Cloudsplitter (98 page)
Even so, over at the rifle works on Hall’s Island, Kagi has grown increasingly anxious about the passage of so much time, for he and his two men, Copeland and Leary, though they have so far held the factory uncontested, are situated far from the hostages in the firehouse, and thus, of Father’s force, they are the most vulnerable to attack from the townsmen. Kagi dispatches Leary to town on foot to request Father to send back a wagon and additional men, so that they can quickly load the seized weapons from the factory and begin their escape into the mountains. It is time. None of the raiders has been killed or even wounded. According to the plan, they should all be departing from Harpers Ferry by now.
And I, up on the Maryland Heights, should also have left by now. That is the plan, Father’s plan, his vision of how it would go at Harpers Ferry on the night of October 16 and the morning of October 17, and everything up to now has gone accordingly. Except for the one thing: that the hundreds of escaping slaves whom we expected to come rushing to our side have not yet appeared, and the few who have are turning fearful and hesitant and may themselves have to be put under guard and made into hostages.
But that does not matter, I decide, as I watch from my perch above the town. Father’s plan can accommodate that, too. We have seized at least three wagonloads of weapons, we have terrorized the entire South into believing that an insurrection has begun, and in the North we have raised fresh huzzahs and enthusiastic promises of material support and a coming flood of volunteer fighters—we have, indeed, begun an insurrection, which surely, thanks to the presence of Frederick Douglass, will catch and burst into flame in a matter of mere days, and if Father leads his men out of Harpers Ferry now and makes his appointed
rendez-vous
in the Alleghenies with Mr. Douglass, we will still be able to feed those flames and follow them into the deeper South, just as Father wished. It is not too late.
The slaves will come in, Father insists. They will soon start to arrive. We must give them every moment up to the last possible moment to learn of our raid and our intentions and to overcome their natural fears and flee their masters’ farms and plantations for the town, which is still under our control. The second we abandon the town, the escaping slaves will have no place to go where they are not in terrible danger. For their sake, we shall continue to hold the town, he declares. Even as the Jefferson Guards ride in on the Charles Town Pike from the west and the Shepherdstown militia comes in along the Potomac road from the north and the troop train from Washington slowly approaches from the east.
But surely, Miss Mayo, surely you, of all people, must already know the part of my account that I am leaving out, and that it turns all I have been relating to you these many months into a fantasy, an old man’s wishful dream, and makes of Father’s exquisitely detailed plan a deadly chimera. For you, like the rest of America, have read and believed Frederick Douglass’s eloquent narrative of his life and are familiar with his version of his final meeting with Father and me in Chambersburg. I have no quarrel with it—what Mr. Douglass says there is true: that for an entire day he and Father wrestled like angels, as the one struggled to keep the other from martyrdom, and the other fought to convince the one to save him from martyrdom by joining him there. And that both men lost the fight.
It was a curious, paradoxical situation, for the two loved and admired one another past all reasoning, and each, to complete his work, needed the other alive and at his side. Thanks to the peculiarities of the disease of racialism and that all Americans, although differently, suffer from it, Negro as much as white, the War Against Slavery could never be won by white or Negro people alone. More thoroughly than almost anyone else in the movement, Father and Mr. Douglass knew this, which caused them both frequently to be criticized by their racial brethren, the whites disdainful of Father’s close, ongoing alliances with Negroes and the blacks suspicious of Mr. Douglass’s apparent, privileged ease of movement amongst white gentility. Then, as much as now, men like Father and Frederick Douglass made people of both races, regardless of their politics and principles regarding racial matters, anxious and mistrustful. They were, therefore, each other’s main comfort.
I cannot be exact as to the date, for while the details of everything that happened in those days are as vivid and sharply outlined in my memory as in a stained-glass window, more so than what transpired here in my cabin this very morning, the abstractions of duration and chronology are somewhat vague to me and are often lost altogether from my mind. But one Saturday morning a few weeks before the raid, Father came to me at breakfast and, taking me aside, said to hitch the wagon and come up to Chambersburg with him. “I have arranged for a meeting there tomorrow morning with Mister Douglass,” he explained.
