by Terry Bisson
The South is in a state of Alarm. There is next week a States’ Rights Convention in Atlanta, called by those who think the federal government is not being forceful enough in defending slavery’s prerogatives; they want to replace Lee with another, and are said to be raising an interstate militia, partly at least with English funds. My Uncle Reuben and my young Cousin Wm. Henry, his eldest surviving, are on their way, my father being too sick to travel.
My mother writes from Staunton that there’s a hanging every week in every town, for as Lee can’t get at Brown’s army he makes his supporters (or supposed supporters) pay. I’m apprehensive about this trip even as I am anxious to go. My father is fast weakening. My sister is marrying the man who tried to shoot me, but flinched. They all assume, even my sister, that the war has cured my abolitionism (as with the few other liberal Southerners).
My thanks to Lee that his officers are little accomplished with small arms.
The great fear is of course that the Rebellion will spread beyond Virginia, which it has already begun to do. My cousin writes from Rumsey, in western Kentucky, that they no longer travel at night.
And you? And you? I promise, no more declarations, at least until a more appropriate circumstance; but please speak when he comes, to Levasseur, who knows my heart better than any living man. I will only make so bold as to declare that loneliness is my constant companion, with my true comrades so far from my side. I have friends in the Medical Ctte., but these Yanks are a New Breed, as cold a bunch as businessmen. There is, ironically, less friendship between black and white now than before the rebellion.
When next you hear from me I will be in Staunton. Has any man ever so dreaded going Home?
Yrs., &c., Thos.
The first weeks of winter were desperate ones in the Shenandoah. Lee’s forces occupied all the towns, and the Africans, free and slave alike, were treated as conquered souls; that always fine distinction between slave and free was seared away in the fire of war, and more and more there was only black and white. This seemed to chafe at Mama (for I still called her that) because she had always considered herself, de facto if not de juris, free, and she resented the arrogance of the soldiers quartered in our barn, even though they were guaranteed with federal money, far more reliable than the tobacco or timber vouchers of the militia. To me she explained that my true mother was her little sister, Taze, Cricket’s mother, who had died giving birth to me. (That my father had run away, was true.) A bundle of rags had been buried alongside Taze to fool old man Calhoun, and I had been spirited into town and given to her sister, ‘Mama,’ who had been bought by Deihl and promised freedom. He agreed to the deception. Cricket, who was four, was told his baby brother had died with his mother. I thought of the little grave with its constellation of colored glass and stones: it was my own. This gave me a chill, like discovering I was not born but awakened from the dead. When Mama told me that Cricket had never been told the truth, for the first time I cried, turning away from her, remembering his big arm around me in the shadow of the willow. Why not? Had they not trusted him, of all people, my own brother, who had been butchered rather than say a word, rather than betray either me or John Brown? Why was he never told? I was never to find out. Mama never said, and Deihl and I never spoke of such things. I turned away from Mama that day. In my anger and grief (and arrogance), I told myself that with her own relative freedom, such as it was, she had turned her back on her own people. Though what was I but proof she hadn’t? November went out cold and December came in wet. Deihl couldn’t find a buyer for the stable, so he and Mama worked like draft beasts, and the money piled up. With Lee’s winter campaign, the ‘freedom’ of the free Africans who made up a third of the population of Charles Town (and almost half of Harper’s Ferry) was revealed in its true coin. We were under martial law. The days when I could run wild through the streets and along the river at any hour I liked were gone. Any dark face was hailed, stopped, abused, and vilified at will by Lee’s U.S. Marines, as often with a harsh Northern or even, God forbid, an Irish accent as a Southern one. Meanwhile the Virginia militia drilled and drank, and drank and drilled, confident in the illusion (later liberally swamped in blood) that they would not be forced again to fight. By the time I looked up again, the Blue Ridge above Charles Town seemed as lifeless as the moon. The war seemed all but over. Brown on the run. Tubman, it was rumored, dead. And our condition worse even than before. I don’t remember how I felt; I don’t think I cared one way or the other, when they told me one night after dinner, a week and a half before Christmas, that we were leaving for Baltimore as soon as the weather broke. Old Deihl sat at the table, even took his hat off, pulled out his Bible, and recited (pretending to read) the verse about strangers in a strange land; then Mama laid fifty ten-dollar notes on the table and said he had sold the house and stable. I do remember that the stack of money and the Bible neither of them could read were precisely the same height.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Harriet said, leaning back against her mother, who was leaning against a rock, which was leaning against a mountain, which was itself resting against the heart of that warm and welcoming planet, Earth. “I just wanted to see False Fire. I thought I would be back by the time you got back. Then it rained. I didn’t realize the map was in miles. How come people ride klicks, but walk miles?”
