Fire on the Mountain (19 page)

The South is in a state of Alarm. There is next week a States’ Rights Convention in Atlanta, called by those who think the federal government is not being forceful enough in defending slavery’s prerogatives; they want to replace Lee with another, and are said to be raising an interstate militia, partly at least with English funds. My Uncle Reuben and my young Cousin Wm. Henry, his eldest surviving, are on their way, my father being too sick to travel.

My mother writes from Staunton that there’s a hanging every week in every town, for as Lee can’t get at Brown’s army he makes his supporters (or supposed supporters) pay. I’m apprehensive about this trip even as I am anxious to go. My father is fast weakening. My sister is marrying the man who tried to shoot me, but flinched. They all assume, even my sister, that the war has cured my abolitionism (as with the few other liberal Southerners).

My thanks to Lee that his officers are little accomplished with small arms.

The great fear is of course that the Rebellion will spread beyond Virginia, which it has already begun to do. My cousin writes from Rumsey, in western Kentucky, that they no longer travel at night.

And you? And you? I promise, no more
declarations
, at least until a more appropriate circumstance; but please speak when he comes, to Levasseur, who
knows my heart better than any living man
. I will only make so bold as to
declare
that loneliness is my constant companion, with my true comrades so far from my side. I have friends in the Medical Ctte., but these Yanks are a New Breed, as cold a bunch as businessmen. There is, ironically, less friendship between black and white now than before the rebellion.

When next you hear from me I will be in Staunton. Has any man ever so dreaded going Home?

Yrs., &c., Thos.

The first weeks of winter were desperate ones in the Shenandoah. Lee’s forces occupied all the towns, and the Africans, free and slave alike, were treated as conquered souls; that always fine distinction between slave and free was seared away in the fire of war, and more and more there was only black and white. This seemed to chafe at Mama (for I still called her that) because she had always considered herself,
de facto
if not
de juris
, free, and she resented the arrogance of the soldiers quartered in our barn, even though they were guaranteed with federal money, far more reliable than the tobacco or timber vouchers of the militia. To me she explained that my true mother was her little sister, Taze, Cricket’s mother, who had died giving birth to me. (That my father had run away, was true.) A bundle of rags had been buried alongside Taze to fool old man Calhoun, and I had been spirited into town and given to her sister, ‘Mama,’ who had been bought by Deihl and promised freedom. He agreed to the deception. Cricket, who was four, was told his baby brother had died with his mother. I thought of the little grave with its constellation of colored glass and stones: it was my own. This gave me a chill, like discovering I was not born but awakened from the dead. When Mama told me that Cricket had never been told the truth, for the first time I cried, turning away from her, remembering his big arm around me in the shadow of the willow. Why not? Had they not trusted him, of all people, my own brother, who had been butchered rather than say a word, rather than betray either me or John Brown? Why was he never told? I was never to find out. Mama never said, and Deihl and I never spoke of such things. I turned away from Mama that day. In my anger and grief (and arrogance), I told myself that with her own relative freedom, such as it was, she had turned her back on her own people. Though what was I but proof she hadn’t? November went out cold and December came in wet. Deihl couldn’t find a buyer for the stable, so he and Mama worked like draft beasts, and the money piled up. With Lee’s winter campaign, the ‘freedom’ of the free Africans who made up a third of the population of Charles Town (and almost half of Harper’s Ferry) was revealed in its true coin. We were under martial law. The days when I could run wild through the streets and along the river at any hour I liked were gone. Any dark face was hailed, stopped, abused, and vilified at will by Lee’s U.S. Marines, as often with a harsh Northern or even, God forbid, an Irish accent as a Southern one. Meanwhile the Virginia militia drilled and drank, and drank and drilled, confident in the illusion (later liberally swamped in blood) that they would not be forced again to fight. By the time I looked up again, the Blue Ridge above Charles Town seemed as lifeless as the moon. The war seemed all but over. Brown on the run. Tubman, it was rumored, dead. And our condition worse even than before. I don’t remember how I felt; I don’t think I cared one way or the other, when they told me one night after dinner, a week and a half before Christmas, that we were leaving for Baltimore as soon as the weather broke. Old Deihl sat at the table, even took his hat off, pulled out his Bible, and recited (pretending to read) the verse about strangers in a strange land; then Mama laid fifty ten-dollar notes on the table and said he had sold the house and stable. I do remember that the stack of money and the Bible neither of them could read were precisely the same height.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Harriet said, leaning back against her mother, who was leaning against a rock, which was leaning against a mountain, which was itself resting against the heart of that warm and welcoming planet, Earth. “I just wanted to see False Fire. I thought I would be back by the time you got back. Then it rained. I didn’t realize the map was in miles. How come people ride klicks, but walk miles?”

“Feet are old-fashioned,” Yasmin said. “Let’s see your shoes. I just thought of something.”

