Chaneysville Incident (54 page)

“He did it anonymously, of course, but he didn’t use a pseudonym. In fact, through his whole life, when he could have lived far more publicly simply by changing his name, he didn’t; I can’t imagine why. The book was published as
Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia, by a Southerner
; it was only in the text that he identified himself as a black man. And you couldn’t really tell from the writing; it sounded whiter than white. It really wasn’t much of a book. It was heavy on the names and on giving credit where it was due and probably where it wasn’t, and there was a definite elitist tone to the whole thing, and it hewed close to the Philadelphia moderate line—good citizenship, measured protest. It got lousy reviews from the blacks in New York, who were getting on with the business of calling for armed insurrections and such by 1841, when it was published. And it surely did no good in Pennsylvania. It made things worse, as a matter of fact. Because the same old anti-free-black sentiment was running strong, even stronger because times were bad and if white people don’t like rich blacks when times are good, they like them even less in the middle of a depression. So in 1841, the blacks of Pennsylvania called a convention in Pittsburgh, and C.K. went as a delegate. It wasn’t an easy trip, three hundred miles across—”

“I know,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, “and there’s another hundred miles west of here. And C.K. didn’t have a Greyhound and a Turnpike. There was a stagecoach, but Jim Crow was no stranger to Pennsylvania—as a matter of fact, the term originated in the Fifth Street Theater in Pittsburgh. So C.K. went on horseback. But he followed the stage route, west through Lancaster and York and Gettysburg, and then to Chambersburg, and then over the mountains through McConnellsburg. He passed through here on the fourteenth of August. He tried to get a room at the local inns. One, which was called the Rising Sun, wouldn’t take him. Another, the Washington Hotel, would, but there were so many slave-catchers hanging around that he felt uncomfortable, and he moved on early in the evening and made a camp for himself a few miles west, on the east bank of the river, not far from the town of Wolfsburg. He caught a few fish and built a fire within sight of an old gristmill that at the time belonged to a man named Morrison. He didn’t know that, of course, but he did describe the mill: three stories high, made of fieldstone, with four stone mill runs. He wrote a lot about that place; maybe it was the fact that he was used to writing and didn’t have much of it to do since the book was finished; I don’t know. But he wrote well into the night, describing the town and the prevalence of the bounty hunters, and the beauty of the country. He was still fairly elitist; he wrote about the black people he had seen in a not terribly complimentary way, said they were beaten out and defeated-looking, and that the only one with any substance was a bootblack named Nelson Gates. But he was impressed with the country, and he wrote on and on about that, and wondered if it might not be a good thing to bring his wife here—”

“So,” she said, “that’s how your family came here?”

“No,” I said. “This was 1841. Things weren’t that simple in 1841, not for a black man. He had to worry about being taken back into slavery, remember, and the slave-catchers he had seen couldn’t have reassured him. And he could read a map; he knew he was only about thirty miles from slave territory. But he did speculate. I guess you could call it a daydream, if you made allowances for his awful style. He sounded like a real Romantic, going on about ‘peaceful sylvan springs’ and things like that. Interesting, because he had never really written like that before, but terrible.

“Anyway, he finished his writing and doused his fire and went to sleep. But sometime in the middle of the night he heard sounds, and he heard his horse whinny, and he came awake. He was carrying a pistol, even though it was illegal for a black to be armed, and he got it out and crept off into the brush, and he waited. In a few minutes he saw movements near the mill, and he thought maybe it was a bounty hunter that had come to kidnap him, so he went sneaking up there and found three slaves, runaways, who were hiding in the water under one of the wheels. As soon as they saw him they came out and spoke to him, asking if he was the man who was to come for them. He told them he wasn’t, but he offered them what was left of the fish he had caught and some bread and they came with him and ate it. They told him they had come north from a farm near a place called Independence, and at first he thought they were talking about Louisiana, and the truth was they didn’t know what state it was in, but they said they had run to Charleston, Virginia—”

“You mean West Virginia.”

“It was Virginia then. Anyway, that and the time they had spent helped him figure out that it was Independence, Virginia, they were talking about. He spent a long time asking them questions and writing down their answers, trying to make sense out of where they had come from and how they had come, but they really didn’t know. They had heard of ‘North,’ and that a man could be free there, and that if you spoke to a particular man in a particular way, he would show you how to get there, and so they had run away to Charleston and found the man and he had passed them on. They had come up the valley under cover of darkness, twenty-five miles in one dark night, and a preacher in town had hidden them through the day and then told them to come west until they saw a three-storied mill and wait there.

