of hay off his coat and trousers and put his cap back on, restoring his dignity. “I’m listening now,” was all he said.

“Well, we’ve got these priorities. The farm and all. And responsibilities, to the family. To your family, too. You and I, we’ve got to take care of them in the proper way. Then we can attend to the others, to the Railroad and all that. But it’s not like we have Father here for that. Don’t you understand?”

“I understand. Priorities. Responsibilities. I understand those things just fine.”

He moved warily towards the open barn door, facing me all the while, as if he expected me to attack him again. And I was gladdened by his wariness. I knew that in an hour, perhaps in a moment or two, I would surely collapse inside myself with shame and would beg Lyman’s forgiveness; but right then I was determined to keep myself open to these feelings of unexpected joy and to let them flow through me like a cold wind. By attacking Lyman physically, I had released in myself something dark and wonderfully satisfying. It was as if an ice-dam had let go, and huge chunks of ice, a flotilla of logs and fallen trees and frozen debris, were cascading over boulders and cliffs, making a great roar, and I was at this instant thrilled by the sheer power and noise of the flow.

I had done the forbidden thing. I had struck a black man.

I took a step towards him, and he jumped back, nearly out the door of the barn into the yard.

I reached for him, and he jumped again. “Why didn’t you fight me, Lyman?”

He squinted up at me as if he had not heard right.

“I want to know. Why didn’t you fight me, just now?”

“You think I’m a fool?”

“Is it because I’m white?”

He laughed coldly. “No, Owen, it ain’t because you’re white. I ain’t afraid of your skin. I might be afraid of what you got inside your head, though. And I treat any man twice my size with a certain caution. That’s all.”

“Well, it’s over,” I said. I couldn’t apologize, not yet, but I said, “I swear, 111 never do that again.”

He hesitated a moment and stared at me, and I saw that the fear had dissipated somewhat, replaced by something harder, darker. “Maybe so. Maybe not. Time will tell that.” He looked more sad than anything else. He said, “You tell me something, though.”

“What?”

“When you grab onto me like that and toss me down, you doing it because you can. Is that because I’m a whole lot smaller than you? Or is it because I’m colored?”

I was silent for a few seconds but did not look away. “You know the answer to that.”

“Say it, then.”

“It’s not because you’re smaller than me.”

“Right. It’s my skin. You’re afraid of my skin. But I ain’t afraid of yours. Which is why I didn’t fight you back. That’s what we got here. Ain’t it?”

“I can’t lie to you.”

“‘Appreciate that,” he said. “I’m going in now. We can discuss all those priorities and responsibilities of yours later on, if you want. But I got some of my own need tending first.” He turned, straightened, and walked towards the house and went quickly inside.

I saw smoke curling from the chimney; Mary had set the fire, and I could see her through the window at the stove, smiling broadly at Lyman as he entered, and Susan crossing the room towards him with her arms out. The others were probably already up and about, too, and were greeting him, welcoming him home, relieved that he had gotten back from the border safe and unharmed. And I saw that I, who was going to lead them, would now have to follow.

We remained friends, Lyman and I, but only of a sort, for there was now between us a nearly tangible distance, as if we were condemned to carry a long stick together, which connected us one to the other and at the same time kept us strictly apart. Each man was at all times painfully conscious of the other’s presence and, when it occurred, his absence as well. A difficult intimacy; but it was all we had now.

I made no further argument against his priorities or for mine, and whenever he took the horse and wagon and was gone from the farm for two or three days at a time, I barely acknowledged to him that I had noticed. When he returned and had rested, he would come directly to me, say nothing about where he had been, and politely ask where did I want him to work that day. I assigned him to whatever task was at hand, and he pitched himself whole-heartedly into it. But then a few days or a week would pass, and word would come that he had passengers waiting over at Timbuctoo, and he’d be gone again.

I forbade the boys to join him on these runs, causing at first some tension between me and Watson, particularly; he had grown stridently anti-slavery — as a way of asserting his new manhood, I supposed. But he was eventually mollified by my promise that, as soon as we had the place in shape for winter, he and I both would join Lyman carrying slaves to freedom. We’d go back to “the work.”

By the time the snows were falling heavily and regularly and temperatures no longer went above zero and the winds from Canada had begun their scraping howl, there were no more escaped slaves coming our way, and we all, even Lyman, from then till spring, spent our days and nights pretty much inside. By mid-December, however, before the heavy snows and cold hit, we had managed to cut and stack close to fifty cords of firewood, most of which, to Lyman’s and the boys’ credit, came from hardwood trees that they had dropped and trimmed in the forest earlier in the autumn. We finished the cold cellar and the other outbuildings, fenced in the sheepfolds, bred the ewes, did all the fall butchering, ran a short sawdust barrier around the base of the house, and completed half-a-hundred other chores and jobs — all of it done before winter finally descended with its full strength.

After that, Lyman withdrew and spent his days mostly in his blacksmith’s shop, manufacturing ironwork for the farm, everything from nails to fireplace dogs, and I worked alone, too, usually in the barn, where, among other useful things, I built a set of sled runners and affixed them to the wagon in place of the wheels, making a sleigh of it, which enabled us to get quickly and comfortably to church on the Sabbath and into the settlement, where we milled our grain and corn, sold fleeces, leather, and woolen cloth for a little cash money, and visited the few families we still felt comfortable with, such as the Nashes, the Brewsters, and the Thompsons; with the latter, through the connection between their son Henry and sister Ruth, we were becoming nicely linked.

I remember that winter, despite the tense stand-off between me and Lyman, as the most peaceful of all our winters in North Elba. Perhaps it was because we were free for once of “the work” and because Father was away. It put us more at ease with our neighbors, certainly, for it made us more like them — abolitionist in principle but not in action; devoted to our farm and livestock, but not at the cost of not socializing with our neighbors; religious to the point of regularly attending services on the Sabbath and otherwise honoring the day as we always had, but not preaching to everyone and thumping people with the Bible on every possible occasion.

Except for the fact that we had a Negro man and woman living with us in our house, we were no different from any other white family settled in that area. Like them, we holed up against the winter, did some hunting, ice-skated on Mirror Lake, repaired and built tools and furniture, spun wool and wove cloth, tanned hides and made new boots, harness, hats, and belts, and tended our flocks and cattle and horses. We ate our stores of salt pork, mutton, venison, and salt fish; we ate it roasted, boiled, baked, and in stews; with potatoes, squashes, beets, beans, pumpkins, carrots, and turnips from the cold cellar. We drank plenty of fresh milk, made cheese and butter in abundance, mashed our apples into cider, and warmed ourselves before the fire with sassafras tea. Like all good abolitionists, we eschewed sugar, but for sweets we had gallons of honey taken in the early autumn, and as we would not be able to tap our own trees till spring, we swapped hides with our neighbors for their extra maple syrup, using it to flavor meats, vegetables, and bread, and made maple sugar from it and sheets of hard maple candy. And we grew healthy and strong inside our warm house.

We said grace over every meal, prayed together in the evening, and sang the old hymns, and sometimes we even sang new songs, which we learned from our neighbors or from Susan or that Mary remembered from her childhood. We read The Liberator and Frederick Douglass’s North Star and from Father’s collection of books, and we older folks taught the little ones their ABCs and numbers, while Ruth worked with Susan and Lyman, teaching them with the primer to read adult books and periodicals.

And we read Father’s letters. Every few weeks, a new, long letter arrived from one of the stops in his odyssey through the courts, letters from Springfield, Troy, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Hartford. Instructional and scolding, as always, but also warm and affectionate, they were. As had been the practice for many years, we read them aloud, and then I or Watson copied the letters; we left the originals out on his desk, for further perusal and to keep track of his instructions, and placed the copies in Father’s steel box, protecting them against flood, fire, or theft. For posterity, as Father said, although up to that time preserving his letters had seemed mere vanity to me — especially after the Gileadites and our adventures in England, which had left me feeling somewhat disillusioned regarding posterity’s interest in my father and his work.

But increasingly that winter, Father’s letters spoke in unusual detail of his meetings with famous men and women, abolitionists all, some of them well-known white ministers and teachers, like Reverends Channing and Parker and the famous Horace Mann, some of them known as well for their support of female rights, like Dr. Howe and Miss Lydia Maria Child and Miss Abby Kelley, who was one of the best orators he had ever heard, said Father. There were famous Negroes, too: he met with Bishop Loguen in Syracuse and confided his plan, which, according to Father, “Bishop Loguen thinks noble and very possibly workable.” At a meeting in Hartford, he heard Miss Harriet Tubman address a hundred white people very bravely. Personally introduced to her afterwards by Frederick Douglass, Father said he “spoke at considerable length with her and found her a great warrior.” In Boston, he frequently found himself in the company of literary people and mentioned Thomas Wentworth Higginson and a young editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Franklin Sanborn, who took him to Concord to meet personally with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Father now admired, and his friend Henry Thoreau, “a firebrand on the subject of slavery,” wrote Father, “but a strangely misanthropic fellow, due to his loss of religion, I believe. I know nothing of his writings, but Mr. Sanborn assures me they are very good.” There were even some businessmen, he told us, who were becoming interested in aiding the movement generally and Father in particular: a fellow in the cloth-manufacturing business named George Stearns and “several rich men who want their money to go for something more substantial than speeches and newspapers and travel expenses for public speakers. I intend to satisfy them of this,”he wrote.

For one as close to Father as I, it was difficult to see him as others did. But it could not be denied that when he held forth on the subjects of slavery and religion in a public forum, he had a commanding presence, despite his high-pitched voice and stiff, somewhat Puritanical manner, and the more people deferred to him, the more he seemed to warrant their deference, for the attention and respect of strangers made him appear to grow literally in size and stature, as well as in lucidity and brilliance of speech. And he was never so tall and straight, never so articulate and convincing in argument, never so unquestionably honest and sincere, as when holding forth on the inextricably entwined subjects of slavery and religion.

It was as if Father saw all Americans residing inside a cosmic allegory, like characters in a story by John Bunyan, and his personal force and intelligence were such that he could make even the most materialistic of men believe it with him. People had grown more desperate now, more pessimistic as to the inescapable, gradual ending of slavery in America, and many who in the past had been content to oppose slavery merely with words were now beginning to consider more drastic action. As one of the very few who had come forward with a specific plan of action, and as perhaps the only man who seemed capable of carrying it out, Father was therefore a considerably more interesting figure now than he had been a mere six months earlier.

Also, it was of no small matter, I’m sure, that Father was unique among white abolitionists by virtue of his having captured the trust and admiration of Negroes, given him not because of his political power or wealth or social standing, for he had none, but because of the pure force of his anger. What in Father frightened the whites pleased the blacks. Frederick Douglass, Bishop Loguen, Reverend Highland Garnet, Harriet Tubman — they all vouched for him, spoke of him as one of them, and this surely must have impressed the whites sufficiently to balance their fear of him.

He was, after all, quite unlike the rest of the better-known white abolitionists. First off, he was a physically tough man, and it showed. Although he had never fought in battle, he gave the impression of a man who had. Tanned and lean as a braided leather quirt, straight as a stick, he had the physical energy of a man half his age. His spartan regimen of little sleep, basic food, no alcohol or tobacco, was impressive. Also, he spoke knowledgeably of weapons and of the acquisition and deployment of men, horses, and supplies; he understood principles of attack and siege, strategic retreat, counter-attack, and ambush; he had studied the memoirs of great generals and the histories of famous campaigns with sufficient diligence that he could sound like a man who had been at Waterloo with Napoleon himself, who had fought alongside Garibaldi, who had ridden with Cortez against the invincible Montezuma.

The winter in North Elba, even by our old Ohio and New England standards, was long and brutal. But our Adirondack neighbors deemed it mild, and despite our secret suspicion that it would never end, spring did eventually come trickling in, and with it came the time for the birth of Susan’s and Lyman’s baby, an imminent arrival which was regarded by all of us as a great event. We had come to know in varying degrees how Susan had lost her previous children to slavery, and though he never spoke of it, we believed that Lyman was eager to become a father. This would be his and Susan’s first child born in freedom, and its birth would be a visible emblem of their great sacrifice and triumph.

Susan had taken to sleeping downstairs with Mary, whose own baby was not due till early June, the two pregnant women sharing Father’s and Mary’s large bed by the stove; Lyman, of course, had continued to sleep up in the loft with me and the boys on one side of the curtain, Ruth and the girls on the other. It was not an uncomfortable arrangement, however unconventional, and it was practical, contriving as it did to make the hours we spent in bed a businesslike affair difficult to corrupt with indolence or socializing, for as soon as you woke, out of politeness and modesty, there was nothing to do but rise from your cot and dress in the dark and set about to work. Our sleeping arrangements, except when Father was at home, when they provided him and Mary with a small privacy, functioned strictly to enable us to sleep, nothing else. Which was, no doubt, as Father had intended.

