“What farm?”
“The Kennedy Farm, where we’ll be getting ready for the raid.”
The time came to go. Brown asked Douglass to join him. “Come with me, Douglass. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.” I took that as a rare acknowledgment that Brown wouldn’t know how to work with colored people.
Douglass turned him down. He said he had to be leaving, and that he’d best leave now. He had tears in his eyes. I wanted to leave with him. I wanted terribly to join him. But I could find no way to abandon Brown’s mission honorably, so I held my tongue.
Douglass told Shields Green to make his choice. Green looked at Brown and said, quietly: “I believe I’ll go with the old man.” So Green joined us on the forty-mile trip south to the Kennedy Farm — a beaten-up two-story building within walking distance of Harpers Ferry. It would hold twenty-two men and a few women for the better part of eight weeks.
I wondered every hour what I was doing there. By the end of our stay, there were more than twenty men confined to the upper level of the dilapidated farmhouse. We couldn’t get out during the day, for fear of being noticed by the neighbors. John Brown didn’t want us to go out at night, either, but we ignored him. He couldn’t hold twenty men in an attic all day and then keep them from blowing off steam at night.
We drilled and had military lectures during the day. We heard from John Brown about great revolts in history. Moses and the Jews. Hannibal in the Alps. The people of Haiti rising up against slavery. Nat Turner’s revolt.
We learned how to strip and load our Sharps rifles. We held shooting practice when the neighboring farmers were away in town. We practiced jabbing pikes into trees. We ran on the spot and did stretching to stay limber. We ate upstairs and slept upstairs. “Holy John,” as I dubbed him, frowned upon us going outside, and during the day we were allowed out only to use the outhouse. The men complained often. Damp sleeping quarters. Bland food. Boredom. No room to move about. The sense of being imprisoned. The absence of women. The lack of concrete details about John Brown’s plans.
One of the first critics at the Kennedy Farm was Brown’s son, Oliver. “I have a wife, and we want a family, and I want to know what we’re getting into if I am to place my life on the line.”
John Brown raised his hand. “Prepare yourself for war against slavery. What else need you know? You are either against human bondage, or you are not. The rest is idle chatter.”
“My wife and future are not idle chatter,” Oliver said.
“We need women around this place,” said John Kagi, Brown’s most trusted aide.
“All right,” Brown said. He brought in his daughters, Annie and Diana, as well as Oliver’s wife, Martha, to do cooking and housekeeping.
I could tell that Diana would bring me trouble if I dared look at her more than once. When I came near, she laughed too loudly, gesticulated too strongly, and spoke too enthusiastically to the other women. She was short and slender and looked deep into my face the first time I cast my eyes her way.
On the other hand, her sister, Annie, was the sorriest-looking woman I have ever laid eyes upon. Slim, of medium height, with long brown hair usually kept in a bun, and of the same calm gray eyes as her father. Sadness sprang from her like a smell. She kept her eyes lowered. I never heard her laugh. Annie was totally devoted to the cause, cooking, cleaning, lifting, sifting, and always on the look-out for strangers approaching the farmhouse.
Martha was a lovely woman, and Oliver was hopelessly in love with her. They held hands whenever John Brown wasn’t looking. In the evening, they would escape into the darkness for hours at a time.
They sat with me under the stars one night, shortly after Martha had arrived. John Brown was on one of his many errands to Chambersburg, lining up the transport of rifles and pikes, so we felt free to talk.
“Langston,” Martha said, “you’re a man of experience. You have escaped bondage, we heard, and lived in Canada. You read and write well. So tell us. Is this an act of complete futility?” Martha held her husband’s hand with both of hers.
“John Brown would say that no blow against slavery is futile,” I said.
“Yes,” Oliver said, “but what would you say?”
“I would say that I’d have to know exactly what your father has up his sleeve before I can judge its futility. You must make your own judgment. But don’t throw your life away on a whim.”
Oliver kissed his wife. She kissed him back. I cleared my throat and stood. “I think I’ll move along now.”
They laughed, and stood, and wandered off into the woods. I wiped my eyes. If I had been able to love like that, I would never have left Oakville.
I walked out under the stars. Someone stepped out from behind a tree.
“Langston. It’s me, Diana. I’m so miserable. Walk with me.”
I was conscious of my heart thumping against my ribs as we took the lane and then walked out onto the road. It was pitch-black except for the burning stars, but I knew my way, having been out here every night for two weeks.
“There’s a hole up ahead. Come to the side,” I said. She slipped her arm through mine.
“I’m frightened,” she said. I stopped and turned to go back. “No, not of the night. I’m frightened of my father. And what he will do to you. To all of you. He has no love. He has no compassion. He’ll think only of justice justice justice to the end — and that will be to the very end of your lives.”
“I’m glad you’re so sure of our victory,” I said.
She giggled. “I’ve never held the arm of a black man before,” she said. “You feel nice.”
I shook my arm loose. “Let’s go back.”
“No. No. No. Walk with me a little, Langston. I’ve been watching you. You’re older than the others. Wiser. You’ve been around. Have you been with many women?” I tried to keep myself a full stride away from the woman, but she kept sidling up closer and touching my elbow.
