Cloudsplitter (56 page)

If I had not known that Father felt as I did, if I had not daily seen his brow furrow with the pain of it, his shoulders slump with the fatigue of having constantly to defeat the cynicism it proposed, had not heard him reduced to a sputter, his words all run dry of meaning, then I do not think that I could have withstood that peculiar loneliness. Without Father’s steady example and companionship, I would have capitulated to my own pain, fatigue, and frustration, and would either have given up and, lying to the whites, who sang one siren song of race, cleaved to them; or, lying to myself, cleaved to the blacks, who sang another.

At the start of the first meeting held in the sanctuary of the Zion Methodist Church, there were, to my surprise and pleasure, more than a hundred Negroes present, although by the end Father had driven away more than half. Like Gideon, he wished to separate the timid from the brave, and he did it with the fire of his rhetoric, the glare of his eye, and his insistence that if, in order to protect their homes and families from the bounty-hunters, they were not prepared to die, then they should depart forthwith.

They were, most of them, respectable freedmen, with even a few freed women in attendance and several deacons of the church and members of the choir. There were also numerous artisans and shopkeepers with whom we were well-acquainted—as Father made it a point to do business with Negroes whenever possible—and many young men whom I knew personally: roustabouts, stevedores, laborers, and factory hands with whom I had often spoken at abolition meetings. It was a crowd of earnest and intelligent people who understood perfectly the threat posed by this new slave-catching law, not only to the slaves who succeeded in escaping from their bonds but also to these free Negroes themselves, many of whose parents had been born in freedom in the North and had never been within two hundred miles of a slave state.

Well they knew that the color of their skin was now more than ever the mark of Cain. It was their brand, and with the passage of the Fugitive Law, they would have to prove that somehow the brand had been burned into their flesh by mistake. And who could prove this? Virginia courts had displaced Massachusetts courts. Any dark-skinned man, woman, or child, escaped slave or no, could be sworn a slave by a white man with forged papers and hauled back down South and sold off to the plantations there. At a single stroke of the pen, a free man or woman could be converted into valuable property. This was surely the evilest alchemy ever invented.

There was shock and anger amongst the whites of the North, certainly. Daniel Webster’s “compromise” may well have made more abolitionists of previously acquiescent whites than twenty years of steady preaching had done—which sometimes caused Father to say that the law must have been a significant part of God’s secret design. But this gave little comfort to the Negroes, as the outrage felt by whites was mostly spent on stoking their own righteousness and warming themselves before its fire. “Words, words, words,” Father said. “They won’t act until they themselves are physically or financially threatened,” he insisted.

This night, for the first time, Father preached violence in public. Moreover, he preached it to Negroes. Defensive violence, however. An over-fine distinction, some might say, yet it was an important one to Father. He was still not ready to carry the war straight to the oppressor, although he had begun to insist that, by virtue of their support of slavery, white Southerners had established a condition of war against all Negroes and those whites who sided with them, and they had therefore forfeited their right to live. “Pro-slavers are fair game,” Father had begun to say. His actions would not catch up to his words, however, until we got to Kansas. For now, a merely defensive action would have to suffice.

He began by asking his audience how they proposed to keep the slave-catchers from coming openly into the town and, with aid and comfort provided by the Springfield constabulary, taking off their sons and daughters to the cotton plantations of Mississippi and Alabama. How did they propose to prove that their child was not the same boy or girl who, according to the slave-catcher’s sworn statement, had run off with Harriet Tubman to an uncle and aunt in Massachusetts? The slave-catcher would have papers to support his case. He would have depositions and warrants. How did they propose to support
their
case? Remember, Father said, the slave-catcher can look at your innocent, beautiful daughter and say, “That’s not Ruth Johnson of Springfield, Massachusetts! That’s Celia McNair of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, property of Mister Jubal McNair!” How did they propose to answer him, when the word of a Negro man could no longer stand in a court of law against the word of a white?

