“Even then . . .”
“Let’s just wait until he calls upon us. We’ll have a much clearer idea of his intentions once we’ve had an opportunity to meet.”
Except that John Brown never called, either on the Reverend King or on Mr. McKellar, and no meeting ever took place. There were plenty of meetings—usually at the Chatham home of Israel Shadd, which also served as the offices of the Negro newspaper Provincial Freeman, where Brown and his sons were staying—but only coloured men were invited. Subsequent meetings in the engine house of the Negromanned No. 3 Fire Company and the First Baptist Church eventually included a few sympathetic whites, but no representative from Buxton was ever asked to attend. The Reverend King never let on that he resented the exclusion, but other people did, no one more than my mother.
“That man up to no good, I tell you that. Friend of the Negro and he don’t have the time or sense to pay his respects to the best friend any Negro I ever known ever had? Riff-raff who he associating with instead, that’s what I say. Good riddance that the Reverend King don’t have to bother himself with him and his peoples none. The Reverend King busy enough already doing good.”
We were walking home from Clayton House. I’d managed to listen to Mrs. King play the piano for nearly fifteen uninterrupted minutes while my mother gossiped out front with Mr. Johnson, who also sold firewood in Chatham. Apparently the Negroes who lived there were as agitated with John Brown’s presence as we were.
“What do you think he wants?” I said.
The story that had spread around Chatham and made it to Buxton was that Brown and his sons were helping to organize a new order of the Masonic Lodge, one for just coloured men, which was why there was so much secrecy attached to the meetings; but no one believed it, everyone knew that John Brown didn’t travel all the way to Canada West just to set up a social club. Besides, the Masons didn’t allow Negroes to be members.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “But it no good, I tell you that.”
Some of the men of Buxton sought private counsel with the Reverend King, wanted his advice about whether or not they should attend Brown’s meetings, whatever they turned out to be about. I’d see them sitting waiting their turn in the hallway outside the Reverend King’s office, each with hat in hand and a worried face that didn’t disappear once the conference inside was over. The Reverend King only spoke out publicly once about John Brown and what he meant—or might mean—to the Negro cause, and even then not by name. He didn’t have to. We all knew whom he was talking about.
“A spirit of uneasiness is manifesting itself in these times. Hate and a festering sense of undeserved injury, prompting to revenge, together with a despair of attaining its end by lawful means, will goad some on to lawless, desperate acts of widespread rebellion, in which the planter and his property both will perish together.”
No man from Buxton joined John Brown’s delegation when they departed Chatham for Kansas. When Brown and two dozen other men descended upon the town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 17, 1859, with the goal of seizing the government arsenal there and calling on the surrounding slaves to join them in an armed rebellion which would, within days, surely, spread throughout the entire South, Osborn Perry Anderson, Israel Shadd’s printer’s assistant, was all that Brown had to show for his recruitment efforts in Chatham.
And when, instead of the expected tide of Black recruits, it was Robert E. Lee and eighty United States Marines who descended upon Harpers Ferry a day and a half later, thirteen of Brown’s men lay dead, seven were captured, while the remaining five managed to escape, Osborn Perry Anderson among them. Anderson later testified how, when one of the men was finally sent outside with a flag of truce, he was promptly shot in the face. John Brown was bayonetted, shackled, and dragged half dead to Charleston, South Carolina, to stand trial on charges of treason, conspiring with slaves, and murder in the first degree. He was promptly convicted and hanged.
So the Reverend King had been right. All John Brown had accomplished was the deaths of several good men and contributing toward the increasing ire of the slaveholding South. The Reverend King had been right, and we had been right to heed his wise counsel. Again.
Sometimes, when George’s father would need to go into Chatham to buy an implement or some seed stock he couldn’t get in Buxton, George and I would ride along. One Saturday afternoon George and I bought a bag of peppermints to share and walked past Israel Shadd’s home on King Street, where everyone knew that John Brown was staying. An old thin white man with a long thin nose and long white hair and a long white beard scowled down from the second-floor balcony of the Shadd house. He stood alone. It wasn’t good manners, but we couldn’t help but stare up at him as we passed by. The old man paid us no attention. It was as if he didn’t even see us, although we were the only ones in the street. He looked like he woke up in the morning furious, as if he’d slid out of the womb with a furrowed brow and a list of several non-negotiable demands.