The animals were restless, shedding their shaggy winter coats and eager to be let out of their pens and stalls after long confinement, and the lambing had begun in a promising way, and we were looking forward to a successful shearing. Also, we had two new calves and a large litter of pigs to add to our livestock. The mountains were still as shrouded by snow and bleak sheets of ice as in January, but down in the cleared valleys and flatlands surrounding North Elba, the snow had diminished to long, rounded peninsulas and smooth-shored islands melting into the yellowed, soppy fields and soft, two-feet-deep blankets that lingered in the woods and dales and on north-facing slopes. The Au Sable River was running freely again, and the lakes and ponds, although they had not begun yet to crack and boom and break up, were no longer safe to cross with a sleigh.

Suddenly, we were once again busy outdoors, clearing new ground, burning stumps and building fences, preparing the land for plowing as soon as it dried, tapping sugar maples and boiling down the sap in huge cauldrons. With each new day the sun rose earlier and set later, and every night we fell into bed exhausted from our work and rose in the morning eager to return to it. We had entered what our laconic neighbors called, not spring, but mud season. Where, for months, the frozen, rock-hard roads, lanes, paths, and farmyards had been buried under head-high drifts, they were now cleared of snow and ice and stood revealed as made entirely of soft, sticky mud — heavy, deep, corrugated rivers and ponds of it. The mud was everywhere, impossible to keep out of the house, off our tools and boots, wagons, animals, and machinery, and we slogged through it as if through molasses.

I hung the sleigh runners in the barn and put onto the wagon a new set of large, wide wheels, which I had built myself during the dark winter months, six-foot wheels with iron rims that had been crafted by Lyman in his smith’s shop. It was hard going, but with the new wagon wheels and by using both horses instead of only one, we were able to travel nonetheless. And travel we did. For there was movement again on the Underground Railroad, and this time I meant to take Watson and join Lyman myself in conducting the fugitive slaves, who were beginning to emerge blinking and fearful from their wintry hiding places and make their way north once again, passed as before from hand to hand, cellar to cellar, and attic to attic, up along the route from Utica to Timbuctoo to Port Kent and on by cart or sleigh to French Canada; or sometimes, via Lyman’s favorite route now, traveling northwest from Timbuctoo over the deepest Adirondack wilderness to Massena, thence to the St. Lawrence crossing at Cornwall and into Ontario there.

We Browns were going to be alongside him this time, armed and vigilant. I wished to make it clear to Lyman that he and I now shared the same priorities. I could not bear the thought that he might think me interested only in the farm, as had undeniably been the case in the autumn. These fluctuations in policy, I knew, were a sign of my confusion then, but it felt not so much like a moral confusion as a temporary and strictly personal conflict between loyalty to Lyman and loyalty to Father. With the autumn and winter behind us, I believed that I was able once again to be loyal to both.

Slave-catchers and their collaborators that spring were skulking like hungry wolves in and around all the towns and cities that lay along the usual routes north, especially in western New York and in the Hudson and Champlain valleys from Albany to Plattsburgh, and as a result, agents of the Underground Railroad in places like Utica, Syracuse, and Schenectady were sending many more fugitives than before over the considerably more arduous Adirondack mountain and wilderness route that Lyman favored. This in spite of the harsh weather, the bad roads, the long distances between stations, and the threat of meeting wolves and other wild animals. Along about the middle of March, fugitives first began arriving late at night in Timbuctoo, and the next morning one of our few allies from the settlement, a person known to us, would arrive at the farm to apprise us of the situation. That same night, regardless of our obligations at the farm, Lyman and I and Watson would hitch up the team and drive the wagon over to Timbuctoo, where we would pick up our poor, frightened human cargo and carry it north to Canada and freedom.

Happily, during this period Lyman and I came to be like brothers again. We renewed our old joking manner with one another and even began having serious talks on such subjects as religion and the relations between men and women. But not race. Prior to our confrontation in the fall, race had been the central subject of all our serious talks with one another, and we rarely, if ever, discussed our true beliefs regarding religion or men and women. Now, however, race was the sole unspoken subject between us. We could talk truthfully and as equals about the Lord, about His work, and about being men, like any two friends of the same color, but we could no longer talk about one of us being black and the other white. I secretly grieved over this particular loss of intimacy, for I had never shared it with a Negro man before. But at the same time I was glad of it, too. Perched up on the box alongside Lyman, with Watson crouched at the rear of the wagon with his rifle at the ready, our precious cargo huddled out of sight underneath the tarpaulin, I felt somehow freed to pretend that Lyman, like me, was a white man, or that I, like him, was black, and we were merely two American men out doing the Lord’s work together.

There were fifteen or twenty runs that spring, but I remember best the morning in mid-April when we came back to the farm from an especially arduous run to the Ontario border. We had been gone for three days and four nights, had almost lost the wagon in a muskeg south of Potsdam, had been forced to travel half a day off our route on an old lumbermen’s trail to find a place where we could safely ford the Raquette River, and at the end had narrowly escaped a pair of slave-catchers encamped outside Massena, just south of the border. Watson had performed bravely, and though he claimed to have shot both of them when they pursued us in the gray, early morning light for several miles along the bank of the broad, still-frozen St. Lawrence, he certainly hit one, which discouraged the other, and thus we were able finally to deliver our cargo safely at the crossing to Cornwall.

The trip back to North Elba, though less risky — since now the only Negro aboard was Lyman, who always carried his old, tattered manumission papers in a wallet strapped to his leg like a knife — was not much easier, as the weather alternated between rain, sleet, and snow. We crossed marsh and muskeg, saw mists at dawn rising off the wilderness lakes where deer and moose came down to the edge to drink and look up and watch us as we passed along the opposite shore. We penetrated deep into the ancient blue spruce and balsam forests, passed through miles of beech woods and hickory, circled beaver ponds, saw the tracks of lion and heard the howl of wolves and the coughing bark of bears, were brought up short at fast-running, rock-bottomed streams choked with snowmelt and overflowing their banks and sending us back up into the woods on lumber trails in long complex loops until we could return again to the road, which was never a real road, only a lonely, wagon-wide path through the northwoods, a deer trail become an Indian trail widened by horses and sledges bringing out timber and by supply wagons going into the camps.

As on other such difficult, demanding treks, with little or no sleep, we had gone a whole day without food, without seeing a settlement or farm or even another human being, save for an occasional trapper crossing the trail into the deep woods to check his lines, furtive and solitary as a wild animal himself. What did the enslavement of three million Negroes mean to him? Or the Fugitive Slave Law? Did he know, much less care, who was President? Had he even heard of abolitionism? Sometimes when I saw one of these pelt-covered, bearded fellows with his backpack and steel-toothed traps and long-barreled rifle disappearing into the wilderness, I almost envied him. His ignorance and single-minded pursuit of the skins of animals was a kind of innocence that I would never know again, if I had ever known it at all.

It was dawn when we finally arrived at the farm. The overcast sky was soft as flannel and gray in the east above Tahawus and soot black in the west. It had rained most of the night, a raw, penetrating rain that had soaked straight through our cloaks and hats and made our bones feel brittle as iron. As we pulled into the yard, we saw lamplight inside the kitchen and smoke from the chimney, and Lyman remarked on it, for normally, with Father away, no one would be out of bed this early. I think that we both at the same instant realized what had wakened the family, for without saying a word to one another, as we passed the house, I handed the reins to Watson, and Lyman and I jumped down from the wagon and made for the door.

It was indeed as we had expected — Susan’s baby had come. Susan’s baby—Lyman’s baby as well. Yet somehow I could not see it that way. Even then, long before I had come to any awareness of the true nature of my feelings for Susan, I seemed to be cutting Lyman out of his privileges and prerogatives, so that when I looked from face to face in the warm, dimly lit kitchen and saw only grief and exhaustion, saw none of the exhilaration and pride that I expected, I did not think once of Lyman’s loss. Only of Susan’s, and in some small, illegitimate way, my own.

Mary slumped at the table with her Bible open before her, but she was not reading from it; she merely gazed out the window opposite at the slowly brightening field and woods beyond. Ruth was seated on the bed next to Susan, wiping the woman’s face with a damp cloth. Ruth’s expression was grim, tight-lipped, frightened, but accepting, as if during the night and long hours into dawn she had learned some terrible thing about her own coming fate. The other children moved about slowly in their pantaloons and union suits; half-dressed, sad-faced waifs they seemed, trying to put together a bit of breakfast for themselves. The women looked drained and exhausted; they had clearly been up all night, struggling to bring a child into the world. Susan herself, mother of the child, lay back among the pillows with her eyes closed, her hands beneath the covers, all color drained from her face so that she was nearly as white as Ruth, and for an instant I thought that she had died and felt a moan begin to rise in my throat.

Then her eyes blinked open. She turned her head slowly on the pillow and, expressionless, looked at her husband and me at the door, the two of us huge and cold, noisy in our heavy boots and rain-soaked clothes, clumsy, obdurate, and male, all out of place in this silent, warm, sad company of women and children. I was thinking hard thoughts. So many babies are born dead, you dare not wish for them to be born at all.

And so many die right after they are born, you wonder why they were allowed to live in the first place. And if they live awhile, so many soon sicken and die, you wish they had died at the start and had not let you learn to love them. The women, they weaken and grow sadder with each loss, but the men, what do they do? I thought that they must gnash their teeth and pound the walls with their fists, as I did then. I balled my right hand into a fist and banged it hard against the wall, one, two, three times, each blow stronger than the last, until I thought I would bring down the wall like blinded Samson. Then, frightened by my own fury, I went to a far corner of the room and closed my eyes and wished for words of prayer, but found none.

In a strangely cold tone, Ruth said, “The baby was born dead. We have wrapped it for burial. You will need to dig a grave for it, Owen. Do it now” she said.

I cleared my throat and said, “And Susan? How is she?”

Mary spoke then. “She’ll be fine, I’m sure. Do as Ruth said, Owen. Dig the grave. Susan will be fine. The midwife from Timbuctoo was over to tend her and left only a short while ago. She knows all the old remedies, and Susan has been treated by them. The baby has no name, but we need to bury it, so we can say our prayers for it. Lyman may want to make a marker, but there’s no need. It never drew breath,” she said, and added, almost as afterthought, “It was a baby boy.”

Throughout, Lyman had not made a sound or a move from the door. He stood there now, immobile and as silent as when he had come in. I had tears running down my cheeks, yet his eyes were dry and cool, his face impassive. My body was hot with rage, and I could barely keep it still, but Lyman stood with his hands slack at his sides. He was more a carved block of ice in the dead of winter than a man. He held himself like that and regarded his wife with strange placidity, as if he had come upon her sleeping and did not want to waken her but merely wished to watch her awhile without her knowing.

Finally, Susan said in a voice that was almost a whisper, “I’m sorry, Lyman.”

He twisted his lips as if to clear his mouth of an unpleasant taste, and when a few seconds of painful silence had passed, he said, “It was not meant to be.” And then abruptly he turned and departed from the house.

I followed him out the door, still shaking with what I thought was rage and grief. Unable to say anything useful or comforting to Susan, still unable even to pray, I proceeded at once to follow my stepmother Mary’s order to dig a grave for the infant. That would be my use. Then, before I had reached the barn, Lyman came riding out on Adelphi.

I reached up and grabbed the bridle and asked, “Where are you going?”

“Timbuctoo.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to put my cabin straight.”

“What? Why do that now? I don’t understand.”

He would not look at me. “I’ll be back in a few days, and I’ll be taking Susan then.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m saying what I’m saying.”

“But you can’t leave,” I said. “She needs to be here, and she needs to have you with her.”

“No. She and I need to be amongst our own people. I don’t want to have to explain it to you, Owen. But it ain’t right for us to be living here anymore with you Browns. There’s too much gone wrong for us since we moved over here, so we’re going to go on back now, soon as Susan’s ready to travel that far.”

“No,” I declared. “You can’t do that.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Don’t know that you can stop me, Owen, since that’s what I’m determined to do.”

“This is Father’s horse you’re riding” I said, as if that would stop him. It seemed to me almost unthinkable, that he would remove Susan and himself from our house and return to their bare little cabin in Timbuctoo. Did he think that we had cursed him, had put a hex on him?

He looked down at me with irritation and something like pity on his face. “Fine,” he said, and he swung down from the horse to the ground, handed me the reins, and walked away. I stood there holding the horse and watched in silence as he strode across the yard to the road, then down the road in the direction of the African settlement, until he was finally gone from sight.

When I returned the horse to its stall in the barn, Watson was there, brushing down the other Morgan. “I thought Lyman went off on Adelphi,” he said. “What’s the matter? He was weird.”

“Yes, well, there’s bad news” I said. “Susan’s baby, it was born dead.” His bright face suddenly went slack and pale. He said nothing, simply stood there with the brush in his hand, open-mouthed and silent, as if he had been hit in the chest and had lost his breath.

“I need help digging the grave, Wat,” I said. “Will you come with me?” I had picked up the spade and pick and stood by the door.

“Yes, sure. Oh, this is pretty terrible for them, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s terrible.”

