Cloudsplitter

Chapter 23

But surely, Miss Mayo, surely you, of all people, must already know the part of my account that I am leaving out, and that it turns all I have been relating to you these many months into a fantasy, an old man’s wishful dream, and makes of Father’s exquisitely detailed plan a deadly chimera. For you, like the rest of America, have read and believed Frederick Douglass’s eloquent narrative of his life and are familiar with his version of his final meeting with Father and me in Chambersburg. I have no quarrel with it — what Mr. Douglass says there is true: that for an entire day he and Father wrestled like angels, as the one struggled to keep the other from martyrdom, and the other fought to convince the one to save him from martyrdom by joining him there. And that both men lost the fight.

It was a curious, paradoxical situation, for the two loved and admired one another past all reasoning, and each, to complete his work, needed the other alive and at his side. Thanks to the peculiarities of the disease of racialism and that all Americans, although differently, suffer from it, Negro as much as white, the War Against Slavery could never be won by white or Negro people alone. More thoroughly than almost anyone else in the movement, Father and Mr. Douglass knew this, which caused them both frequently to be criticized by their racial brethren, the whites disdainful of Father’s close, ongoing alliances with Negroes and the blacks suspicious of Mr. Douglass’s apparent, privileged ease of movement amongst white gentility. Then, as much as now, men like Father and Frederick Douglass made people of both races, regardless of their politics and principles regarding racial matters, anxious and mistrustful. They were, therefore, each other’s main comfort.

I cannot be exact as to the date, for while the details of everything that happened in those days are as vivid and sharply outlined in my memory as in a stained-glass window, more so than what transpired here in my cabin this very morning, the abstractions of duration and chronology are somewhat vague to me and are often lost altogether from my mind. But one Saturday morning a few weeks before the raid, Father came to me at breakfast and, taking me aside, said to hitch the wagon and come up to Chambersburg with him. “I have arranged for a meeting there tomorrow morning with Mister Douglass,” he explained.

“Wonderful news,” I answered, genuinely excited at the prospect, although my habitual laconic manner probably did not show it. I was often thought in those days to be sarcastic or sour, when I was instead merely frightened by the intensity of my feeling and wished no more than to protect myself and others from it.

“Oh, just do as I say, Owen. He has come all the way from Rochester for this. He writes that he wants to hear the details of my plan, but I can only reveal them to him in person. And so he has come.”

Shortly, we were making our way in late summer sunshine through the rolling, blond, recently mown pastures and the peaceful farm villages of western Maryland into Pennsylvania, arriving by evening at our Quaker safe house, where we spent the night talking abolition and religion with the good, pacificistic, prayerful keepers of the house, friends and strong supporters of abolitionism generally and of Father in particular, people who believed that their friendship and support were being used by us to help establish a more formidable and effective Underground Railroad, a belief which Father took care not to disabuse them of or threaten.

Mostly, I listened, eventually stretching myself out on my blanket by the fire and finally falling asleep to the sound of Father’s voice droning on into the night, as he explicated the true meaning in the Book of Matthew of Christ’s ninth-hour cry on the cross, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? “You must remember, friends, that since the sixth hour there had been darkness all over the land,” he explained. “And the priests had reviled and mocked Him, saying, If thou be the son of God, then come down from the cross; and with the scribes and elders, they had all declared, Jesus saved others, but himself he cannot save. And then they said to Him, If you be the king of Israel, the true Son of God, then come down from the cross, and we will believe you. Whereupon Christ cried out, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? and yielded up the ghost, so as to provide for all those who had mocked and reviled Him, even those who had crucified Him, both the question and the answer. For when He had yielded up the ghost, as all men must, the veil of the temple was rent, and the earth quaked and split, and the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints that slept therein arose, and when the people saw that, all of them, even the Roman centurions who stood amongst the priests and scribes and elders, were struck with fear, and they said, Truly, this was the Son of God! Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani’. Out of the pitch darkness came that most human cry of Him who believes in God, of Him who knows that He is the most beloved of God, of Him who is yet subject utterly to God’s will. And thus, in asking His final question — which is not a self-serving plea such as we ourselves, like the priests and the scribes and the elders, might make, but a question that is asked by a child of its parent, by a son of his father, by one who does not doubt the existence of the other and does not question the power of the other — in asking that question, Why hast Thou forsaken me? Christ in His final act amongst men is truly exemplary. Which is exactly and most particularly how the Lord intended Him to be for us, as a gift, His greatest gift, a gift exceeding even life itself, a gift that defines for us the possibility of eternal life, and in the way that it is revealed to us, we are shown the sole means for obtaining it. Belief in the Lord, not special pleading, but belief, simple belief, as the child believes in the parent. .”

Thus, as so often, was my descent into sleep contaminated and controlled by my father’s words and my dreams shaped by them, so that, to the degree that one’s waking mind is sculpted by the artistry of one’s dreams, I was, the following day, when we rode out to the quarry where Father had arranged to meet with Mr. Douglass, locked into considerations, not of the question of the efficacy of martyrdom, but of its ultimate meaning, of its use as proof of belief. For I had come to see that it need have no practical purpose, that it required no particular objective or goal in this world, to be justified or desired. Its purpose was to strengthen belief, the martyr’s belief in God the Father, in the Hereafter, in eternal life, in resurrection — in something, anything, other than the meaning and purpose here and now of the mortal life of the martyr himself.

By mid-morning, after much careful reconnoitering, we had taken up our position like watchful ravens at the quarry where Mr. Douglass in his narrative says that he finally found us — upon a cut-stone platform walled in and set high amongst slabs of gray rock from which we could obtain a good view of anyone approaching us without being seen ourselves. Father was still a fugitive then, with a federal price on his head, and I imagine that I was, too, although, so far from Kansas and with no one any longer actively pursuing us, it was easy to forget. But it was also true that, this early in the game and this late, it would be reckless for the Old Man to be seen meeting with Frederick Douglass so close to the border of a slave state. And, of course, Father enjoyed the accoutrements of clandestinity for their own sake. Thus we hid ourselves up amongst the rocks from Mr. Douglass and made him find us.