“You’ve been around Annie and my father too long. They’re so … austere.”
“You’re older than Annie.”
“Yes, considerably. I’m twenty-six.”
“Have you not been married?”
“Yes, I was. But my husband left me. He filed for divorce, and it was granted.”
“I see,” I said. We were still walking away from the farm. We walked a quarter mile before Diana spoke again.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why?”
“No.”
“It’s because I’m barren. He left me for that. I can’t bear children. So now I am to wait out the rest of my life, serving father. I won’t do it. I’d rather die here with all of you.”
“Why are you telling me all of this? What do you expect me to do? Do you realize what kind of position you’re putting me in?”
“What? Because I’m a white woman, and you are a Negro? I wonder how my father, the Negro liberator, would take that, seeing his daughter arm in arm with a Negro man.”
“He’d say, at the very least, that we were endangering the success of his project by walking out so far on the road. Shall we turn back?”
“No.” She removed her arm and turned to face me. “I want to be loved. I haven’t been loved for so long a time, and I live in a loveless house, and I have a loveless father and loveless sisters and I just want a little loving while loving is still possible. Love me, Langston. Love me now. Love me tonight.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m sorry. Let’s go back.” I started walking back, so Diana was obliged to follow.
“You won’t tell on me? You won’t say anything?” “Of course not.” “Are you married?”
“I was.”
“Not any more?”
I said nothing.
“Do you have children?”
I continued walking back.
“You do,” she said. “How many?”
“Three.”
“It must be so difficult to think that you may never see them a
gain.”
“It wasn’t so bad until you started talking about it.” “Boys?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?” “Yes.”
“I bet you named one of them Langston.”
“All of them.”
“All of them!” She cried out in the night. She laughed like a fool. I had to put my hand around her mouth to make her be quiet. I felt her hot breath on my hand. I stiffened in an instant. I stepped back and turned away.
“You named all of your boys Langston?” she whispered. “What is it, with men? They all want boys named after them.”
We were almost back. I told her I was going in. She grabbed my head and whispered in my ear. I got hard again. I went straight in. She let me go, and followed me inside several minutes later.
The next day, I caught her looking at me in the kitchen, while the men ate. I saw her bite into an apple. I watched her nibble all around the core. She had flashing blue eyes, and more meat on her hips than her sister, Annie. She brushed against me as she gathered the plates from the table, and splashed half a cup of water on my arm. Made it look like an accident. “Sorry,” she said, and kept moving. I got hard again.
I didn’t meet her the next night. Instead, I set out quickly to explore the area. I wanted to know where the roads led, and if there were paths that followed them, and if there were good hiding spots. If John Brown was going to play with my life, I wanted a few escape routes. For three nights, I walked for many hours, and as quickly as I could. I walked all the way to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bridge across the river from Harpers Ferry, and then wound back up through the hills of Maryland, looking at all times for places to hide and places to walk.
The following night, I headed north from the Kennedy Farm. Two miles north, under the light of the moon, I saw a barn several hundred paces off the road. I went to inspect it, and found that it had been abandoned. It was nothing but a shell. It did not look solid. There was no trace of recent activity.
I took Diana to the barn a week after she first approached me. She nibbled all along my face. She put her hands in warm places. She cried out, when we joined, and I smothered her mouth with mine. We joined and rejoined for half the night. And for a number of nights to follow. We stocked the place with provisions. Bits of food stolen from the kitchen. A blanket that nobody was using. Candles, and matches. Diana Brown loved her mouth, and loved to use it, for talking and loving. It was the most expressive, curious, exploring, and laughing mouth that I had ever encountered, and I wanted to survive John Brown’s raid, if only to enjoy that mouth one more time.
It was two miles to the barn, and two miles back, and Diana whispered at me the whole time we walked. The only time she didn’t whisper was when she was gasping with me in the barn. Tell me about this rat business, she would say. Tell me about Canada. Tell me about the women you’ve known. Tell me about your mother. Tell me about escaping from slavery. Tell me how you met my father. We rode each other like animals in the dark. And the more we made love, the less I felt prepared to die.
In the first days of October, we nearly had a rebellion at the Kennedy Farm. It started with a fistfight between Albert Hastings and Aaron Stevens. But it escalated into complaints about what we were doing there, and how they didn’t like being pawns, and how John Brown had better spell out his plan or he was going to be losing some men right away.
John Brown sat down among us and began with a prayer. We don’t want no more prayers, Captain, Dangerfield Newby told him. We want answers. Brown finished the prayer and raised his head and unveiled, finally, his plans.
The men were shocked. Raiding Harpers Ferry? Attacking the federal armory and arsenal? And then what? How would the raiders escape, after that attack?
Brown said that when we stormed the town, slave owners would be too cowardly to fight back. Slaves would flock to Harpers Ferry, and the raiders would supply them with pikes, and the swollen band would move through Harpers Ferry and into the hills of Virginia, where guerrilla bases would be established for further attacks. The raid on Harpers Ferry would attract such attention that more slaves would abandon their owners and join the raiders. The event would catalyze revolts throughout the South. The institution would be crushed.
