Fire on the Mountain

by Terry Bisson

  Yours &c., &c.,

  Thos.

  “Now what am I supposed to do with this stuff?” Yasmin said, looking at the paperback and the letters on her lap as they were driving back toward Charles Town. “If the car’s ready, Harriet and I are leaving for Staunton as soon as I get back.”

  “Leave them with me. I’ll return them. That way she gets some company,” Grissom said. Without taking his eyes off the road, he picked up the book and thumbed through it. “Now why did she give you this? That sly old devil.”

  “It looks gruesome.”

  “It is, in its way. You never read it? I wrote a paper on it in college. It was a bestseller in the l920s. It’s a border fantasy, a what-if.”

  “What if what?”

  “What if Brown and Tubman had failed. What if the U.S. had won the war.”

  “You mean it’s pro-slavery?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Grissom said. “Worse than that, really. It’s a sort of a white supremacist utopia, mis-topia maybe.”

  “So if it’s not about slavery, what’s it about?”

  “Empire. By the middle of the nineteenth century, slavery was about finished anyway,” Grissom said. “Africans around the world were throwing it off. The real issue in the Independence War was land. Nationhood.”

  “So there’s no Nova Africa.” Yasmin riffled the pages. “Does Tubman hang too?”

  “She’s not there,” Grissom said. “That’s the trick the plot turns on. The idea is that instead of going on the Fourth as planned, Tubman gets sick. The raid is delayed until fall, October I think. Brown goes without her. Now according to the book—and in actual fact—Brown was more of a strategist than a tactician. Without Tubman he hesitates, takes hostages, lets the Washington train go through. You know, in real life it was Tubman who insisted on blowing the Maryland bridge and cutting off the train. Anyway, in the book they don’t blow the bridge; they get trapped in the town, captured, and hung as traitors.”

  “So we have John Brown’s body and no war.”

  “There’s still a war. It’s just not an independence war. It’s fought to keep the old U.S. together rather than to free Nova Africa.”

  “So who wins?”

  “The North. Lincoln,” Grissom said. “In this book, he becomes President and the war is started by the slave owners, who are trying to set up a separate country—like Nova Africa, as a matter of fact, on pretty much the same territory.”

  “Clever.”

  “But a slave country, run by the slave owners.”

  “They already had that, for all practical purposes,” Yasmin said.

  “They were losing it by 1860, or at least thought they were. They didn’t want another Kansas. Anyway, in the story the North fights to keep the South in the Union. And they do. They win.”

  “And we lose.”

  “And how. Listen, this book was a bestseller in the U.S. in the l920s. Lincoln’s a big hero; so’s Lee . . .”

  “Lee?”

  “He leads the army for the South. He plays the good loser, the Virginia gentleman, generous in victory, gallant in defeat, shaking hands at the end—all that.”

  “Amazing,” Yasmin said.

  “White right prevails; the slave owners keep the land, even get more. The slave system is modified so that n’Africans end up as serfs; or worse, as a sort of landless nation packed into the slums of Chicago and New York for occasional servile labor.”

  “No Nova Africa.”

  “Afraid not, comrade. One nation indivisible—it’s old Abe’s dream, and your nightmare. You all don’t even get a hundred acres and a mule.”

  “Mis-topia, dystopia, wishful thinking.” Yasmin put the book back on top of the dash. Then she picked it up again with two fingers and looked at Grissom sideways. “That sorry old woman gave me this to insult me, didn’t she?”

  Grissom looked surprised. “Oh, I don’t think so. She’s not mean.”

  “You think. You wish. Sure she did. ‘You colored,’ she called me. I thought she was just senile.”

  “She is, she’s just muddled; hell, you heard her, she thinks I’m a doctor.”

  “You’re blind, Grissom. That sly, old pale thing. This is her revenge.” Yasmin thought about throwing the book out the window, into the sea of yellow wheat. Instead, she turned it face down on the dash.

  “And even worse,” she said, turning back to Grissom, “here you are, a revolutionary, courting these old renegades just so they’ll leave their papers to your precious museum.”

