“A white woman.”
“Well, yes.”
For a long time, I said nothing. Then I whispered, “I can’t do that.” She smiled at me, but as if from a great height. “Well, Mister Brown, then I don’t know what you can do,” she said. And, abruptly, she turned her back and walked away.
Chapter 15
“You ain’t half the man your father is.”
The words came without warning, and they chilled my blood. They do even now, more than a half-century later. They were true then; they are true now.
The first time I heard them, they were uttered by Lyman; but after that, from then on, they were said to me in my own voice, the sentence dripping into my ear like slow poison. You ain’t half the man your father is. To silence them, I would, again and again, for years, be obliged to rouse myself into a fury, a literal blood-letting, making of my whole body a visible and tangible shout. For as long as my shout reverberated in the air, I would not hear them.
You ain’t half the man your father is. And who was he? Twice the man I was, and twice the man he seemed. And yet not half himself, either. Before Kansas, the Old Man had always been larger than his reputation; after Kansas, he was smaller. Although, over time, he himself changed not a whit. I changed, certainly, and nearly everyone else changed. But not Father. Merely, his reputation caught up to the reality and then surpassed it, so that the man who, outside the family, had been known as a somewhat peculiar radical abolitionist with a violent temperament, a somber activist with a huge reservoir of religious enthusiasm, a wild fellow who, despite his vague, crack-brained plan for a slave insurrection, was nonetheless oddly trusted by influential and otherwise rational Negroes and was likewise understandably mistrusted by most whites — that man came over time to be known as a heroic guerilla leader, a courageous and brilliant military man who feared only God and had no other ambition than to bring slavery to an end. He came quickly to be known as a magnificent fighter on horseback, an inspiration and example to lesser men, which is to say, to all decent, anti-slavery white men: for none of them, no matter how thoroughly he loathed slavery and loved his Negro brethren, in his loathing and love was as pure as Captain John Brown, as clear-eyed as he, as unequivocal and uncompromised as he. So that when my father-Father, the Old Man, Mister Brown, Citizen John Brown — got himself turned into Captain John Brown, it was not merely a military rank that had been added to his name but an honorific, and the rank, as if he had been given it at birth, instantly became an integral part of his name, permanently attached to his identity, like that of Governor Bradford, Admiral Nelson, Chief Tecumseh.
In North Elba, though, and to Lyman Epps especially, Father was known entirely for what he was — known more clearly for that to Lyman than even to me. So when Lyman told me I was not half that, he downright shriveled me. He struck my manhood away and left me standing before him a child. Worse than a child: a failed adult.
Most men secretly know that there lies hidden inside them the boy they once were and believe they still are, and all the work a man does in his life is accompanied by various stratagems designed to keep that child hidden from view. From his own view, especially. But that night in late summer at Indian Pass, which lies yonder in the darkness seven miles to the south of our old farmhouse, when Lyman raised his lip and sneered and then declared that I was not half the man my father was, he made it impossible for me ever after to hide my true self from my false self. It was as if, that night in the cave, Lyman were the only man alive who could testify as to both my true character and the true character of my father: he was our sole shared character witness and, thus, was the only man capable of making the comparison between me and Father and making it stick.
I don’t know why this was so. Lyman knew us both well, of course, intimately, domestically, out in the fields, and on the Railroad running slaves north; for several years, he had observed both Father and me more closely than had anyone else who was not a family member. But that was not it. The truth is, I made Lyman the authoritative witness myself; I myself validated his testimony.
As instructed by the Old Man, Lyman and I had been three days and nights down along Indian Pass, cutting a trail wide enough for a man on horseback to get through to North Elba from the old Tahawus mining camp. Father would be away that September, once again — this time, as usual, for the last time, he hoped — settling his besieged financial affairs with Mr. Perkins, and he had charged the two of us with this task before leaving. The Underground Railroad station at Timbuctoo, with its links south to Tahawus and north to Canada, was the one segment of Father’s Subterranean Passway that he felt he could control, and he wished to make it a model and a beginning for the whole. He intended to make it off-limits at pain of death for slave-catchers, man-stealers, and bounty-hunters, so that once he had made this small segment of the Railroad secure, with armed men posted at the passes and gorges and up on strategic ridges, with fortified resting places and storehouses along the way, and with only the most trusted radical whites living in the farmlands below the Adirondacks allowed to provide arms, provisions, and safe houses, he would begin extending the Passway southward into the Appalachians, mile by mile into the mountainous forests of eastern Pennsylvania, until he came to western Maryland, where he would commence his invasion of the enemy’s homeland itself. By this means we would bleed the South white, he declared. His fantasy for years; and then his dream; and finally his plan, too: now the three had at last coalesced, and he was beginning in this small way in our very neighborhood to put all three, fantasy, dream, and plan, into action.
At the Tahawus mining camp, called the Upper Village, there was a new manager, a man named Seybolt Johnson from Albany, replacing the previous supervisor, the infamous Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Johnson was a genuine abolitionist, faithful and true, who had worked the Underground Railroad for years out of Albany and Troy. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, he, like so many others, had sought alternative routes north for the escaping slaves, and as he was a longtime employee of the Adirondack Mining Company’s main office, in Albany, he knew, even before he assumed the position of manager of the Tahawus mines, that he could play an important role in aiding the Underground Railroad out there in the wilderness. Which he had done, for on his arrival at the Upper Village, he at once contacted Father and quickly arranged to regularize the passage of escaped slaves from towns and cities south of Albany to the Upper Village mining camp and on through the northwoods to Timbuctoo, North Elba, Paul Smith’s famous hunting lodge, Massena, and Canada.
Father trusted Mr. Johnson, mainly because Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman trusted him, but also because, immediately upon his arrival at Tahawus, Mr. Johnson had set about to improve the lot of his Irish workers, who had suffered so terribly under the iron hand of the hypocritical Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Seybolt Johnson was that rarity, a white man of the managerial class who felt towards his workers and Negroes alike that there but for the grace of God went he. “The man is a true Christian,” Father had pronounced after his first visit with him. “We can work with him.”
Thus Lyman and I, with axes and crowbars, were sent out to bush the old footpath through Indian Pass and make it into a proper trail. Starting at Timbuctoo, we worked from north to south and in three days had gotten nearly to the halfway point, about seven miles in from North Elba, with Mount Colden on our right and, hovering above its shoulder, the huge, rocky chest and head of Mount Mclntyre. Mount Marcy — or Tahawus, as we still called it, Cloudsplitter, the old Indian name for the giant — was on our left, its great shadow permanently cast across the rocky bottom where we labored day after day and camped in a sweet-smelling balsam lean-to at night. Indian Pass was dangerous, rough ground. A man or a horse could easily fall and break a leg or tumble from a ledge into a rocky pit. The long, narrow defile was shaded in the daytime, and down in the gorge between the mountains, the Northern Star was blocked out at night, and moonlight rarely fell, and a man had to be able to trust the feel of the trail under his feet in order to get through. It was all too easy to get lost there, even at midday, to wander inadvertently down a bear path or deer trail and soon become disoriented in the darkness and dense woods. People had been known to disappear into these woods and starve or freeze to death, their picked bones found years later by a lone hunter or trapper.