And eventually, after considerable trouble, which we watched from above, he did. He came clambering over sharp-edged layers of granite with a companion, a balding, large-eyed Negro man of early middle years and athletic build. Mr. Douglass, as always, was dressed in a fine woolen suit and wore a black cravat and brimmed hat; his companion was in a workingman’s blouse and pants and boots, with a tattered old straw on his head; and the two were puffing and wet with sweat when they suddenly came around a granite pylon and encountered us — no doubt unexpectedly, for they had by then probably begun to believe that we had been delayed or that they had misunderstood Father’s directions to the quarry or perhaps had gone to the wrong place in it.

“Ah, Brown, here you are!” Mr. Douglass exclaimed, much relieved. He smiled, and the two men shook hands warmly and embraced.

Father began at once to speak of the purpose of the meeting, but Mr. Douglass interrupted him and elaborately introduced his friend Shields Green, who he said was very interested in meeting the famous Osawatomie Brown and possibly in “joining him down here in the fray,” as he put it. Then he greeted me with a smile and handshake and gave Father to understand that he and Mr. Green needed to catch their breath for a moment or two. He was sorry, he said, that he had not brought water or refreshment with him.

It was impossible not to honor Frederick Douglass. His handsome presence was commanding without ever seeming pompous or condescending, and he was gregarious and gracious without a taint of servility. He made you feel that you and he were equals on a very high plane. And he was the only man I ever saw silence Father good-naturedly.

He leaned against the rock wall of our aerie and fanned his dark, bearded face with his hat-brim, while Shields Green sat and rested upon a table-sized stone nearby and wiped down his neck and face with a large blue handkerchief. Finally, Mr. Douglass said to Father, “All right, Old John, let me hear it. There are some wild rumors circulating up North about you and your boys, and I need to know the truth of the matter. I’ll tell you, friend, some of your strongest supporters and allies are afraid that you’re about to commence some wild, foolhardy action down here, and I’d like to go home and tell them otherwise.”

“There’s nothing wild or foolhardy about my plans, except to men who lack courage and principles,” Father began, and here he commenced the recitation with which I and the others hidden back at the attic of the Kennedy farmhouse had become so familiar that we could recite it word by word ourselves. He told Mr. Douglass how the old plan had been modified to such a degree that it amounted now to a new plan, and, just as with us, he brought out and unrolled his maps and went over each step of the raid, until he had got to the end of the raid and our rendez-vous in the wilderness with Frederick Douglass and the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of newly liberated slaves.

Mr. Douglass was silent for a few moments and studied the maps with pursed lips and furrowed brow. At last, he sighed and said, “I love you, John Brown. I do. You’ve been a true hero, and I don’t want you killed. You and those brave young men with you.”

“We may suffer losses” Father said, interrupting. “It’s inevitable in war. But we will triumph over our enemies in the end. We will. I know it, Frederick. The Lord will protect us.”

“The Lord can’t protect you from the nature of that place, Harpers Ferry. It’s a steel trap, John. You’ll get in and not be able to get out. Please, forget this.”

“Our hostages will shield us while we’re down there, and the wilderness and the mountains will preserve us when we’ve left.”

“No, no, no, no! Impossible! Remember, I know these white Southerners; you don’t. These men will cut down every tree from here to Tennessee but one, and when they have caught you, they’ll hang you from it. And along the way, they’ll butcher any slave who even dreams of rebellion in his sleep.”

“We’ll be too many too soon for them to go against us, and we’ll be everywhere across the South, so they’ll never be able to unite against us in any one place. This is no conventional war I’m fomenting here, Frederick.”

“The federal army, John. Remember that.”

“Yes, and remember the Seminoles. The Alleghenies will be my Everglades.”

“And our Negroes, are they to be your Indian warriors?”

“If you will lead them with me. If you are at my side, they will rise up and follow me into battle against their white masters.” Then for a long while Father explained how their army of escaped slaves would be divided into two parts, one to conduct raids on the plantations and towns of the South, the other to provide logistical support for the raiders and safe transportation out of the South for those escaping slaves who, because of age or infirmity or temperament, were unable to join the battle or merely wished to flee into the North. It all seemed so logical and so likely to succeed that Mr. Douglass’s persistent objections and skepticism began to look, to me, like a reflection of his character more than his mind, as if a fearful heart had shut down his brain.

Back and forth they went, first one arguing his case, then the other, like attorneys pleading before a stern, inscrutable judge. Who was right, Father or Frederick Douglass? Not in hindsight, but at the moment of their argument. In hindsight, Mr. Douglass obviously seems to have been right. But back then, before the raid, was not Father right to believe that if Mr. Douglass made the raid on Harpers Ferry the opening act of a slave rebellion led by him and Old John Brown together, then it almost had to be a successful rebellion?

“With you at my side, this enterprise will be larger than any previous event in American history. It will be a true revolution, the revolution we should have fought back in ’76!”

“No, Brown, it won’t. It’ll be suicidal. Worse than Nat Turner. With or without me, it’s destined to fail. We are too few, too poorly armed, too ill-equipped, and too untrained as soldiers to accomplish what you have imagined.”

Father stepped away and stared down at the large, open pit of the quarry below. In a low, sulky voice, he said, “I’m glad you weren’t around to advise our Revolutionary forebears, Frederick. We’d all still be British subjects.”

Mr. Douglass smiled. “Yes, well, given the fact that the British have outlawed slavery for close to a quarter-century now, it might not be a bad thing to be a British subject.”

