Abolition

by Tim Black

  “What is going on, sir?” Mr. Greene asked a man, dressed in a bathrobe and pajamas.

  “Something ain’t right at the armory, looks like,” he replied. “Maybe they are working a night shift,” he added. He shrugged his shoulders, turned around and walked back inside his house.

  Mr. Greene waited until he heard a front door close then said, “Okay, here is our plan. We need to see if Victor is a hostage. If we are stopped, I am escorting you home after a very long late evening church service, understand?”

  “Yes, Mr. Greene,” they said, in stereo.

  He offered each of the girls an arm and they walked three abreast down the street to the gate of the armory. Several prisoners were standing in the courtyard of the compound as John Brown was assigning hostages to different buildings. They spotted Victor among the prisoners.

  “Victor!” Minerva cried out.

  Victor turned his head and saw Minerva, Bette and Mr. Greene. He put his finger to his lips in a cautionary gesture, not wanting to draw attention to himself. The trio watched as Victor was marched off to captivity in the engine-house.

  “He’s being smart, not responding to us,” Mr. Greene said. “Minerva, get a hold of yourself.”

  “I will, Mr. Greene,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She was sorry, but she was worried. You are hopeless, Minerva, she told herself. He turns you to mush! Buck up, Messinger! she chided herself.

  John Brown’s man lowered his rifle to stomach level. “Hold on there,” he said to Mr. Greene. “Where are you going with those two hussies, old man?” he asked.

  Mr. Greene became indignant. “Sir, these ladies are my nieces and we are returning from church. Who in blazes are you?”

  “I am a member of John Brown’s army,” the man with the gun replied. “I apologize for offending you, sir. You and your nieces be on your way home now,” he said, motioning with his rifle to proceed down the street.

  As they continued their walk, Mr. Greene said, “We will go down to the next corner and take a right and double back to the classroom. We need to get a plan together…”

  Minerva’s cry attracted the attention of John Brown, who walked over to the gate, apprised the situation and saw a man with two girls walking along the street.

  Mr. Greene back-stepped into the shadows, fearful that John Brown might remember their meeting in Kansas.

  But John Brown said to his man, “Leave them go, Mr. Anderson, we have nothing to fear from an old man and two young ladies.” Then he turned to the time travelers and said, “Please be on your way. No one will harm you.”

  As they walked away Mr. Greene whispered to Minerva and Bette, “That man was Jeremiah Anderson. He will die by a bayonet thrust in the battle at the engine-house… Okay, we will walk to the end of the street and then we will turn right and double back to the classroom to make our plan to rescue Victor. Nod your heads if you agree.”

  Minerva bobbed her head in agreement, but her mind was on Victor. Hadn’t all the captives of John Brown’s raid survived unharmed? She couldn’t remember. And what if Victor’s capture upset the timeline somehow? The timeline could be so fragile. She remembered how Victor’s off-hand comment about their Philadelphia lodgings to Peggy Shippen had changed the course of history and required the group to return to Philadelphia and relive the day copying Thomas Paine’s landmark book Common Sense with quill and ink. Ugh, what an awful day that was, she remembered. Best to rescue Victor before he changed history again, she thought. He was bound to say something stupid to someone, maybe John Brown. She thought she loved him, but he did say stupid things now and again. But then most boys did, didn’t they?

  To test her theory as they trundled up the hills of Harper’s Ferry, Minerva said to Bette Kromer, “Do all men say stupid things, Bette?”

  “Of course, they do, Messinger. It is in their DNA…the Y chromosome, I think.”

  It was Mr. Greene’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

  They passed the Wager House Hotel on their way back to the portable classroom and Mr. Greene remarked, “I have an idea. Tomorrow morning the hotel is going to provide forty-five meals for John Brown’s men and their captives. You girls are going to volunteer to deliver the food. When you get into the armory, find out what building Victor is in and take the meals to that building and then…”

  “Then what, Mr. Greene?” Bette asked.

