by Lois Leveen
“John Brown dies this morning. But Dangerfield Newby is already dead. John Brown did a great thing in the name of justice. But Dangerfield Newby did as great a thing in the name of love. John Brown is an exemplar to many in the struggle to end slavery. But Dangerfield Newby is a hero of our own. It is his death we must mourn, and must honor, and must be ready to die ourselves, if need be.”
I hadn’t heard about Dangerfield Newby before then, and Mr. Bowser’s preaching on him hit me strong. I was sad and angry and proud all at once, teary eyes and pounding heart and a mouth torn between resolution and a frown. Harriet Newby, Papa, Dangerfield Newby, me—everything seemed all tangled together.
Hattie laid her hand on mine. Though her touch steadied me, I felt more distant from her than I ever had. She sat with husband, father, sisters, and brothers-in-law, a whole family together. Nieces and nephews kept home, protected from what they might hear at the service. But for my family there had never been a together, never been a protection. For Newby’s family neither. That’s why Mr. Bowser’s words resounded for me especially, made me ask myself what I was ready to do, to take up the Calling that Mama insisted was mine.
What started as a rumor around the edges of the memorial service on Friday morning was by Friday evening known fact all over Philadelphia—Mary Brown was bringing her husband’s body home for burial on their farm way up in New York State. Which meant that on Saturday, they’d be coming through Philadelphia.
People all over the city were planning to turn out. Those who thought Brown a hero and a martyr, and those who thought him a hell-fiend and a madman, all were expected to line the streets around the train depot come the next morning.
Hattie, her sisters, and their husbands crowded in the front parlor of Mr. Jones’s house to discuss the news. Mr. Jones stayed quiet, even as everyone else talked a storm over the Widow Brown’s funebrial journey.
“She’s lucky to have the body,” Stephen, Charlotte’s husband, said. “I hear they’ve mutilated the others, given them to medical students to dissect, dumped them in unmarked graves, or just left them to rot. Even Mary Brown’s own sons.”
Emily’s husband frowned. “Don’t talk about such things in front of the ladies.”
“Daddy always says ladies ought not be so protected they are ignorant,” Hattie said. “Ignorance of our enemies is just endangerment of ourselves.”
“Our enemies?” Emily repeated. “We don’t even know these people.”
“We know they hate us,” George said. “Only one they hate more is John Brown, because he acted for us.”
Stephen nodded. “They say Mary Brown can have his body, but it will molder in his coffin before his grave is dug. No man in Virginia, colored or white, dares prepare the corpse.”
Something knotty sprang root in my stomach, and in an instant I knew why Mr. Jones sat so tacit in his horsehair armchair. If Mrs. Brown was bringing her husband’s body to Philadelphia to be embalmed, surely there was one man in the city determined to do the job.
Emily shrieked, and it flashed on everyone, all of them talking at once. “No, Daddy, you can’t mean to.”
“Of course he will, he’s got to.”
“It would be madness to try it. They say there will be a mob for sure.”
“Don’t say try, like he might fail. He will do it, and it will be an honor.”
Through all the shouting and the arguing, I shared Mr. Jones’s silence. He always said that when the wind blows from the South, there isn’t a thing you can do to stop it. The wind that was blowing now wasn’t going to cease until it knocked down either all the slaveholders or all the abolitionists. Maybe both.
A log fell in the fireplace. I drew my shawl tighter around my shoulders, as though the south wind was blowing right through the room.
It wasn’t a cold December wind that troubled me once I took to my bed. It was a dream. Mr. Jones was in the backyard of the Van Lew mansion, digging a grave. Just when the hole was deep enough for him to stand in, someone laid down railroad tracks across the top, trapping him underneath. From above the pit, I tried to reach between the rail ties to pull him out. But Mr. Jones yelled for me to help the other man, behind me. I turned and saw two giant metal spikes, fused together in a cross seven feet high. A crowd of white men led a negro to the cross. The mob all had hogs’ heads as pale as their hands, and they made horrid noises like rutting pigs. As they tied the colored man to the metal spikes, one of the hog-men called out, “Well, Nigger Newby, what do you say, now you’re gonna die?”