  Grissom blushed angrily. “That’s absolutely not fair! It’s not true. Do you want me to be rude to some poor old lady with hardening of the arteries? You know these aristocratic southrons.”

  No, I don’t think I do, Yasmin thought. Don’t think I want to. How close the past looms, circling the present like a dead moon, lifting slow repetitious tides on the living planet. She hoped the car was ready. She was tired of these white folks and their ancient craziness. Luckily, when they pulled into the shed at Iron Bridge, the car was ticking over with all its old elegance, and Elvis Presley Cardwell was standing proudly beside it, his wide grin showing off his new teeth— made of the same material, Yasmin realized, as the engine he admired so much.

  After the Battle of Quarry Road, as we called it (the white folks called it the Quarry Road Massacre), Wise and Buchanan apparently settled their differences, for two days later a train filled with marines and horses came from Washington, D.C., across the newly repaired railroad bridge, through Harper’s Ferry, heading for Charles Town to occupy the lower Shenandoah. Another column came marching from Eagle, through the Gap, and a detachment stayed in the Ferry. Drums rolled and flags flew and horses and cannon marched by all day; and all the boys in the town turned out, colored and white as well. But things were changing. I had never had any problem with the local white boys, perhaps because Charles Town was a railroad town and there were so many ‘shanty Irish’ and Germans, making it far different from the farm country to the south. Harper’s Ferry was even more of a railroad town, with almost half of its population ‘free colored,’ so even the white boys who were inclined to mess with us didn’t. I wasn’t until much later to know what an unusual situation that was in the South. Brown, of course, had known it all along. Cricket had derided me for these white friends, finding it childish (on the plantations slaves had friends among the white children only up until age seven or eight); and perhaps Cricket was right and I was hanging on to being a kid, even at twelve, through my Merican friends. At any rate, all that was changing: changing like the seasons as war, like winter, rolled in and we watched, shivering inside. Like an iron frost. You could have seen my breath that day, standing on the street watching the troops and cannons fill the town. I was very aware that the army was here to kill something hiding out (and I think the other black folks felt this as well) not only on the mountain, but inside my heart as well. So I was quiet; I feared it. The grown-ups cheered, but at first, for a time, the white boys were as silent as I was. It was strange how quiet they were, considering how much boys like soldiers. I think boys have more sense than they get credit for: I believe, great-grandson, they understood, for a moment, anyway, that with this war their childhood, like mine, was over with, and the season coming would be long and cold and mean. They got over it, though, and soon joined the grownups, who think about the future less clearly and less often: they all whooped and cheered and cast dark looks about at the few black faces, as if we were burned biscuits disgracing their table; I withdrew as soon as I could with honor, to watch the rest from the loft of Doug Bean’s store. We Africans had an army too; I had even seen it. It seemed unfair that we couldn’t have our own parade with drums and cannons and flags and horses rearing about. The commander of the marines was a West Point colonel named Robert E. Lee, who was also (and certainly not coincidentally) the scion of an old Tidewater family. Thus were here combined both the big guns of slavery: the federal government, with the accents and concerns of the Tidewater; and rightl
y so, since it was the Tidewater that created both slavery and, some say, the federal system, now both gone with the dinosaurs. I was impressed in spite of myself. Lee was the very original of the Virginia slave owner: tall on his horse, and short off it. I learned at lunch that day, and the next, that many of the ‘free’ black folks were glad to see him and the federal troops, since the men in town had grown wild and mean since Quarry Road— the militia and the free booters, the Kentucks and Tennessees from over the Cumberlands. Folks hoped Lee would tone them down a little. But if anything, he made them worse. Now that they didn’t have to worry about going up the mountain, they paraded around Charles Town drunk every night, cutting each other up, stealing