Fire on the Mountain (13 page)

“I beg your pardon?” Yasmin sat up, startled, but Laura May Bewley Jenks Hunter went on as though hard of hearing:

“Did you enjoy the letters? You can keep them a few more days.”

The old woman’s fingers fluttering on the back of Yasmin’s hand felt like a bird’s claw. Yasmin let her pluck the picture back and put it into the box; then watched, curious, as she pulled one of the books from between the bookends.

“I want you to read this, dear,” she said. “Just be sure and have Dr. Grissom return it with the letters.” She squinted, and powder whitened the back of Yasmin’s hand. “Which one is it?”

“
John Brown’s Body
.”

“Oh, yes.”

September 11
Miss Emily Pern
112 Washington Square
New York

Dear Emily:

Herewith, the names you requested for the Medical assistance campaign. Though I am happy for you that you are going to Medical school, I am sorrier than I can readily say to hear that you are going to England. Friends are rare in this life; a woman friend rarer still. Trusting neither the times nor the mails, I send this, because of the names, by hand with my comrade and confederate Levasseur, whom I commend to your trust absolutely. I hope things at home with your family are well. I am soon off on family business myself, to Baltimore, where I am to present my sister at Harvest Cotillion, my father being presently too ill to travel. I don’t look forward to the ceremony, although Laura Sue is a favorite, and makes one grieve for the young minds that are extinguished in finishing schools: another side of the human waste of slavery. I get regular reports from the South and can only say that people there are terrorized, and agitated, and bellicose, even with their closest relatives. I fear War. Will we meet again before you sail?

Yours &c., &c.,
Thos.

“Now what am I supposed to do with this stuff?” Yasmin said, looking at the paperback and the letters on her lap as they were driving back toward Charles Town. “If the car’s ready, Harriet and I are leaving for Staunton as soon as I get back.”

“Leave them with me. I’ll return them. That way she gets some company,” Grissom said. Without taking his eyes off the road, he picked up the book and thumbed through it. “Now why did she give you this? That sly old devil.”

“It looks gruesome.”

“It is, in its way. You never read it? I wrote a paper on it in college. It was a bestseller in the l920s. It’s a border fantasy, a what-if.”

“What if what?”

“What if Brown and Tubman had failed. What if the U.S. had won the war.”

“You mean it’s pro-slavery?”

“Well, not exactly,” Grissom said. “Worse than that, really. It’s a sort of a white supremacist utopia, mis-topia maybe.”

“So if it’s not about slavery, what’s it about?”

“Empire. By the middle of the nineteenth century, slavery was about finished anyway,” Grissom said. “Africans around the world were throwing it off. The real issue in the Independence War was land. Nationhood.”

“So there’s no Nova Africa.” Yasmin riffled the pages. “Does Tubman hang too?”

“She’s not there,” Grissom said. “That’s the trick the plot turns on. The idea is that instead of going on the Fourth as planned, Tubman gets sick. The raid is delayed until fall, October I think. Brown goes without her. Now according to the book—and in actual fact—Brown was more of a strategist than a tactician. Without Tubman he hesitates, takes hostages, lets the Washington train go through. You know, in real life it was Tubman who insisted on blowing the Maryland bridge and cutting off the train. Anyway, in the book they don’t blow the bridge; they get trapped in the town, captured, and hung as traitors.”

“So we have John Brown’s body and no war.”

“There’s still a war. It’s just not an independence war. It’s fought to keep the old U.S. together rather than to free Nova Africa.”

“So who wins?”

“The North. Lincoln,” Grissom said. “In this book, he becomes President and the war is started by the slave owners, who are trying to set up a separate country—like Nova Africa, as a matter of fact, on pretty much the same territory.”

“Clever.”

“But a slave country, run by the slave owners.”

“They already had that, for all practical purposes,” Yasmin said.

“They were losing it by 1860, or at least thought they were. They didn’t want another Kansas. Anyway, in the story the North fights to keep the South in the Union. And they do. They win.”

“And we lose.”

“And how. Listen, this book was a bestseller in the U.S. in the l920s. Lincoln’s a big hero; so’s Lee . . .”

“Lee?”

“He leads the army for the South. He plays the good loser, the Virginia gentleman, generous in victory, gallant in defeat, shaking hands at the end—all that.”

“Amazing,” Yasmin said.