And how did they intend now to deal with the poor, starving escaped slave, wounded and bleeding from the rigors of his escape and half-frozen from the New England cold, when he came late in the night scratching at their door, begging to be let in and fed and warmed by their fire and hidden for a night from the hounds of hell bent on re-capturing him? That man, who might well turn out to be a brother or an elderly uncle, could be seized now and sent back without a Massachusetts trial. And they themselves could be arrested and jailed for having stolen a Southern white man’s property—just as if his fine thoroughbred horse had been discovered blanketed and feeding inside their barn or his wife’s pearls hidden in their flour tin. “How do you intend to deal with that?” Father asked.

Several of the younger men grew restless and angry at these words, as if they felt indicted by them, perhaps hearing Father’s questions as accusations, and they stood up and began to edge towards the door. Others sat looking down at their hands as if ashamed, or crossed their arms over their chests and dropped their gaze, feigning deep thought, but mainly avoiding the eyes of their neighbors and of Father, especially.

His words surely caused them pain. He was saying nothing that they did not already know, but he was saying it in a way that must only have reminded them of their terrible helplessness. This made some angry, others ashamed, but it must have moved still others to some new and unexpected state of mind. The angry ones muttered and scowled and began to leave the church. Those who were ashamed averted their eyes. But the rest appeared to be waiting eagerly for Father to continue.

In the pew directly behind me sat brother John and his wife, Wealthy, the only other white people. I was seated in the front pew beside Father’s friend Mr. Harrison Wheeler, the tailor, a brave man who had tried to escape from slavery three times before finally succeeding. Having taken the name of a dead cousin who had purchased his own freedom some years past, Mr. Wheeler now lived as a free man. I did not know his slave-name.

I heard the door opening and closing—people were departing from the church one by one. A general restlessness was sweeping over the crowd, as most of those who remained shifted in their seats and cleared their throats, coughed, and murmured to one another. Father stood at the front, silently facing us all, his eyes glaring out beneath his heavy brow, mouth tight as an axe and jaw set, his hands fisted on his hips and feet apart like a man challenging another to a fight. When several moments had passed and no one any longer rose from his seat either to leave or to speak out, Father resumed his challenge, this time not by asking what his audience intended to do but by speaking of himself instead and what he would
not
do.

He and his sons and daughter-in-law, he said—and here, as if amongst the crowd of black and brown faces ours needed identifying, he pointed straight at us, which made me hot with embarrassment—he and his family would not recruit and lead a militia of our fellow white citizens to drive off the slave-catchers. No, he would not go about the town arguing armed resistance with the Anti-Slavery Society folks, and he would not beg money from the gentry to purchase weapons, and he would not wheedle and whine with the Quakers and the Presbyterians and the Methodists to load their muskets and protect their free Negro neighbors and open their doors to escaped slaves and defend them with their sanctified lives. No, he had done plenty of that, and look at what it had got them. It had got them this cowardly Fugitive Law.

From now on, he said, he would leave the white people to their own devices, to their speeches and meetings, to their proud denouncements and announcements, their newspapers, their atheneums and churches, their poems and philosophical essays. Not for him, not for John Brown, to make soldiers of white poets, philosophers, clergymen, journalists, and clerks. Not for any man. He knew a useless thing when he saw it. He, John Brown, though a white man, would no longer speak to his fellow whites for the Negroes of Springfield or anywhere else. From now on, Negroes would have to speak for themselves.

For a long while, he went on in that manner, and it seemed to drive many of the older people from the room and the more prosperous among them as well, some of whom may have thought that there were, after all, quite a number of Negroes who had been speaking to whites for them for many long years now, speaking, testifying, arguing, and praying for help and understanding with extraordinary eloquence and power, and they did not need to hear this white man signing off on them. Did he think they would beg him to speak for them? Why should they? He was right: look at what it had got them.