“Is Susan all right?”

“Yes. She’ll be fine in a few days.”

“What about Lyman?”

“Lyman’s upset, but he’ll be all right.”

“Where was he off to on Adelphi?”

“Stop asking questions,” I said, handing him the pick. “Just follow me; we’ll dig the grave.”

He shrugged his bony shoulders, grabbed up the pick, and traipsed along behind me, a pair of gravediggers on a cold, gray, drizzling dawn.

A hundred rods or so beyond the house, in a clearing near a stand of birches, my brother Watson and I dug a deep hole in the wet, rocky soil. Afterwards, I built a small pine box and into it placed the tiny body of the infant wrapped in a plain, earth-colored scrap of wool and nailed it shut. We never saw the infant itself; only its humble shroud. Then Watson and I lowered the box into the hole and filled it and covered the opening in the ground with sod. It would remain unmarked. And by the time we came seven weeks later to bury Mary’s and Fathers unnamed infant in its unmarked grave, the grass had grown tall over the first grave, and daisies were blooming there, and you could not see where it had been. Although I knew exactly where the first grave was located and saw it clearly, as if there were a tall, engraved marble stone at its head:

Unnamed Baby, born to Susan & Lyman Epps “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed”

I Corinthians 15:51

It was a terrible time then, with the baby born dead and with Lyman and Susan gone off to live amongst the Negroes in Timbuctoo and with Mary’s own birthing date fast approaching — in itself not upsetting, even to me, but it meant that Father would soon be coming to North Elba, which now, more than ever before, filled me with nameless dread. Why was his coming so dreadful? He was my father. I loved him. I believed that I had done nothing wrong.

I could only say to myself that it had to do with the disarray that I saw all around, and I knew he would see it the second he drew up before the house — the Old Man could smell disorder in the air — and in short order he would set everything right again. Humiliating me. Even so, I felt strangely paralyzed, and my anticipation of his coming only seemed to make it worse.

Spring planting went ahead, but it was more Watson’s and Salmon’s doing than mine, and it was done in a desultory fashion; and though we continued to clear back the forest at a fairly good rate, cutting and burning and pulling stumps off nearly a half-acre of ground a week, we did it sloppily — unscientifically, Father would say — like hired laborers without a foreman. And the house was falling into steady disrepair, as we could not seem to find the time or the energy or the wit to repair the damage done to the roof and chimneys by the winter winds and ice.

And we had no excuses this time; we could not tell ourselves, or report to Father when he arrived, that we had been too busy doing the Lord’s work to do our own. We were no longer conductors on the Underground Railroad. Father’s great Subterranean Passway, at least our small section of it, had gone dead. Without Lyman to act as liaison between us and the citizens of Timbuctoo, we were unable to carry fugitive slaves north. Without Lyman, no one came to us anymore for help, which disappointed me greatly and made me a failure, not only in my own eyes but in the eyes of Watson, and of Salmon, too, who had grown as passionate as Watson on the issue of slavery and as eager as he to oppose it.

They could not understand my reluctance to confront Lyman forthrightly and honestly. “Why’n’t you just go over there and make it clear that we’re ready to run folks north in our wagon as soon as they show up in Timbuctoo?” Salmon demanded. “Just put it to him, Owen. What’s the big deal between you and Lyman anyhow? So what if he wants to go back and live on his own land in Timbuctoo? Seems only natural, don’t it?”

“You don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t.”

“He doesn’t want anything more to do with us Browns.”

“Why? Because of Susan’s baby? That can’t be it. We didn’t have anything to do with that. It was the Lord’s will.”

“I don’t know, Salmon. You talk to him, if you want. You go over there, and you plead with him to provide us with passengers for our wagon and team so that we can feel better about ourselves. You tell him how much he needs us to help him help his Negro brethren, Salmon. You know what he’ll say?”

“What?”

“I… I don’t know. I don’t know what he’ll say. I just know that I can’t go to him. Not now. Maybe not ever.”

“Sounds crazy to me;’ he said, disgusted. And he did, indeed, that very day of our conversation, ride out to Timbuctoo all by himself, only to return in the evening clearly disappointed and not a little confused. He came in at supper and sat down sullenly at the table without taking off his hat and coat or wiping his muddy boots.

It was Ruth who asked him what Lyman had told him, for she, like everyone else in the family, had known why the boy had gone over there. Mary had even put up a basket of bread and preserves for Salmon to carry to them. I said nothing, and neither did Watson, who I think had guessed by then that there was something dark and personal between me and Lyman, something that could not yet be named by either of us, for neither Lyman nor I knew what it was ourselves. We merely felt its power and acted on it, as if we had no choice in the matter, as if it were a shared compulsion of some sort, the nature of which would become apparent to us and nameable only later, when it no longer controlled us.

“I never even saw him,”Salmon said. “I tried talking to some others, Mister Grey and the other Mister Epps, the choirmaster. But they said there was no Underground Railroad in Timbuctoo. Like I was some kind of slave-catcher or something. Didn’t know what I was talking about. Lyman, they told me, was gone off”

“They say where?” Watson asked.

“Nope. Just gone off. You know how they can get when they don’t want you to know something. They smile and tell you something half-right and half-wrong, act like they don’t know the truth any more than you do. ‘Lyman, he gon’ off somewheres, Mistah Brown.’ I’m telling you, it was like I was the sheriff or a slave-catcher, the way they treated me.”

“Did you go to his cabin?” Watson wanted to know.

I remained silent throughout, as if none of this concerned me. “Yep. And it looked like he’d been doing some work on it. Has himself a pretty decent kitchen-garden under way, too. I even saw Susan,” he said, and I put down my knife and spoon and looked up.

It had been just over a month since they had left, that long since I had seen her, and suddenly, upon hearing her name in my brother’s mouth, imagining him in her presence, I realized that during those thirty-odd days and nights I had thought of almost no one else. Her face, her voice, her shape and movement, had constantly been in my mind. No matter what I was doing, no matter whom I was talking to, it was Susan I was thinking of, missing, pining for, longing to speak to. And to touch. Lyman, whenever I thought of him, as indeed I frequently did, came to my mind only as an obstacle to my reaching his wife. He was a curtain blocking my view, a rock rolled into my path, a palisado surrounding the object of my desire.

That I had not once, until this moment, stepped back from my thoughts and observed their peculiar nature shocked and alarmed me. But that’s how powerful they were, how all-consuming. Once I knew my thoughts, however, I was first appalled and then instantly repelled. Of course! I reasoned. This was the source of the pain between me and Lyman. And he had known it long before I did, surely. He had seen that I was in love with his wife, and naturally, as soon as he could, he had withdrawn her from me.

My blood washed over me. I felt absurd, and then guilty, and wished only that I could somehow purge myself of my love for Susan and make amends to Lyman. It also occurred to me that this had been the source of my anxiety about Father’s imminent arrival in North Elba: I was afraid that he would ask after Lyman and Susan, and when I replied that we had not seen them since their return to Timbuctoo, he would look me in the eye, and he would know at once what I myself had gone months without even guessing.

Abruptly, I stood up and left the house. It was nearly dark, the temperature dropping fast as the sun sank behind the mountains, with the smell of mud and melting snow mingling in the cold air. I went behind the barn and walked up to the grove of young birches there and cut off a switch and stripped it of its new, red buds. Back inside the barn, in the darkness, with the animals shifting their weight quietly in their stalls, I barred the door and stood in the middle of the large room. I pulled off my shirt and drew the top of my union suit to my waist, exposing my naked upper body to the chilled dark. Then I began to beat my chest and back with the switch — slowly and lightly at first, then faster and with greater force, and soon I was doing it with genuine fervor. But it was not enough. The switch was too light and broke off in my hand.

For a moment, I stood half-naked and foolish, out of breath, angry at myself, as if I were an iron object that I had stumbled against in the dark. I remembered Father’s strip of cowhide, which he kept out here to discipline and chastize the younger children, although he rarely used it nowadays. I knew exactly where it was, hung on a nail by the door. It was short, not quite a yard long, but heavy and stiff and dry with disuse, with a sharp edge to it. I reached out in the dark and took it down. The strip of old leather felt in my hand like a weapon. I had not actually held it myself since childhood, since that time when Father had bade me beat him with it, when it had felt alive to me, like a serpent. Now the quirt was dead, heavy, an almost wooden extension of my arm, as if my right hand were grasping my crippled left, and I whisked it through the air and struck myself with it many times — perhaps a hundred strokes, perhaps more. The pain was very great. I thrashed myself around in the darkness, slamming myself against the walls and stalls, knocking over tools and sending buckets flying, thrashing like a man caught by a seizure, until at last I was faint from the pain and exhausted and fell to my knees and did not get up.

But the scourging did not work. Nothing would work to purge my thoughts of Susan or alleviate my guilt for having betrayed Lyman. Not prayer, certainly. I prayed so constantly and loudly in the days following that Ruth and the boys teased me and said that I was practicing for Father’s return, and Mary told them to leave me be, I was only doing what was right in the eyes of the Lord; she wished the rest of the family were as devout as I. But in all my prayers I heard no voice except my own, and my own repulsed me, until eventually I could not bear to hear it anymore and gave off prayer altogether and did not join them in the evenings or when they went to church on the Sabbath. I went generally silent on all matters, not just religion, which was how people were used to me anyway.

I thought that I might cleanse myself with work, but that, too, was to no effect, for I was too distracted and anxious to complete any single task without rushing off to begin another, and all I accomplished was to create an even greater disarray and disorder on the place than had existed before. Trees half-cut or, if cut, left to lie and rot on the ground; chimneys pulled apart and not put back together again; fenceposts driven into the ground but left standing without rails to connect them; half-a-dozen rows plowed, but then the horse unhitched, taken off to haul stones from the river, with the plow abandoned in the middle of the field: it rained for most of those days, and I rushed about as if every day there were a bright sun overhead, a madman farmer, and my brothers and sisters and stepmother watched me with fear and bewilderment. My family kept the house running smoothly and the livestock fed and properly cared for, whilst I made a mess of the rest.

There was no way for me to tell them of the source of such turbulence; I was too ashamed. And besides, as the days went on, I myself had grown as fearful and bewildered as they, for I was no longer sure that my strong feelings for Susan were generated by love for her, so much as by a morbid, cruel desire to take away from Lyman his greatest treasure. I did not love her; I hated him. What perversity was this?

I needed Father to arrive home. Only he, I believed, could provide me with the order and structure of thought capable of leading me out of this wilderness of tangled desire and rage. Come home, Father! I began to say to myself, as I raced uphill and down. Come home and control me, Old Man. Bring me back to myself. Come and deliver me over to a thing larger than these strangely disordered longings. Tell me what it is I must do, and I will do it.

Then, suddenly one morning, there was the Old Man, appearing in our midst like the missing main character in a play, taking over the stage and putting everyone else at once into a supporting role. Which was how we wanted it, of course. Without Father, we had no hero for our play, and whenever he was absent, we undertook our parts without purpose or understanding. We forgot our lines, positioned ourselves wrongly on the stage, confused friend with foe, and lost all sight of our desired end and its opposition. Without the Old Man, tragedy quickly became farce.

Father seemed to know this and almost to welcome it, for when he returned home after a long while away, he always came with a fury, bearing down on us like a storm, crackling with noise and electrical energy, full of clear, irresistible purpose and making thunderous statement of it. He appraised the situation in a second, and before he was even off his horse, the man was barking out orders, schedules, and plans, was making announcements, establishing sequences, goals, standards, setting everyone at once diligently to work for the common good.

Accompanied this time by Mr. Clarke, the Yankee shipper from Westport, he brought supplies, seed, flour, salt, and nails. For the younger children, little gifts — a new Bible for Sarah, a box of paints for Annie, a penknife for Oliver — and for Mary, a silk handkerchief: all presented first thing, unceremoniously, off-handedly, as a greeting. For Salmon, Watson, and me, he had firm handshakes and quick commands to help unload the supplies from the wagon, so Mr. Clarke could move on and make his other deliveries in the settlement before nightfall. He would be returning here in the morning to pick up our furs and as many fleeces as we were able to release to him: that would be Oliver’s job, counting and tying for shipment and sale the spring fleeces and the winter’s catch of pelts — beaver, lynx, marten, and fisher. That’s what Mr. Clarke especially wanted. Father said to get going now, son, that’s a big job, and something was telling him that some of those pelts still needed scraping before they were ready for market, and the other boys were going to be too busy to help him. Mr. Clarke drove a hard bargain and would not accept a bloody hide, Father warned.

Up on his wagon, Mr. Clarke laughed and recalled for Father how he had lost to him his best pair of Morgans, thanks to Father’s nigger, which brought to Father’s attention the absence of Lyman and Susan. He scanned our little group out there in the yard before the house — Mary hugely pregnant and beaming with pleasure at the sight of her husband; Ruth tall and slender and fairly bursting with the secret of Henry Thompson’s promise to ask for her hand in marriage; Salmon, Watson, and I already lugging barrels from Mr. Clarke’s wagon to the barn; the little girls, Sarah and Annie, as if honored by the task, together holding the bridle of Father’s horse, a fine sorrel mare which I recognized as having once belonged to Mr. Gerrit Smith, and, indeed, it did later turn out to be a gift from him.

