by Terry Bisson
Deihl was in a hurry to get back to Charles Town, but he was a man of steady habits and so we had to stop at the Shenandoah Tavern, as usual. I stayed with the wagon. I usually took the chance when Deihl was in the tavern to poke around Harper’s Ferry, but this day I felt I should stay with the tack; I have noticed in my sixty some odd years that in times of civil unrest even the most timid acquire a sudden ability to steal. Sees Her was still prancy and whickery, smelling abolition or blood or smoke, or whatever it was that agitated him. The steep and usually sleepy streets of Harper’s Ferry were filled, and everybody seemed confused. Stranded train passengers were wandering around with slaves dragging their luggage behind them. I got off the wagon once, just to stretch, and a man with a Carolina accent tried to hand me his carpetbag to carry; after that I stayed glued to the wagon seat. Those Deep South types thought every black face belonged to them. Sitting alone in the wagon, I was the only African in sight that wasn’t hauling some white person’s luggage around and I felt several curious looks, as though I were to blame for all the smoke and ashes (I hadn’t yet seen any blood); perhaps it was my imagination, perhaps not. At first I shrank; then I sat up straight, experiencing fully for the first time that mingled sense of pride and terror that makes war such a favorite of men.
I saw an Irish boy I knew and hailed him, but he ran; I saw another boy I hardly knew and didn’t like, and he stopped; he was black like me. This was my second lesson about war. It trues up the lines. The boy stopped at the wagon and in a conspiratorial whisper told me that two hundred “abs” had tried to burn the town and had shot the mayor dead. He sounded simultaneously shocked, scared, and boastful. Four of the raiders were buried in a common grave down on the river, he said; he’d tried to go down and see the bodies, but the soldiers were “thicker than flies.” They weren’t really soldiers anyhow, just Virginias, he said, with leftover Hall’s pattern muskets from the Mexican War. The “abs” all had Kansas buffalo guns that would blow a man in half. Deihl came out and we headed home for Charles Town, six miles across the Valley. As usual when he had been at the tavern, Deihl was more talkative, which meant that he said about four words a mile. But I learned from him that rumors were flying: the “niggers” had all run away; the “niggers” had all joined Brown; the “niggers” were coming down from the mountain as soon as dark fell, with spears as tall as church steeples. In fact, later that week a wagonload of spears was found abandoned. Brown, or some of his backers, had obviously figured the slaves wouldn’t know how to use rifles. Aaron Stevens, a military man and one of Brown’s commanders (after Kagi and Green), and I met again thirty years later, in Ireland, in ‘89, when I was chief surgeon at the Medical Center in Dublin. Stevens was dying of cancer, for which there was then no cure. He yearned to talk of old times, as dying soldiers do. He told me, laughing, that it had taken the average black slave who joined them “a full thirty seconds” to become deadly with the Sharps. The fact was, hardly any slaves joined Brown at first anyway. Mostly we n’Africans were waiting to see, waiting to see. Even the few who had joined him in the excitement of the raid (he had passed out rifles, not spears) had stayed behind rather than follow across the river and up the mountain, perhaps mistaking his retreat for a defeat. Some pretended to have been kidnapped and told fantastic tales: which is probably the origin of the story that Lewis Washington, George Washington’s grandson, had been shot by Brown while quoting Patrick Henry. I knew the man, for Deihl had sold him a team of mules, which he abused so scandalously that I had to go fetch them back. He was no Patrick Henry quoter. The fact was, I found out later, Washington was killed by a stray bullet from the militia, and Brown never intended to kill him at all, which was a sore point between Brown and his soldiers, who wanted no hostages. As to the story about the spears, maybe Deihl believed it, or maybe it was Kate: anyway, we got to Charles Town in record time, long before darkness fell.