“Lost my wife and child,” came the anguished reply. “What I got to live for anyway?”
When I heard the voice, I realized it wasn’t Dangerfield Newby they had. It was Papa. I couldn’t see his face, hidden as he was by the line of hog-men, who were loading their rifles with the fire-pokers Papa had made for the Van Lews. As I tried to run to him, a gust of wind blew hard against me. I heard a pop and smelled rifle smoke. Papa was gone.
I woke with a start. Daylight filled the room. The bodeful stillness in the house told me Mr. Jones was already next door, waiting for John Brown’s body. I threw off the counterpane, dressed, and hurried outside. Though the day was bright and clear, few people milled about on errands, shutters pulled closed on homes and businesses alike.
Blocks before I reached the intersection of Broad and Prime, I heard the crowd. Hundreds of people, maybe even a thousand or more, ringed the rail station. As I got near, a clump of young white men sang out the latest coonshow song. “In Dixie land whar I was born in, early on one frosty mornin, look away, look way, away Dixie Land.”
I skirted wide around them, hastening to the far side of the rail platform, where negroes and whites stood together, Quaker bonnets dotting the crowd. Some of the gathered were reciting Bible passages, some were singing spirituals, some whispered among themselves. Most were quiet.
Before I could search out a single familiar face in the press of people, a whistle pierced the air, and the train chugged into the station. As it braked to a stop, the crowd pushed forward.
The conductor stepped from the lead car. “Back, damn you, or you’ll shove the train right off the track.”
“Where is our John the Baptist?” a woman on our side cried out. “Where is our John the Baptist?” All around me, people took up the call.
The conductor shook his head. “Dead, just like the first one. Like we’ll all be soon enough. Now step back. We’ve freight to unload.”
Two dozen uniformed men poured down from the train, forcing the crowd from the platform. The door to one of the cargo cars slid open, and six guards carried a long pine box out to a cart at the far end of the station.
“Follow them,” someone shouted. “They can’t leave us behind.”
“You best hurry,” a man on the other side yelled back. “We’ve got a real warm welcome waiting for you at the nigger undertaker’s.”
The crowd surged forward, sweeping me up as it lumbered north and east. Later I noticed that I’d turned an ankle along the way, somewhere else a gripping hand had torn my cloak. But I didn’t make out any of that as it happened. All I marked was the press of people suddenly slowing, and the pine smoke curling into the cool air. And then through the smoke, a glimpse of flames, licking their way up the walls of the undertaker’s shop and the wooden barn beside it.
The heat from the fire made the air wave before my eyes, as a knot of white men dragged Mr. Jones out before the crowd. Three held him, a fourth put a burning torch to his feet, and the last smacked the butt of a pistol hard against his face.
“Where is it?” they asked, one after another. “Where is the body?”
“You’ve broken his jaw,” shouted someone in the crowd. “He can’t speak.”
The man with the pistol whirled toward us. “Another word, or a step forward, from any of you niggers or nigger-loving sons of bitches, and I’ll shoot the lot of you.” He turned back to Mr. Jones and smashed the gun into his face, again and again. “Goddamn you, talk!”
I felt all the heat and the hurt they had loosed on Mr. Jones, feared for what more they might do to him. I didn’t know how I might aid him, but I vowed I wouldn’t just stand witness. I suppose I was as much foolhardy as fearless, steeling myself to break from the crowd and try what I could to make them stop, when a shout came from the north, arresting the thug midswing.
“By crivens, we been tricked.”
The man who shouted came galloping toward the rowdies on North Star, yelling out his report. “The box they brung here was sent to hornswoggle us. They brung John Brown’s body direct to Walnut Street wharf. Hurry or he will be gone afore we get there.”
“Lord help us. Looks like the devil himself here now,” muttered an elderly woman beside me. But it wasn’t the devil. It was just a Scotsman with hair the color of hellfire.