Father asked where were our friends, referring to them as Mr. and Mrs. Epps, a tacit correction to Mr. Clarke.

I paused at the rear of the wagon, a keg of nails on my shoulder, and Father caught my eye. “Owen?” he said, as if I were the sole reason for their absence.

Mary said, “I would have written about it to you, Mister Brown, but I thought you were coming sooner than this.”

My silence probably told him as much as any words could have then. He nodded and said that we would discuss this later, meaning after Mr. Clarke had left us. I quickly went back to my work, and Father resumed issuing orders, even as he dismounted and embraced Mary and walked arm in arm with her towards the house. Over his shoulder, he instructed Salmon to kindly water the horse when he had finished unloading, and brush her down and set her out to pasture without feeding her grain, as shed been fed this morning in Keene. Not at Mr. Partridge’s, you can be sure of that, he added. Her name was Reliance, he said, and she was reliable. And then to Watson he said that he could see fencing half up, half lying on the ground, and hed better set to work on that at once, boy, or we’ll be chasing cattle day and night. And me he instructed to check Mr. Clarke’s bill of lading against our goods received and sign it for him, then put myself to work on getting the south meadow turned under by nightfall, so we can harrow and plant tomorrow. He had observed coming down from the notch that the frost was well out of the ground there. “Come to the house at noon for dinner,” he said to me, “and we’ll lay out the rest of the planting then. We have lots of hard work to do, boys, so put yourselves to it! I’ll examine the place and view the livestock in a while this morning and will travel over to Timbuctoo this afternoon. By this evening,” he declared, “we will all know who we are and what we’re doing here!”

And then he was gone into the house.

Silence. Watson, Salmon, and I looked somberly, gingerly, at one another. Then Watson shook his head and grinned. “Well, I guess the Old Man’s back,” he finally said. “Hoo-rah, hoo-rah.”

“Yep,” said Salmon. “Cap’n Brown’s home for three minutes, and we already got our marching orders. He ain’t gonna be very happy when he finds out about Lyman, though.”

“I don’t know,” Watson said. “The Old Man’ll set it right. He has a way with Negroes.”

Mr. Clarke laughed. “Your old man has a way with white folks, too,” he said, his spectacles glinting like mica in the morning sun. “Talked me into giving him more credit than I ever give a poor man nowadays.”

“You’ll get your money,’ I said. “Don’t fret yourself”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see, Red. We’ll see how them pelts and fleeces add up,” he said, and handed me a stub of a pencil and the bill of lading, which I signed with a surly flourish, John Brown, by his son Owen Brown, and as I wrote the date, I realized that tomorrow was Father’s birthday.

I was twenty-seven that spring. When Father was my age, he had been married for nearly a decade and had fathered four children. His wife, my mother, had not yet died. When he was my age, he had already made himself a professional surveyor, had established a successful tannery that employed two grown men and four or five boys, had built a house, raised a herd of blooded sheep, cleared twenty acres of hardwood forest and carved a farm out of the wilderness of western Pennsylvania. He had founded a settlement school, and when he was my age, at a time when most respectable white people preferred that folks show slavery their blind eye, he had publically pledged his life to its overthrow. At twenty-seven, he knew what he stood for, what he could and could not do. At my age, Father had become in all visible ways a man.

And here was I, still a boy. How was that possible? In what crucial ways was my nature so different from his that our lives and works would diverge by this much?

John had once said to me, in a complaining tone, that Father had taught us to be afraid of no man except him. And it was true. Father always insisted that we think for ourselves in every way, except when we disagreed with him, and that we hold ourselves independent of every man’s will, except his. He wanted us simultaneously to be independent and yet to serve him. Father was to be our Abraham; we were to be his little Isaacs. We were supposed to know ahead of time, however, the happy outcome of the story — we were supposed to know that it was a story, not about us and our willingness to lie on a rock on Mount Moriah and be sacrificed under his knife, but about our father and his willingness to obey his terrible God. That was the difference between us and our father. We had him for a father, and he had someone else.

His father, like ours, had taught his son John to be independent of all men, but Grandfather had included himself, the teacher, amongst them. He, too, like Father, had told the story of Abraham and Isaac to his eldest son, but he had told it in such a way that it was not about the nature of obedience or sacrifice; it was about the nature of God. Grandfather Brown was a gentle, rational man whose greatest difficulty was in accommodating his character to a cruel and inexplicable universe, and unlike his son, he was not bound by a lifelong struggle to overcome his own willfulness and vanity. It’s their own secret struggles that shape the stories people tell their children. And had I been blessed with a son of my own, the story would have been told yet a third way. The central figure in it would have been neither Abraham nor God. It would have been Isaac, and the questions my story asked and answered would have been Isaac’s alone.

I would have told my son that Isaac’s father, Abraham, rose up early in the morning and led Isaac up into the mountain of Moriah, claiming that he had been directed to do this by God, in order there to make a sacrifice unto Him. And Isaac believed his father, for he loved him and had never known him to lie. And when they had reached the mountaintop and Isaac’s father had clave the wood for the burnt offering and Isaac saw no lamb there, the boy spoke unto Abraham, his father, saying, “Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” And his father said unto Isaac, “God will provide a lamb.” But when Isaac saw his father come forward with a rope and a knife in his hands to bind and slay him upon the altar they had built together, he understood that he himself was to be the lamb. He was afraid and asked himself, Did he love his father so greatly that he could not flee from Moriah back into Canaan, where lay his aged mother, Sarah, or that he could not follow his father’s bondswoman Hagar and her son, Ishmael, who was his brother, into the wilderness of Beersheba? He said to his father, “I heard not this command from God. It comes to me only from thee, and thou art not the Lord, nor canst thou speak for Him. For thou hast taught me that, and I have believed it, and therefore now I must flee from this place, or else abandon all that thou hast taught me.” Whereupon his father fell down upon the ground and said that an angel of the Lord was calling to him out of heaven, saying, “Abraham, Abraham, lay not thine hand upon the lad, for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son from me.” And Isaac showed his father where behind him a ram had been caught in a thicket by his horns, and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of Isaac, and father and son prayed together, giving thanks unto the Lord, and descended together from the mountain feeling wise and greatly blessed by the Lord. That is the story I would tell.

In the evening, after supper, Father bade me give him my views regarding Lyman’s decision to live away from us. I knew that he had already spoken with Lyman himself that same afternoon in Timbuctoo and had heard his version, and that he had obtained Mary’s view of the matter as well. The former I knew nothing about, for I had not spoken with Lyman myself since the day he departed from us; the latter I knew to be one of placid, unquestioning acceptance: as far as Mary was concerned, Lyman had decided that he and Susan could live more naturally on their own land among their own people, that was all. “And perfectly understandable, too,” Mary said, when Father raised the subject. “Especially after the disappointment of the baby.” We were all gathered in the parlor, where Father was preparing to lead us in prayer.

“Yes. The baby” he said, closing his eyes and looking down as if to pray for its soul. We stood in silence for a moment, and the soul of the infant born dead did seem to flit through the room and then swiftly disappear. That was how it was whenever Father was present — the entire spirit world was strangely enlivened. Then Father said, “I urged them today to come here and retrieve its body and re-bury it properly in the Negro burying ground over there. I assume they’ll do it tomorrow. But before they do, I want to know how it goes between you, Owen, and Mister Epps in particular. And with all the Negroes, too, not just him. I perceive a point of strain, a serious weakness in our relations with them, son. And I believe that you are the fault,” he said. “Give me simply your views on why they’ve separated from us and, a thing which distresses me much more, why the Underground Railroad no longer runs through this valley. The two are obviously connected.”

Everyone in the family looked at me, except for Father, who had opened his Bible and appeared to be studying tonight’s reading from the Scriptures. “Yes, probably they are connected,” I said. “No other whites in the settlement are willing to carry fugitives north. They are as cowardly as ever. More so, of course, since the Fugitive Act. And the Negroes themselves dare not try it, either. Except for Lyman. But Lyman chooses not to enlist our aid anymore, and he has no wagon, not even a single horse or mule. So there it is. No one goes north anymore, unless on foot, and that apparently has discouraged the conductors below from sending fugitives on to North Elba. Instead, they take the greater risk of sending folks by way of the Lake Champlain route and the Rochester-to-Niagara route.”

“Well, that’s been taken care of Father said. “I’ve today written to Mister Douglass and a person in Utica whom I cannot name. Service will resume shortly. But you still haven’t told me your view of Mister Epps’s departure from us.”

“What did he tell you himself?”

“He would say nothing on the subject.”

“Nothing?”

“No, nothing, Owen.”

“Then I can say nothing, either.”

He looked up and studied my face for a long moment. I remember the sound of Grandfather’s clock ticking. Then he said, “Very well, Owen. It shall remain between you and Mister Epps. Let us pray, children.” And in his usual manner, he began to pray.

It was only a matter of days before the Old Man had the farm up and running again — which pleased me, of course, but alloyed my pleasure at the same time with a measure of guilt. A few days more, and he had resumed service on the Underground Railroad between Timbuctoo and Canada, an activity which of necessity I joined. But sullenly at first, I confess, for its resumption was based on Father’s having re-established his old close and trusting relations with Lyman and the other Negroes of the settlement. Within a few short weeks, it was as if the Old Man had never left. He returned to preaching every second or third Sabbath at the Congregational Church in North Elba, a church he nonetheless would not formally join, and he undertook once again to conduct his weekly class on the Bible, which was attended by sometimes as many as a dozen men and women of the village, white and black. He happily approved of young Henry Thompson’s wish to marry Ruth and used it as an opportunity to bridge the distance that had marred relations between our two families, bringing the Thompsons into the abohtionist fold once again, and where the Thompsons went, many other local families went as well.

Father’s physical presence could inspire people, could instill in them a quantity of courage even to the point of recklessness, which, when he was not himself physically present to argue, chide, and explain, seemed to dissipate as fast as it had arisen. It was not so much his oratory that did it, although to be sure he spoke well and preached with conviction and imagination on any number of subjects, from abolitionism to animal husbandry, from the Bible, which he knew better than any trained and ordained preacher I had ever met, to the United States Constitution, which he knew like a Washington lawyer. But it was not his oratory that swayed people. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Instead, folks were impressed and then, perhaps to their surprise, led by his stubborn refusal to rely on common oratorical devices and embellishments, by his evident disdain for the tricks of voice and gesture that most public speakers relied on in those days. As if he were a Channing or a Parker or a white Frederick Douglass, he made people feel empowered by having come in contact with him, so that they felt larger, stronger, more righteous, clearer of purpose and more sure of victory than they ever had before. But unlike those exemplary speakers, Channing, Parker, Douglass, and so on, Father never lifted his voice, never shouted, never pointed to the heavens, never quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson — he never quoted any writer, except for those who wrote the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the United States Constitution.

The effect of Father’s speech and personal presence on otherwise rational and even skeptical men and women was uncanny and never failed to amaze me. No matter the audience — a hall filled with illustrious New England abolitionists or a convention of hundreds of distinguished Negroes, his country congregation at church on the Sabbath or a gathering of Negro farmers at a barn-raising in Timbuctoo, a meeting of his fallen-away white neighbors in North Elba or his own family gathered around the fire at home — Father always spoke simply and directly, his hands at his sides or merely clasped in front of him, an ordinary man in a plain brown suit who happened to possess the truth. Some of it was his sense of timing: he had an instinct for knowing when to remain silent so as to gather everyone’s attention and when to speak so that it would sound most impressive; thus, when he was expected to speak up, he often held his peace and stood against the furthest wall, and when he was expected to go silent and withdraw, he suddenly came forward and gave sharp utterance to his thoughts.

His voice was in no way stentorian or authoritative: it was pitched at not quite the level of a tenor’s. Most people who wrote about him afterwards regarded him as tall and well-built, a man of heroic proportions, but Father was of average height, tanned and sinewy, strong but not bulky or broad, and he walked like a soldier on parade, straight-backed and a little stiff-legged, with his arms swinging. His face was essentially that of a Yankee farmer: sharp-nosed, with tight lips and a jutting chin and a rough-hewn maris large ears sticking out beneath his coarse, reddish-gray hair, which he wore cropped short and spikey, like a stevedore’s. The visible center of his face was in his eyes, pale gray and fierce and steady. When the Old Man locked his gaze onto yours, it was very difficult not to give way before it, as if he’d seen your secret shame. Like an owl or a hawk, a powerful bird of prey, he rarely blinked. He could hold your gaze with his as if with physical force, as if he had reached out and clamped onto your chin and cheeks with both hands and had drawn your face up to his so that he could stare directly into it; and look into it he did, deeply, with curiosity and undisguised self-interest, as if he were examining, not a human soul, but a complex, unfamiliar piece of machinery, which, if properly understood, might save him a lifetime’s labor.