I knew at that moment that John Brown would either destroy slavery or be destroyed trying. I didn’t need to hear about Harpers Ferry to know that John Brown was going to die violently. I have never seen such a beautiful face in all my life as that of John Brown.
*
It hits me hardest when I’m happiest. A good shit; a clean shave; interest calculated monthly that only serves to fatten an already not insubstantial principal—and then a two-by-four to the forehead, because rage’s favourite attacking formation is the all-out ambush, and peace of mind has its price, the same as every other human vice.
My father raped my mother. My father owned my mother. By Louisiana law, my mother was my father’s to rape.
The same three steps to attempted calm, always the same three steps:
I remind myself that I wasn’t the only light-skinned Negro ever born who had the plantation master’s dark green eyes and aquiline nose and whom the mistress of the plantation pretended didn’t exist.
I reassure myself that no mother ever loved her child more, no son was ever maternally luckier or better cared for.
I console myself with knowing that a doctor I once knew told me that cancer of the jaw is one of the most painful ways to die, that on his deathbed there was nothing my father could do to prevent the pain that was feasting away on every cell in his rotting body, that the only thing he owned in his final hours on earth was his misery.
But no one but a madman or a British empiricist ever had to convince himself that tomorrow morning the sun is going to rise. No one who truly walked in God’s light ever had to pray to feel His presence.
My father raped my mother. My father owned my mother. By Louisiana law, my mother was my father’s to rape.
Shaving this morning, I spotted another tuft of white hair sprouting over my right ear. Instead of putting my fist through the mirror or going through the same three steps for the three millionth time, I got the scissors from the kitchen and sharpened my razor and soaped my scalp and carefully shaved my head caramel clean. Knives can do things that the alphabet can’t.
I rubbed my naked scalp—so smooth, so brown—and smiled at the man looking back at me in the mirror.
*
Loretta has arranged her typical breakfast around her at the kitchen table—pork sausages, bacon rashers, eggs, black pudding, toast, a pot of coffee—and is waiting for the kettle to boil so that I can join her with my cup of black tea and bowl of porridge. Henry’s head is already busy in his bowl. Happy as he is to have his morning meal, he’s just as eager to get it over with so as to be ready when Loretta decides to drop a sausage end or a crust of bread to the floor. Eight straight hours tight together in bed and here we are gathered together again in the kitchen. And later, after the day is done but before we retire to our shared bed once more, together again this evening in the library in front of the fire. Families are bodies. Familiar, close-by bodies.
Sitting down across from her with my cup and my bowl, now Loretta can finally commence eating. Her side o
f the table is so crowded with crockery—and everything looks so good, she desires to eat everything at once, just gets started on a dripping slice of just-buttered toast when she can’t resist unleashing her knife and fork upon the fat stack of grease-perspiring sausages—Loretta is the only person I’ve ever seen who eats sideways. She bites a piece of bacon in two, makes Henry sit and shake a paw in return for the other half.
“You are welcome,” she says. “You are a very courteous dog, Mr. Heinrich.”
I sip my tea and watch Loretta eat while waiting for my porridge to cool. Henry stays as close to Loretta as he can without actually sitting on top of her, just in case she wishes to trade another trick for another treat. He and she weren’t always so comfortable with one another. Meaning, Loretta wasn’t always so comfortable with Waldo, Henry’s predecessor.
When I first met Loretta, when I still lived overtop of Sophia’s with Waldo, she wasn’t even so sure dogs should be allowed in the house.
“You understand,” she said, “this animal, if he was starving, he would eat you.”
“And if I was starving, I’d eat him, too.” I reached down and gently stroked Waldo’s head. “We’re both hoping it never comes to that.”