For many hours, long into the afternoon, the two men went back and forth, first one making his argument, citing precedent and pointing to principle for support, and then the other. Shields Green and I listened first to one, then to the other, and said nothing: we were like children listening to their parents argue over a matter that, for good or evil, would shape all their lives to come and wishing that both parents could be right. Mr. Douglass would speak for a while, marshaling his arguments with care and generosity towards Father, with sympathetic understanding of the Old Man’s objectives and firm disapproval of his means, not on principle but for practical reasons only; and Shields and I would nod, as if thinking, yes, Harpers Ferry is a steel trap, we will get in and never be able to get out, and if by some miracle we do fight our way through the outraged townspeople and avoid being cut to pieces by the local militiamen as we flee the Shenandoah Valley into the wilderness, then, yes, the federal army will be arrayed against us and will in a short while cut us off in our mountain retreat and will lay down a siege from which our only escape will be death by starvation or a bullet, and, yes, our raid and the mere threat of the slave rebellion it poses will bring down upon the head of every Negro in the South untold suffering, lynchings, mutilations, chains, for the worst sort of oppression imaginable would be the inevitable consequence of raising fear of a slave revolt in the hearts of white Southerners, and, yes, the Northern whites will not come to our aid, for they will never go to war against their white brethren in the defense of black people and a handful of white radical abolitionists: it is an absurd plan, absurd, and cruel beyond belief.

Then, as the sun passed overhead and moved towards the western Pennsylvania hills, and the shadows of the rock that surrounded us grew long, Father would commence to answer, and now Shields and I nodded in support of his reasoning, too, saying to ourselves, yes, we can take the town by surprise and hold it by means of hostages long enough to capture sufficient weaponry to arm the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slaves who will surely seize the opportunity to rise against their masters, once they know they are being led by men they trust as warriors and as men of principle, and, yes, we can flee to safety in the densely forested mountains of the South, and with a hundred bands of disciplined, well-armed, guerilla fighters we can hold off any army for months, even years, during which time our ranks will swell to such numbers that the Southern states, just to restore their economy, will make peace with their workers, for is that not, after all, who has gone to war against them, their workers?

“In the end, Frederick, it’s right principles and simple economics that will settle this thing in our favor,” Father said, and I could not disagree.

Until Mr. Douglass, in his low, melodious, melancholy voice, answered, “No, John. It’s race that will settle it. And it will settle it against us. Race and simple arithmetic. Not principles and not economics. Simply put, there are more of you in this country than of us. This is not Haiti or Jamaica, and the northern United States are not a separate nation than the southern United States. It’s race, John. Skin color and hair and physiognomy. You say us, John, and you mean all Americans willing to go to war to end slavery. But every other American who says us means race, means us white people, or us Negroes. You are a noble, good man. But you are nearly alone in this country. Even me, when I say us, I mean we Negroes.”

“Then you will not join me.”

“John, I cannot. My practical judgement forbids it. My conscience forbids it. My love of my people forbids it.”

“You are making my task all the more difficult. Without you beside me… my boys, my men…” He stopped and could not speak for a moment. “Without you,” he continued, “the slaves won’t rise up and follow me in such numbers…”

Mr. Douglass placed his heavy hands onto Father’s narrow shoulders and looked into the Old Man’s eyes, and I thought that both men would weep, for their eyes were full. “Please, come away from this. Come back with me, John. Let your son here return to Virginia by himself and send your men home. Fight this war on another front.”

“This is the only front left to me.”

Mr. Douglass turned away and said to Shields Green, “I shall return home to Rochester. If you wish, you may go back with me, or you may stay. You’ve heard all the arguments as well as I.”

Shields looked at the ground and said nothing.

Father reached out and touched Mr. Douglass’s sleeve and, in a soft, plaintive voice, almost a whisper, said, “When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I will need you to help hive them.” It was a trope that he had used many times, and he spoke it mechanically, as if his thoughts, as if he himself, were elsewhere now.

Mr. Douglass did not answer. He looked again at Shields Green and said, “What have you decided to do?“

Shields turned his face, not to Mr. Douglass, but to Father, and he replied, “I believe I’ll go with the Old Man.”

Mr. Douglass nodded and slowly shook hands with us one by one, and when he had finished, he embraced us each in a heartfelt way one by one, as if it were he who was going to war and not we, and then he departed from us straightway for his home in Rochester. That same night, Father, Shields Green, and I returned in the wagon to Virginia.

Chapter 24

This morning I woke in the dark, and my cabin was cold as a grave, and my heart leapt up when I thought again that I had died in the night and had joined Father and the others in purgatory. But then the chalky light of dawn drifted through the window like a fog and erased the comforting clarity of darkness, and I saw where I was, crumpled under my filthy blanket in a corner — a scrawny old man with matted beard and hair lying in his dirty underclothes in an unheated, bare room, my shelves, cot, chair, and tabletop covered with paper spilling onto the floor. I saw that I am nothing but paper. My life has finally come to only this: a tiny bubble of consciousness surrounded by thousands of sheets and scraps of paper — these dozens of tablets filled with disordered scribblings and all the letters and notebooks and documents and yellowed newspaper clippings and tattered old books and periodicals that I so long ago promised to deliver over to you, a great, disheveled heap of words, an incoherent jumble and snarl of truths, lies, memories, fantasies, and even recipes and lists, some of the words as mundane as a description of the several grades of wool in 1848, others as lofty as philosophical speculations on the nature of true religion and heroism, words taken from the floor of the marketplace to Emerson’s brain, but all of it, all these words, adding up to… what? To nothing worth anything to anyone but me, I suppose, and worth nothing to me; so why have I collected and saved it all these years?

I’m struggling to think clearly. Why did I pack and carry Father’s letters sent and received and his pocket notes and the many ledgers and books, an entire wooden crate of them, away out here to my California mountaintop and keep them here beside me these many years? I added to them over the years, as books, articles, and memoirs were published, and now, in feeble old age, I have been adding to the pile still more paper, more useless truths and speculation. Why have I done this?

