“William! No! If you kill them, you’ll hang for it.”
“Some things are worth hanging for.”
“Your wife, man! What about your wife?”
William stared at Lewis for a moment, then lowered his eyes. “What about my wife?” he said softly.
“You don’t think it would make her happy to see you hang, do you?”
William shook his head. “I don’t know, Lewis. I just don’t know anymore.”
“Well, I do,” Lewis responded firmly, putting a hand on William’s shoulder. “Let the Vigilance Committee take care of things.”
After a moment William nodded reluctantly. “All right. But I’m telling you now. If Charlie Hughes and John Knight get within firing distance, they’re dead men. You hear me?”
Lewis nodded. “You’re my kind of man, William.”
When they reached Lewis’s home, William understood why he was Lewis’s kind of man. Placed on tables throughout the house were loaded revolvers, and later, in the basement, William saw two kegs of gunpowder.
“If any slave hunter looks like he’s going to take any slaves I’m hiding, I’ll blow him and me to the highest star,” Lewis explained.
William smiled and hugged Lewis to him. “You’re my kind of man, Lewis.”
IV
The next morning black and white men could be seen carrying posters through the streets of Boston. Quickly these were nailed to fences, trees, and frame buildings. By the time the sun rose and the city began to busy itself for another day, all Boston knew that Charlie Hughes and John Knight were in town and what they looked like.
ATTENTION! ATTENTION!
Citizens of Boston
TWO SLAVE CATCHERS
CHARLIE HUGHES, average ht.,
165 pounds, black beard, blue eyes.
Scar on left cheek.
JOHN KNIGHT, tall, heavy,
sharp nose, brown eyes, brown hair,
fond of chewing tobacco.
When Hughes and Knight left their room at the United States Hotel at eight o’clock, a crowd of black men and women was waiting on the sidewalk.
“Go back to Georgia!” the crowd chanted as the two men stepped outside.
The two glanced nervously at each other, then started quickly down the street.
“Go back to Georgia! Go back to Georgia!” the crowd chanted, following them.
Hughes and Knight quickened their pace.
“Slave hunters! Slave hunters! Slave hunters!” the crowd yelled, changing the chant and hurrying to keep pace with the two white men.
So it was for Charlie Hughes and John Knight all that day.
It was late that evening when Theodore Parker stopped his carriage in front of Lewis Hayden’s house. His short, stocky body was hunched against the chilly wind. It was too cold for the end of October. Or maybe he was feeling the cold more now. He was only forty years old, but the winters were beginning to feel eternal and the summers all too brief. Some mornings he looked at himself in the mirror and saw a face that looked far older than its forty years.
He hadn’t wanted any of this—the constant traveling across the country speaking against slavery, the latenight journeys to help fugitives on their way to Canada. He had planned to devote his life to study, and for many years he’d spent fifteen hours a day reading. He knew between twenty and thirty languages, he supposed, and had at least 16,000 books in his library at home. He chuckled to himself. Lydia maintained that the entire house had become a library.
He would’ve liked nothing more than to be sitting in front of the fire in his study, a book in his lap. But here he was, shivering, walking up the steps of a house in the West End, a pistol in his pocket. Why? he asked himself needlessly. All men—and women, as Lydia reminded him—were created equal in the eyes of God. He owed it to himself to try and look on things through God’s eyes. It was that simple.
He did not have to knock on the door, knowing that on such a night Lewis would keep watch on the street from within the darkened house until sunrise.
The door opened and Parker stepped quickly inside. No words were spoken. It was a moment before Parker’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw Lewis standing by one window and William Craft by the other. Both men had pistols in their hands.
“Have our friends decided to leave the city?” Lewis asked.
“No. Though men with thinner skins would have,” Parker responded. “We had people following them from the minute they stepped out of the hotel this morning until they went to bed tonight. Four men are watching the back and front entrances of the hotel through the night, in case they try to change hotels.”
“Good,” Hayden commented. “Maybe we’ll have to make the crowds following them larger tomorrow.”
“I don’t think it’ll make a difference to those two. The bigger the crowd, the more determined to stay they become.”
“Then we’ll simply be more determined.”
“That may be a bigger task than we anticipated.”
“What do you mean?” Lewis wanted to know.
“A message was delivered to me late this afternoon. That’s the real purpose of my visit now.” Parker turned and looked toward William. “Mr. Craft? A prominent citizen of Boston has an offer for you and Mrs. Craft. If the two of you will allow yourselves to be arrested, then this gentleman guarantees that he will buy your freedom from your former owners, no matter the price.”
“What!” William and Lewis exclaimed almost simultaneously.
“That’s the message I was asked to deliver.”
“I don’t understand,” William said slowly. “Why do we have to be arrested? If he’s so concerned, why doesn’t he just purchase our freedom outright?”
“That’s precisely the point,” Hayden responded heatedly. “If you and your wife are arrested first, then resistance to the Fugitive Slave Bill is broken. If you are bought off, the proslavery forces win.”
“I think there is something I should add,” Parker interrupted. “I spoke with Mrs. Craft this evening. She wants you to accept the offer.”
