Mr. Douglass smiled. “Yes, well, given the fact that the British have outlawed slavery for close to a quarter-century now, it might not be a bad thing to be a British subject.”
For many hours, long into the afternoon, the two men went back and forth, first one making his argument, citing precedent and pointing to principle for support, and then the other. Shields Green and I listened first to one, then to the other, and said nothing: we were like children listening to their parents argue over a matter that, for good or evil, would shape all their lives to come and wishing that both parents could be right. Mr. Douglass would speak for a while, marshaling his arguments with care and generosity towards Father, with sympathetic understanding of the Old Man’s objectives and firm disapproval of his means, not on principle but for practical reasons only; and Shields and I would nod, as if thinking, yes, Harpers Ferry is a steel trap, we will get in and never be able to get out, and if by some miracle we do fight our way through the outraged townspeople and avoid being cut to pieces by the local militiamen as we flee the Shenandoah Valley into the wilderness, then, yes, the federal army will be arrayed against us and will in a short while cut us off in our mountain retreat and will lay down a siege from which our only escape will be death by starvation or a bullet, and, yes, our raid and the mere threat of the slave rebellion it poses will bring down upon the head of every Negro in the South untold suffering, lynchings, mutilations, chains, for the worst sort of oppression imaginable would be the inevitable consequence of raising fear of a slave revolt in the hearts of white Southerners, and, yes, the Northern whites will not come to our aid, for they will never go to war against their white brethren in the defense of black people and a handful of white radical abolitionists: it is an absurd plan, absurd, and cruel beyond belief.
Then, as the sun passed overhead and moved towards the western Pennsylvania hills, and the shadows of the rock that surrounded us grew long, Father would commence to answer, and now Shields and I nodded in support of his reasoning, too, saying to ourselves, yes, we can take the town by surprise and hold it by means of hostages long enough to capture sufficient weaponry to arm the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slaves who will surely seize the opportunity to rise against their masters, once they know they are being led by men they trust as warriors and as men of principle, and, yes, we can flee to safety in the densely forested mountains of the South, and with a hundred bands of disciplined, well-armed, guerilla fighters we can hold off any army for months, even years, during which time our ranks will swell to such numbers that the Southern states, just to restore their economy, will make peace with their workers, for is that not, after all, who has gone to war against them, their workers?
“In the end, Frederick, it’s right principles and simple economics that will settle this thing in our favor,” Father said, and I could not disagree.
Until Mr. Douglass, in his low, melodious, melancholy voice, answered, “No, John. It’s race that will settle it. And it will settle it against us. Race and simple arithmetic. Not principles and not economics. Simply put, there are more of you in this country than of us. This is not Haiti or Jamaica, and the northern United States are not a separate nation than the southern United States. It’s race, John. Skin color and hair and physiognomy. You say us, John, and you mean all Americans willing to go to war to end slavery. But every other American who says us means race, means us white people, or us Negroes. You are a noble, good man. But you are nearly alone in this country. Even me, when I say us, I mean we Negroes.”
“Then you will not join me.”
“John, I cannot. My practical judgement forbids it. My conscience forbids it. My love of my people forbids it.”
“You are making my task all the more difficult. Without you beside me… my boys, my men…” He stopped and could not speak for a moment. “Without you,” he continued, “the slaves won’t rise up and follow me in such numbers…”
Mr. Douglass placed his heavy hands onto Father’s narrow shoulders and looked into the Old Man’s eyes, and I thought that both men would weep, for their eyes were full. “Please, come away from this. Come back with me, John. Let your son here return to Virginia by himself and send your men home. Fight this war on another front.”
“This is the only front left to me.”
Mr. Douglass turned away and said to Shields Green, “I shall return home to Rochester. If you wish, you may go back with me, or you may stay. You’ve heard all the arguments as well as I.”
Shields looked at the ground and said nothing.
Father reached out and touched Mr. Douglass’s sleeve and, in a soft, plaintive voice, almost a whisper, said, “When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I will need you to help hive them.” It was a trope that he had used many times, and he spoke it mechanically, as if his thoughts, as if he himself, were elsewhere now.
Mr. Douglass did not answer. He looked again at Shields Green and said, “What have you decided to do?“
Shields turned his face, not to Mr. Douglass, but to Father, and he replied, “I believe I’ll go with the Old Man.”
Mr. Douglass nodded and slowly shook hands with us one by one, and when he had finished, he embraced us each in a heartfelt way one by one, as if it were he who was going to war and not we, and then he departed from us straightway for his home in Rochester. That same night, Father, Shields Green, and I returned in the wagon to Virginia.
Chapter 24
This morning I woke in the dark, and my cabin was cold as a grave, and my heart leapt up when I thought again that I had died in the night and had joined Father and the others in purgatory. But then the chalky light of dawn drifted through the window like a fog and erased the comforting clarity of darkness, and I saw where I was, crumpled under my filthy blanket in a corner — a scrawny old man with matted beard and hair lying in his dirty underclothes in an unheated, bare room, my shelves, cot, chair, and tabletop covered with paper spilling onto the floor. I saw that I am nothing but paper. My life has finally come to only this: a tiny bubble of consciousness surrounded by thousands of sheets and scraps of paper — these dozens of tablets filled with disordered scribblings and all the letters and notebooks and documents and yellowed newspaper clippings and tattered old books and periodicals that I so long ago promised to deliver over to you, a great, disheveled heap of words, an incoherent jumble and snarl of truths, lies, memories, fantasies, and even recipes and lists, some of the words as mundane as a description of the several grades of wool in 1848, others as lofty as philosophical speculations on the nature of true religion and heroism, words taken from the floor of the marketplace to Emerson’s brain, but all of it, all these words, adding up to… what? To nothing worth anything to anyone but me, I suppose, and worth nothing to me; so why have I collected and saved it all these years?
I’m struggling to think clearly. Why did I pack and carry Father’s letters sent and received and his pocket notes and the many ledgers and books, an entire wooden crate of them, away out here to my California mountaintop and keep them here beside me these many years? I added to them over the years, as books, articles, and memoirs were published, and now, in feeble old age, I have been adding to the pile still more paper, more useless truths and speculation. Why have I done this?
I know that I began with the belief that I would compose a relation of my memories and knowledge of my father and that I would send it to you and Professor Villard, along with all the documents that I collected and kept over the years — for your purposes, for the composition of what you properly hope will be the defining biography of John Brown, a great book, no doubt, scheduled to make its public appearance in auspicious conjunction with the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the raid on Harpers Ferry and my father’s capture by the federal army and his execution by the government of Virginia. But, surely, this long after I first began, that memorial year has come and passed us by. And yet here I sit, still scribbling, writing now in the margins of my long-filled tablets and on the backs of Father’s letters and in his notebooks, even in the margins and blank end-pages of his broken-backed personal books, his Flint’s Survey, his Jonathan Edwards, Milton, and Franklin, his own published writings, too, “Sambo’s Mistakes” and the Provisional Constitution, old copies of The Liberator, scrolled maps of the Subterranean Passway, newspaper accounts of the raid and of Father’s final words on the scaffold, and Redpath’s and Higginson’s and Hinton’s and Sanborn’s biographies and memoirs — each day that passes, I write a few new sentences, sometimes only one, and sometimes, when my heart beats fast with feeling and my vision of the past is sharp and bright, as many as a hundred.