Fire on the Mountain (20 page)

Was there ever a man so impatient to enter Purgatory?

Your friend and Colleague,
Thomas
City of Brotherly Love

I have no story to tell of Lee’s great victory at Front Royal or his subsequent defeat at Winchester, or the rout at Strasburg. I witnessed none of it, yet I saw it all. The tides of war were reflected in the face of every white person, which changed like the oceans of a planet too familiar with its moon; while the black faces in the Shenandoah Valley were, through years of training, impassive and unreadable, often even to ourselves. After Deihl sold the house and stable, only the weather, the worst in many years, held us in Virginia. Many others were trapped as well; a sea of refugees, black as well as white, filled Charles Town, and every day we were lashed with rumors like sleet. The war didn’t wait on the weather. On Christmas Eve we heard that Brown was encircled and all was lost (or won); they had brought a rope from Kentucky to hang him with, donated by the hemp growers, and another more elegant noose of Sea Island cotton. The buckskins laughed and sang carols as they rode off with Lee’s secondaries; they were followed by the militia, the Richmond Grays, eager now to join the fight they had until now been so satisfied to be left out of. None of them came back. Not one. In the morning we heard of the encirclement, and in the evening we heard of the ‘defeat.’ (For we n’Africans were still in another man’s country, using his words backward. Even today, fifty years later, I catch myself rejoicing at a defeat and weeping for a victory.) But there was no hiding the smiles of the black folks when it was found out that not only Brown but Tubman lived; our gallant Tubman, it was in fact she who (as it later turned out, this had been planned) broke the encirclement with the first international detachment of Haitian cavalry, of Garibaldini in their red silks, of Cherokee and Creek warriors, and Pennsylvania Molly Maguires. The ‘Grays’ were slaughtered, and I use the word with medical precision. The Carolina militia drowned in its own liquored-up blood. A few of the Kentucks and the Fourth Rhode Island got away. Meanwhile, to the south, Atlanta was burning, and the Cherokee courthouse raid had filled Asheville with troops, and emptied it of citizens. The South was calling for more troops, and the abs up North were agitating against them, even in the ranks. Like a fire, abolition was consuming the South. I had vowed to join Brown; then I had hated him; now I was eager to join him again. But the war had moved up the Valley from Charles Town, and I was only a twelve-year-old boy and an African, and there was no way I could head south without looking like a runaway slave. I resolved the conflict as I have resolved so many in my life: by numbing myself against it, working unthinkingly, waiting for the weather to break.

JAN 15 1860
MINT SPRINGS FARM
STAUNTON VIRGINIA

LAURA SUE HUNTER BEWLEY:

