After a while, almost without my noticing it, the ground leveled off somewhat, and Father and I no longer had to stay close to the wagon to be ready to push it. Our little group had strung itself out practically in single file, as if we each of us wished to be alone with our morbid thoughts, with Father in his greatcoat up at the head of the column, and then the team and wagon driven by Lyman, and me trudging along in its tracks. Behind me came Mary, Ruth, Sarah, and Annie, picking their way through the snow in a ragged line, while stretching back for many rods walked the livestock, singly or sometimes two animals abreast, with Salmon and Oliver positioned among them to keep them moving, and back somewhere out of sight, Watson and the collie dogs brought up the rear.
The road by now had dwindled to a narrow, palisadoed trail barely the width of our wagon. It no longer switch-backed across the side of the mountain, and there were no longer the occasional breaks in the trees with views of the forested slopes and ridges below. Instead, plunging across slabs of rock and over snarls of thick roots, the trail ran straight into the still-darkening forest, as if down a tunnel, and had we met a wagon or coach coming out of the tunnel towards us, we could not have turned aside to let it rush past. It seemed that there was nothing ahead of us but slowly encroaching snow and darkness.
When, suddenly, as if struck by a blow, I realized that we had emerged from the forest. Light poured down from the skies, and the towering trees seemed to bow and back away. Dazzled by the abrupt abundance of light and space, I saw that we were passing along the shore of a long, narrow lake that lay like a steel scimitar below high, rocky escarpments and cliffs, beyond which there loomed still higher mountains, which curved away and disappeared in the distance. The enormous scale of open space, snow-covered mountains, precipices, and black, sheer cliffs diminished our size to that of tiny insects, as we made our slow way along the edge of the glistening lake. Wonderstruck, gaping, we traced the hilt of the sword-shaped body of water and crossed the long slant of its cutting edge to the point, where we exited from the gorge as if through an ancient stone gate.
We had passed through Cascade Notch, and below us lay the beautiful wide valley of North Elba. Off to our left, mighty Tahawus and Mclntyre rose from the plain, splitting the southeastern cloudbank. To our right, in the northwest, we could see Whiteface Mountain, aged and dignified by its wide scars and pale gray in the fading afternoon sun. And between the mountains, spreading out at our feet for miles, lay undulating forests scratched by the dark lines of rivers and the rich, dark tablelands, grassy meadows, and marshes that we would call the Plains of Abraham.
Lyman drew the wagon to a halt, and the family came and gathered around it and admired the wonderful sight together. We removed the damp blankets from our shoulders, folded them and placed them back into the wagon. Then Father took himself off from us a ways and lowered his head and silently prayed, while the rest of us continued simply to admire the generosity and beauty of the land.
For a long time, no one spoke, and then, when Father had rejoined us, Lyman said, “We better keep moving, Browns, if we wants to get home by nightfall.” He slapped the reins, and the wagon jerked forward along the rocky, narrow road, and we all moved back into line behind it, walking easily downhill into the valley, as the sun descended towards the hills and mountains beyond.
Chapter 6
On our arrival at North Elba, after Lyman Epps had departed for his own home, we passed nearly a full week at the long-abandoned farm on the Keene Road, before any of us ventured forth again—time spent unpacking the wagon and cleaning, re-organizing, and repairing the tumble-down cabin and shed, which were too small to be properly called a house and barn. In various ways we were stretching the structures so as to fit our many belongings and our numerous selves. Then, on the morning that I came to breakfast ready to commence plowing the one sizeable, cleared field on the place, Father instructed me not to plow.
This surprised me. With the shortness of the growing season, there was a clear need to get the ground turned over and the seed sown as quickly as possible. It was a clear, dry day, and Watson and Salmon were already waiting for me in the shed. I stood at the door to the cabin on my way outside, while Father perched on a three-legged stool next to the stove, finishing his morning shave.
