I couldn’t see nothing
He pointed to the wide passages and craggy cliffs all around us. “A man can hide in these passes for years. There’s plenty game. Plenty timber for shelter. An army of thousands couldn’t dig out a small army that’s well hidden. God pressed His thumb against the earth and made these passages for the poor, Onion. I ain’t the first to know it. Spartacus, Toussaint-Louverture, Garibaldi, they all knowed it. It worked for them. They hid thousands of soldiers that way. These tiny passages will entrench hundreds of Negroes against an enemy of thousands. Trench warfare. You see?”
I didn’t see. I was fretting that we was standing out in the cold in the middle of no place, and come night, it’d be even colder. I weren’t liking that idea. But, being that he never asked my opinion, I told him truthfully, “I don’t rightly know ’bout them things, Captain, having never been in no mountains myself.”
He looked at me. The Old Man never smiled, but the gray eyes got soft a minute. “Well, you’ll be in ’em soon enough.”
We weren’t far from Pittsburgh, turns out. We followed the tracks all day back down the mountain to the nearest town, waited, and caught a train to Boston. On the train, the Old Man announced his plan. “I got to raise money by speechifying. It ain’t nothing to it. It’s just a show. After I raise enough chips, we’ll head out west again with a full purse to gather the men and raise the hive in our fight against the infernal institution. Don’t tell nobody nothing ’bout our purpose in the meantime.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“And I might ask you to tell some of our donors about your life of deprivation and starvation as a slave. Being hungry and all. Whipped scandalous, and them type of things. You can tell them that.”
I didn’t want to confess to him I weren’t never hungry as a slave, nor was never whipped scandalous. Fact is, only time I was hungry and eating out of garbage barrels and sleeping out in the cold was when I was free with him. But it weren’t proper to say it, so I nodded.
“And while I gives the show,” he said, “you must watch the back of the hall for any federal agents. That’s important. They is warm on us now.”
“What do they look like?”
“Hmm. I reckon they got oily hair and is done up in proper clothing. You’ll see ’em. Don’t worry. I done arranged everything. Yours won’t be the only eyes watching. We’ll have plenty help.”
True to his word, we was met up at the Boston train station by two of the finest, richest-looking white fellers I ever seen. They treated him like a king, fed us well, and drug him along to a couple of churches for some speechifying. He pretended he weren’t for it at first, but they insisted it was already arranged—and he went along as though it come as a surprise. At the churches he gived boring speeches to crowds of white folks who wanted to hear all about his adventures fighting out west. I never been one for speeching and carrying on, unless course there’s joy juice or paying money involved, but I must say that while the Old Man was hated out on the plains, he was a star back east. They couldn’t get enough of his stories about the rebels. You would’a thunk that every Pro Slaver, including Dutch, Miss Abby, Chase, and all them other low drummers, scammers, four-flushers, and pickpockets, who mostly lived off pennies and generally didn’t treat the Negro any worse than they treated each other, was a bunch of cranks, heathens, and drunks who runned around murdering one another while the Free Staters spent all day setting in church at choir practice and making paper cutout dolls on Wednesday nights. Three minutes into his talk, the Old Man had them high-siddity white folks hollering bloody murder against the rebels, nigh shouting against slavery. He weren’t much of a speaker, to be honest, but for once he got the wind in his sails about our Dear Maker Who Restoreth Our Fortunes, he got ’em going, and the word spread fast, so by the time we hit the next church, all he had to say was, “I’m John Brown from Kansas, and I’s fighting slavery,” and they roared. They called for them rebels’ heads, announced they’d trounce ’em, bounce ’em, kill ’em, deaden ’em where they stood. Some of the women broke into tears once the Old Man spoke. It made me a bit sad, truth be to tell it, to watch them hundreds of white folks crying for the Negro, for there weren’t hardly ever any Negroes present at most of them gatherings, and them that was there was doodied up and quiet as a mouse. It seemed to me the whole business of the Negro’s life out there weren’t no different than it was out west, to my mind. It was like a big, long lynching. Everybody got to make a speech about the Negro but the Negro.
