Fire on the Mountain (8 page)

August 12, 1859
Miss Emily Pern
11 Commerce St.
New York

Dear Emily:

Thank you for your letter. My friend Levasseur is also encouraging me to go and hear Frederick Douglas when he comes to Bethel Church next week, but it conflicts with a tragic and not unrelated event, a family funeral. I can no longer pretend to be personally unaffected by recent Events. I lost a young first cousin in the Massacre at Iron Bridge, near Harper’s Ferry, who though misled and foolish, was much beloved by his Family. His name was John, my Uncle Reuben’s eldest son. He was a student at Shenandoah M.I. He was exactly my sister’s age, fifteen.

I must be in Baltimore when my uncle brings his remains Home.

I have heard so much that is noble about Douglas that even in my sorrow I am sorry to miss his appearance. I heard about it even before you wrote. Some say he was behind Brown on the raid, and others say he was against it. From what I have heard of his judgment and intelligence, I favor the latter. They say that Blood is thicker than water, yet I feel, truthfully, no vengefulness at my cousin’s death, only sadness at the crimes that now stain the cause of Abolition. Revenge was never my strong suit, making me, I fear, a poor Virginian.

Meanwhile, here, the Copperheads are getting bolder. A colored man was beaten and killed two nights ago, and a church was torched, in retribution, no doubt, for Iron Bridge; which is precisely what I feared, the more dangerous elements inspired and unleashed. Violence has been sowed and will be reaped.

Douglas will be well guarded, I think. My friend Lev is urging me to plead exams and come to Bethel Church, but I would be far more than remiss to do so; Lev does not understand, I fear, the Southern family. My uncle and I are not close: he is my father’s younger brother, and having moved North to enter law, he religiously sends his children South to be indoctrinated as Virginians. Thus the ironies of slavery: for I, the eldest of an eldest son, will inherit Mint Springs and its human chattel, which fate denied to him, a rabid enemy of Abolition. Meanwhile my father, in his illness, borrows regularly from his younger brother, who makes money hand over fist having been (to his profit) forced off the land into a profession. And I wonder will there be any slaves left to manumit when I come to my inheritance.

So I must to Baltimore. There were ten years between us and I knew John only as a child, which was, in truth, in understanding, all he ever attained. G.R.H.S.

Though I shan’t hear Douglas, I expect to know of his words in detail, for if there’s one thing I have gotten out of my almost four years of Medical school it’s a plethora of friends with the ability to take sure Notes.

Any news of your plan? I hope you will continue to accept me as a true friend of abolition, of Hippocrates, and not incidentally, my dear Miss Pern, of Yourself.

Your Faithful, &c.,
Thomas Hunter, Esq, M.D.
(ad imminen)

It was in the little things, like using a twelve-year-old to pick up dead fifteen-year-olds, that the South, even its less harsh masters like Deihl, showed its unthinking, casual inhumanity: the fact that we were not in their eyes human. It took three wagons to “gather the children home,” (as the preacher put it, weeping) from Iron Bridge, and two of the wagons were Deihl’s. I drove Kate. It’s a rare horse and a common mule that can carry the dead without spooking. I have never forgotten the sight of those fourteen boys all in a row like ducks whose mama was the Gray Lady herself, their gray wool S.M.I. uniforms ruined with blood, being lifted one after another into the back of the wagon. No matter how gently they laid them down, the rusty springs shrieked each time. They didn’t get to me, though, not like the youth I saw with John Brown on the morning road to Frederick. These were not boys like me: already dead, these were
things
. Plus, I knew they were not friends. Folks lined the streets of Charles Town when we brought them in. This was in the first shock, and nobody seemed mad. It was as if lightning had struck the town. Everybody seemed dazed. The men who unloaded the boys into the church kitchen, and the women who cleaned them up were mostly black, though the militia that stood over them at honor guard for two days while their families arrived was all white. Charles Town had never seen such fine families before, I guarantee. They came not only from Richmond and the Tidewater, but the Carolines, Charleston, and Savannah; as far north as Baltimore and as far west as the bluegrass of Kentucky. We didn’t see them, of course, at Mama’s; they were not your cornbread-and-beans type; but we kept their horses and traps at the stable and we fed their slaves in the yard, where Mama had fixed up a special ‘colored’ kitchen. These slaves were first shocked and amazed at what had happened, and then curious and interested, all the time putting on a mighty show of grieving for the boys they had swaddled and raised. We slaves were the masters of grief’s appearances, weeping for every tragedy but our own. It was the end of the week before I got a chance to slip out to Green Gables. I left Sees Her tied up behind the big house and found Cricket down at the slough. Cricket seemed not to like this new horse of mine; I do believe he was jealous, great-grandson. The trotlines were slow. Cricket was trading catfish to Mama and the cook at the Shenandoah as well. While we ran the lines, I described the line of bodies all with their throats opened like mouths, the howling of the wagon springs as they were laid in like cordwood, the buzzing of the flies. Cricket had to hear every detail. It was hours before we were done with the lines, and I wondered why we were going so slow. It was because Cricket had something to show me, and he was waiting for the moon to rise. Right after the moon came over the mountain, he took me out to a certain canebrake, to a certain little high piece of ground near the Shenandoah, and showed me four graves with four white crosses: each one decorated neatly with flowers and bottle glass and white conch shells, each with a new little pine tree planted on it, African-style. Here was the resting place of Brown’s men. After Iron Bridge, it was like seeing the pretty side of death, the human side: for is burial not the most uniquely human of all our enterprises? Ants make cities and deer make roads, but only we of all creatures, in a tenderness and trustingness that would shame God if there were one, make graves. Cricket made me swear never to tell where it was. I went back looking for the spot years later, in 1895, thinking it should be made a shrine to the common humanity of all who died young so that Nova Africa might live; but it had all been swept away by the floods.