“Wonderful news,” I answered, genuinely excited at the prospect, although my habitual laconic manner probably did not show it. I was often thought in those days to be sarcastic or sour, when I was instead merely frightened by the intensity of my feeling and wished no more than to protect myself and others from it.
“Oh, just do as I say, Owen. He has come all the way from Rochester for this. He writes that he wants to hear the details of my plan, but I can only reveal them to him in person. And so he has come.”
Shortly, we were making our way in late summer sunshine through the rolling, blond, recently mown pastures and the peaceful farm villages of western Maryland into Pennsylvania, arriving by evening at our Quaker safe house, where we spent the night talking abolition and religion with the good, pacificistic, prayerful keepers of the house, friends and strong supporters of abolitionism generally and of Father in particular, people who believed that their friendship and support were being used by us to help establish a more formidable and effective Underground Railroad, a belief which Father took care not to disabuse them of or threaten.
Mostly, I listened, eventually stretching myself out on my blanket by the fire and finally falling asleep to the sound of Father’s voice droning on into the night, as he explicated the true meaning in the Book of Matthew of Christ’s ninth-hour cry on the cross, Eli, Eli,
lama sabachthani?
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
“You must remember, friends, that since the sixth hour there had been darkness all over the land,” he explained. “And the priests had reviled and mocked Him, saying, If thou be the son of God, then come down from the cross; and with the scribes and elders, they had all declared, Jesus saved others, but himself he cannot save. And then they said to Him, If you be the king of Israel, the true Son of God, then come down from the cross, and we will believe you. Whereupon Christ cried out, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? and yielded up the ghost, so as to provide for all those who had mocked and reviled Him, even those who had crucified Him, both the question and the answer. For when He had yielded up the ghost, as all men must, the veil of the temple was rent, and the earth quaked and split, and the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints that slept therein arose, and when the people saw that, all of them, even the Roman centurions who stood amongst the priests and scribes and elders, were struck with fear, and they said, Truly, this was the Son of God! Eli, Eli,
lama sabachthani’.
Out of the pitch darkness came that most human cry of Him who believes in God, of Him who knows that He is the most beloved of God, of Him who is yet subject utterly to God’s will. And thus, in asking His final question—which is not a self-serving plea such as we ourselves, like the priests and the scribes and the elders, might make, but a question that is asked by a child of its parent, by a son of his father, by one who does not doubt the existence of the other and does not question the power of the other—in asking that question, Why hast Thou forsaken me? Christ in His final act amongst men is truly exemplary. Which is exactly and most particularly how the Lord intended Him to be for us, as a gift, His greatest gift, a gift exceeding even life itself, a gift that defines for us the possibility of eternal life, and in the way that it is revealed to us, we are shown the sole means for obtaining it. Belief in the Lord, not special pleading, but belief, simple belief, as the child believes in the parent . . .”
Thus, as so often, was my descent into sleep contaminated and controlled by my father’s words and my dreams shaped by them, so that, to the degree that one’s waking mind is sculpted by the artistry of one’s dreams, I was, the following day, when we rode out to the quarry where Father had arranged to meet with Mr. Douglass, locked into considerations, not of the question of the efficacy of martyrdom, but of its ultimate meaning, of its use as proof of belief. For I had come to see that it need have no practical purpose, that it required no particular objective or goal in this world, to be justified or desired. Its purpose was to strengthen belief, the martyr’s belief in God the Father, in the Hereafter, in eternal life, in resurrection—in
something, anything,
other than the meaning and purpose here and now of the mortal life of the martyr himself.
