WITNESS: Mr. R. P Carney, Clark Co., Ala., in the “Mobile Register,” Dec. 22,1832. TESTIMONY: “One hundred dollars reward for a negro fellow, Pompey,40 years old; he is branded on the left jaw.”
WITNESS: Mr. J. Guyler, Savannah, Ga., in the “Republican,” April 12,1837. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, Laman, an old negro, grey, has only one eye”
WITNESS: J. A. Brown, jailor, Charleston, S.C., in the “Mercury” Jan. 12,1837. TESTIMONY: “Committed to jail a negro man, has no toes on left foot.”
WITNESS: Mr. J. Scrivener, HerringBay, Anne Arundel Co., Md., in the “Annapolis Republican,” April 18,1837. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, a negro man, Elijah; has a scar on his left cheek, apparently occasioned by a shot”
WITNESS: Madame Burvant, corner of Chartres and Toulouse Sts., New Orleans, in the “New Orleans Bee” Dec. 21,1838. TESTIMONY:
“Ranaway, a negro woman named Rachel, has lost all her toes except the large one”
WITNESS: Mr. O. W. Lains, in the “Helena (Ark.) Journal,” June 1, 1833. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, Sam; he was shot a short time since through the hand and has several shots in his left arm and side.”
WITNESS: Mr. R. W Sizer, in the “Grand Gulf (Miss.)” June 1, 1833. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, my negro man, Dennis; said negro has been shot in the left arm between the shoulder and elbow, which has paralyzed the hand”
WITNESS: Mr. Nicholas Edmunds, in the “Petersburgh (Va.) Intelligencer,” May 22,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, my negro man named Simon; he has been shot badly in the back and right arm.”
Long into the winter night I read, my voice breaking like glass at times, as it did then naturally, due to my youth, but more particularly because of the horrors that loomed before my eyes. My breath caught in my throat, my eyes watered over, my hands trembled, and it seemed that I could not go on saying the words that described such incredible cruelties. Yet I continued. It was as if I were merely the voice for all five of us seated together in that candlelit room before the fire, and we were together very like a single person — Father, Mary, John, Jason, and I, bound together by a vision of the charnel house of Negro slavery.
I said the words on the page before me, but I felt situated outside myself, huddled with the others, listening with them to the broken voice of a white boy reading from a terrible book in a farmhouse kitchen in the old Western Reserve of Ohio. Those cold, calm accounts from newspapers, those mild and dispassionate descriptions of floggings, torture, and maimings, of families torn asunder, of husbands sold off from wives, of children yanked from their mother’s arms, of human beings treated as no rational man would treat his beasts of burden — they dissolved the differences of age and sex and temperament that separated the five of us into our individual selves and then welded us together as nothing before ever had. Not the deaths of infant children, not the long years of debt and poverty, not our religion, not our labor in the fields, not even the death of my mother, had so united us as our hushed reading, hour after hour, of that litany of suffering.
In my lifetime up to that point and for many years before, despite our earnest desires, especially Father’s, all that we had shared as a family — birth, death, poverty, religion, and work — had proved incapable of making our blood ties mystical and transcendent. It took the sudden, unexpected sharing of a vision of the fate of our Negro brethren to do it. And though many times prior to that winter night we had obtained glimpses of their fate, through pamphlets and publications of the various anti-slavery societies and from the personal testimonies given at abolitionist meetings by Negro men and women who had themselves been slaves or by white people who had traveled into the stronghold of slavery and had witnessed firsthand the nature of the beast, we had never before seen it with such long clarity ourselves, stared at it as if the beast itself were here in our kitchen, writhing before us.
We saw it at once, and we saw it together, and we saw it for a long time. The vision was like a flame that melted us, and afterwards, when it finally cooled, we had been hardened into a new and unexpected shape. We had been re-cast as a single entity, and each one of us had been forged and hammered into an inseparable part of the whole.
At last, after I had recited the irrefutable and terrifyingly detailed rebuttals to the slavers’ objections to the abolition of slavery — with Objection III, “Slaveholders Are Proverbial for Their Kindness, Hospitality, Benevolence, and Generosity”—I saw that I had come to the end of Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. I closed the book on my lap. I remember that for a long time we remained silent.
Then slowly Father got up from his chair and placed a fresh log on the dying fire and stayed there, his back to us, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, and watched the flames blaze up. Without turning, he began to speak. He was at first calm and deliberate in speech, as was his habit, but gradually he warmed to the subject and began to sputter loudly, as he often did when excited by the meaning and implications of his words.
He reminded us of an event some two years past, when, in this same month of November, on learning of the assassination, in Alton, Illinois, of that holy man Elijah Lovejoy, Father had publically pledged his life to the overthrow of slavery. We all knew this. He had done it in church, and we and our neighbors had witnessed his pledge, and so had the Lord, who sees everything, Father declared. And we and the Lord had also seen that, since then, just as he had done all the long years of his life before making that pledge, Father had continued to be a weak and despicable man.
We said no, but he said yes and waved us off. The truth was that he had not made himself into the implacable foe of this crime against God and man which he had sworn publically to oppose. Then he said, “My children, the years of my life are passing swiftly.” He fisted his hands and placed them before his eyes like a child about to weep. He said that while he had been idling selfishly and in sinful distraction, lured by his vanity and by pathetic dreams of wealth and fame, the slavers had dug in deeper all across the Southern states. They had spread out like foetid waters, flooding over the plains into Texas and the territories. They had steadily entrenched themselves in positions of power in Washington, until now the poor slaves could no longer even raise their voices to cry for help without being slain for it or being swiftly sold off into Alabama and Mississippi. Black heroes, and now and again a white man like Lovejoy, had risen in our midst and were everywhere being persecuted and even executed for their heroism, legally, by the people of these United States.
“My children,” he said, “it’s mobs that rule us now. And all the while Mister Garrison and his anti-slavery socialites bray and pray and keep their soft, pink hands clean. Politicians keep on politicking. For the businessmen it’s business as usuaclass="underline" ‘Sell us your cheap cotton, we’ll sell you back iron chains for binding the slaves who pick it.’”
Father then cursed them; he cursed them all. And he cursed himself. For his weakness and his vanity, he said, “I curse myself”
He turned to us and now crossed his arms over his chest. His face was like a mask carved of wood by an Indian sachem. His eyes gazed sadly down at us through holes in the mask. It was the face of a man who had been gazing at fires, who had roused the attendants of the fires, serpents and demons hissing back at the man who had dared to swing open the iron door and peer inside. We all knew what Father had seen there. We had seen it, too. But he, due to his nature and characteristic desire, had gazed overlong and with too great a directness, and his gray eyes had been scorched by the sight.