Bible. His maps was scrolled on large canvas paper, unfurled to nearly as tall as me. I helped him spread them on the floor and sharpened his pencils and fed him cups of tea as he set on his hands and knees poring over them, scribbling and planning, while the girls fed us both. The Old Man never ate much. Usually he gobbled down a raw onion, which he bit into like an apple and washed down with black coffee, a conglomeration which made his breath ripe enough to draw the wrinkles out a shirt and starch it clean. Sometimes he throwed a little hominy down his gizzards just for variation, but whatever he didn’t eat, I polished off for him, for food was always scarce around him. And with more men arriving by the day, I knowed by then to furnish my innards as much as possible for the day when there wouldn’t be no furnishings to line it, which I expected wouldn’t be far off.
We worked like that for a day or two till one afternoon, poring over his map, he said to me, “Has Mr. Cook held his tongue whilst you was here?”
I couldn’t lie. But I didn’t want to discourage him, so I said, “More or less, Captain. But not to the limit.”
Staring at his map on all fours, the Old Man nodded. “As I figured. It doesn’t matter. Our army will be here in full within a week. Once they’re here, we will gather the pikes and go to arms. I goes as Isaac Smith in public ’round here, Onion, don’t forget it. If anyone asks, I’m a miner, which is true, for I mines the souls of men, the conscience of a nation, the gold of the insane institution! Now, give me my report on the colored, which you and Cook has no doubt been hoeing and cultivating and hiving.”
I gived him the clean side of it, that I had found the Rail Man. I left out the part ’bout the Coachman’s wife and her maybe spilling the beans. “You has done a good job, Onion,” he said. “Hiving the bees is the most important part of our strategy. They will come, no doubt, by the thousands, and we must be ready for them. Now, in lieu of cooking and cleaning for our army, I suggest you continue your work. Hive on, my child. Spread the word among your people. You are majestic!”
He weren’t nothing but enthusiastic, and I didn’t have the heart to blurt out to him that the coloreds wasn’t sharing his enthusiasm one bit. The Rail Man hadn’t said a word to me since I gived him that money to spread the word among numbers runners in Baltimore and Washington. The Coachman avoided me. I saw Becky in town one afternoon, and she damn near fell off the wooden sidewalk scrambling to get out my way. I reckon I was bad luck to them. Somehow the word had gotten out on me, and the colored in town runned the other way every time they seen me coming. I had my hands full at home, too, running from Annie, who seen me as needing her religious training and liked to go naked every couple of days while the men were out, plopping into the tub anytime she pleased, causing me to scamper out the room on one pretense or another. At one point she announced it was time for me to wash my hair, which had gotten scandalous nappy and frizzy. I normally kept it tucked under a rag or a bonnet for weeks, but she got an eyeful of it one afternoon and insisted. When I refused, she allowed she’d find a wig for me, and one evening ventured to the Ferry and returned with a book she brought forth from the town library called
“The Onion,” I allowed.
She burst into laughter and let it go. She had a laugh that made a feller’s heart jump, and that for me was dangerous, for I growed to liking her company a bit, so I took to making myself even scarcer. I made it a point to sleep next to the stove at night, away from her and Martha, and always made sure to be the last soul on the first floor to go to sleep at night and the first out the door in the morning.
I kept myself on the go that way, hiving the bees without much success. The colored of Harpers Ferry lived on the far side of the Potomac railroad tracks. I hung around them for days, looking for coloreds to talk to. Course they avoided me like the plague. Word had gotten around to them ’bout the Old Man’s plot by then. I never did figure out how, but the colored wanted no parts of it nor me, and when they seen me, moved off quick. I was especially moved to discouragement one morning when the Old Man sent me on an errand to the lumber mill. I couldn’t find it, and when I rolled up to a colored woman on the road to ask for directions, before I could open my mouth, she said, “Scatter thee, varmint. I ain’t got nothing to do with you and your kind! You gonna get us all murdered!” and off she went.
