Fire on the Mountain (15 page)

She had worried about the new shoes, but the walk seemed to loosen them up. They seemed almost to glow with it.

The timber was thick, and the trail wound around and through giant boulders, following a slash that had been made by loggers snaking tulip poplars down 150 years before. It was not Brown’s actual trail—or was it? This land had already been lived in and timbered over a hundred years when the war began—or had it? Harriet wished Grissom were along to explain such things, but the trail was not for a one-legged man. She couldn’t believe her mother had looked at her crossed-eyed for asking him about hiking. She could tell it made him feel bad, but so what? Sometimes missing things was the next best thing to having them.

She picked up a rock and carried it for twenty steps, curious to know what it was like to haul a ten-pound Sharps rifle up a hill; but a rock had no place to hold on to. Harriet dropped it and stopped to rest. It was probably easier if somebody was shooting at you from behind. She was gad her mother was having a baby. Who wouldn’t be?

She looked at the map Grissom had given her. Her mother would be getting back soon and finding her gone, but the mountain was bigger than it looked on the map.

Well, let her worry a little. What were mothers for?

Meanwhile, great plops fell on the map.

For one thing, it was starting to rain.

Even Mama quit what she was doing. She walked out into the yard and watched the cannonade, her face blank, still wearing her apron while the biscuits hardened in the oven and the fire went out. Every six minutes exactly, the ground shook as the Ericsson gun went off a mile across town. By 7:25 they had found their range, and with every shot a puff of smoke would dance off the top of the ridge near the fire—which could be seen in the daylight from Charles Town for the first time. Or maybe it was just the first time I had noticed. It seemed bigger than ever. Unless the shells hit near the top of the ridge, we couldn’t see them; in the deeper woods along the lower slopes, the shots disappeared like raindrops in the grass. By noon the Charles Town-Harper’s Ferry Road was filled with buggies filled with white folks, watching and picnicking, local and from as far away as Strasburg and Winchester. Mama, of course, had to use up the hard biscuits as ham biscuits, and sent me with the two girls, neither of whom I could tolerate, to sell them. All the rest of the black folks, including kids my age, were watching from the fields and fence rows, and staying away from the road which was choked with white folks. I sold about half my biscuits and then found Cricket and two other Green Gables boys near a brush arbor church at the edge of town, and we shared the rest (I told Mama that two white boys had stolen them). At noon the troops moved out, bugles and all, and at two, it was announced, they moved up the mountain. Like the cannon hits, the soldiers were invisible in the trees and in the trackless laurel, no ragged (I imagined) with shot. I watched the whole thing with cold fascination. It was like watching a whipping or a hanging (or so I thought at the time, so I thought). I honestly don’t know to this day what the other Africans were thinking while they watched, but I was thinking with the terrible smug certainty of the true slave that Brown and Tubman and Little John and the wounded soldier I had given Sees Her on the Green Gables lawn, all deserved this whipping; that they were fools for disregarding what every schoolboy knew: that the power of the whites, once marshaled, was irresistible; what boy, black or white, didn’t know this? To ignore this law of nature seemed the height of perversity. So I was as surprised as the whites when Lee’s men marched back at dusk unbloodied, humiliated, empty-handed. I heard the story a hundred times in the next week and a hundred more in the fifty years after, and I have no doubt, great-grandson, you are hearing it still, in 1959, fifty years from now: They had gained the top of the ridge and found only fire—not a man, not a mule, not a gun, nary a hat nor boot nor coat; no bodies, no blood, no nothing. Only the fire was there, blazing out of the rock fortress known forever afterward as False Fire, roaring as if someone had just thrown a rick of wood on it. Brown and Tubman and their men had slipped away like blackbirds. Like foxes. Like wild Indians. Like smoke into the wind or fish into the sea. Like Africans. We have had the same three hundred years to learn to hide our smiles, that white folks had to perfect their scowls. The whole town turned stunned, nasty, cold like a December drizzle, even though it was not quite October; and walked softly, gingerly home, avoiding the streets. Lee waited for darkness to ride in that night on his great gray horse, certified a fool; and late that same night, that very same bold dark life-giving night, Brown and Tubman struck twice, from the east and from the south: burning a courthouse (at Black Creek) and for the first time a church. The big Ericsson gun was swabbed down and wheeled away (lest they steal it?). The fire reappeared on the mountain farther down the Valley, then on one ridge to the east. And Lee turned to terror.

October 6, 1859
Miss Laura Sue Hunter
Miss Colby’s School
Richmond

Dear Laura Sue:

No, upon my very life, I will not apologize for what you call my insult to your young man’s Honor. Our Uncle Reuben has written on the same Subject and I would expect to hear from Father, were he in his health. Honor is sufficient unto itself; what I injured last week was not Bewley’s Honor but his Pride. I called him a Pup only because he has not quite yet attained the full stature of a Dog. Gentlemen have the right (indeed, some would say, the obligation) to disagree. But no man, Southern or Northern, family or otherwise, calls Frederick Douglass, Negro though he be, such a name in my presence and walks away unchallenged.

Perhaps like so many others, young Bewley was unhinged by his Commander’s recent humiliation at Harper’s Ferry. So be it. I would remind him that Defeat demands more of a gentleman than Victory.

I only wish that you might prefer to marry a man rather than a provincial sycophant, which is what these days our poor South demands more and more of her beleaguered sons, as the clouds of War gather.

Your ever faithful but
never remorseful brother, Thomas &c.