  “We have to slip Victor a woman’s outfit that he can slip on when Lee’s men storm the engine-house. That’s where the last group of captives will be. If he is not in the engine-house, he will be released before the assault. Otherwise, he will need a bit of camouflage and I think I have just the outfit that will do the trick.”

  *

  Victor Bridges rolled up his jacket into a ball in the engine-house. There, he took a seat against a wall. Next to Victor was the aged William Williams, the night watchman who patrolled the bridge that spanned the Potomac and who had recently been captured and brought to the armory.

  “Ain’t seen you before,” Williams whispered to Victor. “Where you from?”

  “Ah…Pennsylvania,” Victor lied. “I attend Pennsylvania College in Gettysburg.”

  “Watcha doing here?” Williams asked.

  “Just visiting for the weekend. I wanted to do a little fishing,” Victor said, continuing the lying. “Should have stayed in Gettysburg, I guess, nothing ever happens there,” he added, thinking to himself “yet.”

  “You know they captured me at the bridge and made me a prisoner. I never did nothing to nobody. What are they up to, ya think?”

  “The old man said he wants to free the slaves. He thinks they will rise up and join him. What do you think?”

  “I think he’s a crazy old coot. The coloreds ain’t gonna rise up no time. That’d be death for them and they knows it. The old man’s crazy.”

  Victor thought it best to agree with Mr. Williams. “You might be right,” he replied. He remembered a favorite 19th century word. “He looks addled to me.”

  “Yeah, addled,” Williams agreed. “Wait until the word gets around town. Folks ain’t gonna stand for this nonsense, let me tell ya. Why, there’s Charles Town five miles away.”

  Victor agreed with the man and bobbed his head. He didn’t want to get into a long discussion with William Williams. Knowing what was coming, Victor took the rolled-up jacket and made it into a pillow. He remembered from reading about the raid that not much occurred of any incident from the night of the 16th to the morning of the 17th of October 1859. He decided to get some sleep.

  When he awoke in the morning to the sound of voices, Victor noticed that William Williams had been replaced by another gentleman, a balding man with a thick mustache who Victor thought to be around fifty years old. He seemed to be listening to the Calvinist lay preacher named John Brown who was delivering a sermon on the evils of slavery while gesturing with a beautiful sword, which Victor remembered had once belonged to Frederick the Great and had been given to George Washington and had been passed down to his descendant, Lewis Washington who was, obviously now John Brown’s prisoner.

  “Why did you take me hostage?” the man asked John Brown.

  “It is Captain Brown to you, Colonel Washington. But yours is a good question. I thought you might wind up to be a troublesome customer. I wanted you for the morale effect it would give our cause having one of your name as a prisoner.”

  “You do know, Captain Brown,” Lewis Washington replied in an even voice, “that you will not leave here alive.”

  John Brown smiled serenely, as if, Victor thought, he knew that he was doomed and accepted his fate, like a good Calvinist who believed in predestination. “A good friend of mine said that I was ‘going into a perfect steel-trap, and that once I was in I would never get out alive.’”

  “Who said that?” Washington asked.

  Brown shook his finger. “You shall not learn the names of my friends, Colonel Washington,” John Brown replied. “My friend advised against my adventure and would not join me
in its exercise.”

  Victor knew who warned John Brown about the raid being a steel-trap: Frederick Douglass. John Brown would never disclose Frederick Douglass or the “Secret Six” who financed the Harper’s Ferry raid. He would go to his death without giving anyone up. Demon or saint, John Brown had courage and loyalty.

  “So,” Washington said, “you are not afraid to die then?”

  “We are going to die, Colonel Washington. If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I submit; so, let it be done!”

  And as he finished that statement, John Brown walked away to resume the command of his group of men. Colonel Washington looked up to see one of his slaves carrying a long metal pike. These were the weapons that were to be handed out to liberated slaves, Victor knew. “Jim, what are you doing?”

  The large black man replied. “Massa Lewis, Jim is gonna fight for his freedom. Nothing against you personal, Massa Lewis, but Jim wants to be free.”

