Father had inspired and moved us beyond measure, it appeared, and me he had moved beyond expectation. It was as if he had been speaking for me, and I had through him become wonderfully articulate and clear. It was as if my crippled arm had been magically healed and, full-faced, I had stood forward, bright and challenging, my two arms extended for the first time in public, and, speaking before an audience of hesitant, frightened, and angry people, an audience of suspicious Negroes, I had succeeded in transforming myself into an old-time, Biblical prophet capable of leading men into a holy war, a war in which, as a result of my words, men and women were prepared to sacrifice themselves for the lives of others and for the greater glory of God.
Father’s thoughts and beliefs were mine. He had spoken for me, or, rather, I had spoken through him, and it seemed to me then to have occurred not because I had contrived for him to do it or had subtly managed him somehow — although in a certain light I suppose that my aid to him and reassurance could have been construed as such — but because now, for the first time, I was no longer resisting his will, no longer holding back from his calls for action, action, action. I had finally taken him at his word, the word which he had been laying in the porches of my ears since I’d drawn my first breath, and now his word was mine, his personal power mine, his ease with speech, his natural movement, his hard, gray eye, his intelligence and imagination, mine!
I remained, of course, still the hulking, crippled, red-headed country boy, the same shy, inarticulate bumpkin as before. But now all that was like a clever disguise designed to hide and shelter the real person inside — a man who, neither white nor Negro, was dangerous. A man who, whenever necessary, could step out of the shadows where in silence he silently labored his days away and suddenly stand revealed as a warrior for the Lord, a man of God who would inspire and lead God’s chosen people out of Egypt into the promised land, and who would do it even as he denied he was doing it, who would be Moses while claiming merely to be Aaron. Whom or what we love, although it can never be our reason for loving them, we become. Without his love of God, my father, I saw, would have been a pitiful man. But in giving himself over to God, Father had become many times larger and more powerful a man than he could ever have been otherwise. Now I, too, having finally come to love my father as totally as he loved God — I, too, was no longer pitiful.
That same night, we adjourned to the rooms where John and Wealthy had been living — since the removal to North Elba, Father had not maintained living quarters in Springfield, and consequently he and I had been sleeping in the office of Brown & Perkins’s empty warehouse. There Father instructed me to write up a statement of advice and principles which he could present to the Negroes tomorrow night and a draft of a pledge. He had arrived over the years at a high estimation of my literary abilities, although he had little more to go on than my letters and the help I gave him with his own. He also knew that I believed his style to be on the eccentric side of my own. Reluctantly, he had come to agree with me, and thus he frequently enjoyed employing me as a kind of village scribe, in which he was the village. He would say aloud what he meant or wished to mean, pacing back and forth, hands clasped behind him, brow furrowed in thought, while I scratched away with my pen, setting down his thoughts and intentions in language that I hoped would be readily understood by the man or woman to whom those thoughts and intentions were directed, a person who, with a transcription of Father’s own words in hand, would very likely have been puzzled or merely annoyed.
With his composition “Sambo’s Mistakes,” Father had tried working alone, and I think that afterwards he was sorry he had done so and in time blamed its failure to be published on his inability to set down on the page the true nature of his thoughts. Since then, whenever he wished to make a written statement of any importance or delicacy, he’d taken to calling on me. Increasingly, this job of scribe had become a pleasure for me — it gave me, naturally, a certain degree of importance not otherwise available, and it provided me with the chance to voice some of my own thoughts and beliefs as well.
Father talked and tried out first one sentence and then another, rejecting, editing, retracing his words, struggling to make his statement to the Negroes. He paced the length and breadth of the sitting room and rumbled on into the cold autumn night, while John and Wealthy slept in the adjacent chamber, and I sat at the little table and by the dim, flickering light of a Nantucket lamp, wrote down much of what he said and most of what he meant or wanted to say.
It was nearly dawn before we had a preamble, which we entitled “Words of Advice,” and a pledge, entitled “Agreement;” whereupon we adjourned to the Brown & Perkins office and slept a few hours on our cots, before having to commence the day’s work, which then consisted mostly of writing letters to attorneys and creditors and attempting to find a tenant for the warehouse who would take over Brown & Perkins’s lease.
That evening, Father and I — this time without John and Wealthy, for she was newly pregnant, and they would soon be departing for their farm in Ohio and thus could not be a part of our work here — returned to the Zion Methodist Church, where we were joined by most of the Negroes who had remained until the end of the meeting the evening before. They numbered thirty-two men and nine women, the majority of them between thirty and forty years of age, with a sprinkling of very young and elderly men among them. Seen together like that, grim-visaged, muscular, and healthy, their dark brown and black faces stern and determined, they constituted a formidable-looking force. I felt proud to be associated with them.
More than half of the company were friends and acquaintances of ours, the best among the blacks of Springfield. I was glad to see Mr. Harrison Wheeler still there, and Deacon Samuels, also the apothecary Mr. Minahan and his teenaged son, and several of the fellows who at different times had worked alongside me in the warehouse sorting and baling wool, trustworthy young men with stout arms and strong backs and anger to spare. Most of the Negroes who were lucky enough to be properly employed or have a profession were engaged at a level below their natural or acquired abilities, and as a result a Negro apothecary often had the intelligence and many of the skills of a white physician, and a Negro laborer was frequently the equal of a white foreman. Thus Father’s determination to do business with Negroes was based on no condescending desire to provide charity; it was, as he said, practical. And he was rarely disappointed by them — nowhere near as often as when he had to employ or deal financially with white people, who he believed were more likely than blacks to cheat or cut corners.
When everyone had been seated and the door closed and, at Father’s instructions, bolted, we began with a singing of the hymn “Broad Is the Path That Leads to Death,” a favorite of mine. Then Father announced that he would present to us a statement which he had drawn up. Holding the paper close to his eyes, like a court clerk reading a judge’s sentence, he commenced to read.
Words of Advice! To the Springfield, Massachusetts, branch of the United States League of Gileadites. Adopted November 15,1850, as written and recommended by John Brown.