The Good Lord Bird

in a hurry when he left his house. He was so hot to get out, he grabbed the wrong sword off his mantelpiece as he runned out the door. He snatched up his military parade sword instead of his regular broadsword. Had he used a regular sword, he would’a deadened the Old Man easily. “But the Lord didn’t want him killed,” Mr. Caldwell said proudly. “He still got more work for him.”

That may be true, but Providence laid down a hard hand for the Negroes in Charles Town in them days following the Old Man’s defeat, for he was jailed and scheduled to be put on trial. I lived hidden in the back room of Mr. Caldwell’s barbershop during them weeks and heard it all. Charles Town was just up the road from Harpers Ferry, and white folks there was in a state of panic that bordered on insanity. They was plain terrified. Every day the constable would bust into Mr. Caldwell’s shop and rouse up Negro customers. He drug two or three men out at a time, brung them to the jail to question them ’bout the insurrection, then jailed some and released some. Even the most trusted Negroes in the slave owner’s houses was put out in the fields to work, for their masters didn’t trust them to work in the house, thinking their slaves would turn on ’em and kill ’em. Dozens of slaved Negroes was sold south, and dozens more run off, thinking they’d be sold. One colored slave come into Mr. Caldwell’s shop, complaining that if a rat’s tail touched the wall in his master’s house in the middle of the night, the entire house was roused, guns was grabbed, and this feller would be sent downstairs first to go see ’bout it. The white newspaper said that Baltimore arms dealers sold ten thousand guns to Virginians during Old John Brown’s trial. One Negro in the barbershop joked, “The Colt Company ought to do something nice for Captain Brown’s family.” Several fires were set on Charles Town plantations, and nobody knowed who done it. And a story in the Charles Town paper said that slave owners was complaining that their horses and sheep was dying suddenly, as if they’d been poisoned. I’d heard that one, too, whispered in the back of Mr. Caldwell’s barbershop. And when I heard it, I said to Mr. Caldwell, “Would that all these fellers doing that devilment today had showed up at the Ferry. It would have been a different game.”

“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.