The Harper’s Ferry Museum was filled with dead things. Rifles that hadn’t been fired in a hundred years and would never be fired again; wool coats with bullet holes in them, one with blood splashed all over the collar. Swords, spears, pistols, knives. Harriet was sick of history. First a famous father, now a famous great-grandfather. Great-great. There was no room for real life. Her famous father crowded out the real father she loved remembering. Her mother spent her life digging up bones.
Scuffling along in her ploddy new shoes, she followed her mother through the dim, almost deserted museum, trying to keep her eyes from alighting on any of the exhibits, resisting their power with her own.
The Second International Mars Expedition was just making sub-Deimos orbital insertion as Yasmin entered the museum director’s office, according to the vid on the wall behind his desk. Grissom stood up and punched it off, coming around the corner of his desk to meet his guest. Yasmin had heard that he was in the war, but she hadn’t known he was missing a leg. She could see that standing up was his way of letting people know it, so they wouldn’t be caught off guard. A one-legged man was a shock, almost as old-fashioned as the artifacts out in the museum.
He scanned down the vid—also considerately, she suspected: guessing, correctly, that it might be painful to her.
Still, she was glad to know that the boys and girls were safely through the Door, as Leon had called it: the Deimos Door. He was always very romantic about anything having to do with Mars.
“Scott Grissom.”
“I’m Dr. Abraham’s great-granddaughter, Yasmin. And this is his great-great . . .“
But somehow, Harriet was not behind her. She had gone off somewhere. Well, let her explore. Or sulk. Or whatever. Kids loved old guns.
Yasmin knew Grissom had fought in 1948, in the Second Revolutionary War, so she’d had him figured for a man about her own age. She was surprised to see he was twenty years older, in his late fifties at least. She was also a little surprised that he was white, since even after a hundred years, even after a war and a revolution and almost ten years of building socialism, most of the Mericans who admired Brown and Tubman were black, like her mother-in-law.
Yasmin handed Grissom the doctor’s bag, and Grissom turned it over as if he were trying to find the spot where he could see through it. He looked at Yasmin and she nodded and he opened it. He grinned at the rich smell of old pills, and Yasmin decided she liked him. He took out the crinkly typed papers and hefted them, smacked them, turned them over, sniffed them like a scholar or a hound dog.
“So,” he said, “the ancient family destiny fulfilled.”
Yasmin nodded. “They’re yours now. I’m leaving the bag with them. I think that’s what he would have wanted.”
“Thanks,” Grissom said. “On behalf of the Revolutionary Park Service—and personally. I feel like I know the old man after reading the fax you sent. He was a particular old soul, wasn’t he? He expected his papers to be opened and read right here, last Fourth of July, exactly one-hundred years after the raid, to the day.” He regretted saying this as soon as he saw her face cloud over.
“He expected me to be a great-grandson, too, you might have noticed, if you read them.” It irritated Yasmin that this man, like her dead ancestor, like so many men in her life, didn’t realize that she had other things to do than participate in their ceremonies. “As I explained in my letter, I was delayed in Africa and couldn’t . . . ”
“Oh, I didn’t mean . . . I know you’ve been at Olduvai. After I got your letter I read the article in Scientific African about the dig. What did you call it? ‘Million-year-old dirty dishes.’”
Yasmin rewarded him with a thin smile. “A woman’s lot.”
“All I meant was, better late than never.” Again. One foot and he couldn’t keep it out of his mouth. “Anyway, I do hope you both can stay a few days. I’ve arranged a room at the Shenandoah if you’ll be the guest of the museum.”
“Oh, I’m afraid not,” Yasmin said. “I’m due in Staunton tomorrow, and Nova Africa Friday.”
“But Mother, you said we were going to s
tay a night,” Harriet protested from the doorway. “Please?”
What was this, forgiveness?
“This must be the old man’s great-great you were telling me about,” Grissom said. He saw a tall young woman with a broad moon face—like her father—in the doorway, keeping her back to the old Sharps and Hall’s rifles and the coats with bullet holes in them. Like most teenagers, she seemed to regard museums as assaults on the very principles of youth.