There were now fewer than half a hundred remaining, somber-faced men of various ages and a few women here and there. Mr. Wheeler had not moved from my side, I was glad to see, nor had any of the people whom I knew from personal acquaintance to be brave and proud defenders of their few rights, people who would under no circumstances shuffle and scrape before a white man. They leaned forward in their seats expectantly. There was in Father’s words and manner something that they wanted badly to hear and see, and they wanted to hear and see it not only in a white man but in themselves. And, indeed, it was for us all now that he began to speak, substituting the word “we” for the “you” and “I” of his previous harangue.

We must take up arms, he said, and we must become united amongst ourselves, and we must be prepared to die in the defense of our homes, of our loved ones, and of our brethren who are in flight from the slave-catcher. We must go home and take down the old musket or rabbit gun or the seldom-fired revolver that we bought at auction, and we will clean and oil it and make sure that the powder is dry and that we have bullets a-plenty, and then we must go out and fire it in our yard and in the fields beyond town, to test our weapon and to improve our aim, but also so that the general public will hear reports of it and know that we are armed. And we will sharpen our knives and attach them to poles, and we will let ourselves be seen walking abroad in the bright of day and dark of night with gleaming pikes on our shoulders, so that the general public will know that we mean to engage the enemy in close quarters, if necessary. And we will let it out that, in our houses, in the windows above the doors, we have put large cauldrons ready to be filled with scalding hot water that can be poured down upon the slave-catcher when he comes with his writs and warrants and pounds on our door demanding entry. That way the general public will know that we will employ any means necessary to defend our homes and whoever happens to be inside them.

“We must form a cadre;’ he declared, “a rock-hard core at the center of our community. It shall be a League of Gileadites! And its members’ names shall be known only to those of us who have taken an oath that, in the defense of our community and our enslaved brethren who have put themselves under our protection, in their names, we are prepared to die! Whenever the cry goes out from anyone in the Negro community for help against the slave-catcher, we will, like the old Concord Minutemen, drop our work or rise from our beds and grab up our weapons and come a-running!” No one who was himself not a Gileadite, he explained, would know which man among us had taken this vow, and thus no one would know which man among us was ready to die and was not afraid even of hanging for his actions. A single one of us standing invisible in a crowd of Negroes would make every person in the crowd more powerful, for all would be seen as potential Gileadites. We must let it out, therefore, without naming names, that some among the Gileadites were white men and some were Negro women, some were young and some were old, so that no single, small group could be separated from the population and persecuted generally. “In unity there is strength!” he stated. “And God will protect us only if we are willing to protect ourselves and each other.”

There were a number of Amens and other shows of enthusiasm from the people, whereupon Father, without changing the stern expression of his face, extended his open hands, palms up, at his sides, as was his habit when particularly pleased with himself. Several men in the room, including Mr. Wheeler, had stood and, wishing to speak, were waiting, hats in hand, for Father to acknowledge and call on them. “Anyone who wants to be heard may come up here now and speak,” Father said. “If there is a Gideon among us, let him come forward now, and let him forthwith divide the timid from the brave.”

Mr. Wheeler and the others hitched a bit and sat back down, and when no one came forward, as Father knew they would not, for all those who would have opposed him or would have wished to wrest leadership from him had already departed from the group, he walked to the further end of one of the nearly empty pews and himself sat down.

A moment or two passed in silence, as if everyone were waiting for the arrival of an important visitor, and then Father rose again from his seat and returned to the front. “We will let the Lord separate us out,”he declared in a low, calm voice. “Therefore, let us go to our homes now, and there shall each one of us pray alone for guidance in this matter. And whosoever returns to this place tomorrow night at this same hour, let him come prepared to swear the Oath of the Gileadites, which I myself shall be the first to take and then shall deliver to each of thee, one by one.” At that, he marched down the center aisle of the sanctuary and passed out the door to the vestry beyond and into the cold autumn night, and the rest of us followed.