“Led ’em on a merry chase, I did,” McNiven told us later. “Almost a sin, to be preying upon fools so.” He acted as though it had been a lark, diverting the pro-slavery mob away from the area while taking care they didn’t reach the wharf before the boat with Brown’s body set sail. But from what Doc Weatherston said, Mr. Jones would be dead if not for McNiven’s quick thinking.
Even now, the old man barely clung to life. Sending a decoy coffin to the undertaker’s shop gave the Widow Brown time enough to transport her husband’s corpse through Philadelphia undetected, but Mr. Jones’s part in the plot cost him dearly. The torch scarred his feet so badly he couldn’t stand. His jaw was shattered from the pistol whipping, his tongue too swollen to speak or eat. Hattie and her sisters tended him day and night, taking turns spooning him pot liquor or porridge, praying he might recover.
We gathered around him at Charlotte’s house. The undertaker’s shop and the fine home that stood beside it had burned to the ground before the fire company bothered to arrive. Everything of mine—letters, books, keepsakes, every stitch of clothes except what I put on that morning—was gone. Even Papa’s iron cross was buried amid the great heap of ashes. All the time I’d spent listening to Zinnie Moore laud the virtues of simplicity must have had its effect on me, because when I found myself without possessions, I felt more of a sense of being lightened than of loss.
The fire and the beating had wrought their changes on me, just as they had on Mr. Jones.
Fire tempers metal, beating shapes it. A blacksmith’s daughter knows that well. Whatever I had been before—a young lady, a schoolmarm—I was something different now. Stronger, and with a purpose, like the tools Papa shaped at the smithy. I had no place in Philadelphia, nothing of my own. And that would make it easier to leave.
BOOK
THREE
Richmond
1861–1865
Twelve
I don’t like it, not one bit,” he insisted, for about the one hundredth time.
I opened my mouth to answer that it was my choice, not for him to like or dislike either way, but McNiven flashed me a look. “Not she nor I am asking you to like it, Bowser. If you do it, ’twill be a courtesy I shall remember and repay.”
David Bustill Bowser, gruff and dark and broad, would have said no once and been done with it. But his cousin—I had to keep reminding myself they were cousins, for this slender, copper-skinned young man was so unlike the Mr. Bowser I knew—was more argumentative.
Weak sunlight streamed through the copse of leafless sweet gum and tulip trees. It was none too warm a January morning, and I was still more than forty miles from where I meant to be. So though Wilson Bowser was anxious to convince me of the folly of my request, he couldn’t. I was going home. And I needed him to take me there. “You’ve forwarded plenty of baggage through this area. Surely it wouldn’t be so difficult for you to carry me on.”
He acted as though my speaking of the Railroad confirmed I was a fool. “Baggage moves from the South to the North. Not the other way.” He looked to McNiven. “She always this contrary?”
“Just be glad she is on our side. Elsewise we maun find her contrary nature even more troublesome.” McNiven hid his mouth beneath the orange fringe of his mustache, but I saw enough of his devilish smile to know that between us, we would convince this Mr. Bowser to take me after all.
When I decided to come back to Virginia, I put my plan to McNiven and told him the part I meant for him to play in it. I never had need to ask a white man for a thing until then. This was a gift fate had given me, Old Master Van Lew dead when I was so young, Young Master John hardly grown enough to head the household before I left Richmond. The colored men I knew in Philadelphia always treated me the way they treated any colored females, as though they were our protectors. Fearing any of them would make a different choice for me than I wanted to make for myself, I turned to a white man instead.
“You ask mighty a wild thing,” McNiven had said. “Are you truly ready to go, whenever and however I say?”
If he’d told me we were leaving right then, it would have been none too soon. I’d already waited through all the politicking of 1860, pinning my expectations on Mr. William Seward. Senator Seward had opposed the Fugitive Slave Act when it was first proposed, had even defended fugitive slaves in the court of law. He helped found the Republican Party, vowing it would be the party of abolition. I thought for sure he’d garner this new Party’s nomination that May. Even thought of it as a present for my twenty-first birthday.
