We ourselves have arrived in a trickle, a few at a time. First, on July 3, Father and I and our old Kansas cohort Jeremiah Anderson came in by wagon from North Elba, and then soon after came Oliver and Watson and the Thompson boys, William, who earlier wished to be in Kansas with us and his brother Henry but never made it off the Thompson farm, and his younger brother Dauphin, only twenty years old, by nature a sweet and gentle boy, but who over the years has come practically to worship Father. From Maine comes Charlie Tidd and with him Aaron Stevens, both hardened veterans of the Kansas campaign, and shortly after them, Albert Hazlett rides a wagon in, followed by the Canadian Stewart Taylor, the spiritualist, who is convinced that he alone will die at Harpers Ferry and seems almost to welcome it, as if his death is a small price to pay for the survival of the rest of us. A week later, the Coppoc brothers, Edwin and Barclay, will arrive at the farmhouse, lapsed Quakers who trained with us in Iowa. Then, late in the summer, Willie Leeman will walk all the way in from Maine, and shortly after him come the first of the Negroes, Osborn Anderson and Dangerfield Newby, which pleases Father immensely, for he has begun to grow fearful that his army will be made up only of white men. In the end, there will be four more men to join us at the Kennedy farm: the Bostonian Francis Meriam, unstable and inspired to join us by his recent visit with the journalist Redpath to the black republic of Haiti; and John Copeland, Lewis Leary, and Shields Green, the last three of them Ohio Negroes, which, not counting our commander-in-chief, rounds out our number at twenty.
But do not fear, this number will be sufficient unto our present needs, Father has declared. We have pared away from our side all those men who would defeat us through their cowardice and faithlessness. We now have only the enemy to fight. July has turned into August and is moving rapidly towards autumn, and as each new recruit joins us, Father begins his narrative anew, an old jeremiad against slavery that lapses into fresh prophecy of its demise, as weekly he adjusts his plan for the taking of Harpers Ferry, so that it reflects the skills and personalities of the new arrivals, his increased belief in his recruits’ commitment to the raid, and his growing awareness that in the end there will be far fewer of us than he anticipated. The arrival of Mr. Douglass will, of course, alter things considerably, even if he comes alone, but it’s mainly afterwards that his presence will revise our circumstances and operations, Father points out, after we have seized the town and the cry has gone out across the Virginia countryside that Osawatomie Brown and Frederick Douglass have begun their long-awaited war to liberate the slaves. That’s when our sharpened pikes, with their six-foot ash handles and eight-inch knife blades bolted to the top, will go into action. Father believes that most of the slaves who join up with us will not be much experienced in the use of firearms, but until they can be trained and properly armed, these weapons will do them fine. Besides, the very sight of razor-sharp spears in the hands of vengeful liberated Negroes will help terrorize the slaveholders. Terror is one of our weapons, he says. Perhaps our strongest weapon. Until then, however, and for now, this is the plan.
From our blanket rolls scattered over the rough plank floor, we prop our heads in our hands and listen to our commander-in-chief, and each of us sees himself playing his role flawlessly, not missing a cue or a line, as if he were an actor in a perfectly executed play. Father sits on a stool in the center of the attic, and as usual, he first hectors and inspires us with his rhetoric and then runs through his plan yet again. He is the author of the play and its stage-manager and master of costumes and scenery and all our properties, and he is the lead actor as well — along with Mr. Douglass, of course, we mustn’t forget him, for without Frederick Douglass, no matter how successful the first act is played, the second and third will surely fail. There may not even be a second or third. Everyone knows that. Father will reveal more about those acts later, he says, but for now we need be mindful only that it is overall a work, a performance, whose second and continuing acts will require not one hero but two.
The rest of us are important players, too, we know, but compared to the Old Man and Mr. Douglass, minor. Father insists that no, each one of us is as crucial to the success of this operation as every other: from top to bottom, we are a chain, and if one link breaks, the entire chain comes undone. But still, we know better. And so does he. Each of us twenty is replaceable, and until Mr. Douglass arrives, this will be the Old Man’s show, and then it will belong to the two of them. It will never belong to us. Meanwhile, however, we listen to the Old Man’s directions and memorize our lines and positions, so that when at last Osawatomie Brown steps onto the stage and begins the action, we will be able to follow his lead and efficiently prepare the way for the entry of the famous Frederick Douglass and his thousands of Negro actors, all of whom are as yet unrehearsed and have been cast as players only in our imaginations.
Even so, the time to act is fast approaching, Father tells us. Already there have appeared numerous signs from the Lord — such as the sudden recent arrival of the pikes from Chambersburg, where they had been oddly delayed for weeks, despite Kagi’s best attempts to get them released and sent on to us. And soon from the Lord there will come additional signs, emblems and omens dressed as incidental events and information, to encourage us and make us the more eager to risk our lives in battle rather than continue with this suffocating waiting game at the farm on the Maryland Heights. For instance, Father will dispatch Cook down along the Charles Town Turnpike to determine the numbers and disposition of the slaves there, his only attempt to reconnoiter the region beyond the town of Harpers Ferry itself, and Cook will return aflame with news that the moon is right for insurrection, for it is nearly a dog-tooth moon, the type that makes Africans particularly discontented, he has learned. This, too, is a sign from the Lord, Father tells us. Cook has also been told of a young male slave at a farm nearby who just yesterday hung himself because his owner sold the man’s wife down South. A shipment of spears suddenly released, a dog-tooth moon, and a hanging man: on the strength of these and other similarly propitious portents, Father has sent sister Annie and Martha back home to North Elba. We are now awaiting only the arrival of Mr. Douglass, who we hope will bring with him a phalanx of well-armed Negro fighters from the North, although Father warns us that lately letters from his black cohorts back there are suggesting otherwise.