Many people date the formal beginning of the Independence War from Lee’s Christmas defeat at Roanoke, because it marks the entry of Garibaldi and Mexico, Haiti and the Cherokee, Douglass’s proclamation, and the internationalization of the conflict; but for myself and I suspect for many of the folk in the Valley, the war began at the end of September, with False Fire. War raged up and down the Shenandoah all that fall and winter. Lee struck at Brown, but it was like striking at smoke, and in frustration and rage (or so it seemed at the time, but as we found out later, the worst of his outrages were calculated), he struck at the people: the black people, of course. For every plantation torched, east and south (Brown’s particular strategic genius was that there were none to the west or north), a freedman’s cabin was torched or pulled down by oxen while the children watched and wailed. For every militia man or slave owner killed, or even injured, a woman or child was found murdered. Or sometimes both in one, as in the notorious incident of Katy Creek, which even the North heard about, where a pregnant woman was hanged by a ‘drunken’ band of soldiers. At first Lee struck with his regulars, but they balked, and after the protests in Congress, where the Southerner had more enemies than the African had friends, Lee began to use his irregulars. They were often the same men out of uniform, or militiamen, or ‘Kentucks’ from across the Cumberlands: the same bloodthirsty adventurers who had purloined Texas from Mexico only a few decades before (for the planters’ pockets, not their own: but no one said, least of all myself, that these were not fools). Still landless, these ruffians were still gathering land for the landed! I knew them well enough, since it was they, not the gentlemen, who took their cornbread and sweet potato pie with my mother, and left their ill-starred horses to my indifferent care. Every Wednesday there was a hanging in Charles Town, as regular as prayer meeting. It was usually a ‘sympathizer’ of Brown and Tubman, since few members of their little army had yet been taken alive. It got to be a weekly ceremony of terror; the whites packed lunches, and even some black folks (God in His infinite depravity licensing every outrage) circulated through the crowd selling chicken wings. Meanwhile, Mama and Deihl were making plans to move North. Old Deihl had promised to move back to Pennsylvania and free her (and me) someday, and Brown and Lee conspired together to move that date ahead. Deihl was somewhat reluctant to leave, with the money rolling in. But all could see the gathering storm, and I suspect Mama talked some sense into the old man, which was a talent she had.

October 12, 1859
Miss Emily Pern
Queens Dispensary
Bath, England

Dear Emily:

I wait eagerly to hear from you. I do hope England suits you well. You must know that as some things inch Forward, others fly Backward, and I have now been challenged to the Ten Paces, by the very young man that my little sister wishes to marry. It seems that by only calling him a Pup instead of smacking him like one last week, as was my inclination, in Baltimore, on the occasion of an insult to my Ideals (I don’t guard my honor so closely), I gravely wounded not only his Pride (at which I confess I had taken Aim) but his Family. He is this very morning in Philadelphia with two cousins—calling on me—and my father has sent an old family slave, by train, with two Longmann duelling pistols, too valuable to trust to the post, anxious that I don’t let this chance pass to fire a salute to Feudalism. My family first asks me to apologize; and failing that, wishes me to shoot the man!

However, I will not so honor Barbarism and have refused to see my challenger. The irony is that my family is pressing this duel upon me, while it was a remark about their arch-Satan, Douglass, to which I took exception.

As to the political situation you left behind: Rumors are flying here since the recently poorly publicized but well-known failure of Lee’s operation. The streets are filled with foreigners, and it is much rumored, agents, of this government, European governments, ‘interested parties,’ idealists, mercenaries, moral reformers, romantics, and adventurers of every stripe. There is talk of an international detachment of Garibaldini gathering in Mexico to aid the rebels, and, some say, recapture Texas and even California. Levasseur (who sends his compliments) just got back from New York where, he says, German Socialists, veterans of ‘48, are openly drilling with arms in Union Square. In St. Louis street fighting has erupted between the Socialists and the Know-Nothings and local Copperheads. Meanwhile, one of our Medical Group was called home with Connecticut’s 125th Guard, which was ordered to the Shenandoah, mutinied (or, at least, refused), and offered up an abolitionist resolution in support of Captain John Brown! They are not likely to be hanged in Danbury. This was, my friend writes, in emulation of the Massassoit Guard, the Negro regiment of Concord and Boston (which is openly recruiting the free colored of the Bay State, and not, the Governor complains, to guard the Constitution). What a wind of freedom is blowing through America today! I pity you, banished to stuffy old imperial England. There is talk of rebellion among the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania, the Irish, even in America, eager to strike a blow at England through attacking the Slavery that feeds her dark satanic mills; for it is well known that the English are active among that element of southern Federalists (actually Monarchists with no King but Slavery) who talk of an independent slave-nation, as if such a soul-less Frankenstein’s creature could walk, even supported by England on the one arm and New England on the other. The blacks of Canada, who come from both the U.S. and the Carib Sea, have raised a company in Chatham which they are openly equipping to land in the Carolinas, some say to hide their real intentions to infiltrate through the Ohio Valley. Many are from Cincinnati. What a wind! What a light burns atop that old Blue Ridge Mountain, which beheld every scene of my youth! I wish I could see it myself. It seems to have stirred up everyone’s deepest feelings and ambitions; God knows what hatreds have been awakened in the South. The struggle is spreading, as the South feared and old Brown hoped, beyond the Blue Ridge; several Tidewater estates have been burned (one belonging to a branch of my Family) and of course every depredation and piece of banditry is blamed on Brown and Tubman. Perhaps this is all to the good. Certainly there is no more debate about whether the Negro will fight for freedom. The question is, since Iron Bridge, moot. Now the question is who will win? My own Opinion I must admit has gone through substantial alterations.