In early June, as Mary came close to her time, we were conducting to Canada an elderly couple whose sons had gone before them the previous year and a young boy accompanied by his gentle, bespectacled uncle. All four had escaped off the same Maryland plantation, which had become notorious along the Railroad, due to the cruelty of its master, a Dutchman named Hammlicher, and to the particular viciousness of his white overseer, a man named Camden, and due to the fact that Harriet Tubman herself had taken a special interest in facilitating the escape of the Hammlicher slaves. Mysterious, elusive, and yet seemingly everywhere at once, Miss Tubman was thought to have had a family connection among the Hammlicher slaves, through one of her own lost children, perhaps, and thus had lent it her special attention. Already at least fifteen of the several hundred human beings owned by this man had been spirited up along the Chesapeake Bay to Philadelphia and New York and thence on up the Hudson to Troy and freedom. But now, because of the increase in the number of slave-catchers in those cities along the old route, Miss Tubman had decided to send her charges north across the Adirondacks by way of Timbuctoo.

When Father had met her in Hartford that winter, he had convinced her of the good use to which she might put this previously obscure route, and his personal connection with her, when he revealed it to the Timbuctoo Negroes, had instantly won them back. Father’s reputation for honesty was such that no one questioned his claim; it was sufficient unto itself. How could they have refused to ally themselves with John Brown, when he came to them with the endorsement of the famous Harriet Tubman? The great Harriet! The General! None of them had ever met her or even seen her at a distance — she was all legend to them, one of the great African women, like Sojourner Truth, who seemed less a modern American saboteur of slavery than an ancient spirit-leader, an invincible, sometimes invisible, female warrior protected by the old African gods. Father’s having met and, at the instigation of Frederick Douglass, having spoken privately with Miss Tubman gave him an authority that at once renewed Lyman’s commitment to running fugitives with us Browns and drew with him more of the others in the settlement than we would need. It made our Timbuctoo stop on the Underground Railroad suddenly important in the only world that mattered to the Negroes and to Father, and once again, increasingly as the summer wore on, the only one that mattered to me.

Slavery, slavery, slavery! I could not have a thought that was not somehow linked to it. It was an obsession. At times, it came to feel like a form of insanity, for I was incapable of a normal thought, a single private thought that began and ended with me and did not identify me as a white man. And this was all due to Father.

It was during our run with the four Hammlicher fugitives that Mary came to her time. And before we were able to get back from the Canadian border to North Elba, she gave birth to a son, her next-to-last child, born strangled and crushed by the terrible trial of his birth, leaving Mary herself nearly dead and Father frantic with fear that he would lose her.

The excitement of our run to Canada had made our blood race, and we were still thrilled by it when we returned home. It was almost as if we had Miss Tubman herself aboard, her long rifle at the ready, and for the first time in months there was no tension between me and Lyman, which put even Father into a jolly mood as we rode the wagon back down along the rough roads from Massena. We had passed a party of Indian hunters along the way, Abenakis, French-speaking Algonquins from Lower Canada, a remnant of a remnant people, and had engaged in deep speculation amongst ourselves as to their racial origins, Lyman arguing for ancient Africa, Father for Asia, and Watson for the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Then, when we arrived at the farm, we were met by the grim sight of a birthing gone bad, the sad familiarity of it, the desolation and dashed hopes and expectations, the terrible, bloody, failed work of it, and all our male heartiness and camaraderie, our blustery pride in our good and difficult work, went suddenly silent and cold. Men go numb at these times, I discovered. That’s what they do. All feeling bleeds out of us. We suddenly realize that we know nothing of what it means to the woman who has carried this child inside her body for nine months and has suffered through the excruciating pain and work of bearing it and has had to see its tiny body emerge into the world lifeless, battered and bruised by the vain effort, a grotesque, sorrowful waste. We do think sorrow and grief and pity. But we feel nothing. Husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers, we all respond the same way. First we say to ourselves that we are to blame, then we say that we are unfairly deprived; we are the cause, we are not the agent; we are the custodian, we are a mere bystander: every feeling is cut down by its near opposite, so that in the end we come up numb, silent, too large, too rough, too coarse, too healthy and strong, to be in the same room with the poor, devastated women, our shattered, weary mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters.

Numb. Cold. This, I know, was how Father felt that June afternoon when we men, dirty, exhausted, full of our own importance and valor, entered the house and saw that Mary’s baby had been born dead. We are there at the beginning and almost never at the end. Father, Watson, Salmon, Oliver, and I, and it was how Lyman felt, too, and how he had felt when his own baby was born dead, I now understood. There’s no way to change this; we are men and must remain men. It was how my brothers felt, their young faces dark and worried with the fruitless search for an appropriate emotion. And it was how I felt. Numb. Cold.

But so different was it from when I had exploded with rage on the raw, gray morning seven weeks before, when Susan’s baby was born dead, that I was forced to remember the earlier event anew and this time to regard it with dismay. My rage then made no sense to me now. Lyman’s silence and withdrawal, which had seemed strange to me then, I now saw as having been the only sensible, normal response for a man. I should have reacted as he had. From what hole in my unconscious mind had that rage of mine emerged? Why had I not reacted instead with this all-too-familiar, cold cancellation of feeling that surrounded me now?

I saw that my anger had been caused not by Susan’s suffering and loss at all but by my guilt for wishing that I could have stood that morning in Lyman’s place instead of mine, for believing somehow that I should have been Susan’s husband and the father of her dead infant and should not have been this farmer standing at his side. I had felt guilt but could not show it, even to myself, and so I had pounded the walls with my fists and roared like a wounded lion. Lyman had instinctively understood the nature and source of my rage, and he had hastily withdrawn himself and his wife from my presence and had stayed away from us, until now, until Father had returned and displaced me and reshaped the family and its priorities. Until once again it was slavery, slavery, slavery. And — inescapably — race, race, race. Until once again, due to our obsession, we were, as it were, insane. Which to the Negroes, to Lyman, made us perfectly comprehensible and trustworthy — sane. Not just another dangerous batch of well-intentioned, Christian white folks.

Mary’s recovery from her delivery was slow and erratic. It had, in fact, been many years since she had been able to return to her normal state of good health following a pregnancy; she was no longer young, after all, and this had been an especially difficult and painful birthing, leaving her physically devastated, without even the joy of a new infant to help her heal.

Father managed to obtain several postponements of trial downstate, where he had been scheduled to defend himself and Mr. Perkins against their creditors, and he by-passed the July convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Syracuse, so that he could stay at the side of his wife throughout this period of her recovery. Night and day, he prayed at her side and nursed her back to health in his inimitable, tireless fashion, leaving most of the work on the farm and the risk and work of running the Underground Railroad to his sons and Lyman and the other residents of Timbuctoo. But it was not clear, until nearly a month had passed, that Mary would recover at all. She waxed and waned, came forward and fell back, with the entire family growing increasingly fretful. Each day commenced with an announcement from Father as to our mother’s condition, followed by appropriate family prayers, either for her continued good progress towards health or for a fresh resumption of that progress. Happily, the Lord blessed us all, and slowly the good woman began to come around, and from midsummer on, her progress was steady and in a straight line, until Father was freed once again to resume his normal activities at his usual, furious pace, exercising over us and everyone associated with those activities his characteristic authority and force.

The farm was flourishing, religion was properly established, and our white neighbors had begun again to join us in aiding our black neighbors and the fugitive slaves. Sister Ruth and Henry Thompson were set to marry in the fall, as soon as Henry and his brothers finished building the couple a proper cabin on a piece of land that his father had deeded over to them. Miss Tubman and associates of Mr. Douglass were steadily sending escaped slaves north to us from Utica, Syracuse, and Troy, two and sometimes three times a fortnight, and though ours was a difficult route, it was now the safest, as slave-catchers and their helpers no longer dared to come slinking around North Elba or Timbuctoo. The word was out: the mad abolitionist, John Brown, and his sons and neighbors and a pack of Gerrit Smith’s niggers were holed up there in the mountains all armed and ready to drive off anyone who came looking for fugitives.

Emboldened by this change in the community, the residents of Timbuctoo began to move about the settlement more freely and to mingle with the whites in a more regular fashion, showing up at barn-raisings, for instance, in considerable numbers and taking their ease down at the grist mill or joining the whites after church at a huckleberry-picking prayer picnic up on the sunny slopes of Whiteface Mountain. On several of these occasions, I saw Susan, always at a distance from her, which distance I studiously kept, but each time I saw her — a glimpse of her coffee-brown face, half-hidden by her bonnet, or her shoulder and arm, visible for a second, until a crowd of Negroes surrounded her — my heart pounded like a hammer, and the blood rushed to my ears, and if I happened to be speaking with a person, I began to stammer and had to lapse into silence or else sound foolish as a mooncalf. I averted my gaze and then stole glances out from under it, until she disappeared from my sight.

She, of course, made no attempt to speak with me. Nor did Lyman, when he was with her. Any initiative would have to be mine, and I had neither the courage nor the clarity to take it.

I know now what was the cause and true nature of my fixation on the woman, how thwarted and misshapen it was, how far from its true object; but I did not understand it then in the least. I was ashamed of it, naturally; but ashamed for all the wrong reasons.

Often, at an hour close to dawn, I found myself, after a long night of prowling alone through the forests, lurking in the close vicinity of the cabins of Timbuctoo, peering through the mist and the languorous, sifting pines at the very cabin where she slept beside her husband. I would crouch in low bushes for hours, lost in a sort of reverie, my heart furiously pounding, my hands trembling, my legs weak and watery, as if I were a hunter who at last had sighted his long-sought prey. Then I would suddenly shudder and come back to myself and, horrified, would steal away home.

These prowls were not unlike my sordid, secret, nighttime walks several years earlier in the streets and alleyways of Springfield, and my family accepted them more or less as they had then, which is to say, as evidence of a solitary young man’s restless nature. And to a degree, they were correct to think that. Also, I always carried my rifle and sometimes brought home the carcass of a raccoon or fisher or some other nocturnal animal, as explanation for my having been out so late and long. As long as they did not interfere with my work on the farm, Father did not acknowledge my late night absences; perhaps he did not even notice them, so preoccupied was he that summer, first with Mary’s long recovery, then with the planting and further clearing of our woodlands, and with his local abolitionist activities and the Railroad. Also, he was busily educating his neighbors as to the advantages and virtues of raising blooded stock by selling them some of his Spanish merino ewes and carting his best ram around for stud and showing off and now and then selling one of his red Devon cattle. After lengthy negotiations by mail with a farmer in Litchfield, Connecticut, whom he knew from his past dealings with Wadsworth & Wells, he had succeeded in having a fine young Devon bull delivered as far north as Westport for him. I do not know how he paid for it, as such an animal did not come cheaply; possibly with promises of eventual returns from stud fees, possibly with a portion of the monies he accepted from our neighbors to help feed and clothe the fugitives. It was not beneath Father to mix ingredients like that; despite all, he was still unaccountably optimistic when it came to financial matters. But in early July, he sent Salmon and Oliver over the mountains to the lake to retrieve the beast, and soon it had become a source of much pride and the occasion for his traveling about the settlement in the attempt to improve the stock of his friends and neighbors.

Thus, except for my brothers, who watched me go out late and come back in the early pre-dawn hours, my nighttime prowls went largely unnoticed by the family and, in a significant sense, unnoticed by me as well. My brothers teased me some, privately, for they suspected that I was secretly courting one of the maidens in the settlement, but they did not otherwise speak of it.

Then in August, like most of the farm families of the region, we took ourselves, our best produce and manufactured items, and our finest livestock down to the Essex County Fair, in Westport. We loaded the wagon with jugs of maple syrup, Mary’s and Ruth’s quilts, blankets made from the wool of our sheep, willow reed baskets and fishing weirs, tanned hides, and various leather items the boys had made during the winter — wallets, purses, sheaths for knives, belts, harnesses, and, a specialty of Oliver’s, plaited bullwhips. Father made up a small, handpicked herd of merino sheep, together with his finest red Devon heifer and the widely admired new bull, and off we went — a triumphant return to Westport, as it were, proof that our spiritual errand into the wilderness, despite our reputation as non-farming, abolitionist troublemakers, had turned out an agricultural success, too.

Father rode at the front on his fine sorrel mare, which later carried him all through the Kansas wars with great strength and courage. He loved that animal as he had no other and trusted no one not a family member to care for her and trusted not even us to ride her. I drove the wagon, with Mary and Ruth beside me, the younger children all crammed in with our cargo, and the boys came along behind with Father’s little herd of blooded stock, helped by our black collie dogs, the type Father preferred over all others, despite their diminutive size and their uselessness for hunting.