So I was devastated to see the nomination go instead to Mr. Lincoln, of whom we negroes knew so little. Hattie’s sister Gertie kept mistakenly calling him Ephraim Lincoln, he was so foreign to us, and we all thought it a grand joke. But we sobered up quickly enough once the Republicans chose him for their ticket. We knew all our hopes rested on him, whatever he turned out to be.
When those slavery-loving Democrats split their party right in half, nominating two different candidates for president because the Southerners found Stephen Douglas not slavocrat enough, I saw this Abraham Lincoln would win the election. Just as soon as the ballots were counted, South Carolina announced it was seceding. As 1860 slipped into 1861, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia followed suit. Other Southern states were lining up to do the same. Some of them didn’t even bother to secede before sending their militias to seize a Federal arsenal. Though they’d been mad as rabid hounds when John Brown tried that, they turned greedy as hogs at feeding time doing it themselves. But no one seemed to know what way Virginia might go. At least, no one up in Philadelphia.
All we knew was that though James Buchanan was spending the final months of his presidency hemming and hawing over all of it, surely Mr. Lincoln wouldn’t stand for what was happening. And if he didn’t, it seemed likely we were headed for war. If war was coming, I wanted to be in Richmond, with Papa, before it came to pass, and for as long as it took to see it through. To help it through, as I meant to do.
So when McNiven asked if I was truly ready to leave, I nodded and said just as soon as we could.
“I’m glad for it,” he said. “Richmond will be much to us in the next years, whether Virginia secedes or no. Your talents will be a great help in our labors there.”
When I first met McNiven, I couldn’t have imagined I’d take pride or comfort in knowing he meant for us to ally together. But back then I couldn’t have guessed I’d ever connive to travel back across Mason and Dixon’s line, either.
We were halfway to Baltimore before McNiven informed me he could go only so far as the distant bank of the Rappahannock, that David Bustill Bowser’s cousin would have to carry me on from there. And only after we met up with Mr. Bowser, at the regular rendezvous point for their Railroad work, did I realize McNiven hadn’t yet told him about me.
We spent the better part of that morning hour arguing, until at last McNiven was directing his buckboard wagon back toward Maryland while we rode south to Richmond. Mr. Bowser’s conveyance was much smaller, a cart barely big enough to haul three sacks of flour, though at five foot by three, large enough to hide a fugitive slave or two. As I sat beside him on the driver’s bench, I rem
inded myself that Mr. Bowser’s reluctance was understandable, given my unexpected presence and unusual request. Perhaps now we might begin to be acquainted without so much consternation.
I offered up some comment about how picturesque the winding road was against the wintry landscape. But all Mr. Bowser answered was, “No one will believe it. Do you realize that?”
“What won’t they believe?”
“That you’re a slave.”
It was the only way I could come back home. To do as Mama had done, use my freedom to play at being bound in slavery.
“Whites in Virginia look at a negro, they don’t see anything but slave,” I said. “Even if that person is free. I’d think you of all people would know that.” My words came out snappish as I said that last piece. I told myself it must be the fatigue of the journey, although deep inside I felt there was something about Mr. Bowser that brought out such petulance in me.
“Anybody white or colored looks at you, they’ll see a woman who carries herself proud. A woman whose clothes are fresh and whose face is soft. A woman without a chafe, callus, or bruise. Not so much as muscle well formed from hefting. How many slaves don’t work all day? How many slaves’ bodies don’t bear the mark of that work, one way or another? Forget how quick you are to speak your mind. Even before your mouth gives you away, the rest of your body will betray you.”
I drew my merino shawl fast around my shoulders and kept my mouth shut tight. I’d proven in the Railroad work I could keep mum, even play dumb, as well as anybody. But when I looked down, I saw that even against the dull brown skirt of my new linsey-woolsey dress, the unblemished hands folded in my lap were clearly those of a woman who didn’t cook or clean, even for herself. Let alone for a master and his family.