Like all kids, Harriet loved to peel growstone: softer than balsa wood but stronger than concrete, it flaked off satisfyingly in thumbnail-shaped moons. She amused herself with the bridge rail (which would, of course, grow back smooth again) while the grown-ups argued; then she asked the question she already knew the answer to.

From here the road led across the top of the mountain, through Bear Pond Gap, Grissom told her. “Should we drive up there and have a look? Like your father,” he said, “you’re drawn to the high places.”

That made Harriet grin and made Yasmin angry. She couldn’t tell if Grissom had said it to defy her silence about Mars, or to acknowledge it and make it seem more natural. Either way, his presumption angered her.

“Harriet, quit picking at the bridge,” she said, and got into the driver’s seat. It was, after all, her car. Sort of.

The top was a disappointment. The mountain was covered with white oak, maple, and hickory forest, turning beautiful in October colors; but there were few pines, no bare rocks, no feeling of height, even though they were at over a thousand feet. The mountain top was broad and flat where the road crossed and there was no view. Harriet got out of the car anyway, and stood on her tiptoes, as if maybe that last inch would reveal something.

Yasmin was just getting out of the car when, suddenly, two people crashed out of the brush at the side of the road. It was a man and a woman carrying backpacks topped with tents and bedrolls. Yasmin jumped back. With a wave the two crossed the road and disappeared into the brush on the south side of the road. Yasmin leaned back against the car, alarmed at how her heart was pounding. For a second, with their giant backpacks and white hats, they had looked like P.A.S.A. cosmonauts.

“There is a trail that runs along the top of the mountain, following the route of the Army of the North Star,” Grissom was explaining to Harriet. Then he noticed Yasmin looking as though she’d seen a ghost: “Are you okay?”

She nodded.

“Hundreds of people hike it every year,” Grissom went on. “Not just Mericans and n’Africans, but Canadians, Quebecois, Oka, Dineh, even Europeans. All the way from New England to Alabama. The section from Harper’s Ferry to here is especially pretty; it goes past False Fire, only a mile from here.”

“Have you ever hiked it?” Harriet asked.

Yasmin scowled at her daughter as she got back into the car. What a question to ask a one-legged man. But Grissom didn’t seem to mind.

“All the way. As a boy scout from Chicago, forty years ago. Before the Revolution,” he said. “Since then, not so much.”

“Why don’t you get a pseudo-leg?”

“The hip’s all messed up, nothing to work it with.”

“Can’t you hike on crutches?”

“You probably could from here; you’re already on top of the mountain. The trail coming up from the river is rough, though. I’ll show it to you; you can see the beginning of it from the museum. What’s that noise?”

Yasmin pulled the starter again.

Te-oonk te-oonk te-oonk

“What is this?”

Te-oonk te-oonk

The engine fired, then there was a horrible clatter like dishes falling.

“Shut it off!” Grissom yelled.

Yasmin had already shut it off. “What was that?”

“I don’t know. I think you lost your polarization.”

“What does that mean?”

“Are we stuck?” Harriet asked.

“It means we switch over to planetary drive,” Grissom said.

“Planetary?” Yasmin said, moving over and letting him into the driver’s seat. “What’s that?”

“Mother!” Harriet was already pushing, laughing. Yasmin got out and joined her.

“Planetary drive. Gravitational. In layman’s words,” Grissom said, “we roll down the hill.” The car was rolling faster. “Luckily, the old guy in the house trailer by the bridge is an internal-combustion mechanic.” Yasmin quit pushing and jumped into the front seat and slammed the door. “I know because I interviewed him for a folklore project last summer.” Harriet jumped into the back seat and slammed the door. “Lewis, that was his name.” They whooshed silently around the long curves. “No, it was Leavis. No . . . ” The road looped through long halls of forest. “Angus. Elbow. Pelvis. Elvis. That’s it . . . ” At the bottom of the mountain, after a sharp turn, they fairly flew across the river on the bridge, toward the trailers in the sycamores.

“Elvis Presley Cardwell.”

August 16, 1859
Miss Emily Pern
11 Commerce St.
New York

Dear Emily:

I am writing to tell you that my plans changed, I went to Bethel Church last night and saw the great Frederick Douglass. Instead of a funeral I attended a Birth. Instead of a rain of tears, the Thunder of righteousness. Even I, with my conservative (as you say!) Southern ways, was moved. How like a lion is Douglass, a statesman, a philosopher, and a fighter in one, and he has done more in these two days to alter my opinions on how to end Slavery (I had started to say On Slavery, but my opinions on that Evil institution were long ago fixed) than any other event or individual save, I must own, perhaps yourself.