“You don’t want me to plow today,” I said to him, making it a statement, not a question. Repeating his words was one of my ways of getting the Old Man to explain his purpose without seeming to question his authority.
“No. Saddle the lead horse, Adelphi, for me. I’ve developed a real fondness for the animal. And hitch the off-horse to the wagon and load up my transit and lines,” he said. “It’s time for you and me to call on our African neighbors. Time for us to go to Timbuctoo.”
Although I wasn’t particularly glad of the chance to put off the plowing, I was eager to see Timbuctoo, for I had never visited a Negro farming community before. As far as I knew, this was the only one in the Northeast, although Father said there were a few just across the border, in Canada. I remember wishing that it had a different name, however. I knew from Lyman that, while the acreage that Gerrit Smith had given them to farm was located in the valley in various spots, the Negroes had clustered their cabins together on a narrow, rising section of the tableland southeast of the village of North Elba. They might have called their settlement the Heights, I thought, or South Elba. But, no, they had named it Timbuctoo.
“Same as Timbuctoo in Guinea,” Lyman had explained to me. “You know, like the way white folks call their towns New London and New York and Manchester and such, so as to bring back to their minds the place they came from.” They had even made a flag to fly above the settlement, he told me. “Red, like the blood of the slaves, with one star on it. The freedom star.”
I could see that from their perspective, although they had no more memory of Africa than I had of England, Timbuctoo was an affectionate and respectful name, which I am sure is how Father took it. No doubt their need went beyond that, for while I was connected to my English forefathers by means of the language I spoke, the Negroes’ links to their ancestors had been cut away by slavery, which gave the word “Timbuctoo” a greater resonance in their ears than did words like “Manchester” and “New London” in mine. But I could also hear the whites in the region saying the Negroes’ name for their settlement in a derisive and derogatory way.
“Wouldn’t it be better, this first time, for us just to walk over there?” I asked the Old Man. “In a neighborly way, as equals among equals?” I didn’t want to make our first appearance there with Father up on horseback and me driving a wagon. The picture put me out somewhat, made me feel slightly uncomfortable, for it placed us on a height in our first meetings with these people, who, according to Lyman, owned no horses or oxen, had but a few swine and dunghill fowl, and drew their plows themselves or chopped their soil by hand with hoes and spades. Our elevated position might suggest that we regarded ourselves as Mr. Gerrit Smith’s newly hired overseers riding out to examine the number and condition of the plantation darkies.
Father wiped his razor clean and stood and buttoned his waistcoat. Mary, who was again feeling poorly, lay abed where she and Father had slept on the mattress placed next to the stove. The rest of us had slept in the attic above. With just two rooms downstairs, the cabin, though cozy and clean, was crowded as a small boat. “No” Father said. “I can understand your discomfort, but it’s necessary for us to make a proper show for them. They are a downtrodden people, Owen. And we need them to see that Mister Smith has taken them seriously enough to send out a significant sort of man to deal with them.” When you offer your services to men who consider themselves mighty, he explained, it’s good to go modestly and small. An honest man approaches Herod’s tent with dust on his sandals. But when you come to help people who for generations have been made to regard themselves as lowly and undeserving, you come as grandly as you can and with fanfare. The first gift we offer them, he said, will be a sense of their great value as human b
eings. They are not simply the despised ex-property of men, they are the blessed children of God, and until they possess that high a view of themselves, they will not be able to utilize our further gifts. “So wear your coat and hat, son,” he said, with a hint of a smile on his thin lips. “And button your shirt to your throat. Today you must look like the son of an important man. A surveyor. You can wear your plowman’s smock tomorrow.”
Father rode ahead of me, seated like a preacher, erect and reflective-seeming, as if he were not admiring or even conscious of the splendid scenery that surrounded us. He was fully as aware of the landscape as I, however. More so, probably. He no longer surprised me when, after a journey during which I had believed him throughout to have been lost in thought, he gave to Mary or the others who had remained at home a vividly detailed report of everything that we had passed, even including the flowers in the glades, the birds in the trees, and the trees and shrubs, all of which he had carefully noted to himself and had named in passing and had remembered.