I know that I began with the belief that I would compose a relation of my memories and knowledge of my father and that I would send it to you and Professor Villard, along with all the documents that I collected and kept over the years — for your purposes, for the composition of what you properly hope will be the defining biography of John Brown, a great book, no doubt, scheduled to make its public appearance in auspicious conjunction with the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the raid on Harpers Ferry and my father’s capture by the federal army and his execution by the government of Virginia. But, surely, this long after I first began, that memorial year has come and passed us by. And yet here I sit, still scribbling, writing now in the margins of my long-filled tablets and on the backs of Father’s letters and in his notebooks, even in the margins and blank end-pages of his broken-backed personal books, his Flint’s Survey, his Jonathan Edwards, Milton, and Franklin, his own published writings, too, “Sambo’s Mistakes” and the Provisional Constitution, old copies of The Liberator, scrolled maps of the Subterranean Passway, newspaper accounts of the raid and of Father’s final words on the scaffold, and Redpath’s and Higginson’s and Hinton’s and Sanborn’s biographies and memoirs — each day that passes, I write a few new sentences, sometimes only one, and sometimes, when my heart beats fast with feeling and my vision of the past is sharp and bright, as many as a hundred.

But I have long since given up any hope of ordering these pages and sending them to you. I write now only so that I can someday cease to write. I speak in order to go silent. And I listen to my voice so that I will soon no longer be obliged to hear it.

That fateful October night at the Kennedy farmhouse, after Father and the others had departed for the town, I spent a good while gathering and heaping everything together on the floor in front of the stove, and when I stood and stared down at the mass of incrimination, it was like listening to a thousand low, choked confessions all at once, as if the voices, mingling and merging with one another, were the sad, accumulated results of a long, unforgiving Inquisition into the heresy and betrayal of their Puritan fathers by an entire generation of sons. I burned none of it. My heretical refusal to play Isaac to my father’s Abraham seemed not mine alone: it felt emblematic to me — as if an Age of Heroism had acceded to an Age of Cowardice. As if, in the context of those last days at Harpers Ferry and the one great moral issue of our time, I had become a man of another time: a man of the future, I suppose. A modern man.

Stepping back from the cold stove, I set my candle on the table and blew it out, dropping the house into darkness. Then I went into the rain and crossed the stubbled field to the shed, where Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam had finished loading the weapons onto the wagon. Coppoc was seated up on the box with the reins in his hands, scowling impatiently at me, while Meriam sat ashen-faced behind him.

“You finally done in there?” Coppoc said.

“Yes.”

“Well, then, let’s get a move on. The Old Man must already be across the bridge. Me and Frank heard gunfire a minute ago.”

“Fine,” I said, and climbed onto the wagon, taking a place on the wooden cases next to Meriam. Coppoc clucked to the horse, Adelphi, the second of our old North Elba pair of Morgans, and we moved slowly away from the Kennedy farm onto the wet, rumpled road and headed gradually downhill towards the abandoned schoolhouse overlooking the river and the town below. By the time we reached our destination, we could hear guns firing below, intermittently and from several different places — from near the armory, we thought, then from the Maryland side of the bridge, and a little later from the factory at the further edge of town. As instructed by Father, we quickly unloaded the weapons from the wagon and stacked the unopened cases along the walls inside the one room of the schoolhouse.

About an hour before daylight, when the rain let up, we went outside and walked through the woods a short ways to the edge of a cliff high above the Potomac, and stood together there, looking down in the hazy, pre-dawn light. Behind us, still hitched to the empty wagon, the horse browsed peacefully on a blond patch of grass. The sky was smeared gray beyond the far, dark bluffs, and in the town below, a few lights dully shone from the windows of the hotel and firehouse. We could see the train where it had stopped on the siding next to the railroad station and a few dark figures standing on the platform. Coppoc said he could make out some of our boys and a couple of Negroes posted inside the armory walls by the firehouse, where the hostages were supposed to be kept, but I couldn’t distinguish them from this distance.

Suddenly, Meriam, who had been strangely silent, blurted in his nervous, high-pitched voice, “Owen, where are the slaves? There should be hundreds of escaped slaves coming to us by now, right? Isn’t that right, Owen? We’ve got all these damned pikes and guns and no one to give them to!” He laughed edgily.

“Shut up, Frank,” Coppoc said. “They’ll come in. And it’s all right if they don’t. Or if only a few make it here tonight. They’ll catch up with us later in the mountains. We’ll arm them then.”

“No, Barclay,” I said. “They won’t.”

“How’s that?”

“They’re not coming. Not now. Not ever.”

The two looked at me angrily. ’Course they’re coming in,” Coppoc said. “Good Lord, Owen, this is way beyond arguing now. We’ve got options anyhow.”

“Yes, and we got of Fred Douglass a-waiting in the wings,” said Meriam.

“No, we don’t.”

“Now, come on, Owen, what’re you talking about?” Meriam demanded, his voice rising. “We got options. Plenty of’em. You heard the Old Man, same as us.”

“Say it, Owen.”

And so I said it. “Boys, Frederick Douglass is in Rochester, New York, tonight, asleep in his bed. I know that, and Shields Green knows it, and Father knows it. We lied to you,” I said. “At least, I did. Father and Shields, I think, lied to themselves and each other and believed their lies, and so they told you only what they thought was the truth.” Then in a few sentences I revealed to Meriam and Coppoc what had happened at the quarry in Chambersburg and how later, riding back down to Virginia, Father had insisted that, once Mr. Douglass realized we were deadly serious, he would change his mind. Maybe he would wait until the raid had actually begun, but in the end Mr. Douglass would fly to our side, for he was a man of deep principle and great personal courage. Father was sure of it. And Shields had agreed, in a way that made it seem that his friend Mr. Douglass had given him some private assurances.

Father instructed us not to report to the other men what had been said at the quarry. “It will only make them unnecessarily fearful and will sow disunity amongst them,” he said.

And we obeyed — Shields because he believed that my father knew things that no other man knew, and I because I was his son. “Shields thinks Osawatomie Brown is a prophet,” I said.

“And I take it you don’t,” Coppoc said, disgusted.

“No.”

“For God’s sake, none of that matters now! What’re we going to do?” Meriam cried.

“My brother Ed’s down there!’ said Coppoc.

