The Good Lord Bird (38 page)

“Somebody'll know him!”

“No, they won't. The federals out there, they ain't from this country. They're from Washington, D.C. They won't know the difference. They can't tell one of us from the other anyway.”

—

At dawn, the Old Man gived the order. They fired the tow balls, tossed 'em, and commenced blasting out the window, letting the colored slip out the back window of the engine house. I went right along with 'em, four of us altogether went, and we more or less fell right into the arms of the U.S. Cavalry. They was on us the second we hit the ground, and pulled us clear of the engine house while their brothers fired on it something fierce. At the back gate, under the railroad tracks, they gathered around us, asking 'bout the white folks inside, and asking where is you from, and who does you belong to, and is the white folks hurt. That was the main thing they wanted to know, was the white folks hurt. When we said no, they asked was we part of the Old Man's army. To a man we swore up and down we was not. You never seen such ignorant Negroes in your life. By God, we acted like they was our saviors, and dropped to our knees and prayed and cried and thanked God for bringing them to save us and so forth.

They took pity on us, them federal marshals, and the Emperor was right. They had cleared the entire area around the armory of local militia. The soldiers doing the asking weren't locals from the Ferry. They was federal men who come up from Washington, D.C., and they bought our story, though they was suspicious enough. But, see, the fight was still raging while they questioned us, and they wanted to go back and get the local prize, which was the Old Man hisself, so they let us take our leave. But one soldier, he smelled a rat. He asked me, “Who do you belong to?” I used the name Master Gourhand and told him where Master Gourhand lived, up near Bolivar Heights, near the Kennedy farm.

He said, “I'll give you a ride there.”

I hopped aboard his mount and got me a ride clear up to the Kennedy farm. I directed him there, hoping none of the enemy knowed yet 'bout the Old Man using it as his headquarters. Luckily they didn't, for when we reached it, it was all quiet up there.

We charged into the yard on horseback, me riding behind the federal, and when we charged in there, who but O. P. Anderson was standing out front, drawing water from the well with another colored slave he'd picked up someplace. That fool was yet living. He had no rifle and was dressed like a slave. You couldn't tell him from the other slave. His hair uncombed, he was dressed as poor as the other feller, looking rough as an orange peel. Them two could'a been brothers.

But the sight of me without my bonnet, dressed in men's clothing, just knocked O.P. out.

“Whose nigger is this?” the soldier said.

O.P. blinked the shock out his face. He had trouble with his tongue for a moment.

“Huh?”

“He said he lives 'round these parts with a Mr. Gourhand,” the soldier said. “Poor creature was kidnapped and was held prisoner at the Ferry.”

O.P. seemed to have trouble speaking, then finally got right with the program. “I has heard the news, master,” he said, “and I am glad you brung this child back. I will wake the master and tell him.”

“There ain't no need,” Owen said, coming out the cabin and stepping on the porch. “I is the master and I is awake.” I reckon he was hiding inside along with Tidd, a feller named Hazlett, and Cook. I got nervous then, for I'm sure them three had drawed a bead on that soldier from inside the house the minute he clomped up there. Owen stepping outside likely saved that soldier's life, for them men had grabbed a few hours' sleep and was bent on leaving in a hurry.

Owen stepped off the porch, took a step toward me and suddenly recognized me—seen me dressed as a boy for the first time. He didn't have to play it slick. His shock was genuine. He liked to fell out. “Onion!” he said. “By God! Is that you?”

The soldier seen it weren't no ruse then. He was a nice feller. “This nigger's had quite a night. He says he belongs to Mr. Gourhand, who lives up the road, but I understand he is out of town.”

“That is correct,” Owen said, rolling with the lie. “But if you will hand his colored over to me, I will keep him safe for Mr. Gourhand, for it is a dangerous time to be about, what with what is going on 'round here. I thank you for bringing her back to me,” Owen said.

The soldier smirked. “Her?” he said. “That's a
he
, sir,” he scolded. “Can't y'all tell your niggers one from the other? No wonder y'all got insurrections all 'round here. You treat your colored so damn bad you don't know one from the other. We'd never treat our niggers this way in Alabama.”

And with that, he turned on his mount and took off.

