It was only a matter of days before the Old Man had the farm up and running again — which pleased me, of course, but alloyed my pleasure at the same time with a measure of guilt. A few days more, and he had resumed service on the Underground Railroad between Timbuctoo and Canada, an activity which of necessity I joined. But sullenly at first, I confess, for its resumption was based on Father’s having re-established his old close and trusting relations with Lyman and the other Negroes of the settlement. Within a few short weeks, it was as if the Old Man had never left. He returned to preaching every second or third Sabbath at the Congregational Church in North Elba, a church he nonetheless would not formally join, and he undertook once again to conduct his weekly class on the Bible, which was attended by sometimes as many as a dozen men and women of the village, white and black. He happily approved of young Henry Thompson’s wish to marry Ruth and used it as an opportunity to bridge the distance that had marred relations between our two families, bringing the Thompsons into the abohtionist fold once again, and where the Thompsons went, many other local families went as well.
Father’s physical presence could inspire people, could instill in them a quantity of courage even to the point of recklessness, which, when he was not himself physically present to argue, chide, and explain, seemed to dissipate as fast as it had arisen. It was not so much his oratory that did it, although to be sure he spoke well and preached with conviction and imagination on any number of subjects, from abolitionism to animal husbandry, from the Bible, which he knew better than any trained and ordained preacher I had ever met, to the United States Constitution, which he knew like a Washington lawyer. But it was not his oratory that swayed people. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Instead, folks were impressed and then, perhaps to their surprise, led by his stubborn refusal to rely on common oratorical devices and embellishments, by his evident disdain for the tricks of voice and gesture that most public speakers relied on in those days. As if he were a Channing or a Parker or a white Frederick Douglass, he made people feel empowered by having come in contact with him, so that they felt larger, stronger, more righteous, clearer of purpose and more sure of victory than they ever had before. But unlike those exemplary speakers, Channing, Parker, Douglass, and so on, Father never lifted his voice, never shouted, never pointed to the heavens, never quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson — he never quoted any writer, except for those who wrote the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the United States Constitution.
The effect of Father’s speech and personal presence on otherwise rational and even skeptical men and women was uncanny and never failed to amaze me. No matter the audience — a hall filled with illustrious New England abolitionists or a convention of hundreds of distinguished Negroes, his country congregation at church on the Sabbath or a gathering of Negro farmers at a barn-raising in Timbuctoo, a meeting of his fallen-away white neighbors in North Elba or his own family gathered around the fire at home — Father always spoke simply and directly, his hands at his sides or merely clasped in front of him, an ordinary man in a plain brown suit who happened to possess the truth. Some of it was his sense of timing: he had an instinct for knowing when to remain silent so as to gather everyone’s attention and when to speak so that it would sound most impressive; thus, when he was expected to speak up, he often held his peace and stood against the furthest wall, and when he was expected to go silent and withdraw, he suddenly came forward and gave sharp utterance to his thoughts.
His voice was in no way stentorian or authoritative: it was pitched at not quite the level of a tenor’s. Most people who wrote about him afterwards regarded him as tall and well-built, a man of heroic proportions, but Father was of average height, tanned and sinewy, strong but not bulky or broad, and he walked like a soldier on parade, straight-backed and a little stiff-legged, with his arms swinging. His face was essentially that of a Yankee farmer: sharp-nosed, with tight lips and a jutting chin and a rough-hewn maris large ears sticking out beneath his coarse, reddish-gray hair, which he wore cropped short and spikey, like a stevedore’s. The visible center of his face was in his eyes, pale gray and fierce and steady. When the Old Man locked his gaze onto yours, it was very difficult not to give way before it, as if he’d seen your secret shame. Like an owl or a hawk, a powerful bird of prey, he rarely blinked. He could hold your gaze with his as if with physical force, as if he had reached out and clamped onto your chin and cheeks with both hands and had drawn your face up to his so that he could stare directly into it; and look into it he did, deeply, with curiosity and undisguised self-interest, as if he were examining, not a human soul, but a complex, unfamiliar piece of machinery, which, if properly understood, might save him a lifetime’s labor.
In early June, as Mary came close to her time, we were conducting to Canada an elderly couple whose sons had gone before them the previous year and a young boy accompanied by his gentle, bespectacled uncle. All four had escaped off the same Maryland plantation, which had become notorious along the Railroad, due to the cruelty of its master, a Dutchman named Hammlicher, and to the particular viciousness of his white overseer, a man named Camden, and due to the fact that Harriet Tubman herself had taken a special interest in facilitating the escape of the Hammlicher slaves. Mysterious, elusive, and yet seemingly everywhere at once, Miss Tubman was thought to have had a family connection among the Hammlicher slaves, through one of her own lost children, perhaps, and thus had lent it her special attention. Already at least fifteen of the several hundred human beings owned by this man had been spirited up along the Chesapeake Bay to Philadelphia and New York and thence on up the Hudson to Troy and freedom. But now, because of the increase in the number of slave-catchers in those cities along the old route, Miss Tubman had decided to send her charges north across the Adirondacks by way of Timbuctoo.
When Father had met her in Hartford that winter, he had convinced her of the good use to which she might put this previously obscure route, and his personal connection with her, when he revealed it to the Timbuctoo Negroes, had instantly won them back. Father’s reputation for honesty was such that no one questioned his claim; it was sufficient unto itself. How could they have refused to ally themselves with John Brown, when he came to them with the endorsement of the famous Harriet Tubman? The great Harriet! The General! None of them had ever met her or even seen her at a distance — she was all legend to them, one of the great African women, like Sojourner Truth, who seemed less a modern American saboteur of slavery than an ancient spirit-leader, an invincible, sometimes invisible, female warrior protected by the old African gods. Father’s having met and, at the instigation of Frederick Douglass, having spoken privately with Miss Tubman gave him an authority that at once renewed Lyman’s commitment to running fugitives with us Browns and drew with him more of the others in the settlement than we would need. It made our Timbuctoo stop on the Underground Railroad suddenly important in the only world that mattered to the Negroes and to Father, and once again, increasingly as the summer wore on, the only one that mattered to me.
Slavery, slavery, slavery! I could not have a thought that was not somehow linked to it. It was an obsession. At times, it came to feel like a form of insanity, for I was incapable of a normal thought, a single private thought that began and ended with me and did not identify me as a white man. And this was all due to Father.
It was during our run with the four Hammlicher fugitives that Mary came to her time. And before we were able to get back from the Canadian border to North Elba, she gave birth to a son, her next-to-last child, born strangled and crushed by the terrible trial of his birth, leaving Mary herself nearly dead and Father frantic with fear that he would lose her.