We arrived in mid-afternoon, in high excitement. There was a light off-shore breeze, and in the east, across the glittering waters of the lake, a towering white bank of clouds rose from the softly rounded hills of Vermont into the bright blue sky, where it broke apart and scudded off in pieces to the south, leaving us here on the western shore to bask in bright sunshine. It was the first agricultural fair ever held in the region, a visible sign that the northern wilderness of New York State had finally been settled and conquered by farmers. People came to it from all over the Adirondacks. They trekked in from their log and daub-and-wattle cabins in the furthest, most isolated valley and bog — squatters, grubstakers, miners, shag-bearded trappers and hunters dressed in the skins of their prey. Merchants and storekeepers, boatswains, blacksmiths, and coopers rode down in carriages from the prosperous shoreline towns to the north, like Port Kent and Plattsburgh, or rode up from Port Henry and Ticonderoga or sailed across from Shelburne and Charlotte in Vermont, readier to buy goods and livestock than to sell. The big dairy farmers and sheepmen rode in from their fifty-year-old farms on the broad, rolling meadows of the older villages inland, like Elizabethtown, Jay, and Keene, their wagons and carts stacked high with the fruits of the year’s labor, touting their skills and bearing evidence of the generosity of the fertile Lake Champlain and Au Sable River floodplains. From the newer outlying settlements tucked up among the mountains, North Elba, Tupper Lake, and Wilmington, came the poorer, hardscrabble farmers, folks like us and the Thompsons and the Brewsters and the Nashes, recent settlers who were still chopping small fields out of the upland forests and had not much to show for it yet, although we Browns intended to give that the lie. Many of the citizens of Timbuctoo came over also, a two-day trek on foot, bearing on their backs and in wheelbarrows — for they had no wagons at that time and no draft animals — garden produce to sell and exhibit in the halls, hams and maple syrup and candy and cheeses, packs of furs and hides, caged fowl, and a variety of crafted objects: reed baskets, woven hats, and prettily dyed cloth. There was even a small number of Indians, Abenakis and Micmacs, who had paddled down along the lake shore in canoes from their last remaining encampments, north of Plattsburgh, coming more out of curiosity, it seemed, than to exhibit wares or to buy and sell livestock and farm goods, for they had none to sell and no money with which to buy. Their abject poverty and loneliness were apparent to all, and they seemed more like refugees in the land than its original masters, a people exiled without ever having left home. It was difficult to know how to feel towards them, and so we tended to watch them in silence and from a distance and not to speak of them at all, even to one another.

This was the largest gathering of people that Mary and the children had seen since leaving Springfield and the largest gathering of northcountry people that any of us had ever seen. Young men and women strolled hand-in-hand openly, and gangs of boys roughed each other up and organized teams for ball games and other sports, and girls walked demurely in pairs in their vicinity. Old folks and distant family members renewed connections with one another, while men compared crops, animals, and prices and talked politics, and women set their smallest children free to run and turned to one another in friendship and cheerful confidentiality.

There was a quarter-mile race track without a hoofprint on it yet and a white, freshly painted grandstand ready to be filled that evening for the first time. Behind the grandstand were ten or twelve long, low barns for livestock, and beyond the barns was a pair of fenced circles with stone boats, where ox and horse-pulling contests were already under way. Beyond these were several large exhibition halls for showing and judging produce and crafts, and then rows of small, canvas-sided booths where shifty-eyed characters plied the crowd with games of chance and sold cheap novelties and gew-gaws. Nearby, clouds of fragrant smoke poured from pit-fires where flocks of chickens were grilled and whole hogs roasted on spits and potatoes and unshucked ears of corn cooked in the ashes.

We registered our livestock and installed them in the barns and pitched our camp alongside several other families from North Elba, in a grove of low pines directly behind the sheep barn, and in short order we all separated from one another, each to follow his or her particular interest. Father headed straight for the sheep barn and, of course, very soon found himself lecturing on the proper care of sheep and wool to anyone willing to listen, a sizeable number of farmers and sheepmen, in fact, who had on their own gathered around the box-stalls where he had installed his merinos, for the large, healthy, heavy-fleeced animals were an excellent advertisement of Father’s skills and knowledge. Ruth went off in search of Henry Thompson, who was not at his family’s camp; Mary and the girls, Annie and Sarah, disappeared in the direction of the exhibition halls; and the boys, Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, raced away with a gang of young fellows from North Elba, leaving me to wander the fairgrounds alone.

I saw her almost at once. I had lingered in the sheep barn, listening to the Old Man hold forth for a few moments, and then, when I caught myself saying his sentences silently ahead of him, had drifted away, and as I passed out of the low shed and made my way towards the booths on the midway — suddenly, there she was. She was a considerable distance away but glinting brightly in the crowd, like gold in gravel, outside one of the exhibition halls — she was the only Negro in a group of white women and girls that included my stepmother, Mary, and sisters Annie and Sarah. Susan’s pale gray bonnet hid her face from my view, but I knew instantly, from her posture and the precise tilt of her head and the easy gestures of her hands, that it was she, and my heart leapt up.

She and Mary talked together for a few minutes longer, and then Mary embraced her and, with the other girls and women, drew away and strolled inside the hall, leaving her to stand alone outside with a characteristically bemused expression on her face. She was wearing a red and white plaid dress, which I recognized as one that Ruth had given her last winter, and carried a wicker basket, over which she had draped her shawl. For a moment, she seemed unsure of which direction to go, but finally she turned to her left and made her way towards the fairway.

I followed at a discreet distance, until she turned into a narrow, shaded space between the second and third exhibition halls. No one else was there, and I quickened my pace and came up behind her and said her name.

She turned abruptly, her dark eyes open wide, frightened to see a man suddenly this close to her, for I had come to within a few feet of her before speaking. Then she recognized me, and the fear left her face, replaced at once by a heaviness — a sadness, as I saw it, which produced in me a corresponding sadness and made me wish to embrace her, but I withheld myself and in a trembling voice said that I was happy to see her.

“It’s been a long while, Mister Brown,” she answered. “I was pleased to see your mother looking so strong again. And Annie and little Sarah.”

“Yes. We all miss you, Susan.”

“Well. That’s nice, Mister Brown. Thank you.”

We made light, nervous conversation for a few moments, asking after each other’s health, speaking of the weather, the surprising size of the fairgrounds, the great number of people, and so on — until I suddenly heard myself blurt, “Susan, I must tell you, Susan, that in his heart my father has replaced me. He’s replaced me with Lyman.”

“What… what do you mean?”

“I bear Lyman no resentment for this, but it’s hurt me, Susan.”

She appeared shocked and said that it could not be true. “You shouldn’t be envious of Lyman. He loves and admires your father over all other men,” she said. “But you, you’re your father’s son, Mister Brown. And your father, he loves you for that, I know. More than he can ever love Lyman.”

“No! You don’t understand. You see, Lyman is more important to him than I am. And with good reason.”

She sighed heavily. “What are you wanting me to say to you, Mister Brown?”

I was silent for a moment. Finally, I said, “Please, just tell me why you’ve moved away from us.”

For the first time, she shifted her eyes away from mine. “Well, I explained it to your mother and your sister back then, back when we first decided. It was due to Lyman wanting to farm his own land and to live in his own house. That’s all. We been with you all for a long time.”

“No, not Lyman! I know why he left, and I know the real reason, too! I’m the cause of that. No, I want you to tell me why you left us.”

“It’s very simple, Mister Brown. I went where my husband said. That’s the whole of it. And you’re not the cause of anything Lyman done, Mister Brown,” she declared. Then she lifted herself to her full height and said, “This is not a right conversation for us to be having.”

“Yes, it is, because we need to talk. I need you to hear me. Even though you’ll despise me, because it’s… it’s a sin for me to feel for you as I do, and I have no right to say anything about it to you, because—”

She placed her hand gently on my arm and stopped me. “Mister Brown, please, sir, I know you’re a decent man. You are. But you are all mixed up” she declared, looking straight at me. “I’m saying this to you, Mister Brown, because I like you, I truly do, and I know you don’t mean me no harm. But Lyman, he told me what happened last winter between you and him, when you come back from all your travels to England and you beat on him out there in the barn that day. So I know things, Mister Brown. Maybe more even than Lyman knows, since he is a man and is a little mixed up about these same things, too. But I’ve watched you, Mister Brown, and felt sorry for you, because I can see that you are all confused and mixed up and angered. Maybe due to your father. Who is a strong, good man doing good works, and he believes that he needs your help, so he won’t send you off from him. Mainly that, I think. That, and us being coloreds and you wanting to help our people like you do. It’s the two things. They make you think about Lyman too much, which is how you come now to be thinking about me too much.”

“No;’ I said. “It’s not that. None of it.”

“Just stop that now! Stop. I’m not angry with you, Mister Brown, because I know you don’t mean any harm. But I’m a colored woman, and my husband is a colored man. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation, you know, not a word of it, if my husband and I was white people.”

I stepped back from her. “Yes. You’re right. Please, then, please tell me what should I do.”

“Do? Not for me to say, Mister Brown,” she said tenderly. “I know you want to be natural and peaceful and respectful with colored folks. But if you can’t, well, maybe you should stick to your own kind. Lots of good folks, white and colored alike, that’s what they do. Go away from your father and live amongst white people. Why not go out there to Ohio, Mister Brown, where your other brothers are, and find yourself a wife and settle down with her?”

“A white woman.”

“Well, yes.”

For a long time, I said nothing. Then I whispered, “I can’t do that.” She smiled at me, but as if from a great height. “Well, Mister Brown, then I don’t know what you can do,” she said. And, abruptly, she turned her back and walked away.

Chapter 15

“You ain’t half the man your father is.”

The words came without warning, and they chilled my blood. They do even now, more than a half-century later. They were true then; they are true now.

The first time I heard them, they were uttered by Lyman; but after that, from then on, they were said to me in my own voice, the sentence dripping into my ear like slow poison. You ain’t half the man your father is. To silence them, I would, again and again, for years, be obliged to rouse myself into a fury, a literal blood-letting, making of my whole body a visible and tangible shout. For as long as my shout reverberated in the air, I would not hear them.

You ain’t half the man your father is. And who was he? Twice the man I was, and twice the man he seemed. And yet not half himself, either. Before Kansas, the Old Man had always been larger than his reputation; after Kansas, he was smaller. Although, over time, he himself changed not a whit. I changed, certainly, and nearly everyone else changed. But not Father. Merely, his reputation caught up to the reality and then surpassed it, so that the man who, outside the family, had been known as a somewhat peculiar radical abolitionist with a violent temperament, a somber activist with a huge reservoir of religious enthusiasm, a wild fellow who, despite his vague, crack-brained plan for a slave insurrection, was nonetheless oddly trusted by influential and otherwise rational Negroes and was likewise understandably mistrusted by most whites — that man came over time to be known as a heroic guerilla leader, a courageous and brilliant military man who feared only God and had no other ambition than to bring slavery to an end. He came quickly to be known as a magnificent fighter on horseback, an inspiration and example to lesser men, which is to say, to all decent, anti-slavery white men: for none of them, no matter how thoroughly he loathed slavery and loved his Negro brethren, in his loathing and love was as pure as Captain John Brown, as clear-eyed as he, as unequivocal and uncompromised as he. So that when my father-Father, the Old Man, Mister Brown, Citizen John Brown — got himself turned into Captain John Brown, it was not merely a military rank that had been added to his name but an honorific, and the rank, as if he had been given it at birth, instantly became an integral part of his name, permanently attached to his identity, like that of Governor Bradford, Admiral Nelson, Chief Tecumseh.

In North Elba, though, and to Lyman Epps especially, Father was known entirely for what he was — known more clearly for that to Lyman than even to me. So when Lyman told me I was not half that, he downright shriveled me. He struck my manhood away and left me standing before him a child. Worse than a child: a failed adult.

Most men secretly know that there lies hidden inside them the boy they once were and believe they still are, and all the work a man does in his life is accompanied by various stratagems designed to keep that child hidden from view. From his own view, especially. But that night in late summer at Indian Pass, which lies yonder in the darkness seven miles to the south of our old farmhouse, when Lyman raised his lip and sneered and then declared that I was not half the man my father was, he made it impossible for me ever after to hide my true self from my false self. It was as if, that night in the cave, Lyman were the only man alive who could testify as to both my true character and the true character of my father: he was our sole shared character witness and, thus, was the only man capable of making the comparison between me and Father and making it stick.

I don’t know why this was so. Lyman knew us both well, of course, intimately, domestically, out in the fields, and on the Railroad running slaves north; for several years, he had observed both Father and me more closely than had anyone else who was not a family member. But that was not it. The truth is, I made Lyman the authoritative witness myself; I myself validated his testimony.