“Oh Mother, they’re beautiful,” Harriet said. “They really are.” And they really were. The rain seemed to have brought the blues and grays to a swirling shimmer, like oil on water. The tops were higher and lighter, almost a moon color, and when Harriet touched them, they opened and fell into a little pool around her ankle. “Look, they’ve learned to undo themselves.”

“Amazing,” Yasmin said. She touched them, and they climbed back up again. “And the soles aren’t so clunky now. See how soft they grow? You won’t believe this, but I just remembered what it is you’re supposed to do to make them grow in: get them wet. Go for a walk in the rain!”

So why were you crying? Is it the baby?”

Harriet shook her head. Her braids were ragged, Yasmin noticed. They definitely needed work. She felt that delightful old itching in her fingertips an African mother gets when she studies a daughter’s hair. “You’re sure you don’t mind not being an only child?”

“Oh no.”

“Positive?”

“No, I think it’s great. The only thing is, I just wish ...”

“Just wish . . .”

“I just don’t want you moving to Africa. I was thinking about that. What would I do then? I don’t want to change schools and...”

“Is that it?” Yasmin caught her daughter’s chin and turned her head so she could look at her face. “Honey, I’m not moving to any Africa.”

“Really? I thought you loved it so much, and now. . .”

“Is that why you never asked who the father was? I’m not even getting married. I’m just having a baby. In Charleston. At home. In our little yellow house. You and me.”

“Really?”

“That’s the fact, child.”

Harriet thought this over. She grinned. She stood up and took her mother’s hand.

“Well, I was just wondering, that’s all,” she said. “You took so long to come home.”

They followed the winding path along the ridgetop, through brushy trees and laurel. The view they’d been promised from the rocks was gone now, and they might as well have been walking through a forest on the Valley floor. The path narrowed and Yasmin dropped back. Harriet was hungry. She wondered if her great-great-grandfather had ever walked this path. If she looked behind her, would she see him with the kids? Or would she see him in front with the grown-ups? Twelve and sixty at the same time. A kid with an old man’s face.

“Did Great-Great-Grandpa ever come up here?”

“Probably not, except maybe digging sang with Cricket. But I don’t think you find that on a mountaintop. By the time he joined Brown, they were a hundred klicks to the south,” Yasmin said. “Almost to Roanoke.”

“What’s ‘sang’?”

“Ginseng. He has a hospital named after him in Roanoke, and one in Ireland, too.”

Harriet could always tell when her mother wanted her to ask questions. “Ireland? Really?”

“He fought with Connolly. That’s a whole other story he never wrote. He left Nova Africa during the eighties, under a cloud. He went to Ireland where he met Connolly. That was the only actual fighting your great-great-grandfather ever did, against the British in 1885.”

“What does that mean, ‘under a cloud’?”

“Politics,” Yasmin said. “Your great-great-grandfather was a revolutionary but not exactly a socialist, at least in his younger days—”

“But Nova Africa wasn’t socialist then.”

“It was headed that way.” Yasmin didn’t like to be interrupted. “—nor was he an easy man to get along with. It wasn’t until after he came back from Ireland, in the late eighties, that he joined the Party. Even then, he argued with this one and that one until the day he died. But that’s still another story. Are you hungry?”

“Starving.”

“Grissom is waiting in the car on the road at Bear Pond Gap, where we were the other day when the car broke down. He says it’s only a mile the other side of False Fire. But where is False Fire?”

The mountain was narrowing as it rose to southward. The view was coming back, reluctantly. Through the trees on both sides now, they could glimpse golden fields of wheat far below. The trail wound up an easy rise, where the ridgetop got rocky again, then dropped slightly. Harriet ran ahead, then looked back and saw her mother, pregnant, but showing it only in how carefully she picked her way along the rocky trail.

“I found it,” Harriet called back.

False Fire.

December 20
Miss Emily Pern
Queens Dispensary
Bath
England

Dear Emily:

I got your letter one day and Lev’s the next— learning from the one that he was wounded, from the other that he is in prison, from both that he is alive. Thanks be to whatever Entity it is that looks after Jacobins. He apologized to me, but I don’t yet know what for, since apparently his letters have crossed in the mail. The mail-train robbery I had read of there, yet had no idea Abolitionists were involved, much less Lev! It was a bold stroke, the bolder since those who escaped got out of England with several hundred thousand pounds, I hear. Lev seems to think that, thanks to Marx’s agitation around the case, there is enough anti-slavery sentiment in England that he will serve no long prison term, and my hope is that he is right.

As for me, I am as you see by the weary address below, still in Philadelphia. I owe my unwanted leisure to unseasonable snow to the North and rain to the South of the Mason-Dixon line, which in terms of the weather has proved this year a most precise boundary, and fatal to our plan, since snow is sometimes kind to the traveler, but mud, never. We’re hoping for a break in the weather after the New Year.