—

I didn't have time to give 'em the full word on the Old Man's situation, and didn't need to. They didn't need to ask. They knowed what happened. And neither did they ask 'bout my new look as a boy. They were in a hurry and making ready to run for their lives. They had slept a few hours from sheer exhaustion, but now that it was light it was time to go. They packed up on the quick and we took the tall timber together—me, O.P., Owen, Tidd, Cook, Hazlett, and Merriam. Straight up the mountain behind the Kennedy farm we went, with the sun coming up behind us. There was some fussin' and fightin' when we got to the top of the mountain, for everyone except O.P. wanted to take the mountain route direct north, and O.P. said he knowed another way. A safer way and more roundabout. Southwest through Charles Town and then farther west via the Underground Railroad to Martinsburg and then over to Chambersburg. But the others weren't for it. Said Charles Town would be too out of the way and we were too hot. O.P. gived 'em a mouthful on it and that brought on more hard words, for there weren't a lot of time, not with patrols likely rolling by then. So them five went their own way, direct up toward Chambersburg, while O.P. went southwest for Charles Town. I decided to cast my lot with him.

It was a good thing, for Cook and Hazlett got caught up in Pennsylvania a day or two later. Owen and Merriam and Tidd somehow got away. I never did see any of them ever again. I heard Merriam killed hisself in Europe. But I never did see Owen again, though I heard he lived a long life.

Me and O.P. got free through Mr. George Caldwell and his wife, Connie, who got us through Charles Town. They're dead now, so it don't hurt none giving 'em up. There was lots working on that underground gospel train that nobody knowed 'bout. A colored farmer drove us by wagon to Mr. Caldwell's barbershop, and when Mr. Caldwell found out who we were, he and his wife decided to split us up. We was too hot. They sent O.P. off with a wagonload of coffins to Philadelphia driven by two Methodist abolitionists, and I don't know what happened to him, whether he died or not, for I never heard from him again. Me, I was kept with the Caldwells. I had to sit with them, wait it out underneath their house and in the back room of Mr. Caldwell's barbershop for four months before rolling ahead. It was on account of being 'bout the back room of the barbershop that I learned what happened to the Old Man.

Seems that Jeb Stuart and the U.S. Cavalry busted in the engine house with killing on their minds just minutes after I got out, and got to it. They overrun the engine house, killed Dauphin, Thompson, brother of Will, the Coachman, Phil, and Taylor. Watson and Oliver, both the Old Man's boys, was done in. Killed every one in there, good and bad, all but the Emperor. The Emperor somehow lived, long enough to hang anyway.

And as for the Old Man?

Well, Old John Brown lived, too. They tried killing him, according to Mr. Caldwell. When they busted down the door, a lieutenant runned a sword right into the Old Man's head as the Captain was trying to reload. Mr. Caldwell said the Lord saved him. The lieutenant was called to emergency duty on account of the uprising and was in a hurry when he left his house. He was so hot to get out, he grabbed the wrong sword off his mantelpiece as he runned out the door. He snatched up his military parade sword instead of his regular broadsword. Had he used a regular sword, he would'a deadened the Old Man easily. “But the Lord didn't want him killed,” Mr. Caldwell said proudly. “He still got more work for him.”

That may be true, but Providence laid down a hard hand for the Negroes in Charles Town in them days following the Old Man's defeat, for he was jailed and scheduled to be put on trial. I lived hidden in the back room of Mr. Caldwell's barbershop during them weeks and heard it all. Charles Town was just up the road from Harpers Ferry, and white folks there was in a state of panic that bordered on insanity. They was plain terrified. Every day the constable would bust into Mr. Caldwell's shop and rouse up Negro customers. He drug two or three men out at a time, brung them to the jail to question them 'bout the insurrection, then jailed some and released some. Even the most trusted Negroes in the slave owner's houses was put out in the fields to work, for their masters didn't trust them to work in the house, thinking their slaves would turn on 'em and kill 'em. Dozens of slaved Negroes was sold south, and dozens more run off, thinking they'd
be
sold. One colored slave come into Mr. Caldwell's shop, complaining that if a rat's tail touched the wall in his master's house in the middle of the night, the entire house was roused, guns was grabbed, and this feller would be sent downstairs first to go see 'bout it. The white newspaper said that Baltimore arms dealers sold ten thousand guns to Virginians during Old John Brown's trial. One Negro in the barbershop joked, “The Colt Company ought to do something nice for Captain Brown's family.” Several fires were set on Charles Town plantations, and nobody knowed who done it. And a story in the Charles Town paper said that slave owners was complaining that their horses and sheep was dying suddenly, as if they'd been poisoned. I'd heard that one, too, whispered in the back of Mr. Caldwell's barbershop. And when I heard it, I said to Mr. Caldwell, “Would that all these fellers doing that devilment today had showed up at the Ferry. It would have been a different game.”