“So they waited, eating C.K.’s food and making jokes about slavery, and how good it was to be free, and asking C.K. questions about what life was like in the North, and how long it took a black man to talk as well as he did, and wear a suit, and ride a horse. C.K. kept trying to quiet them, trying to explain that they were a long way from being free, but they wouldn’t listen. It was lucky there wasn’t anybody around.

“Just before dawn two men came, black men with a hay wagon. They wouldn’t give their names, but took the slaves and hid them under the hay, and drove on. And an hour later, just after dawn, a party of slave-catchers came by, searching the woods on either side of the road with bloodhounds. But by that time C.K. was bathed and shaved and mounted, and was watching from the other side of the river.”

“They would have taken him, wouldn’t they?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. You can’t tell. And he couldn’t, either. So he made sure of his safety in the only way he could: he rode hard and slept light and didn’t go near a town until he got to Pittsburgh. And it worked; he made it without being bothered.

“But not without being changed. The experience had done something to him. It shows in his writing style. While he was writing about this area he was really emotional, enthusiastic, and even though the style was flowery there was some enthusiasm for the content as well as the style, and it isn’t half as bad as the other stuff about so-and-so, the great colored citizen. But what he wrote after he got to Pittsburgh—and he didn’t write anything else until he did get there—was just like the earlier stuff, only worse. It seems like he lost the enthusiasm for the style too. The style didn’t change—he was still throwing around quotes and tossing off metaphors—but it wasn’t really a style anymore; more like an empty form. He wrote about the convention as though it were…I don’t know. There were a hundred and forty-seven delegates, and Pittsburgh wasn’t even a major black population center, so it must have been an important gathering, but C.K. makes it sound like a tea party. I don’t know what actually caused the change, but I suspect it was being so close to slavery again, and being afraid of being taken, because when he got back to Philadelphia, he started writing about the things he was doing to protect his wife against kidnap, even though Priscilla Langley had evidently been born free. The fear he had wasn’t unreal—a lot of free blacks were being kidnapped, especially attractive females, of which she was evidently one—but he made more out of it than he had before. He had papers of manumission forged for himself, and he had affidavits drawn up testifying to Priscilla’s freedom, and he hired people to watch the house when he was away. So he must have been preoccupied with the whole thing, but you couldn’t tell it; the style stayed florid and empty for a solid year, right up until the riot in 1842. And then he dropped the flowery style and started putting down the facts, nothing else: names, dates—”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “You lost me at the riot.”

“Sorry,” I said. “The anti-free-black sentiment erupted again in 1842. Actually, it had been going on all along. There was a major riot in 1834, when C.K. met Priscilla, and one a year later, and in 1838 they had burned down Pennsylvania Hall, which had been built by the Abolition movement, and they had done it while the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women was meeting there, so they were getting pretty unchivalrous in their anger. Part of it was due to the Panic of 1837, which made for a lot of idle whites and resentment, but some of it was just…I don’t know…background hatred. It wasn’t just Philadelphia, either; the black section of Pittsburgh had been burned down in 1839. Anyway, in 1833 the British Parliament had passed a law ending slavery in the Empire as of August 1, 1834, and in 1842 the Philadelphia blacks got together to celebrate the anniversary, and evidently a gang of whites didn’t like the idea of blacks taking a day off and celebrating freedom, so they went tearing into the Negro section, beating up on people and killing a few, and burning property left and right. It was a regular Long Hot Summer act, and the militia had to be called out to quell the riot. And C.K. was right in the middle of it. He dropped the florid style like a shot and he just set down fact after fact. He got everything. Names, dates, places, ages, everything.”

“And he didn’t feel a thing.”

