He smiled back. “I dare not guess.”
We did not speak of it again but went about our business at the office of the shipping agent for the Cumbria—which, to these landlubbers and viewed from the dock, appeared quite seaworthy — and returned to the Howes’ in time for a pleasant early supper of stuffed grouse served on fancy China plates with genuine antique silverware from France. Later that evening, still secretly angry with Father, who remained closeted in our rooms at prayer, I headed out, by way of Beacon Street, to the Park Street Church, which was located not far from Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill. Beacon Street ran alongside the wide expanse of the famed Common, with a facing row opposite of large, old brick town houses, the patrician homes of many of Boston’s elite. As I walked, I kept to that side of the street, close by the tall, elegant houses and as far from the darkened Common as possible, for there — lurking among the shrubs and trees and appearing suddenly out of the darkness to glare and howl at the decorous, well-dressed men and women walking peacefully towards the church — was the enemy.
They were boys, mostly, and young men, idlers and drunkards, brawlers, louts, whoremongers, and common thieves; there were numerous females among them, too, maps and doxies as wild and brutal looking as their brothers. It was not so much their unwashed physiognomies that made them appear brutal and coarse, as their rage. No matter how noble the human face in repose, how symmetrical, fresh, and clear it may appear, when the brow is bent and glowered down, the mouth misshapen by an obscene word, the nostrils flared in revulsion and the lips sneering, and when the fist gets doubled and held out like a weapon, one recoils as if from a sub-species, as if from a demonic, bestial version of one’s self. How can we all be humans alike, when one of us has turned suddenly so ugly? And when a whole crowd turns ugly, turns itself into a mob, what species is it then?
I could fairly well smell the brandy and beer on the breath of the youths who stuck their whiskered faces out at me and brayed their Negro-hating sentiments at me and the other men and women who were silently, peacefully walking the sidewalk alongside me. The gang cackled and screeched and sometimes even tossed a rock and then ducked back into the bushes out of sight, to be replaced a few rods further on by another gang, whose drunken members would pick up the chant. “Nigger-lovers!” they hollered. “Yer nigger-lovers! Yer niggers yerself! Ugly black niggers! Ugly black niggers!” And so on, stupidly, even idiotically, they ranted — until we were walking a kind of gauntlet, it seemed, or proceeding through a maddened, howling mob to our own public hanging, headed not to a place of worship but to a scaffold. How courageous, I thought, were these men and women beside me, many of them elderly, who walked in silence along the sidewalk, being jeered and tormented by people with murder in their eyes. That our pale complexions protected us, keeping us from being physically attacked by them and possibly even killed, caused me to realize anew that white is as much a color as black. Our flag, our uniform, was our white skin, and while it provoked this attack from our fellow whites, it also shielded us from serious harm.
Nonetheless, once inside the large, clean, rationally proportioned sanctuary of the church, I breathed a great sigh of relief and realized that I had been seriously frightened by the harassment of the mob — although it was hard to distinguish fear from anger. My legs felt watery, and my heart was thumping. I wanted to strike out, to hit and hurt those foul mouths, and it had taken great restraint for me simply to appear to ignore them and walk serenely along to my meeting like the others, instead of picking up a loose brick or thrown rock and hurling it back at the coward who had thrown it, or chasing the fellows into the bushes and thrashing them there. I was a big, sturdy young man then and could easily have tossed three or four of them around like so much cordwood. Indeed, had one of them actually struck me with a rock, I believe I would have lost my serenity and rushed across Beacon Street after him. I was never a Quaker.
None of the others, however, as they entered the church, seemed in the slightest bothered by the caterwauling of the mob outside. They treated it like a disagreeable rain and seemed to brush it off their cloaks and shawls as they entered the foyer and greeted one another cheerfully and took their seats inside. Standing there in the foyer, shivering with rage — or fear — and tamping down fantasies of violent retribution, I, however, suddenly felt ashamed of myself. “Action, action, action!” was Father’s call, but here, in this serene and pacifistic context, action seemed vile, easy, childish. Mr. Garrison’s perspective, I knew, and that of the Anti-Slavery Society as a whole, was based on the Quaker philosophy of non-violence, and it was easy to criticize it from afar, while gnashing one’s teeth over the ongoing injustice of slavery and its growing power in Washington during those years. But here, in the face of the mob, pacifism seemed downright courageous and almost beautiful.
I was suddenly glad that Father was not at my side, for although he, like me, probably would not have charged into the woods of the Common to thrash his tormentors, he surely would have entered the foyer of the church growling and snarling at the weakness of the Society members for not having created a stout and well-armed security force from amongst their membership and posting it all along Park Street to protect their meetings.
“If you behave as slaves, you will be treated as slaves,” he often said. He said it to freed Negroes; he said it to sympathetic whites. “If you wish to do the Lord’s work on earth, you must gird your loins and buckle on your armor and sword and march straightway against the enemy.”
Ah, Father, how you shame me one minute and anger me the next. How your practical wisdom, which at times borders on a love of violence for its own sake, challenges my intermittent pacifism, which borders on cowardice. Your voice stops me cold, and then divides me. One day and in one context, I am a warrior for Christ. The next day, in a different context, I am one of His meekest lambs. If only in the beginning, when I was a child, I had been able, like so many of my white countrymen, to believe that the fight to end slavery was not my fight, that it was merely one more item in the long list of human failings and society’s evils that we must endure, then I surely would have become a happy, undivided man.
With thoughts like these, then, and in a kind of dulled despondency, I took my seat in a pew at the rear of the sanctuary, for the church was nearly filled by now with proper Bostonians, all of them white people, well-dressed, with the benignly expectant faces of people gathered for the dedication of an equestrian statue. Indeed, the meeting itself, once it got under way, was not unlike just such a ceremony. Father would have been appalled, and even I was somewhat embarrassed for being there.
My mind wandered during the benediction and the welcome to new members and guests, and I did not rise like the other newcomers to introduce myself to the assembly — out of embarrassment, no doubt, but also because at the proper moment I was thinking of something else and was not sure, when I saw a scattering of folks in the audience stand and heard them, one by one, say their names, what the ceremony was all about. I was thinking about the packs of wild boys and men outside and their dark domain beyond.
Even before Mr. Garrison appeared, I rose from my seat and left. In a moment, I was back on the street. The howlers were gone, disappeared into the darkness of the Common, where I supposed they now lurked, waiting for their prey to emerge from the church, when they would resume barking and snarling at them.
I think back to that night from this vantage point a half-century later, and I cannot remember what, if anything, was in my mind when I crossed the street and stepped into the thicket there. I cannot imagine what my intentions were, as I stumbled down the unfamiliar slope in darkness and made my way towards the rough pasture in the middle, where in the distance I saw what appeared to be a scattering of small campfires and huts made of cast-off boards and old pieces of canvas sheeting. Now and again, the figure of a man or a pair of men passed near enough for me to see and be seen, and, once, a fellow said to me, “Evenin, mate,” almost as if hed recognized my face, and passed into the darkness close by. When I looked back over my shoulder to see where he had gone, I saw him stop and step forward from the shadows towards me, as if expecting me to follow. I said nothing and plunged ahead, in the direction of the distant firelight.