“No,” he said. “It had to end the way it did. Old John Brown knows what he’s doing. They should’a killed him. He’s raising more hell now writing letters and talking than he ever did with a gun.”
And that was true. They put the Old Man and his men in jail in Charles Town, the ones from his army that lived through the fight: Hazlett, Cook, Stevens, the two coloreds, John Copeman, and the Emperor, and by the time the Captain got done writing letters and getting visitors from his friends in New England, why, he was a star all over again. The whole country was talking ’bout him. I hear tell the last six weeks of his life the Old Man got more folks moved ’bout the slavery question than he ever did spilling blood back in Kansas, or in all them speeches he gived up in New England. Folks was listening now that white blood was spilled on the floor. And it weren’t just any old white blood. John Brown was a Christian man. A bit off his biscuit, but a better Christian you never saw. And he had lots of friends, white and colored. I do believe he done more against slavery in them last six weeks with letter writings and talking than he ever done raising one gun or sword.
They set a quick trial for him, convicted him right off, and set a date for the Old Man to hang, and all the while that Old Man kept writing letters and squawking and hollering ’bout slavery, sounding off like the devil to every newspaper in America that would listen, and they was listening, for them insurrections scared the devil out the white man. It set the table for the war that was to come, is what it did, for nothing scared the South more than the idea of niggers running ’round with guns and wanting to be free.
But I wasn’t thinking them thoughts back then. Them fall nights become long for me. And lonesome. I was a boy for the first time in years, and being a boy, with the end of November coming, that meant in five weeks’ time it would be January, and I would be fifteen. I never knowed my true birth date, but like most coloreds, I celebrated it on the first of the year. I wanted to move on. Five weeks after the insurrection, in late November, I caught Mr. Caldwell one evening when he come to the back of the shop to give me some bacon, biscuits, and gravy and asked ’bout me maybe leaving for Philadelphia.
“You can’t go yet,” he said. “Too hot. They haven’t hung the Captain yet.”
“How is he? He’s yet living and yet well?”
“That he is. In the jailhouse as always. Set to hang on December second. That’s in a week.”
I thunk on it a moment. It hurt my heart a little to think of it. So I said, “It would do me well, I reckon, for me to see him.”
He shook his head. “I ain’t hiding you here for my safety and satisfaction,” he said. “I got enough risk just taking care of you.”
“But the Old Man always thunk I brought him good luck,” I said. “I rode with him for four years. I was friends to his sons and family and even one of his daughters. I’m a friendly face. It might help him, being that he ain’t never gonna see his wife and his children on this side no more, to see a friendly face.”
“Sorry,” he said.
He sat on that thought a few days. I didn’t ask it. He said it. He come to me a few days later and said, “I thunk on it and I changed my mind. It would be a help to him to see you. It would help him through his last days, to know you is yet living. I’m doing this for him. Not you. I will arrange it.”
He called on a few persons, and a few days later he brung an old Negro man named Clarence back behind the shop to where I was hid. Clarence was a white-haired old feller, slow movin’ but thoughtful and smart. He cleaned the jailhouse where the Old Man and the others was kept. He set down with Mr. Caldwell, and Mr. Caldwell discussed the whole thing. The old man listened thoughtfully.
“I gots an in with the captain of the jailhouse, Captain John Avis,” Clarence said. “I knowed Captain Avis since he was a boy. He’s a good man. A fair man. And he’s grown fond of Old John Brown. Still, Captain Avis ain’t gonna just let this boy walk in there,” he said.
“Can’t I come with you as a helper?” I asked.
“I don’t need a helper. And I don’t need no trouble.”
“Clarence, think on what the Captain has done for the Negro,” Mr. Caldwell said. “Think of your own children. Think of Captain Brown’s children. For he has plenty, and won’t never see them nor his wife no more on this side of the world.”
The old man thought for quite some time. Didn’t say a word. Just thunk on it, rubbing his fingers together. Mr. Caldwell’s words moved him some. Finally he said, “It is a lot of activity in there. The Old Man’s popular. A lot of people coming and going during the day. Lots more for me to do with them leaving things, gifts and letters and all sorts of stuff. The Old Man’s got a lot of northern friends. Captain Avis don’t seem bothered by it none.”
