But I have long since given up any hope of ordering these pages and sending them to you. I write now only so that I can someday cease to write. I speak in order to go silent. And I listen to my voice so that I will soon no longer be obliged to hear it.
That fateful October night at the Kennedy farmhouse, after Father and the others had departed for the town, I spent a good while gathering and heaping everything together on the floor in front of the stove, and when I stood and stared down at the mass of incrimination, it was like listening to a thousand low, choked confessions all at once, as if the voices, mingling and merging with one another, were the sad, accumulated results of a long, unforgiving Inquisition into the heresy and betrayal of their Puritan fathers by an entire generation of sons. I burned none of it. My heretical refusal to play Isaac to my father’s Abraham seemed not mine alone: it felt emblematic to me — as if an Age of Heroism had acceded to an Age of Cowardice. As if, in the context of those last days at Harpers Ferry and the one great moral issue of our time, I had become a man of another time: a man of the future, I suppose. A modern man.
Stepping back from the cold stove, I set my candle on the table and blew it out, dropping the house into darkness. Then I went into the rain and crossed the stubbled field to the shed, where Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam had finished loading the weapons onto the wagon. Coppoc was seated up on the box with the reins in his hands, scowling impatiently at me, while Meriam sat ashen-faced behind him.
“You finally done in there?” Coppoc said.
“Yes.”
“Well, then, let’s get a move on. The Old Man must already be across the bridge. Me and Frank heard gunfire a minute ago.”
“Fine,” I said, and climbed onto the wagon, taking a place on the wooden cases next to Meriam. Coppoc clucked to the horse, Adelphi, the second of our old North Elba pair of Morgans, and we moved slowly away from the Kennedy farm onto the wet, rumpled road and headed gradually downhill towards the abandoned schoolhouse overlooking the river and the town below. By the time we reached our destination, we could hear guns firing below, intermittently and from several different places — from near the armory, we thought, then from the Maryland side of the bridge, and a little later from the factory at the further edge of town. As instructed by Father, we quickly unloaded the weapons from the wagon and stacked the unopened cases along the walls inside the one room of the schoolhouse.
About an hour before daylight, when the rain let up, we went outside and walked through the woods a short ways to the edge of a cliff high above the Potomac, and stood together there, looking down in the hazy, pre-dawn light. Behind us, still hitched to the empty wagon, the horse browsed peacefully on a blond patch of grass. The sky was smeared gray beyond the far, dark bluffs, and in the town below, a few lights dully shone from the windows of the hotel and firehouse. We could see the train where it had stopped on the siding next to the railroad station and a few dark figures standing on the platform. Coppoc said he could make out some of our boys and a couple of Negroes posted inside the armory walls by the firehouse, where the hostages were supposed to be kept, but I couldn’t distinguish them from this distance.
Suddenly, Meriam, who had been strangely silent, blurted in his nervous, high-pitched voice, “Owen, where are the slaves? There should be hundreds of escaped slaves coming to us by now, right? Isn’t that right, Owen? We’ve got all these damned pikes and guns and no one to give them to!” He laughed edgily.
“Shut up, Frank,” Coppoc said. “They’ll come in. And it’s all right if they don’t. Or if only a few make it here tonight. They’ll catch up with us later in the mountains. We’ll arm them then.”
“No, Barclay,” I said. “They won’t.”
“How’s that?”
“They’re not coming. Not now. Not ever.”
The two looked at me angrily. ’Course they’re coming in,” Coppoc said. “Good Lord, Owen, this is way beyond arguing now. We’ve got options anyhow.”
“Yes, and we got of Fred Douglass a-waiting in the wings,” said Meriam.
“No, we don’t.”
“Now, come on, Owen, what’re you talking about?” Meriam demanded, his voice rising. “We got options. Plenty of’em. You heard the Old Man, same as us.”
“Say it, Owen.”
And so I said it. “Boys, Frederick Douglass is in Rochester, New York, tonight, asleep in his bed. I know that, and Shields Green knows it, and Father knows it. We lied to you,” I said. “At least, I did. Father and Shields, I think, lied to themselves and each other and believed their lies, and so they told you only what they thought was the truth.” Then in a few sentences I revealed to Meriam and Coppoc what had happened at the quarry in Chambersburg and how later, riding back down to Virginia, Father had insisted that, once Mr. Douglass realized we were deadly serious, he would change his mind. Maybe he would wait until the raid had actually begun, but in the end Mr. Douglass would fly to our side, for he was a man of deep principle and great personal courage. Father was sure of it. And Shields had agreed, in a way that made it seem that his friend Mr. Douglass had given him some private assurances.
Father instructed us not to report to the other men what had been said at the quarry. “It will only make them unnecessarily fearful and will sow disunity amongst them,” he said.
And we obeyed — Shields because he believed that my father knew things that no other man knew, and I because I was his son. “Shields thinks Osawatomie Brown is a prophet,” I said.
“And I take it you don’t,” Coppoc said, disgusted.
“No.”
“For God’s sake, none of that matters now! What’re we going to do?” Meriam cried.
“My brother Ed’s down there!’ said Coppoc.
“And two of mine. And two brothers-in-law. And a father.”
“Owen Brown, what kind of man are you?” Coppoc said, and turned away from me.
We heard more gunshots then, rifle shots, coming from the vicinity of the church a short ways above the armory and overlooking it. Some townspeople were running and ducking behind walls, and it looked like they were taking potshots at our men in the armory yard below. Then our men returned fire, and one of the townspeople went down. The others quickly grabbed up his body and pulled it behind a shed, and the guns went silent for a while.