The Good Lord Bird

“Make sure it’s right,” Mrs. Tubman said. “Remember. Your average Negro would rather run from slavery than fight it. You got to give ’em direct orders. With a direct, clear plan. With an exact time. And a fallback plan if the thing don’t go. You can’t deviate from your plan once it set. Start down the road and don’t go sideways. If you deviates, your people will lose confidence and fail you. Take it from me.”

“Yes, General.” That’s the first and only time I ever heard the Old Man capitulate to anyone, colored or white, or ever call anyone a general.

“And the map I gived you of the various routes through Virginia and Maryland, you must memorize and destroy. You got to do that.”

“Course, General.”

“Okay. God bless you, then. Send me the word when you is ready, and I will send as many to you as I can. And I will come myself.” She gived him the address of the tavern in Canada where she was staying, and made ready to leave.

“Remember, you must be organized, Captain. Do not get too hung up on emotional matters. Some is gonna die in this war. God don’t need your prayers. He needs your action. Make your date solid. Hold tight to it. The wheres and whats of your plan, don’t nobody need to know, but hold tight to the date, for folks is coming a long way. My people will be coming from a long way. And I will be coming from a long way.”

“I will make it clear, General,” he said. “And I will hold tight to the date.”

“Good,” she said. “May God bless you and keep you for what you has done and is ’bout to do.”

She flung on her shawl and prepared to leave. As she did, she spotted me toward the door, sweeping the floor, hiding behind that broom more or less, for that woman had my number. She motioned to me. “Come over here, child,” she said.

“I’m busy here, ma’am,” I croaked.

“Git over here.”

I went over, still sweeping.

She looked at me a long time, watching me sweep the floor, wearing that damn fool dress. I didn’t say a word. Just kept on sweeping.

Finally she placed her small foot on the broom and stopped it. I had to look up at her then. Them eyes was staring down at me. I can’t say they was kind eyes. Rather they was tight as balled fists. Full. Firm. Stirred. The wind seemed to live in that woman’s face. Looking at her was like staring at a hurricane.

“You done good to speak out,” she said. “To make some of these fellers stand up as men. But the wind of change got to blow in your heart, too,” she said softly. “A body can be whatever they want to be in this world. It ain’t no business of mine. Slavery done made a fool out of a lot of folks. Twisted ’em all different kinds of ways. I seen it happen many a time in my day. I expect it’ll happen in all our tomorrows, too, for when you slave a person, you slave the one in front and the one behind.”

She looked off out the window. It was snowing out there. She looked right lonely at that moment. “I had a husband once,” she said. “But he was fearful. He wanted a wife and not a soldier. He became something like a woman hisself. He was fearful. Couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand being a man. But I led him to freedom land anyway.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We all got to die,” she said. “But dying as your true self is always better. God’ll take you however you come to Him. But it’s easier on a soul to come to Him clean. You’re forever free that way. From top to bottom.”

With that, she turned and walked past the other side of the room toward the door, where the Old Man was busy picking up his papers, maps, and his seven-shooter. He seen she was leaving, and dropped his papers to hurry to open the door to let her out. She stood at the open door a minute, watching the snow, her eyes glancing up and down at the empty, snowy road. She studied the street carefully a long moment, looking for slave stealers, I reckon. That woman was always on the lookout. She watched the street as she spoke to him.

“Remember, Captain, whatever your plan, be on time. Don’t deviate the time. Compromise life before you compromise time. Time is the one thing you can’t compromise.”

“Right, General.”

She bid him a hasty good-bye and left, walking down the road in them boots and that colorful shawl draped on her shoulders, snow falling on the empty road around her, as me and the Old Man watched her.

Then she quickly turned back, as if she forgot something, walked to the steps where we stood, still wearing her beaten colorful shawl, and held it out for me. “Take that and hold it,” she said, “for it may be useful.” Then she said to the Old Man again, “Remember, Captain. Be on time. Don’t compromise the time.”

“Right, General.”

But he did compromise the time. He blowed that one, too. And for that reason, the one person he could count on, the greatest slave emancipator in American history, the best fighter he could’a got, the one person who knowed more ’bout escaping the white man’s troubling waters than any man alive, never showed up. The last he seen of her was the back of her head as she walked down the road in Chatham, Canada. At the time, I weren’t sad to see her go, neither.

21. The Plan

By the time the Old Man got back to Iowa, he was so excited, it was a pity. He left the U.S.A. for Canada with twelve men, expecting to pick up hundreds. He come back to the U.S.A. with thirteen, on account of O. P. Anderson, who joined us on the spot, as well as a few white stragglers who come along for a while and dropped off like usual when they seen that freeing the slaves was liable to get your head squared by an ax or butchered some other way. The rest of the coloreds we’d met up in Canada went back to their homes in various parts of America but had promised to come when called. Whether they was gonna be true to their word or not, the Old Man didn’t seem worried, for by the time he got back to Iowa, he was downright joyful. He’d got the General behind him, that was Mrs. Tubman.

He almost weren’t sensible in his excitement. He was joyful. It ain’t a clean proposition when you decides to mount thirteen fellers and declare a war on something rather than somebody. It occurred to me then he might be slippin’ and I ought to maybe take my leave when we got back home before he got too deep into whatever foolishness he planned next, for he didn’t seem right. But in them days I didn’t linger on any subject so long as I was shoving eggs, fried okra, and boiled partridge down my throat. Besides, the Old Man had more bad luck than any man I ever knowed, and that can’t help but to make a person likable and interesting to be around. He spent long hours in his tent, praying, studying maps, compasses, and scribbling numbers. He always wrote letters like a madman, but now he wrote triple the letters he wrote before, so much that his army’s main job in them first weeks in Tabor involved nothing more than sending and getting his mail. He sent his men to Pee Dee, Springdale, and Johnston City, to pick up letters from safe houses and taverns and friends and send off letters to Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. It took him hours to go through his mail, and while he done that, his men trained with wood swords and pistols. Some of that mail was letters with money from his abolitionist supporters back east. He had a group of six white fellers in New England who gived him big lumps of money. Even his friend Mr. Douglass sent him a shilling or three. But the truth of it is, most of them letters, the ones that weren’t from creditors, contained not money but questions. Them white folks back east was asking for—no begging for—his plans.

“Look at this, Onion,” he railed, holding up a letter. “All they do is ask questions. Talk, talk, talk, that’s all they do. Armchair soldiers. Setting around while someone destroys their house and home with the infernal institution. And they call me insane! Whyn’t they just send the money? I’m the one they trusted to take on the fight, why tie my hands behind my back by asking me how. There ain’t no ‘how,’ Onion. One must do, like Cromwell. There are spies everywhere. I’d be a fool to tell ’em my top- secret plans!” He was confounded with it. He was furious when some of his supporters declared they weren’t going to send him a dime more if he didn’t tell them their plans.

The ironical thing is, I reckon he would have told them his plans. He wanted to tell ’em his plans. Problem