If the Old Man was hiding from a federal agent, he had a strange way of showing it. From Boston to Connecticut, New York City, Poughkeepsie, and Philadelphia, we done one show after another. It was always the same deal. He’d say, “I’m John Brown from Kansas, and I’s fighting slavery,” and they’d howl. We collected quite a bit of money in this fashion, with me movin’ ’bout the hall passing the hat. Sometimes I collected as much as twenty-five dollars, sometimes more, sometimes less. But the Old Man made it clear to all them followers that he was planning to head back west to fight slavery, clean, in his own fashion. Some questioned him about how he planned to do it, how he planned to fight slavery and all, who he was gonna do it with, and so forth. They put the question to him ten times, twenty times, in every town.
I could’a heard it another two hundred years the way I was living, for I was mostly satisfied in them times. I had the Old Man to myself, and we lived high. I ate well. Slept well. In feather beds. Traveled on trains in white folks’ compartments. Them Yanks treated me fine. They didn’t no more notice me of being a boy under that dress and bonnet than they would notice a speck of dust in a room full of cash. I was simply a Negro to them. “Where did you find her?” was the question most asked of the Old Man. He’d shrug and say, “She is one of the many multitudes of enshackled persons whom I has freed in God’s name.” Them women fussed over me something fierce. They oohed and ahhed and gived me dresses, cakes, bonnets, powder, ear loops, pompons, feathers, and gauze. I was always wise enough to keep silent around white folks in them days, but there weren’t no call for me to talk nohow. There ain’t nothing gets a Yankee madder than a smart colored person, of which I reckon they figured there was only one in the world, Mr. Douglass. So I played dumb and tragic, and in this manner I managed to finagle a full set of boy’s pantaloons, shirt, jacket, and shoes, plus twenty-five cents from a woman in Connecticut who sobbed when I told her I was aiming on freeing my enslaved brother, of which I had nar one. I hid those clothes in my gunnysack for my own purpose, for I always had my eye on movement, always kept myself ready to roll. In the back of my mind was the notion that the Old Man would one day be deadened by somebody, for he was a fool about dying. He’d say, “I’m on God’s clock, Onion. I’m prepared to die fighting against the infernal institution,” which was fine for him but not for me. I always made ready for the day I’d be on my own.
We slung along like that for a few weeks till spring approached, and the Old Man begun pining for the prairie. Them city parlor halls and speakings was wearing him down. “I’d like to go back west to smell the spring air and fight the infernal institution, Onion,” he said, “but we still has not made enough yet to raise our army. And there is still one special interest I must tend to here.” So instead of leaving from Philadelphia the way he planned, he decided to make a second pass at Boston before heading west for good.
They had him set up at a big hall there. His handlers had primed the thing. There was a fine, mighty crowd standing outside, waiting to be let in, which meant much money to be collected. But they delayed it. Me and the Old Man was standing behind the big organ pipes in the pulpit, waiting for the crowd to come in, when the Old Man asked one of his handlers who was standing about, “What’s the delay for?”
The man was in a tizzy. He seemed scared. “A federal agent from Kansas has come to this area to arrest you,” he said.
“When?”
“No one knows when or where, but someone spotted him at the train station this morning. You want to cancel today’s event?”
Oh, that primed the Old Man. That drug him out. He loved a fight. He touched his seven-shooters. “He better not show his face in here,” he said. And the others standing around allowed that they agreed, and promised that if the agent showed himself, why, he’d be jumped and shackled. But I had no trust in them Yanks. They weren’t uncivilized like the raw Yanks out west, who would knock you cold and drug you along from a stirrup by one boot and beat you something scandalous like a good Pro Slaver would. These Yanks was civilized.