“No,” he said. “It had to end the way it did. Old John Brown knows what he's doing. They should'a killed him. He's raising more hell now writing letters and talking than he ever did with a gun.”

And that was true. They put the Old Man and his men in jail in Charles Town, the ones from his army that lived through the fight: Hazlett, Cook, Stevens, the two coloreds, John Copeman, and the Emperor, and by the time the Captain got done writing letters and getting visitors from his friends in New England, why, he was a star all over again. The whole country was talking 'bout him. I hear tell the last six weeks of his life the Old Man got more folks moved 'bout the slavery question than he ever did spilling blood back in Kansas, or in all them speeches he gived up in New England. Folks was listening now that white blood was spilled on the floor. And it weren't just any old white blood. John Brown was a Christian man. A bit off his biscuit, but a better Christian you never saw. And he had lots of friends, white and colored. I do believe he done more against slavery in them last six weeks with letter writings and talking than he ever done raising one gun or sword.

They set a quick trial for him, convicted him right off, and set a date for the Old Man to hang, and all the while that Old Man kept writing letters and squawking and hollering 'bout slavery, sounding off like the devil to every newspaper in America that would listen, and they was listening, for them insurrections scared the devil out the white man. It set the table for the war that was to come, is what it did, for nothing scared the South more than the idea of niggers running 'round with guns and wanting to be free.

But I wasn't thinking them thoughts back then. Them fall nights become long for me. And lonesome. I was a boy for the first time in years, and being a boy, with the end of November coming, that meant in five weeks' time it would be January, and I would be fifteen. I never knowed my true birth date, but like most coloreds, I celebrated it on the first of the year. I wanted to move on. Five weeks after the insurrection, in late November, I caught Mr. Caldwell one evening when he come to the back of the shop to give me some bacon, biscuits, and gravy and asked 'bout me maybe leaving for Philadelphia.

“You can't go yet,” he said. “Too hot. They haven't hung the Captain yet.”

“How is he? He's yet living and yet well?”

“That he is. In the jailhouse as always. Set to hang on December second. That's in a week.”

I thunk on it a moment. It hurt my heart a little to think of it. So I said, “It would do me well, I reckon, for me to see him.”

He shook his head. “I ain't hiding you here for my safety and satisfaction,” he said. “I got enough risk just taking care of you.”

“But the Old Man always thunk I brought him good luck,” I said. “I rode with him for four years. I was friends to his sons and family and even one of his daughters. I'm a friendly face. It might help him, being that he ain't never gonna see his wife and his children on this side no more, to see a friendly face.”

“Sorry,” he said.

He sat on that thought a few days. I didn't ask it.
He
said it. He come to me a few days later and said, “I thunk on it and I changed my mind. It would be a help to him to see you. It would help him through his last days, to know you is yet living. I'm doing this for him. Not you. I will arrange it.”

He called on a few persons, and a few days later he brung an old Negro man named Clarence back behind the shop to where I was hid. Clarence was a white-haired old feller, slow movin' but thoughtful and smart. He cleaned the jailhouse where the Old Man and the others was kept. He set down with Mr. Caldwell, and Mr. Caldwell discussed the whole thing. The old man listened thoughtfully.

“I gots an in with the captain of the jailhouse, Captain John Avis,” Clarence said. “I knowed Captain Avis since he was a boy. He's a good man. A fair man. And he's grown fond of Old John Brown. Still, Captain Avis ain't gonna just let this boy walk in there,” he said.