Grissom got up and took her hand. “And how did you like Africa?”
“I didn’t go. I’ve been in Virginia all summer with my grandmother.”
“We really don’t have the time to stay,” Yasmin said. “I’m due in Staunton tomorrow, and Nova Africa Friday.”
“You stay in hotels all the time,” Harriet complained. “I never get to stay in a hotel. With a six-track I’ll bet.”
“In every room,” Grissom said. “Oh, are those living shoes?”
“They’re new,” Yasmin said. She noticed they had changed a little. The left one was darker today and went farther up Harriet’s ankle. “I mean, just developed.”
“I know, I read about them. A new substance, grown only in zero-gravity tanks on Kilimanjaro. The first creation of a new life mode in space.”
“Really?” Harriet said, almost smiling. “They feel okay.”
“They get prettier, too,” Yasmin said. She decided she liked Grissom after all. But when she’d been told the shoes were from Kilimanjaro, she’d thought people meant the mountain, not the orbital station.
“Please stay at least a night or two,” Grissom said. “I was hoping to show you around the area. You’re part of our history here, you know, through your great-grandfather. Plus, I have someone I want you to meet. Remember the letters that I wrote you about in Africa?”
Letters? Yasmin tried to remember: something about a doctor.
“What letters?” Harriet asked.
“Old, old letters,” Grissom said. He fumbled through the junk on his desk and pulled out a pile of yellowed papers, handwritten, tied with pink ribbon. He handed them directly to Harriet. “A hundred years old. They’re from the abolitionist doctor who taught your great-great-grandfather medicine.”
July 7, 1859
Miss Emily Pern 11
Commerce St.
New York
Dear Miss Pern:
Everyone here in Philadelphia is talking of the Events at Harper’s Ferry. I don’t mind telling you it has set the Cause back a hundred years. I suspect you and I will disagree on that, but so be it; we can discuss it when I am next in New York, which, God willing and exams be done, will be next month early. I don’t think violence will do anything but enrage the Southerners, and I speak knowingly, being for better or worse, one of them. Not that I am enraged, just worried.
What if Brown’s attack had failed? Such an undertaking, unfortunate as its effects are now, would have been Disastrous had the abolitionists fallen into the hands of Virginia. Imagine, abolitionists hanged for Treason! I fear it will happen yet; they are for now high in the Blue Ridge, but in the long run they are doomed.
No slaves joined them and none will. Violence will never free the slave, not only because he is so outnumbered, but because violence is foreign to his nature. I hasten to add: whatsoever my Reason tells me, my Heart is with those who oppose slavery, however I may abhor their methods. Let me tell you a story in strictest confidence. Amazingly, I had, it seems, foreknowledge of Brown’s raid. In June my father had a stroke, which he survived, but in a weakened state. I was called home to Staunton for a week and returned north with my uncle, Reuben Hunter, the Attorney, of Baltimore, my father’s younger brother. Uncle Reuben is forty, between my father and myself in age. Far from resenting the fact that Mint Springs was entailed to my father (and thus to me), he is quite solicitous of the Hunter family honor, and even goes beyond, affecting all the airs of a planter: and even presumes to instruct me in how a Virginia gentleman should act. Needless to say, I never discuss with him my sentiments toward abolition. In short, we’re not close, but blood is thicker than water, and I agreed to ride with him from Winchester, where he had bought two horses, to Baltimore, and proceed by train from there back to school in Philadelphia. It was on this journey, some five miles north of Harper’s Ferry, that we saw a young woman hanging wash outside a little dogtrot house on the mountainside on the Boonesborough Pike. Uncle Reuben pranced his new horse Caesar (which was quite skitterish) across the lawn to ask for water. We didn’t need water, of course, we’d just forded Sassafrass Creek a half mile back, but Uncle Reuben, though married, loves to play the bachelor, at least when his wife’s not around, and show off his traps and manners, sweeping his hat off his head like a Tidewater planter. I stayed on the road since I find these mannerisms