“When we have named a thing, we have begun to see it,” he often said. “And in so doing we praise and give continual thanks to our heavenly Father. Thus it is to God’s greater glory that we name the most obscure flower in His field.” He had made a game of it when we were children, testing our abilities to identify by name, not the hawkweed or purple vetch or red milium, which everyone knew and admired, but the tiny heal-all, the spotted knapweed, and the lowly squawroot. Salmon was the best of us. Even as a small boy of seven or eight, he knew the names and uses of hundreds of flowers and plants that the rest of us, including Father, barely noticed. He knew that the burnet weed will stanch a wound, that coltsfoot will cure a cough, and that a sick deer will eat pickerelweed, and he knew where in forest and field to find them all.
Father’s and my arrival at the settlement was not quite the grand occasion that I had expected. But it was more the fault of my high expectations than the somewhat dismal reality I encountered, and my expectations, I felt, were more the fault of Lyman than of Father. Earlier, as our journey into the mountains from Westport had progressed, Lyman had spoken to me with increasing friendliness and sincerity. Then, lying side by side in the stale hay of the Partridge barn, he and I had talked long after the others had fallen to sleep. That was when he told me to call him Lyman, since we were close in age, and I agreed, but with reluctance, for somehow my calling him by his given name seemed, in my eyes, at least, to demean him.
“You’ll have to call me Owen, then,” I told him, and after he had done it several times, it no longer seemed so strange for me not to be addressing him in Father’s way, as Mr. Epps.
He was eager to hear about the famous Negro abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who had visited Father several times in Springfield the previous year. Lyman was mightily impressed that Father was sufficiently connected to Mr. Douglass that the great man had actually visited our home and had even stayed overnight with us. I may have been a little over-impressed with it myself and thus doubtless exaggerated somewhat the firmness of the connection, for Father and Mr. Douglass had not yet formed the close association that would mark their later relations. And that in turn might account for Lyman’s exaggerated report of the Negro settlement in North Elba, in terms both of their number and of their achievements as settlers. He may have been trying to impress the son of a close friend of the famous Frederick Douglass.
There were, he said, close to a hundred Negroes living in North Elba, most of them freedmen, with a small number of fugitives secreted among them, individuals who could not be named. “Could be, Owen, that I myself am running from a slavemaster” he said, “and the next man be the freedman. You can’t know which is which, can’t tell one from the other, freedman or slave, unless I name him for you—and even then, how you going to be sure? So long as you know that one of us is free, then the next man is safe. Leastways up there in the mountains he’s safe, because the slave-catchers, they don’t dare show their faces in Timbuctoo.”
The Negroes were armed, he said, and would kill any man who came sneaking around looking to haul a single one of them, man, woman, or child, back to slavery. I lay there in the darkness next to him, rapt with pleasure, as he described a remnant people settled in the wilderness and living off the land, an industrious people, secure and vigilant, setting lookouts on the peaks, with elaborate signaling systems, rams’ horns and drums, to give the warning whenever a stranger entered their wild domain. I pictured valiant Negroes ambushing their enemies at the mountain passes.
For years, Father had told us stories about the Maroons of Jamaica, whom he so admired—those escaped slaves who had fled into the mountainous interior of their island and who for half a century fought off the mighty British army, until finally the King of England gave up the fight and let them stay in their highland villages, where they raised their families and ruled their territory unimpeded. I saw the Negroes of Timbuctoo as a modern American version of those old Jamaicans, and of the rebellious slaves who had followed Toussaint L’Ouverture into the mountain fastness of Hispaniola, waiting for the moment when they would have the numbers and the occasion to sweep down upon the sugarcane plantations along the coastal plain and strike a death blow against their French owners, freeing themselves from servitude forever. I imagined the Negroes of Timbuctoo to be warriors of that high order.