horses, threatening ‘niggers,’ and generally making themselves obnoxious and dangerous. At ‘Mama’s’ (which is what Deihl called the lunch kitchen she ran for him), they watched their manners, but in the street I would be insulted or even threatened by the same low-grade hillbillies who begged for extra biscuits to slip into their greasy shirt pockets at lunch. A few days after Lee’s arrival, they hung John Brown in effigy and horsewhipped an old deaf black man in Charles Town, a thing they would not, I think, have done before. In Winchester they tarred and feathered a Philadelphia newspaperman, even though since the latest ‘massacre’ the Northern papers, even the most staunchly abolitionist, were no longer sympathetic. Both times the Federals stood by and watched, licensing rather than preventing such behavior. So now we were under martial law and there were American flags everywhere, though the troops only amounted to a detachment in each crossroads and a main force at Charles Town. That night of the day Lee came, I went out to Green Gables. I felt lonesome in town. I felt like seeing Cricket. Since Brown’s men had ridden through and tried to burn the house, old man Calhoun had moved to town with the womenfolks; his son-in-law and his overseer stayed, but with the house boarded up like a fortress. The crops were laid by and there wasn’t a lot of work to do. Green Gables was on the African ‘peavine,’ and the news from the east and down the Valley was ominous; there was talk of panic among the whites and of slaves being sold off South, to the new cotton lands in Mississippi, or worse, the hemp plantations in western Kentucky or the turpentine forests in Georgia, where men were cheaper than mules. There was other talk, too. One Green Gables slave whom I had barely known, a silent, grieving man named Little John, only recently bought, had gone ‘Up the Mountain’ a few nights before. He was the first from Green Gables, and nobody knew what to expect. People said old man Calhoun was trying to collect the insurance, but the underwriters were maintaining that ‘insurrection and war’ invalidated the claims. Meanwhile, the folks at the Gables hardly ever saw a white face (or a red one, as the besot Irish overseer was hardly ‘white’). I waited around for Cricket, then went looking for him. My hoot-owl call was answered, and I found him out in the graveyard behind the kitchen gardens. Cricket had a little brother who had died at birth, along with his mother, and Cricket left him something shiny or bright every week: a piece of bottle glass or creek stone, or even a toy. Cricket said this kept the child from crying; thus he was helping his mother in ‘Africa,’ as the slaves called heaven. Plus, he claimed his little brother’s ghost brought us luck on our trot-line, sang-digging, and other enterprises. I always found that little foot-long grave fascinating, festooned with glass chips and trinkets arranged neatly in rows. It didn’t bring us any luck that evening, though, I remember. Cricket was afraid to dig sang, afraid that on the mountain we would be shot for rebels or runaways. We ran the Holsom Slough trotline and cleaned two puny catfish, who were probably glad to be collected after waiting on the line for three days. I told Cricket how downcast I had felt that morning watching Lee’s soldiers, not expecting any sympathy, because he always did get on me for being too much of a ‘townie,’ but I got some: he told me to watch my back because ‘the only where white folks go from mean is meaner.’ I was inclined to agree, or at least to worry about it, for there I was stuck there in the middle of it all, with only my mama and myself amidst hordes of whites who were becoming less restrained in their viciousness every day. From old Deihl, a Yank and an abolitionist in his way (though surely Brown had redefined that term), I felt no danger, but no protection either. I had never particularly envied Cricket the ‘idiocy of rural life,’ as Marx calls it, but I did sometimes envy him living among his own people. The ignorance and superstition of the plantation slaves, which usually annoyed or disgusted me, seemed almost like a charm as I sat among them that night, welcomed simply because I was who I was. African. And if I wanted a show of martial strength, there it was: the fire on the mountain, burning as steadily as a star, bringing comfort to its friends and terror to its enemies. Indeed, the fire on the mountain was to turn out, in the long run, more effective than any of Lee’s parades. But the long run can be a long time running.