“White right prevails; the slave owners keep the land, even get more. The slave system is modified so that n’Africans end up as serfs; or worse, as a sort of landless nation packed into the slums of Chicago and New York for occasional servile labor.”

“No Nova Africa.”

“Afraid not, comrade. One nation indivisible—it’s old Abe’s dream, and your nightmare. You all don’t even get a hundred acres and a mule.”

“Mis-topia, dystopia, wishful thinking.” Yasmin put the book back on top of the dash. Then she picked it up again with two fingers and looked at Grissom sideways. “That sorry old woman gave me this to insult me, didn’t she?”

Grissom looked surprised. “Oh, I don’t think so. She’s not mean.”

“You think. You wish. Sure she did. ‘You colored,’ she called me. I thought she was just senile.”

“She is, she’s just muddled; hell, you heard her, she thinks I’m a doctor.”

“You’re blind, Grissom. That sly, old pale thing. This is her revenge.” Yasmin thought about throwing the book out the window, into the sea of yellow wheat. Instead, she turned it face down on the dash.

“And even worse,” she said, turning back to Grissom, “here you are, a revolutionary, courting these old renegades just so they’ll leave their papers to your precious museum.”

Grissom blushed angrily. “That’s absolutely not fair! It’s not true. Do you want me to be rude to some poor old lady with hardening of the arteries? You know these aristocratic southrons.”

No, I don’t think I do, Yasmin thought. Don’t think I want to. How close the past looms, circling the present like a dead moon, lifting slow repetitious tides on the living planet. She hoped the car was ready. She was tired of these white folks and their ancient craziness. Luckily, when they pulled into the shed at Iron Bridge, the car was ticking over with all its old elegance, and Elvis Presley Cardwell was standing proudly beside it, his wide grin showing off his new teeth— made of the same material, Yasmin realized, as the engine he admired so much.