“And two of mine. And two brothers-in-law. And a father.”

“Owen Brown, what kind of man are you?” Coppoc said, and turned away from me.

We heard more gunshots then, rifle shots, coming from the vicinity of the church a short ways above the armory and overlooking it. Some townspeople were running and ducking behind walls, and it looked like they were taking potshots at our men in the armory yard below. Then our men returned fire, and one of the townspeople went down. The others quickly grabbed up his body and pulled it behind a shed, and the guns went silent for a while.

Meriam was frantic by now, confused by the war between his mortal fear, which made him want to flee, and his long-held desire to become the man whose sacrificial death would save the others, and he careened amongst the trees like a blind man, while Coppoc stared coldly from the cliff to the town. “You should have kept them from going in,” he said finally. “You should have told us the truth.”

“That wouldn’t have kept Father out. Nothing would. He’d have gone alone, if necessary. You know that. And there’d always have been some of the men to follow him. Maybe not Kagi, maybe not Cook or you. But your brother would. And mine, Watson and Oliver, and the Thompsons, some of the others. Those boys would follow the Old Man straight through the gates of hell. You know it as well as I. No, it’s better they all went in together, not just five or six of them. Even me, if Father had not posted me on this side of the river, I’d have gone in, too. Twenty men have a better chance of getting out than five or six.”

“Maybe. But only if they leave that place now!’ Coppoc replied, and then he declared that he was going over. He would tell them the truth of the matter himself. “To let them know their real situation,” he said. He called Meriarn to him, calmed him somewhat, and asked him to go down into the town with him. Coppoc explained that they could get across the bridge all right, as it was still evidently under Father’s control, and if they hurried and got across before full daylight, they could sneak unseen into the armory yard and help the Old Man and the boys fight their way out.

Meriam agreed at once. Coppoc had resolved his dilemma. “It’s how I knew it would happen,” he said. “I foresaw it, and now it’s the Lord’s will running things, not mine. It’s how it has to be. So I must go with you, Barclay.”

“What about you, Owen?”

“Father said to wait here for the Negroes. You two ought to do the same. He ordered us to arm the slaves when they came here and to meet up with him and the others later in Cumberland.”

“Well, now, that’s done with, isn’t it? Countermand the Old Man’s order, for heaven’s sake! You got the right. You’re in command up here.”

“My father does not want me to save him,” I said.

“Seems to me that’s the only order you’re following. Back at the house there, when we loaded the wagon, I never smelled chimney smoke. You didn’t burn those papers like he said to, did you, Owen?”

“I needed more time. There was more material than I thought, books and so on. I’ll go back and destroy them later. Or carry them away,” I added.

“So, Owen Brown, it’s over. And you’ve single-handedly done the whole thing in. Amazing.” Coppoc shook his head in weary resignation. “Well, what about it, are you coming with me and Frank?”

“No.”

“You don’t intend to try stopping us, do you?” he said, and he leveled his rifle at me.

“My orders are to stand fast, unless he sends for us. And if you go down there with what I’ve told you, Barclay, all you’ll do is sow disunity amongst the men,” I said. “Father was right about that much. One by one, they’ll sneak off and run, and not a one will come out of that place alive unless every one of them believes he’s fighting for more than just to save his own life. Those are brave men, Barclay, and they still have a chance, but this news will make cowards of them all.”

“You sound like the Old Man. All theory. You ready, Frank?” Meriam nodded solemnly, and they slowly backed away from me, with Coppoc still keeping me under his gun, although I had no intentions of trying to force them to stay. It was too late. They were already doing exactly what I feared the others would do, cutting away from Father and running for their lives. I knew that Coppoc and Meriam would never make it into town, that before they reached the bridge they would realize the extremity of their situation and would disappear into the Virginia woods, and that eventually they would be hunted down out there and shot dead or else hog-tied and brought in to be hung.

The dawn wind blew through the leaves overhead. Then I heard the train locomotive hissing and blowing steam below and turned my gaze back to the town. Slowly, the train pulled out of the station and entered the bridge. A minute later, it reappeared on the other, the near, bank of the river, where it bore away to the east, curling along the broadening valley of the Potomac, carrying to the nation the fearful and exciting intelligence of the Negro insurrection raised this October night by Old John Brown and his men at Harpers Ferry.

It was nearly full daylight, and the tall oaks stood around me like sentries. For a long while, as if I could not, I did not move. I was alone, as alone as I had ever been in my life. But strangely — all unexpectedly — free. As if, after a lifetime bound to my father’s fierce will and companionship by heavy steel manacles and chains, I had watched them come suddenly unlocked, and I had simply, almost casually, pitched them aside.

But were my actions from then on those of a free man? I cannot say. To be sure, I followed no impulses but my own. It sounds ridiculous now as I write it, but when Coppoc and Meriam had been gone awhile, I climbed the branches of the tallest oak tree up there on the cliff, climbed to the topmost branch that would safely support my weight, and, with my Sharps rifle in my lap, made for myself a sort of crow’s nest from which I could see clearly the streets and buildings of Harpers Ferry — from the rifle factory at the further, southern end of town, where Kagi, Leary, and Copeland were pinned down by local riflemen, to the Maryland side of the B & O bridge, where Oliver, Will Thompson, and Dangerfield Newby were posted. I could also see along the remaining length of the high ridge of Bolivar Heights, down to where the road from the Kennedy farmhouse emerged from the woods and crossed the canal to the tow path. And I could look directly into the armory yard itself, where Father and most of his raiders had positioned themselves behind the high, iron-rail walls and cut-stone pylons and inside the firehouse with the hostages.

All was still and silent down there, until, from my watchtower, I saw Father walk out of the firehouse with a man I did not recognize and appear to send him from the armory across the open square to the hotel. After a time, the man returned, carrying a large, open carton of what must have been food — breakfast for the hostages and the raiders both, I assumed. Again, all was calm for a while, until around midmorning, when movement and the sound of men and horses below me and to my right drew my attention away from the town. A large party of armed white civilians under the flag of the notorious Jefferson Guards was riding in from the west along the tow path.