Time and familiarity eventually accomplished what logic and reasoned argument rarely can. I can even remember witnessing her mind begin to amend. It’s a rare day when you can actually see an idea.
“One moment, please,” Loretta had said.
Our relationship had grown legs. If I wasn’t busy with Sophia’s or Loretta wasn’t reading German to me or we weren’t making love—and the latter two usually followed one another—we were walking, eventually ending up in Tecumseh Park. By the time we’d met, I was a confirmed city person and the natural world had become an inconvenience to be overcome. But a well-manicured park is different, is civilized nature. Besides, we were both attempting to save money, and walking, like reading and fucking, is free. The future was something we both believed in.
Loretta drifted from my side in the direction of a young couple pushing their infant in a pram through the park. I stayed where I was, with Waldo, the stray dog I’d recently taken in. Proud new parents are always delighted to provide absolute strangers with the opportunity to marvel over the world’s latest little miracle, but mixed-race couples are, unfortunately, just a little too strange.
The day was warm and the baby lay on top of a thin cotton blanket. Except for being dressed in a blue sailor’s suit and matching blue cap, it looked like every other baby I’d ever seen, like a tiny, wrinkleless old man. Loretta leaned over the pram with her hands on her knees.
“And who is this little darling?” she said.
“This is Oliver,” the woman said. “Say hello, Oliver.”
The only thing more ridiculous than parents addressing their infant children as if they’re understanding adults is adults who should know better playing along and pretending that’s what they are.
“And hello to you, too, Oliver,” Loretta said to the expressionless child. “May I say, you look very handsome in your uniform today.”
“Say thank you, Oliver.”
And this time the baby did respond, with a slight upturn at one corner of his mouth in conjunction with his eye on the same side halfway shutting. At which point everyone but me—even the bearded, cigar-smoking husband—chorused a long “Aww,” all in celebration of what was probably Oliver passing wind. Except for the baby she’d lost coming to Canada, we’d never discussed the topic of children, but I’d known Loretta long enough I’d assumed we didn’t have to.
I looked at Waldo, sitting patiently, waiting to be on the move again. Dogs do what they’re told, will defend you to the death, and will never ask you for money. Why would anyone have a baby when they could have a dog instead? I thought. Loretta bid Oliver goodbye and we continued on our walk.
Waiting what I considered a reasonable interval, “You like babies,” I said. I hadn’t intended it to sound like an allegation.
“Of course. Everyone likes babies.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“You are mistaken. This is not possible. We are made—yes?—to like babies. It is this way so that we are forced to care for them until they grow up and can take care of themselves. It is children you do not like.”
“What’s the difference?”
“A baby is a baby,” Loretta said. “But a child—a child is almost a person. I have never met a baby I did not like. But persons . . . I have never met many of those that I did like. Not, at least, after getting to know them.”
Just then Waldo burst into motion, raced off ahead of us. Because he’d been a stray and on his own for who knew how long, and probably owed his survival, in part, to the occasional careless squirrel, I was used to such sudden dashes.
“David,” Loretta said, grabbing my arm, “your animal.”
Thankfully, any time Waldo had spotted a squirrel he’d wanted to know better, he’d been unsuccessful in making the meeting happen, would, at most, corner it up a tree. This time he kept running. And running. Then I saw what he was chasing.
“Look,” I said, Loretta’s arm still on mine.
“What? What do I look at?”
I pointed to the sky.
The bird was so high, it took her a moment to understand that that was what I was pointing at. “Your animal is chasing a bird?”
I nodded. Waldo was still running, was almost out of sight.
She patted my hand with hers. “Now this, this is most impressive.”
Loretta halves another slice of bacon with her teeth, and before she has time to ask Henry to shake a paw, he’s one step ahead of her, is waiting for her to give him hers.
“You are very greedy this morning, Heinrich, but I forgive you, we have quite a busy day today.”