“What are we going to eat?” I asked.
“Cane, you are too flippant for my liking,” Brown said. “Have you not a serious bone in your body?”
“Eating isn’t serious?” I said. The men all laughed, except Brown, who stroked his beard and stared at me. “You’re going to be heading over the Shenandoah and into the hills of Virginia. You’re going to have us, and a flock of runaway slaves, you say. So I say, what are we going to eat in those hills? Where are we going to sleep?”
Brown accused me of ridiculing a serious plan. He said provisions would be brought along in a wagon by his son Owen, once the raiders had established control of Harpers Ferry and the bridges leading in and out of town.
We talked for several hours. Several men said that Brown had misled them. He had led them to believe that they’d be freeing slaves — not storming a U.S. weapons manufacturing site. Brown countered that he hadn’t been able to unveil his plans until they’d been perfected. And that he hadn’t wanted to run the risk of information leaking out and destroying the entire project.
“We’ll all die in there,” Dangerfield Newby said. “You’re sending us in there to die.”
“We must not think of ourselves,” Brown said. “We must think of the slaves. Who will speak for them, if we don’t?”
“I don’t mind dying if my death is a decent blow against slavery,” Shields Green said. “I don’t mind dying at all, as long as I get to take some of dem slave owners down with me. Maybe we will finish the job, or maybe we won’t. But we can start it. And if we don’t start it, who will? I say, let’s take down Harpers Ferry and shout it to the whole world.”
Brown offered his resignation, but who else had all the information? Who else had contacts with military suppliers and financiers? Who else had spent ten years establishing a network of support for this big moment? The men agreed uneasily to Brown’s plan.
That night, Diana and I stocked the barn with bread, cheese, apples, and dried strips of meat. We also left extra clothes there, and blankets. John Brown was about to send the women away. Diana let me know that she had no intention of returning to her father’s home. Not for now. We agreed that on the day of our attack on Harpers Ferry, Diana would split from the other women and hide in the barn with a horse and carriage. She would wait for twenty-four hours to see if I returned.
It was raining and cloudy on the night of October 16. We set out at eight in the evening, the men heading south and the women heading north. Martha Brown had to be torn from the arms of her husband, Oliver. She wailed, but he remained silent. His arms dropped. He started to cry. “I love you, Martha. I’ll love you forever.” She wailed again. Annie and Diana pulled her away.
Brown rode on a horse-drawn wagon, and eighteen of us men walked with him in silence. We walked for two and a half hours in the drizzle. There was no moon. Our rifles were hidden under capes. Owen Brown and two others remained behind with the supplies. They were to move into Harpers Ferry after we’d taken control.
The plan unfolded masterfully during the first hours. There were moments when I doubted my criticism of Brown. There were moments when I thought, This man is a genius. He’s going to pull it off. He’s going to bring down Harpers Ferry and get the hell out of here and people will be so impressed that they will flock to him. Crossing over the Potomac on the Baltimore and Ohio Railway bridge, we took a night watchman prisoner without a struggle. Exiting the bridge, we found the armory to our right, and the arsenal to our left. First, we took control of the armory with barely a struggle. We took the night guard prisoner, too. Brown directed Hastings and me to take control of the arsenal. That proved easy enough — there was nobody guarding it. A few twists with the crowbar broke the lock, and we were safely inside the weapons storage area.
Brown dispatched other men to take control of the rifle works, which was a few minutes away on the Shenandoah River, and another two men to take control of the Shenandoah bridge, which we were supposed to cross later in our flight south into the hills of Virginia. A final group of men headed off into Jefferson County to take some plantation owners prisoner, and to free their slaves and bring them along for support.
After guarding the arsenal without incident for an hour, Hastings and I were replaced and sent to guard the Harpers Ferry end of the Baltimore and Ohio bridge. We stood there for an hour. Nothing happened. What was John Brown up to? Why was he spending so much time in the armory? A man approached us from the darkness.
“Halt,” Hastings said. “You are our prisoner — “
The man turned and started running back. Hastings fired at him. The man fell forward, face down, arms splayed. Hastings reloaded. “I’ll cover you,” he said. “Go on out there and disarm him and finish him off if you need to.”
I walked out toward the man. He was only thirty yards away. Drawing near, I heard him rasping and moaning. “Oh Jesus. Oh Lord. What have they done to me?”
“Throw me your gun, or I’ll have to shoot you,” I said.
“I don’t have a gun. And you already shot me.”
I walked to within arm’s reach of the man. He was black. We had just shot a black man. I took the final step and kneeled by his face.
“You,” he said to me. “You shot me? You, a colored man?” “I didn’t shoot you. Another man did.”
“Why?”
“We’re here to free the slaves.”
“There’s no slaves in town, damn it. The slaves are in the country. I’m no slave. I’m a free man. Why’d you shoot me?”
“I didn’t shoot you.”
“One of your men shot me in the back.”
I drew a flask from my pocket. I wasn’t expecting to need it so soon in the night. “What’s your name?”
“Hayward Shepherd.”
“What were you doing out here?”
“Just looking around. I’m the baggage man at the station.” “Have a sip of whiskey.”
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