“Of course he did,” I said. “As a matter of fact, after the riot a white Abolitionist named Henry C. Wright wrote to him asking for information, and C.K. wrote back and said…” I stopped for a minute, to remember the exact words. “ ‘To attempt a reply to your letter, now, is impractical.’ He couldn’t give the man facts, you see; he was still sorting through things—”

“Sorting through things,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Rubble. And emotions were part of the rubble. In the same letter he wrote: ‘I feel that my life, weighed down and crushed by a despotism whose sway makes a hell of earth…’ But those weren’t facts. The white folks didn’t mind; they published the letter in
The Liberator
, anonymously, of course. But C.K. was—”

“Busy sorting through things,” she said. “I know. Just like a good little historian. You like him, don’t you?”

“I admire the hell out of him,” I said.

“And you want to be just like him. You think there’s something good about getting the feelings out of things. Don’t you?” She was looking at me hard, and I could see the fire’s glow reflected in her eyes.

“Yes,” I said. “Not ordinary feelings; a historian has to have ordinary feelings—a little sympathy, a little anger. That’s what makes him human. But if the feelings are so strong they get in the way of the facts—”

“And you think that’s what he had?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t.”

“I don’t give a damn what you think,” I said. “Because you don’t have the facts. But I’ll tell you, it takes one hell of a historian to sit at a desk with a quill and ink and write down, without even making a blot, that among those killed was Priscilla Langley Washington, aged twenty-seven, and in her seventh month of pregnancy.”

She didn’t say anything. I didn’t look at her, just sat there, looking at the fire. It was dying a little now, the glowing center eating into the fourth log. I could already feel myself chilling. I pulled my clothing close about me and stirred.

“Where are you going?” she said. There was a little alarm in her voice.

“More wood,” I said. I pulled my hat and gloves back on and stood up. The wind hit my head and chest, hard and frigid, and I felt the chill drive into the pit of my stomach. I climbed quickly over the windbreak, shaking as the wind sliced at my knees, and plowed to the wood I had piled. I had to spend a moment estimating, but it was all right; there was enough there to last. I picked out two logs and carried them back and laid them carefully on the fire, trying not to break the structure of it, trying to keep it going while adding to it. When I had it done as well as I could, I sat down again. My cup was half full, but the toddy was cold. I added hot water to it and sipped, feeling the warmth run through me, feeling the cold go away; not far, but away.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“What for?”

“For …being impatient.”

I shrugged. “I get impatient too,” I said. “I want to hurry. I want to know everything
now.
But history doesn’t work that way; the truth is usually in the footnotes, not in the headlines. One of the local historians said history was ‘the sayings and doings and surroundings of individuals; their rivalries, and quarrels, and amusements, and witticisms, and sarcasms; their mechanical and professional pursuits; their erection of houses and fulling mills and grist- and sawmills…their births and marriages and deaths; their removal to other localities, and how they prospered, and what descendants they left….’ ”

“C.K.?” she said.

“What?” I said. “Oh, no. No, a man named William Maclay Hall.”

“Does he come into it?”

“Yes,” I said. “He comes into it.” I didn’t say anything for a while then, and she left me to my silence, snuggling down next to me and laying her hand against my belly. But I could not feel her hand through my clothes, and though the fire blazed brightly, I felt the chill growing in me. When I began to shiver I leaned forward to mix another toddy. She took her hand away, but said nothing. I sipped the whiskey and, for a time, felt the chills recede.

“I don’t know exactly what he did then,” I said. “I know he buried her and I know that he stopped attending meetings and things like that as soon as he did, because he kept the journal, and there’s nothing in there about any of that. But there isn’t anything in there about grieving, either, nothing about anger. All I know is that he went about the business of selling everything that he had, converting everything into cash, and that on Christmas Day, 1842, he donated the entire sum to the Abolition movement. Or most of it; he must have kept something back, or perhaps he went to work to live. He doesn’t say. For the next six months the journal is nothing more than a list of books he’s finished reading. Up until this time, he’d make casual reference to a book, or quote from it; for those six months he simply listed titles and quotations. He was reading fast—three, four books a day. And he was reading different things than he had been: literature. He finally read Jonathan Swift, and he read Sir Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens—evidently he had met Dickens when he was in this country in 1842—and a lot of the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Shelley. He read contemporary criticism too, and he spent an awful lot of time reading Southern writing, not that much of it was worth reading. But he followed Poe’s career carefully, and managed to meet the man during that year—Poe was living in Philadelphia at the time. He doesn’t mention any of his old associations, but I suspect they were after him to become active again, because in July of 1843 he wrote that he had been selected to attend the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, and that he had decided to go.