“Feet are old-fashioned,” Yasmin said. “Let’s see your shoes. I just thought of something.”
“Oh Mother, they’re beautiful,” Harriet said. “They really are.” And they really were. The rain seemed to have brought the blues and grays to a swirling shimmer, like oil on water. The tops were higher and lighter, almost a moon color, and when Harriet touched them, they opened and fell into a little pool around her ankle. “Look, they’ve learned to undo themselves.”
“Amazing,” Yasmin said. She touched them, and they climbed back up again. “And the soles aren’t so clunky now. See how soft they grow? You won’t believe this, but I just remembered what it is you’re supposed to do to make them grow in: get them wet. Go for a walk in the rain!”
So why were you crying? Is it the baby?”
Harriet shook her head. Her braids were ragged, Yasmin noticed. They definitely needed work. She felt that delightful old itching in her fingertips an African mother gets when she studies a daughter’s hair. “You’re sure you don’t mind not being an only child?”
“Oh no.”
“Positive?”
“No, I think it’s great. The only thing is, I just wish ...”
“Just wish . . .”
“I just don’t want you moving to Africa. I was thinking about that. What would I do then? I don’t want to change schools and...”
“Is that it?” Yasmin caught her daughter’s chin and turned her head so she could look at her face. “Honey, I’m not moving to any Africa.”
“Really? I thought you loved it so much, and now. . .”
“Is that why you never asked who the father was? I’m not even getting married. I’m just having a baby. In Charleston. At home. In our little yellow house. You and me.”
“Really?”
“That’s the fact, child.”
Harriet thought this over. She grinned. She stood up and took her mother’s hand.
“Well, I was just wondering, that’s all,” she said. “You took so long to come home.”
They followed the winding path along the ridgetop, through brushy trees and laurel. The view they’d been promised from the rocks was gone now, and they might as well have been walking through a forest on the Valley floor. The path narrowed and Yasmin dropped back. Harriet was hungry. She wondered if her great-great-grandfather had ever walked this path. If she looked behind her, would she see him with the kids? Or would she see him in front with the grown-ups? Twelve and sixty at the same time. A kid with an old man’s face.
“Did Great-Great-Grandpa ever come up here?”
“Probably not, except maybe digging sang with Cricket. But I don’t think you find that on a
mountaintop. By the time he joined Brown, they were a hundred klicks to the south,” Yasmin said. “Almost to Roanoke.”
“What’s ‘sang’?”
“Ginseng. He has a hospital named after him in Roanoke, and one in Ireland, too.”
Harriet could always tell when her mother wanted her to ask questions. “Ireland? Really?”
“He fought with Connolly. That’s a whole other story he never wrote. He left Nova Africa during the eighties, under a cloud. He went to Ireland where he met Connolly. That was the only actual fighting your great-great-grandfather ever did, against the British in 1885.”
“What does that mean, ‘under a cloud’?”
“Politics,” Yasmin said. “Your great-great-grandfather was a revolutionary but not exactly a socialist, at least in his younger days—”
“But Nova Africa wasn’t socialist then.”
“It was headed that way.” Yasmin didn’t like to be interrupted. “—nor was he an easy man to get along with. It wasn’t until after he came back from Ireland, in the late eighties, that he joined the Party. Even then, he argued with this one and that one until the day he died. But that’s still another story. Are you hungry?”
“Starving.”
“Grissom is waiting in the car on the road at Bear Pond Gap, where we were the other day when the car broke down. He says it’s only a mile the other side of False Fire. But where is False Fire?”
The mountain was narrowing as it rose to southward. The view was coming back, reluctantly. Through the trees on both sides now, they could glimpse golden fields of wheat far below. The trail wound up an easy rise, where the ridgetop got rocky again, then dropped slightly. Harriet ran ahead, then looked back and saw her mother, pregnant, but showing it only in how carefully she picked her way along the rocky trail.
“I found it,” Harriet called back.
False Fire.