After the Battle of Quarry Road, as we called it (the white folks called it the Quarry Road Massacre), Wise and Buchanan apparently settled their differences, for two days later a train filled with marines and horses came from Washington, D.C., across the newly repaired railroad bridge, through Harper’s Ferry, heading for Charles Town to occupy the lower Shenandoah. Another column came marching from Eagle, through the Gap, and a detachment stayed in the Ferry. Drums rolled and flags flew and horses and cannon marched by all day; and all the boys in the town turned out, colored and white as well. But things were changing. I had never had any problem with the local white boys, perhaps because Charles Town was a railroad town and there were so many ‘shanty Irish’ and Germans, making it far different from the farm country to the south. Harper’s Ferry was even more of a railroad town, with almost half of its population ‘free colored,’ so even the white boys who were inclined to mess with us didn’t. I wasn’t until much later to know what an unusual situation that was in the South. Brown, of course, had known it all along. Cricket had derided me for these white friends, finding it childish (on the plantations slaves had friends among the white children only up until age seven or eight); and perhaps Cricket was right and I was hanging on to being a kid, even at twelve, through my Merican friends. At any rate, all that was changing: changing like the seasons as war, like winter, rolled in and we watched, shivering inside. Like an iron frost. You could have seen my breath that day, standing on the street watching the troops and cannons fill the town. I was very aware that the army was here to kill something hiding out (and I think the other black folks felt this as well) not only on the mountain, but inside my heart as well. So I was quiet; I feared it. The grown-ups cheered, but at first, for a time, the white boys were as silent as I was. It was strange how quiet they were, considering how much boys like soldiers. I think boys have more sense than they get credit for: I believe, great-grandson, they understood, for a moment, anyway, that with this war their childhood, like mine, was over with, and the season coming would be long and cold and mean. They got over it, though, and soon joined the grownups, who think about the future less clearly and less often: they all whooped and cheered and cast dark looks about at the few black faces, as if we were burned biscuits disgracing their table; I withdrew as soon as I could with honor, to watch the rest from the loft of Doug Bean’s store. We Africans had an army too; I had even seen it. It seemed unfair that we couldn’t have our own parade with drums and cannons and flags and horses rearing about. The commander of the marines was a West Point colonel named Robert E. Lee, who was also (and certainly not coincidentally) the scion of an old Tidewater family. Thus were here combined both the big guns of slavery: the federal government, with the accents and concerns of the Tidewater; and rightly so, since it was the Tidewater that created both slavery and, some say, the federal system, now both gone with the dinosaurs. I was impressed in spite of myself. Lee was the very original of the Virginia slave owner: tall on his horse, and short off it. I learned at lunch that day, and the next, that many of the ‘free’ black folks were glad to see him and the federal troops, since the men in town had grown wild and mean since Quarry Road— the militia and the free booters, the Kentucks and Tennessees from over the Cumberlands. Folks hoped Lee would tone them down a little. But if anything, he made them worse. Now that they didn’t have to worry about going up the mountain, they paraded around Charles Town drunk every night, cutting each other up, stealing horses, threatening ‘niggers,’ and generally making themselves obnoxious and dangerous. At ‘Mama’s’ (which is what Deihl called the lunch kitchen she ran for him), they watched their manners, but in the street I would be insulted or even threatened by the same low-grade hillbillies who begged for extra biscuits to slip into their greasy shirt pockets at lunch. A few days after Lee’s arrival, they hung John Brown in effigy and horsewhipped an old deaf black man in Charles Town, a thing they would not, I think, have done before. In Winchester they tarred and feathered a Philadelphia newspaperman, even though since the latest ‘massacre’ the Northern papers, even the most staunchly abolitionist, were no longer sympathetic. Both times the Federals stood by and watched, licensing rather than preventing such behavior. So now we were under martial law and there were American flags everywhere, though the troops only amounted to a detachment in each crossroads and a main force at Charles Town. That night of the day Lee came, I went out to Green Gables. I felt lonesome in town. I felt like seeing Cricket. Since Brown’s men had ridden through and tried to burn the house, old man Calhoun had moved to town with the womenfolks; his son-in-law and his overseer stayed, but with the house boarded up like a fortress. The crops were laid by and there wasn’t a lot of work to do. Green Gables was on the African ‘peavine,’ and the news from the east and down the Valley was ominous; there was talk of panic among the whites and of slaves being sold off South, to the new cotton lands in Mississippi, or worse, the hemp plantations in western Kentucky or the turpentine forests in Georgia, where men were cheaper than mules. There was other talk, too. One Green Gables slave whom I had barely known, a silent, grieving man named Little John, only recently bought, had gone ‘Up the Mountain’ a few nights before. He was the first from Green Gables, and nobody knew what to expect. People said old man Calhoun was trying to collect the insurance, but the underwriters were maintaining that ‘insurrection and war’ invalidated the claims. Meanwhile, the folks at the Gables hardly ever saw a white face (or a red one, as the besot Irish overseer was hardly ‘white’). I waited around for Cricket, then went looking for him. My hoot-owl call was answered, and I found him out in the graveyard behind the kitchen gardens. Cricket had a little brother who had died at birth, along with his mother, and Cricket left him something shiny or bright every week: a piece of bottle glass or creek stone, or even a toy. Cricket said this kept the child from crying; thus he was helping his mother in ‘Africa,’ as the slaves called heaven. Plus, he claimed his little brother’s ghost brought us luck on our trot-line, sang-digging, and other enterprises. I always found that little foot-long grave fascinating, festooned with glass chips and trinkets arranged neatly in rows. It didn’t bring us any luck that evening, though, I remember. Cricket was afraid to dig sang, afraid that on the mountain we would be shot for rebels or runaways. We ran the Holsom Slough trotline and cleaned two puny catfish, who were probably glad to be collected after waiting on the line for three days. I told Cricket how downcast I had felt that morning watching Lee’s soldiers, not expecting any sympathy, because he always did get on me for being too much of a ‘townie,’ but I got some: he told me to watch my back because ‘the only where white folks go from mean is meaner.’ I was inclined to agree, or at least to worry about it, for there I was stuck there in the middle of it all, with only my mama and myself amidst hordes of whites who were becoming less restrained in their viciousness every day. From old Deihl, a Yank and an abolitionist in his way (though surely Brown had redefined that term), I felt no danger, but no protection either. I had never particularly envied Cricket the ‘idiocy of rural life,’ as Marx calls it, but I did sometimes envy him living among his own people. The ignorance and superstition of the plantation slaves, which usually annoyed or disgusted me, seemed almost like a charm as I sat among them that night, welcomed simply because I was who I was. African. And if I wanted a show of martial strength, there it was: the fire on the mountain, burning as steadily as a star, bringing comfort to its friends and terror to its enemies. Indeed, the fire on the mountain was to turn out, in the long run, more effective than any of Lee’s parades. But the long run can be a long time running.