“I never liked the idea from first I heard it. Never thought he’d be stupid enough to try it, either.”
That’s the first time I ever heard anyone outside the Old Man’s circle mention the plan. “Where’d you hear it from?”
“The General. That’s why I’m here.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Is she coming?”
“I hope not. She’ll get her head blowed off.”
“How you know so much?”
For the first time, he turned to me. He sucked his teeth. “Your Captain, God bless him, he’s gonna go home in threes when they done with him here. And whatever colored is stupid enough to follow him’s gonna get shot to pieces, God damn him.”
“Why you so mad? He ain’t done nothing to you.”
“I got a wife and three children in bondage here,” he snapped. “These white folks is gonna donate every bullet they got to elephant-hunt the Negro once they kill Old John Brown. They’ll be right raw for years. And whatever coloreds they don’t stick in a death wedge in the ground they’ll send off. They’ll sell every soul in bondage ’round here who even looks colored. Right down the river to New Orleans they’ll go, God damn him. I ain’t saved up enough to buy my children yet. I only got enough for one. I got to decide now. Today. If he comes —”
He shut up. That ate at him. Just tore at him and he looked away. I seen he was troubled, so I said, “You ain’t got to worry. I seen plenty more Negroes who promised to come. Up at a big meeting in Canada. They speeched ’bout it all day. They was angry. Lots of ’em. These were big-time fellers. Reading men. Men of letters. They promised to come—”
“Oh, hogwash!” he snorted. “Them uppity, long-breathed niggers ain’t got enough sand in the lot of ’em to fill a God-damned thimble!”
He fumed, looking away, then pointed to the train on the trestle above us. “That train there,” he said, “that’s the B&O line. It rolls outta Washington, D.C., and Baltimore every day. Rolls north a bit and connects up with the train out of Philadelphia and New York City twice a week. I seen every single colored that’s ever been on that train for the last nine years. And I can tell you, half of them Negro leaders of your’n can’t afford a ticket on that train that would take ’em more’n ten yards. And them that could, they’d blow their wives’ head off with a pistol for a single glass of the white man’s milk.”
He sighed angrily, blowing through his nose now. “Oh, they talk a good game, writing stories for the abolitionist papers and such. But writing stories in the paper and making speeches ain’t the same as being out here doing the job. On the line. On the front line. The freedom line. They talk a whole heap, them stuffed-shirt, tidy-looking, tea-drinking, gizzard lickers, running around New England in their fine silk shirts, letting white folks wipe their tears and all. Box Car Brown. Frederick Douglass. Shit! I know a colored feller in Chambersburg worth twenty of them blowhards.”
“Henry Watson?”
“Forget names. You ask too many questions and know too God-damned much now.”
“You ought not to use God’s name in vain. Not when the Captain comes.”
“I ain’t studying him. I been working the gospel train for years. I know his doings. Been hearing of ’em for as long as I been doing this. I like the Captain. I love him. Many a night I prayed for him. And now he ...” He groused and cursed some more. “He’s deader than yesterday’s dinner, is what it is. How many’s in his army?”
“Well, last count there was ... sixteen or so.”
The Rail Man laughed. “That ain’t hardly enough for dice. The Old Man’s lost his buttons. At least I ain’t the only one that’s crazy.” He sat down at the water’s edge now, then tossed a rock in the water. It made a tiny splash. The moon shone down on him brightly. He looked terrifically sad. “Gimme the rest,” he said.
“Of what?”
“The plan.”
I gived it to him from soup to nuts. He listened closely. I told him all ’bout taking the night watchman in the front and back entrance, then fleeing to the mountains. After I was finished, he nodded. He seemed calmer. “Well, the Ferry can be took, that much the Captain’s right ’bout. There ain’t but two watchmen. But it’s the second part I don’t get. Where’s he expecting his coloreds to come from, Africa?”
“It’s in the plan,” I said, but I felt like sheep bleating.
He shook his head. “John Brown is a great man. God bless him. He ain’t lacking in courage, that’s for sure. But God’s wisdom has escaped him this time. I can’t tell him how to do his business, but he’s wrong.”
“He says he’s studied it for years.”
“He ain’t the first person who’s studied insurrection. Coloreds been studying it for a hundred years. His plan can’t work. It ain’t practical.”
“Could you make it so, then? Being that you’s a big wheel in the gospel train around here? You know which coloreds would fight, don’t you?”
“I can’t make two hundred coloreds get up outta Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and come up here. He needs at least that many to bust out the armory and get to the mountains once he’s got what he wants. Where’s he gonna get them kind of numbers? He’d need to run souls from Baltimore up through Detroit and down to Alabama.”
“Ain’t that what you do?”
“Running one or two souls ’cross the freedom line to Philadelphia is one thing. Running two hundred souls from D.C. and Baltimore this way is another. That’s impossible. He’d have to spread the word far and wide, all the way down to Alabama to make sure he gets them kind of numbers. The gospel train can carry a word fast, but not that fast. Not in three weeks.”
“You saying it can’t be done?”
“I’m saying it can’t be done in three weeks. Takes a letter a solid week to get from here to Pittsburgh. Sometimes a rumor travels faster’n a letter—”
He thought a minute.
“You say he’s throwing big metal at ’em in three weeks?”
“October twenty-third. In three weeks.”
“There ain’t no time, really. It’s a God-damn shame. Criminal, really. Except ...” He fingered his jaw, thinking. “Y’know what? Tell you what. Pass the word on to the Old Captain thusly—you let him decide on it. For if I speaks it, and someone asks it of me, I’m bound by the Lord’s word to tell the truth, and I don’t want that. I’m a good friend of the mayor of this town, Fontaine Beckham. He’s a good friend to the colored, and to me. I got to be able to tell him, if he asks, ‘Mr. Mayor, I knows nothing ’bout this whole bit.’ I can’t lie to him. Y’understand?”
I nodded.
“Pass word to the Old Man thusly: There’s hundreds of coloreds in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., itching for a chance to fight slavery. But they got no telegraph and gets no letters.”
“So?”
“So how would you pass word fast to thousands of folks who got no telegraph and gets no letters? What’s the fastest way from point A to point B?”
“I don’t know.”
“The railroad, child. That gets you to the city. But then you got to get to the colored. And I know just how to do it. Listen. I knows a few in Baltimore runs a numbers game. They collect numbers every day from both those in bondage and those that’s free. They pays out to the winner no matter what. Hundreds plays it every single day. I plays it myself. If you can get the Old Man to give me some money to grease them feller’s palms, the numbers men will spread the word fast. It’ll go everywhere within a day or two, for them types don’t fear the law. And if there’s a penny in it for them, that’s all they care ’bout.”
“How much money?”
“’Bout two hundred and fifty oughta do it. That’s twenty-five apiece. Some for them in Washington and some for the men in Baltimore. There’s ten of ’em I can think of.”
“Two hundred and fifty dollars! The Old Man ain’t got five dollars.”
“Well, that’s what he got to work with. Get me that money and I’ll spread it around in Baltimore and D.C. And if he throws in another two hundred fifty, I’ll have a set of wagons and horses to throw at it, so them fellers that wants to join him—I expect it’ll be women, too, lots of ’em—they’ll ride here. Ain’t but a day’s ride from