“Oh, no!” Hayden exclaimed.
Parker could not see William’s face and was glad. Whatever anguish was on his face should be seen only by the darkness.
“Did you tell her that this offer might be a trick?” William wanted to know.
“No. I didn’t want to prejudice her, as I don’t want to prejudice you.”
No one spoke for some minutes. Lewis and Parker were not waiting to hear William’s decision, because they were too alone suddenly with the burdens of their own lives and time, alone with the knowledge that whatever decision William made, it would be the right one and the wrong one. When the silence was broken finally, it was not William who spoke, but Lewis, his voice breaking on the darkness.
“When I was a boy, there was a white man who wanted to have his way with my mother. She resisted him and he went to my mother’s master and said he wanted to buy her. Mother begged Master not to sell her to that man, but Master did. Mother refused to let the man have his way with her, so he put her in prison. The people in prison beat her and did everything they could think of to punish her. My mother began to lose her mind. She managed to get a knife once and tried to kill herself. A few months later she tried to hang herself. She was young and very beautiful. She was part Indian and had long straight black hair. It turned all white.
“The jailer became concerned and told her master that it might help her mind if she could see me. So she was brought to me, and when she saw me, she leaped at me and held me so tight I thought my arms were going to break. And she said, ‘I’ll fix you so they’ll never get you!’ And she grabbed at my throat to kill me.”
He stopped and the silence rushed back in, heavy, as if it were about to burst from the weight of unshed tears and unheard sobs swelling in its womb.
Then there was a sardonic chuckle. “I hadn’t thought about this in years,” Lewis continued. “One time a white man traded me for a pair of horses.”
No one
knew if minutes passed or hours. It didn’t matter. Finally, when William spoke, he said only, “I have to see Ellen.”
V
The next morning at breakfast Theodore told Ellen that they were going to try and bring William to see her that night. She left the table without a word and hurried through the book-lined hallway and up the three flights of book-lined stairs to her room at the top of the house.
Books, books, books. She’d never known there were so many books in the world. Books over the doorways, beside the fireplaces in every room, and in every room in the house. Mrs. Parker said she had refused to allow books in the dining room and kitchen. “If Theodore had his way, the food would be stored in sacks so he could use the shelves for books.”
William would love this house, Ellen thought, gazing at the books lining the walls of her room. She went over to a shelf and took down a book. She opened it and turned the pages slowly. It was nothing but words on paper. Why would a man get excited by something like that? You couldn’t hold words in your arms like you could a baby.
She stared at a page and spelled out a word—t-h-e-o-l-o-g-y. But the letters did not become a word. They remained random letters of the alphabet, which was all she had managed to learn. She had watched William spelling out the letters to himself, and seen a wonderful smile break over his face when the separate letters coalesced into meaning. She would have given anything to have that smile.
It was different for her. William could open a book, or even speak, and enter a world that must be as beautiful as flowers opening in the spring. She remembered that first time she and William had attended an antislavery meeting and been introduced. When the crowd began shouting, “Speech! Speech! Speech!” she had been certain that William would smile shyly and shake his head. But he walked to the platform and spoke, the words coming one after the other as if he were reading a speech. She liked the words, the way they sounded together, the pictures they created in her mind, the feelings they brought forth from her heart. But she did not know the man from whose mouth the words came. And if that man was William, who was she?
In Macon she had known. She was Ellen, the slave and daughter of Ira Taylor. In Boston she was the runaway slave who looked like a white woman. Neither was much, but somehow who she was in Boston was worse. She was not a white woman, but neither was she what others thought a slave looked like.
Ellen remembered sitting at dinner parties and knowing that white people did not know how to talk to her. If she were really white, they could talk to her about whatever white people talked about with each other. But she could tell they were thinking that she was not white. She was an ex-slave, a black woman. But how could anyone so white be black?
It had been dark for some time now. She sat in the parlor, and every time she heard a carriage approach, she was certain it was the one bringing William. When the steady, dull sound of the horse’s hooves passed the house and faded until there was silence once more, she twisted the handkerchief in her hands a little more tightly.
Thus she was surprised when William walked calmly in.
“How—” she began, but could not continue. She looked into his tight, drawn face, noticing the lines of fatigue beneath his eyes. “Are you all right, William?”
“Fine,” he said quietly, coming over to the divan where she sat. “You?”
“Fine. How did you get here? I didn’t hear a carriage.”
“I walked.” He smiled.
“Walked?”
“From the nearby home of a Vigilance Committee member where I’ve been all day. We decided last night that they wouldn’t expect me to go anywhere in the daytime, so I came early this afternoon. But it wasn’t safe to come to this house until after dark. I came in through the cellar.”
William sat down next to her. Ellen sat stiffly, glancing at him from the corners of her eyes nervously. It was a different kind of silence for them, and it didn’t surround and entwine them like invisible colored ribbons. This was a hard silence, as thick as a mountain, and neither knew how to climb it and get to the other side.
“Would you like some tea?” Ellen asked finally. “It’s rather chilly tonight.”