December 20
Miss Emily Pern
Queens Dispensary
Bath
England
Dear Emily:
I got your letter one day and Lev’s the next— learning from the one that he was wounded, from the other that he is in prison, from both that he is alive. Thanks be to whatever Entity it is that looks after Jacobins. He apologized to me, but I don’t yet know what for, since apparently his letters have crossed in the mail. The mail-train robbery I had read of there, yet had no idea Abolitionists were involved, much less Lev! It was a bold stroke, the bolder since those who escaped got out of England with several hundred thousand pounds, I hear. Lev seems to think that, thanks to Marx’s agitation around the case, there is enough anti-slavery sentiment in England that he will serve no long prison term, and my hope is that he is right.
As for me, I am as you see by the weary address below, still in Philadelphia. I owe my unwanted leisure to unseasonable snow to the North and rain to the South of the Mason-Dixon line, which in terms of the weather has proved this year a most precise boundary, and fatal to our plan, since snow is sometimes kind to the traveler, but mud, never. We’re hoping for a break in the weather after the New Year.
Was there ever a man so impatient to enter Purgatory?
Your friend and Colleague,
Thomas
City of Brotherly Love
I have no story to tell of Lee’s great victory at Front Royal or his subsequent defeat at Winchester, or the rout at Strasburg. I witnessed none of it, yet I saw it all. The tides of war were reflected in the face of every white person, which changed like the oceans of a planet too familiar with its moon; while the black faces in the Shenandoah Valley were, through years of training, impassive and unreadable, often even to ourselves. After Deihl sold the house and stable, only the weather, the worst in many years, held us in Virginia. Many others were trapped as well; a sea of refugees, black as well as white, filled Charles Town, and every day we were lashed with rumors like sleet. The war didn’t wait on the weather. On Christmas Eve we heard that Brown was encircled and all was lost (or won); they had brought a rope from Kentucky to hang him with, donated by the hemp growers, and another more elegant noose of Sea Island cotton. The buckskins laughed and sang carols as they rode off with Lee’s secondaries; they were followed by the militia, the Richmond Grays, eager now to join the fight they had until now been so satisfied to be left out of. None of them came back. Not one. In the morning we heard of the encirclement, and in the evening we heard of the ‘defeat.’ (For we n’Africans were still in another man’s country, using his words backward. Even today, fifty years later, I catch myself rejoicing at a defeat and weeping for a victory.) But there was no hiding the smiles of the black folks when it was found out that not only Brown but Tubman lived; our gallant Tubman, it was in fact she who (as it later turned out, this had been planned) broke the encirclement with the first international detachment of Haitian cavalry, of Garibaldini in their red silks, of Cherokee and Creek warriors, and Pennsylvania Molly Maguires. The ‘Grays’ were slaughtered, and I use the word with medical precision. The Carolina militia drowned in its own liquored-up blood. A few of the Kentucks and the Fourth Rhode Island got away. Meanwhile, to the south, Atlanta was burning, and the Cherokee courthouse raid had filled Asheville with troops, and emptied it of citizens. The South was calling for more troops, and the abs up North were agitating against them, even in the ranks. Like a fire, abolition was consuming the South. I had vowed to join Brown; then I had hated him; now I was eager to join him again. But the war had moved up the Valley from Charles Town, and I was only a twelve-year-old boy and an African, and there was no way I could head south without looking like a runaway slave. I resolved the conflict as I have resolved so many in my life: by numbing myself against it, working unthinkingly, waiting for the weather to break.
JAN 15 1860
MINT SPRINGS FARM
STAUNTON VIRGINIA
LAURA SUE HUNTER BEWLEY:
DELAYED BY WEATHER/ ARRIVING HOME WEEK OF FEB 1/ AT LEAST THE WAR BROUGHT US A TELEGRAPH! TELL FATHER HOLD ON/ LOVE THOS
Every year in the South there is a ‘Little Spring’ toward the end of January, when the earth thaws out; the sun warms the air, if not the mud; and one feels almost as if the trees will be fooled into blooming. But only the people are. I was surprised to feel sorrow at leaving the old half-board, half-log house, and the stable where I had toiled so many hours for the horses I never grew to love: such are the attachments of childhood, which it is mistakenly said grow weaker through the years. It is years later, looking back from the barren mountaintop of age, when we feel most keenly the sorrow that childhood’s continual state of leaving evokes. We loaded the wagon and drove past the gallows, but I couldn’t find a tear to shed for my brother, or for myself. We rode across the Potomac bridge and past the steep wild end of Maryland Mountain, and I remembered the morning, it seemed a century ago, when I had seen that bold little army setting out. It had been the Fourth of July, deliberately, and now, for better or for worse, they had transformed every life in the valley. That July morning the road had been empty, but now it was crowded and we were