By mid-morning, after much careful reconnoitering, we had taken up our position like watchful ravens at the quarry where Mr. Douglass in his narrative says that he finally found us—upon a cut-stone platform walled in and set high amongst slabs of gray rock from which we could obtain a good view of anyone approaching us without being seen ourselves. Father was still a fugitive then, with a federal price on his head, and I imagine that I was, too, although, so far from Kansas and with no one any longer actively pursuing us, it was easy to forget. But it was also true that, this early in the game and this late, it would be reckless for the Old Man to be seen meeting with Frederick Douglass so close to the border of a slave state. And, of course, Father enjoyed the accoutrements of clandestinity for their own sake. Thus we hid ourselves up amongst the rocks from Mr. Douglass and made him find us.
And eventually, after considerable trouble, which we watched from above, he did. He came clambering over sharp-edged layers of granite with a companion, a balding, large-eyed Negro man of early middle years and athletic build. Mr. Douglass, as always, was dressed in a fine woolen suit and wore a black cravat and brimmed hat; his companion was in a workingman’s blouse and pants and boots, with a tattered old straw on his head; and the two were puffing and wet with sweat when they suddenly came around a granite pylon and encountered us—no doubt unexpectedly, for they had by then probably begun to believe that we had been delayed or that they had misunderstood Father’s directions to the quarry or perhaps had gone to the wrong place in it.
“Ah, Brown,
here
you are!” Mr. Douglass exclaimed, much relieved. He smiled, and the two men shook hands warmly and embraced.
Father began at once to speak of the purpose of the meeting, but Mr. Douglass interrupted him and elaborately introduced his friend Shields Green, who he said was very interested in meeting the famous Osawatomie Brown and possibly in “joining him down here in the fray,” as he put it. Then he greeted me with a smile and handshake and gave Father to understand that he and Mr. Green needed to catch their breath for a moment or two. He was sorry, he said, that he had not brought water or refreshment with him.
It was impossible not to honor Frederick Douglass. His handsome presence was commanding without ever seeming pompous or condescending, and he was gregarious and gracious without a taint of servility. He made you feel that you and he were equals on a very high plane. And he was the only man I ever saw silence Father good-naturedly.
He leaned against the rock wall of our aerie and fanned his dark, bearded face with his hat-brim, while Shields Green sat and rested upon a table-sized stone nearby and wiped down his neck and face with a large blue handkerchief. Finally, Mr. Douglass said to Father, “All right, Old John, let me hear it. There are some wild rumors circulating up North about you and your boys, and I need to know the truth of the matter. I’ll tell you, friend, some of your strongest supporters and allies are afraid that you’re about to commence some wild, foolhardy action down here, and I’d like to go home and tell them otherwise.”
“There’s nothing wild or foolhardy about my plans, except to men who lack courage and principles,” Father began, and here he commenced the recitation with which I and the others hidden back at the attic of the Kennedy farmhouse had become so familiar that we could recite it word by word ourselves. He told Mr. Douglass how the old plan had been modified to such a degree that it amounted now to a new plan, and, just as with us, he brought out and unrolled his maps and went over each step of the raid, until he had got to the end of the raid and our
rendez-vous
in the wilderness with Frederick Douglass and the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of newly liberated slaves.
Mr. Douglass was silent for a few moments and studied the maps with pursed lips and furrowed brow. At last, he sighed and said, “I love you, John Brown. I do. You’ve been a true hero, and I don’t want you killed. You and those brave young men with you.”
“We may suffer losses” Father said, interrupting. “It’s inevitable in war. But we will triumph over our enemies in the end. We will. I know it, Frederick. The Lord will protect us.”
“The Lord can’t protect you from the nature of that place, Harpers Ferry. It’s a steel trap, John. You’ll get in and not be able to get out. Please, forget this.”
“Our hostages will shield us while we’re down there, and the wilderness and the mountains will preserve us when we’ve left.”
“No, no, no, no! Impossible! Remember, I know these white Southerners; you don’t. These men will cut down every tree from here to Tennessee but one, and when they have caught you, they’ll hang you from it. And along the way, they’ll butcher any slave who even dreams of rebellion in his sleep.”
“We’ll be too many too soon for them to go against us, and we’ll be everywhere across the South, so they’ll never be able to unite against us in any one place. This is no conventional war I’m fomenting here, Frederick.”