That moved me to discouragement badly. But it weren’t all bad news. After Kagi arrived, he met up on his own with the Rail Man, and I reckon his cool manner calmed the Rail Man some, for Kagi reported they’d gone over various plans to get the colored to the Ferry from points east and thereabouts, and the Rail Man seemed to have it worked out right and promised to deliver. That pleased the Old Man no end. He announced to the others, “Luckily for us, the Onion has been diligent in her work, hiving.”
I cannot say I agreed with him there, for I hadn’t done nothing but fumble ’bout. It didn’t matter to me what he said then, to be truthful, for I had my own problems. As the days passed, Annie became a powerful force in my heart. I didn’t want it to happen, course, never seen it coming, which is how these things work, but even in all my running around outside, it couldn’t help but that the three of us, Annie, Martha, and myself, was kept busy as bees in the house once the Old Man’s army rolled in. There weren’t no time to make a clean break with all that scrambling around, and my idea of running off to Philadelphia, which was always my plan, got lost in all that busywork. There just weren’t no time. The men come pouring in, a trickle at first, in the dead of the night, by twos and threes, then more steadily and in bigger numbers. The old players came first: Kagi, Stevens, Tidd, O. P. Anderson. Then some new ones—Francis Merriam—a wild-eyed feller a bit off his rocker. Stewart Taylor, a bad- tempered soul, and the rest, the Thompson brothers and the Coppocs, the two shooting Quaker brothers. Lastly, two Negroes arrived, Lewis Leary and John Copeland, two stalwart, strong-willed, handsome fellers who hailed from Oberlin, Ohio. Their arrival perked the Old Man’s ears toward the colored again, for them two was college fellers and arrived out of nowhere, having heard the fight for freedom was coming through the colored grapevine. He got much encouragement from seeing them pop into place, and one evening he looked up from his map and asked me how the hiving ’bout the Ferry was going.
“Going fine, Captain. They hiving hard.”
What else was there to say to him? He was a lunatic by then. Hardly eating, not sleeping, poring over maps and census numbers and papers and scribbling letters and getting more letters in the mail than seemed possible for one man to get. Some of them letters was full of money, which he gived to the girls to buy food and provisions. Others was urging him to leave Virginia. My mind was so confused in them days, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. There weren’t no room to think. The tiny house was like a train station and armed camp put together: There was guns to ready, ammo to figure, troop strength to discuss. They dispatched me all over, to the Ferry and back, here and there in the valley and all around it to get supplies, count men, spy on the rifle works, tell how many windows was in the engine house at the Ferry, fetch newspapers from the local general store, and count the number of people in it and the like. The Old Man and Kagi begun several late-night runs back and forth to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, ’bout fifteen miles, to collect other arms by wagon, which he had shipped to secret addresses in Chambersburg. It was just too much work. Annie and Martha was a cooking and washing service and entertainment sensations, for the men had to stay cooped upstairs in the house all day playing checkers and reading books, and them two kept them amused and entertained, in addition to the three of us scurrying ’bout downstairs preparing food.
This went on for nearly six weeks. The only solace from that madness was to hive the colored, which got me out the house, or at times, to set out on the porch with Annie in the evenings. That was one of her jobs, to set there serving as lookout and to keep the house looking normal and keep the downstairs presentable to make sure that nobody wandered in and found the hundreds of guns and pikes laying around in crates. Many an evening she asked me to set out on the porch with her, for none of the men was allowed to show themselves, and besides, she saw it as her business to educate me as to the ways of the Bible and living a Christian life. We spent them hours reading the Bible together in the dusk and discussing its passages. I come to enjoy them talks, for even though I’d gotten used to living a lie—being a girl—it come to me this way: Being a Negro’s a lie, anyway. Nobody sees the real you. Nobody knows who you are inside. You just judged on what you are on the outside whatever your color. Mulatto, colored, black, it don’t matter. You just a Negro to the world. But somehow, setting on the bench of that porch, conversating with her, watching the sun go down over the mountains above the Ferry, made me forget ’bout what was covering me and the fact that the Old Man was aiming to get us all minced to pieces. I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn’t count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman.
“What do you want to be someday?” Annie asked me one evening as we set out on the porch at
