Fire on the Mountain (12 page)

With the burning of the Charles Town courthouse, the waiting was over, or so it seemed. Everybody seemed relieved, especially the white folks. The war was on. Another plantation house was torched the week after Green Gables; and this one burned to the ground, the slaves not so foolishly putting it out but, Cricket speculated (acting this out), blowing on it. Another, two days after that. As the Shenandoah was not serious plantation country, this pretty much exhausted the opportunities. The slave market that was burned at Sandy Hook wasn’t really a market but a holding pen for ‘beaters’ heading up the Potomac from Washington and south along the Valley road, to the cotton and hemp country of the south and west, where slavery was big business. Meanwhile, the town was filling up with volunteers, adventurers, contractors, and newspapermen waiting to see what the government was going to do and how they could turn a dollar off it. All of them were white, all were men, all were armed, and all of them were full of strong talk. Around the kitchen and the stable, I heard their rumors, their boasts, their threats, and even (reading between the lines) their fears. None of these men was eager to go up the mountain after Brown. Not after Iron Bridge. They were all waiting on Holliday, the head of the Virginia militia, to arrive from the Tidewater. The private talk (for a stable and tavern boy heard lots of private talk) of Holliday’s agents, who were already in town arranging provender, was that these over-the-mountain fur-hat hillibillies didn’t really know how to deal with ‘niggers,’ as white folks felt free to call us in those days. The fur-hat hillbillies let them talk. Though the militia, press, government, and army alike, stayed at the Planters or the Potomac, those who weren’t ‘on found’ tended to eat lunch at least at Mama’s. It was cheaper and better. Everyday the big parlor was filled with a wild mix of white men, and the backyard, under the catalpa tree, with colored. Mama gave all the same fare: cornbread and beans, greens and hamhocks too fat for eating (a hamhock in those days, great-grandson, would flavor a week’s beans; they weren’t your skinny wartime hams), chicken, pork, squirrel and dove in season, rabbit and catfish, all the game and fish brought from her extensive network of slave and free black entrepreneurs. Mama had her partialities, though, and she would often give me a plate of pigeon breasts or sweet little squirrel hearts to set down near a certain favorite, always a preacher, and always colored. (We didn’t get white preachers whatsoever; I doubt Mama would consider them real preachers anyhow.) Mama was in her element, serving rough men strong food and making money: for though she was a slave, she managed all of the old German’s money. She liked a crowd as much as Deihl shunned society. Her warmth in this crowd was in contrast to her brooding silence in private. I found her, my own mother, proud, cold, shy, and mysterious; she seemed to come alive around others, but alone she was remote and distant. I regretted being an only child almost as much as I regretted slavery, though I knew the two were linked; Mama had told me that the reason she’d been sold to Deihl was because she could bear no children after me. I think now, looking back, that the lonely life of semi-freedom in town, in a white man’s house, killed something in her by taking her away from her people. But she had wanted it; she managed both our lives and was a slave in name only. Those were strange days, great-grandson. Two countries were fighting a war by night but eating out of the same pot of greens by day. In fact, the whites seemed positively friendly that August, thinking, I’m sure, that the ‘niggers’ who weren’t up the mountain liked both slavery and them. This particular one of their illusions didn’t survive the winter. The black folks, especially those in the town, seemed more mistrustful of one another than of the white folks in those first months of the war. Maybe it was the affair of Granny Lizbeth that did it. All the talk under the catalpa out back was of mules and weather and food, as if there were no such thing as the fire on the mountain, no army of abolitionists burning plantations and setting slaves free. I used to study those dark faces and wonder: did they really believe nothing had changed? Or was it part of the centuries-old mime the African played for the whites and, ultimately, for ourselves as well. We kids were going through our own changes. Since the raid, and especially since the night I lost Sees Her and found the flag (as I think of it), Cricket was more brotherly and less ornery than usual. He didn’t pick on me and boss me around like before. Meanwhile, the few friends I had had among the white kids in town, such as Sean Coyne, were gone. I didn’t see them anymore, not after Iron Bridge, not after the courthouse for sure. And I didn’t miss them either, except for Sean. I later learned he was killed at Roanoke toward the end of the war; he died with me owing him two taws and a clay, which I would gladly put on his grave today, could I but find it. I was busier than a one-armed blacksmith, since I had to deal with the mules and horses (doubled in number) morning and night, and dinner from eleven to three. I got out of washing up, though, since Mama had hired two girls. War times are flush times in the livery business. Deihl was off almost every day in the Valley buying up horses and contracting for hay. I missed the old man around the stable. Except with Sees Her, or any troubled horse, he was a far better hand with horses than I, since he genuinely liked and understood the beasts, and I was always faking it, finding them the only living thing dumber than wood. With Sees Her gone, all I did was throw them hay and water. I never took time to rub them down or look at their hooves, though the militia and government men didn’t mind and seemed to care as little about their animals as I did. These were the first strange days, great-grandson, of the war we didn’t yet realize was a war.