At a point very close to the Maryland end of the B & O bridge, they spotted Oliver and Will Thompson and Dangerfield Newby, dismounted, and at once began firing at them. The three raiders took shelter behind the toll house and returned fire, but the fusillade from the militiamen drove them steadily backwards towards the bridge, where I saw Newby at the entrance suddenly fall down dead, slain by what appeared to be a long spike or a bolt shot from a smooth-bore musket that tore through him ear-to-ear at the throat. Dangerfield Newby — the mulatto slave-son of a Scotchman from Fairfax County, Virginia — was forty-four and the oldest, after Father, of the raiders. He had joined us early on, with the main intention of freeing his wife and children, who were slaves of a man in Warrenton, Virginia. A tall man of light color, well over six feet, and a splendid physical specimen, he was a melancholy man, a good man, and my friend. And now he lay dead — the first of the raiders to go down — while Oliver and Will Thompson fled to safety in the firehouse.

Soon after this, another detachment of armed civilians led by a man in uniform, a second militia force, I supposed, came riding into town from the southwest along Shendandoah Street, where they swiftly secured the Shenandoah bridge and took up positions behind the arsenal, thus commanding the town square and the front of the armory yard. Their position, combined with that of the Jefferson Guards at the B & O bridge, effectively shut off the only escape routes left to Father and his men. They also made it impossible for Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam or anyone else to slip in from the Maryland side and help rescue them. Except for Kagi and his men out at the rifle works, Father and his Provisional Army were now trapped with their hostages in the armory yard and firehouse.

In about an hour, a pair of men — one of whom I did not know and figured was a hostage, the other being Will Thompson, my brother-inlaw — emerged from the firehouse bearing a white flag, the signal to parley. There was by now an emboldened crowd of armed townspeople in the square and on the porch of the hotel and the platform of the railroad station, and when they saw the two men come forward from the firehouse, the crowd rushed them and seized and beat Will, dragging him into the hotel. The other man they made much of and slapped him on the shoulders and offered him pulls from their bottles, for many of them were by now freely drinking.

A few moments later, my brother Watson and the dark-browed Aaron Stevens and a third man, another hostage, I assumed, came out of the firehouse and walked into the cobbled square with a white flag. Suddenly, there was a barrage of gunfire from the crowd, and Watson fell, and Stevens fell, both bleeding from the face and torso. The hostage ran towards the crowd, but Watson pulled himself to his knees and dragged his gut-shot body back inside the armory grounds to the safety of the firehouse. Stevens lay writhing in pain, shot four or more times and unable to lift himself from the pavement, when, strange to see, one of the hostages came out of the firehouse, picked him up, and lugged him across the square and into the hotel. Shortly afterwards, the same man walked from the hotel and returned to the firehouse, a hostage again, but choosing it this time, which made me think that Father must be close to surrendering, if for no other reason than to get medical attention for Watson, who had looked to be seriously wounded.

More time passed, while the crowd at the hotel and railroad station and in the town square grew larger by the minute and more courageous and raucous with drink and rage, when I spotted a man climbing from the rear window of the firehouse into the armory yard. It was not a hostage escaping, I suddenly realized, it was young Willie Leeman, our wild and pretty boy from Maine, skittering across the yard away from the front gate to the rear. A slender lad, barely twenty years old, he slipped between the bars of the wall, dashed across the railroad tracks, and made for the Potomac. I was not surprised to see him abandon the others. He had come up the hard way — Poor Willie, we called him. Sent to work in a Haverhill shoe factory at fourteen, he had run off at seventeen to join Father’s volunteers in Kansas, where he had been difficult for us to control, a lonely, uneducated boy who liked his drink and when drunk shouted his principles to anyone who would listen.

Just as he reached the river, which ran fairly shallow there, and waded in, someone in the crowd spotted him, and a batch of men up on the railroad station platform commenced firing at him, while he swam frantically for the Maryland side. With bullets splashing all around, he managed to get no more than fifty feet from shore before he was hit. Unable to swim any further, he turned back and hauled himself onto a tiny mudflat and collapsed. Several men ran along the tracks and down to the shore, and one of them waded out to the islet where Willie lay bleeding, put his revolver to the boy’s head, and shot him dead. The man returned to his comrades and they raced back to the station platform and joined the crowd, making from there a target of Willie’s body, shooting into it over and over, as if it were a sack of wet grain.

By midday, the youngest of the raiders, Will Leeman, was dead; and the oldest, Dangerfield Newby. Inside the firehouse, and inside the hotel across the way, my brother Watson and Aaron Stevens lay wounded, perhaps mortally, and my brother-in-law Will Thompson, brutally beaten, sat in the hotel under armed guard. I was sure that Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam had by now fled into the woods, and there may well have been others among the raiders who, to save themselves, had abandoned Father — John Cook, who was clever and knew the streets and alleys of the town better than any of us and had friends and even family amongst the townspeople, he was one; and Charlie Tidd was another. I had seen neither of them all morning; nor Albert Hazlett and Osborn Anderson, who had been stationed alone at the arsenal. The small brick building on Shenandoah Street was close to the town square, and the militiamen, with guards posted at the doors, were now treating it as if they had taken it back.

At one point, I noticed a fellow walking exposed on the railroad loading-trestle that bordered the armory buildings, and when he neared the firehouse, he dropped to one knee and peered around the water tower from an angle that would have given him an easy rifle-shot into the firehouse, except that he did not appear to be armed. Even so, when the door to the firehouse opened, and I saw Edwin Coppoc and my brother Oliver standing there, I feared that the man on the trestle would shoot them, for they were exposed and unsuspecting. But, no, Coppoc spotted the fellow, raised his rifle, and fired, dropping him like a stone, at which point a second man, who had been following a few yards behind the first, shot straight down into the engine house and caught Oliver full-bore in the chest, knocking him backwards inside.

