“And Job said to Zophar, ‘No, no, no, no! Look around you, fool! Everywhere the tabernacles are full of robbers, and they prosper. Everywhere those who provoke God are secure. Therefore, you, my friends and neighbors,’saith Job to Zophar, Bildad, and Eliphaz, ‘you are all physicians of no value.’
“Hear me, friends and neighbors of this village of North Elba. Hear me. Job said, ‘You speak wickedly for God and talk deceitfully for Him. You speak in your own interests only. Does not His excellency make you afraid? Does it not make you tremble?
“As for me,’ Job said to his friends and neighbors — and here I come to the point of my preachment to you — Job said, As for me, though the Lord slay me, yet will I trust in Him and will maintain mine own ways before Him. Miserable comforters are ye all!’ Job said to them. ‘Ye believe that one might plead with God as a man pleadeth with his neighbor. I cannot find one wise man among you.’
“Have ye not known such miserable comforters as these, friends? They are all around us, are they not? Why, we might even be them ourselves, might we not?
“Where, then, neighbors, shall wisdom be found? And where lieth the place of understanding?
“Behold. I, John Brown, I say to you that it is just as the Bible shows us. The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom. And to depart from evil, that is understanding.
“And you will remember, neighbors, from the old story, there came a whirlwind, and out of the whirlwind the Lord answered Job’s cry. ‘Of Job’s friends and neighbors,’ the Lord saith, ‘who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? And where was’t thou,’the Lord saith to Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, ‘where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Where wast thou when I placed the firmament between the firmaments?’
“To them the Lord saith, ‘My wrath is kindled against thee! For you have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.’ And the Lord took from them seven bullocks and seven rams each and gave them unto Job. And He blessed the latter end of Job’s life even more than at the beginning with sheep and camels and oxen and asses, and He gave him seven sons more and three daughters.
“Well, neighbors, there you have it. My answer to your charges against me! Now, shall I tell thee the meaning of the story of Job? Shall I again compare us here in this sanctuary today to old Job out there in Uz, a man of principle?
“Or shall I instead compare us to his friends and neighbors, to Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, whose hypocrisy kindled the wrath of the Lord against them? Which of these ancients resembles us more?
“For, look, ye have counseled me exactly as Job’s wife counseled him. Ye have told me to forsake my integrity and curse God.
“Ye hath brayed at me like Eliphaz. Ye hath spoken out against me as if wisdom were thine and thy feet were set in the place of understanding.
“Remember, neighbors, in the fear of the Lord, that is where wisdom lies. And to depart from evil, that is understanding. And that is all ye need to know.
“I say to you, miserable comforters! physicians of no value! I tell thee here and now that I and my family shall continue as before — to fear the Lord and to depart from evil. We seek wisdom and understanding. Those are our principles. We shall live by our principles. You, my good neighbors, you may do as you wish.”
Here the Old Man completed his remarks and stepped down and rejoined the congregation. When he had taken his seat, he lowered his head in prayer, and first Mary, next to him, and then the rest of us alongside in the pew did likewise, and as I myself, the last in our group to do so, lowered my head, I noticed that there were a good many other people amongst the congregation who were also following Father’s example, as if in this argument with Job they wished pointedly to separate themselves from the side of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.
A moment later, the Reverend Hall walked up to the lectern, and although the service resumed in its usual manner, I was not aware of it, for my thoughts were turning around the meaning of Father’s talk. I felt myself surrounded by a buzzing light, as if by a swarm of golden bees, and I had to struggle to hear my thoughts. A terrible understanding had come over me in the midst of Father’s talk, and I did not want to lose it, in spite of its being fearsome and threatening to me.
In Father’s words, the figure of Job was, of course, like no one so much as Father himself. As Job stood to God, Father did also. My terrible understanding was that I, too, was like no one so much as Job. Not, however, in my relation to God; but in my relation to Father.
Who was Satan to me, then? Who would test my faithfulness to Father by afflicting me as Satan had afflicted Job? Would I, too, come to curse the day I was born? Would I beg for my own death, as Job had cried out for his and, as I knew, Father, in his periods of greatest despondency, had also? Would I, like Job, like Father, be able to resist the blandishments and sophistries of the hypocrites?
In the Bible, Job is rewarded at the end for his faithfulness to the Lord, he receives from Him new cattle and new children, and Satan is sent packing, along with Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. But, as Father showed, Job’s reward is given as evidence of God’s power, not His justice. This is what the hypocrites found beyond their understanding. The moral of the story would be the same even if God had not rewarded Job at the end, for it was done merely to punish the hypocrites and confound Satan, not to comfort Job.
Who, then, in Father’s story of my life, plays the role of Satan? Who wishes to prove me a hypocrite?
The terrible answer, the only possible answer, was that anyone who opposes Father as Satan opposes God, could, if I merely questioned Father, prove me a hypocrite. That answer turned me into a trapped animal, a fox with a paw clamped in an iron-toothed jaw. To escape it, I would be obliged to gnaw at my own flesh and separate my body from itself. Freed, I would be a crippled little beast unable to care for himself, unable even to flee. I would have obtained freedom, yes, but freedom for what? To huddle alone in the bushes nearby, there to die slowly of my self-inflicted wounds. No, I thought. Better the intimacy of iron against my wrist. Better the familiarity of my own teeth closed inside my mouth. Better boils, a potsherd, ashes. Better to curse ever having been born.
Predictably, with a few changes made — none of them, however, designed to placate the wishes of our white neighbors — Father went straight back to work on the Underground Railroad. In his mind, all our white neighbors were now cowards and hypocrites, every one of them, and periodically he denounced them to any of us in the family who would listen. He denounced even his good friend Mr. Thompson, for, although the Old Man at first thought that he had successfully shamed our neighbors with his sermon, his message evidently hadn’t taken hold: no one in the village was willing anymore to aid him in his efforts to spirit fugitive slaves out of the country — except, of course, for the Negroes themselves. And except for the rest of us Browns. Meaning me, I suppose, although there was considerable sacrifice required as well of the others in the family, who had to accommodate themselves to Father’s and my and Lyman’s frequent and protracted absences from the farm.
The most significant change in our modus operandi, however, was in cutting Mr. Wilkinson of the Tahawus mining camp out of the operation. In a flurry of letters to Mr. Frederick Douglass in Rochester, Father made it clear that he would not work with the man. Thenceforth, cargo from the South would have to be shipped to Father in North Elba via an agent named Reuben Shiloh, in care of a Mrs. Ebenezer Rankin, resident of the town of Long Lake, New York, a small, rough lumbering community in the southern Adirondack wilderness about forty miles from North Elba. Reuben Shiloh was in fact Father himself, a pseudonym. Mrs. Rankin, his point of contact in Long Lake, was the elderly widow of a veteran of the War of the Revolution. She lived alone in a cabin on the land her husband had homesteaded after the war, was regarded in the village as mildly eccentric and harmless, and, due to her deep religious feeling and independence of spirit, was sympathetic to the cause. Father first met her after a sermon he had made on the subject of abolitionism at the Congregational church there in Long Lake and, as was his wont, had trusted her instantly. Generally, the Old Man made decisions as to a person’s trustworthiness at once and without consulting others. When it had to do with business matters, of course, he was usually wrong, well off the mark, absurdly so; but when it concerned the question of slavery, he was almost always right.