As instructed by the Old Man, Lyman and I had been three days and nights down along Indian Pass, cutting a trail wide enough for a man on horseback to get through to North Elba from the old Tahawus mining camp. Father would be away that September, once again — this time, as usual, for the last time, he hoped — settling his besieged financial affairs with Mr. Perkins, and he had charged the two of us with this task before leaving. The Underground Railroad station at Timbuctoo, with its links south to Tahawus and north to Canada, was the one segment of Father’s Subterranean Passway that he felt he could control, and he wished to make it a model and a beginning for the whole. He intended to make it off-limits at pain of death for slave-catchers, man-stealers, and bounty-hunters, so that once he had made this small segment of the Railroad secure, with armed men posted at the passes and gorges and up on strategic ridges, with fortified resting places and storehouses along the way, and with only the most trusted radical whites living in the farmlands below the Adirondacks allowed to provide arms, provisions, and safe houses, he would begin extending the Passway southward into the Appalachians, mile by mile into the mountainous forests of eastern Pennsylvania, until he came to western Maryland, where he would commence his invasion of the enemy’s homeland itself. By this means we would bleed the South white, he declared. His fantasy for years; and then his dream; and finally his plan, too: now the three had at last coalesced, and he was beginning in this small way in our very neighborhood to put all three, fantasy, dream, and plan, into action.

At the Tahawus mining camp, called the Upper Village, there was a new manager, a man named Seybolt Johnson from Albany, replacing the previous supervisor, the infamous Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Johnson was a genuine abolitionist, faithful and true, who had worked the Underground Railroad for years out of Albany and Troy. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, he, like so many others, had sought alternative routes north for the escaping slaves, and as he was a longtime employee of the Adirondack Mining Company’s main office, in Albany, he knew, even before he assumed the position of manager of the Tahawus mines, that he could play an important role in aiding the Underground Railroad out there in the wilderness. Which he had done, for on his arrival at the Upper Village, he at once contacted Father and quickly arranged to regularize the passage of escaped slaves from towns and cities south of Albany to the Upper Village mining camp and on through the northwoods to Timbuctoo, North Elba, Paul Smith’s famous hunting lodge, Massena, and Canada.

Father trusted Mr. Johnson, mainly because Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman trusted him, but also because, immediately upon his arrival at Tahawus, Mr. Johnson had set about to improve the lot of his Irish workers, who had suffered so terribly under the iron hand of the hypocritical Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Seybolt Johnson was that rarity, a white man of the managerial class who felt towards his workers and Negroes alike that there but for the grace of God went he. “The man is a true Christian,” Father had pronounced after his first visit with him. “We can work with him.”

Thus Lyman and I, with axes and crowbars, were sent out to bush the old footpath through Indian Pass and make it into a proper trail. Starting at Timbuctoo, we worked from north to south and in three days had gotten nearly to the halfway point, about seven miles in from North Elba, with Mount Colden on our right and, hovering above its shoulder, the huge, rocky chest and head of Mount Mclntyre. Mount Marcy — or Tahawus, as we still called it, Cloudsplitter, the old Indian name for the giant — was on our left, its great shadow permanently cast across the rocky bottom where we labored day after day and camped in a sweet-smelling balsam lean-to at night. Indian Pass was dangerous, rough ground. A man or a horse could easily fall and break a leg or tumble from a ledge into a rocky pit. The long, narrow defile was shaded in the daytime, and down in the gorge between the mountains, the Northern Star was blocked out at night, and moonlight rarely fell, and a man had to be able to trust the feel of the trail under his feet in order to get through. It was all too easy to get lost there, even at midday, to wander inadvertently down a bear path or deer trail and soon become disoriented in the darkness and dense woods. People had been known to disappear into these woods and starve or freeze to death, their picked bones found years later by a lone hunter or trapper.

The pass itself was colder than the peaks and cliffs that towered above it, and in some places slubs of old, gray snow remained year-round. High, sheer walls of mossy rock rose up beside us and disappeared into the mists overhead, while below on the floor of the gorge we chopped, dug, and shoved, and when necessary laid down narrow log bridges to cross the gills and brooks and the peaty muskegs that abounded there. We would finish one arduous task of clearing and move on to the next bend in the path and instantly come to a new obstacle — a fallen, primeval spruce tree six feet in circumference, a head-high tangle of thick, twisted roots, a mudslide, a wall of enormous boulders — which we were obliged to cut or move aside when we could or, when we couldn’t, carve a pathway through lesser trees or around smaller rocks. Our simple intent, our one thought and standard, was to make it possible for a horse or a string of horses, by day or night in any season, to carry frightened, exhausted fugitives from slavery through to freedom. That thought drove and organized us, and as we worked we talked of little else.

At night, though, lying back on our mattress of layered balsam boughs, with the fire guttering out, we spoke of other things, naturally. Lyman and I had not been together like this for a long time, a sad time, which I regarded with considerable regret. But out here alone in the wilderness, as of old, we soon found ourselves speaking our innermost thoughts to one another once again, talking of our respective childhoods and early days, our hopes for the future, and our beliefs regarding all first things. Our lives in every way were significantly different, but in a paradoxical way, this let us know all the better how we ourselves might have lived, had Lyman been born white and I black. Despite our differences, Lyman and I regarded ourselves, except for race, as remarkably similar, the way that lovers often do.

This is a complicated and painful recognition for a black and a white man to make. On both sides, envy and anger get confusedly mingled with love and trust. And so it was with us. Or at least with me. I now knew, for instance, that my thwarted love for Susan was my love for Lyman gone all wrong, fatally corrupted by guilt and envy. I did not want to love her — I did not love her at all — so much as I wanted to neutralize my powerful feelings for Lyman. For they had frightened me: they were unnatural; they were the unavoidable consequence of a manly love finding itself locked inside a white maris racialist guilt, of Abel’s sweet, brotherly trust betrayed by Cain’s murderous envy.

We were on that third night out seated before our fire, after having eaten a supper of trout pulled from a pool in the trickling beginnings of the Au Sable and potatoes carried in from home, and we were speculating on the nature of the earth before the arrival of the plants and animals — whether it had been a warm planet, as some scientists were then claiming, or cold and covered with ice, as others thought, or whether the Bible was to be believed in this matter in a literal way, when so many self-professed Christians nowadays, even including Father, regarded its description of God’s creation of the earth as figurative and allegorical.

“Either way!’ Lyman said, “we know God created everything. The whole kit an’ caboodle. Question is, first time around, was it ice or was it fire? Did things heat up to get to where they are now, or cool down? With all that business about the darkness and the firmaments between the firmaments, it must’ve been ice,” he declared. “I’m holding out for a world of ice that God sets to slowly melting over the years, especially in the years since the birth of Jesus, as the Christian religion gets spread over the world. Starts way down in the Garden of Eden and moves out from there. Which is why the Bible comes from the desert anyhow. Egypt and all that. On account of it being close to Eden and it being already warm there first.”

Lyman’s accent had slipped to the South, as it usually did when we were at ease alone together and as I imagined it did when he was speaking only with black people. He slurred his vowels, dropped consonants, and let his grammar follow different, less logical rules and conventions than those that guided white people’s grammar. When he talked this way, which was his natural speech, I was often inclined to let my own speech drift over in unconscious mimicry, for it was to me an attractive way to speak — smoother and slower, softer and more intimately expressive than my own habitual pronunciation and grammar permitted. I envied its intimacy especially and longed to escape from the formality of my accent and the impersonal logic of my sentences. But whenever I heard myself trying it, I grew severely embarrassed, as I could not speak Lyman’s English without hearing myself in blackface. I felt like an inept imposter, an unskilled actor mouthing lines not his own.

Reluctantly, I would return at once to my accustomed manner of speaking, which had been influenced so profoundly by Father’s that, in the context created by Lyman’s fluency and ease, my words seemed to be coming from Father’s mind and my voice from his lips. Consequently, instead of sounding like an untalented minstrel showman making a mockery of Southern Negro speech, I sounded to myself like a tinny, nervous imitation of my old-fashioned Yankee father.

I have no idea of how I sounded to Lyman’s ears. If he envied the formality of my pronunciation and the rigorous, constricting logic of my grammar, he showed no signs of it. Merely, when amongst white people, he spoke in the manner of a poor, uneducated Southern farmer who was white also, and since he was, after all, a Southerner, it seemed authentic enough, at least to white people. Perhaps he was simply a better actor than I and could move from Negro to white speech without exposing the gap between his true and false selves. I, it seemed, could not, no matter how I spoke. Which is one reason why I so often chose to remain silent. Until now. When there is no one left to hear me but the dead, and you, Miss Mayo.

Lyman said, “There’s still lots of places around here, even, where the old, original world ain’t got warm yet. So you can still see how it was back in them olden days, if you wants to. Got ‘em close by, even.” He told me then of an ice-cave located not a hundred rods from where we sat. There were a number of ice-caves up here along Indian Pass, he said, which were known to the people of Timbuctoo and carefully avoided by them. “On account of them ol’ African superstitions an’ such. But they don’t bother me none. It’s older folks, mostly, who is scared to go inside. They warns you off ‘em like the devil live there. Ain’t nobody live there. Too cold, ‘specially for the devil;’ he said with a short laugh. “You wants to see one?”

I said sure, and we each stuck a pitchy pine-branch into the fire and, torches in hand, marched single-file into the darkness beyond our camp, moving uphill along a rocky rivulet. Soon we approached the sheer, high walls of stone that mark the highest point of the pass, where the trickling waters split and half the trickles run south and grow in time into the mighty Hudson and half run north and become the Au Sable and empty finally into the St. Lawrence. Here Lyman turned off the narrow path to his right and began to scramble uphill over riprapped rocks and tangled roots. I followed close behind.

Suddenly, I felt a breath of cold air in my face, as if a huge, dead thing had exhaled. Lyman disappeared from my sight, and I thought the freezing breath of the dying monster had blown his torch out, for all I saw before me was a clutch of low balsams and behind them the perpendicular face of the rock wall. “Lyman! Where are you?” I cried.

His voice came back all hollowed out: he was inside the cave. “Cup your torch, and come forward,” he said.

I did as instructed, and the balsams easily parted, and in a second I found myself gone from the familiar world of trees and mountain streams and purple-blue night sky. I was standing beside Lyman inside a high, rock-walled chamber — standing in the very mouth of the monster. Looking down its half-illuminated length in the flickering light and leaping shadows, I could see the throat and belly. It was as if we had been swallowed whole by Jonah’s whale. The chamber was freezing cold and the air damp and still, and our warm breath blew pale clouds that lingered before our faces. There were long, white icicles hanging from the crackled sides and sharply angled top of the cave, and thick, yellowish tongues of ancient ice along the floor, dirtied and stained by the animals that over the years had wintered here — the old beasts: bears, catamounts, fisher cats. No human could have stayed here long; it was too cold, too dark, too cruel a habitation to visit, except briefly and only to escape blizzard, flood, or fire.

Then the ice-cave was suddenly like a tomb to me, a stone sepulchre, and we were locked inside it, as if a rockslide had sealed off the entry from the world outside. I imagined this but also for a moment believed it — that we two were actually trapped inside this cold, rock-walled chamber together, and no one knew. No one would come and dig us out. No one would ever find our bones or know what had happened here. We had been at last cut loose from everything in the world outside that had long separated us one from the other — the color of our skin, our war against slavery, Susan, Father. Even God! It was a vision that promised the end of solitude. I glimpsed in this moment the possibility of escape at last from my terrible isolation. The loneliness that had cursed me since childhood and that had surrounded me like a caul seemed for the first time to stretch and extend itself like a pregnant woman’s belly to include another human being inside, who was a man like me, who was my twin, myself doubled and beloved, and who was at this instant looking back at me with love.

I reached down and shoved the unlit end of my torch into a notch between two rocks beside me so that it continued to burn. Then I drew out my knife and opened it and placed it into Lyman’s right hand and laid my right hand on his shoulder.

He looked at the knife and at me. “Why you givin’ me this?”

“I have a confession to make.”

“No,” he said in a low voice. “You don’t.”

“Yes, I do. And I’m ready to die for it. But only at your hand.”

He snorted, derisively almost. “I don’t want no confession from you, Owen Brown. Whatever you done, you already done it anyhow.”

“No. Not yet. My confession will be the act.”

“Yes, you has. Ain’t nothin’ you confess to me I don’t already know. Susan told me how you spoke to her. An’ I seen you sneakin’ ‘round our cabin nights. And now you wants me to forgive you for it? Or else to kill you?” He laughed. “No. I ain’t gonna give you that, not neither one. You wants to kill yourself, now, that’s different. Why not anyhow? Sneakin’ ’round after a colored woman, a married black woman. Like she’s not as good as a white woman and deserving the same respect? Or like I’m not as good as a white man? When here you is, the son of John Brown.” He curled his lip and stared me in the face. “You ain’t half the man your father is,” he said.

He handed the open knife back to me, turned, and left the cave for the world outside, while I dropped precipitously down a well of darkness, his words echoing in my ears as I tumbled and pitched and turned — descending into myself once again: no-man.