Coppocs having killed an apparently unarmed man seemed to fuel the crowd’s drunken rage. In minutes, they were dragging their prisoner Will Thompson from the hotel, pummeling and screaming wildly at him. They set him out on the edge of the B & O bridge, stepped a few feet away, and shot him many times, after which they tossed his body into the river, where the current carried it against a thicket of driftwood. It caught there, and as they had with Willie Leeman, the townsmen made a target of my brother-in-law and shot into his dead body for a long while.

About mid-afternoon, I noticed a significant number of gun-toting townsmen separate themselves from the mob and in an organized way move up Shenandoah Street in the direction of the rifle works, where it appeared that Kagi, Lewis Leary, and John Copeland were still successfully holding off the militia — thanks to the deep, fast-running, twenty-foot-wide channel that cut between the mainland and the island on which the factory was situated. A footbridge led from the shore to the island, but the walls of the factory came right to the water’s edge, as if to a moat, and up to now the militiamen had been hesitant about rushing it and had contented themselves with keeping the three raiders inside under siege. Now, however, encouraged by the arrival of a crowd of heavily armed townsmen, they put up a protective shield of steady gunfire at the factory windows, whilst a gang of men ran against the timbered gate with a battering-ram and smashed it in. Then the entire combined force of militiamen and townspeople charged into the factory.

A hundred yards downriver, from my treetop aerie high above the further shore, I watched three figures — a white man, whom I knew to be Kagi, and two Negro men, Leary and Copeland — climb out one of the large windows that faced the river. The three men hung from the sill above the churning water for a second and then dropped. In seconds, fifty riflemen were firing down at them from the upper-storey windows, killing John Kagi, who sank beneath the water almost at once, and hitting Lewis Leary numerous times but not killing him outright, for he managed to struggle back to shore downstream a ways, where a contingent of militiamen pulled him limp and bleeding up the embankment into custody. Copeland made it to a large, flat rock in mid-river, where he was immediately spotted by some Jefferson Guards posted on the further shore, who began shooting at him. Caught hopelessly in a cross-fire, he raised his hands in the air, and a few minutes later, a pair of fellows rowed out, made him their prisoner, and saved him from Willie Leeman’s and Will Thompson’s fate for another.

There was a lull until about three P.M., when a B & O train pulled in from the west and stopped on a siding at the upper end of the armory, a safe distance from the firehouse. Several dozen civilian riflemen stepped down from the passenger cars and quickly arranged themselves in assault formation and began marching on the firehouse from the rear. They had scaling ladders and got over the fence back there with ease and were halfway across the armory grounds before Father and the boys spotted them and began firing out the windows and the partly opened door of the firehouse. The raid might have ended there and then, but neither of the other two militia companies present in town thought to charge the undefended front gate and storm the firehouse, and consequently, in about ten minutes, despite taking some serious casualties, Father and his remaining men managed to drive the first company back out of the armory grounds and over the fence.

Towards dusk and starting around four P.M., more men rode into town, uniformed soldiers and officers this time — five companies I counted of the Maryland Volunteers, and several additional civilian militias from nearby towns like Hamtramck and Shepherdstown: hundreds of angry, frightened, armed white Southerners coming in on horseback and by train and on foot, until the town square and many of the main streets were filled with federal soldiers, top-hatted riflemen and sharpshooters in buckskins, excitable slope-shouldered boys with pistols, vagrants and drunkards, men, and women, too, carousing and firing their guns into the air and scuffling amongst themselves, and the occasional mounted U.S. Army officer waving his saber and trying vainly to restore order and bivouac his men.

Except for the pall of death that hung over the small, blockaded building at the center, it was a carnival scene down there — chaotic and sensual and violent, with torches and a bonfire, and there was even a fiddler, and drunken dancers lurched up and down the hotel porch. Hawkers were selling food and whiskey, caissons and wagons clogged the streets and gouged deep tracks across front yards, and a riderless, terrified horse galloped down a side street, scattering people in all directions, and down by the river, boys were still potshooting at the bodies of my comrades.

Overhead, the stippled ridges in the white October sky were plated with gold, and in the east, red and cold, zinc-colored streaks had appeared, as the rain clouds rippled and broke, and the autumn sun slipped quickly towards the darkly shadowed, wooded horizon behind me. It had grown suddenly cold, but there was still plenty of bright daylight up on the rocky escarpment, where I remained clinging to the topmost branches of the highest oak tree. Down in the gorge, however, where the two broad, slate-gray rivers converged, the town was falling into darkness. It had grown nearly impossible for me to make out what this morning I had climbed up into the tree to view and could not bring myself, these many hours later, to leave, despite the horror of it — my brothers and my friends making their last stand against slavery; and, of course, my father, Father Abraham, making his terrible, final sacrifice to his God.

In the end, I could see only the lights — lamps starting to flicker from the windows of the houses and public buildings, dancing torches and bonfires casting dark, erratic shadows onto the cobbled streets and against the red-brick sides of the buildings. Occasionally, there was the rattle of gunfire, but it seemed random and almost celebratory, not the sustained noise of combat. An excited waiting had begun down there, a tense, almost hysterical pause, as before the public execution of a famous criminal. I shifted my position in my roost amongst the spindly limbs of the tree, and at that instant from the darkness below heard a rifle shot ring out, and a bullet tore through the leaves close beside my cheek. Then a second gun barked, a muzzle-loader this time. I heard the ball crack against a branch a few feet above me, and a flurry of yellow leaves fluttered across my head and floated past to the ground. I was awash in the last remaining light of day up here, and the soldiers and townspeople below, standing in darkness, had finally seen me. A third shot went wide of the mark, but I heard it tick through the leaves of a nearby tree and saw the leaves fall. A fourth shot slammed into the trunk just below my foot, and I began frantically to climb down, which was difficult, for I had my rifle, useless to me now, and my crippled arm. I must get out of the light, was my one thought. Just a little ways further down, and I, too, will be in darkness and invisible. I let go of my rifle, heard it clatter to the ground, and felt my way to the next-lower branch. A whole crowd of shooters was firing at me now. Bullets zipped through the foliage and crackled against the tree, shattering limbs and tossing splinters, twigs, and leaves into the air: I saw that I was game, a treed bear, pathetically large and cumbersome, all unable to hide, unable toflee, but still alive and struggling to stay alive, still a pleasure to kill. Like the bear, I had fled to the topmost branches of the tallest tree in the forest, not, as I had thought, so that I could better view my enemy, but in terror and delirium and in the crazed hope that I could not be seen there.