“So can I go?” I asked.
“Lemme think on it. I might mention it to Captain Avis.”
Three days later, in the wee hours of the second of December, 1859, Clarence and Mr. Caldwell came into the basement of the barbershop and roused me from sleep.
“We moves tonight,” Clarence said. “The Old Man is hanging tomorrow. His wife come down from New York and just left him. Avis’ll look the other way. He’s right touched by it all.”
Mr. Caldwell said, “That’s fine and good, but you got to move from here now, child. It’s gonna be too hot for me if you is found out and come back here.” He gived me a few dollars to get started in Philadelphia, a railroad train ticket from the Ferry to Philadelphia, a few rags, and some food. I thanked him and was gone.
It was close to dawn but not quite. Me and Mr. Clarence drove in an old wagon and mule to the jailhouse. Mr. Clarence gived me a bucket, a mop, and cleaning brushes, and we howdied the militia out front and walked past them and into the jailhouse smooth as taffy. The other prisoners was dead asleep. Captain John Avis was there, setting at a desk in front, scribbling his notes, and he looked at me and didn’t say a word. Just nodded at Clarence, and looked back down at his papers. We walked down to the back section of the house where the prisoners were, way to the end corridor, and on the right, in the last cell, setting up on his cot writing notes by the light of a small stone fireplace, was the Old Man.
He stopped writing and peered into the darkness as I stood in the hallway outside his cell, holding that bucket, for he couldn’t see me clear. Finally he spoke out.
“Who is there?”
“It’s me. Onion.”
I stepped out the shadows wearing pantaloons and a shirt, and holding a bucket.
The Old Man looked at me a long time. Didn’t say a word ’bout what he seen. Just stared. Then he said, “C’mon in, Onion. The captain don’t lock the door.”
I come in and set on the bed. He looked exhausted. His neck and face was charred from some kind of wound, and he limped as he moved to put a piece of wood on the fire. He moved gamely as he sat back on his cot. “How is you feeling, Onion?”
“I’m fine, Captain.”
“It does my heart good to see you,” he said.
“Is you all right, Captain?”
“I am fine, Onion.”
I didn’t right know what to say to him at that moment, so I nodded at the open cell door. “You could escape easily, couldn’t you, Captain? There’s plenty talk ’bout rousing up new men from all parts and taking you back out. Couldn’t you bust out and we could stir up another army and do it like the old days, like Kansas?”
The Old Man, stern as always, shook his head. “Why would I do that? I am the luckiest man in the world.”
“It don’t seem that way.”
“There is an eternity behind and an eternity before, Onion. That little speck at the center, however long, is life. And that is but comparatively a minute,” he said. “I has done what the Lord has asked me to do in the little time I had. That was my purpose. To hive the colored.”
I couldn’t stand it. He was a failure. He didn’t
hive nobody. He didn’t free nobody, and that spun my guts a bit to see him in that state, for I did love the Old Man, but he was dying cockeyed, and I didn’t want that. So I said, “The slaves never hived, Captain. That was my fault.”
I started to tell him ’bout the Rail Man, but he put up his hand.
“Hiving takes a while. Sometimes bees don’t hive for years.”
“You saying they will?”
“I’m saying God’s mercy will spread its light on the world. Just like He spread His mercy to you. It done my heart good to see you accept God in that engine house, Onion. That alone, that one life freed toward our King of Peace, is worth a thousand bullets and all the pain in the world. I won’t live to see the change God wants. But I hope you do. Some of it anyway. By God, I feels a prayer hatching, Onion.” And he stood up and grabbed my hands and prayed for a good half hour, holding my hands in his wrinkled paws, his head down, powwowing with his Maker ’bout this and that, thanking Him for making me true to myself, and all sorts of other business, praying for his jailer and hoping the jailer gets paid and don’t get robbed and nobody breaks outta jail on his watch, and throwing in a good word for them that jailed him and killed his boys. I let him go on.
