As soon as we were alone, Father stripped my torn clothing off and washed me down in placid silence, as if I were one of his lambs and had been attacked by a wild animal or a pack of feral dogs. Throughout, Father said not a word. Finally, when he had me wrapped in a warm blanket and I was drifting towards sleep, he peered down at my face as if examining it for further wounds and said, “Owen, tell me now what happened to you tonight.”
“Is it necessary?”
He answered that he wished only to know how I came to be walking at night through the woods and fields of the Common, when the place was a well-known haunt of hooligans and prostitutes. “Your private business is your own business;’ he said, “but I pray that it’s not what it looks like.”
I almost wished that it were; it would have been somehow more natural; but I could not lie to him. I told him the story of my evening, just as I have related it now — of my having passed along the gauntlet of taunts and derision on my way to the meeting, and of the strange, yet seductive, passivity of the abolitionists as they walked through this assault and afterwards at the meeting, and of my slow-boiling, confused rage, how it eventually drove me from the meeting back to the street and thence into the Common.
Father drew a chair up to my bed, and with thread and needle in hand and my torn shirt, sat listening in grim, attentive silence as I spoke through broken lips. “I don’t truly know why I went there, though. It was because of what happened earlier, I suppose. There were all kinds of strange, demented people in that place,”I said. “It’s as if the place has been specially set aside for them. I felt like I was inside a vast cage with packs of wild animals roaming, and that I was one of the animals.” I told him that when a group of them wished me to step aside and defer to them, I had attacked them.
“You attacked them?” His eyes opened wide, and he ceased sewing. “Yes.”
He reached out and set his hand on my head. “You went in there and purposely attacked this gang of Negro-hating hooligans?”
“Yes. It looks that way. It felt that way, too.”
“Didn’t you realize, son, that they were capable of stabbing you, of killing you, of simply beating you to death, as they nearly succeeded in doing? Didn’t you know that, or are you merely that naive?”
“No, I knew.”
“Yet you went in there anyhow. You went after them.”
“Yes.”
Gently he stroked my hair. “I see you freshly, son.” He sat back and looked steadily at me. “You have as much of the lion in you as the lamb. In my prayers tonight, I will be thanking God for that,” he said, and smiled, and went peacefully back to his sewing, and I to sleep.
The next morning was a fine, bright day, still unseasonably warm. I woke feeling broken, however, in pieces and chunks, barely able to stand, pummeled by a hundred shooting pains from crown to foot, and feverish. It was Sunday, and I remember, when Father marched me off to church services, that I was fuzzy-headed and dizzy and only dimly aware of what we were up to. I did not recognize the streets we passed along, and if Father had told me that we were now in Liverpool and I had slept through the crossing to England, I would have believed him.
And before long I did indeed think that I was dreaming, for our reality that morning corresponded uncannily to a nighttime dream that I frequently had in those years. Father and I were the only white people in a crowd of well-dressed Negroes. As we moved through the large gathering of black, brown, and tan men, women, and children, they parted for us and nodded respectfully, some of the men touching the brims of their hats, the women politely averting their gazes, the children looking at us with surprised eyes — lovely people of all the many Negro shades, from pale butterscotch and ginger all the way to ebony and even a few of that most African hue of blue-black. It was as if every tribe of the continent of Africa, from Egypt to the southernmost tip, were represented there. Father walked cleanly through the crowd in his usual manner — back straight as a hoe handle, head pitched slightly forward and led by his out-thrust jaw, arms swinging loosely at his sides, like a man pacing out a field for a survey — and I struggled to keep up, my feet heavy and difficult to move, as if I were wading through mud or walking underwater.
Soon the crowd closed around him and filled in between us, and I found myself cut off from him, falling further and further back, and suddenly I became afraid, not so much of the Negroes who surrounded me as of being separated from Father. Like a small child, I cried out to him, “Father! Wait!” At that, the crowd seemed to part again and to open up a corridor between us. Father slowly turned and peered at me. Then, impatiently waving me on, he resumed walking up the broad steps of a small brick church and entered and disappeared from my view into the darkness of the sanctuary. The narrow corridor through the crowd remained open, however. Laboriously, I made my way along it, sweating from the effort and the heat of the day and the many aches and pains of my beating the night before, when I had walked another gauntlet, that one amongst white people. I was never so conscious as I was then, during those few moments that I spent traversing the short, paved space at the entrance to the Negro church of Boston, of the difference between the faces of the oppressors and the oppressed, or the faces of my white-skinned brethren and my black. And I was never so conscious of my own bewildering, sad difference from both. My face was invisible to me. Father! I nearly cried out. Wait for me! I cannot bear to be so alone! Without thee beside me, I seem not to exist at all! Without thee to look upon me, whether I am amongst white people or black, I am invisible!
I found him inside the church, of course, seated in a pew close to the front, and I took the empty seat next to him, fairly collapsing into it. He studied my face with sudden concern and felt my brow. “You’re unwell, son|’ he said. “Perhaps you should have stayed at the Howes’ today.”
“No, no, I want to be here. I’m very happy here, Father,” I said to him. And I was. Frightened of nameless things; and filled to overflowing with chaotic emotions; yet happy! I felt an inexplicable readiness, as if for a religious awakening, as if for an infusion of light and power. I sensed it coming, not from a truly divine source like Father’s God, but from some other, up to now wholly unknown source of light and power, which lay outside myself and beyond all my previous experiences of awakening, beyond all my earlier resolves and oaths, all the sudden stages of my moral growth, all my old degrees and kinds of enlightenment and the pledges that had followed hard upon them. Filled with trembling expectation, then, I waited to become a new man. Or, perhaps, for the first time, a man.
And, indeed, it happened there, on that Sunday morning in September, in the African American Meeting House on Belknap Street in Boston, Massachusetts. While the choir sang a familiar old Methodist hymn, I began to shake and shiver and then experienced a great seizure. I remember the beautiful Negro voices pealing like heavy, dark bells, like distant thunder rolling down the valleys and across the fields of North Elba, coming closer and closer to me:
Come, O thou Traveler unknown,