Today is March 1—rent day—and every rent day for the last couple of years Henry has accompanied Loretta on her collection rounds. Of course, Loretta could employ someone to do it for her—not just because it’s supposedly beneath the dignity of a well-off landowner to travel door to door, but because her property holdings are so extensive it takes most of the day to get the job done—but Loretta wouldn’t have it any other way. “I like to feel how much money I have made.” And Henry is just as happy to spend the day escorting her around town. And stopping off at the butcher shop on the way home for a fresh pork cutlet.
When Loretta pushes her last cup of coffee away from her, Henry knows it’s time to go. Loretta stands up, surveys the tableful of dirty dishes.
“Because you are a foolish man who will not do as I say and acquire domestic help, I leave all this for you,” she says.
My porridge is just the right temperature now; I’ll tidy up the kitchen after I’m done eating and have had another cup of tea.
“You two have a good day,” I say.
“Oh, we will, won’t we, Heinrich?” Henry’s at her side, ready for action. She leans down and scratches him between the ears. “We always enjoy rent day very much, don’t we?”
*
One door down from Coopers’ Bookstore is the post office. Coopers’ is where I buy ink and pens and parchment, but not where I buy books. Coopers’ carries books—bibles, bibles, and even a few bibles, right alongside Bowdler’s scrubbed and scoured Family Shakespeare and a generous sampling of this season’s contribution to everlasting literature, such as The Constant Nymph and White Wings: A Yachting Romance—but not, unfortunately, any books that are suitable for reading. For that I need the post office. For that I need Larwill.
Ordinarily, the tinkle of the bell over the door announcing he has a customer summons Larwill from the rear of the post office with a smile on his face and a spring in his step right up until he sees that I’m the one it’s his job to help. Then his face will fall blank and he’ll slow his pace and make sure to make me wait for as long as he possibly can while rummaging around in the drawer underneath the counter looking for the nothing we both know he’s only pretending to look
for. Today, though, the smile stays stuck where it is, even after he realizes it’s me, even while he sorts and collects my mail. I can’t help but wonder if there’s something lodged between my teeth or if I’ve spilt something down the front of my coat.
Larwill speaks as he sorts. “Mr. King . . . no . . . no . . . no . . . no . . . Mr. King . . . no . . . no . . . no . . . Mr. King . . . no . . . no . . . Mr. King . . . no . . . no . . . no . . . and . . . no. Here we are. Two periodicals and two books for Mr. King, it appears.”
He slides across my copies of the Fortnightly and the Quarterly and the two slender packages containing, no doubt, the two latest instalments in the English Men of Letters series I’ve been waiting for—Leslie Stephen on Swift, Cotter Morrison on Gibbon—with a smirking courtesy it’s like he’s daring me to find offensive.
“And will there be anything else today, Mr. King? Or is that everything for you today, Mr. King?”
Of course. Up until this very moment, a surly, exaggerated “Sir” is as close as Larwill has ever gotten to referring to me by name, his only way of not endangering his job yet still shamelessly withholding his acknowledgement of me as as much of a Mr.—of a man, of a human being—as he is. Now all of a sudden I’m Mr. King. Like Mr. King my namesake. Like Larwill’s father’s one-time nemesis, the Reverend King. Like the recently deceased Reverend King. The King is dead, and Larwill wants me to know just how pleased his demise has made him.
It’s harder to impersonate a fool than a wise man, but I do my best.
“No, that will be all, Larwill,” I say, like he’s just lit my cigar to go along with the final brandy of the evening and I’m granting him permission to retire until tomorrow morning, when it will be once again time for him to serve me my breakfast in bed. I take my mail but turn around at the tinkling door. “Now that you mention it, Larwill, there is one more thing.”
“Oh, and what is that, Mr. King?”
“I’m expecting the transfer of a very large sum of money in the next few days, and I’d appreciate it if you took special care of it for me when it arrives. It turns out that the bank I would normally have it deposited into can only insure my account up to ten thousand dollars. It seems as if I need to find someone else to hold on to my money for me. Well, if it’s not one thing, it’s something else, isn’t it, Larwill?”
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