  September 26

  Miss Laura Sue Hunter

  Mint Springs

  Staunton, Virginia

  Dear Lee Little Laura Sue:

  Don’t believe everything you hear. I was at exams, not at Bethel Church, though I had friends there who did indeed hear Douglass: who is hardly the Devil Incarnate as our father would have it, but only seeking that which God ordains, indeed, commands, all men to seek. Nor did he call for the blood of all Whites. Don’t listen to our father, or any slave owner, for that matter, on political matters.

  I found your young Bewley’s poem very nice, though I am less given than he to regular meter. I do hope that in addition to Honor and Courage, he will consider Sentiment among Man’s estate. I look forward eagerly to meeting him in Baltimore next week, and to seeing you also. I must tell you, Lee Little Sister, in all confidence, that I, also, have met Someone, a woman (not merely a Lady) I have known for a while but only recently discovered in my own heart the feelings which I have not yet disclosed to her. She is from the North. I will tell all when I see you next week. Meanwhile, not a word!

  On his return Payson will be passing through Staunton with my bay, Emmanuel, which was street-injured and doesn’t take to Philadelphia. Please remind our father to ask old Hosea to check his withers; he was always the best with horses. I can find no vet here who has the way with animals of our Virginia Colored.

  Your Loving and Intrigued Brother,

  Thomas

  Grissom had been a revolutionary for forty-seven years: in wars for twenty-one, six of these overseas (he was a veteran of Berlin as well as Chicago); in prison for eleven; in peace for nine. Peace had its own difficulties. Yasmin was right. Old Mrs. Hunter was an unreconstructed racist (no surprise), and he was an opportunist for catering to her so uncritically. He could find a way to relate to the old folks in the area without accommodating himself so completely to their political backwardness. He would write to Yasmin, accept her criticism, and thank her for it. The incident had made saying good-bye a little awkward when he dropped her at Cardwell’s. She was in a hurry to get to Staunton. It was odd how childishly she dealt with her husband’s death. How easy it is to spot other people’s weaknesses!

  Grissom hoped she got onto the highway before it started pouring rain. He punched on the radio and found the weather, but it sounded backward; it said the storm was finally breaking. But he could see the top of the Blue Ridge, even now, gathering clouds around it like a cloak . . . Then he realized that the weather report was not about the Shenandoah at all, but about Mars. Faraway Mars. The weather had broken and the ship was going down. Grissom would have sat in the car to hear the rest, but when he pulled into his garage in back of the museum the phone was ringing—the high-pitched, close-together rings that meant the caller was holding the ‘urgent’ button all the way down. Not bothering with his crutches for the first time in years (and amazed at how fast he could move without them), Grissom got through the door and caught it.

  It was Yasmin.

  “Harriet is gone,” she said.