DELAYED BY WEATHER/ ARRIVING HOME WEEK OF FEB 1/ AT LEAST THE WAR BROUGHT US A TELEGRAPH! TELL FATHER HOLD ON/ LOVE THOS

Every year in the South there is a ‘Little Spring’ toward the end of January, when the earth thaws out; the sun warms the air, if not the mud; and one feels almost as if the trees will be fooled into blooming. But only the people are. I was surprised to feel sorrow at leaving the old half-board, half-log house, and the stable where I had toiled so many hours for the horses I never grew to love: such are the attachments of childhood, which it is mistakenly said grow weaker through the years. It is years later, looking back from the barren mountaintop of age, when we feel most keenly the sorrow that childhood’s continual state of leaving evokes. We loaded the wagon and drove past the gallows, but I couldn’t find a tear to shed for my brother, or for myself. We rode across the Potomac bridge and past the steep wild end of Maryland Mountain, and I remembered the morning, it seemed a century ago, when I had seen that bold little army setting out. It had been the Fourth of July, deliberately, and now, for better or for worse, they had transformed every life in the valley. That July morning the road had been empty, but now it was crowded and we were part of a stream of humanity, all headed North. Thousands of others were seizing upon that break in the winter to flee Virginia and the war. The road through the Gap to Frederick was cut off, so we followed the rest of the refugees north toward Hagerstown. Hundreds of people and wagons were bottled up a few miles north of the Potomac at Boteler’s Ford on Antietam Creek. The ford had been gnawed away by the traffic and the waters, and an enterprising local family, the Cutshaws (whom we knew very well as mule sharpers) were making money ‘sailing’ wagons across with ropes and oxhides filled with air. It was an odd scene, of the kind that war spawns. Antietam Creek was swollen with an unaccustomed flood, which even more than the warm air made it seem like spring. The south bank was crowded with humanity of all ages and both sexes, black and white, talking, smoking, laughing, cursing, watching with admiration the Herculean exertions of the four gigantic Cutshaw boys, who were thrashing the wagons across the creek. Women helped one another with the babies while boys and men helped the horses haul the wagons over the steep stones. The Africans were most of us women and children and the old, for once unmolested by the whites. The tension of the past months seemed eased by the struggle in the creek below, by the commotion of flight. Here two nations, which forty miles to the south were fighting one of the bloodiest battles of the war, were mingled in a peasant scene from Brueghel, rich with the humor and compassion with which our race is blessed: I mean our human race. It made me not resent war but credit it, for the ordinary day-to-day conflict of slavery admitted no such moments of humanity; and I was glad that ‘peace,’ at least, was gone forever, whatever the future might hold. Like the rest, I put my skinny shoulder to the wheel. The passage across the creek was slow. Everybody got wet along with the Cutshaws, who stayed wet and grimly energetic, with sticks and weeds tangled in their hair, like great yellow bird dogs. We were on the bank for ten hours. Every hour the news changed, from “Lee winning” to “Lee losing” back to “Lee winning.” It seemed not to matter to the tide of refugees. The whites were the small farmers, and a few of the great ones who had recently discovered the virtue of looking and acting like small ones. The Africans were the free blacks and the abandoned or runaway slaves passing as free, all unchallenged and unquestioned, since the cash value of a human being had dropped (that is, great-grandson, risen) almost to nothing with the war. One would have thought, seeing that crowd, that we n’Africans were a nation of children and boys, women and old men; and I think it lent speed, on the one hand, and heart, on the other, to the refugees to realize how many of the able-bodied black men were ‘missing count’—that is, gone Up the Mountain. We were all morning, then all afternoon on Antietam Creek. Like the Cutshaws, Deihl and Mama saw a chance to make a little money. Mama had me ‘hurry up’ a fire and she fried up some hoecake and boiled chicory, which she sold at coffee prices to the people around, and to the people coming through from the other side, where the line was of course much shorter. In fact, only one wagon came over from the North, although several horsemen—adventurers, military contractors, newspapermen, and a few revolutionaries, I expect, posing as all three—splashed across. This wagon was a brand-new Pennsylvania Townerley driven by a youngish white man, a doctor I later discovered, well outfitted, with a fair pair of Morgans, one of which picked up a stone in the creek. I helped him doctor it, and Mama sold him some hoecake. He seemed a gentleman and had a fine pair of duelling pistols under the seat of his wagon (I happened to notice), and I heard plantation Virginia in his speech. That was when I got my idea. Much as we dislike one another, horses and I have an understanding: this doctor was having trouble with the Morgan that had picked up the stone, and I calmed things out for him. He said I was pretty good with a horse. “I loves horses,” I told him, in that ‘nigger’ talk white folks love to hear, “and de Morgan de bestest.” It was growing dark by then, and I bid farewell to Mama, though God forgive me, were there one, she didn’t know it. I told her and Deihl that I had made an arrangement to help the Cutshaw boys through the night for two dollars, and would catch up with them down the road, the traffic being so slow. Here was the cruelest act of my childhood. I was never to see Mama again, for she died of the pox that laid Baltimore low the third year of the war. I never even kissed her good-bye, not only because I was cold to her then (but I was! I was!) but because such a gesture might have given away my intention to head South. How often since that day have I remembered the love and care she gave me. I was to see old Deihl once more, in his old age, twenty years later, but it was strange between us without Mama, to say the least. She had left me some money, and he had tried to get it to me, but the U.S. government at that time wouldn’t release funds for Nova Africa. The doctor made it past Charles Town and almost all the way to Winchester before he stopped to rest his horses and sleep. In the back of his wagon he found a twelve-year-old African stowaway curled up (and by now I was no longer pretending) asleep.

February 2, 1860
Miss Emily Pern
Queens Dispensary
Bath, England

Dear Emily:

Well, I am at last in Staunton, after a harrowing week’s journey, during which I almost lost my horses, my chest, and my life; delivered a child (dead); was delivered by another; and gained an assistant and lost him again.

I suspect that even if you have written I will be late in getting your letters; so in the meantime, exiled in my own home as I am, let me share with you the scenes of terror and hope that have engulfed your country since you left. Every year in the South there is a Little Spring, late in January. This year it released me from my long wait. I left Philadelphia Thurs last and crossed the Mason-Dixon line into Maryland Friday, A.M., already west of the mountains. From Hagerstown on into Virginia, the highway was a scene of fantastic confusion and fear, though the terror really only began after Lee’s defeat at Signal Knob. The road was filled with refugees, deserters, bandits, looters, the wounded, the abandoned, the quick and the dead—all heading North. There were few others heading south; we were often forced to the fields as the crowded road would simply not admit traffic in a southerly direction. I say We, for just south of Martinsburg, at a miniature Noah’s flood called Antietam Creek, I was attached to by a slave boy of about fifteen, named Ayrab (I spell it as he pronounced it), who had been hired out to help drive cattle to Hagerstown and was now on his way back to Roanoke to rejoin his mother and master (he said). He had lost his traveling letters (he said) and was afraid of red-lighters and worse, and so attached himself to me, after helping with my Morgans. I felt the sting of delivering a slave back to his master, but hid my true feelings, since the boy helped me complete my own cover, and we agreed he would pass as my personal servant.