Then late one afternoon while I was watering the horses I heard a Tidewater voice say the word ‘war’ as if it had three syllables, and I froze as still as a deer. I was in full view of two men across the barn, but if you have ever been a twelve-year-old African in a white man’s country, you know what it is to be invisible. Just to make sure, though, I backed up between two horses and started rubbing them down, which would have alarmed any more intelligent animals, since I had never laid on them with a brush in my life. Under their bellies, far off under the hayloft, I could barely see two pairs of English-style boots facing each other, but barn sound is funny, and I could hear their voices as if I were standing next to them. They were planning an ambush that night out the Old Quarry Road, where they had intelligence that Brown’s men were coming down nightly for supplies. From the amount of tack and horses, I figured their force was about thirty men, as big as Brown’s whole army! When Deihl came back, they contracted for all our horses, leaving their own behind. I suppose one of the benefits of being in the government militia is that you subject a rented horse to fire and not your own. I was until almost dark getting the tack and mounts together; meanwhile I was burning inside. I had to tell someone. The only person I could trust, who would know what to do or who to tell, was Cricket; but he was three miles away at Green Gables, and it was already getting dark. I was still trying to decide what to do when Mama called me to help with the dinner spread. Something told me not to answer. It was dark by the time I got to Green Gables, out of breath all the way, and to my dismay Cricket was gone; running about everywhere, I checked down by the slough and out in the woods. There was no one else I trusted to tell. Cricket trusted the old granny woman, but I didn’t trust her or anyone. Cricket had said the fire two weeks before had cleared things up between those who poured water on the fire and those who ‘blowed on it,’ but this didn’t help me, since I didn’t know who had taken which side. Besides, things had changed. Nobody on the plantation seemed to want to talk to me, or I to them. I sneaked home on foot, heartsick, hating all the slaves; and surprisingly, got neither a scolding nor a whipping from my mother, who thought I was coming down with something and sent me to bed. I crept on up to my corner of the loft, and maybe I was sick: I went right to sleep. It was almost dawn when I was awakened by the sound of horses. They didn’t sound right. I peered out through the crack under the eave I had opened up for summer and saw a big bay eating Mama’s roses, his head not five feet from mine, nosing the roses, then gobbling them down. He was riderless, and his saddle had slipped down under his belly, and his back was smeared with blood. Two other horses came up, whickering into my little field of vision, one of them dragging one leg. I heard white men hollering far away. The back door slammed downstairs, and Deihl hopped into sight like a chicken, pulling on his filthy old pants, grabbing at the horses. It was like a scene from Hell. The ambush had been ambushed, and the horses had come home. Six men had been killed and twice as many wounded. The two Tidewater gentlemen rode in on one mount, one of them shot in the arm but not excited about it, I’ll grant him that: those Virginia slavers were cool customers to the end. I worked at cleaning up the horses while Deihl shot two. I always wondered why he spared me that, but not the gruesome work with the boys. It must have been hard on him. Through the day the news got worse and worse as the wounded came back. Worse for them, the whites, that is. I looked at black folks with a different eye by the evening of that long and bloody day, bloodier for Deihl since he lost four horses—two of which, ironically, the U.S. government still owes me for, since Mama was freed before she died and left her half to me. I was excited. It was clear that the raiders on the mountain had more friends—and more effective friends—than me. I delivered a plate of cornbread and side meat and beans to Mr. Pleasance up at the Planters Hotel that night, and instead of cuffing me, as he did when he was mean drunk, or giving me a nickel as when he was generous drunk, he had me set it outside the door. Then he slid a nickel under the crack. For me that nickel sliding was the true beginning of the war.

Laura May Bewley Jenks Hunter was a tiny little woman like a china figurine: bone-white, covered with a web of fine wrinkles like crazing. She must be ninety, Yasmin thought, although she knew she was a poor judge: white people looked old to her at sixty. The old woman peered at her through huge glasses, then touched her hand. Satisfied that this visitor was real (as if perhaps she had plenty of the other kind) she settled back into her wheelchair and smiled. When she smiled, powder cracked from her face and fell into her lap like snow from a shaken tree.

Yasmin told her how much she’d appreciated reading the letters. It would have seemed rude to have said ‘enjoyed.’

Mrs. Hunter explained that her mother had been the sister of Dr. Hunter. All the letters had come from her, since Dr. Hunter had left no heirs. Yasmin had figured out that much; her question was, how had she gotten hold of the ‘Emily’ letters? Even though it had all taken place a hundred years ago, Yasmin was reluctant to ask. It seemed like prying.

“My father was a Bewley, of the Lynchburg Bewleys, and my husband was a Jenks, you know, but when he died I changed my name back to Hunter. The Bewleys were nobody in particular, and the Jenkses were nobody at all. You know when you get old, dear,” the old woman said, “the past seems closer than the present.” Black folks called you ‘honey,’ and white folks called you ‘dear’: Yasmin had noticed that as a child, and it still was true. She herself had called Harriet ‘honey’ last night when she had told her she was going to have a baby brother. Brother? Had she really said ‘brother’? Did she really think that? Did her subconscious know some secret her body hadn’t yet revealed?

“Now looky here.”

The old woman was opening a little cedar box she held on her lap; she pulled out an ancient, browned tintype.

“Here’s my mother, Laura Sue Hunter, as a girl with her brother, Thomas Hunter, who wrote the letters. He left no heirs, you know.”

She handed the photo to Yasmin, who studied it, looking for some sign of the young man who had heard Douglass thundering at Bethel Church; whose best friend was a Jacobin; who was in love (did he even realize it?) with a Yankee bluestocking. But the picture was too posed and dim: a Southern belle standing next to a Virginia gentleman, both completely characterless, like holos of photos of drawings. She was a teenager made up to look like a woman; he was a boy in his twenties with an eager mustache, wearing a frock coat. They were standing in front of a photographer’s painted backdrop of a columned house, Spanish moss and cotton fields stretching off into the distance, in a scene totally unlike the Great Valley of Virginia where they had lived. Yasmin’s eyes were drawn back by the perspective, to the tiny stylized black dots bending down between the rows.

“She married a Bewley, of the Lynchburg Bewleys, but she was a Hunter through and through,” the old woman said. “He, on the other hand—my uncle—he was what you might call the
black
sheep of the family. Wouldn’t you call him the black sheep, Dr. Grissom?” She smiled, and another light avalanche of white powder fell into her lap.

“Of course, blood is thicker than water, isn’t it, dear? You colored do hold to that, don’t you?”