After ’bout a half hour he was done, and sat back down on his bed, tired. It was getting light outside. I could see just a peek of dawn was through the window. It was time for me to go.
“But, Captain, you never asked me why I . . . went ’bout as I did.”
The old face, crinkled and dented with canals running every which way, pushed and shoved up against itself for a while, till a big old smile busted out from beneath ’em all, and his gray eyes fairly glowed. It was the first time I ever saw him smile free. A true smile. It was like looking at the face of God. And I knowed then, for the first time, that him being the person to lead the colored to freedom weren’t no lunacy. It was something he knowed true inside him. I saw it clear for the first time. I knowed then, too, that he knowed what I was—from the very first.
“Whatever you is, Onion,” he said, “be it full. God is no respecter of persons. I loves you, Onion. Look in on my family from time to time.”
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a Good Lord Bird feather. “The Good Lord Bird don’t run in a flock. He flies alone. You know why? He’s searching. Looking for the right tree. And when he sees that tree, that dead tree that’s taking all the nutrition and good things from the forest floor. He goes out and he gnaws at it, and he gnaws at it till that thing gets tired and falls down. And the dirt from it raises the other trees. It gives them good things to eat. It makes ’em strong. Gives ’em life. And the circle goes ’round.”
He gived me that feather, and set back on his cot, and gone back to his writing, writing another letter, I expect.
I opened the cell door, closed it quietly, and walked out the jailhouse. I never saw him again.
—
The sun was coming up when I come out the jailhouse and climbed in old Clarence’s wagon. The air was clear. The fresh breeze was blowing. It was December, but a warm day for a hanging. Charles Town was just waking up. On the road to the Ferry to catch the train to Philadelphia, military men on horseback, a long line of ’em, approached us, riding by twos, carrying flags and wearing colorful uniforms, the line stretching far as the eye could see. They rode past us in the other direction, headed down toward the field past the jailhouse, where the scaffold was already built, waiting for the Old Man. I was glad I weren’t going back to Mr. Caldwell’s place. He gived me my walking papers. Give me money, food, a train ticket to Philadelphia, and from there I was on my own. I didn’t stick around for the hanging. There was enough military there to crowd a field and beyond. I hear tell no colored was allowed within three miles of that hanging. They say the Old Man was taken out by a wagon, made to sit on his own coffin, and driven over from the jailhouse by Captain Avis, his jailer. He told the captain, “This is beautiful country, Captain Avis. I never knowed how beautiful this was till today.” And when he got on the scaffold, told the hangman to make it snappy when he hung him. But like always he had bad luck, and they made him wait a full fifteen minutes with his face hooded and his hands tied while the whole military formation of white folks lined up by the thousands, militia from all over the United States, and U.S. Cavalry from Washington, D.C., and other important people from all over who come to watch him hang: Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson. Them last two would be deadened by the Yanks in the coming years in the very war the Old Man helped start, and Lee would be defeated. And a whole host of others who came there to watch him hang would be deadened, too. I reckon when they got to heaven, they’d be right surprised to find the Old Man waiting for ’em, Bible in hand, lecturing ’em on the evils of slavery. By the time he’d done with ’em, they probably wished they’d gone the other way.
But it was a funny thing. I don’t think they’d have to wait that long. For we rode past a colored church as we moved out of Charles Town, and inside the church you could hear the Negroes singing, singing ’bout Gabriel’s trumpet. That was the Old Man’s favorite song. “Blow Ye Trumpet.” Them Negroes was far away from the doings on the plaza where the Old Man was to hang, way out from it. But they sang it loud and clear. . . .
Blow ye trumpet blow
Blow ye trumpet blow. . . .
You could hear their voices for a long way, seemed like they lifted up and carried all the way into the sky, lingering in the air long afterward. And up above the church, high above it, a strange black-and-white bird circled ’round, looking for a tree to roost on, a bad tree, I expect, so he could alight upon it and get busy, so that it would someday fall and feed the others.
The End
Acknowledgments
Deeply grateful to all those who, over the years, have kept the memory of John Brown alive.
James McBride
Solebury Township, Pa.
The Good Lord Bird Page 39