part of a stream of humanity, all headed North. Thousands of others were seizing upon that break in the winter to flee Virginia and the war. The road through the Gap to Frederick was cut off, so we followed the rest of the refugees north toward Hagerstown. Hundreds of people and wagons were bottled up a few miles north of the Potomac at Boteler’s Ford on Antietam Creek. The ford had been gnawed away by the traffic and the waters, and an enterprising local family, the Cutshaws (whom we knew very well as mule sharpers) were making money ‘sailing’ wagons across with ropes and oxhides filled with air. It was an odd scene, of the kind that war spawns. Antietam Creek was swollen with an unaccustomed flood, which even more than the warm air made it seem like spring. The south bank was crowded with humanity of all ages and both sexes, black and white, talking, smoking, laughing, cursing, watching with admiration the Herculean exertions of the four gigantic Cutshaw boys, who were thrashing the wagons across the creek. Women h
elped one another with the babies while boys and men helped the horses haul the wagons over the steep stones. The Africans were most of us women and children and the old, for once unmolested by the whites. The tension of the past months seemed eased by the struggle in the creek below, by the commotion of flight. Here two nations, which forty miles to the south were fighting one of the bloodiest battles of the war, were mingled in a peasant scene from Brueghel, rich with the humor and compassion with which our race is blessed: I mean our human race. It made me not resent war but credit it, for the ordinary day-to-day conflict of slavery admitted no such moments of humanity; and I was glad that ‘peace,’ at least, was gone forever, whatever the future might hold. Like the rest, I put my skinny shoulder to the wheel. The passage across the creek was slow. Everybody got wet along with the Cutshaws, who stayed wet and grimly energetic, with sticks and weeds tangled in their hair, like great yellow bird dogs. We were on the bank for ten hours. Every hour the news changed, from “Lee winning” to “Lee losing” back to “Lee winning.” It seemed not to matter to the tide of refugees. The whites were the small farmers, and a few of the great ones who had recently discovered the virtue of looking and acting like small ones. The Africans were the free blacks and the abandoned or runaway slaves passing as free, all unchallenged and unquestioned, since the cash value of a human being had dropped (that is, great-grandson, risen) almost to nothing with the war. One would have thought, seeing that crowd, that we n’Africans were a nation of children and boys, women and old men; and I think it lent speed, on the one hand, and heart, on the other, to the refugees to realize how many of the able-bodied black men were ‘missing count’—that is, gone Up the Mountain. We were all morning, then all afternoon on Antietam Creek. Like the Cutshaws, Deihl and Mama saw a chance to make a little money. Mama had me ‘hurry up’ a fire and she fried up some hoecake and boiled chicory, which she sold at coffee prices to the people around, and to the people coming through from the other side, where the line was of course much shorter. In fact, only one wagon came over from the North, although several horsemen—adventurers, military contractors, newspapermen, and a few revolutionaries, I expect, posing as all three—splashed across. This wagon was a brand-new Pennsylvania Townerley driven by a youngish white man, a doctor I later discovered, well outfitted, with a fair pair of Morgans, one of which picked up a stone in the creek. I helped him doctor it, and Mama sold him some hoecake. He seemed a gentleman and had a fine pair of duelling pistols under the seat of his wagon (I happened to notice), and I heard plantation Virginia in his speech. That was when I got my idea. Much as we dislike one another, horses and I have an understanding: this doctor was having trouble with the Morgan that had picked up the stone, and I calmed things out for him. He said I was pretty good with a horse. “I loves horses,” I told him, in that ‘nigger’ talk white folks love to hear, “and de Morgan de bestest.” It was growing dark by then, and I bid farewell to Mama, though God forgive me, were there one, she didn’t know it. I told her and Deihl that I had made an arrangement to help the Cutshaw boys through the night for two dollars, and would catch up with them down the road, the traffic being so slow. Here was the cruelest act of my childhood. I was never to see Mama again, for she died of the pox that laid Baltimore low the third year of the war. I never even kissed her good-bye, not only because I was cold to her then (but I was! I was!) but because such a gesture might have given away my intention to head South. How often since that day have I remembered the love and care she gave me. I was to see old Deihl once more, in his old age, twenty years later, but it was strange between us without Mama, to say the least. She had left me some money, and he had tried to get it to me, but the U.S. government at that time wouldn’t release funds for Nova Africa. The doctor made it past Charles Town and almost all the way to Winchester before he stopped to rest his horses and sleep. In the back of his wagon he found a twelve-year-old African stowaway curled up (and by now I was no longer pretending) asleep.
