“I can’t keep it down. I can barely keep down warm water.”
“Shall I sing to you, son?”
“If you wish. Quietly, though, please. My head pounds, and my joints ache.”
“Quietly, then.” And he would begin, in a low and tender voice, one of the sweet Methodist hymns. A verse or two into it, however, and his voice would begin to lift and grow in volume, and soon he was nearly shouting out the words.
“Father! My head! Too loud, Father.”
“Of course, son. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, my boy,” he would say, and he would begin the hymn a second time, quietly, almost whispering the words now, and of course it was not long before once again he was bellowing it out, obliging me to wrap my poor head in the pillow, which would cause him finally to cease his singing altogether and, not without a sigh to indicate the degree of his sacrifice, settle for silently reading from his Bible or in one of his accounts of Napoleon’s campaigns, which he was then studying with an eye to making an on-site examination after we had completed our business in Liverpool.
With or without Father, daytimes I confined myself to our cabin. Prompted by necessity, however, it had become my habit after a few nights at sea to walk awhile abovedecks alone late, and I well remember one night in particular. Long after Father had come in, when finally he lay snoring in the upper bunk — from the first night out, he had made me sleep below, so as to ease my fits of sickness and not to wake him when I had to get down and use the chamber pot — I rose and pulled on trousers and shin; and then, barefoot, my sloshing chamber pot held carefully in two hands and extended well before me, pitched my watery limbs and turbulent barrel of guts down the narrow, dimly lit passageway and made my way up to the main deck. At the stern, I tossed the contents of the pot into the sea and returned to midships, where I set the container down by the cabin passageway and took what had become my nightly stroll, such as it was — a circuit or three, depending on the tolerance of my roiling innards.
On this night the sea was calm and the breeze light. The squeamishness of my stomach had somewhat abated, and I was able to look out over the glistening black waters without nausea and steady my gaze on the moonlit horizon without dizziness, and for the first time I actually enjoyed the slight roll and buoyancy of the ship below me and the tender flap of the vast sails above, the slosh and creak of the slowly turning sidewheel. I listened with affection to the groan of the masts and spars, the slap of the lines and whir of wooden pulleys, as the wind luffed and loafed overhead. The quiet, steady plash of the low waves as they met the bow seemed almost tropically soft, as if we were in the shallow, warm waters of the Caribbee, and for a long moment I quite forgot that I was cast upon the broad, fierce back of the old, cold North Atlantic.
Then, as I made my dreamy way around to the leeward side of the ship, I discerned the figure of a fellow passenger, a small, frail-looking woman wearing a heavy, dark woolen shawl over her head. She clung to the railing there and stared down into the inky depths as if lost in thought.
When I spoke to her, “Good evening, m’am,” she turned abruptly from her reverie as if startled, and to reassure her I quickly introduced myself by name and said I was a fellow passenger, the son of John Brown, whom she had no doubt already met.
“Oh, yes,” she said. Then, after a long silence, added, “The preacher.” We had not yet been properly introduced, due to my illness and persistent reclusion, but I already knew who she was, of course. I had glimpsed her when we first came aboard in Boston, and later Father had described her at length and had often speculated about her condition and reasons for travel.
She said her name, Miss Sarah Peabody, of Salem, Massachusetts, and held out her delicate, bare hand, which I grasped in mine for a second. Not knowing what then to say or do, I let go of it quickly, as if her hand were unnaturally hot, instead of alabaster cool. She seemed wraith-like, more apparition than mortal, the image of someone long dead or not yet born, this pale young woman — little more than a girl, I saw, when she opened her small, almond-eyed face to me. Not yet twenty, I thought. And in a dark, sharpened way, she was very pretty.
“Well, Father’s not exactly a preacher,” I finally said. “But, yes, I suppose he does tend to preach to folks. He’s a man of religion, you might say.”
She smiled lightly. “Mister Brown is an… impressive man,” she said, with a hint of mockery in her tone. Her face was intelligent, and though she was clearly a genteel and refined person, she looked straight at me and, despite her fragility, spoke with mild self-assurance. She was a young woman who seemed sure of her gifts and their value. A new kind of female, to me.
I could not imagine her pregnant and abandoned, however — I could not imagine her becoming pregnant. Even so, there was something about her gaze and light smile that was not in the slightest virginal, that was bold and provocative, and I found myself defending Father to her, as if wanting her approval of him and, more to the point, of me as well. I told her that my father was a businessman, a wholesaler of wool. And that he was also a famous abolitionist.
“Really?” She arched her eyebrows and smiled more with pity than condescension. “A famous abolitionist? Strange that I’ve never heard of him. Although perhaps I should have.” She began suddenly to speak with surprising animation. She had thought that she knew everyone of importance who was in the movement. She and her family, she said, the Peabodys, were all deeply involved in the struggle to bring an end to slavery and had been for many years. She and her family were also active in bringing about other reforms, she said, women’s rights, education, and so on. Except for one aunt, she conceded. Not her Aunt Elizabeth, the woman with whom she was traveling to England, but another, her Aunt Sophia, who was married to an author.
“Poor Aunt Sophia, she follows the Democratic politics and principles of her husband. A fine and famous man,” she said, “who ought to know better.” She told me the author’s name, Nathaniel Hawthorne. “You no doubt have heard of him and perhaps have read some of his tales,” she said.
At that time, however, his name meant nothing to me. “I’m not much for tales,” I said. When it came to literary matters, I told her, I was an ignorant country boy, a rough shepherd, whose reading was mostly still shaped by his father’s tastes, which is to say, by religion and politics. Amongst the so-called moderns, John Bunyan was our tale-teller and John Milton our poet, and they were hardly moderns, were they? The rest, according to Father, was dross, or worse. Filth.
“Your father;’ she said. “The famous abolitionist.”
“Well, yes,”I said. “But perhaps he’s better known amongst the abolitionists in Springfield and out west in Ohio, where we used to live.” I thought for a moment to tell her of his association with Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith, but realized that I would be merely bragging, and besides, it would be as indiscreet as it was vain for me to invoke the names of those fine men merely to glamorize Father’s name. Especially in the light of our recent escapades in the northcountry, adventures that neither Mr. Douglass nor Mr. Smith would care to be associated with.
“Actually, Father works pretty much alone, and with the Negroes themselves. Not so much with white people, excepting, of course, us family members. Which actually enhances his effectiveness, rather than hinders it,” I added, and my voice and phrasing sounded in my ears precisely like Father’s, as if he were speaking through me, as if, even in chatting casually with this attractive young woman, I had no voice or language of my own.