With my left arm, I clamped myself to a slender branch close to my head and reached down with my right hand to grasp a sturdier limb below. I let my weight go and groped in the air for a footing, and for a few seconds my body was suspended entirely on my poor arm — that childhood curse: never had it so enraged and humiliated me as now! Suddenly, there was an extended barrage of gunfire from the town, a booming fusillade, and bullets and balls exploded through the tree all around me, snapping off limbs and showering me with torn leaves, and I thought, Surely, now, I am a dead man, they will kill me this instant, when the limb I clung to with my hooked arm let go. Shot through, it floated away from the tree still clamped in the crook of my arm, and I fell, slamming against the branches, tearing foliage away with my free hand — a long, clattering drop into the darkness and safety and silence of the forest.

Here in my cabin, I have fallen. A sympathetic act, no doubt, caused by my account of falling, and I watch myself now from outside myself and above, as astonished and detached as I was that October night on Bolivar Heights, and as I was so many years before in the Negro church in Boston, and long, long ago, when I followed my brothers out along the steeply pitched roof and, in falling against the stone steps of the dry-cellar below, betrayed their Sabbath-day flight and permanently smashed my arm. It is as if a huge, invisible hand above me has pushed me down, or as if since childhood I have been carrying an insupportable weight and have finally been borne down by it.

I write these words with painful slowness now. I know that I am coming to the end of my ability to set down my story, which has proved to be not just my story, after all, but Father’s as well. His is the one that I had hoped to tell you; the other, mine, which lies beneath it, I wished only to tell to Father himself and my brothers and comrades, those ghosts standing in the shadow of the mountain Cloudsplitter, the men whose bodies lie buried beneath the great, gray stone in North Elba.

I tell you this so that if you someday read these pages, you will know that I have finally gone where I always wanted to go, for this morning, after I fell, I managed in the fading dark to crawl across the cluttered floor to the table and locate there my old revolver: it lay cold and heavy as an iron skillet beneath a sheaf of loose papers, where I had placed it — how long ago? Weeks? Months? A year? It doesn’t matter: there is no more time for me, no more chronology. I’m becoming my own ghost at last.

Father believed that the universe was a gigantic clockworks, brilliantly lit. But it’s not. It’s an endless sea of darkness moving beneath a dark sky, between which, isolate bits of light, we constantly rise and fall. We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another’s light to keep our own light from going out: abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water. For most of my life, surely since that day in October when I fled the field at Harpers Ferry, I have been a steadily diminishing light — until the day when I began to set down this long account, and my light flared up as it never had before. It has continued to burn brightly against the night ever since.

But now there is little left to tell, almost nothing, and soon I will learn if this has been all for naught, if this passage between the firmaments has been no more than the dying fall of a cinder into the dark waters of the swirling deep. When I have told the little that is left to tell, if I have not died by then and still have the bodily strength, I will simply put down my pencil and pick up my revolver, and I will use it to place me at my father’s side, where I have always properly belonged. If I cannot lie there next to him and my ghost cannot reside alongside his, then it will mean only that my light went out forever on that night those many long years ago at Harpers Ferry, and this account has been but a meaningless, phosphorescent flare, the memory of light, instead of the thing itself, and it will not matter.

Here, Miss Mayo, is all that I have left to tell.

I took the horse and wagon and returned from the schoolhouse to the Kennedy farm. Once there, I pulled the wagon in behind the house, well out of sight from the road, and went straight to the storage shed, where in the darkness I groped over the half-dozen wooden crates that Father and the boys had emptied before setting out, when they loaded their wagon with weapons for the slaves. They had broken most of the crates apart in the process, and it took several minutes before I found one that was intact and had its topside boards. It was a crate that had contained the long pikes, those poles with knives attached that Father had imagined would terrorize the slaveholders. The box was stoutly constructed of pine and plenty large enough for my purposes, so I carried it to the kitchen and set it by the stove. Then I commenced filling it from the huge heap of papers and books that lay untouched on the floor where I had placed them the night before.

While I was in the midst of this task, I heard a group of horsemen approach from the direction of Harpers Ferry and stop before the house. “Hello, the house!” one of them shouted. “Anyone there?”

I quickly placed the lid onto the half-filled case. Then I lifted it and carried it out the rear door of the kitchen, where, silently, carefully, as if it were a child’s coffin, I set it into the wagon bed. I climbed up on the driver’s box and sat there, waiting.

For several minutes, all was quiet. Then I heard the clump of boots on the porch at the front of the house, and someone rapped on the door. “It appears there ain’t anyone home, Cap’n!” he called back.

“No matter,” came the response. “We got most of what we come for back at the schoolhouse anyhow.” A moment later, I heard them leave.

I sat motionless for a long while, until the horse abruptly shifted her weight, signaling me to give her direction. But I had no plan. I barely had thoughts. I had spent my entire life following Father’s plans, thinking his thoughts. And at that moment, as I sat up on the wagon with the reins in my hands and my horse impatient to move on, I did not know what to do or think.

I was in considerable physical pain, for I had cut and bruised myself badly in my fall, and my clothes were torn. I was lightly armed — I had my revolver but no rifle, which I had lost in the darkness after dropping it from my treetop lookout. And I had no food or supplies or money. But I was alone. Alone, and free. The entire continent lay out there. I was a man, a white man, and could go to any place on it where no one knew me, and I could become new. I could become an American without a history and with no story to tell. I believed that then and for many years to come.

So if I had a plan, that was it. If I had a thought, that was the thought.