Lyman told me that they had built their cabins close together all in one place to make them easy to defend, and when they worked their fields, which were often located far from their cabins, they went armed with swords and guns. Even the women and children, he said. I asked who was their general or leader. Was there one among them who functioned as a chieftain, and how had they elected him? I remember peering through a broken window in Mr. Partridge’s loft to the shrubby field behind the barn, where fireflies lit up the spring night like the silent firing of the guns of a hundred scattered, hidden warriors—here, here, here; gone, gone, gone—harassing their huge, clumsy enemy, maddening him with the accumulated pain of many small blows struck by an army of black-skinned warriors made invisible by the darkness.
“No one chief rules us,” Lyman said. “What we do, Owen, is reason together. We sit and talk things out, mostly amongst the men who knows a thing or two. Men such as myself. And then we comes to an agreement together about how we going to do this and that. Course, there’s some folks who gets listened to more closely than the others, there’s some who don’t get no never mind at all, and there’s some who’re in between. Me, I’m one of the in-between fellows. On account of my still being a young man and all. But with me working for Mister Brown now, that could change some. Folks up there thinks highly of Mister Brown,” he said, wistfully, as if he had forgotten that I was the son of Mr. Brown, almost as if he had forgotten for a moment that I was white, which pleased me. More than that, it comforted me.
It never happened that when in the presence of a Negro I did not feel perceived as white and then at once begin to think of myself in those terms also. No matter how used to the presence of Negroes I became—and since my early childhood, Father, whenever possible, had brought all types of Negroes into our household, providing us with daily, respectful proximity to them—a black person made me constantly conscious of my whiteness. I could not forget it. It angered me in a way that left me secretly ashamed. And on those occasions, in a childish way, I sometimes actually wished that Negroes did not exist as if their very presence in our country were pestilential and the disease of race-consciousness were their fault and not ours.
I didn’t know how to inoculate myself against this disease, except to associate strictly with whites, which I could never do and call myself a man. Because of our history together, I didn’t know how to see around or through a black person’s race, and thus I could not see around or through my own. And whenever I became aware of my whiteness, I was ashamed. Not just because of the horrors of slavery, although that surely provided plenty of reason for any white American to feel ashamed of his race,
but because, in the eyes of the God of my father and, most importantly, in the eyes of my father himself, race-consciousness was wrong. Just as wrong as not being able to forget, whenever I found myself in the presence of a woman, that I was a man and not just a fellow human being. It was as if race-consciousness, like sex-consciousness, were some kind of uncontrollable lust that left a white man with no regard for the deep, personal relations of friendship and family.
Pride, lust, envy—these are the certain consequences of race-consciousness, whether you are black or white, just as they are the consequences of thinking constantly of your maleness or femaleness when in the presence of the other sex. It affects you in such a way that you either feel proud of your race or sex, mere accidents of birth, or envy the other’s; proud, you think of the other person as available for your base and sensual use, or else, ashamed, you wish to have the other person make use of you. You do not view yourself or the other person simply as a person. Perhaps only the old New England Puritans or certain of their latter-day descendants, like Father, were properly equipped, morally and intellectually, to recognize and defeat such serpentine failings. I, however, despite Father’s best intentions and teaching, was not so equipped, and as a result, I frequently added a fourth sin to the list-wrath. For on those occasions when I had become enraged by my inability to overcome my weakness, I directed my anger, not at myself, as I should have, but against the person whose race had made me conscious of my own race or the person whose sex had enflamed me. The latter I might defeat by living like an anchorite and withholding myself from the company of women other than those related to me by blood, which, of course, is precisely what I have done. The former, however, I could defeat only by abandoning my pledge to dedicate my life to the destruction of slavery and arranging my life so as to associate only with white people. But waging war against slavery was my sworn duty, as marriage was not, and by the time I had reached my young manhood, thanks to the imprint made upon my mind and spirit by Father, abdication of it was no longer imagineable.
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