ignorant and degrading, not only to the women who must endure them, but to his family and to himself. Of course, since he is my uncle, and I not his, I cannot protest. I happened to hear a clatter from upstairs in the house and looked up and saw—I suppose it doesn’t hurt to tell it now, and to a true abolitionist such as yourself—a negro in the window holding not just a rifle but what I recognized as a new pattern Sharps. Alarmed, I looked out for Uncle Reuben, who was getting a frosty welcome from the woman (whose accent was unexpectedly Northern). Not to be deterred, he was about to dismount, when the door slams and out of the house rushes an old colored mammy, a hanky on her head, her aprons flying, clucking like a hen, swinging a tow sack—Lawdy, Massa! she started yelling that he was trampling her—yarbs ‘n’ narstrums—and boldly grabbing Caesar’s bit, she led the horse back out to the road while its rider looked back helplessly, longingly, and fetchingly, I suppose he imagined, toward the lady. I have known Uncle Reuben to whip slaves like an Irishman, but he was too much playing the gallant to even speak harshly to the old Mammy in front of her lady (plus, he could not trust his horse). By the time I looked back up at the window, the negro with the Sharps had gone. I was careful never to say a word of this to anyone, for I figured we’d stumbled across a Way Station (for fugitive slaves) and that was that, though a Way Station with armed Negroes seemed a sinister thing. Little did I know that what was being planned was a bloody raid in which the innocent would die. Did you know that the first to be murdered at Harper’s Ferry was a free colored man, not a slave but a Citizen of the town? The whole country knows this Osawatomie Brown from Kansas, where he gave abolition a dark name killing five men cold-bloodedly in the Swamp of the Swan, with a sword. All the same, I’m glad to see a blow struck against slavery. To be fair I must admit that many here in abolitionist circles admire Brown, more than will announce or own it. Caesar turned even more skitterish and went lame later that day, and Uncle Reuben swore the old Mammy’d hexed him. We had to sell the horse for half his price and then buy another at twice, for Uncle Reuben’s pride will not allow him to seat a plain mount. Some say Brown made the raid to steal guns for Kansas, where he plans a free-state empire. Others say he’s arming the slaves to massacre whites.
As for me, I think violence only makes the Negro’s situation worse, as well as being foreign to his Nature.
I appreciated your frank letter and hope to see you again very soon. I sincerely admire your determination to study medicine, but I hardly think Boston will be more friendly to the idea of a female doctor than New York, or even the hidebound South itself. Your friend and future Colleague,
In the Cause,
Thos. Hunter, Esq, M.D. (ad imminen)
Philadelphia
“Ow. Mother! Grandma already did that.”
“Hush. Sit still, honey. Let your mama fix your hair.”
“No, later, please. I want to watch vid.”
Yasmin gave up, got a shawl, and went outside, onto the little terrace that opened from the room. It was almost dark. Yasmin didn’t usually like to be outside at night under the stars, but here it was okay: the bulk of the mountain covered half the sky like a comforter pulled up under the eyes, and the clouds took care of the rest. The S
henandoah Inn was almost empty; the hotelkeeper had explained that it was late for tourists and that travelers usually stayed in the more modern Bolivar Hotel up the bluff, toward Charles Town, which had a shuttle to the airship hold. It was cool here under the mountain and Yasmin liked that: now, again, she could feel the little fire inside her, too small to light or heat anything but itself, not quite a person, but certainly a life. She sat with the old letters on her lap, not reading them but listening to the river, invisible behind the trees. The yellow poplar leaves shook as if applauding a show she didn’t have tickets to. The Shenandoah River sounded cold and rocky and indifferent, not like the muddy, friendly little Caroline rivers that just sort of sat with you. Behind her she could hear bits and pieces of the news on the vid as Harriet scanned through, then double-clicked on the Mars voyage. Why shouldn’t she? The ship was named after her father.