  Lee moved fast, and then he moved slow. Within a week of Quarry Road, he had filled the Valley with troops; then
for another week he marched them around in circles. They arrived all at once on trains on the newly repaired track from north, south, and east (there were neither tracks nor roads through the blue wall of the Cumberlands to the west). The population of the town doubled, all with men, all of them white, most of them young and filled with a festive spirit. They were going slave hunting. There was artillery in light blue uniform from Connecticut and Ohio, for this was before the abolitionists began their work in the ranks; the Richmond Grays with their beaver hats, and North Carolina militia too; trainloads of cadets, who looked naked to me now without the black flies on their throats, though this time they would not walk point up the mountain. There was cavalry as well; and even with their own provender and smiths and spares there was profit for old Deihl, whose face showed those seams that passed for smiles in those days. Having filled Charles Town with troops, having stirred it with the steel spoon of martial ceremony, Lee let it simmer for a week. There were balls with the local debutantes (such as they were) for the billeted officers (such as they were); turkey shoots for the enlisted men; bowling on the green; horseshoes; horse races; and, new to our backward, over-the-mountain area, duels. These were not blood fights but half-load, triple-waistcoat Virginia gentleman duels—but what did we know? At first they caused quite a stir among the town boys, among whom I still included myself for such adventures as these. Three times at dawn that week there were shots on the sycamore flats near Caney Creek, and all three times the brush piles were filled with boys’ expectant eyes. What disappointment—a bar fight was bloodier than these affairs! Every morning there was drilling in the town square, and every afternoon on the outskirts, more drilling, near the Charles Town racetrack, where the bulk of the troops were tented. Lee made no secret of his plans. He was to trap Brown and Tubman on the mountain between the deep gap where the rivers plunged through, at Harper’s Ferry, and Key’s Gap, a high notch some eight miles to the south, past Iron Bridge. Lee’s second-in-command was J.E.B. Stuart, the same who was later to become infamous in the campaign of southwestern Virginia; he controlled the Loudon Valley to the east of the Blue Ridge with a smaller force. As the Federals saw it, the heavily populated eastern valleys were less hospitable to Brown even though there were more black people there, because they were slaves and afraid of the ‘abs’—unlike the free blacks of the Harper’s Ferry area, whom Lee suspected of supporting Brown. This illusion (that slaves fear freedom) cost Lee plenty; it cost him the Shenandoah Valley campaign; it cost him, in fact, Brown. Harper’s Ferry was easy enough to secure. The south side of the Potomac for two miles was blue with troops, though these were not Lee’s best, for no one thought that Brown would break that way. Meanwhile, mounted pickets covered Key’s Gap, up the hill from Iron Bridge, seasoned men with the new Henry repeaters. Brown was trapped, and Lee was playing with him. I watched all these preparations with the dumb fascination of a turkey on the stump watching the ax get fetched; that was, I think, the point of them. Looking back, I can see that Lee’s assault was as much on the sensibilities of the Africans watching and waiting as on the actual few (so far) who had picked up arms. And, of course, it was all designed to succor and reassure the whites, abolitionists as well as slavery supporters, since all (or most) were making it clear in the newspapers of the North that as much as they hated slavery (oh, none could hate it more!), they abhorred murder and insurrection worse. The whites were closing ranks while we were yet to do this. Colonel Lee was in no hurry. He had his Captain Brown and he was playing with him. I heard his strategy discussed with perfect candor at Mama’s table by cavalry sergeants and mule-skinners alike. Moving with vastly superior numbers, from east and west at once, while the gaps to the north and south were sealed, in high daylight, after a devastating cannonade, Lee intended to squeeze Brown onto the narrow mountaintop and swat him and his pitiful hundred men like a single fly. Lee’s expedition numbered 2,600 in all, of whom 900 were to ascend the Blue Ridge. It was not to be a battle; this was, in their eyes, extermination, not war. It was not a fox hunt but a mad-dog clubbing. There were no provisions to bring prisoners down. It was assumed by now that the renegade whites would not give up; and the blacks, after such an escapade, were valueless. It was over for them all. The town had a week to consider all this. Pity and scorn for Brown’s fanatical enthusiasm was balanced with admiration for Lee’s deliberation, regularity, determination, and strength. For six days we were all awaiting this great execution while Lee drilled his men and moved his artillery into place on the Bolivar Heights at the foot of the ridge. But except for the morning duels of the hungover officers (which we boys now slept through), not a shot was fired. On Friday, September 29, the Washington train brought across the newly repaired Maryland bridge a great rifled gun the size of a church steeple, riding on a flat car and covered with soldiers, newspapermen, excursionists, and boys looking for excitement; they had ridden the train all the way from Frederick, Maryland—some from Washington! The giant Ericsson gun (named after its Swedish inventor, who was along in a club car, with his own entourage) was parked on a siding near the stockyard, then moved because of the smell to the Fairgrounds on the east side of Charles Town. Clearly the plan was not only to punish Brown but punish the mountain as well for sheltering him; to knock it down. On Sunday night I stole out to Green Gables. The fire on the mountain no longer looked brave, but stupid, like the fevered eye of an idiot; like the eye of the turkey watching the ax get fetched. I wished it weren’t even there. I wished they had run away, but of course it was too late for that; there was no place to go. Since Little John, no one was slipping up the mountain; it would have made about as much sense as hiding in the muzzle of the Ericsson gun. Cricket said old man Calhoun still hadn’t reported Little John’s loss: not only was there uncertainty about the insurance claim, but there were rumors that owners of rebel slaves would be assessed for the damages caused by Brown, and perhaps even for the expense of Lee’s expedition. These rumors all, of course, turned out to be groundless. On Monday morning, October 1, at precisely 7:00 A.M., the cannonade began with the Ericsson gun firing from the siding near the Fairgrounds. I was in the barn helping Deihl with the horses, and the great boom shivered the water in my pail. It sounded like a giant door slamming shut in the sky. It was echoed by the smaller pieces at the foot of the mountain; then a distant rumble from over the mountain in the Loudon Valley. There was no more work that morning. The battle was joined.