In time, my torch flickered and finally went out and fell over, hissing like a snake against the ice it had fallen on. I stood alone in the darkness and cold of the cave like that for a very long while, before I stirred and groped along the granite wall and found my way back out. By the time I stumbled back into our camp below, Lyman had wrapped himself in his blanket and was asleep at the further end of our lean-to, or appeared to be. I drew my blanket around me and curled up opposite him. But I did not sleep. Like a dead man, I lay with my eyes wide open, unblinking, staring at the night sky, with no words and no human voice in my ears but the words and voice of Lyman’s terrible truth.

For the two days that followed, we worked in near silence, speaking to one another politely but only when necessary, as we chopped trees and roots and pried, rolled, and lugged stones off the path that led through the mountains to the Tahawus mining camp. What was there now to say? It had already all been said — and Lyman’s final words to me in the ice-cave had permanently closed off any further conversational intimacies between us. I had not told him what by me still wanted telling, but he had made it clear that whatever I might say, it needed no hearing from him, and I could only accept that judgement.

Hard labor it was, then, made harder by the silent distance that stretched between us, and at night we fell back into our respective nests and dropped quickly into sleep. Days, it rained periodically and then cleared, and raggedy blue skies appeared overhead for a while, and then it rained again. For the most part, Lyman and I worked separately and as far from one another as possible. The nights were cool, and a steady wind blew out of the southwest up along the narrow defile, twitching the high pines and spruce trees into their raspy, long song.

We were now well beyond the crest of the pass, and as we worked our way further along it, the burble of south-flowing rills and brooks soon became the crash and thrum of a large stream — the Opalescent, which emptied into Lake Colden below and then became the headwaters of the mighty Hudson. At night, we heard the gruff cough of a bear, the distant howl of wolves, the dour call of the owl, and at dawn the song of the whip-poor-will and the wood thrush, and the raucous cries of ravens on the heights. But our human voices rarely joined the forest chorus, rarely intruded on our private thoughts or broke our self-imposed solitudes.

On the morning of the third day following our visit to the ice-cave, we came out of the long, forested gorge onto the northern shore of Lake Colden, which stretched before us black and glittering in the sun. From the marshy shore on our right where the Opalescent emptied into the lake, a pair of loons rose like scratches on the sky and crossed overhead, disappearing into the spruce forest. A broad grove of drowned trees spread along the further shore, standing like the gaunt pikes of a medieval army. For a while, we worked our way along the western shore of the oval lake, keeping to the high, dry ground amongst beeches and hickory trees, blazing the trees to mark the trail, and moving at a pretty good clip, for the ground was relatively smooth now and there was not much heavy cover — ferns, briars, and hackberry thatch, mostly, due to its having been scorched a few years back by fire.

By midday, we were nearly past the lake and were about to re-enter the deep forest that for a mile or so of short ridges and gullies led gradually downhill to the mining camp; we expected to finish our job and reach the camp by dark. It had become our habit to stop at noon to rest and eat dried venison and apples and corn bread, gone stale by now, and Lyman, who had been working a few rods ahead of me, leaned his axe and crowbar against a birch tree and headed on a line towards a narrow, flat rock that extended a ways into the lake. I put my tools and pack down and followed, not for companionship anymore, but because his pack held our small stock of food.

Although it was a seasonably cool day, the sun shone down brightly, and the sky was cloudless and stark blue, a taut blanket that stretched from horizon to horizon. In a moment, I had caught up to Lyman, who was pushing his way through a chest-high thicket of willows. We were in a low, wet place and could see but the tip of the rock just beyond the willows, and only now and then. I cut to his right, following what appeared to be an easier path to the rock, and when I came out of the thicket, Lyman was on my left and a few feet behind me. He was still struggling to get through the willows. But when I turned and extended my hand to help him, he had ceased moving altogether. On his sweating face was sheer terror — as if he had seen Satan or God.

I turned slowly around, moving just my head, and saw what terrified him, and it terrified me as well — a long, tawny-gray mountain lion backed up to the edge of the rock, with nothing but the glittering lake behind it and dark water on both sides and we two puny humans in front. The lion had been surprised by our sudden, upwind approach, and now it no doubt believed itself trapped by the water and by us. The animal was no more than ten feet from me, its great tail switching like a snake. Its shoulders were hunched low and its hindquarters lower, coiled to spring. Its small, feline head was nearly all mouth, as if it had been split in half by a hatchet, with black lips and tongue and enormous fangs.

I had never seen a mountain lion alive this close, although with Watson I had tracked and shot two the previous year up on Mclntyre.

I was as fascinated and thrilled by its fierce beauty as frightened of it. I had no weapon, other than the pocketknife I had pathetically proffered to Lyman back in the ice-cave. But I knew that Lyman had his pistol in his rucksack. I stood squarely between him and the lion and had a much better shot at it than he. And I was the better marksman anyhow, and was even to some degree famous for it, while Lyman was equally famous for his inaccuracy.

I showed him my open hand, and with extreme delicacy and without taking his eyes off the beast, he drew the pistol out and extended it to me. Moving slowly and keeping my eyes fixed on the huge cat’s yellow eyes, I took the butt of the gun into my right hand, squared my body, and laid the barrel across my left forearm, which due to the old injury was as steady as a window sill and accounted in no small degree for my good marksmanship. Lifting my forearm, I aimed at the lion’s pale brow, at the top of the inverted V mid-point between its eyes. I thought I could smell the lion. I remember, as I drew back the hammer with my thumb, inhaling deeply — rotten apples — when, without warning, at the last possible second for it to flee, the lion sprang from the rock. It crossed through the air some eight or ten feet to our left and towards the shore, its forepaws reaching the gravelly bank with ease, its hind paws barely touching the water, and was gone into the brush. It crashed away in the distance for a few seconds more, and then silence. Not even birdsong.

Slowly, I exhaled and at once began to tremble. My legs went all watery. I was glad, truly glad, and relieved that it had escaped. Seen this close, the animal was too beautiful to wish dead. I was not altogether sure I could have killed it with the pistol anyhow, for I would have had but one shot, and the lion, a large male, appeared to weigh close to two hundred pounds and, wounded, would have been even more dangerous than when merely startled and inadvertently trapped on its peninsula. Still trembling, I stepped up onto the rock and sat down on the spot of bright sunshine where the lion had been taking its solitary leisure a few moments before and handed the pistol up to Lyman, who had followed me.

“That was the biggest lion I ever seen,” he said in a low, amazed voice, to which I merely nodded. “Don’t know who was more surprised, though, him or us. Never come up on one like that before,” he said. He was holding the pistol at his side, and I looked at it and suddenly realized that I had neglected to let the hammer down — the pistol was still cocked. Hair-triggered. If he mishandled it, the pistol would fire.

I stared up into his narrow, dark, closed face: he was thinking not of the gun in his hand but of the lion, I saw — the beautiful, powerful, ferocious mountain lion, an animal from another world than ours, a beast controlled and driven, from its first breath to its last, by hungers and fears that Lyman and I had been privy to only in the most terrible moments of our lives. We could not forget those moments; the lion could not distinguish them from any other. The beast’s sudden, long leap from the rock across water to land had been extraordinarily beautiful and at once familiar and strange, like the best, last line of a beloved hymn, a graceful arc from bright, certain death to the dark, impenetrable mystery of the forest. Why could I not make that same leap? From my place out there on the back of the rough, gray rock, I peered across the water to the thicket of willows at the shore and the trees beyond, up the beech- and hickory-covered slope to the spruces and the tangled heights and rocky parapets above, where I imagined the lion now, moving in solitude freely and safely all day and night, tracking down its prey and suddenly leaping upon it, pulling it to the ground with its great weight and the brutal fury of its attack, rolling it over in the soft, rust-colored pine needles, and burying its hungry mouth in the body.

I heard the explosion of the gun and was not startled by it. I looked up at Lyman. For a split second, he understood everything. Then his astonished, yet utterly comprehending gaze turned blank and flat as stone, and a huge, red blossom erupted in the center of his chest. His mouth filled with blood and spilled it, and he pitched forward headfirst. His forehead, when it hit the rock, made an evil crack, like the snap of a dry stick.

He rolled over once onto his back, and the upper half of his body slipped off the rock into the water of the lake. A cloud of blood spread from the hole in his chest and grew large in the water and quickly surrounded him, enveloping his chest, shoulders, arms, and head entirely, like the billowing masses of a woman’s silken, scarlet hair.

The human body is a sac filled with blood — puncture its skin, and the shape and color of the body are grotesquely re-arranged and changed. It’s no longer human, its skin is no longer white or black. Half in the lake and bathed in the spreading swirls of his own blood, Lyman could have been a white man or a black — there was no way to tell which. Blood is red.

But I was the man who had never been able to forget that Lyman, while he lived, was black. Thus, until this moment, I had never truly loved him. He was a dead man now — finally, a man of no race. And as surely as if I had pulled the trigger myself, I was the man, the white man, who, because of Lyman’s color and mine, had killed him. It was as if there had been no other way for me to love him.

There was nothing for love, now, but all-out war against the slavers. My nature was fully formed; and it was a killer’s. And only by cleaving strictly to Father’s path would I be kept from killing men who did not deserve to die. Father would be my North Star. Lyman Epps would be my memory of slavery.

When Lyman was slain by the accidental firing of his own pistol — reported as such by me and believed at once by all — I did not know that four months later his grieving widow would give birth to his son. I deprived Lyman of that, too. Susan would name the infant after his father, and he would grow up to become famous in later years as a singer of religious songs. At the time of his birth, however, I was long gone — following Father’s instructions to gather up Fred in Ohio. The younger Lyman Epps, the man who, because of me, was born and raised fatherless, I saw and heard sing on the day of the interment ceremonies below Father’s rock. His sweet voice rose into the cold May sky like the pealing of a bell as he sang “Blow, Ye Trumpets, Blow” over the box that contained the bones of eleven men and should have contained my bones, too.

A terrible irony that would have been, had my bones joined those others. His splendid voice honors my burial, without his knowing that, by my refusal that long-ago day at Lake Colden to save his father, I was his father’s murderer. Although I told the truth then, when his father died, and I have told the truth now, these many years later, the one was a lie, this other a confession. For the one was told to the living by a man struggling to stay alive, a man still ignorant of his true motivations and weakness; and this other was told to the dead by a ghost wishing solely to join them.

The story of how his father died, when his mother finally conveyed it to him, surely must have cut the boy’s heart, leaving him scarred and wary all the years of his life. It was necessarily the story that I myself told to Father and to the manager of the Tahawus mining camp and that they in turn told to others. Accompanied by a pair of fugitives-two strong young men led by Harriet Tubman herself off a North Carolina plantation and brought out from Albany by Father — they came up towards the pass searching for Lyman and me, after we had not turned up at the camp at the appointed time, for they needed us to convey these fugitives on to Canada. At the lake, they found Lyman’s body where it had fallen, bled gray in the water, and me they found on the rocky heights above, howling like a wounded animal, with no memory of how I got there.

I had cut my crippled arm up and down its rigid length with my knife and had smeared my face with blood and had rolled in dirt and leaves. Father calmed me and, holding me in his arms, managed after a while to extract from me a description of what had occurred, and finally led me back down from the crag to the lakeside, where the others had constructed a litter to transport Lyman’s body home to Timbuctoo.

Father explained that he was obliged to return that day to Albany for one of his court appearances, and Mr. Seybolt Johnson could not be away from the mining camp, so I and the two frightened young fugitives were pressed into carrying Lyman’s body back along the trail we had just cut through the pass to Timbuctoo.

“When you’re back there, let Watson deliver Lyman’s body to his wife, and let him then carry these fellows on to Massena and the crossing to Canada,” Father instructed, speaking to me as if I were a child and taking care also to write his orders on the back of an envelope, which I was to place in Watson’s hand as soon as we arrived at the farm. I was then to leave at once for Ohio, he said, to retrieve Fred, who had been too long alone. It had been several months since John and Jason went off to Kansas with their wives and little sons and put up their homesteads there.

Father placed his hands on my shoulders and in a soft voice said that he thought I was too shaken to stay in North Elba now and needed some time away. He perceived the depths and power and the true nature of my feelings, if not their source, and I believe that for the first time he was afraid for my sanity, afraid that if I stayed in North Elba close to the Negroes and especially to Lyman’s widow, I would try to take my own life. He was right.

The true story of Lyman’s death, however, my confession, Lyman’s son never heard, man or boy, and has not heard now and never will, unless, when he himself dies, he comes over to our old farmhouse and family burying ground and finds me still talking into the darkness — the mad ghost of Owen Brown, he who was the murderer of the elder Lyman Epps, he who was the secret villain of the massacre at Pottawatomie, the meticulous arranger of the martyrdom of John Brown, and the cause of the wasted deaths of all those others whose bodies lie now before me.

The younger Lyman Epps will not end up buried here; his bones will molder next to his father’s and mother’s, three miles yonder in the old Negro burial ground of Timbuctoo. And if he learns the truth of why his father died, he will hear it from his father, the only man who knows it as well as I.

But does my beloved, murdered friend Lyman speak on into the night over there, as I do here? Impossible. Unlike me, Lyman died with a clean conscience. Thus he surely went instantly silent.