“No thank you. I can’t stay long. Rev. Parker and Lewis are extremely worried. They thought that Charlie Hughes and John Knight would have given up and gone back to Macon by now. They seem more determined to stay than ever.”
“Then it would be better to let ourselves be arrested, have our freedom purchased, and have it all over with.”
William placed his hand on top of hers. “Do you really believe that, Ellen? Do you really believe that somebody would buy our freedom after we were arrested?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“That it’s a trick. If this man, whoever he is, wants to buy our freedom, then why doesn’t he do it? We don’t need to be arrested for him to buy our freedom.”
“Well, perhaps there are reasons for that procedure that we don’t know now,” Ellen responded stubbornly, unable to refute William’s argument.
“Even if he is telling the truth, we can’t do it, Ellen. Can you imagine how demoralizing it would be for fugitive slaves all across the country if we allowed our freedom to be purchased for us? If we let our freedom be bought, we’ll be saying that the Fugitive Slave Bill is just.”
Ellen slid her hand from beneath William’s. “I just want to be left in peace, William. I don’t want all the fugitive slaves in America looking at us as their model. It’s not fair! What about our lives? Don’t our lives mean anything to you?”
William reached for her hand again and held it tightly this time. “Maybe,” he began quietly, “our lives don’t belong just to us anymore. Maybe it isn’t fair. We had no way of knowing that our escape would inspire so many. But that’s how it is.”
“Well, I don’t like it! I feel less married to you now than I ever did in slavery.”
“Then look into your own soul,” he said gently. “I knew something was wrong. I thought maybe you hadn’t recovered fully from the ordeal of our escape.”
She laughed wryly. “I’ve been over that for quite some time. Whatever is wrong is between us.”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t believe so. Yes, I know I’ve changed some. I have a chance to live in the world as a man now, and not a thing. I like that.”
“So you won’t consent to letting this man buy our freedom,” Ellen cut in coldly. “You won’t consider that he might be telling the truth and that we wouldn’t have to live in fear and hiding for the rest of our lives.”
“I will not have my freedom purchased.”
“Do you love freedom more than me?”
“I love freedom more than slavery,” he said evenly.
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“That’s my answer. Can’t you hear what I’m saying?” he asked, his voice acquiring a passionate urgency for the first time.
“Do you love this freedom more than you love me?” Ellen repeated angrily.
William released her hand and stood up. “Are you asking me to choose between freedom and you?”
He turned and walked toward the doorway. Then he stopped and stood for a moment before turning around and looking at her. “If you must have an answer, then, yes.”
They stared across the room at each other for a moment, then he turned and started to walk through the door.
“William,” she called softly.
He stopped but did not turn to face her. From the back he looked so ordinary, she thought. She’d always imagined heroes as tall and handsome, not short with big, thick hands.
Perhaps that was what she had not done. Loved freedom more than herself. To love the fear, the emptiness, and the utter terror of unknown and unknowable freedom, to love as Rev. Parker and William loved that letters made words and words made visible the felt unseen, just as a baby—that baby she would have with William—was the unseen love of a woman and a man becoming known.
She stood up and went to him. She had only hated sl
avery. William had loved freedom.
“Very well, William Craft,” she whispered, putting her arms around him. “You trusted me to bring you out of slavery. I suppose I must trust you to bring me to freedom.”
They hugged each other tightly, and then he was gone.
VI
Each morning the crowds outside the United States Hotel were larger. Charlie Hughes and John Knight were followed throughout the day, fingers pointing at them, voices shouting, “Slave catchers! There go the slave catchers!”
Three times the Vigilance Committee had the two men arrested on charges of conspiracy to kidnap and defamation of character for calling William and Ellen slaves. Each time bail had been set at $10,000 and someone, no one knew who, put it up.
Hughes and Knight refused to leave town, however, not even after an angry black man grabbed Charlie by the throat as he left the hotel one morning. No one doubted that the southerner would have been killed if the crowd hadn’t intervened.
Then word came that President Millard Fillmore was threatening to send seven hundred troops to Boston to capture William and Ellen. Theodore Parker and Lewis Hayden understood now why all their efforts to get the two slave catchers to leave town had failed. Clearly the President meant to enforce the Fugitive Slave Bill with military force. The Reverend Parker and Lewis were agreed: Hughes and Knight had to be forced out of town immediately.
On the morning of October 30 Theodore Parker led a group of sixty white men into the United States Hotel. They filled the lobby and hallway leading to Room 44.
When Hughes and Knight opened the door, Rev. Parker introduced himself politely, and then continued, saying, “I have come to request that you gentlemen leave Boston.”
John Knight laughed harshly. “We’ll leave when we get what we came for. And not before.”
Rev. Parker smiled. “No, no. I’m afraid that you don’t understand. You see, this is almost embarrassing, but I’m supposed to be a leader here in Boston, and I find myself at the point of being unable to control my people. Until now I’ve been able to restrain them. I take no pride in telling you, however, that they are at the point of ignoring my leadership. See for yourselves.”
This Strange New Feeling Page 11