  How odd, Victor thought, that Jim referred to himself in the third person. But then so did Julius Caesar, and Caesar enjoyed a good scrap, too. Victor watched as two black men cut portholes into the wooden slats that opened as windows. The portholes were for rifles, Victor realized. The engine-house was the site of John Brown’s last stand and would be later referred to as John Brown’s Fort.

  A black man with melancholy eyes who Victor thought resembled the bearded and mustached photograph he had seen of Dangerfield Newby, handed a message to John Brown. “Kagi and Stevens says we must leave now, Captain Brown or else be trapped.”

  “We must stay here until the bees begin to swarm,” John Brown said, as a metaphor for a slave uprising. But Victor heard a timorous doubt in John Brown’s voice, as if the old man was trying to kid himself that the slaves were rising, in response to his call. They weren’t, and John Brown knew it. His face registered resignation. He had been wrong in his assessment; the slaves would not rise. The truth hung over John Brown’s head like the Sword of Damocles. John Brown’s position of power would diminish over the following hours. Yet, he still had time to leave, to gather arms, take the slaves that he had freed and be in the Blue Ridge Mountains within a few hours. Meanwhile a physician named John Starry, after looking after the first fatality of the raid, a black man named Shepard Hayward, rode off into the countryside alarming the public of the attack. He rode straight to Charles Town to alert the militia. But Victor sensed there was still time for Brown to skedaddle across the Potomac River bridge into Maryland.

  But instead, John Brown sealed his and his men’s fate by telling the messenger, “Dangerfield tell Mr. Stevens of my decision and then go to the Potomac River bridge and tell my son Owen and the others.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Newby replied.

  At that moment the armory front door opened, and more hostages arrived, armory workers who had shown up for the day. Outside, Victor could tell the day was damp and gloomy.

  John Brown addressed the new hostages.

  “My object is not to make war against the people, and you will not be injured if you remain quiet. My object is to place the United States’ arms in the hands of black men. I propose to free all the slaves in this vicinity. We need to get some food for these people. Send a messenger.”

  Victor watched the eyebrows on a few of the workers rise in disbelief. He thought of the black man Dangerfield Newby whom he realized only had an hour or so to live. Newby had joined John Brown’s group in the hopes of liberating his wife from slavery. That was his motive for getting involved with old Osawatomie. Rescuing his wife. But Dangerfield Newby was fated to be shot and killed, his body mutilated as it lay in the streets of Harper’s Ferry as a feast for hogs, after one resident of the town cut off Newby’s ears and genitals for souvenirs. Victor shook the horrid images from his mind. Others of John Brown’s men would have their dead bodies used for target practice by members of the local militia. What was that saying that Victor learned in Sunday school. Didn’t Jesus say that “all who live by the sword, die by the sword”? He looked at John Brown brandishing the sword of Frederick the Great. How apt Christ’s words were, Victor thought. John Brown was a doomed man, as was his movement to free the slaves was a doomed adventure.

  *

  Minerva had no idea what her teacher was talking about, but she followed along with Mr. Greene as he led the group to the classroom.

  Once there, he retreated to his closet and retrieved a large black dress. He explained to the girls. “This is the dress I wear on Carrie Nation Day. I just started that last year. She was the temperance crusader who wielded a hatchet, opening kegs of whiskey and shattering bars. She was six feet tall and looked more like a linebacker than a lady,” Mr. Greene went on. “Minerva, I want you to roll this dress up and place it beneath your dress. I have some string in my desk, and Bette, I want you to fasten the dress around Minerva’s middle. Go to the closet and do this please,” the teacher said. He went to his desk and retrieved a ball of twine and a pair of scissors and gave them to Bette Kromer before the girls retreated to the closet.

  When the two girls emerged from the closet, Minerva Messinger sported a large baby bump, and to the casual observer appeared to be several months pregnant, which was an impossibility for Minerva Messinger as she was chaste.

