Paradoxically, then, it is when a white person resists the privilege of turning colorless that he frees himself, at least partially, from the sickness of racialism. It’s the only way for a white man finally to clamber up and out of the pit of Negro slavery wherein this nation was unnaturally conceived and born in a bloody caul and raised into twisted, sick adulthood. He has to separate himself from the luxurious unconsciousness that characterizes his own race, without claiming as his own the historical experience of the other. There is a price, though. He pays with cold loneliness, an itching inner solitude, a permanent feeling of separation from his tribe. He has to be willing to lose his own history without gaining another. He will feel like a man waking at dawn in a village that was abandoned while he slept, all his kith and kin having departed during the night for another, better place in an unknown land far, far away. All the huts and houses are empty, the chimneys are cold, and the doors hang open.
If I had not known that Father felt as I did, if I had not daily seen his brow furrow with the pain of it, his shoulders slump with the fatigue of having constantly to defeat the cynicism it proposed, had not heard him reduced to a sputter, his words all run dry of meaning, then I do not think that I could have withstood that peculiar loneliness. Without Father’s steady example and companionship, I would have capitulated to my own pain, fatigue, and frustration, and would either have given up and, lying to the whites, who sang one siren song of race, cleaved to them; or, lying to myself, cleaved to the blacks, who sang another.
At the start of the first meeting held in the sanctuary of the Zion Methodist Church, there were, to my surprise and pleasure, more than a hundred Negroes present, although by the end Father had driven away more than half. Like Gideon, he wished to separate the timid from the brave, and he did it with the fire of his rhetoric, the glare of his eye, and his insistence that if, in order to protect their homes and families from the bounty-hunters, they were not prepared to die, then they should depart forthwith.
They were, most of them, respectable freedmen, with even a few freed women in attendance and several deacons of the church and members of the choir. There were also numerous artisans and shopkeepers with whom we were well-acquainted — as Father made it a point to do business with Negroes whenever possible — and many young men whom I knew personally: roustabouts, stevedores, laborers, and factory hands with whom I had often spoken at abolition meetings. It was a crowd of earnest and intelligent people who understood perfectly the threat posed by this new slave-catching law, not only to the slaves who succeeded in escaping from their bonds but also to these free Negroes themselves, many of whose parents had been born in freedom in the North and had never been within two hundred miles of a slave state.
Well they knew that the color of their skin was now more than ever the mark of Cain. It was their brand, and with the passage of the Fugitive Law, they would have to prove that somehow the brand had been burned into their flesh by mistake. And who could prove this? Virginia courts had displaced Massachusetts courts. Any dark-skinned man, woman, or child, escaped slave or no, could be sworn a slave by a white man with forged papers and hauled back down South and sold off to the plantations there. At a single stroke of the pen, a free man or woman could be converted into valuable property. This was surely the evilest alchemy ever invented.
There was shock and anger amongst the whites of the North, certainly. Daniel Webster’s “compromise” may well have made more abolitionists of previously acquiescent whites than twenty years of steady preaching had done — which sometimes caused Father to say that the law must have been a significant part of God’s secret design. But this gave little comfort to the Negroes, as the outrage felt by whites was mostly spent on stoking their own righteousness and warming themselves before its fire. “Words, words, words,” Father said. “They won’t act until they themselves are physically or financially threatened,” he insisted.
This night, for the first time, Father preached violence in public. Moreover, he preached it to Negroes. Defensive violence, however. An over-fine distinction, some might say, yet it was an important one to Father. He was still not ready to carry the war straight to the oppressor, although he had begun to insist that, by virtue of their support of slavery, white Southerners had established a condition of war against all Negroes and those whites who sided with them, and they had therefore forfeited their right to live. “Pro-slavers are fair game,” Father had begun to say. His actions would not catch up to his words, however, until we got to Kansas. For now, a merely defensive action would have to suffice.
He began by asking his audience how they proposed to keep the slave-catchers from coming openly into the town and, with aid and comfort provided by the Springfield constabulary, taking off their sons and daughters to the cotton plantations of Mississippi and Alabama. How did they propose to prove that their child was not the same boy or girl who, according to the slave-catcher’s sworn statement, had run off with Harriet Tubman to an uncle and aunt in Massachusetts? The slave-catcher would have papers to support his case. He would have depositions and warrants. How did they propose to support their case? Remember, Father said, the slave-catcher can look at your innocent, beautiful daughter and say, “That’s not Ruth Johnson of Springfield, Massachusetts! That’s Celia McNair of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, property of Mister Jubal McNair!” How did they propose to answer him, when the word of a Negro man could no longer stand in a court of law against the word of a white?
And how did they intend now to deal with the poor, starving escaped slave, wounded and bleeding from the rigors of his escape and half-frozen from the New England cold, when he came late in the night scratching at their door, begging to be let in and fed and warmed by their fire and hidden for a night from the hounds of hell bent on re-capturing him? That man, who might well turn out to be a brother or an elderly uncle, could be seized now and sent back without a Massachusetts trial. And they themselves could be arrested and jailed for having stolen a Southern white man’s property — just as if his fine thoroughbred horse had been discovered blanketed and feeding inside their barn or his wife’s pearls hidden in their flour tin. “How do you intend to deal with that?” Father asked.
Several of the younger men grew restless and angry at these words, as if they felt indicted by them, perhaps hearing Father’s questions as accusations, and they stood up and began to edge towards the door. Others sat looking down at their hands as if ashamed, or crossed their arms over their chests and dropped their gaze, feigning deep thought, but mainly avoiding the eyes of their neighbors and of Father, especially.