  Minerva blushed when she reappeared outside the closet. Bette Kromer could not hold back a wisecrack at the expense of her BFF. “Looks like the angel Gabriel paid Miss Messinger a visit, Mr. Greene,” she teased.

  Minerva frowned at Bette. “Do you want to be the pregnant one, Bette?” she asked. “That can be arranged.”

  “Okay, girls, let’s not fight. Buckle up. We are going ahead to the morning of the 17th. We are going to have breakfast at the Wager House Hotel and will be there when they receive the demand for food from John Brown. You will volunteer to deliver it, so the waitresses can wait on their regular customers. Got it?”

  “Got it!” Bette replied.

  The portable passed the hours until dawn quickly and the first rays of sunshine for the morning came through the window. “Let’s go!” Mr. Greene said. “Operation Rescue Victor now commences.”

  They descended the streets of Harper’s Ferry and walked into the dining room of the Wager House Hotel. They took seats at a table with a checkered tablecloth, and the sole waitress for the hotel came over and took their order.

  They hadn’t been there but five minutes when a man burst into the dining room and shouted, “Invaders took over the armory! They took many men hostage. They are demanding forty-five meals to be delivered to the armory! Within the hour or else!”

  The commotion in the dining room drew the attention of the cook, who came out from the kitchen and talked to the messenger.

  “Can you make forty-five meals quick?” the messenger asked the cook. “Lives depend on it,” he added, dramatically.

  “Well, I have a mess of biscuits and gravy, I guess,” the cook said. “Who is going to deliver the stuff. I only have Florence working this morning,” he said, nodding to the waitress.

  “We’ll help!” Bette Kromer shouted. “We can deliver the food.”

  “That would be a great help,” the cook said. “I can use your help, Miss,” he said.

  Minerva stood up. “My sister will help, too,” Bette said, referring to Minerva.

  “What about her condition?” the cook asked, nodding to an obviously pregnant young woman.

  “I’m not due for two months,” Minerva lied, thinking of Victor’s predicament. Time traveling required a good deal of mendacity, Minerva realized. Better a little lie here or there than a change in the time stream.

  The cook retreated into the kitchen and after a few minutes returned with a bucket of gravy and a burlap potato sack filled with fresh hot biscuits. He handed Minerva the bucket and a la
dle and gave Bette a stack of tin plates on which to pour the gravy. Mr. Greene stood up and took the biscuits in tow, until Florence, the waitress, took them from the teacher. “This is woman’s work,” she commented. “Let’s go girls,” she said and led the time travelers out of the hotel and down the street to the armory.

  Florence, carrying the potato sack of fresh biscuits, led the way, and Bette and Minerva fell back a bit so they could discuss their plans.

  “We have to get to the engine-house, first, Minerva, find Victor, and get him out of the building somehow so you can give him Carrie’s dress.”

  “Yes.” Minerva agreed. “But how?”

  “Get him to go to the privy,” Bette suggested.

  “Good idea,” Minerva agreed.

  Bette nodded to Minerva’s belly bump. “What are you going to name it?” she teased. “Victor Junior?”

  Minerva smiled. “I think I should call it Carrie, don’t you?”

  Florence turned around. “Hey, let’s not dawdle, girls. I gotta get back to my regular job. I can’t fiddle around, you hear?” She gave a quick glance to Minerva, saw no ring on her left hand, and realized Minerva was unmarried. She remembered her own unwed state and her father’s shotgun that encouraged her reluctant husband to do the right thing. She felt sympathy for this new girl.

  Jeremiah Anderson was at the gate, but he didn’t seem to remember Minerva and Bette from the night before, for which Minerva was thankful.

  “Let’s go the engine-house first,” Bette suggested.

  “One’s as good as another,” Florence replied. She turned to Anderson and said, “Do you have prisoners in all the buildings?”

  “No, just the armory and the engine-house,” he said, as he put his hand into Florence’s potato sack and withdrew a biscuit. He made short work of it.

  Florence shrugged, and the three women took the food and the plates to the engine-house.